Domain of the Bored

At about 9:20 on Thursday morning, we heard knocking and the doorbell. I woke up, got my socks on, went to the door. Mom was already there in her nightgown, looking through the peephole. She said that there were a couple of men walking away, one saying something about “scratches”; she guessed that they were repairmen trying to sell their services. (We still don't know for sure whether this was the case or not.) I went back to bed; mom chose to stay up.

About twenty minutes later, we heard knocking and the doorbell again. I didn't even bother with the socks this time, being more curious than that now; about when I got to the dining room, I heard a woman's voice calling out my mom's name from outside. Now this was very odd.

I opened the door, with mom behind me; it was our neighbor from across the street, with two men behind her. “These men want to talk to you.” Mom stepped out; I stayed inside the door (being barefoot, remember?), and noticed a sheriff's badge clipped to the belt of one of the men. (Both of them were in plain clothes: each, a suit with no jacket.)

For awhile, we had a 1981 Audi parked in our driveway. It fell into disrepair, and we received a “notice of violation” since one cannot legally have an “inoperative” vehicle visible from a public road. We donated the car to a charity, but awhile after that, we received a letter reminding us of the violation. We paid it no mind, having already cleared the violation, but upon sight of the badge, I thought that this was another reminder about the car (I forgot that it wasn't present anymore, so they probably wouldn't have knocked on our door about it).

“I'm afraid we have some bad news to tell you.”

So much for that. I knew at this point that something had happened to my dad. The man speaking was not the one with the sheriff's badge; we would find out in a few minutes that he is an Investigator in the HBPD.

“Your husband” — the officer was addressing my mom — “was killed this morning.” Text doesn't adequately convey it; he seemed pretty shaken up about it himself. “Oh God”, responded my mom.

We were given my dad's backpack and a paper bag containing the items on his person — money, ID, watch with its band broken (and its bezel blood-stained), among other things. We were also given a form giving a summary of the incident, and the business cards of both men. The senior of the two told us that the autopsy would be done that afternoon. A woman was with them; I think she was a grief counselor of some kind, but she didn't say anything that I heard (although I did go back inside briefly to get my socks on).

Clipping from the OC Post (another newspaper, run by the Orange County Register).

My dad took the bus to and from work every workday. At 5:54, he was crossing Brookhurst Boulevard to get to the bus stop, when a van hit him; the impact was fatal. The driver stopped and called police.

Dad was pronounced dead on the scene; presumably, the rest of the three-and-a-third hours between then and the time that the officers arrived at our door was spent interviewing the driver, towing vehicles, recovering personal effects, and cleaning up the scene.

Note: This is a good argument for always carrying your ID with you, if you live with anybody. Dad had his California ID card on him, so the officers knew where he lived and that he was married, making that location (i.e. our house) the logical place to look for next-of-kin.

A little later, the same neighbor from before and one of our next-door neighbors came over to see how we were doing. He gave us his business card, and I gave him one of our phone numbers (I've forgotten which one); she said she'd ask a friend of hers about urns, that friend being an employee of a nearby mortuary.

He came by later (while I was taking a nap, since my sleep had been cut short) to drop off a printout of an HB Independent article (and there's an article in the Orange County Register, too). She came by even later than that (waking me up), and gave us a tray of Honeybaked Ham (spiral-sliced ham, regular-sliced ham, and turkey, along with baked beans, potato salad, cheese potato, and creamed corn). It was an awesome dinner (and we still have plenty of it to eat), and satisfied my longtime curiosity as to exactly how good or not Honeybaked is; obviously, though, that isn't the way I wanted to try some Honeybaked Ham.

So, my father is dead. Once the arrangements are made, we'll invite family down for the viewing, and then his body will be cremated.

It hasn't quite sunk in yet. I know, objectively, that my father is dead, but it isn't real for me yet — I don't feel it, if that makes sense. I expect that it will hit me at the viewing.

I haven't written any code since the incident, and may not for several days yet (if not longer). I've been on IRC the past couple days, after staying well away from it for a long time in order to be more productive.

That's all I can think of right now.

When you build a program in Xcode, you may have noticed that error messages from GCC look like this:

error.c: In function `main':
error.c:2: warning: implicit declaration of function `pirntf'

This shouldn't happen on a modern operating system with modern text capabilities. Fortunately, it is easy enough to make it do the Right Thing, which is to use Unicode quote marks.

First, figure out the correct ISO 639-1 language code for your preferred language. I use English, so mine is “en”. The Library of Congress has a list of ISO 639-1 language codes. In addition, you may want to append a region code; I use American English, so mine is “US”. These should be separated by an underscore; my full language specifier, then, is “en_US”.

Then, append “.UTF-8” to this (= “en_US.UTF-8”), and set it in your LC_ALL environment variable. You can do this by adding this variable to $HOME/.MacOSX/environment.plist. If you don't already have one, you can create it with Property List Editor; you will need to move it to the proper location with Terminal. Either way, you will then need to logout and login.

GCC will then use nice Unicode quote marks in its output:

error.c: In function ‘main’:
error.c:2: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘pirntf’

There's extra work to do if you also invoke builds from Terminal or xterm (whether you use xcodebuild, make, or gcc directly).

The iTunes Store has a new feature as of today called the Million Hit Lowdown. They have the season finales of Lost, Desperate Housewives, and Grey's Anatomy, as well as a documentary special relating to each show, available for free. All told, about six hours of video. The catch is, each season finale will only be free until it has been downloaded one million times. So if you want any of these, you should snap 'em up before they go away. (You can always pause the download if you don't want to download it immediately.)

If you want all the episodes in one list, here's an iTunes search for them.

Check this out. Any ideas as to what it is? (BTW, the chattering noise in the background is just RFI from the phone. It's not part of the message.)

The good.

• Power Search is finally linked from the front page of every iTMS section. This isn't a complete fix to iTunes 6's ruined search field that doesn't let you select a criterion before searching (I haven't tried 7 yet), but it's nice to have anyway. I will definitely make a webloc with the itms: URL for it.

• The borders and backgrounds on the TV Shows section are nice.

• Hooray for movies! Pretty small selection, but the TV Shows section started out small too. Hopefully some other studios will get on board with the idea of selling their movies through iTunes.

• I like the new top-level pane for an iPod.

• They finally added a downloads viewer! Woo-hoo!

  

• Speaking of which, iTunes now downloads up to three of your pending downloads (e.g. season pass episodes) at once. This also applies to shopping-cart downloads. There's no obvious pref to change the maximum number of concurrent downloads.

  

• You can pause a download and resume it later. IMO, this is a necessary feature, especially with the huge new 640×480 downloads. As an example, this Lost episode is only 920.4 MB, according to iTunes' downloads viewer.

• You can now get album art from iTMS for songs that don't have any (because you ripped them from CDs, downloaded them from eMusic, recorded them from TV or radio, etc.).

• I'm going to say this in font-size: 120% because it's just so huge. THEY FIXED VIDEO FRAME-RATES IN iTUNES! I can now play MacBreak (which is HD) at half-size with an acceptable frame-rate and The Daily Show (in the old 320×240 size) at double-size with a smooth frame-rate!

The bad.

• SHOUTING IS BAD!

• Helvetica is ugly. What was wrong with Lucida Grande? Can we now expect a return to Helvetica in Leopard? (Strangely, this only applies to iTMS. iTunes itself still uses Lucida Grande.)

• They got rid of the “Free Downloads” sections on the Music and TV Shows pages. Why? I liked knowing at a glance what I could get for free. There isn't even any indication on the iTMS front page that there's still a Discovery Download (and there is, as you'll find if you search for it).

  UPDATE 2006-09-19: Simone found that if you turn off “Just for You”, a “Free Downloads” section appears on the front page of iTMS. If you then click “See All” in that section, it takes you to this page. Unfortunately, the list there is incomplete; it, too, is missing the Discovery Download.

• Some of the heading borders look like a rather plain web page — just a basic border around some text (consider this example). The old headings looked much better.

• Another new version of QuickTime? What exactly is wrong with the one I have?

• Some pages have hyperlinks, but they aren't underlined. When I see a hyperlink like this one, my first thought is “how?”.

  

• $5 a game? Do cell-phone people pay these prices?

• Could they have made the new UI any uglier and more non-standard?

  • It does not respect Appearance preferences. I already chose a selection color and turned on double-arrows-at-both-ends. iTunes uses neither of these. (UPDATE 2006-09-20: Simone has filed both of these as bugs.) And its scroll thumbs (which look almost, but not quite, like Dashboard's) are some funky cross between Aqua and Graphite. Pick one!

  • The outline view, scroll bars, column video headers, buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, and iPod tabs look nothing like any other app. (Only in the main window, though; not the preferences.)

• iTunes is paranoid about showing dialog boxes for perfectly harmless and easily reversible actions.

  

  Yes! Of course I do! That's why I unchecked the checkbox! And if I didn't, I could simply check it again!

• STILL with the UI preemption! Please, Apple, let us do two things at once! (I'm referring now to the “Updating library…” dialog, as well as to the old “Buffering stream…” dialog that appears when you listen to a preview or when a stream lags. These operations cannot be canceled or postponed or backgrounded, except that you can switch out of iTunes and use some other app while it churns.) UPDATE 2006-09-20: Also filed as a bug by Simone.

• The new “Cover Browser” (which I think is what used to be called CoverFlow) is nice. But it only works in the Library, not on iPods. Why?

• No more Browse view. I miss this because it was a much faster way to navigate the TV shows.

  UPDATE 2006-09-14 23:47 PDT: Not so! m2e points out in a comment that the Browse view is still around; simply press ⌘B. You can also choose “Show Browser” from the View menu. Thanks!

  UPDATE 2006-09-20 00:31 PDT: Also, klarno points out in a comment that you can invoke it by clicking the eye button at the bottom-right of the window. That's how I used to invoke it: by clicking the eye button. But in 6, that button was in the top-right, and was colored, and had the word “Browse” under it. I thought that the new one invoked the Visualizer (which would have been welcome; an eye makes much more sense to me as a symbol for “Visualize” than for “Browse”).

• iTunes takes 20% CPU (40% if the downloads viewer is visible) to download something. This is worse even than Safari or OmniWeb.

The indifferent.

• The icon's beamed eighth note (♫) is blue again.

  

  

• The new rewind/playpause/fast-forward buttons are nice.

• The chasing arrows are back!

  

• The iTunes Music Store is now the iTunes Store.

• You now only get the jump-to-iTunes-Store buttons for the selected item in a list of songs, not all of them. Slightly distracting to see buttons appear and disappear as the selection changes. But I don't think they were clickable for non-selected items anyway, so it doesn't matter much.

I don't like the new interface, but I can tolerate it in exchange for the greatly improved video performance, the higher resolution, and the concurrent and resumable downloads. On the whole, I like the new iTunes.

Oh, and the new iPods look awesome. The new shuffle redefines the nano's old slogan, “impossibly small”, and the new nano brings back the great (and non-scratch-prone) aesthetics of the iPod mini. Good work, Apple iPod division!

Just because I find sets like this amusing.

what

“show what versions of object modules were used to construct a file”

whence

“For each name, indicate how it would be interpreted if used as a command name.”

where

“Equivalent to whence -ca.” (-c: “Print the results in a csh-like format.” -a: “Do a search for all occurrences of name throughout the command path. Normally only the first occurrence is printed.”)

which

“Equivalent to whence -c.”

who

“show who is logged on”

who

“show who is logged on”

wtf

Defines acronyms.

Missing, of course, are why, when, whom, and wherefore. Somebody please write these utilities. ☺

UPDATE 2006-11-02: wootest pointed out that “why” was missing from the missing list, and this caused me to remember that “wtf” was missing from the main list. Both omissions are now fixed. Thanks!

From the Daily Show, 2006-07-19 (starting at 10m28s in the actual episode). Small context note: Prior to this excerpt, he'd critiqued Senator Stevens' choice of “a series of tubes” as his analogy of the internet, recommending instead “oh, I don't know, off the top of my head, a net?!”, and then also calling it a “mesh”.

HODGMAN: So, what is Net Neutrality? Well, let's say we're both computers here on the mesh.
STEWART [interrupting]: Uh — what kind of computer would you be?
HODGMAN: Uh… [audience applauds]
STEWART: In uh, in uh…
HODGMAN: I could be a home computer, or network servers…
STEWART: Uh-huh. What kind of operating system would you use?
HODGMAN: Well, statistically speaking, it would probably be a Windows operating system. So, definition —
STEWART: So, you'd be like a, uh, like a personal computer, or do you say I guess the common abbreviation…
HODGMAN [resigned]: OK.
HODGMAN: I'm a PC. [audience applauds]
STEWART: OK. All right. So, uh I guess I would then be a different type of computer.
HODGMAN: OK, that's uh, that's enough of that.
STEWART: OK.