A Day Wasted

The following diary entries were made on the same day by Charles Francis Adams, an ambassador to Great Britain, and his son, Brooks Adams:

Charles Francis Adams: "Went fishing with my son. A day wasted."
Brooks Adams: "Went fishing with my father - the most glorious day of my life."

This reminded me to waste some time with my kids today.

Incorrect owner flags for directoy hard link (id=xxxxxxxx)

While running Apple Disk Utility repair on my external USB drive (which I use primarily for Backup), I started getting hundreds and hundreds of warnings:

Incorrect owner flags for directoy hard link (id=xxxxxxxx)
(it should be 0x2 instead of 0x0)

where the id was a 8 digit number, like 19831030, that increased with each message. After running all night, it repair didn't seem any closer to finishing. So, I killed Disk Utility. I set the USB Drive as my startup drive (fortunately, it has OS X on it), and rebooted into safe mode (Cmd-S).

Then, I entered:
fsck_hfs -yprdf /dev/rdisk1s2

Fsck_hfs gave me similar messages, but seemed to be running faster. Indeed, it finished in about 47 minutes, with errors repaired. I ran it again, this time with no errors reported.

To finish and reboot, I entered:
shutdown -r now

After reboot, I switched the startup disk back to my built-in hard drive, and restarted. Once restarted, I ran Apple Disk Utility on the USB drive again. It found a minor error, and repaired it. Since then, it has been repairing fine.

I still have no idea why the USB drive started misbehaving. My guess is that one of the kids interrupted a backup by non-gracefully powering down the machine. Anyway, I hope this trick helps others.

Children: Agents of Chaos

I love kids. Especially toddlers. They are unpredictable and sometimes unstoppable. They haven't learned what things should and should not be pushed, thrown, leaned against, poured, stepped upon, eaten, flushed down the toilet, or inserted into the CD slot.

Unfashionable

This paraphrased quote from Randy Pausch's book, "The Last Lecture", caught my fancy:

"Fashion is commerce masquerading as hip"

My wife tells me that only a person lacking fashion sense would find this amusing.

Only the Criminals Need Fear...

I'm glad I'm not this guy: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-07-25-n65.html...

...yet.

A High Quality Knol

This week I published my first article on Google's new Knol service (http://knol.google.com/k/knol#). It was pretty easy. The topic is something near and dear to my heart (and my career) -- Bugs. More specifically, software defects. You can check out the article by clicking, "Setting Bug Severity and Priority". Let me know what you think.

Update: Moved article to Google Docs after Knol shut down: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12wzwGnKE0GG4ehEC0d2MYT8WrcTsX9AGe1ERRC11AIA/edit?pli=1#heading=h.vq50zqp6utsv.

Makes as much sense as...

Selling T-shirts at an Andrea Bocelli concert
Selling pork rinds at a Weight Watchers convention
Searching for "Dixie Dregs Lyrics"
Braille billboards
A roach coach pulling into a parking lot... at Google.

While riding home from work Friday, I saw a "Roach Coach" (i.e., a mobile diner, famous for serving greasy low-quality food) pulling into the parking lot at Google. My first thought was that the driver was lost (based on the confused look on her face). My second thought was that it didn't make much sense for a roach coach to be pulling into a Google parking lot. Which got me to thinking about things that don't make sense when you hear about them. Which led to me writing this post.

"Pretentious? Moi?"

Short article about humor on wired.com: http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-07/st_holt/.

Open All In Tabs in Firefox 3.0

How to make "Open All in Tabs" in Firefox close existing tabs?

Firefox 2 has an option to close or leave open existing tabs when you select the "Open All in Tabs" menu item for a folder of bookmarks on the bookmarks toolbar. The option is pretty easy to set:

1. Open a blank tab, and enter about:config in the address bar.
2. Find the browser.tabs.LoadFolderAndReplace setting.
3. Double-click the setting to toggle it between true and false.

"true" causes Firefox to close the current tab(s) and replace them with tabs for the selected group of bookmarks. "false" causes Firefox to add tabs for the group to the currently open tab(s). You have to restart firefox to have a change take effect.

Unfortunately, Firefox 3 does not respect this setting, and always behaves as if the option was false. Bummer!

But today I found a sort-of workaround: Hold down the Shift key when selecting the menu option. This opens a new window with only the new tabs. Sure, the old window is still open in the background. But, at least your current window doesn't just keep accumulating tabs.

Actually, there are two versions of this workaround. The first is fastest, if you know ahead of time that you want open the folder of bookmarks in a new window. Just hold down the Shift key and click on the name of the folder in the bookmarks toolbar. Voila! The entire folder of bookmarks is loaded into a new window.

The second is if you want to peek into the folder before opening a new window. First, click on the folder to display a menu of its contents. If you like what you see, then hold down the shift key when selecting "Open All in Tabs". Ta da! Success. Okay, not complete success, but a decent workaround.

Hopefully, the Firefox 3 development team will make FF3 respect the browser.tabs.LoadFolderAndReplace setting. But till then, I hope this workaround helps.

Blinking Airbag Warning Light

A few months ago, the "Airbag" indicator on the dashboard of my 1997 Nissan Altima GXE began flashing. I decided to take it to a mechanic to have it reset, as well as getting a tune-up, but never seemed to have the time.

Finally, on Saturday, I did a little Google search on "flashing airbag light", and found just the information I was looking for. I tried it, and it worked the first time! So, I'm sharing the information with you. There was some discussion on various boards about what models and years this would work, but the consensus seems to be that it works on many different models and years, so go ahead and give it a try. Its easy!

1) Open your driver-side door, and sit down. Insert key into ignition switch.
2) Turn key to the "On" position. This position is usually where the accessories are powered on, but the engine is NOT started.
3) Quickly depress the door-ajar sensor button located on the driver's side door frame 5 times, before the Airbag light starts blinking (you have about 7 seconds to do this).
4) Turn the ignition off. Breath deeply.
5) Turn the ignition switch to the "On" position (no need to start the car)
After 7 seconds, the Airbag light will go out. No more blinking!

Musical References to Music

A few days ago, my daughter and I were singing along to Lynard Skynard's "Sweet Home Alabama". When it got to the verse:
Well, I heard Mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard ole Neil put her down.
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A southern man don't need him around anyhow.
I asked Annie if she would like to hear Neil Young's song they mentioned there. What song? was her response. We talked about the lyrics, and she agreed to listen to "Southern Man" by Neil Young. After hearing it, her opinion was that it was not a very good song, and she wasn't surprised Lynard Skynard didn't like it either. That made me laugh.

But it got me to thinking about songs that make direct (and oblique) references to other songs, bands, or singers. The one that popped into my mind almost instantly was American Pie, by Don McLean. There are many references in this song, but the one that stands out for me is, "The birds flew off with the fallout shelter Eight miles high and falling fast", which I always took as a reference to the Byrds' song, "Eight Miles High".

The next was "Major Tom (Coming Home)" by Peter Schilling, which I take as either a response or sequel to, or parody of, David Bowie's "Space Oddity". Although, in this case, the reference is not to a singer or a band, but to Major Tom, a character in David Bowie's song.

Finally, there's Stevie Wonder's song "Sir Duke", which gives a quick list of musical pioneers: Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Satchmo (Louis Armstrong), "Sir" Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald.

Anyway, I thought it would be cool to begin to collect a list of songs that contain references to other songs/singers/bands. If you know of one, please add it as a comment to this post.

Deep-Rooted in Christ

Started reading "Deep-Rooted in Christ", by Joshua Choonmin Kang. :-)
Subtitle is, "The way of transformation".

Lost my copy of "Mastering Regular Expressions". It is a good book that I'd like to finish. So, I'll have to buy another one I suppose.

Burping Omega-3 Goodness

Omega-3 burps: bathing my esophagus with the oily aroma of warm fishy vapors.

Tolerance and Indifference

Interesting (but possibly misleading) quite from Forbes: "It is easy to be tolerant when you do not care." -Clement F. Rogers

I understand this to mean that indifference, carelessness, or just plain laziness can sometimes look like the virtue of tolerance. I do NOT believe that tolerance is the same as carelessness, or that the basis of tolerance is indifference, or that a tolerant man is just intellectually lazy or morally compromised.

But it can happen.

When Envy Presumes Pride

I wonder how many accusations of "pride" are actually motivated by envy?

For example, if you see someone driving a beautiful car, or see a really well-kept home from the street, do you presume that the owner is proud of it and obsessed with its appearance? Why would you think that? Particularly toward people whom you don't know and have never met?

I do not know, but for myself, the possible explanations are:

• I would be tempted to feel that way if in the other person's shoes. So I project that same feeling on them.


• I know people who were clearly obsessed with their possessions, and had negative experiences because of it. So, I may initially ascribe this same flaw in others who happen to have a nice car or house.


• Pride and conceit are common vices, and so it's highly likely they are guilty of pride regardless. Particularly in the SF Bay Area, and Silicon Valley. The problem for me here is the "guilty until proven innocent" mentality.


• It feels better to accuse someone else of a vice (like pride) rather than recognize it as my own (envy).

Mastering Regular Expressions

I'm reading "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl, and really enjoying it. Not only is it a topic that I find very interesting, but Jeffrey does a great job of leading you (and challenging you) on a path of discovering the power of regex. The narrative is sometimes a bit too self-conscious (the author never lets you forget that it's HIM doing the talking), but that can be forgiven because the book is well written and interesting.

I don't read a lot of technical, "geeky" books, so I don't have a broad base for comparison. But this is definitely the best I've read. So far, my only quibble is that he says that regex should be pronounced with a hard G, as in regular, rather than a soft G, as in regina. I haven't met a programmer yet who pronounces it this way, some of whom have been using regex for many years. We pronounce it rej'eks. Personally, I find reg'eks awkward to pronounce.