Did the earth move for you to? Well, it did here… for real. OK, it wasn’t a big shake (3.4 on the Richter scale according to the USGS event report). It wasn’t the largest since I’ve been living here either, but it was the closest to my home and definitely felt as large as some of the others. Anyway, it was enough to wake me up (just after 3:30am) by rattling the blinds quite hard and shaking the bed. No damage though, just a disturbed night’s sleep.
I had hoped to be able to install Tiger on my PowerBook this weekend. The package from Amazon should have been delivered on Thursday according to the tracking information from the Useless Parcel Service.
First the box sat in San Pablo for two days without anything changing on the tracking info. Then, two days in a row they have managed to arrive at a time when there is nobody in the leasing office to sign for the box; today they even managed to miss the end of their own “approximate time of next attempt” window (10:30am to 2pm) by over 4 hours, not turning up until after 6pm! I actually wonder why people bother to use them for anything – they are over-priced and frequently unable to deliver (literally). This is not the first time I’ve had this problem. In fact, I usually end up having to collect packages from their facility at Oakland airport because they are unable to actually make a delivery.
The iLife box I ordered at the same time was sent out later, via the regular postal service. It arrived today, just two days after it was shipped, and was delivered without any problems on the first attempt. Amazon would do well to note that fact and drop the UPS option from their shipping.
Having just spent a few days in Japan, I was amused to see a posting on the Tokyo Times blog about smoking manners ads (I did not see any of the ads themselves).
Sure, a lot of people smoke in Tokyo, but as with anything the Japanese do they were always polite and considerate about it. I find it really hard to believe from what I saw that they need any kind of education related to manners! In fact, they would make the perfect teachers for the rest of the world in that regard.
The three ads in the posting are fun though. I’ve no idea whether the Japanese version is any clearer than the English translation under it, but in a way I kind of hope not. One of my co-workers from the Japan office did use one of the portable ashtrays advocated in the first ad, and I have to say I think they’re a great idea, although there were plenty of “public” ashtrays around too in case of need (pretty much every office building has one at the door, and there were even some alongside the street trash cans in some places).
The BBC has an article up today about the world’s best restaurants. The top ten list is as follows:
So what? Well, look at the country that has the most restaurants in this list… the United Kingdom (taking first place, and with a total of four restaurants in the top ten). The country continually criticised for having poor food. And look at France – just a single restaurant on the list. How times change, eh?
Friday found most of the folks from Devicescape up at Safari West in Santa Rosa for an African safari in California! The safari was a blast – a drive around the 400 acre preserve in an open safari jeep with a driver who knows about everything you’re going to see. Unlike the more commercial drive-through safari places (such as Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida), this one stops regularly allowing the occupants to get photos, hear about the animals and ask questions. It also allows the animals check out the vehicle and its occupants (sometimes close up).
The ostrich on the right took a fancy to one of the guys in our jeep, and she repeatedly pulled at his shirt sleeve despite several attempts to discourage her (gently of course). The photo was taken while she was checking out the camera – from about a foot in front of it. We were also examined by a giraffe and watched by the cape buffalo from a few feet away as we passed by.
After lunch, we took a guided walking tour of the aviary and had some more closeup time with the giraffes before heading back to San Francisco.
I have three rants today, all about poor quality desktop software and none of it from Microsoft. Since two of them are free software, I probably shouldn’t complain too much, but it worries me that this lack of quality is indicative of the overall level of quality that the software industry is accepting. The third was paid-for software and really should work as advertised. So, on to the problems:
iPhoto:The problem is simple, it refuses to export photos from my library to a folder on the hard drive where I can burn them to a CD that a friend with a Windows box can read, claiming that the drive is full (“Caution: Not enough disk space to complete current operation”). Only I have 33GB free and only 250MB of photos to export. Turns out that this is a known issue, supposedly fixed in version 4.0.1 (I have 4.0.3) and there are numerous workarounds on the internet for it. The best though came from one A. Dieckmann and was posted on the MacInTouch reader forum – basically, ignore the export option, select the photos you want and drag them to a finder window. So, I have a workaround, but not a fix. I am going to try to rebuild the “database” (hold down shift when starting the application I’m told, rather than an easy to find menu option), but somehow I don’t hold out much hope there.
Firefox: This one has been bugging me even before Firefox when using Mozilla. The thing leaks memory like a sieve. From the moment you start it, all it seems to be doing is eating RAM, and it carries on doing so until there is nothing left. Now, this is a common feature of software written in OO languages, like C++ and, even more so, Java, that have a tendency to hide the mechanics of memory allocation behind language features. The result of this abstraction appears to be badly written software that leaks memory. I suspect that using Java as a teaching language will make it worse too – there will be a whole generation of programmers who don’t even know that they have to release the memory they allocate (assuming they could recognise a memory allocation in the first place). Carefully written C++ can be memory efficient and not leak, but that will only happen if the engineers writing it understand where what they write will allocate memory, and that they are responsible for releasing that memory when they are done with it.
Also, shouldn’t somebody have seen this already? I cannot be the only user out of all those millions that downloaded it who leaves it running all the time can I? To make it worse, it also has a bug that sometimes causes it tol go off into the background somewhere and consume 100% of the CPU. The visible windows it has still work, just very slowly. Opening a new window and closing all the old ones doesn’t fix it either. The only fix is to re-start the whole program. Oh, and this happens on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X – at least it is consistent!
Zinf: A free shoutcast stream player that is actually not bad (doesn’t have as many features as iTunes, but it does run on Linux). The only problem is that around 17 minutes into a stream the music goes all jittery. The workaround is easy: stop the stream and restart it. Don’t even need to close the program. But surely people out there listen to a stream for longer than quarter of an hour at a time don’t they?
A rainy Valentine’s evening in Oakland, California. I only had the small camera (my trusty Canon S100) with me, but I liked this shot of a rainy sidewalk, or pavement where I come from!. It was taken on 8th street, just outside the New World vegetarian restaurant – which I strongly recommend by the way. You can see the Starbucks that is on the corner of 8th and Broadway.
Up on Alameda Point, the former naval air station, was a wall with this painted on it. That was ten years ago, so this year marks the 70th anniversary of the first Pan American Airway’s China Clipper flight. You can read more about this little piece of history, recorded in a simple painting on the wall of a disused hanger, on these sites:
Yesterday afternoon we stopped by an art-deco style house in the sunset district of San Francisco (on the corner of Moraga Street & 33rd Avenue). The house, being offered by Zephyr Real Estate, has outstanding views over the Pacific Ocean and beautiful hardwood floors throughout. Upstairs, the feel is very much art-deco sophistication. The kitchen includes a diner-style breakfast nook. Downstairs, the family room has a wet bar, and wood panel walls, making for a very cabin-like feel.
On the downside, both the kitchen & bathroom would need some updating, and it was a little smaller than we were looking for, especially for the $798,000 asking price. The third bedroom, downstairs off the garage, is also more of an office space. With only a powder room downstairs it is less practical as a guest bedroom.
The shot above was one I snapped as we were leaving the house. The listing on Zephyr’s website has more photos; here’s a few of the interior ones:
 Dining room |
 Living room |
 Kitchen |
 Family room |
 Bedroom |
I added some links towards the bottom of the left column on every page of the blog (well, OK, I re-enabled the links feature in the index template and actually entered both the links and some categories for them into WordPress). For now there are four categories:
I will add new links to these lists over time, and I’m always open to suggestions for new sites to list.