Mac OS X - Aldoblog

Showing My Dock in Public

A deceptively frivolous article on MacDevCenter has inspired a lot of people to show their Docks in public. (The Dock is an application launcher / current applications list / application switcher in Mac OS X, analogous to the Taskbar + Start Menu in Windows.) I noticed a particular commonality among many of the Docks posted, and wanted to ask about it. But before I asked people about their Docks, I thought I ought to show mine.

(click for full-size version)

From left to right: Finder, System Preferences, iPulse, Eudora 6 (with Eudora 5 icon), OmniWeb, NetNewsWire Pro, Interarchy, BBEdit, Terminal, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, SuperGetInfo, StuffIt Expander, Spell Catcher X, Radio UserLand.

Now, here’s my question. Many of the Docks being posted include an FTP client on them. Without exception (that I have seen) that client is Transmit, from Panic Software. Why are people so universally choosing Transmit? Is it that much better than the competition?

I’ve been using Interarchy for a very long time, since way before Mac OS X. I’ve found the Mac OS X version to be pretty good, now that it’s hit version 6. I don’t really want to switch, but if I’m missing out on the best FTP client, I would actually like to know it.

Eudora 6 with SpamWatch

QUALCOMM’s Eudora has been my e-mail client of choice for nearly 10 years, and last week a major new version shipped, Eudora 6. My primary concern before upgrading was whether and how my other anti-spam tool, Spamnix, would work with the new version, especially with the new SpamWatch feature. I’m thrilled to report that Spamnix works fine with Eudora 6 (for Mac OS X), and that Spamnix + SpamWatch is more effective than either tool alone.

Note: Although still terrific tools, and in the case of SpamWatch free and built-in, I no longer use either Spamnix or Eudora’s SpamWatch, having found more effective tools. See my Personal Survey of Anti-Spam Tools for more details and recommendations.

QUALCOMM’s Eudora has been my e-mail client of choice for nearly 10 years, and last week a major new version shipped, Eudora 6. I’m usually of the “fools rush in” school of thought with regards to software updates, so I waited to see what people were saying about the upgrade (MacInTouch is a great resource for these “reader reports”).

But it’s been a week, and nary a peep. And with the amount of spam I receive continuing to grow, I really wanted to try the new SpamWatch feature. So, after doing multiple backups, I upgraded myself over the weekend.

My primary concern was whether and how my other anti-spam tool, Spamnix, would work with the new version, especially with the new SpamWatch feature. Unlike a lot of other third-party anti-spam tools, Spamnix is a Eudora plug-in, and so runs “in-process” (i.e., inside) with Eudora. [Update: SpamSieve 2 just shipped, and now also includes a Eudora plug-in. Very cool!] This makes it more efficient, but also (in theory) more susceptible to compatibility issues.

I’m happy, nay, thrilled to report that Spamnix works fine with Eudora 6 (for Mac OS X), and that Spamnix + SpamWatch is more effective than either tool alone.

I love the way that SpamWatch and Spamnix tag-team to combat spam. SpamWatch gets first crack, before other filters or plug-ins look at the message, and if the message’s score is over the spam threshold, it will be filtered into the Junk mailbox, with no further processing. (Qualcomm designed SpamWatch to run first, and you can’t change that.)

If a message doesn’t get caught by SpamWatch, then Spamnix takes a look at it, and if Spamnix decides it’s spam, it’ll go into Spamnix’s own spam folder (on my system named “_Spamnix”; note the initial space to influence sort order). These messages, nicely separated and usually all spam, are prime candidates for further training for SpamWatch.

I receive hundreds of spam messages a day, but after two tiers of spam filtering very little spam gets to my Inbox — so far only a couple a day, with very little training of SpamWatch yet. The few that have made it through have gone straight back to SpamWatch for training. :-)

What is fascinating about this process is the progress that SpamWatch has made, in less than 4 days of processing my mail. The first time I downloaded a sizeable batch of e-mail (more than 50 messages), most of the spam got through SpamWatch, and caught by Spamnix. After training SpamWatch with those messages, and then downloading another big batch a few hours later, the ratio went the other way: SpamWatch was now catching most spam before Spamnix got a chance to look at it.

I’m still glad to have both layers. Spamnix was extremely effective at catching my spam, prior to SpamWatch being added to the mix, and it’s still catching spam that SpamWatch is missing. So overall, I am doing better in my personal war against spam (though it’s important to remember that this is defensive action only).

About the only downside of introducing SpamWatch as a new layer of anti-spam defense is that right now it’s relatively untrained, and generating a larger number of false positives (non-spams filed in the Junk folder) than I’m used to. SpamWatch ships “pre-trained”, meaning it already has a database of spam words to run against, but this list is generic, not customized to my own e-mail traffic. So it’s not that surprising that some of Rochelle’s e-mails are getting tagged as spam. My previous experience with Bayesian filtering is that it rapidly adjusts as you correct its mistakes, so I’m confident the false positives will go down in a week or so.

At any rate, I’m quite happy with the new version, especially since I was still in my 12 month support period from my last upgrade, so version 6 was free. Recommended, even if you have to pay for it.

Trying Thunderbird

Today I set up Mozilla Thunderbird, the new e-mail client that’s coming out of the Mozilla project. I wanted to give it a whirl, because I’m looking for a new e-mail client for Rochelle. She’s been using Netscape 4.7 to manage her e-mail, and that application is getting old, and has a number of issues, mostly having to do with the fact that it’s now completely unsupported software. Also, Thunderbird has best-in-class spam controls, which is very important, since Rochelle is beginning to receive more and more spam.

Problem is, I haven’t found a better e-mail client than Netscape. Outlook and Outlook Express are out of the question. They are deeply insecure applications, and the number one vector for spreading computer viruses. (Mark my words, in the next 12 months there will be a malignant virus that will wipe Outlook users’ hard disks clean. It’s just a matter of time.) They are also spam-friendly applications (though an Open Source project, SpamBayes, gives Outlook robust anti-spam tools). People who voluntarily use Outlook or Outlook Express are stupid. IM!HO.

I actually bought Eudora Pro for Windows for Rochelle’s computer, on the basis of my experience using Eudora on the Mac for the last decade. But Eudora for Windows uses the obsolete Windows MDI interface paradigm, where all of the windows are contained in one “parent” window. It’s maddening, and a relic from the late 80s. The application has a number of other quirks, differences from the Mac version, to the point where I found it unusable.

So I’m evaluating Thunderbird, to see if it’s ready for Rochelle. I plan to use it regularly over the next few weeks, configured to manage one of my less-used e-mail accounts.

It’s a good thing it’s a less-used e-mail account, because already in my first 15 minutes, it’s clear that Thunderbird is still pretty raw (giving double meaning to the “trying” in this post’s title). Basic e-mail functionality is there, and the application seems solid (no crashing). This is the result of Thunderbird’s gestation as part of the Mozilla Suite. You can use, and even rely on Thunderbird. But there are a lot of fit-and-finish issues, which seem like small things, but add up to making it unsuitable — unenjoyable — for daily use.

Some examples:

The first thing I want to do when setting up an e-mail client is turn off automatic downloading of HTML images. (Loading images in a spam message can tell the spammer your e-mail address is valid, resulting in a lot more spam.) There is a control for this in Thunderbird’s preferences, hidden a little too deeply (Advanced -> Privacy -> Block loading of remote images), but easily checked once you find it. So far so good.
The problem is when you get messages with graphics from valid senders. The graphics don’t display, as per the general preference, but there’s no way to override that for the one valid message. This renders some messages unreadable.
Solution: a toolbar button in the message window to download that message’s graphics.
The default font settings render many messages a blur, with the text far too small to be legible. (This is on Mac OS X, it might be better on Windows or Linux.) The “minimum size” preference seems to do nothing, and the View -> Text Zoom menu option does not appear to be a global setting. I finally solved the issue by changing my Serif font setting to Lucida Grande, a sans serif font that is highly readable, even at small sizes. But all in all, there are far too many settings and options that affect text size and font choice, and it’s not at all clear what does what, how they interact, or how to accomplish specific goals with regard to text rendering.
It reminds me of Don Norman’s description of refrigerator / freezer settings in The Design of Everyday Things. In most home refrigerators the freezer and refrigerator compartments share a single compressor, the key component of the cooling system. Because it’s shared, making changes to the freezer setting, e.g., setting it lower, can affect the refrigerator setting, making it lower too. So you turn up the refrigerator knob to keep your lettuce from freezing, but that makes the freezer less cold, and your ice cream oozes out of the carton. You have to fiddle and fuss to finally get to a balance you can live with.
It’s a ridiculous thing for an end-user to have to deal with, and it happens because the designers give you controls that affect the system’s internals directly, instead of letting you choose a goal state (e.g., a specific temperature for each compartment), and have the system figure out how to achieve it. Product designers and programmers do this because it’s easy to build, and because they don’t see anything wrong with it. The problem is that users don’t think like programmers, and have trouble figuring things out.
Thunderbird is supposed to be a simplified, easy-to-figure-out e-mail client, vs. the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink e-mail client in the Mozilla Suite. They have a ways to go with the text settings.
Thunderbird makes some assumptions about my e-mail reading workflow that are wrong. If I open a message, read it, and then delete it, Thunderbird automatically opens the next message, in a window sized and positioned exactly like the first message.
First of all, while this straight-through workflow may work for some people, it’s deeply distracting to me. I pick and choose my e-mails, working via priority order (or whim), not on the order the messages arrived. I suspect most sophisticated e-mail users do this. Auto-opening a message I would prefer to defer looking at just means I have to close it, and then right-click to mark the message as Unread. Pain in the ass. There appears to be no way to affect this behavior.
The second issue with this is that Thunderbird’s screen redraws are extremely efficient. There is zero flicker when one message disappears and the other appears. Because the new message appears in the same place and is the same size, only the text changes. If you’re looking at a new message that is visually similar to the previous one — say, two text messages — you might not notice it was new, and think that you didn’t hit delete at all. Guess what you’d do then.

These are three examples, but I’ve seen many other issues. I can hold my nose and manage this low-priority e-mail account, but it’s clear that Thunderbird has a few more months of development in front of it before I’ll give it to Rochelle.

A Backup a Day Is All I Ask

I was once again reminded of the value of a good backup strategy last night, when Eudora crashed, and corrupted my e-mail Inbox. Almost 700 messages, most not yet responded to or handled, wiped out. No matter what Eudora tries to tell you, rebuilding the table of contents for a mailbox is not always what you want. But recovery was easy. I fired up Retrospect, located my Inbox in the list of files backed up, and recovered it. Fired up Eudora again, and I was good to go.

But recovery was easy. I fired up Retrospect (backup software I have used for nearly 10 years), located my Inbox in the list of files backed up, and recovered it. Fired up Eudora again, and I was good to go.

I lost a few messages, but only a few. I do a full-system backup once a day, in the middle of the night. Most of the messages that came in after the backup were spam, and I was able to recover the 6 messages that mattered by pulling them out of the corrupted mailbox.

I started doing daily backups about 7 years ago, when my hard disk died, and took everything with it. I had a backup that was a year old, which kept me from crying like a little baby, but I was still really pissed. In the end, that disk crash killed my use of Quicken, because I never managed to get caught up on the data entry.

Anyway, if you depend on a computer, you should make a daily backup. Buy a big tape drive, and use it every day. A good one that can back up an entire 80 gigabyte hard disk runs around $1000 these days, but that is peanuts compared to the cost of losing everything that’s stored on the disk. I know this from painful personal experience. My tape drives have saved me serious grief — problems that would be otherwise unrecoverable — at least a dozen times, making the cost-per-incident under $100. Peanuts.

Get yourself a good backup strategy, today.

BeOS is the new Amiga

I hate to say this about something I once loved, but the BeOS — or more accurately, the community that is still around it — is becoming the Millennial version of the Amiga.

Nowhere is this more clear than a recent OSNews.com article reviewing the latest beta of YellowTAB’s “Zeta”. The author begins by saying “it’s not dead” and then gives copious detail about how screwed up this release is, and makes it clear (without intending to) how impossible it is that it will ever be fixed. Just a couple of examples the author gives:

It’s based off of EXP, or what was Be’s main development branch for BeOS. At the time Be stopped working on it, EXP was known to be very unfinished in many areas. Frankly, without the original engineering team, EXP is probably not salvagable in an interesting timeframe.
Smooth window dragging is admitted to work less well than Mac OS X. Not surprising, Mac OS X has had 3 more years of development, by a vastly larger team, but that’s exactly the point. Zeta is behind the state-of-the-art, with zero hope of ever catching it.
It uses BONE, the next-generation networking stack, which was 75-85% finished when Be stopped working on it. It’s probably the most straightforward module to complete, so if they can’t even finish that…
“And hopefully, there is better support for the SB128 sound cards which was the main complaint in 2001.” Um, it’s the middle of 2003 now.
No usable web browser, no 3D / OpenGL, no Java.

These are fundamental problems, a minimum of 2 years of development for a large, dedicated team, not things fixable by a couple programmers working for a couple months. YellowTAB simply doesn’t have the means to complete this project. It would be one thing if the author began her review by saying, “OK, BeOS is basically dead, but for those of us who still like to hork around with it, here’s something new and fun to play with.” But to treat the release like it’s a serious project with hopes of someday being useful, instead of a hobby, is just kind of crazy. Just like the Amiga folks.

Why won’t people let BeOS rest in peace? It’s unfortunate but true: BeOS is a red shirt of the computing industry. It’s dead, Jim. Beam back to the Enterprise, and move on to the next planet.

I recommend Mac OS X.

NoteTaker vs. NoteBook

Aquaminds NoteTaker has deservedly received some good press recently. But as it happens, it has a competitor from the same family tree. Circus Ponies NoteBook is based on the same source code, from a product originally written for NeXTSTEP. It’s just been released, and has a competitive upgrade price of only $10 — a no brainer.

Aquaminds NoteTaker has deservedly received some good press recently, including a nice mention in the May Macworld’s “More Mac Software Bargains” article, where it’s one of the most expensive items listed. It’s a really fine outlining and semi-structured way to organize information for Mac OS X.

An interesting thing about NoteTaker, it’s based on code written years ago, for a NeXTSTEP application called NoteBook. As it happens, when Millennium Software Labs (the company that published NoteBook) disbanded, two people got the rights to the source code. A founder at Aquaminds is one of them, and a founder at Circus Ponies is the other. And Circus Ponies just recently announced their newest version, named (curiously enough) NoteBook.

The two products are both priced under $100 (NoteBook just barely), and have enough similarities that you can see their common ancestry. And they’re different in some interesting ways, too.

The most interesting thing about NoteBook, though, is the competitive upgrade. It’s $10! That price is so low, it’s a no-brainer to buy the software. And there’s a wide range of products which qualify you for the competitive upgrade, too.

But hurry, the offer only lasts another five days, expiring on the 18th. Buy it now!

I Need a Calendar

I was recently trying to give someone a date for an upcoming event, and I didn’t have a good way to put a calendar in front of my face while sitting at my computer here at home. I don’t use iCal, because it doesn’t synchronize events with my Outlook schedule on Windows at work, making it essentially useless; for just a monthly calendar, it takes too long to launch. I want something very small, with a clean, simple interface. I don’t need a scheduler, I just want a small, navigable monthly calendar.

I was recently trying to give someone a date for an upcoming event, and I didn’t have a good way to put a calendar in front of my face while sitting at my computer here at home. While this blog has a reasonable calendar in the sidebar navigation, it’s not terribly useful in that it can’t look to the future. I don’t use iCal, because it doesn’t synchronize events with my Outlook schedule on Windows at work, making it essentially useless (more on this in a future post). For just a monthly calendar, it takes too long to launch.

I want something very small, with a clean, simple interface. I don’t need a scheduler, I just want a small, navigable monthly calendar. It needs to be omnipresent, which ideally means it’s available from the menu bar. On Mac OS 9, I had a perfect little application called SimpleCalendar, which brought up a calendar window less than two inches square, that could be easily maneuvered into the future or past. But this app doesn’t exist on Mac OS X, and isn’t a menu bar app, which I’ve decided I want (since menu bar items can be very stable under Mac OS X, unlike Mac OS 9).

A quick trip to VersionTracker.com and a search for “calendar” yielded about eight suspects, which I downloaded and tried. Some were simply unsuitable, being application-only calendars. A few were too obtrusive, taking too much room in the menu bar, or shifting menu items around when toggling the display. And some tried to do too much.

I finally settled on MenuCalendar. It puts a very small icon in the menu bar, at the far right, shifting everything else over to the left. It uses a NSStatusItem to put up the icon, which means it’s relatively supported and stable. And clicking it drops down a monthly calendar pane that is tremendously similar to the old SimpleCalendar window, which I loved.

There are a few things I’d like to see improved. For example, today should be highlighted with the system preference highlight color, or at least be user-changeable; it’s hard-coded right now. I’d also like to be able Command-drag the menu bar icon to be next to the clock. And most annoyingly, clicking to drop down the calendar seems to only register the mouse down event; when I move the mouse off of the icon, the other menu items will drop down as though I was holding down the mouse button, when I’m not.

Ultimately, I’d like for the calendar to drop down from the menu bar clock. There were a couple utilities that almost did this right (e.g., PTHClock), that I could have replaced the Apple clock with, but they had one or two minor things wrong. MenuCalendar seems like my best option right now, but I’ll keep looking.

Channel-Specific RSS Feeds

For those of you who may not be interested in everything I write (hi Mom, sorry about all the technology stuff), here are some channel-specific RSS feeds.

For those of you who may not be interested in everything I write (hi Mom, sorry about all the technology stuff), here are some channel-specific RSS feeds:

Life		Tech
Self Rochelle Food Travel The Cats The House The Job Haightlife I Like Politics & Law Media Miscellaneous		Mac OS X Anti-Spam Technology About This Site

Latent Semantic Analysis Is Not Bayesian Filtering

Macworld recently ran an article about anti-spam tools for Mac OS X, which incorrectly simplified the world of anti-spam tools down to Boolean, points-based, and Bayesian filters. There are at least two more categories of anti-spam tools.

Macworld recently ran an article about anti-spam tools for Mac OS X, which incorrectly simplified the world of anti-spam tools down to Boolean, points-based, and Bayesian filters.

Two additional categories are distributed recognition, such as the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse (DCC) and Vipul’s Razor, and latent semantic analysis. I don’t know of any distributed recognition products for the Mac (there’s a very good one for Windows Outlook, SpamNet by Cloudmark), but there certainly is a latent semantic analysis tool — Apple’s Mail in Jaguar!

The simplification (or oversight) is relatively understandable. From an end-user perspective, there’s no meaningful difference — even though the math is very different. It’s not clear which will prove better at filtering out spam, even though in the article Mail’s filtering did the best. Seems like it’s good to have both in the fight!

While I’m posting about it, I should note that the article was written prior to the release of my new favorite anti-spam tool, Spamnix, and so it doesn’t include it in the roundup. From my own experience with Mac OS anti-spam tools I think that, with the caveat that it only works with Eudora, it would have done well in the evaluation. Perhaps Geoff Duncan, or someone else at TidBITS, will review it soon, and confirm that guess. I know they like Eudora at TidBITS — they literally wrote the book!

Spamnix, My New Anti-Spam Tool

Yesterday a new anti-spam tool shipped, Spamnix, which functions as a plug-in to Eudora, on either Mac OS X or Windows. After installing it and using it to check e-mail a couple times, I’ve decided to abandon my old tool, Spamfire.

Update: Although it remains an excellent tool, I no longer recommend Spamnix, having found more effective tools while Spamnix 3 was in development, and Spamnix 1.2 was not enough. See my Personal Survey of Anti-Spam Tools for more details and recommendations.

The reason is pretty simple. Spamfire is fairly effective, but its design means my e-mail is processed twice. First Spamfire downloads and scans my messages, deleting those it considers spam. Then Eudora downloads whatever Spamfire lets through. Spamfire integrates with an e-mail client via the POP3 / SMTP mail server, with AppleScripts to trigger the client’s e-mail check. Overall this works fine, but because Spamfire is a separate application the whole process is slow and cumbersome. It would be better if Spamfire itself was not as slow as molasses, but, well, it is as slow as molasses.

While it’s true that Spamnix can only be used with Eudora, I’ve been using Eudora for so many years the possibility of switching to something else is near zero. So my only consideration is how well it integrates.

Spamnix does that beautifully. My e-mail downloads as normal, but messages are scanned during the download process. Messages which exceed the spam threshold are filtered to a separate mailbox, for later review. The rest go to my Inbox as normal. No two-stage mail downloading and processing, no switching to a separate application to review the caught spam for false positives, no hassle rescuing the few false positives that do turn up.

One of the other selling points for me (and here’s where you can tell I’m a nerd) is that Spamnix is based on SpamAssassin, the extremely well-regarded Open Source spam tagging tool written in Perl. While Spamnix appears to currently be using only the text scanning part of SpamAssassin right now, I am very hopeful and excited that Spamnix may soon support the Bayesian filtering and Vipul’s Razor collaborative spam tracking capabilities of the latest SpamAssassin.

At any rate, if you’re a Eudora user on either Mac OS X or Windows, and it’s worth $30 to you to block most of the spam you’re currently receiving, you should give Spamnix a try. The software is downloadable for free, and functions for 30 days before requiring a license key for further use.

But if you’re like me (I get well over 200 spams every day), it won’t take 30 days to convince you that $30 is a small price to pay. I decided in less than 24 hours!

DHI 102-107

Daily Home Improvements: stackin’ plastic, biting off more than I expected, more anti-spam, and a little lipstick on the pig.

DHI 102: Began work on a major consolidation of all my software CDs, from the scattered piles, shelves, and bins that I’ve tossed them into, down to a single CD rack. This is going to be a big project, since I just put in an hour, and I’ve barely dented the task. I think I might need a second CD rack!

DHI 103: Continued working on the migration of my system, installing a number of software packages from CD and fresh downloads. This is a huge task! It will likely take me a couple of months, because I am trying to only move things over as I need them, so that my new system setup has only the software and tweaks that I actually use.

DHI 104: Edited Aldosoft to update the contact e-mail address, and configured Sendmail to block messages sent to the old address. I did this because there was a sudden jump in the amount of spam being sent to the old address.

DHI 105: Did some tweaking on this blog’s page template, updating the copyright date, adding the subtitle to the page as well as the TITLE attribute, and replacing the text RSS subscription link with the rapidly-becoming-standard 80×15 graphic badge for the same.

DHI 106: Submitted this site’s new URL to GeoURL, and added the graphic badge for it to the page.

DHI 107: Added an RSS 2.0 syndication feed to this web log.

Mounting Disks in Mac OS X

This might be so obvious it’s not actually a tip, but I just learned it today. This is a tip that’s useful if you have more than one hard disk in your Mac OS X system. With more than one disk (or partition), it’s occasionally useful to unmount a hard disk, either to “hide” it from some activity or utility you’re using, to run a disk checking utility on the unmounted volume, or just to keep down the clutter on your desktop. But how do you get it back, without rebooting?

This might be so obvious it’s not actually a tip, but I just learned it today. This is useful if you have more than one hard disk in your Mac OS X system. With only one disk (we’re ignoring disk partitions here), it’s impossible to unmount the disk, because you can’t make your startup disk unavailable to the system.

With more than one disk (or partition), it’s occasionally useful to unmount a volume, either to “hide” it from some activity or utility you’re using, to run a disk checking utility on the unmounted volume, or just to keep down the clutter on your desktop.

Way back in the day, when SCSI hard disks were all that the Mac could access, I used a control panel called SCSIProbe to mount disks which, for whatever reason, were not mounted and available on my desktop. These days I’m using Mac OS X full time, so SCSIProbe is no longer available. And SCSIProbe was only good for SCSI disks. Since I recently decommissioned the one SCSI disk in my system, in favor of a pair of ATA (IDE) disks, I need a new tool anyway.

There’s a command line tool to mount and unmount disks, but if you want something easier, just use Disk Utility, provided by Apple, in your /Applications/Utilities directory. After launching it, select the disk volume in the list on the left, and choose Mount from the Options menu. Simple!

Note that you have to select the disk volume, which will appear as the disk name indented under the physical disk item, which just lists the disk’s physical capacity. If you select the physical disk, the Mount command will be dimmed out. If your disk has multiple partitions, they’ll all appear under the physical disk item, and you can mount them in the same way.