<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
while current ones read like this:
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
It doesn’t look like this difference is of any practical relevance as both the old and new style properly lists work just fine on my Mac. But seeing the difference made me wonder whether it’s like this ‘by design’ or because Apple parse the files sloppily. If what’s up there in XML files really serves as an identifier, it shouldn’t change or Apple would have to ‘register’ the same format under two names. Which’d seem a bit sloppy.
Would a strict parser bark on this? Unfortunately I couldn’t find a clear answer to that question with a bit of googling. As far as I understand the space between the first ‘//’ and the second ‘//’ is used for the name of the format’s owner. Is that the current owner or rather the owner at the time the format was specified?
On the upside: 9 bytes saved per file! OMG! LOL!
]]>
Plus a bit of salad even because – despite my otherwise Fleisch ist mein Gemüse
attitude, I like that as well.
And as an ‘exotic’ dessert there were even marshmallows.
Sickeningly good, I say. Apparently the pack we had was made in Belgium and they had serious problems spelling short and long German words correctly. Uh, and they considered § an appropriate replacement for ß. I think, for a change, we can file that as human rather than technological failure.
So it’s surprising to see a huge energy company make ads on saving energy. It seems they feel a big need to work on their reputation. But, hey, they managed to put the emphasis there on the point that using less energy will save you money. Sure, it does and it won’t hurt if people save energy because of that. But somehow that seems to be missing the point.
This ad just struck me as particularly moronic. And it’s been up there for me to see several times a day for at least a fortnight…
]]>My big problem is that I’m not an emacs person. Yeah that thing is powerful and will probably give all the modifier keys you have a good workout. But I never wanted to deeply learn a text editor, I just wanted to type stuff. I’m not usually fussy when it comes to this and I am perfectly capable of typing an e-mail in Apple’s Mail or a simple text in TextEdit. I won’t need any fancypants features for doing that, so those applications will do. In uncomfortable situations and simple edits I can even deal with pico or vi in the terminal. The latter may be the most user-hostile piece of software ever because it has no quit button but once someone explains you how its two modes work and how to save files and quit, it does the job just fine.
While I haven’t used computers long enough to consider manual work with magnets on metal platters or punching holes text editing, I once had to use edlin on MS-DOS. Which probably was the most horrific text editing experience I ever had.
At some stage, of course, you realise that simple editors may be nice but when you do something like write TeX, HTML or programming languages, a slightly more powerful editor is helpful. First and foremost syntax highlighting helps – and has been around for a long time (on the Mac even with bold face and IIRC non-monospaced fonts in applications like Think Pascal). In a next step there’s highlighting of brackets while you are typing to see whether you balanced things correctly. And, finally, an editor can know more about the language you are typing in and it can offer commands to insert commonly used structures for your convenience. Soon after that people will want to start customising those commands because everybody has a different understanding of ‘commonly used’.
Although I have been a user of the rather extensible Alpha editor on the classic Mac, I never grew quite comfortable with the vast customisability and extensibility. And when switching to OS X I settled for using TeXShop instead. Apple’s developer tools come with their own editor that wasn’t brilliant but did the job (and had a convenient ‘compile’ button right there…) and I can’t even remember what I used for HTML editing right after switching to OS X.
As time went on I stuck to TeXShop – learning to love its lack of progress as well as bugs – but discovered SubEthaEdit (né Hydra) and was rather happy with that (all the Cocoa goodness + command line tool + syntax highlighting + change highlighting + document sharing). Then Coda came along and I started to use that for remote file editing because it’s nice for that and has quite good autocompletion (but with its huge windows and lack of Mac support or command line tool isn’t that great for local editing). Which means that I ended up being a bit screwed because there are just too many text editors on my system – each with its own set of strengths and weaknesses – which I find confusing.
After seeing TextMate’s creator Allan Odgaard speak about TextMate on the C4 video, I at least wanted to know what the fuss is about and thought I’d try TextMate as an editor. From a distance I suspected that TextMate is ‘too emacsish’ to please me. Too many options, too well hidden, too powerful for little Sven. And too much DIY required to get things working ‘just right’.
The suspicion turned out to be essentially right. I don’t think TextMate is a particularly good Mac citizen. Not just because it doesn’t display Finder labels in its file listings (Coda doesn’t do that either, what’s wrong with those text editor makers?), but mainly because it is very keyboard focused. In fact so keyboard focused that I found it rather hard to even find the commands it had. Which to me is a bit like subverting the whole idea of discoverability that gave us graphical user interfaces to begin with.
In my initial struggle several people pointed me to the somewhat amusing – and to the non-initiated non-self-descriptive – ‘Select Bundle Item…’ command. It lets you search through all the commands provided to TextMate by plugins (in a way that’s a bit better than that provided by X.5’s Help Menu). That may be brilliant for long term users but it was rather useless for novices like myself as I didn’t know which commands existed and how they were named. And that menu item is the top-most-, most important-one in the ‘Bundles’ menu (what a name?!).
I also failed to understand why, when editing a TeX document, for example, I always had to navigate into a submenu – of either the ‘Bundles’ menu or a submenu of a menu that appears when clicking a tiny button (about a third as important as setting the ‘Tab Size’ if size is anything to go by) at the bottom of the editor window – just to use a command directly relevant to the mode I am currently working in. For such an essential action this seems overly complicated and inforced the ‘emacsish’ and ‘too keyboard-focused’ impression I had.
I didn’t take notes, so I’m sure I missed a few more points which I sighed about while trying to use the editor, but a few of them stuck anyway: Be it that using italic styling in small font sizes generally is a bad idea if you like things to remain legible. Be it because I thought that the syntax highlighting was a bit slow at times. Be it the inability to mark my changes in a file, the lack of split views, the inability to drag tabs out of a window (or simply the skill to hide those abilities from me). The separate window for the find feature drove me nuts as well as I got addicted to ISIM crack many years ago and Coda luckily went with a similar idea. At the end of the day there are too many things I didn’t like in the editor.
But in a way that’s a shame because TextMate comes with a number of very cool and useful features. While I don’t really approve of it, the customisation certainly is one of them. Particularly because it is reasonably easy to add your own commands to those already defined by the application and its plugins – even I could do it. Neither the process nor result were particularly pretty but it did the job.
Then, the code folding is certainly a nice thing to have. I don’t think I would use it frequently but sometimes it’s very handy. The same holds for the editor’s ability to keep a clipboard history for you. The lack of speed in syntax highlighting I perceived certainly came with the advantage of giving good results. A particularly good use of that is the highlighting of wrong quote usage in LaTeX mode:
Nanny-text editor, perhaps, but useful nonetheless and quite precise as well. The next thing worth mentioning is autocompletion which has a few nifty tricks up its sleeve. One is mapping the autocompletion keystroke to the escape key (rather than option-escape or F5, the two usual combinations which are pretty inconvenient on a laptop keyboard). While not as fancy as Coda’s autocompletions which pop up in a menu, TextMate just cycles through the available options and provides the shift-escape key combination for cycling backwards. In practice I found or at least perceived this as faster and more convenient than using a menu. The autocompletion seems to work based on the context you are in and it worked quite well for me as long as I wanted to complete terms without a hyphen or so in them.
But there are also more advanced things which I’d call ‘completions’ in some sense. At a basic level, typing something like a { will automatically insert a } for you. Many editors do that these days which is sometimes great and at other times infuriating. But TextMate has some extra smarts up its sleeves. For example when starting to write a CSS selector and hitting return after that { after which the matching } was automatically inserted, TextMate does just the right thing™, by moving the closing } two lines down and putting the cursor in an indented position in the blank line in the middle. Excellent:
Along with that it’s worth mentioning that many of the TextMate modes also come with commands to just re-style a document. Meaning that if you receive (or wrote!) a shoddy CSS or TeX file which is hard to read, using a single command can improve the situation dramatically.
Another neat feature is the ability to insert something you type several times for a single keystroke. That’s useful when typing LaTeX environments, for example. You’ll type ‘begin’ and then the tab key and TextMate will convert it into a pair of \begin{} and \end{} commands with the genius being that you can then type the environment’s name and it will appear inside both brackets simultaneously.
Speaking about TeX, TextMate also comes with a very interesting (but not particularly practical) way of running TeX: Rather than displaying the full ugly TeX log output to you, the LaTeX Mode makes the brave attempt of parsing the output and filtering out the relevant information. The implementation isn’t perfect, but it illustrates that TeX output doesn’t need to be ugly and hard to read and that the front end you are using can try to get just the relevant information to you. [Compare with the dedicated TeX front end TeXShop for which people have to hack things to get semi-ugly output.]
Despite those features, I am left with the feeling that TextMate just isn’t made for people like myself but more for people who only dislike emacs because it runs in a terminal window rather than disliking it more profoundly.
So I’ll just sit back and hope that the editors I am using will improve over time and pick up a few of the neat tricks. So, hello Coding Monkeys, what about some of these niceties? And hello Panic people, what about giving the monkeys some bananas to make sure you’ll get their improvements as well? KTHXBYE.
[Waiting for people to tell me that emacs did all this and more since ca 1789 already…]
]]>Uh, nice, screen – now where’s the computer?way that people never seem to unlearn. And while it perhaps wasn’t the most powerful machine on earth back then, it certainly left an impression of being powerful enough for the tasks most people would want to use it for.
While I never had an iMac myself (or perhaps because I never had one?), I always liked the machines. Reducing the nuisance of having a computer to the basics, not tormenting people with all the cables that can get into the way, and swiping away any ‘buts’ about expansion that distractors may have, the machines stuck to those simple principles all the way through. The original iMac’s design probably needed until the slot loading drives came to be really good – and the technological bits like built-in FireWire, wireless networking and a reasonable optical drive only became standard later on as well.
Give or take a flowerpower or dalmation version, the design made it through the years and was eventually replaced by the white ‘desk lamp’ G4 iMac. Uh, a flat screen! And shown off with rather nice (though apparently not always completely firm) mechanics while the computer itself was hidden in an improbably tiny dome at the bottom. I am not sure this design ages as well, but I keep thinking it’s rather cool.
Finally the G5 iMac came. And for me its design is for iMacs what the Titanium Powerbook’s design was for laptops. It looks slim and authoriative at the same time. It’s simple – yet it is rather powerful. And – unlike its predecessor – it has no problem scaling to various screen sizes.
The latest revisions of Intel iMacs changed the casing to be less angular and thinner to the sides. Just like the MacBook Air that makes the machines looks thinner and smoother. But to me that’s just unnecessary and it reduces the machine’s coolness to me. Luckily the machine still looks quite good as it is and you won’t see the thinness when looking at it from the front anyway.
Let’s hope the iMac is good for many more years. Its idea of making the computer invisible is brilliant. It’ll just be hard to significantly improve the design now. Simply because there’s not much left to remove. At least if you want to keep the screen, that is…
[Postcards by a local Mac dealer for their anniversary shortly after the iMac had been introduced. I always loved that idea.]
]]>
Not only could Schindewolf be taken as a rather harsh name, but somehow the sign people managed to screw up both the spacing and the G. Amusingly they also have a web site with a ‘Last updated in 1999’ note on it.
]]>From time to time good films even win Oscar awards and No Country for Old Men is one of them. While the story could just be a poor guy runs across a crime scene with a load of money that just wouldn’t do the trick. Add a highly competent manic killer with a faible for air pressure to the mix and things become much more interesting. Where I don’t mean ‘interesting’ in a tacky way. Up to the killing everything is done in moderation.
The good actors, the clean shots and the typically Cohen-like colour style completed the enjoyment.
After liking Kim Ki-Duk’s films I thought I should try other Korean stuff and was pointed to Git, a.k.a. Feathers in the Wind by Il-Gon Song. It is also a film that doesn’t need many words and includes a stunning skyscape or three. We follow a film-writer to an island where he wants to write and is supposed to meet an ex of his on a date they agreed on a decade ago. Instead he just finds the girl looking after the hotel who is into tango. Then a piano arrives as do sad news.
Actually things don’t seem as absurd as they sound in the film itself. But still I only thought it was an ‘OK’ film, not a brilliant one. Somehow it couldn’t keep the tension for me.
I like short films, I appreciate Michelangelo Antonioni’s work, I love Wong Kar-Wai’s films and Steven Soderbergh made a few good ones as well. And yet, Eros, three short films by these directors didn’t impress me too much. Particularly the first film by Antonioni went straight past me. But unlike with L’Avventura or Il Deserto Rosso, I believe this time it wasn’t my fault. While this film was the most generous with nudity of the three, it would have needed much more to make it ‘worthwhile’.
The Soderbergh film was in fact rather cool and cheeky. What else could you say about a film that features snooze buttons and an analyst throwing paper airplanes from his office window. You’ll be very vulnerable now.
The final part by Wong Kar-Wai around a taylor and one of his clients was most likely the most on-topic for the film’s sujet but it didn’t quite do it for me.
I just like Michel Gondry’s films. [Or rather I am very tempted to think that the guy is a one of the very few creative people who are allowed to make films.] And Be Kind Rewind (to be seen here as Abgedreht
which is exactly the kind of clever/funny translation advertising people should be shot for) was no exception. Videos get erased in an old-fashioned video store; the guys decide they have to simply re-film them; they do it – and people love the results, particularly when they can participate in making the films. That doesn’t save the video store in the end but is a great experience for the community around the video store.
The whole re-filming idea certainly evoked a cringing ‘just like YouTube’ feeling in me. And perhaps the film shows the lost opportunities of such web-2 video. Unlike most of the stuff you see online, the re-makes were done shabbily but still with a light-handed style and playfulness that is usually missing online. From Ghostbusters to 2001 to Driving Miss Daisy many films are re-created and we get a little side-note on racism here, a little Hobbes quote there and of course some copyright lawyer turning up to destroy the fun in the name of the movie business – without making any fuss about it.
If you want to restore your sense of childlike wonder, drop your tech-toys and watch this film instead.
Ensemble, C’est tout – or rather Zusammen ist man weniger allein, as the film was called in Germany (apparently going by the name of Hunting and Gathering in English) – was quite popular at least in the small cinemas here recently but it took a long time before I got round to seeing it. Apart from the charming Audrey Tautou, the film features the story of three people who end up living together and following their rather distinct lifestyles.
And thus we have a stutterer going by the funny name of Philibert, a cook who needs to look after his mother and their poor neighbour. Add some some love and caring in the form of well intentioned kitsch, add a bit more until it’s more than necessary and there you are. Amusing but a bit too sweet and kitschy for me in the end.
The South African TV documentary Story of a Beatiful Country sounds a bit clichéd: A guy drives all the way through the country in a minibus and films people from all walks of life with a hand-held camera while they sit in the back of the minibus. However, the different people he interviews give a broad picture, with the common theme that, yes, things were bad, problems aren’t solved, quite likely many new problems are coming – but at the end of the day all of them love their country and are positive that they’ll make it.
Encouragingly, I got the impression that this attitude is very common in the country. Sure, people will bitch and complain. And then they’ll try to make the best of it. It’s their country after all.
I quite like films where people are stuck in a dire situation and develop into some sort of drama or tragedy. And thus They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? was recommended to me. And deservedly so. A fantastic film set in the Recession era U.S. around a ‘dance marathon’ in which the couple lasting the longest wins. The ‘competition’ lasts week after week and the participants get to know each other, from the old sailor to the couple expecting a baby to the main protagonists Gloria and Robert who actually joined up just for the dance.
While everything starts fairly upbeat, things become depressing as people wear out and are submitted to additional ‘competitions’ and races that make them suffer just ‘because we can’™ and because it’s fun to watch. Seeing this in a film from forty years ago about an era eighty years ago suggests that today’s humiliating ‘reality’ shows are more an ‘acquired taste’ than a result of modern cynicism.
What also fascinated me was the question on what’s actually happening in the film and what the protagonists think for really. Gloria is world weary and presumably doesn’t care about anything. Yet, she is hurt by her dance partner Robert being seduced by another girl. Robert, on the other hand, is picture as the naïve youth who can dream staring at the ocean or into the sun but who’ll get himself locked up in a dance marathon for weeks. A guy who at the same time seems to be oblivious of the girl he’s dancing with for weeks and stares at her with huge eyes which seem like he’s going to eat or at least kiss her the next minute. Yet none of that happens. Yowza, yowza, yowza!
Hafið (aka The Sea, aka Die Kalte See, but I really wanted to use the ð) is a 2002 film by Baltasar Kormákur who also directed 101 Reykjavík. With Festen at the back of my mind I am tempted to classify it as ‘Scandinavian Family Tragedy’ – however wrong that may be once you think about it.
The film’s main topic is the sea and fishing. A family-owned fish filleting business that’s a part of the village, that’s tied to fishing quotas, that stopped being profitable in comparison to ‘modern’ fishing vessels with their own fish processing just on board the ship. And there the past and the present clash and the boss and father calls his children home from whereever they are to sort out the situation after he had written down his memoirs. The kids don’t care for his business, he detests his kids, people get drunk, fires start and tragedy ensues with their stepmother-slash-aunt keeping the countenance.
Despite its 1980s-ness I was quite impressed by Koyaanisqatsi when I saw it last year. The composition of all those situations and the people really seemed to catch something. Unfortunately Godfrey Reggio’s 2002 film Naqoyqatsi continued the same idea with a slightly darker mood and much less of the fascination. Perhaps because the scenes used in the film seem much more anonymous. Or perhaps because the film has been overly treated with what were considered ‘amazing’ colour, morph and 3D effects around 1995.
]]>
And I ran into a totally new aspect of this yesterday. Having been invited to a barbecque at some friends’ in a small village a few kilometres out of town I made my way there in the late afternoon. If it hadn’t been for the hills and my bike being not too good for that, it was a lovely ride there, following the road to the end of town and then going on on a path through the fields. Unfortunately I hadn’t thought this through properly as it was dark when I returned home. And that path across the fields wasn’t just hilly but not exactly in good shape or lit either. I didn’t want to use it in the dark for fear of falling over.
My friends recommended to just go on the usual road which is in good shape and reasonably straight. That sounded perfectly reasonable. Until I realised that unlike in town they just turn the street lights off in the countryside at ten or so. Leaving me on a pitch dark road on which my bike’s (not tremendously strong) front light didn’t shine particularly far. That wasn’t the biggest problem, though as following a road isn’t all that difficult. But I was absolutely scared of the cars going on the road. They went fast, this was the countryside so I would have to assume they might be drunk, and many of the morons just kept their lights switched to full beam when passing me. When that happened I was essentially blinded and it’s really hard to keep going straight when that happens. I was very happy when a separate cycle lane appeared after half the way and when the small town’s ‘bright lights’ surrounded me again.
Nice photo opportunities, though.
More dramatically:
[I sense a slight inefficiency in the JPEG format here. Both images contain the same information and their size differs by a factor of four.]
]]>
Each of those maps has to find the sweet spot between precisely representing the routes and creating an easily understandable diagram. And depending on the location of such a map greater focus may be given to either of those: On a street map at the exit of an underground station you’ll want to give truthful locations of everything while, on the other extreme, inside a train or on platforms served by just a single line you’ll probably be happier with a single straight line that just gives people information about their position along that line.
The maps they are using in the London Underground are commonly taken as examples for good and – back in the days – revolutionary diagrams. With their simple in train diagrams, the precise maps at the exists and the surprisingly distorted city-wide route diagram which not only distorts distances in the suburbs but also straightens out lines considerably and even manipulates the relative positions of the stations to fit them in an easily understandable and legible diagram. The ideas used there can be found in many other public transport diagrams these days.
Many examples for those can be found in the book, which is split in several chapters that put the large public transport systems for which they had a lot of maps to also illustrate the historical development at the front and things become ‘more efficient’ towards the back where newer systems with less sources are mentioned. To a certain degree these differences seem a bit arbitrary.
Most of the larger examples are accompanied by what I’d call ‘obnoxious commentary’ which often, but not really consistently elaborates on the past and future of the public transport system at hand as well, even when that seems fairly irrelevant to the topic of its maps. According to the commenary 45 degree angles are ‘signature’ or ‘classical’; straight lines and distortion for geometry over reality are good; Asian networks usually resemble a character of the […] alphabet
; it’s worth describing things like black circles with white bull’s eyes
over and over again for the symbols used for stations or interchanges.
In total I found the text rather repetitive and not particularly helpful. At the same time I could have easily imagined additions of text to make the book much better. While some general information about the length of the route network and the city’s size is provided for each system, what about some internet references? Either a web site to go with the book providing links to the site of all systems or just the address of their sites printed somewhere along with the maps. That would make further investigation easier. Less trivially, but more interestingly, I would have appreciated more detailed ‘general’ chapters discussing the stratgies in diagram-making: How simplified should diagrams be? How does that depend on the size of the city and the complexity of the system? How many maps are rotated from the usual north=up direction and why? Which symbols are used for stations and/or interchanges? What’s the benefit of extra symbols for interchanges? Are key parts of the city (rivers, parks, buildings) visible on the map? Each of those could be cross referenced to the examples that come later. At least I would find that interesting. Add some tables for quick lookups at the back and I might be drooling.
Might because apart from the text, which is easy to ignore, there’s another problem with the book. At least the edition I have (Penguin, 2007, Printed in Mexico) is very poorly printed. Most of the maps simply don’t appear crisp and clearly. While I appreciate that shrinking graphics can be tricky, I have also done this much better. And in a book focusing on a graphical topic and printing severely shrunk diagrams I expect that ‘better’. In a few places (photos of ancient prints) there might be an apology for the quality, but in most places it seems to be due to careless scaling and poorly aligned colour screens in printing. The fact that the book’s text seems to be printed in a colour slightly lighter than black without using a matching spot colour gives a fuzzy pixelly feeling even to the main text. And making a bit of effort in that direction – say to ensure that black lines in diagrams will be printed with solid black rather than rasterised would certainly make tiny text more legible. If that raised the price of printing it would certainly have been worth is as – huh – it would enable you to actually read the diagrams which are the book’s main content.
Of the diagrams displayed in the book, I already used the ones in Berlin (luckily the book doesn’t discuss general usefulness of public transport graphics as Berlin is pretty crap in that respect – they may have a diagram, but they often prefer to not use them to help people…), London, New York, Paris, Hamburg, Lisbon, München, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Oslo, Prague, Vienna, Köln-Bonn, Frankfurt, Hannover, Rhein-Ruhr (now that’s a huge system because it includes several cities – quite a challenge), Stuttgart, Bratislava, [I’d love to say Genoa but I only used a bus there and they ‘system’ with a handful of stops on a single line is a bit trivial diagram-wise,] and San Diego. Not that many, really. Of course I also used other public transport systems, but apparently they didn’t qualify for the book.
Bookmark: 08-07-2007, London Underground day pass (yeah, that seemed adequate).
]]>
And then I saw this construction site where they dug a long hole in the middle of nowhere for a pipe of some sort. I immediately had people happily sitting in their huge and powerful machines digging those holes and shifting the ground around in my mind. And I thought one could label a picture of that with Terraforming… Please Wait.
Which in turn I am pretty sure is a phrase that I frequently saw at the beginning of some computer game a long time ago. But I can’t really remember which one it was. Populous perhaps? Something along the Civilization or Colonization lines? Railroad Tycoon or Sim City after all? You’ll need a bit of earth to work with in either of these, but somehow I currently favour the first one. Which I only played very rarely and cannot remember well at all. Any takers for this question?
]]>