password security questions

December 1, 2007  🔐 🤤

RCN has been hassling me with automated phone calls to set up a new account password. If I don’t do that, apparently, I will never be allowed to discuss my account with them again. I don’t get it, but I just called in to set up my password.

email::folder woes (part n)

November 27, 2007  📧 🐪 🧑🏽‍💻 🤤

I mumbled something about Email::Folder hating me, today, but I was too busy to explain, and I promised that I’d write down my annoyances later. I’d love to fix these problems soon, but for now it’s easier to just grumble about them, and it will make me feel better.

fun with pipes and the momputer

November 22, 2007

Leopard’s ultra-easy screen sharing has made it a breeze to help my mom with her new Mac. Today I used it for some more fun. I created my first working Yahoo! pipe, a merging of my MJ photos and Gloria’s. Then I connected to my mom’s computer with Leopard’s excellent VNC client and subscribed her Mail.app to my new pipe feed. I ran TextEdit and put a note on her desktop about what I’d done.

aol service assistant, slightly better than nothing

November 20, 2007  🐪 🧑🏽‍💻 💾 🤤

For a long time, my parents have been held hostage by AOL. AOL, for ages, made it nearly impossible to use any tool other than their mega-integrated awful front end to The Internet. Even once they set up IMAP, you were stuck with their Favorites and Address Book. This was a big deal for my dad, who has a gigantic contact list. I’ve been heckling him to use Apple’s Address Book for ages, but he couldn’t get out.

omnifocus is good

November 19, 2007  🌀 💾

I’ve been using OmniFocus since pretty early on in the private beta. It started out pretty good and has gotten very, very good. For years, I have said that nothing is as effective as index cards. OmniFocus replaced my index cards a few months ago.

ongoing email programming: trying to stay peppy

November 19, 2007  📧 🐪 🧑🏽‍💻

Email is tough. It’s very, very complicated, which is a big problem, because from the outside it seems so simple: it’s like some headers and then a body or two, right? I try to advise people that Mail::Message is not as crazy as everyone implies, but people really like to use something really, really simple, and it leads to problems – one of which is trying to figure out where the ideal distinction between “just enough” and “too much” is.

coping with mac os 10.5

November 6, 2007  🤤

I’ve been running Leopard for just over a week, and it’s a really mixed bag. My memory is that Tiger and Panther were only annoying because they failed to fix things I wanted fixed. Leopard has broken quite a bunch of stuff, and I afraid that some of it just isn’t going to get fixed.

time machine and superduper

November 4, 2007  🍏 💾

For quite a while now, I’ve used SuperDuper! to do backups. It’s basically a nice GUI over a rsync. The common use it to tell it “make drive B into an exact duplicate of drive A.” It does so as quickly as possible, changing only the files that need to be changed. This means that after your initial backup, you can make a new backup very quickly by updating the initial backup.

long-awaited sub::exporter features draw near

November 1, 2007  🐪 🧑🏽‍💻

Since the very, very early days of Sub::Exporter, it was clear that it would be really useful to be able to replace the way that exporting itself occurs. That is: the way that routines are generated and installed, based on configuration, gathered collections, and other user arguments to the generated import method.

rm -r ~/.procmailrc

October 29, 2007  📧 🐪 🧑🏽‍💻

I first started using procmail around 1993, I guess, when I got my first access to the Internet through my dad’s alumni account at Lehigh University. The only programming language I knew was C (and things that don’t count, like Logo and BASIC), so procmail was like magic.