Sounds amazing:

I wanted to tell you about an unusual boombox event which will take place in broad daylight, 12 noon on Wednesday June 1st.
I’ve long had a yen to serenade Wall Street the way we do the Village with Unsilent Night. This year we will get to do it as part of the parade inaugurating the annual River to River Festival. We will start at Chase Plaza (Pine and William Street) a little after 12 noon, going through the canyons of the financial district and winding up at the South Street Seaport, where there will be an unruly harmony of accordions, ukuleles, bagpipes and marching bands colliding at the end of the parade.

I think it will be amazing sounding fun and I really need folks to help carry my boomboxes or bring some of their own. As always, the more we have the more awesome it will sound.

If you are into it, please contact me

thanks,

Phil Kline

One of the big under-the-hood changes to Mail.app in 10.4 is that messages are no longer in mbox files, this allows Spotlight to index individual messages without having to first parse out the contents of the entire mailbox. Despite being unused, the old mbox files are often still on the drive, which means that most everyone’s mail is now taking up almost twice as much space as it did with 10.3. (my mail folder went from 1.4 to 2.8 gigs). If installing Tiger devoured a lot of hard drive space, that might account for a significant portion of where it went.

After an Archive & Install upgrade, my ~/Library/Mail directory still has folders labeled *.mbox, but those folders each now contain a “Messages” directories which holds thousands of numbered *.emix files. Those mostly appear to be plain text files each containing one message. There is a small glob of XML plist data attached to the end of each file, as well an integer at the top of the file. The first integer is the message’s character/byte count from the end of the integer to the beginning of the XML data.

In theory, a fairly simple shell script could glom everything together into a standard mbox. Not sure how processor intensive that would be, but the steps to reassemble the data would be trivial. At very least Apple’s decision to move away from the mbox format can be easily reversed with no data loss.

Not much has been written about this, but I found this MacOS X Hints mbox thread which confirms what I’m seeing:

I used to be able to use mutt or pine to view the mbox mailboxes in ~/Library/Mail/<account>/<box>/mbox . In 10.4 these are still present, but appear not to be updated any more. The up to date emails are in ~/Library/Mail/<account>/<box>/Messages/*.emlx which I believe is required for spotlight to be able to index messages – it only indexes file-based entities, not subportions of files.

Because Carbon Copy Cloner doesn’t work with 10.4 yet, I can’t comfortably back up my drive and experiment with deleting the old mboxes. It seems like it should be safe to remove all mbox files and associated files, nothing outside the Messages directories has been modified since I upgraded to 10.4. If anyone has more information, please leave a comment.

(While reading a little background on the mbox format, I found the original RFC for email as a text file. The W3c also has an HTML version of RFC822, partially converted by (sir) Tim Berners-Lee. It’s fun to encounter raw history like that.)

Update I posted a simple command to delete unused Mbox files.

While everyone’s rightly worrying about Dashboard and widget security issues, I’ve found a more immediately annoying problem — widgets that run processes while hidden. If a widget appears in Activity Viewer repeatedly sucking up CPU while hidden, it’s gone. I noticed this because one (extra geeky) binary clock was constantly using 8-20% of my cpu cycles while invisible. Hula girl has been known to run off on her own as well.

Sidenote: Clocks in Dashboard are a waste of screen space. Yes I have Hula Girl and the Butterfly, but no clocks.

Jeff Caudill’s new solo album is finally out, Here’s What You Should Do is available from CDBaby (no record company BS), and hopefully it’ll be on iTunes soon too.

Jeff was formerly the lead singer/songwriter for Gameface, and his solo work has just gotten better and better with each release. His songwriting is incredibly personal and real, sincere and moving without being depressing or unlistenable. He’s written some of my favorite songs, and made favorites of others he’s covered.

Jeff became a father last year, I’m looking forward to hearing this and seeing how that huge change has affected his music. The recent free MP3s from his site are fantastic.

• Beginning Mac Development Good getting started article and pointer to resources
  tags: cocoa development mac macosx osx programming +
• iMagine Photo I might need this in the future.
  tags: applescript exif iptc metadata photo +

While responding to an email asking about IPTC data in iPhoto, I started thinking how great it would be to store iPhoto’s information as Spotlight extended attributes, but I found that Apple did it already! This is a great idea and I was glad to see it.

The mdls [file] terminal command will list all metadata associated with the specified file. (The easiest way to see this is to type “mdls”, space, then drag a file into the terminal window)

Anything in iPhoto with keywords or a title should have these two additional bits of metadata attached to them as HFS extended attributes:

kMDItemKeywords = ("3rd Avenue", Mirror, Sidewalk, NYC)
kMDItemTitle = "Man Walking with Mirror 1"

It’s great to see this but it’s not especially portable yet. Anyone know how to write IPTC data from the command line?