As I said in that last post, in WordPress 1.2

There was no separate junk folder that you could just empty.

Well now there is and it works. There’s a separate viewing screen for comments awaiting moderation and you can mark them as spam and clear them out with one fell swoop.

Thank you WordPress dudes.

on 2/15/2005 I posted about adding custom keyword searches to firefox through the address bar. At some point they integrated this feature into the contextual (right-click) menus and renamed it the feature Smart Keywords. It’s the same thing only now its not as much of a pain to do. enjoi

I finally did the wordpress upgrade from 1.2 to 1.5.1.2. It took a little while, but I finally handed in all my final papers and I decided I would do it as a little break/reward. I should have watched a movie or something, I haven’t seen one in weeks. Instead I’m upgrading my blogging software. I am pitiful.

wasn’t that bad, just followed their upgrade instructions — backed up the mysql databases and other files, uploaded the thing, copied the customized files back and zampapowpadoodlebameedoo, wordpress 1.5.1.2.

nonetheless, I did it cuz they claim that it features improves comment management. and man the management features on the last one truly suck. while 1.2 had the ability to corral spam comments into a bin to “await moderation,” it still required regularly going through the thing and cleaning them out. There was no separate junk folder that you could just empty. Having just installed this thing, I don’t know what the new and improved comment management stuff is, but I might report back on that soon.

nothing much interesting else to say right now, as I don’t do the posting my life thing on there really. but to break with the trend I’m working on a demo for my advisor and working on a paper for WoSLAD. Any workshop about spatial language which titles itself with an acronym that sounds like “Woah salad!” can’t be that bad. Although I hear Delmenhorst is not the coolest place on earth. I’m moving to DC on Saturday or Sunday.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/w00kie/sets/180637/

Apparently there is another way to do this, and it is posted online. Using an .xinitrc file is another clean way to set this up, and there are some other things you can do too. I didn’t find this one, but got feedback on the local northwestern OS X listserv:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2004082505230779

thanks Conrad

Back in OS X 10.2 - Jaguar it was pretty easy to launch X11 apps through the native OS X Terminal.app combined with Apples X11 implementation. All you had to do was start X11 and launch a Terminal. If Terminal was running, you quit the app and restarted it after running X11. Since 10.3 - Panther, it seemed that this feature didn’t work anymore. I’ve looked around on the web for people who’d figured out how to do it, but the general concensus seems to be people don’t do it, they just use the xterm that comes with X11.

Well I don’t really like the xterm compared to Terminal.app, so I’ve found this whole using two different terminals annoying. Terminal is tightly integrated into OS X, with drag and drop file to pathname conversion, easy cut & paste, a GUI for setting preferences, and probably best of all, Quartz tranparency, which makes it easy to see code through the window, and looks bitchin. xterm is pretty much an old school unix term, which requires modification of a dot settings file or command line arguments to tweak its behavior and looks, and of course, there’s no transparency. A while back I gave up on trying to figure it out, but I tried something else today and it worked.

It turns out that you can get the Terminal.app in X11 just by running it through X11. Two easy ways to do this:

1. Launch an xterm, then launch Terminal.app from the command line: /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/MacOS/Terminal &
2. The other option is just to stick that same path in an X11 shortcut by adding it to the Applications pulldown on the menu bar when in X11. I think you can make Apple Script launchers to do this also, but I haven’t messed with that.

Both methods do the same thing, I prefer (2) which doesn’t require launching the old school xterm. But doing it this way, my X11 apps seem to launch no problem through Terminal; likewise for X11 forwarding.

A couple peculiarities to note. First, the Terminal window will start up underneath your other windows, not on top. Second, the Terminal icon will show up in the dock, but if you already have a shortcut in your dock to the Terminal, it won’t bounce and get an arrow under it — the system will put a second, active Terminal icon in the dock (or third, or fourth depending on how many times you launch it). I don’t know why those two things happen, but it’s probably obvious to some real Mac hackers.

Tiger’s (10.4) out now, but I don’t have Tiger yet, so I don’t know if this trick works there. I don’t think too much work went into upgrading Apple’s X11 for Tiger, so I would guess that it still works, but these upgrades are bananas.

I finally found the feature I was looking for. In some older versions of Firefox, you could type “dict word” into the address bar and it would return the Dictionary.com definition of the word. At some point, this built-in special search was taken out, and replaced with the default search from the address bar, Google’s “I feel lucky”.

This article details how to add in your own custom search keywords to search just about any site. All you need to do is make a bookmark for the search string, e.g. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s, where %s is a placeholder for the search string; Go to Manage Bookmarks; Click Properties for the bookmark, and type a keyword in.

.

I am elated.

This is pretty nerdy too. I’m always looking for a good desktop background/wallpapers. Let me know if you have some good ones. I’ve been using the cartoons from exploding dog, but I usually end up going back to the high def images that are included in the OS X screen savers. The pics of space, nature and beach stuff are formatted for the screen and a lot nice than any similar stuff I’ve found on the web.

You can use those images as wallpapers, I have been for a while now. I have no idea what happened to them in Panther (10.3), but chances are, you still have them in the /Previous Systems folder.

If you type .slideSaver into the Finder search box, you should find them right away. In Jaguar, the screen savers were located in .slideSaver files, which are actually directories, in the System > Library > Screen Savers directory. In Panther they’ll still be there, under Preview Systems. You can right click the .slideSaver and select ‘Show Package Contents’ to get at the .jpgs.

(more…)

PC Magazine has posted a review of its top 15 extensions for Firefox. There are some good ones in there. I just got DictionarySearch , which allows you to highlight words and right click them to bring up a new tab with dictionary.com definitions or google search them. I’ve had been using the Dict extension, not reviewed in the article, which looks up words the same way, but gives you a pop-up window w/preformatted definitions of the word from websters & wordnet. I’m also tried the Tabbed Browsing extension, which lets you tweak the tabbing preferences, but haven’t really found the need for the extra control there yet. I’m thinking about trying the AdBlock extension, for automatically filtering ad images from loading and ScrapBook, which lets you save local copies or snippets of webpages like bookmarks, to avoid bookmark links dying on you.

I saw this post on AppleMatters today about the Macs being more cost effective than PCs. This is a brief response. I have a lot more to say about this matter, but don’t feel like spending more time on it.

I generally prefer Apple over the competition for a plethora of reasons, but I’m gonna play devil’s advocate on this one, being a grad student & strapped for $$$. Despite the introduction of the Mac mini and cheaper iBooks, Apple is still high end and more expensive than a cheap Windows or Linux box. The cost is not up front, their prices are competitive for what you get. Their chip speeds will generally be slower, but since the OS is better, you don’t usually notice the difference (maybe for some gaming apps).

The cost is mainly in the service. Servicing a PC is usually cheaper. PC components are cheap and you can often do the labor yourself. Even on laptops, where you can’t do the labor as easily, the service packages on most brands are better than Apple’s, which is only once year, unless you pay more for extended, which I highly recommend, given that minimum cost of service is generally their flat rate of about $300.

For quality components, OSs, UIs, etc. Apple’s top notch. You will generally feel better and enjoy working on the Mac. Things tend to be where they should be intuitively, and they’ve gone through great pains to make it feel that way for just about everyone from the tech expert to the computer illiterate. But their service is really not very good for a company that prides itself on user friendliness. It’s expensive and hard to get.

I don’t recommend Macs to students like myself anymore, as spending an hour or two on the phone or at the genius bar only to be told you need to drop the mandatory $300 to have a fan replaced is not the kind of thing someone strapped for cash and time can do. If you have cash, buy an Apple, and a BMW to plug yer iPod into. If not, the cheapo Windows boxes and minimal time invested in tuning & security is often the way to go. I still prefer Apple, but I work on Winows at work and XP is pretty decent.

I had to shell out $300 last year when my logic board died. I ended up getting the money refunded, which took like 6 months, through their iBook logic board refund campaign, since it turned out thousands of the iBooks in the batch mine was from had faulty boards, but until they made the official refund announcement it was $300 just to look at the thing. The geniuses were of no help. The battery on my iPod is dying now, and although I bought the extended service thing for it (~$60 I think) they give you a hell of a time about replacing it, requiring you to leave it with them for a few days to run diagnostics. This includes erasing all your music, which at the time, I didn’t have 100% backed up, so I had to go home, back it up and I haven’t made time to get out to the Apple store to get it checked up yet. I need to do that… and get the oxygen emissions sensor replaced on my car so the damn check engine light shuts off…

Oh, and regarding the author’s comments on the security of the IE 6 browser, that’s just incorrect. The security it uses for sending info encrypted is the same as any other browser, https is standard stuff. Granted, people may be spending more time trying to hack the browser and exploit its security flaws, but all browsers are buggy, all of them can be tricked.

Last Friday, John Searle came to speak at Northwestern. Justine passed on an email to me inviting interested grad students to have lunch with him before his “dialogue” with Alan Wallace. I don’t have too much to say about the lunch, but, as you might expect, John Searle is a really down to earth, brilliant guy. He is awesome. The food at the Orrington Hotel’s globe cafe looked somewhat creative but tasted mediocre. The service was good, it was overpriced, but the Cog Sci center footed the bill.

I asked him about why he thought people sometimes called him a dualist and about the free speech movement at Berkeley in the 60’s. A lot of the time was spent listening to two of the other grad students debate some of the issues John has written about and that he was invited to speak on. It was fun though, and I’m glad I can say that I’ve hung out a guy I consider to be one the most important American philosophers. The debate was so-so. Searle was funny and animated as he was the last time I saw him speak. His points are strong and insightful, but as he will say himself, not hard to swallow or particularly earth shattering, but important to keep in mind when debating consciousness and the possibility of it’s existence in things besides brains. I paricularly like his view of biological naturalism, i.e. that consciousness is a ‘natural’, biological process, just like digestion or respiration. Robin has posted a summary of the ‘4′ main points he said he wanted to convey, along with her own ideas on the whole thing. Searle doesn’t really know what consciousness is, and as Colin McGinn, my old Rutgers prof who I’ve cited before says, maybe an understanding of consciousness is beyond the grasp of human intelligence altogether. Searle hasn’t gotten us too much closer to what consciousness really is, but his statements of fact about what it has to be are important to keep in mind.

Alan Wallace was also interesting to listen to, although his presentation was a lot of quotes from William James and John Searle, which made the idea of debating somewhat awkward for Searle at first (not for too long though, he is a philosopher after all). He also enunciates all his words and has funny forced looking facial expressions, much like Frasier. On the whole, I don’t think Wallace did a great job at supporting his thesis. He made a great case for introspection as an important tool in understanding consciousness, in addition to other methods (neuro, cognitive), although a lot of his argument was James’s quotes. His inferential leap came in the claim that through Buddhist meditation practices, science could acquire a tool analogous to the telescope in astronomy or the microscope in microbiology, allowing greater clarity and higher resolution in the study of qualitative, mental phenomena (a.k.a. qualia). Searle came to the same conclusion I did here, and said it, namely, that if this is true, what will the results of applying the method look like? Wallace replied that the practices did have clear results: healthy, peaceful lives for practitioners. But, the real point remained unanswered: why should somebody spend time in (or the bigger question in academia, spend money on) a lab that plans to train a bunch of people in Buddhist meditation methods, in order to attain clearer pictures of mental phenomena, when it’s not clear what such clearer pictures would get you in terms of understanding consciousness. A deep meditative state might allow someone to give you a more detailed description of what a pin prick feels like or the color red looks like when viewed, but I’m not sure that anyone’s actually looking for that. Not to mention the fact that experience from an altered mental state throws into question it’s comparibility to quotidian qualia. Wallace is a trained Tibetan monk — shouldn’t he have something to tell us that would say he’s on the road to offering so new info on the consciousness mystery, some results to show for applying the method before evangelizing it to the world? I haven’t read any of his many books, so if anyone out there has, let me know if there are any juicy findings.