Schinckel.net

I was excited about the update to Missing Sync for Palm OS. Finally, it promised to link up Palm and iCal categories. This to me was a big reason to upgrade, since I seem to spend lots of time manually updating calendar items to be in the right category. It also promised better Address Book support. Including multiple addresses, birthdays, and support for Address Book groups. And that’s where it falls down. Multiple addresses are fine, as are birthdays. And groups work, kind of. The big issue is that it’s possible in Address Book for a contact to belong to multiple groups. In fact, I have contacts that are in about 6 groups. When one of these contacts is synched to the Palm, it chooses one of the groups, and assigns it to this. That’s okay, I have no issues with that. What shits me is that when it is brought back into Address Book, it now only belongs to this group. All of my hard work making sure all contacts are in the right groups is wasted. There’s a large difference between a one-to-one and a one-to-many or many-to-one correspondence. And contact vs. groups can clearly be a one-to-many. Obviously, in iCal, the behaviour is simpler, as an event can only belong to one calendar. And another thing. When I have an email address on iCal, I want it to be an email address on the Palm. Otherwise, when I try to IR it to my phone, it only takes the number part of the email address. ie: luser88@hotmail.com -> 88 in the phone. I think I understand why Mark/Space have set this up: PalmOS doesn’t distinguish between phone numbers and email addresses (other than email addresses get E-mail as their field name), so the simplest way to match up Work email and Home email is to just classify them as work and home, and parse the data on the reverse sync looking for the @ sign. Of course, this doesn’t help me a helluva lot.

Smart Groups in Address Book are crap. You are limited to less than 20 options. And Related Names isn’t in them, so I can’t do a lot with the data I have, in terms of Smart Groups. I need to be able to say:

People who (are in Group CSTA Database) and (Related Names: Referee > 0) Or, even simpler: People who (are in Group CSTA Database) and (Related Names: Gender is Male) I can get away with (Card contains Male), but this will also pick up anyone who happens to have Male in their name. At least it doesn’t pick up Females, that’s a start. Otherwise I’d just have to have a does not contain Female clause. However, the biggest kicker is not being able to refer to groups. I’d like to be able to have lists that get people who are in a particular group, but also have some other attribute. Oh, and I suspect that you cannot search using Spotlight, as this would require seperate files. Oh for the joyful days of BeOS, where people files existed, and you could just add extra attributes, as you chose. And then use queries (which, by the way, are much faster than Spotlight searches!) to find what you want. And it had the ability to create really complicated queries, really simply. And modify them easily to get exactly what you want. • While I’m on bitching about Address Book: I just looked through all of the Package Contents, and the HTML exporter seems to still use font tags. Ugh!

Google.Oz (in reality, google.com.au) has a special Melbourne Cup image: After my last rantpost, this bugs me too.

Click Restart to finish installing the software.

Why the hell do installers still insist on me restarting my computer after I install some software. I want to shut down, as it’s 11:30 at night, and I don’t want to have to wait for it to start up. Yet, when I installed the latest update to Missing Sync, it tried to force me to restart. Doesn’t it realise that at shut down is like a restart with a rest in between? Fuck crappy installer software… I’m going to bed. Thank god for Force Quit. • Oh, and while I’m ranting: Fuck Opera for thinking that having a custom menu appear when you double-click on some text is a good idea. Nothing ever did that before. How is a user supposed to know that? How am I supposed to be able to override this so I can have my own action happening on a double-click? It makes little sense for me to limit a user to my auto-select on a single-click, as they may not want all of my code at once. However, the only way for me (other than to implement a link or button that can be clicked on) to allow for auto-select is by double-click. Which doesn’t work on Opera. I hope they go out of business. Just for this. Bastards. Which reminds me of the old “Bastards Incorporated.” sketches on the Comedy Company. Ahh, funny 1980s Aussie Sketch Comedy. “Guddayandhowareyoutoday?” • Oh, and OmniWeb doesn’t play like the other browsers, it won’t run all of my nice toolbox scripts. Yet. Oh, yes it does - I just hadn’t logged in. Fuck being tired.

In the latest issue of Express, the TransAdelaide Newsletter, the main stories discuss the new tramline extension: Passengers on the new tram extension will travel free, replacing the Bee line bus. The 99B also services the West End, and is much more frequent than the 99C. If they do kill the whole Bee-line, they’d sure better increase the frequency of the City Loop!!

One of my pet hates is the lack of knowledge about which your/you’re should be used in a particular context. From JB Hi-Fi’s website.

If your looking for batteries, headphones, plugs and leads or cleaning products, venture into any one of our stores and experience the JB - You’ve done it again philosophy.

I’m not totally happy with the standard iPod headphones. They don’t prevent much noise from outside, and they tend to make my ears sore after a few hours of listening. Quite by accident, I came across a review on Amazon.com for some Sony ‘in-ear’ headphones, that have silicon buds that actually seal quite well in the ear, increasing both comfort and noise reduction. I went into Sony Central in the city, and they have them, but at $99. I’m not quite sure I’m ready to buy $100 headphones.

I miss Adam and Wil on TripleJ’s breakfast, the new guys really don’t cut the mustard. But the one interesting thing I have heard them deal with is the debate about “Tom Price”, the mining town in WA.

Who was the person who actually discovered the Iron Ore there?

Was it Lang Hancock, or Bill Burns and Ian Whitcher?

Not that I really care, but this was only 40 or so years ago. There are people who are still alive who were involved in the discovery. So why is there so much uncertainty about what happens? It really makes me wonder how much of ‘ancient’ history is true.

How accurate were the records from 1914-18, let alone hundreds or thousands of years ago? How do we know we haven’t had the wool pulled over our eyes about thing in history?

I mean, Pythagoras didn’t really discover that theorem (the Egyptians knew about it all along), and Aristotle’s 4 humours held back medicine for centuries!

Similarly with the 4 elements and general science. And Fraud (intentional error) just made his results up, yet they have been treated as gospel. Don’t get me onto gospel!

I’d never really come across classical philosophy until partway through my Education degree. We did a philosophy of education subject, and around the same time I happened across Stephen Jay Gould’s books. And I realised how some historical figures - most notably Freud & Aristotle have shaped our ideas of the world. And in some cases held back the progress of science by decades, or even centuries. The most obvious examples are the elements, and the planets. Aristotle pushed for the acceptance of the 4 Elements theory - Earth / Air / Fire / Water, and it took centuries for more reasonable theories to take over. Four of anything is usually pretty neat - especially if you can pair them up on axes at right angles to one another and have a continuum. And having four elements means you can associate them with your four humours. Now there’s a classical mistake that cost countless lives! The furore over planetary gravitation is another cause of concern. The most worrying thing is that there were Classical Greek scholars who decided that the Earth orbited the Sun. But not Aristotle. Think of where we might be now if we’d figured this one out 2000 years ago. Freud and his fixation on sex held back psychology decades. And his work was all based on half a dozen patients. Nothing like a small (non-random) sample size to skew results. I think I could formulate a coherent theory of mental illness related to facial hair with a dozen or less carefully chosen subjects. And now I read (and realize) we have more than 5 senses. And the whole sight-sound-touch-taste-smell gimmick is down to the big A. I mean, it’s obvious to anyone who’s had a cold that taste and smell aren’t independant. And you can ‘feel’ when you are in a changing gravitational field, like an accellerating elevator. And there are others I hadn’t even thought of. We sense when we are hungry, or need to urinate. We know where our limbs are. NewScientist had an article naming 21. But my favourite is the Circadian Rhythm. Knowing when to get up. I think mine is broken.