That not so fresh feeling

So last night I decided that I had enough of Safari crashing randomly, and dying completely when I tried to upgrade it. I knew that somewhere along the line something had gone wrong with my system, and it was time to admit that the prudent thing to do was to wipe the system and install a fresh copy of Lion.

Now I had basically been running the same OS install since 2007, which was originally a (short lived) install of Tiger, followed by Leopard once it was released that fall, then Snow Leopard and finally Lion this year. People will say "oh, well, you really should do a fresh install when a new OS comes out, so that..." and then their train of thought goes off into some cargo-cult chicken-bone-rune casting mumbo jumbo, or at least the technological equivalent thereof.

The thing is, so long as the filesystem itself isn't corrupted, there should be no difference between a freshly installed system and one that had been upgraded from a previous install, no matter how long ago that install was performed. Any deviation therein is nothing less than a failure on the part of the developers, in this case Apple's OS division. And so, to Apple's MacOS release packaging team, I have one thing to say: Son, I am disappoint.

But my disappointment runs deeper than that. You see, on windows there exists a little known utility called "SFC", which stands for "System File Checker". As the name implies, it runs a checksum over all (or most) of the important system files and can replace any that deviate from expectations. As far as I can tell, though, there's no equivalent to this on MacOS X.

The sad thing is it would be dead simple to integrate into Disk Utility. There's already a framework in place, the ever so lovely "repair permissions" routine that seems to be the first line of action in every OS X tech support script. It would, in theory, be quite simple to extend this to record and verify checksums on all the vital files, and then, at the very least, indicate which files are damaged if not replace them automatically.


In the mean time, though, I'm at least glad that nuking the drive from orbit, reinstalling, and migrating the data, apps and settings back from my time machine drive is at least a reasonably seamless process.

Via a series of tubes, no doubt

Apparently G+ and Blogger have joined forces to allow automatic sharing of blog posts to G+.

I am trying this out now.

Jet Airliners, Tractor Pulls, and Math

Recently a friend of mine made a post about the AF-447 crash and some of the human factors involved. One of the things he noted was that the thrust levers were not designed to indicate, by their position, the current thrust setting of the engines they controlled. At first glance, this seems an odd decision, but there is indeed a method to the madness.

Before we dive into that method, we first need to take a little detour through the deliciously redneck world of competitive tractor pulling. Yes, you read that right, tractor pulling...

MakeMoneyFast.txt

So recently YouTube invited me to start putting ads in my videos. I figured I don't have much to lose since I can select which videos get ads, and switch it off whenever I like, so I'm giving it a try.

Since YouTube, AdSense and Blogspot are all under the same Google umbrella, I figured I'd enable it on my blog here too. Not that I get any hits here from anyone who doesn't use some form of adblock, but what the hell.

I initially tried enabling the suggested layout of sticking ads in the sidebar as well as between posts, but the between posts ones were a bit too much so I scaled it back to just the sidebar. I figure that's fairly unobtrusive.

I'd love to share with you all how this experiment turns out, but I think there's some crap in the agreement that says I'm not allowed to disclose revenue amounts. Even if it's 30 cents per year, it's still free money so whatever.

While I'm at it, I should note: don't spam-click the ads or I'll probably get my account suspended.

To California again...

Flying down on Tuesday and back on Thursday. Interviewing with Overland Storage (digital storage, not the other kind).

I'm also trying out the new google blogger app for iOS. So far it's very orange.

Oh bother...

So I've been drinking my tea for a few years out of a 20oz acrylic beer mug, which I've quite enjoyed. The downside, of course, is that acrylic doesn't tolerate heat well, and it's been slowly cracking ever since I started using it. This hasn't generally been a problem as the cracks started on the inside and have only slowly been working their way deeper through the plastic as the years have gone by.

Today, though, one of the cracks made it all the way through. It's not leaking, but I can feel the crack with my nail on the outside of the mug, so it's clearly time to look for a replacement.

I had been eyeing up this set of glass beer mugs on Amazon as a suitable replacement; I'd planned to get them once I moved south, but things being as they are I decided to try to order them up today instead.

They don't ship them to Canada. Arg. Seeing as it's not really worth going down to Pembina to pick them up, I'll need to find some other solution.

Delicious Tea

On a more upbeat note, compared to the previous entry, I've recently been experimenting with tea. You see, I've always been somewhat fond of tea, but finding the perfect method of preparing and serving it has eluded me in the past. I find drinking it straight to be nice, but somewhat unsatisfying; it always ends up tasting a bit plain and dry. I've tried loading it up with sugar, but that really doesn't improve things much, and isn't the healthiest thing in the world either, especially as I've made this recent move in an attempt to move away from drinking juice and all its unneeded calories. I've tried adding a bit of milk, but besides changing the colour it never seemed to add much to the experience, and certainly fell far short of delivering on the promise of adding richness and creaminess to my freshly brewed drinking experience.

Of course, I contrast this with tea experiences that have been wholly satisfying, namely those times I've had a chai latte at a coffee shop. It wasn't until a few days ago that I finally put the pieces together and came to a revelation: I was using far, far too little milk.

While watching a barista prepare a chai latte this summer, I noticed that the ratio of tea to milk was close to 2:1, rather than the usual middling teaspoons added to a standard cup of tea. I didn't think much of it at the time, as I assumed they were using a much stronger mix of tea than I might hope to brew at home, but on a lark I decided to try it.

After a bit of tinkering, this is the winning algorithm I came up with: In a 600ml mug, brew approximately 400ml of tea with a single tea bag per the package directions. Spiced teas work especially well, and herbals might also be nice though I haven't tried yet. Once the tea is brewed, chuck the teabag and immediately top up the mug with 200ml of whole milk, fresh from the fridge.

This results in a deliciously creamy tea beverage that's at a drinkable temperature immediately upon preparation, which is another bonus.

Even with the whole milk, a mug full only adds up to about 120 calories or so, which is about half of what I'd get from a glass of juice. There's also a lot more of it in a mug, so I can easily get by with just one or two per day, rather than 3 or 4 glasses of juice, to sate my thirst. That said, it's quite a bit more than the roughly zero calories I'd get from plain tea, but I think it's definitely worth it.

With all this calorie talk I should mention that I'm not freaking out about weight or anything. It's just, on the balance, I'd rather spend my daily calorie intake budget on delicious things I enjoy eating, rather than waste it on things that bring me no joy.