In the tradition of HiveLogic’s A Better PHP UUID, I am here noting Sam Ruby’s method of ‘cheating’ translated to PHP.
Mr. Ruby’s Ruby code:
def new_guid
`uuidgen`.chomp
end
The PHP:
function new_uuid ()
{
return exec('uuid');
}
This method has the advantage that it generates true UUIDs, rather than just pseudo-uuid MD5 hashes. I just wish I had made the mental connection myself.
You hook your camera up to the iMac and iMovie recognizes its presence. iMovie displays a blue screen with “Camera Ready To Record”. iMovie refuses to proceed any further with the importing of video and just sits there until you quit it.
The Problem
Unknown. Something has gone wrong deep within the bowels of the OS. Most of the lab can import video, it’s just these four iMac G5s that stubbornly refuse. It may have something to do with Core Audio.
The Solution
Launch Garage Band, play with the virtual keyboard a bit. Quit Garage Band and everything works perfectly. iMovie recognizes the camera and operates without a hitch.
Addendum
This is a true story. The names are unchanged to identify the guilty.
Well, in the period of time since my last posting, my Junk Mail folder has gained 183 entries. Eight of which slipped by Apple Mail and were caught by JunkMatcher. Three messages did manage to evade both Mail and JunkMatcher. Well, I say three messages, but really it was three copies of the same message. One of the copies was flagged by the Bayesian filter but since JunkMatcher isn’t set up with SpamBayes as a hard filter it had to let the message through.
So, JunkMatcher kept five spam messages out of my Inbox that otherwise would have been there. I thnk that by next week I’ll be able to make the SpamBayes test a hard filter and return to the serene peace that is a spam-free Inbox.
One of the major reasons for my recent flirtation with Mailsmith is the fact that I’ve started having spam messages show up in my Inbox. Not a lot of them, and only one at a time. But still, Apple Mail is supposed to be filtering these things out. Having them show up is annoying. And going through the Hawk Wings archive I stumbled across an entry mentioning JunkMatcher, it looked interesting so I decided to give it a try.
First off, I want to mention Michael Tsai’s Spam Sieve. Spam Sieve gets a lot of love from Bare Bones Software, Daring Fireball, But She’s a Girl, and a lot of other places with opinions I place value in. But Spam Sieve has a really big problem that prevents me from using it: it wants to live in my Dock.
My Dock is set up to contain the Applications I use most often, it also contains any other GUI apps that happen to be running. That’s it. I know my Dock icons, I know why each and every one of them is in the Dock. Telling me I have to accept a new icon into my Dock is a very bold move. Telling me I have to accept an icon for something I don’t think should need an icon is an even bolder one.
Spam Sieve (and JunkMatcher) provide enhanced spam filtering to Apple Mail. This is a task that should go on in the background. Thus, it shouldn’t have a GUI, and thus it shouldn’t have an icon on the Dock. If I have to interact with the app, then yes, it should launch a GUI app and that can have an icon. The icon will remind me to quit the config app after I’m done configuring. Spam Sieve wants to be running all the time. It wants a permanent place in the Dock. I don’t want to give up real estate that valuable to what should be an FBA (Faceless Background Application, a.k.a. daemon). And I sure as heck don’t want to have to pay money for the privilege.
JunkMatcher thus has two big advantages over Spam Sieve: it’s free and it doesn’t want a place in my Dock. It has a GUI app, but that only runs for configuration, the actual filtering happens behind the scenes completely GUI-less. That pretty much sold me on JunkMatcher right there. In fact, the only way it could get itself uninstalled would be to not provide enhanced Spam Filtering. And considering that’s its raison d’être, failure in that respect would be a damn good reason for uninstalling.
So, I downloaded and installed it.
The first thing I did after launching JunkMatcher was quit it, dive into it’s bundle looking for its .nib files and switch the Analyzer Window over to the unified look. Apparently I really dislike the old toolbar look, good to know.
Then I launched Mail and, boom, two messages got flagged as spam. I know this because when JunkMatcher set up its rules in Mail for catching spam, it failed to carry over the modification I had made to the stock spam rule: I had added an action to mark spam as read after it was put into the Junk Mail folder. Those two messages were marked unread. It was a simple enough fix, I just altered the Built-In and JunkMatcher rules to mark spam as read.
I recently got around to emptying Mail’s Junk Mail folder. Which meant that I only had 36 spam messages to train the SpamBayes engine with rather than 22,000 or so. But I forged on regardless and trained with what I had. The I found another 2700 spams in the trash, so I trained them too (along with 3500 ‘ham’ messages from my Archive folder.)
Now it’s just a matter of leaving it well enough alone and waiting to see if any more spam shows up in my Inbox or if it shows up in Junk Mail flagged as such by Junk Matcher.
I like Apple Mail. I’ve tried the rest, but I stick with the one that serves my needs the best. But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to Apple Mail’s faults.
For one thing, I have to go out of my way to use the MPW font for plaintext messages. Which is annoying, but hey now I know how to switch in whatever font I want and everybody’s happy. For the last couple of days I used Hermes as my plaintext font. It was an entertaining change. I’ve switched back to MPW now.
But this isn’t about fonts, it’s about icons. (You know you like an app when your main complaints are purely aesthetic.) Specifically the toolbar icons. In Tiger, the toolbar icons got ‘lozenged’. This is not to my taste, nor do many people think it was a good idea. (I’m not going to link anything specific here, just Google a bit — you’ll see.)
I stumbled across the Hawk Wings blog this evening. It’s been a while since I’ve discovered a blog and instantly started working backwards through the archives. But that’s what I’m doing. (Plus, it gives me a chance to run my back-up scripts in the background. Multi-tasking OSes are a privilege, not a right.)
And, to finally get to the point, Hawk Wings pointed out Mail Stamps. I downloaded it, used it. And then about 5 minutes later, I changed the icons back. It seems I’ve become used to the new look. And now the Panther icons just seem a little off — and huge, I usually set toolbars to ‘Use Small Size’, but since Mail thinks it has lozenges, it lacks that option. It’s not that I like the lozenges, I don’t, but I do prefer the artwork on the icons inside them.
Luckily Hawk Wings also mentions Cage Fighter and Debuttonizer which keep the Tiger artwork but remove the lozenges. So I downloaded Debuttonizer, partly because I prefer the name but mostly because the root of 512k.org warms the cockles of my heart. And I am now quite satisfied with Mail’s toolbars.
So there it is: read Hawk Wings and use Debuttonizer, that is my advice to you.
I can sum this post up in one quick paragraph. When you download Stuffit Expander it comes on a nice standard .dmg file. And it installs a single application. In order to connect those two things, Allume have used a ‘Stuffit Installer’ Application. That’s incredibly broken.
Take NetNewsWire as an example, it too comes in a .dmg file and installs a single application. When you download NetNewsWire the disk image is mounted and then the application is automatically copied to your disk and the .dmg file is automatically deleted. It’s not magic, it’s just efficient usage of the capabilities Apple has built into Mac OS X.
Allume on the other hand have an actual installer application. And installer so old it draws text using QuickDraw. (Text drawn using QuickDraw gets the old AntiAliasing engine from OS9 — which is to say it looks like shit compared to Quartz-rendered text.)
It’s not 1995. Stuffit Installer has been surpassed by competing products at least twice. Either improve it enough that it can hold its own against Apple Installer and InstallerVISE or just put the poor thing out of its misery.
But, the Mac version of Expander is downright beautiful compared to the Windows version. Some might say all Windows apps are ugly, so I’ll just say that Expander is ugly even for a Windows app.
Stuffit Expander with Expander Enhancer was a really nice utility once upon a time. It was so indispensable Apple included it on the CD along with the Operating System. Apple doesn’t include Expander anymore, they don’t bundle Internet Explorer anymore either, which pretty much sums it up if you ask me.
Note to self: pay more attention when running apt-get.
This is a little tale about how I can scare myself sometimes. I sshed into my server and ran apt-get upgrade. It spit out a goodly list of packages and I let it loose on them. Then I switched over to NetNewsWire and start reading the morning’s feeds. A little while passes and Mail starts jumping out of the Dock. That’s not a common occurrence, so I ⌘tab over and apparently my server’s rejecting my password (the fact that I’m running upgrades on it doesn’t occur to me). So I ⌘tab over to Safari and punch in scotfl.ca. Safari tells me it can’t connect to server. This is where I got worried because somebody has to be changing passwords and stopping services. So I ⌘tab over to Terminal to ssh into the server. And there’s my upgrade scrolling by. And I feel a strong wave of relief as I watch Courier and Apache get restarted. Switch back to Safari, hit ⌘R and… Wordpress give me a Db error. Back to the Terminal, scroll up, and, yep,MySQL is in the upgrade list as well. Three more minutes and everything is working fine again.
The moral: If you’re going to kill your three most important services during an upgrade, you should probably remember the upgrade is running.
(Yes, I realize this is a rather cavalier upgrade style, but the most important thing on the server is this blog (which is stretching the word ‘important’ somewhat), and I have a good back-up schedule so I can rollback the changes without much difficulty.)
Well, Mailsmith lasted two hours. Yep, that’s it. It turns out that when it comes to email, I have more important requirements than powerful text processing and grep searching.
First, the little things. Importing my mail from Apple Mail was less than seamless. Mailsmith failed to autoimport a bunch of my folders (I have a number of folders that mail gets auto-sorted into). However, I’d be willing to place the blame for this more on Mail’s doorstep. Still, it was annoying to have to resort to another utility to actually move the mail.
One thing I didn’t really get time to look into is Smart Folders. I like Mail’s Smart Folders, they do pretty much exactly what I need. Mailsmith might have some sort of ’saved search’ functionality, but I switched back to Mail before I found it.
Mailsmith’s Filters are about on par with Mail’s Rules, with the addition that Mailsmith will let you use regexs in the rules. However, Mail has a nicer interface for setting them up. Mailsmith doesn’t let you select one filter and duplicate it. I have a number of list subscriptions and I have a bunch of rules (one per list) that auto-sort the mail into the List’s folder. In Mail, I select one of them and then just make a couple changes to set it up for a new list. in Mailsmith I have to create an entirely new Filter every time. It’s annoying. In addition to that, I can only specify ‘In Header Text’ in Mailsmith, while in Mail I can specify a specific header to check. I can specify certain headers in Mailsmith, but I can’t add new headers to the list; I can in Mail.
And now, for the important stuff.
Mailsmith doesn’t have IMAP support. I have an account I access from different locations, from different machines. With IMAP I can have specific messages saved on that account that I can access from all the locations. Mailsmith can’t access or create those messages. The IMAP standard is not new. It is perfectly reasonable to expect a modern mail client to support IMAP. Mailsmith doesn’t.
Mailsmith doesn’t do HTML mail, nor does it display attachments inline. I could live without HTML mail since Mailsmith gives you a button to display the HTML version in a browser if necessary. But I’ve really become used to inline display. I didn’t realize how much so until it was gone.
And the biggest thing: No threaded view! This is absolutely essential to the way I read email now. I literally can’t imagine going over a local archive of a mailing list without collapsable threads and the clean, simple, intuitive interface that gives you. (And yes, Thunderbird’s View By Threads counts as much as Mail’s here.) Mailsmith doesn’t have this or anything like it unfortunately.
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