This is the second full-size Moleskine I’ve filled; This one lasted from August 2008 to December 2009, which is about as long as the first one. I went through a number of pens and inks on the first, but settled on a Pilot Knight fountain pen filled with Noodler’s Bulletproof Black by the time I finished it. I used the same pen through the second one, though I switched to Noodler’s Heart of Darkness and swapped the regluar medium nib for an italic.

I wrote on the right-hand page, and pasted a photo on from the day I wrote the entry on the opposite page. It’s a good feeling – the journal ends up with a nice heft, and it gives you a sense of progress. It adds literal weight to the words inside.

I’m declaring it a failure.

Why?

I reevaluated what I consider important. Owning lots of cool stuff not only seemed unimportant, it suddenly felt suffocating. It has to be stored and maintained and moved. I spent so much time and energy spent on these things which did nothing to improve my life.

I resolved two things:

1. I would get rid of all the unnecessary stuff I have.
2. I wouldn’t buy any more.

Minimalism is hard. Step one is incredibly hard. As humans, we find significance in all sorts of insignificant things. Nearly anything we come into possession to is imbued with this near-mystic emotional value. Maybe the thing itself isn’t important, but it reminds you of the time you got it, or who you got it from. I tried to turn a critical eye, but the proportion of things I got rid of to the things I didn’t was completely backwards.

Fortunately, I found the second goal easy. It has much value; it’s a minimalist preemptive strike. You don’t have to discard that which you don’t acquire.

I think there are multiple reasons why I failed, but the primary one is simply that I wasn’t minimal in my approach to minimalism. I saw minimalism as an end, but my chosen means was to boil the ocean.

While I consider this attempt a failure, I’m not giving up. It’s hard to reverse the trend of a few decades, but even a small step towards minimalism is a step in the right direction. So I’ll strive for it, and try to be more pragmatic in my decisions.

I WANT TO KNOW IF YOUR ITEM IS STILL AVAILABLE FOR SALE?

Sent from iPhone

It is.

Hello

Thank for your reply? Am very interested in buying your item and i will like to buy this item now reason is that i want to buy it for my son and i will be offer you $850 for the item so i will provide you $150 for the shipping cost so provide me your paypal email so that i can make the payment.

Thank

I was only asking $750, so it’s pretty clear that this guy is a scammer.

Your offer of $1000 is very generous, but not enough. I couldn’t possibly accept any less than $1200.

ok…no problem i will pay $1200 for the item and send me your paypal email address so that i can make the payment…ok

I’m very sorry, I meant $1300. I apologize, I must have mistyped. It can be a little hard to ger thinga righy since I spilled that beer on the keyboard.

In addition to the $1300, I will also need two beers.

ok…no problem i will pay $1300 for the item and send me your paypal email address so that i can make the payment…ok

$1300 and two beers. I’m not sure how you can send me payment in beer over the Internet, as nobody has invented BeerPal yet.

Dylan, I haven’t heard back from you, and it makes me very sad. I’m sure your son would like this MacBook Pro very much, and it’s quite a bargain for $1300 and two beers.

Rendering, corrected for Internet Explorer.

I feel that I must continue to provide the quality browsing experience Internet Explorer users have become accustomed to.

If you hit M-h in Emacs, it runs mark-paragraph, which is good, but means that you can’t hide Emacs. However, if you hit ⌘tab to trigger the app switcher, then select Emacs, then hit ⌘H, it will hide instead.

Alternately, you could bind ns-do-hide-emacs to some other key combination.

• Video doesn’t play smoothly anymore. It stutters, freezes, and jerks. Exacerbated by multitasking, and seems to be particularly bad when doing anything which hits the disk at all.
• Finder screws up the Desktop. Clicks register a few hundred pixels above or below the actual pointer location. Items placed on the desktop are not shown.
• WiFi is not stable. It freezes up periodically, then works normally if you turn it off and on again. Always seems to happen midway through a large Time Machine backup (to a disk connected to my AirPort Extreme).
• The system runs significantly hotter. It’s no longer comfortable to use on your lap.
• After a few days of uptime, video starts to glitch out. If you move a window horizontally, the vertical edges exhibit tearing artifacts. Happens with video, too, and makes watching movies a frustrating experence.

When I installed, I backed up my system to an external disk with Carbon Copy Cloner, performed a clean install. I then installed iLife & iWork, installed all updates, then used Migration Assistant to copy my user data over. No applications or settings were migrated.

For what was supposed to be a “no bugs” release, this is extremely disappointing.

I’ve seen some pretty massive memory consumption with PHPUnit; I have a test suite that needs 1.2gb of RAM to run. The test I was looking at was dying with an OOM at that level, so I turned memory_limit up to 2.5gb. At that point it stopped OOMing and started segfaulting.

When the interpreter crashes, I hand problems off to Andrei. He took a look and came back with the answer.

When the test ran, an exception was thrown, then caught and logged with print_r($e, true). That true tells PHP to return the pretty-printed value as a string, rather then outputting it. Internally, PHP implements this by enabling otuput buffering, calling print_r() normally, then shutting down OB and returning the captured buffer.

Now, the problem here is that the output buffer is limited to two gigabytes, since it’s accessed through a signed 32-bit pointer. The backtrace was 4.1gb, so it overflowed the buffer and crashed PHP.

1. WiFi is incredibly unreliable. It seems to freeze up often, requiring me to turn it off and back on to reconnect. Must frustrating, particularly as I’m trying to perform multi-GB Time Machine backups over it.
2. It takes an extremely long time for my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to connect after a reboot. Around thirty seconds. I’ve taken to powering them down and back on. Lame.
3. For no reason I can discern, the system will refuse to let me launch new shells. Not in Terminal, not in Emacs, not in Screen, not anywhere. I can launch new apps, but any /bin/bash process hangs when I launch it. Logging out and back in fixes it.
4. OpenVPN doesn’t work anymore. I was using Tunnelblock 3.0b14 on Leopard; that complained about incompatible kexts and refused to launch. I upgraded to 3.0b16, which launches okay, but refuses to connect with no error message whatsoever. Nothing in the logs. No idea why it doesn’t work. I installed Viscosity, but that doesn’t work either; it complains about command-line arguments. I hacked on the configuration, but didn’t get anywhere.

iPhone OS 3.1

I upgraded my (new) iPhone 3GS. There isn’t much to report, except that audio-only playback has returned! Sort of. It’s buried really deep, but I found it in 3.0, and it still works in 3.1.

1. Start playing a video podcast. It doesn’t work with movies anymore, only video podcasts.
2. Press the home button. The podcast will stop playing.
3. Press the play/pause button on the headphone remote. The audio will play, and you can pocket your phone.

Sucks, but at least it’s still there.

Moving forward, I hope to transition the nightlies to S3 and build them from Git instead of CVS.

Cocoa Emacs 23.1

For people who prefer the stable release, I built Cocoa Emacs 23.1. This is a vanilla build of the official release.

What’s wrong with the NS port?

Lots. It’s significantly slower, less stable, and lacks features which were in the 22.x Carbon port, like fullscreen. It’s really not ready for prime time, and it sucks that people will get such a bad experience on OS X. What sucks even more is that new users will get a bad first impression. This could have been a chance to turn people on to Emacs and GNU software, but it’s more likely to alienate them instead.

The Carbon port was discontinued in the hopes that a single NextStep port could work on OS X and GNUStep. Unfortunately, relatively few people cared to work on it, and the result is that the stable Carbon port is dead and it’s replacement just isn’t as good. I also hear that the GNUstep builds are completely broken, though I haven’t personally verified such.

The politics of GNU bear some of the blame, too. Non-free platforms like Macintosh are second class citizens in their eyes, and there is very little desire to improve the experience of GNU software on them. The idea being that if they want things to work well, they should use GNU/Linux instead.

This is backwards, painfully stupid and wrong. If a user tries some of your software and it sucks, they’re going to stop using all of your software. Nobody is going to use crap software and think it’s a great idea to switch to a whole platform of it.

Now they’re killing the NewsGator service entirely, and forcing users to use Google Reader. Worse, the next version of NetNewsWire has ads in it. I hate ads, and it galls me that the software I paid good money for is now throwing crap in my face.

I don’t know what I’m going to use now, but it’s sure as hell not going to be NetNewsWire.