July 5th, 2006
Here’s something I just figured out a year+ too late. If you’re using Apple Mail (at least in version 2.0, but probably others as well) to access an IMAP server for a Unix account with shell access, it will treat your home directory (i.e. ~) as the mail folder. This is almost always wrong. It may work for mail only accounts, but regular shell accounts usually place the mail somewhere else; for instance in ~/mail.
To tell Apple Mail where the mail folder is, place the relative path to the mail folder (starting fromn your home directory) in the Advanced tab of the Accounts pane of the Preferences dialog:
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Posted in Mac | 1 Comment »
July 2nd, 2006
I’m looking for a reference to a story I vaguely remember reading sometime in the last ten years or so. To my recollection, a pair of doctors had dissected a human skull in a new way; i.e. with a new pattern of cuts. In the process they found a completely new organ that had been missed for hundreds of years because the standard pattern of cuts destroyed that organ. Does anyone remember this story, and can point me to a citation for it?
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Posted in Tech | 7 Comments »
June 30th, 2006
What’s the best book discussing the proper writing of .NET code in general and C# in particular? I’m thinking of something along the lines of Joshua Bloch’s Effective Java, but for C# instead of Java. That is, I want a book that assumes I already know the basic mechanics of the language, and am quite familiar with general object oriented principles like polymorphism, but need to know things such as “classes begin with lower case letters and methods begin with upper case letters.”
Here are a few possibilities:
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Posted in Software Development | 4 Comments »
June 30th, 2006
When I installed XCode on my Mac, I also picked up a Projects menu on the right side of the menu bar that I almost never use:

For the life of me I can’t figure out how to turn this off. Surely someone must know how to remove this. Any ideas?
Posted in Mac | 3 Comments »
June 29th, 2006
Have you ever noticed how many bird song mnemonics involve beer?
White-eyed Vireo: Chuck, pick up the beer… Quick!
Olive-sided Flycatcher: Quick! Three Beers!
Common Nighthawk: Beeer
Black-throated Blue Warbler: Beer Beer Beer Beeee
Alder Flycatcher: Free Beer!
I don’t think this says much about the birds, but it may say something about the birders.
Posted in Birding | No Comments »
June 29th, 2006
1've decided that as pretty as Gill Sans is, it’s not going to work. On rereading an older post in the new font, 1 noticed a major flaw in its design that makes it unsuitable for production use. 1f you’re reading this post in Gill Sans, you may want to switch your font to see what 1'm talking about. 1f you’re reading it in another font, doubtless you’ve already noticed the problem.
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Posted in Web Development | 7 Comments »