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Yesterday I noticed that my Gmail account has been upgraded to allow me to check mail on other accounts. It occurred to me at that point that I didn’t want to give my password to Google because the email account is also a shell account on my server and that its password can be used with sudo to do things with root access on the server. So today I went and created a brand new mail account that’s not able to log in via the shell at all, and then configured /etc/aliases so that all of the mail that was being sent to my shell account is now sent to the new mail account. I then let Google have POP access to the new account, and now virtually all of my personal email is being shuttled to my Gmail account. ...

I’m just posting this because I have been fiddling around with a Rails 1.2 application for days in utter frustration due to an obscure problem. Every time I tried to load a page, I got an error message like this: Mon Feb 05 11:22:35 -0500 2007: Error calling Dispatcher.dispatch #<NameError: cannot remove Object::COPYRIGHT> The name of the object that couldn’t be removed has varied. The NameError has also caused a number of other problems that basically left my application dead. Today some searching revealed the problem. In Rails 1.2, you must put include statements inside class definitions. I had the line: ...

This from Andrew Leonard interviewing Scott Rosenberg: And programmers, as I quote Larry Constantine in my book, programmers are programmers because they like to code – given a choice between learning someone else’s code and just sitting down and writing their own, they will always do the latter. Jonathan Rentzsch responds: Summing up: programmers don’t like to code, we like to solve problems. Coding is not problem solving, but software problem solving usually involves some coding. Even when we talk about rewriting something, the objective is not to code, it’s usually to get a better understanding of the problem for solving in the best possible manner. ...

How valuable is your search history? How would you feel if somebody else could see everything you’ve searched for in the past few months? One Google user was surprised when their search history wound up in someone else’s account. In this case, the problem was user error: A couple of months ago, l was pitching our product to a VC in a coffee house in Palo Alto. He wanted to compare LeapTag to Google Personalized Search, so he logged in to his Google account from my laptop. We had a nice discussion. ...

Adium 1.0 is finally out. I find it to be vastly better than iChat, so I can’t resist using it, even though I have found it to have had a number of crippling bugs. The bug that drove me to the 1.0 beta series from the commonly used 0.8.x release was a problem where Adium wouldn’t reconnect if it disconnected due to your computer going to sleep, so when you came back from lunch you had to quit the application and restart. Then a month or so ago, a bug was introduced that periodically hosed the networking on my Mac entirely every once in awhile, forcing me to restart the computer. The fact that I still use Adium in spite of the headaches it has given me tells you how good it is otherwise. ...

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has the definitive post on the “bomb scare” in Boston. Bruce Schneier is worth reading on this subject as well. By the way, I have seen Fox News as being partly complicit in this fiasco but haven’t made the connection. If you can explain Fox News’ role, please do so in the comments.

iConcertCal is an add on for iTunes that displays a concert calendar for all of the bands in your iTunes library. You just install it, enter your city and state, and it populates a calendar automatically. I had been wondering if there was a good way to keep track of the concert dates for bands that I’m interested in, and iConcertCal exceeds my expectations in every way. Simple yet brilliant. ...

Dissent, democracy, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln. Glenn Greenwald outdoes himself. Just read it.

I love seeing pictures of dishes served at restaurants on other people’s blogs, but I never take out my camera at restaurants (or even bring my camera to restaurants) because I think that snapping photos at the table would be rude to other diners. I don’t want to draw attention to myself because I’m standing up and leaning over the table with the flash going off. (I don’t see how you can take decent pictures indoors without a flash.) ...

One of the mighty has fallen. Here’s her New York Times obituary. Here’s her obituary in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram where she worked for nine years. Here’s her obituary from the Austin American-Statesman. And here are Texas Monthly editor Paul Burka’s thoughts on her passing.