Stumbled across a rather astonishing timeline: A CHRONOLOGY OF THE COMMON ERA (the page is 1.5 MB). There’s tons there, much subsequent Googling ensued.

I’ve been reading a lot of history lately, especially trying to get a better grasp on early Europe, pre-Islamic Arabia and The Crusades. This was all largely skipped in the Western Civ classes I took in college (“we’re going to avoid too much emphasis on wars”, which now seems akin to describing a steak dinner as having too much emphasis on beef).

Though all this, I keep coming across this Shakespeare quote from Macbeth:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing

Human history is a damned mess.

“The Method” was a work of Archimedes unknown in the Middle Ages, but the importance of which was realized after its discovery. Archimedes pioneered the use of infinitesimals, showing how by dividing a figure in an infinite number of infinitely small parts could be used to determine its area or volume. It was found in the so-called Archimedes Palimpsest (Παλίμψηστος του Αρχιμήδη). The ancient text was found in a rare 10th-century Byzantine Greek manuscript which is probably the oldest and most authentic copy of Archimedes’ major works to survive, and contains transcriptions of his writing on geometry and physics.

The manuscript was the only source for his treatise “On The Method of Mathematical Theorems” and the only known copy of the original Greek text of his work, “On Floating Bodies”. The manuscript also contains the text of his works “On The Measurement of the Circle”, “On the Sphere and the Cylinder”, “On Spiral Lines and On the Equilibrium of Planes”.

The volume is a palimpsest, a manuscript in which pages have been written on twice. As writing material was expensive an original text could be washed off so the parchment could be reused. The upper layer of writing on the document to be auctioned contains instructions for religious rites but underneath it contains versions of Archimedes’ most celebrated Greek texts.

Paper. The ideas weren’t important enough to preserve, the paper was.

Or, How I reclaimed 1.25 gigabytes of my hard drive.

When 10.4 imported mail from the old 10.3 mbox files, it broke each message into an individual file so Spotlight could index them. The old mbox files, rightly, were left on the drive. For most people this wouldn’t take up a noticeable amount of space, however those of us with a ton of mail saw a significant hit to our disk space.

The following commands will remove the unused mbox files from the drive, recovering a potentially large amount of disk space:

    cd ~/Library/Mail
    find . -name "mbox" -ls

Make sure the only thing listed are mbox files in your mail directory (they should be). To delete all those files, change the last “-ls” of the above command to “-delete“. (I didn’t include the full command on purpose since it deletes files and I wanted to strongly encourage everyone doing this to check the file list before deleting.) Just to be doubly safe, backup before doing this.

Total size of my mail folder went from 3.07 GB (3,206,511,328 bytes) to 1.84 GB (1,884,864,581). A savings of almost 1.25 GB. At $229.00 for a 93.2 GB formatted notebook drive, that’s an actual cost savings of $3.02.

Note there was/is a bug with Mail importing under 10.4 where very large mbox files don’t read correctly. Make sure all your messages really did import correctly before deleting your mbox files.

A friend asked me to help him rescue 14,000 email messages that wouldn’t import from 10.3 to 10.4. The mbox containing the files was 1.46GB, but more disturbingly, had some sort of error where the system couldn’t figure out how big the file was. BBEdit, TextWrangler, and a few other apps (I think I tried TextMate and SubEthaEdit too, but I can’t remember for sure). I gave up on Pico and vi after about 10 minutes each, not that I’m particularly adept with Pico or know much of anything about vi. The standard Mac apps were returning MacOS Error code: -116 which is a size check storage allocation error where the system can’t determine how big the file is. As a result of that, Mail seemed unable to import the mbox. Once it imported 800 of 14,000, another time only 45 from the same mbox. That would sort of make sense if Mail.app couldn’t tell where the file began or ended. I don’t know what causes this, but I was able to successfully duplicate the file and work with it from two other drives and another computer, so I wasn’t worried about Maxtor-style creeping disk failure.
(more…)

There will be a rally supporting Denmark and Freedom of Speech and Expression in NYC today (Friday) at noon. Rallies are planned for other cities as well. The Danish Consulate is at One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, (2nd Ave @ 47th St.). Snarksmith got the ball rolling on this.

If you haven’t yet read MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism, cosigned by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salmon Rushdie and 10 others, please do so now. Note how many of the cosignatories have been forced to live under constant police protection. These are dark times.

Two quotes from Edmund Burke:

“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”

Apple is offering a $49 Pro Applications Universal Crossgrade, which is a remarkable deal, especially compared to Adobe’s “you will wait and pay for CS3” approach. Of course Apple does have an obligation to make everything work with Intel, but they could very easily have rolled this into the FCP 6 announcement at NAB (assumed, I have no prior knowledge, am not beta testing anything and don’t have a current NDA).

What Apple neglected to mention on that page is the archaic process users must go through to get that upgrade. This is the order form PDF, here are the actual steps:

1. Try to remember how to write by hand, fill out a paper form, with pen.
2. Calculate our own sales tax, (it really says “Please consult your local chamber of commerce for your applicable sales tax.”) Hope that’s correct.
3. Photocopy the four key original disks and order form (The DVDs should be backed up. They’re dual-layer DVDs, making duplication a bit more trouble.) The DVDs will be replaced, these four are gone forever.
4. Take the whole thing to UPS/Fedex (or schedule a pickup)

I don’t remember the last time a software upgrade was that much work.

The customer service people at Apple Software Exchange said the disks could be sent via UPS or Fedex to the following address:

5681 W. Cleveland Road
Back of Building 2
South Bend, IN 46628

Considering the value of these disks is $1,299 new, it would be somewhat silly to just drop them in a mailbox without any means of tracking.

Hopefully I filled out the form correctly. Despite the “back of building 2” address, talking with Apple’s software exhange office made me feel a lot more comfortable about sending in my disks. The only bad news was the ship date for the universal pro apps is still listed as “end of March.”

The FXScript Reference site is 100% scratchbuilt. I created it partly to teach myself more practical PHP and MySQL skills and shunned any existing code snippets or libraries. Yet the site and my home-built commenting system is getting pounded with spam.

How is this happening? It’s the usual crap; laser this, cheap pills that, a bunch of links that were scuttled by my post-cleaning routines, fake comments with links to casinos and porn. The spam is coming from different IP addresses each time, usually from India, Russia or Columbia. All spam comments were posted using Firefox.

The k30fps entry has been taking the brunt of the spam (72,000+ hits vs a normal average of 2500-3000 hits for other items?).

I set up a quick log to collect all $_SERVER and $_POST data for any comments posted, to see what was happening. I was hoping something would stick out like curl or some unknown referrer page. No such luck, everything looked normal, the most troubling thing was the user agent:
[HTTP_USER_AGENT] => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

I suspect there is a hacked Greasemonkey script out there which exploits HTML form auto-entry to insert spam comments. There’s not much I can do about blocking that.

Traffic has been low recently, except for the spammers, so I’ve unfortunately decided to turn off comments for the time being. Maybe the lack of exploitable forms will get me off the spam list. When I have more time I will try to hook into Akismet. Since turning that on for my WordPress site I have not had to manually delete a single spam comment.

If anyone has something they’d like to contribute, send me an email and I’ll either post it for you or open the site a window for posting.

**Update** Comments are on again.