LevelsOfDetail

A small list of little programs I need to write:

• A better task switcher for windows XP (and maybe vista, though that seems a lot harder). It will highlight the frame of the window you're about to switch to, just like metacity does.
• A better compose window for outlook. One that has a real text editor in it, with real quoting. Or a better quotefix type program.
• Blackberry app to automatically sync shrinked down versions from photos from your photo site to your device for local viewing.

imac

outlook quoting

Lifehacker

Inbox zero

To me, that means: If it's crap, delete it. If its something I can read in a few seconds, read it, and archive. If it's something that I know I'll need later, put it in a 'saved info' folder. If I just 'might' need it later, then just archive it. If I need to reply, and can do it right away, then do it and archive. If I need to reply later, then move it to some folder or mark it some how.

Sounds stupid, but I actually noticed a couple changes:

First, keeping my inbox clear really saves me time in the long run. Algorithmically speaking, the cost incurred in processing an email is amortized over each subsequent glance at the inbox. Before, I had thousands of messages in my inbox, and a single checking of that inbox was essentially a linear scan through to confirm "in-progress" threads. The more threads and messages, each check was more costly and more error prone. Now, I often find myself staring at an empty inbox. It's actually kind of jarring. Makes me feel like I get a lot less mail than I thought I was getting. But more importantly, each check is a quick binary decision: is there any mail in my inbox?

Second, having an empty inbox is peace of mind. In retrospect, having a full inbox always made me feel like I had some set of pending tasks that I could never keep in my head. That there were N threads that I had to respond to. Even if there were no such threads. The sight of threads existing was enough to make me worry that I missed one in the list somewhere.

This kind of scheme works pretty well with gmail, but outlook is more of a challenge. I had to fiddle with my filtering rules quite a bit. Maybe I'll write about that some time.

I had a bad feeling about this Asus P5B motherboard ever since I got it. It claims integrated wi-fi, but all that really means as it has an internal usb header with a usb wifi device hooked up.

And all the utilities are ricer-looking.

And the auto-bios update utility can't find bios files on their ftp site.

Well, today, in my quest to enable resuming from sleep with my keyboard, I downloaded a new bios update and tried to use their utility. Boom! flash failed. Can't even re-flash. (I probably should have suspected something when their supposedly x64 utility installed into c:\Program Files (x86))

Now when I power on, the power light comes on, and that's it. I heard the drives spin up because they get power as well, but no beeps, no post, no nothing. Lame. Now I'll lose a week to the RMA process. And a few hours doing a motherboard transplant.

Whats worse, Asus's site tells me to contact the reseller, and Newegg's site tells me to contact Asus. Fun.

I don't really know the lingo, I just know what I see.

Look at the image below. Can you tell which is which?

The left is XP, the right is Linux (Firefox, mstt core fonts, and mlind's freetype/xft/cairo updates with David Turner's newest lcd filtering patches, full, BCI-enabled hinting). I took the screenshot by overlaying a VMware window running Ubuntu on top of a Firefox window on the Windows host.

As far as I can tell, the problem isn't actually in the subpixel filtering. It's more that, in the Linux example, the "thickness" of the parts of each letter are inconsistent. For example, diagonal, and curved parts look much thicker than the rest of the character. Arial seems to exaggerate this effect. When there's a bunch of small text clumped together like this, the letters just look fuzzy and dirty.

If you're like me, you're stuck with Outlook at work because your company runs an Exchange server. Sure Exchange has IMAP and POP support, but it's never quite the same as using outlook.

You've mostly tamed Outlook, except for one small problem. All your programmer colleagues insist on using plain-text messages. And when you use Outlook's plain-text reply facilities, you get super frustrated by it's inability to quote and re-flow messages correctly.

Sure there's Outlook-QuoteFix, but it doesn't work very reliably, and it still get some cases wrong.

Well I've hacked up an attempt at fixing this problem. For the impatient, click here to download OutlookSmartQuote 0.5.

This is a 30 minute attempt at packaging up something that I've gotten fairly reliably working on my own machine.

It's based on the QuoteFix macro but instead of using Outlook's crappy reflow algorithm, I implemented my own in python. So yes, you need a python interpreter, and you need to tell the macros about where they are (see the install.txt file in the zip file for details) but the end result is IMHO much better quoting.

It's still very basic, and I'm sure the install document sucks and is missing a bunch of stuff I forgot to write down, but hopefully someone will find it useful.

Nikon's new D3 camera has a full frame sensor! Their marketing data calls it "FX" format. Whatever. Does this mean that 1.5x crop sensors are on the way out? They made all that noise about how DX is big enough and that it makes it easier to build new lenses. Was that all FUD? Does the pixel size just matter too much?

I seem to be frequently having this experience lately where I find a windows app that implements some desktop/GUI feature that I really like from linux, and almost in a better way. The two I've found recently are:

1. VirtuaWin: A virtual desktop switcher for windows. (thank you Ramesh for the pointer)
2. AutoHotKey: A massively customizable keyboard shortcut/macro type program.

ok. Slin says the iPhone as gotten much better. Here is my ultimate test. If you can read this l, ihave been able to successfully post on my blog without crashing.

Qian and Matt conspired to get me a Wii for my birthday, and I'm having tons of fun with it.

By far the best of the Wii sports is boxing. The minimum amount of movement required is pretty high, and it demands a considerable amount of skill and quick thinking. And it makes my arms sore.

A few months ago, I read about PeerGuardian, a special windows program that blocks traffic to and from certain hosts that are known to be associated with law enforcement agencies and the like or just plain old spyware and malware.

That's cool, except that today I discovered that the reason my Outlook can't download any of my dreamhost mail is because the mail server is blocked by this program. My theory is that someone must have sent a crapload of spam from a dreamhost mail domain, and that earned it an entry on the PG block list.

The real problem is that el cheapo dreamhost maps all your mail domains to the same host. mail.kendeeter.com, mail.test.kendeeter.com, etc, all point to the same IP, and thus all get blocked by the same rule.

Lame.

I think I actually got somewhere this time.

The end result is:

Configuration details are available here.

Note that the above shot is just for arial. The other fonts available on the system often look much better. But the point of that shot is that arial actually looks semi-decent now.

My awesome friends felt so sorry for me that they bought me a Blackberry Curve for my birthday. All I can say is that this thing rocks.

And I managed to post this without the damn thing crashing.

Seems like my other post didn't quite make it all the way through. So here's another try.