News from Great Castle Wilson

Category: Uncategorized

  • GUI Bloopers: Paste Special

    So in case you haven’t seen it, “Paste Special” is a common feature in many applications that support rich content of one form or another. The intent is that, instead of having the application decide (based on the available content types of the object in the paste buffer) the best format to use when pasting, it offers the user a dialog with a range of available formats, something like this:

    The typical behavior, in this case, is to open the dialog with the format that would have been chosen if the user had simply picked “Paste” already selected. I guess this is done so that, if the user hits return when the dialog opens, they will get the same behavior as Paste provides. The thing is though, no one who opens that dialog ever wants that behavior. The only reason why a user would go through the extra pain of the dialog is because they want to paste in some way that is not the default, so in point of fact, picking any other choice would be better than picking the one that does what Paste would do.

    The question is then, what should the dialog have as the default selection?

    In 99.9% of the times Paste Special is used, the intent is to remove any rich formatting from the content in the paste buffer, so that it can pick up the surrounding formatting of its destination. Given that, when there are multiple possible formats, always pick the “plainest” one. So, for example, in the above dialog, it should have “Unformatted text” selected by default.

    Of course, as usual, the Apple guys have understood the underlying problem better. Instead of a Paste Special command, in Pages I get this…

    … which does what you (almost always) actually want, without putting up a dialog at all.

  • This. Is. Horrendous.

    What these people are doing to innocent children is abhorrent. Accepting this behaviour would be well beyond religious tolerance; It’s cult brainwashing at its absolute worst. For God’s sake, can we not take these poor kids away from their sadly misguided parents before it’s too late?

    Jesus Camp

    (Yes, I realize it’s not a new documentary.)

  • Pakenham

    For the last few years, my family has been getting season passes at Mount Pakenham. It’s not a big hill, but it’s close, the people are friendly, and (as Dennis likes to remind me) the terrain park is awesome. Well, the park isn’t open yet, but things definitely looked promising when we were up this weekend. There were three runs open, and lots of snow on the remaining ones. Maybe next week.

    Now all I have to do is get back in shape, so I can do more than six runs before collapsing in exhaustion. Oh well, the season is young. Here’s a Treo shot from the lift on Sunday. See. Snow! 🙂

  • The Golden Compass

    Apologies, but it seems that both of the CBC links in this article are gone. now — a reminder of why article permanence is important!

    What kind of a world gives us both this…

    Golden Compass named best children’s book in 70 years

    …and this…

    Complaint over fantasy novel spurs school board review

    To my eye, it seems like there is a distinct lack of forthrightness here on the part of either the board, the original person requesting the “review” or both. The fact that nobody involved is willing to discuss why the review was requested seems like an obvious attempt to deflect the natural criticism that this situation would engender.

    And it’s clear what the situation is: The Golden Compass specifically targets the myths of Christianity and inverts them, providing a clear “what if” scenario that, heaven forbid (sic), might actually cause young people to think about their beliefs.

    Well, we can’t have that!

    It’s time for us to realize, as a species, that ignorance is never the answer. By all means, talk to your child about the books. Remind him that they are fiction. Heck, if you’re feeling especially daring, discuss whether the world would be significantly different if what the books describe were real.

    Whatever you do though, don’t hide the books from your kids. If their faith is so fragile that The Golden Compass can disrupt it, then perhaps there’s a bigger picture you need to be considering.

  • Bah, 10.5 just blows.

    Originally, this post contained links to several other blogs that reported problems with 10.5, but sadly they were all gone when I checked the links.

    Ok, I’m clearly not the only person who is having problems with Leopard. But I have to say this is the worst Mac OS upgrade I’ve been through. Everything from random messages filling up the system logs (in at least two variations), to incompatibilities, to things that are just plain busted (e.g. neither Back to my Mac nor Time Machine work for me).

    I just spent another two hours fighting to get my (Apple) iSight camera to work again — this even though it had already been working since I upgraded.

    I really can’t keep wasting this much time on something that isn’t adding significant value. If things don’t stabilize soon, I’m going to have to downgrade to 10.4 again. And if you want to talk about something that would dissipate the Reality Distortion Field, boy, that would be it.

    Aside: On my MBP I did a straight upgrade, but I did a complete HD wipe and re-install on the server. Neither one is working well.

  • The new beta of Ubuntu rocks!

    I just installed the latest beta of Ubuntu 7.10 on my old IBM T30. Unlike the last time I tried this, both the wireless and the video worked first try. Woot! I ran the movie player and attempted to stream a video off my slug and it calmly downloaded the required codecs and then played it perfectly.

    Of course, I can’t run the fancy desktop effects, but I couldn’t do this on the old version either, and at least it now notices that it can’t run them instead of attempting to switch and leaving the UI in a busted state.

    This spirit of helpfulness carries through in other places too. When I booted the first time, it warned me that my battery was “busted” because the capacity was down to 32%. Yup, that seems busted to me. Anybody know of a good source of T30 batteries in Ottawa?

    Anyway, I probably won’t start using the laptop for anything important until the Gibbon comes off beta in a couple of weeks, but man it sure is nice to have found a way to make the old beast useful again. As usual, Ubuntu feels much snappier then WinXP did on this box.

  • If you’re reading this…

    … then I owe you an apology. I took a bit of a break from blogging when I got back from our family vacation travel, and it’s taken me a while to get back into writing. I’m not exactly “re-charged” yet, but I’m ready, so here goes…

    Demise of SplashBlog

    As you can see, the widget in the sidebar that was displaying pictures has been disabled. See the text box for the current state of affairs, but never fear, the pictures will come back. I really like the immediacy of taking pictures with my phone and having them show up automatically in the blog. It’s just going to take a bit of work to re-enable them.

    Vacation Pictures

    Speaking of pictures, I did get my vacation shots up on the web in my Gallery2 site — no, that link won’t work any more; I might replace it with something better at some point. You won’t be able to see them unless you log in, so if you want to take a look you can send me a note and I’ll tell you the password (if I like you. ;-)).

    If you do check them out, watch out for The Black Spot. Unfortunately, the CCD on my camera developed a dark spot (while we were in Kingston) that is clearly visible in any of the images where that area is approximately a solid color — like the mist coming off a waterfall, for example. doh! I took the camera to Henry’s when we got back and they happily fixed it for free, but it was too late for the vacation snaps. Oh well.

    A Rogue by any other name

    One of my main “achievements” — if you want to call it that — during my vacation, was to level my horde-side rogue “Caltrop” to 63 [maybe 64 by tonight. ;-)] so that I could get back to playing with the guild on Sunday nights. It was a lot of work — she’s 13 days played — but it was worth it. For those unfamiliar with the game, “13 days played” means 13*24 hours in front of the screen to get her to that level, although some of that was done before my vacation started.

    I read books.

    Over the course of my vacation, I got through seven new books — all in the fantasy and sci-fi genres, of course.

    One in particular that I had been waiting for was the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora, called Red Seas Under Red Skies. I’m not certain I enjoyed this one as much as the first, but I will say that after two full books I still find the mix of grand scope and yet very personal story compelling. I just wish he would drop his habit of trying to fool the reader in the introduction; this time, I actually imagined a better outcome from the confrontation than the author did. Oh well.

    I also picked up Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Sharing Knife books. They were a bit too girly for my tastes, but it was probably good for me to read something where the people were more important than the action, for a change.

    The rest of the books were just pulp. The sci-fi equivalents of the “penny dreadful” — just what you need when you’re on vacation. Speaking of pulp, has anybody ever seen the E. E. Smith “Lensman” or “Skylark” books in electronic form? It’s been a long time since I read them, and I’d like to ride that particular inertialess drive again.

    Whew! I guess that about covers it. Talk to you soon.

  • Mothers’ Day

    A couple of quick pics from our traditional family Mothers’ Day outing: A trip to the Quilt Show (on the Saturday before) so mom can pick out gifts that we all know she’ll like. As an added bonus this year, Stacey came along to celebrate her birthday.

    But here’s the good picture: Proof that Dennis will do whatever it takes for his mom (even if he doesn’t enjoy it).

  • OLPC as e-book reader.

    So why would I buy a Sony reader when I could get this:

    I’m not too happy about the position of the forward and back buttons, but for $175 I could live with it. Compare the functionality of that versus the Sony Reader.

  • Canada + Cell Data Plans == nightmare

    Getting a cellular data plan in Canada is senseless. Here are the best deals I could find by wandering around the vendor websites:

    Bell$100 = 250Mb/month + $3/Mb after
    Rogers$100 = 100Mb/month + ?/Mb after
    Fido$100 = 200Mb/month + $5/Mb after
    Telus$100 = 250Mb/month + $3/Mb after

    For comparison purposes, in the US, unlimited internet access on your smartphone is 20 dollars!. Don’t believe, me? Here’s a chart snipped from the cingular website:

    It looks like it costs more if you want to use the phone as a modem for your laptop, but even then it seems that you can get an unlimited plan for $60. Wow! Only $60 for per month for unlimited internet access! Hey, Rogers: I will personally guarantee that if you offer that pricing plan in Canada, I will sign up for at least one full year. I bet I know several other people who would go for it as well.

    The Canadian vendors really have to realize that their pricing just doesn’t make sense any more. Think about the iPhone. At one point there was a rumour that Rogers was going to carry it. Would it make sense to own an iPhone connected to a Rogers network? No. The iPhone has a real web browser on it. Using that, in the way it was intended, could blow your entire monthly allotment in a single session. Heck, just doing the research for this article cost me 5Meg or so of data. Bah!

    Not that it will do any good, but if you feel like venting your frustration about this, there’s an online petition you can sign — well, there was at one point, but the site is gone now. I signed it.