Many of the screenshots that show up on my blog were captured with ImageWell, a little Mac app with resizing, uploading, and rudimentary image editing functionality. It used to be freeware. Now it costs $20 after the trial period runs out.

InstantShot! is a menu bar app that does a good job of taking screenshots, but that's all it does.

ChocoFlop, which I've only just discovered, seems like the best of the free image editors for the Mac. The rest are pretty bad. Nothing as good as Paint.NET on Windows.

GIMP on OS X has finally become more or less usable, but that's heavyweight.

Python has long had a string interpolation operator, %.

Python 2.6 and 3.0 introduced a new, richer set of string formatting operations. See PEP 3101 for the rationale.

One trick that I liked with the old way of formatting was to put the locals() dictionary or self.__dict__ on the right-hand side

>>> def stuff(a, b):
...  c = a+b; d = a-b
...  return "%(a)s, %(b)s, %(c)s, %(d)s" % locals()
...
>>> stuff(3, 17)
'3, 17, 20, -14'

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to do the equivalent with string.format: use the ** syntax to unpack the dict into kwargs.

>>> class Person(object):
...  def __init__(self, name, age):
...   self.name = name
...   self.age = age
...  def old(self):
...   return "name=%(name)s, age=%(age)d" % self.__dict__
...  def new(self):
...   return "name={name}, age={age}".format(**self.__dict__)
...  def dict(self):
...   return "name={0[name]}, age={0[age]}".format(self.__dict__)
...
>>> gb = Person('George Burns', 100)
>>> gb.old()
'name=George Burns, age=100'
>>> gb.new()
'name=George Burns, age=100'
>>> gb.dict()
'name=George Burns, age=100'

The getitem variant ({0[name]}) might be slightly more efficient, since the dict does not need to be flattened, but I doubt it makes a perceptible difference in practice.

I took today off and headed north to the Skagit Valley with Emma and Lyndol to see the tulips. It was a glorious spring day, sunny, not too warm, a light breeze. The tulip fields were busy for a weekday; they're completely overrun at the weekends.

We wandered around Tulip Town for an hour, had lunch in La Conner, and headed back to Seattle via Camano Island.

We had intended to take Chuckanut Drive up to Fairhaven, but Emma wasn't feeling well. Some other time. Chuckanut Drive is pretty year round; the tulips are good only for another couple of weeks.

More photos at Flickr.

I gave a poetry reading tonight, of Frank Maloney's poems. I'm working through a book of Interpretive Reading projects at Freely Speaking Toastmasters. I had to read some poetry for tonight's project and Frank's work was an obvious choice. (Had I remembered, I would have recorded the reading and made a podcast.)

Frank was most active as a poet in the 1970s when he published his collection, How to Eat a Slug.

Six poems follow that give a taste of his work. The material in [square brackets] I omitted from the reading.

Title: Deadly Decision

Author: Kathy Reichs

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Pocket

Copyright: 1999

ISBN: 0671028367

Pages: 368

Keywords: crime

Reading period: 15–18 April, 2009

There are two Dr. Temperance Brennan's. Both are forensic anthropologists. One is the heroine of Kathy Reichs' novels, who, like Reichs herself, is a professor in North Carolina and works with the Montreal police. The other is the star of the TV show, Bones, is brilliant but devoid of social skills, works with the FBI in Washington DC, and has a state-of-the-art lab and a crack team of geeks.

A war has erupted between biker gangs in Montreal. Old bones have been found in the ground, including the skull of a teenaged girl, whose other bones were found years ago in North Carolina. Brennan works hard to find evidence that will convict some of the bikers.

The plot moves along briskly, the characters act like real humans, and the medical detail is interesting. Too many threads are implausibly tied together for my liking, but otherwise I enjoyed it.

I fear going into my home office. It's a huge mess of clutter, books piled everywhere, boxes of unsorted papers, crap all over my desk. (No, it's not as bad as the accompanying photo.)

My office overwhelms me. As a result, I don't go in there, except to drop more stuff off and make it worse. I rarely use the desktop system there.

The living room couch has become my sub-office. I sit there of an evening and surf the web from my laptop. I pull out the bills every couple of weeks and take care of them from the couch. Then I dump them in the office.

I know what the solution is. I've known for a long time. I should go into the office for an hour at a time and impose order on some section of it. Repeat often enough and the office will feel welcoming again. I just spent an hour in there tonight and dealt with a big pile of books. The odds of my doing more sorting anytime soon are low, though, so the problem will persist.

One app that I really want for my iPhone is iKeePass, an port of the KeePass password safe. I've mentioned it before. I'm up to about 400 entries now. It's completely indispensable to me for keeping track of not just passwords, but identities, and which websites I've registered on.

Apple is holding up approval of iKeePass, apparently indefinitely. It seems to be some combination of not wanting to approve strong encryption for export and hangups about open source. Or something. Whatever it is, it's damned annoying.

KeePassX works on Mac and Linux and means that I can move my password database back and forth to Windows without problem. Only my iPhone is without some form of KeePass.

I spent part of my day fighting with CSS for an email template. CSS support is poor in both desktop and web clients, and much worse than in current browsers.

Gmail, for example, does not support <style> in either the head or the body of HTML email. You have to explicitly set style attributes on individual nodes. You might as well be using <font> tags!

You can't assume that images will be downloaded, so the mail has to make sense without them. And forget iframes.

CampaignMonitor seems to have the definitive guide to CSS support.

I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The accountant completed our return last night. Usually we have something of a rebate, so the amount that we owed came as an unwelcome surprise. It's paid now. Bah!

I pay taxes willing enough, but “like” is too strong. We cannot run a complex society without taxes. There are many functions that the vaunted free market performs poorly if at all: roads, sewers, schools, police, health care, education, defense, emergencies. The profit motive is at odds with providing good, dispassionate service. Government doesn't necessarily do it well either, especially when it's run by people who are ideologically opposed to taxes. Vide Katrina.

Title: Nameless Night

Author: G.M. Ford

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: Harper

Copyright: 2008

ISBN: 0060874430

Pages: 340

Keywords: suspense

Reading period: 14 April, 2009

Seven years ago, “Paul Hardy” was found with his head smashed in. He recovered physically, but not mentally. After another accident, his wits come back and a few memories. Googling for the one name he remembers brings the NSA to his door. He goes on the run, causing the unravelling of a coverup.

Efficient, well-plotted thriller in the paranoid vein. The plot is as risible as most such books, but no matter. Enjoy it for a few hours.

A Toastmasters meeting has three parts: prepared speeches, table topics, and evaluations of the prepared speeches.

Table Topics offer a chance for those present to wing it on some topic for one or two minutes. The Table Topics Master sets up the topics and the speaker has as most a few minutes to prepare.

Sometimes, when I'm running Table Topics, I present a topic for everyone at the beginning of the section. On a winter's day, I might ask people to tell us about some favorite food they associate with winter. Or I might ask them to tell us about where they're going for their summer vacation.

At other times, I spring the topic on the speaker after they've volunteered. Tonight at Freely Speaking, I had two envelopes filled with slips of paper. One envelope had names of people, the other was some dastardly crime. I told them that they had to plead their case before a judge, the school principal, Oprah, or some court of opinion. Perhaps plead for mercy or maybe proclaim their innocence.

The People

• Snow White
• The Big Bad Wolf
• CEO of AIG
• Charlie Brown
• George W. Bush
• Tom Cruise
• Sherlock Holmes
• Dorothy (from Kansas & Oz)
• Joan Crawford
• Sarah Palin
• Bill Gates
• Dolly Parton
• Mr. Spock
• Simon Cowell
• Barney (purple dinosaur)

The Actions

• Pulling your little sister's hair
• Being an insufferable jerk
• Blowing the Three Little Pigs' House Down
• Doing 90mph in a 40mph zone
• Cheating at cards
• Cheating on your partner
• Kicking a dog
• Swindling old ladies
• Plagiarizing your assignment from the Internet
• Amputating the wrong leg of the patient
• Beating up the small kids for their lunch money
• Pushing Humpty Dumpty off the wall
• Jaywalking
• Tying the heroine to the train tracks
• Telling offensive jokes

Miranda opened as Joan Crawford, plagiarizing her assignment from the Internet, and skilfully evaded the question by channeling Mother Dearest on the rampage. Phil was Bill Gates, swindling old ladies with a crooked version of Windows. Barry was an arrogant Mr. Spock, who did 90mph in a 40mph zone in his spaceship. John was on his knees as Charlie Brown, pathetically denying that he beat up the small kids for their lunch money. Guillaume spoke as Dorothy who had dreamt of blowing the Three Little Pigs' house down and waking to find her own house flattened by a tornado. Kim explained away Sherlock Holmes, cheating at cards. Joe was Simon Cowell, claiming that being an insufferable jerk helped toughen up American Idol competitors. Don was the CEO of AIG, on trial for tying the heroine to the train tracks, who thought it was ridiculous and that he should have been on trial for more serious crimes. Barb closed as Sarah Palin, who had pulled her little sister's hair, an act of family values.

Title: Anathem

Author: Neal Stephenson

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: William Morrow

Copyright: 2008

ISBN: 0061474096

Pages: 937

Keywords: science fiction

Reading period: 29 March–12 April, 2009

Anathem takes place on Arbre, a world where those of an intellectual bent sequester themselves in monasteries apart from the Sæcular world. When an alien ship is noticed orbiting the planet, avout from concents all over Arbre are drawn together for a Convox to determine how to respond to the threat of the Geometers.

Stephenson's Anathem is an ambitious project, pulling together physics, metaphysics, world-building, anthropology, and an adventure tale. It's an alien world as he keeps reminding us by the huge vocabulary he's invented. Said vocabulary alternates between exasperating and entertaining, but one becomes accustomed to it. The plot mostly meanders along, with long philosophical detours, accelerating in the final third of the book. The ideas and the explanations come thick and fast. The characters are enjoyable, if improbably talented and versatile nerds.

Vintage Stephenson.

I wrote yesterday about NTFS-3G because I was backing my MacBook to an external NTFS drive. I was backing up because I wanted to de-partition my Mac.

When I upgraded my MacBook to a bigger drive, more RAM, and OS X 10.5, I partitioned the drive. I created two 25GB partitions with the intention of putting Windows and Linux on them with BootCamp. It turns out that BootCamp doesn't like that. It wants the system drive to have only one partition, which it would shrink. I never bothered to go any further.

The disk has been filling up recently and I wanted the extra space back, to extend my primary HFS+ partition by 50GB. I found a guide to nondestructively resizing volumes with the command-line diskutil tool.

With some trepidation, I set out to reclaim the end of my drive. Happily, it turned out to be both quick and painless.

Here's the old disk layout:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *298.1 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS GeorgeR Mac             250.0 Gi   disk0s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data WINDOWS                 25.0 Gi    disk0s3
   4:       Microsoft Basic Data LINUX                   22.8 Gi    disk0s4

First, I merged the two FAT32 partitions into one HFS+ partition:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ sudo diskutil mergePartitions \
    "Journaled HFS+" End disk0s3 disk0s4
The chosen disk does not support resizing, do you wish to format instead? (y/N) y
Merging partitions into a new partition
     Start partition: disk0s3 WINDOWS
     Finish partition: disk0s4 LINUX
Started erase after partitioning on disk disk0s3
Erasing
Mounting disk
[ + 0%..10%..20%..30%..40%..50%..60%..70%..80%..90%..100% ]
Finished erase after partitioning on disk disk0s3 End
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *298.1 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS GeorgeR Mac             250.0 Gi   disk0s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS End                     47.6 Gi    disk0s3

Then, I merged the two HFS+ partitions:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ sudo diskutil mergePartitions \
    "Journaled HFS+" End disk0s2 disk0s3
Merging partitions into a new partition
     Start partition: disk0s2 GeorgeR Mac
     Finish partition: disk0s3 End
Attempting resize
Changing filesystem size on disk 'disk0s2'...
Attempting to change filesystem size from 268435456000 to 319728959488 bytes
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *298.1 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS GeorgeR Mac             297.8 Gi   disk0s2

And everything is good:

georger@georger-macbook:~$ df
Filesystem    512-blocks      Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   624470624 508168048 115790576    81%    /

Disclaimer: back your disk up and read the diskutil man page very carefully before using: one misstep could ruin the contents of your disk.

After I started running Linux and then Mac OS X, in addition to Windows, I started on a quest to find the universal filesystem. I had multiboot systems and external drives where I wanted to to be able to read and write disks under multiple operating systems.

The obvious choice is FAT32, the ubiquitous, lowest-common denominator filesystem. FAT32 is supported out-of-the-box by all major operating systems, digital cameras, and PDAs, so that's a huge advantage. FAT32 also has major shortcomings:

• Maximum file size is 4GB. I have ISOs, MPEGs, and other large files exceeding this limit.
• Fragmentation happens too easily.
• Timestamps: accurate only to 2-second resolution. No notion of timezones or UTC.
• Journaling: none. Preferred for robustness.
• ACLs or Permissions. Nothing beyond R/W.

I experimented with ext3 (and its non-journaling sibling, ext2) on Windows and later on the Mac. On Windows, ext2fs works well and I used it happily for several months on a machine dualbooting XP and Ubuntu. It did not work well with Vista initially, though that seems to have been fixed since.

My experiences on the Mac were bad: ext2fsx caused some kernel panics, which was enough for me to abandon it.

There was no free solution for reading and writing Mac HFS+ disks under Linux and Windows the last time that I checked.

Both Linux and Macs natively support mounting NTFS disks read-only. The NTFS-3G project allows Linux to write to NTFS disks, and Mac NTFS-3G does likewise for Macs. I've never had a problem with NTFS-3G and it's worked flawlessly under Linux and Mac for me.

New post to the Cozi Tech Blog: Iframes: thinking outside the box.

Using an iframe to host some content turned out to be a big pain, so I came up with a different approach.

As I mentioned the other night, I introduced two narrators into the chapter of Ulysses that we're reading in June.

I'd say from the rehearsal tonight that the additions are successful, that they clarify the text for the listener, without being intrusive. I expect that I'll have to produce a third draft of the script in a few weeks, but I think the next round of changes will be minor. The second draft required hundreds of small changes.

We gained three new readers tonight. There are plenty of parts to go around, so it's all to the good. We had great difficulty initially last year in getting enough readers from the old guard, until we recruited several new readers.

On Friday, the Iowa Supreme Court struck down their state's gay marriage ban. Today, the Vermont Legislature legalized gay marriage.

It's been a great week for fairness. We still have a long way to go: 29 states have constitutional amendments banning gay marriage.

I'm sure the right wing are beating the fund-raising drums for all they're worth. We can expect more Proposition 8-style backlashes, I'm afraid.

But the news still made my day.

Moments ago, I completed the second draft of the Circe Part I script for this year's Ulysses reading.

The chapter is couched in the form of a play, making it relatively straightforward to convert to a staged reading. There are, however, huge numbers of “stage directions”, often ironic, generally unactable: A vast, detailed procession in Bloom's honor; Bloom burning at the stake; camels offering mangoes to Molly; and much, much more.

In addition, there are over one hundred characters, most of whom have a line or two, then disappear. They need to be introduced somehow.

So I added two narrators to handle all of this. They steer the reading along, adding much-needed context to aid the audience who won't be nearly as familiar with the text as we are.

Next rehearsal is Wednesday, when I'll get to hear the changed text for the first time. I'm confident that most of the changes that I made will work, but I'll probably need to produce another draft in a few weeks.

In Seattle, it is said that moss grows on the north side of the rain. To be sure, moss thrives in the shadier parts of our yard.

On a cold, dry February day, I rented a pressure washer with the intention of scouring the moss from the ground and the flaking paint from the garage walls. Although it was quite effective at removing moss, it made a godawful mess. There were muddy flecks of moss everywhere. Against the flaking paint, it made little impression and I still have to deal with that. I had dealt with perhaps a third of the moss when the pressure washer died. I got a partial refund, but didn't feel like renting another one.

The following weekend, I scraped up more moss with a shovel. Not messy, but not wholly effective either, leaving small, low patches of moss that are starting to return.

Today, I took on the exterior basement stairs. They are always in shade and the moss carpeted the steps. I used an old grill brush that had grown too foul with grease to be used on the grill. It did an excellent job; I've never seen those steps look so clean. The scraper peeled most of the moss off the ground and the brass bristles ripped up the roots with ease.

Bloody hard work, though.

It's been a long, dreary winter in Seattle. After a horrible, wet Saturday, last Sunday was glorious, the first nice day in weeks. Then the cold and rain came back. It snowed on April 1st, for Pete's sake.

And now we have another lovely weekend, with promised highs in the high Sixties tomorrow. I did some yard work today and cleaned the grill and outdoor furniture. We've invited a handful of friends over for dinner tomorrow night.