Suppose you want to invite a bunch of friends over to watch a movie. You start to write an email and start adding your friends’ email addresses. You probably add addresses in the order you think of them; maybe you think about who lives nearby, or who you’ve seen most recently. If you’re like most people, you probably stop there, send the email, and proceed to have a lovely evening with your friends.
If you’re like me, though, you start worrying that somebody might be offended that they’re near the bottom of the recipient list. What to do? My approach is usually to alphabetize the list after I’ve added everybody. That way, anybody who’s looking at the list carefully enough to be offended will notice that it’s alphabetized and doesn’t imply any kind of preferential ranking. Sorting the list by hand, though, is tedious and error-prone. To that end (and also to learn more about writing Mac software), I’ve written a little doohickey for Mac OS X that will alphabetize email address lists on demand.
You may have noticed a “Services” menu under Mac OS X. It lives in the application menu (if you’re reading this in Firefox, it would be in the menu labeled “Firefox”), and has a bunch of system-wide contextual actions. The thing I’ve written — the Email Address Sort Service — adds an “Alphabetize Email Addresses” item to that menu. The idea is that you type a bunch of email addresses into the To: field of the email client of your choice (either a client-side application or a webmail application), select all of the addresses, choose “Alphabetize Email Addresses”, and then the email addresses get sorted in place.
The sorting algorithm is smart enough to recognize “real names” mixed in with email addresses. It will try to alphabetize first by real name (last name first), then by email address if all else fails. The service can be downloaded from the project page, which also has some usage instructions.
In terms of the people-who-care to hours-spent-on-project ratio, I suspect this is personal low for me. Still, if you find this useful or can think of ways to make it better, I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks!
(Also, I’m aware that this doesn’t work with the Firefox 3.0 series. Firefox 3.0 doesn’t support Mac OS X services, but I hear 3.5 may.)
I had a strange problem installing the new Pandora One desktop player under Ubuntu Linux. I had previously installed the beta Pandora desktop player, and the Adobe AIR app installer complained that it couldn’t install the new client over the old one.
I couldn’t find a clean way to uninstall the old one, so I just removed it from /opt/Pandora manually. When I tried to install the new player, the installation failed as follows:
I did some digging and discovered that it’s possible to capture installer logs per Adobe’s knowledge base article “Logging Adobe AIR 1.5 application and runtime installations.” It turns out that the AIR installer for Linux (or at least Debian-derived distributions like Ubuntu) uses dpkg to install AIR packages. Here’s the line that tipped me off:
subinstaller: Error occurred; beginning rollback: [ErrorEvent type="error" bubbles=false cancelable=false eventPhase=2 text=" error: dpkg: error processing /tmp/FlashTmp.mdgH0a/setup.deb (--install):
received unknown message type from subinstaller:
received unknown message type from subinstaller: trying to overwrite/opt/Pandora/bin/Pandora’, which is also in package com.pandora.pandora.fb9956fd96e03239939108614098ad95535ee674.1`
When I removed the Pandora directory by hand, there was still an entry in the dpkg database, as shown here:
$ dpkg -l | grep -i pandora
ii com.pandora.pandora.fb9956fd96e03239939108614098ad95535ee674.1
I removed the package (sudo apt-get remove com.pandora.pandora.fb9956fd96e03239939108614098ad95535ee674.1) and everything worked great.
I realize this is even less interesting to most of you than usual, but Pandora doesn’t officially support Linux, so I want to make sure that this gets written down somewhere in case somebody else has the same problem.
“Disconnect from the Internet?” How quaint. It’s puzzling to me that somebody trying to deliver cutting-edge development tools would have a notion of developers (who just downloaded a hundred-meg installer) that involves dial-up connections and “disconnecting from the Internet.”
Oh, also: Battleforge.
It’s an unlikey X + Y + Z game, where in this case:
X = Magic: The Gathering
Y = Starcraft
Z = World of Warcraft
So it’s pretty much got everything going against it.
Still, it kind of works.
You get cards in booster packs, assemble those cards into decks and then enter into various scenarios. There’s a whole suite of single-player scenarios, many of which are raid-like multiplayer cooperative scenarios. I haven’t tried those yet, but it’s all quite interesting. As a strategy game it works okay, the card-collecting is (as most card collecting mechanics are) strangely compelling, and the online component is pretty well done. It’s worth a play, since it’s free right now. Hit me up if you want a beta key, I have 3 of them available.
I have a love-hate relationship with real time strategy games. I adored Myth, but I’m kind of stupid with economy-based RTS’ like Starcraft or Warcraft because I really just want to focus on units. But in classic RTS’, unit control tends to not matter that much if you suck at economy management and build orders because you’re outpaced already.
Dawn of War II (as seen above) is pretty much a perfect storm of awesome. It mostly dispenses with buildings, although it does keep a headquarters building that can be upgraded twice. HQ upgrades unlock new tiers of units. Resources are still collected, but they come not from workers near your base, but from buildings spread around the map. Control of those buildings grants you requisition points and energy, which you can spend on new units, reinforcements of existing units, and upgrades for those units. Losing a squad is a very big problem; it’s always cheaper to reinforce an older squad than buying a whole new one. Plus, squads gain experience, so it’s well worth your time to be careful with them. One of the major new mechanics for DoW2 is effective retreating. If a battle isn’t going your way, you can activate “flee” which boosts unit speed substantially, makes them highly resistant to damage, and removes your ability to control them until they get back home.
All this is an elaborate way to say that DoW2 feels really right. Battles flow really nicely. Armies tend to smash into each other and when one side is obviously winning, the other falls back to regroup and try again. There are costs to losing, but winning doesn’t feed forward too much. Angles of attack matter hugely; flanking around defensive positions is key. In team games, supporting your teammate’s attacks can be devastating, though concentrating so much power in one place leaves the rest of the field open for the other team to capture resource points. Overall, I feel like I’m making important tactical and strategic decisions all the time and it’s immensely satisfying when they work out. There’s tons of great moments to remember, too. Epic coordinated assaults of heavily entrenched enemy positions; razor thin victories where I’m throwing everything I have into buying 30 seconds for a team-mate to capture a critical point; having scouted out an enemy to prepare the perfect counter for their next attack.
I’m also a sucker for community dialog. Although you wouldn’t know it glancing through these notes, the forums united to threaten to not buy the final game because of that document. On Thursday, Relic released the so-called “Zero Day” patch notes, rolling back the most offensive of the mistakes from the previous patch. Of course, the forums have just re-aligned on different battle lines. Even though Relic answered their biggest complaint, there are a million new things to complain about and the cycle starts over.
Anyone want to play? The multiplayer beta is still available for another few days. I’m “heresiarchic” on XBL. And I’ll be picking up the full version when it drops next Wednesday.
Kyrgyzstan delayed a parliamentary vote on the closure of a U.S. air base on Monday by agreeing to send additional paperwork to the chamber, potentially giving Washington more time to try to dissuade it.
Something about “agreeing to send additional paperwork” really makes me smile.
I’m guessing somebody pressed the “post” button just a little to early at NPR. Stuff like this always makes me smile. It’s a reminder that there’s always a human behind reporting the news.
The report quotes e-mails to colleagues in which Schlozman called civil rights attorneys “pinkos” and “commies.” He bragged about hiring “real Americans” and “bitch-slapping a bunch of attorneys” he perceived as liberal.
Yikes — somebody did something bad in the government and we’re actually holding them accountable! Truly, these are the last days. I’m curious as to what will come of this, but this is the most unequivocal finding of wrongdoing I can think of in the past eight years.
LONDON (Reuters) - Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke on Tuesday suggested the incoming Obama administration may want to retool the government’s approach to fighting the credit crisis and tap a $700 billion financial rescue fund to sop up bad assets on the books of banks.
Wait… isn’t this what we gave you a zillion dollars for in the first place?
Mr. Chu, who was expected to get a friendly and brief review by the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said in prepared testimony that “last year’s rapid spike in oil and gasoline prices not only contributed to the recession we are now experiencing, it also put a huge strain on the budgets of families all across America.” He called for a “greater, more committed push towards energy independence, and with it a more secure energy system.”
Sigh. I know I’m being all intellectual about something that totally doesn’t affect me, but it’s sad that no government figure is allowed to allowed to say that gas prices should be higher or we’re never going to see meaningful alternative energy investment and innovation. I’m sure Chu was told in private “Look, you just can’t say that in public even if it’s true - it will cause an uproar. Just hope that gas prices go up and do what you can behind the scene to make a difference, but taxing gas is off limits.”
If only the economy wasn’t totally shot to hell, Obama might have been able to push something like that through. Unfortunately, his political capital has to be spent elsewhere. Maybe in four years.
