philcrissman.com

As an addendum to my post about the addition of a Mac to the plethora of PCs littering my home office…

I think it was Amit Singh’s post on OS X over a year ago that first made me seriously consider it: it can be found here: http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/.

A very interesting piece of technical writing about the Mac OS. Amit states that it is not his intention to persuade people to switch, just to describe the OS, it internals, and to state his own reasons for switching. At any rate, regardless of ones OS tastes it is a great article.

EDIT: I wrote the article is “over a year” old; it was actually published in 2004.

Blame sales for those computer security breaches - Yahoo! News:

The poll of 942 IT managers found that salesmen aged between 26 and 35 are most at risk from computer viruses and other online attacks.

Internet security firm MessageLabs, which commissioned the survey, said sales staff were too busy to worry about protecting themselves and their company from fraud.

Interesting.

Wait a minute… I have to do tech support for about 1500 salespeople…

Yikes!

(Actually, ours are pretty good; they’re not only too busy to keep their computers secure, they’re also too busy to get viruses, so we’re all good.)

jasonboucher: I Am Not Tolerant

When did tolerance become such a hip thing to obtain in our lives?

Thanks to Scott Hodge for the link to Jason’s fine post, above.

I’d love to say something more, but it will have to wait. Good post.

Like most readers, I get a lot of email. Despite my best efforts, my inbox frequently gets completely out of control… I make all sorts of plans to keep my emails organized, usually creating elaborate file structures and vowing to quickly file each email when it comes in. Invariably this does not happen.

The main reason, for me, seems to be that the vast majority of emails that I get seem to defy the clear-cut categorization schema which I devised. This leaves me in the position of either putting the item in a folder where it doesn’t really “fit” (which raises the question, Will I ever find this email again?), or creating a whole new category and a folder to match it. The latter option raises a slew of new questions: is the new category a sub-set of an existing category? What should it be? Will it be flexible enough to hold other, future emails, or will this one email be its only contents? Even worse, will this begin a trend of creating new folders and categories for every new hard-to-place item, to the point that each email sits securely filed in its very own unique category¹?

¹ Theoretically, the number of systems of numeration is unlimited.
The most complex (for the use of divinities and angels) would
record an infinite number of symbols, one for each whole number…
– Jorge Luis Borges, The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

Gmail’s system of tagging is theoretically “better,” since you could tag an item with as many tags as you like, thus alleviating the process of deciding which one and only one folder should store the email. In practice, I’ve found that if I am not careful, it is just as uncontrollable; I’ve wound up with far more tags than I want to remember, and I still find myself occasionally either creating a new tag, or tagging an email with something that doesn’t really fit.

Clearly, my email organization techniques needed an overhaul. So, I sat down with a blank sheet of paper and started from scratch, trying to determine a new way to organize my email. My main goals were to have the system be simple (to guarantee that I could actually use it indefinitely without getting bogged down again) and practical (so it would actually work, sensibly, as a method for finding emails which I filed last week, last month, or last year).

This is what I devised.
Continue reading ‘A Nice, Clean, Inbox: Organizing Email, Revisited’

If you’re trying to get the most out of Linux, you need to learn to use the command line. If you don’t, you wind up frustrated, and may find that a lot of features cannot be made to work properly.

Case in point: I just repartitioned a Windows laptop and threw Ubuntu on the new partition. I was pleased to see that the wireless was Linux-friendly and worked with no configuration. However, when I tried to connect to my home network, I found myself stymied…. Why?

I was using the GUI tool to configure the wireless card; it looks quite nice. You can simply select your wireless interface from the list of interfaces, click “configure” and then find your wireless network and enter your key.

Except that it just would not work.

Finally, I turned to the command line; typed in “iwconfig eth1″ and saw that the security mode was listed as “Open.” Well, that was wrong, but there was no way to change it from the GUI. A quick scan of the man page for iwconfig showed that you could fix this with the command “iwconfig eth1 restricted PUTKEYHERE” (where “eth1″ is your wireless interface, of course; wlan0 might be more appropriate, but whatever).

Voila — wifi was working almost as soon as I hit “enter”. If I had stuck with the GUI tool, I would have had to give up and plug myself into the router.

The command line still rules — not because it is “geekier” or “more low level” or anything like that. It rules because the GUI tools lack the functionality that you can get from the command line tools.

Now, that could be fixed, certainly. Beyond this simple fact, the command line can be made to do magic tricks that no GUI will ever be likely to emulate, but that is admittedly in the realm of hardcore *nix geekery and not necessarily of much interest to the Average User. That being said, even the Average User is likely to want to connect to a Wireless network… so until the GUI tools can do at least all the options of the command line tools they replace — the command line wins.