The color of orange...

I've been meaning to write this since last weekend's Washington State Democratic Caucus.

As we all gathered at the precinct table (one of dozens in a crowded high school gym), I noticed a woman with a Bush/Cheney button, but didn't want to stare too closely at it. I remarked to my wife that maybe she was really a Bush supporter who was there to vote for the least likely candidate to beat Bush (no party registration is required in this state). However later I just had to ask her what it said and got a better look.

The caption read "They look good in orange don't they?" -- and both were dressed in orange prison uniforms. I wish I could find one of these!

Here it comes

It didn't take long for Republican leaders to start taking pot shots at the Democratic nominee front runner John Kerry. From CNN today, Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager, discussed a comment attributed to last April, where he said that that regime change was needed not only in Iraq but also in Washington. This was just days before the U.S. invaded Iraq.

"While our troops were at risk in Iraq, John Kerry compared the commander in chief to Saddam Hussein, calling for regime change in the United States," Mehlman said.

Hmm, it still sounds like a good idea to me.

Very presidential

It's time to start paying attention to the Democratic Party primaries. After Iowa and New Hampshire, John Kerry's the front runner, and I have to admit, I am starting to lean towards him as my preferred candidate. Howard Dean's a smart guy, but he appears to be flaming out. Of the rest, I'd only really feel comfortable with Gen. (ret) Wesley Clark and maybe Joe Lieberman. Whoever it is, I surely hope he can run a strong race against the best president money can buy. The latest information about how the war in Iraq was planned (preordained?) before and by Bush's election should be disturbing to everyone. And still no WMD!

Overheard on NPR....there's a new "campaign" button floating around.

"At least Clinton's lies didn't get anyone killed"

they would be kings

I read somewhere that our current administration doesn't want to govern so much as they want to rule. Our foreign policy and the domestic agenda of the administration surely seems to point this out. It makes following the national news as depressing as the international news.

triplets

I've decided to try to enforce a little self discipline here and only try to write when I have something somewhat intelligent to say. One way to facilitate this is to call this page "Home" that will include anything general (state of the state, politics, general bullshit), along with two side blogs for science or computer-related thougts. Their links will be located at the upper right of the page.

And someday I'll think of a better title for all of this...it's so hard to not make it too generic yet so simple to make it sound totally banal.

Speaking of blogs, an essay on NPR by Scott Simons the other day kind of put blogs into perspective. Inane, sad, whatever. The take home message is that most ordinary days in someone's life does not make great literature. The other is that good writing is really a profession, and not an easy one at that.

So true.

Google--anything it can't find?

In my "private" blog, I noted the very funny story in the Onion written by a guy that said his mom had found his blog...and there are things in people's blogs that you wouldn't want your mother to read. Anyway, mentions of Google searches by nosy moms everywhere made me search my name. Besides the usual links to many work pages (and many for that other Mark Strom that appears to write and lecture about religion), there it was...a link to this very blog.

It really makes me wonder how this search engine even found the page in the first place. After publishing, it's up what, like all of 30 seconds on the Blogger Home page? Amazing technology involved in the search algorithm as well as the server implementation for this search service. I haven't used a different search engine in months.

More Mac OS X 10.3 installs

We've installed 10.3 on two additional computers this week. One, an older iMac DV 400 Mhz G3 and my wife's iBook (800 Mhz G3). The installs went fairly smoothly. No problems really on the older iMac. I'm surprised that it runs as well as it does, considering this computer only has 256 Mb of RAM. I set it up with three users (myself and the two kids), and the fast user switching seems to work fine. The only "disappointing" part of the latter is that the video card doesn't support Quartz Extreme so you don't get to see the cool cube rotation. The only thing that slowed down the installation was having to change permissions on many of their files once they were moved into their own home folders.

On the iBook install, initially every Microsoft application crashed shortly after starting up. I fixed permissions and rebooted and immediately had the flashing finder--which reminded me that I hadn't removed that old Haxie for font smoothing. Zapped that and everything was back to normal. The next morning, MS Entourage wouldn't open any email, but a quick rebuild of the database took care of that problem.

Panther and Safari

I've had a chance to play with Safari 1.1 the past couple of days, and it's definitely become my everyday browser of choice. Besides speed, compatibility, and stability improvements, I noticed the improved downloads ability where it cleans up after itself (i.e., you only see the unpacked or uncompressed file in your download location). Very nice.

The only thing I stil miss is having the option to include the URL on printed pages. Since the Apple developer Dave Hyatt is looking for feedback on Safari 1.1 on his Surfin' Safari Weblog, this is it.

Panther Installation stories

We've now installed Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) on three computers. My two work computers (Powerbook and PowerMac G4 DP450) and our home iMac (1 GHz, flatscreen). The installs were straight upgrades instead of the more laborious archive and install or clean install. The upgrades of the Powerbook and iMac went without a hitch. The only customization was to make sure the older Epson print drivers that included the 740 were installed (not default), and to leave out all of the language translations (at least on my Powerbook). Both were installed with zero problems and all applications appear to work as advertised.

The only one I was concerned about was the PowerMac, and rightly so--this has been my work computer since it came with OS 9, and I've been upgrading it with new OS's and have never done a clean install of any of them. I've also installed a ton of 3rd party software (and deleted much of it too), Fink for Unix style programs, developers tools, preference panes, and so on. In other words, there's probably a lot of junk floating around on it, some of which may not work right under 10.3. So, to cover my bases, I did all the disk maintenance I could think of, including rebuilding the volume with DiskWarrrior, optimizing the drive with Tech Tools Pro 3.9, and repairing disk permissions. After unplugging the external Firewire drive and CD burner (as recommended), I started the installation. Again, loading the disks and clicking OK when prompted went without a hitch. The problems started on reboot after the final steps of installation. The login window displayed correctly, but then after logging in, there was a longer than usual pause while the Finder launched. Then when it did, the first app crashed almost immediately after opening followed by the Finder blinking on and off--using the force-quit command to relaunch the Finder had no effect, and the system looked dead in the water.

After searching around and trying basic stuff (like booting into single user mode and running fsck -f [-y didn't work because of "journaling"], or booting from the install CD and running disk utility to repair the drive and fix file permissions), I found similar instances on the Apple OS 10.3 support forum. It turns out that programs or pref panes that load on start up that are incompatible with the OS might do this. One specifically mentioned the Haxies, small programs that add functionality to the Finder. It turns out that way back before better font smoothing was added to the OS, I had installed such a Haxie (Silk) to turn on smoothing in MS Word. Luckily the System Preferences could still be launched from the Dock--after disabling this, the system rebooted normally, and all looks well.

Next time--more on the performance and enhancements found in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.