May 27, 2004
posting warning

Here's a tip - don't post on your way out the door without more carefully reading... As Mike so aptly points out, the Unix Chart I referenced earlier is in fact correct. I had conflated Mac OS 10.3.4 with the presumptive 10.4.

This is me, washing glasses.

Posted by esinclai at 11:11 AM
the future history of unix

This the history of unix chart is quite a lovely achievement, scrolling rightwards forever as an amazement to behold

Curiously, he has down some OS X dates that I just didn't see before - or is yesterday the future?

[thanks to Jeremy Zawodny's linkblog]

Posted by esinclai at 07:27 AM
May 18, 2004
cheatin'?!?

AZ has brought to my attention a new Guardian (or as some wags put it, Grauniad) piece about London and those who get lost there...

My question is... when was AZ there without me? Who is that confused man she's assisting? The gall, the unmitigated gall, of going to London without me!

Truly though, this does happen often to us - when we were in London last we were asked for directions. When we go to Manhattan, people ask us for directions. We usually have a map, or an A-Z... and apparently a self-assured air.

Posted by esinclai at 10:14 PM
Commodification rampant

A terabyte? Whoo Moses! That is some predictive overbooking, or high volume discount action....

Really, I gotta get me one of those.....

Posted by esinclai at 07:25 PM
May 17, 2004
Us and Them (or baby birds are companies too)

Ted Leung, smartly, opines regarding the current tempest in a teapot about weblogging/personalpublishing/lightweight CMS software:

I'm not going to try to predict which community of blog software developers will be able to align their interests with the interests of a large portion of the blogosphere. I hope that at least one of them will try. In order to put an end to Us versus Them, Us must become Them, and Them must become Us.

The issue at play in the 6A/MT discussion is that only half that bargain happened, and the other half didn't. Users in the MT community believed that in their usage they owned the core of MT, that their usage was the heart of the product.

Of course, as can be seen, they owned not the heart of the product, but in the community they owned the spirit. The heart itself moves on its own rhythm, and that rhythm can drive the rest of the body.

While we believed there was an Us that included All of Us, it really was Us and a baby bird that happened to have investors and employees. Not necessarily a Them, but not quite an Us either.

Only a week out, even in Internet Time , is far too early to see how this will play out.

But bearing the issues of Community and Us and Them and Commons in mind will help to understand, I suspect.

Posted by esinclai at 07:05 AM
May 16, 2004
Online Hours

Between Mike's discussion of the Seattle Public Library building (and I just wanna know where Rem gets the time to do all this - he just finished the UIC project this past year....) contrasting the deep design (see the Muschamp article in today's NYT today for details), and Adina Levin on the Austin Public Library and their deep strangeness without apparent design, it's been a good day for library linkage.

I do kinda want to see the SeaPub building, though. Though the Randtriever compact storage experiment in Bloomington (Mike's dates are off a bit - it was installed with the construction in 1968, and then finally decommissioned and removed in 1987) wasn't a success, they can be (though I hear the National Library of Paris' system also has problems...)

Posted by esinclai at 03:51 PM
6600 and iSync NSSyncConduitException errors

I've had intermittent problems with my Nokia 6600 and iSync's calendar/todo synchronization, but having found a workaround... I'm happy to share rather than complain further... Further, a recent discussion with Ted Leung reminded me that writing this up would be a GoodThing...

Back in January I bleeding edged myself and picked up a Nokia 6600 (bleeding edge in a US sense, that is - the phone had been out for the rest of the world for some time...) from a local vendor. I wanted to take advantage of the increased storage and improved PDA functions, as well as do some GPRS tethering in a pinch. More on those experiences in a future post.

Exercising the storage would be my ongoing address book, pulled from the Newton through various PalmOS devices, Outlook revisions and others to the present day. At that time, configuring the phone to use iSync involved grabbing Emory's pulled together conduit elements and hoping for the best. And for the most part, the beast worked for me - some occasional flakiness, but nothing untoward.

Then a month or so later, Apple released their updated iSync which included a proper conduit for the more recent Symbian phones, including the 6600. I grabbed it and installed and had few problems. I would make updates on one of my devices, they'd get copied hither and thither, and all was well in my digital yet wireless lifestyle.

Until one day it wouldn't sync the calendar. In the iSync log was the error

#timestamp# Error Conduit #devicename# generated exception NSSyncConduitException: An exception has occured. Please try to sync again..

which is useful in telling you something is broken, but not that useful for figuring out what IS broken. Especially since trying again just repeats the error, over and over. Various people have logged items comparable to this in the discussion forums at Apple, but none of the workarounds seemed all that palatable.

In my experience, other devices would sync properly, and other attributes involving the 6600 were fine (I could transfer files via bluetooth, and changes were appropriately propagated in the Address Book/Contacts as well).

I played around with a number of solutions, thinking I must have had some corrupt data. I deleted recent entries, I added them in different places, all to no avail.

Desperate, I started removing filesystem items on the phone, starting with deletion of the iSync.ini item. This didn't help, so my desperation increased.

Ultimately I came upon the solution (or at least a workaround more acceptable than resetting all my devices and hoping for the best). I decided to get rid of the calendar in total. Using the FExplorer utility, I found the Calendar data (which also includes todos) on the Nokia at C:\system\Data\Calendar and deleted it.

Having done so, the error went away - but no data was put onto the phone, even as changed. iSync apparently still felt it knew the proper state for the phone. To get beyond this, I turned off the various calendars in iSync (Work, Personal, etc) to be synchronized with the phone, and then turned them back on, forcing iSync to delete and remove them from its view of the phone's contents.

One by one as I did so, the calendars were recreated on the phone, and all was right with the world again.

I've actually had to do this twice. My current theory is that something in the creation of a repeating scheduled item on the phone (or modifying a repeating item via the phone) is the sneaky culprit, but this is purely anecdotal.

Posted by esinclai at 01:06 PM
May 12, 2004
PubTrans

Public Transportation may be more prevalant in the big city, but that doesn't mean its more responsive. Compare and contrast these two items

Problems with new bus schedules in Bloomingon vs Chicago Transit Authority User Complaints (and responses) (registration may be req'd).

Posted by esinclai at 01:44 PM
May 09, 2004
More KJ Fun in the Sun

A new blogpartnership is now available.... KittyJoyce Gardens. An AZ and Eric coeditorship, chronicling our varied attempts at greenthumbery.

It's also our first co-blog-production... Not since the Indie-List have we put heads and keyboards together in this way... Fun, compost and tomfoolery awaits!

Posted by esinclai at 07:36 PM
May 03, 2004
Positive and Negative; Collective!

One of the core elements of management systems like GTD is the concept of a trusted repository of information, plans, and actions. This is necessarily challenging to consistently achieve in immediate terms, for trust only comes through measured and regular use over time, a forming of habit in ability.

Two recent musings from different angles on this. Kimbro's very often linked Notebook Book and this morning Speak-Up's Sketchbook Ode.

Passing through my thoughts recently via emv is marginalia, another form of this collection, but not aggregated into a tightly trusted system, but more as a mnemonic and happenstance recollection. Equally powerful as part of the whole.

Posted by esinclai at 06:48 AM