I hadn't noticed before that the tabs in Safari are smarter than your average tab.

If you open multiple tabs with similar names, Safari shifts the tab title so that you can tell the difference between the two (or more).

For instance, I was checking out a series of articles at O'Reilly today and just opened Part 1 and Part 2 in seperate tabs:

Cool!

This is pretty funny...as I write this, I'm attending WWDC 2005. Every year Apple holds a "bash" on Thursday night. A chance for all the developers to get together in a backyard barbecue type atmosphere and just hang out and unwind after a pretty stressful week of cramming on all the current and upcoming technologies.

Right this minute I'm on my way to that bash, on a tour bus, in a caravan of tour buses (about 50 or 60 I'm told; about 3,000 people that go).

So while waiting to actually pull away I noticed a coffee shop across the street with a sign proclaiming simply, "Internet." So I thought I'd see if I could hit it with my PowerBook and I could. I checked email again (feed the beast) and figured I'd change my settings so that it'd just join any open access point that it finds along they way and at least let that go while not on the highway and see to how many open access points I'd connect.

So far it's actually hit a few. It's evening traffic, so the going is a bit slow which gives my PowerBook a chance to find and connect.

I find that kind of comical.

Another thing about back in "my day:" I don't think I was such a lazy damn ass. How ridiculous that I can't update my weblog more often than once a year. It's certainly not that I don't have anything to say. Not to say that nothing interesting ever happens to me nor to say that I don't have any opinions. Anyone who knows me knows that's not true. Not to say that I'm opinionated really, at least, I don't think so...not in a bad way at least.

It's also not that I'm not much of a writer...I was actually a really good writer in college and rarely have much of a problem expressing myself although I'd definitely say I feel more rattle-brained these days. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence I loose what I'm saying or somehow merge two words together or start off saying one thing and finish the statement off with some other thought that flies through my head at during exposition. Blah!

I could make excuses, but it's purely a lack of focus. Now, I could speculate about the cause of my "focus problem," but I don't think I have to spend time on that. I'm fairly sure it's work related.

In any case I'll be focusing on what I should post next...I've got a lot to say.

In my browsing a few of my usual hangouts, I clicked through a few links and found something called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. This feels like something I had to have heard about and should have even already seen before, but if I ever did, I never thought to go look up some of the old stuff that I've created in the past.

Oy! This was the only decently archived version of my webpage from when I was a student at EKU (the archive doesn't seem to capture all images). I was hoping that they'd captured a more recent version of it because I had changed it to this great rant about them (EKU faculty) disallowing students the use of slirp, especially since I was the first person at EKU that figured the damn thing out and put it into use (sysadmin noticed and thought it was great...it quickly spread like wild-fire amongst faculty and then students for a year or two). (Wow, it has it's own Sourceforge page now, not surprising really, but when I first figured it out, I learned about it using gopher...damn!). I remember what I said, but what I always wish I'd kept was this great picture of Professor Bobo from MST3K that I'd put on the page. If I ever find some archived copy of that page on any floppies or anything, I'll post it. I know that we all had a big laugh (yea, I was even a sarcastic bastard back then too).

So, I went looking to see what else I could find. Here's one of the first iterations of a website I did for a company called Parts-Plus. Here's a later one...I can remember seeing that pinstripe somewhere and feeling the desire need to use it in lots of places...sort of a premonition about Apple using the pinstripe in their hardware and software in what would be the next few years. (Hmm...ok, either my brain just inserted for me, or a reload didn't get the pinstripe the second time because I don't see it now...but check the html source...it's there in the body tag.) That should have been, and mostly was, a great gig at Parts-Plus. I started there about halfway through college just to create their website. I did that, but it was more difficult than I'd expected since the owners had no idea what they wanted. "Just create something and then we'll tell you what to change on that." Yeesh! What a terrible way to design. Too bad that so much around me still seems to get designed the same damn way. Anyway, in a few months I also took on doing all their Macintosh support and repair and eventually a ton of inkjet repair as well as on-site repairs for a lot of the school systems surrounding Richmond, KY. I had a lot of fun working there for quite a while, but a word of warning to those who run businesses: the personal lives of your employees are their own. Don't meddle in them. Especially the small businesses...you'll loose the people that are the bread-and-butter of your business.

I couldn't think of anything else to look up. I used to run a website for the Pioneer Amateur Radio Club in Winchester, KY in my spare time, but I couldn't remember where I'd had that so that I could search for it. Once I got into my senior year of college, some guys in the club started pestering me that I wasn't updating the website reliably enough, so I moved a much paired down, single page to GeoCities and told them to have at it. It's funny...that page is still there and hasn't changed since the day I put it there. I sure hope the counter is broken and that more than 1,922 people have visited since about 1999 or so. Surprisingly, it's the first hit on Google. Ignore the information on there though...I'm not sure when or where it is that they meet anymore, but the Shoney's has been converted into a Chinese buffet restaurant last time I was in Winchester.

Beyond this stuff, I couldn't really find or think of anything public that I'd created. There was an online courseware site that I designed and revamped at EKU before they purchased some commercial thing to replace it with, but that was all internal. I've also designed a few different webpages for intranet sites at my current job, but they're unreachable as well. My, how the web designing has changed over the years though.

Go read the first two articles in a series of three on learning the Japanese languages over at Kuro5hin.org. Presented in a way that will make sense to all those with "nerdular" minds. Very interesting!

Alas, I do not speak or read Japanese and my title is merely a Sherlock translation, although I don't think it claims to bring your dead relatives back to life or anything.

I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I just learned a new meaning to the word imposition. It's probably something that someone with a printing (as in newspaper or book printing press/type-set/etc.) background would know, but imposition is the proper word, for what everyone I know refers to as, n-up.

I love Apple's listserv lists.

I've been subscribed to quite a few for a few years, but generally I've only signed up for particular lists when I find that I'm going to start needing info about that particular topic.

Unfortunately, that means that I don't have all the "back-issues." Apple provides searchable and browse-able archives, but their search engine usually only returns results with the subject line used in the email and a summary-excerpt that tends to be the email headers from that particular post. Not very helpful, or at least, not as useable as the search capabilities of Mail.

They use Mailman, which would automatically generate browse-able archives as well as make the archives available for download in an mbox format. However, they're short-circuiting that part of Mailman and using MHonarc to generate the web archives and HtDig to make them searchable.

But, I had to have my own copy of at least some of the lists. A lot of times the answer to my question is located in those "back-issues."

I've fiddled and fiddled for quite a while and finally found a solution. First, you'll need wget, which isn't included in Mac OS X 10.2 or 10.3. I'm using version 1.9.1 of wget and I had no problem with the default configure, make, sudo make install routine. Once you have wget installed, you need to go to lists.apple.com and decide on the list for which you want to create your own mbox archive. I'll use the xgrid-users list in my example.

First, you need to pull down the archive. One of the problems I'd run into is that when you browse it, the archive is served up as webpages with links on each page that take you up the hierarchy, making it difficult to pull down only exactly what you need. Luckily, wget has the right switch we need. To pull down the archives, here's the wget line to use:

I could make you look at the man page (and you should anyway...wget is a great utility with lots of features), but I'll tell you what the options mean. -r tells wget to follow other links that it comes upon in the webpages, --limit-rate=5k will make wget try to hold it's download speeds at or below 5k per second to keep from overwhelming Apple's webserver, -I is the magic bit that tells wget to only follow links down the archives/xgrid-users path and not go try to grab everything on the website and last is the URL for wget to start at, including the username and password to get you in.

Wget will process away and you'll ultimately be left with a set of directories and files nested the same way that they're served up from the webserver. Next, we need to put all the individual text files that make up the archives together into an mbox formatted file that can be imported into Mail.

If the list you've grabbed was started relatively recently this will be easy. The problem is that there are posts in older lists in which the contents are ordered slightly differently due to the listserv system they were using at the time those messages were posted. If the list is new enough, it won't have the problem since it's always been handled by Mailman (which stores everything correctly). For the xgrid-users list, we can use the simple method since it's only been around since January. Change into the xgrid-users directory and use the find command below to concatenate all the text files together:

You'll need to put the mboxFile that was generated on the desktop into a folder (it can just be called the default "Untitled Folder") because Mail only seems to let you select the directory containing the mbox file, not the mbox file itself. Then, open Mail and choose Import Mailboxes... from the File menu. In the presented dialog box, select the Other option and proceed to the next panel. You're then presented with only the Mailboxes (mbox format) option already selected (how intuitive!). Proceed and select the folder containing the mbox formatted file you created. Mail will parse the file and present it to you in a list to be imported. If it doesn't show up in the list, then that's a big clue that you won't be able to take the easy route here and you can cancel at this point. If it does, then go ahead and let Mail import. It will eventually finish and leave you with the imported Mailbox in an Imported folder in the Mailboxes drawer. If you've got about as many messages in the mailbox as text files were used to create the mbox file, then you're done. Weed out the duplicates from your existing archive of list messages if you have any and move the imported messages in with the ones you already have. You're done! If there seem to be much fewer messages in the imported mailbox than there were text files, or a lot of messages seem to contain multiple mail messages or only partial messages, then you may want to remove the imported messages and continue on below.

Now, if it seems you're going to have to take the long route, that's ok...I wanted to grab the applescript-users list a while back, which contains over 72,000 messages it turns out and has been running since the beginning of January 1995. It certainly had some oddly formatted messages in the archive. I wrote a perl script which will process the archive of text files and output things ordered correctly so that Mail will recognize and import it as an mbox formatted file. So, while it was a longer route, it will be a fairly quick extra step for you! I've posted the perl script on the Satellite Of Love.

I called the script concat.pl. You'll have to set the permissions to executable on the script. Then, assuming the script is on your desktop, change into the lists.apple.com/archives/ directory and execute the concat.pl script on xgrid-users (or other list archive directory you've grabbed), sending the output to the mboxFile with this command:

From there, follow the directions above for importing the mboxFile into Mail.

I have to admit that this script may not catch every variation on text file format, but it comes pretty close. There's no guide to what format the older text files were in, and they're not necessarily in any consistent format by any means it seems. Note that even though absolutely all the messages may not get separated out completely, none of them are actually lost. At the least, you might have a few messages in Mail that are actually several messages in one. The search function will still find the message if it has content pertinent to your search.

Last, I'd like to recommend that you don't try this during the daytime hours of Cupertino, CA. These lists aren't spread across Akamai's servers, they're only on one server, which can make your download take forever as well as make them slow to access for others. Also, make sure to do some sort of bandwidth limiting like the wget switch used above.

I ran into some limitations of the .mac services today, or actually yesterday I guess by now.

A friend emailed me earlier this weekend needing some files. At first, I attempted to email them to him, but the .mac SMTP server won't allow attachments over 3 MB. Turns out the SMTP server for my ISP won't allow attachments over 10 MB. My attachments were weighing in at 12.5 MB. At least Mail had the courtesy to tell me that's why it was failing to send.

Naturally, where there's a will, there's a way. I just dropped the files in my .mac Sites folder and sent him a message with the URLs. Turns out that one file he had no problem with, but the other gave the standard .mac homepage not found error. But the file was/is there. I tried changing the filename to something else, which happened to be much shorter than the original and that worked.

Intrigued, this became the newest experiment on the Satellite Of Love. Turns out that the max number of characters a file can have on .mac and still be accessible through the webserver is thirty-one characters. This one is downloadable, this one is not even though I promise you that it is there.

What the hell? I would figure they're running Apache, and that's not a limitation of Apache of which I am aware. I tried checking Netcraft, but it's checking what you get if you just enter homepage.mac.com, the login page for .mac which I don't think is the same server from which they're serving up actual .mac homepages. I'm not sure where the limitation on filename sizes is happening. I may just have to quiz some help person. I'll update this if I ever figure it out.

Well, I think it's fairly well assured that no one reads this right now...besides, what the hell is here that anyone would want to read. I can't even seem to find any reference to my little website via Google, but that's no surprise (I don't think anyone has a link to me from anywhere).

Anyway, I've fixed some problems with the blog part of the website and added some light styling to the pages as well as the general copyright stamp to the bottom of me-specific pages and a bit of javascript to track last modification times.

I'm not going to say anything about promising to log more...I'll do whatever time and will allows. Hopefully I'll have a chance to post some stuff that will be of use to others (and to me when I forget things I've already figured out).

If there are comments or suggestions, please send them along to me. Grab my user name from the URL and slap it in front of '@mac.com' and send away!

One last thing, a movie recommendation: Transylvania 6-5000 is a silly comedy that my brother and I used to rent every year on New Year's Eve (when we were too young to go anywhere). It's still just as funny as I remember, and there are enough names in it that have gotten big over the years that they probably wouldn't be able (or wouldn't want) to afford to make it with the same cast these days. Anyway, I saw it at Best Buy for $10 this weekend and bought it and got Faye to watch it. She laughed so hard she almost peed herself a few times. Glad to see it's not just me that still finds it funny.