So Final Cut Studio is now available as a Universal Application, with less than 48 hours left in March. I have zero credibility talking about software release dates, so I’ll stop there.

Apple’s crossgrade tracking page doesn’t show mine as shipped yet.* Looking forward to being able to move Joe’s Filters development over to my new MacBook.

* It shipped a few hours after posting this, now I’ve really got to get this documentation online so I can use it… (I’m not transferring everything to the MacBook until the new docs for Joe’s Filters are online)

I’ve been asked to move IOP’s web and email hosting off Hosting Matters after an excess of problems. One of the biggest issues is that we always have emails flying around with large attachments, these tend to fill up the smallish space HM provides. To be fair, HM has been very good about fixing stuff when it breaks, but there’s been a lot of stuff to fix. Also, they don’t offer phone support, don’t take American Express and their billing system is a pain to use.

I host my own sites and several others on LiquidWeb, which has been excellent for the past several years. I really have nothing to complain about, except maybe that they don’t have a more recent version of MySQL installed, apparently due to a CPanel dependency.

I would move IOP over to LiquidWeb too, but I don’t want to have all the sites I’m responsible for hosted by one company. With multiple locations, I have many more options should one host suffer a catastrophic failure.

Researching web hosting is miserable. Google’s results are heavily spammed, and while sites like WebHostingTalk are helpful, they tend to be full of casual users looking for a zillion TB/month for $2.95. I was considering DreamHost after some time on those boards, but there are a lot disgruntled former-customers out there and I was troubled by DH’s CPU time metering. I’m still thinking about them simply for a cheap off-site Subversion repository and Jabber server. However their whole referral thing is actually a huge turn off for me, I’d rather their customers were genuinely fans of the service. That program makes me question the credibility of anyone advocating for DH.

I was also close to signing up with MediaTemple, but their shared hosting plans don’t include rsync. Rsync is a critical tool for local mirroring and development and a deal-breaker.

Jim Boykin ‘s page asking for web hosting advice is a nice resource. There are some good links in there and I’m looking into several of the places from his roundup.

My current shortlist is pair Networks, Swift Communications and TextDrive, wanting to lean towards TextDrive because their users seem really happy and I’ve been reading John Gruber for years, but he doesn’t host his site there (yet?).

Suggestions are welcomed, my requirements are basically:

• good email support
• PHP/MySQL
• SSH access
• rsync
• lots of storage space (>1gb)
• $20-40/month

Update

I ended up going with Swift Communications, based largely on two factors. First, they were very fast in answering my pre-sales questions. Second, they offered the best cost per gigabyte of my three finalists.

The domain is already switched over and everything seems good so far. Server response is fast and SSH/rsync worked right away. Their support continued to be excellent after opening my account. They had initially set up our account login based on my name, which wasn’t ideal since this is a company site, but this was changed within 5 minutes of me requesting it. The move seems to have gone exceptionally smoothly and I’m very happy so far.

Dave sent me a link to Bid to Lure Films Works So Well, It’s Nearly Broke, which is an exceptionally lazy piece of reporting.

But the good news for the city’s film industry is a mixed blessing for the city’s treasury. In 13 months, the city has exhausted the $50 million it had allotted for four years’ worth of tax credits for the industry, while the state has used up most of the $125 million it has allotted over five years. It is not clear if new business spurred by the program is making up the difference.

And being the New York Times, they didn’t see fit to, you know, do any actual reporting or fact-checking.

Otherwise, after two minutes of Googling and a search on the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance site, they might have learned that January 2006 NYS tax revenues were up 18.6% over the previous January with personal income tax revenue up a remarkable 28.3%. (page 2 of the January 2006 Tax Collections PDF)

One hopes our elected public servants do better than to trust the Times’ lazy reporting at face-value. Cutting the tax credits would just screw everything up again.

This is the Laffer Curve in action, again. Lower taxes lead to increased tax revenues, in different kind of taxes as state taxes or vehicles taxes like the IPVA 2018.

Please visit dccu.us for more information.

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.
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