random($foo)

I’ve switched pretty much exclusively to using Apple’s Mail.app for day to day mail reading. For the most part, it’s a pretty good experience. It definitely handles both Courier and Sun IMAP better than Mozilla (only Courier gotcha is manually setting the INBOX prefix). There are a couple things that really bug me however:

• Not being able to filter by unread, custom flags; this is incredibly useful in Moz/TBird
• No advanced search; pretty lame
• No keyboard shortcuts for lots of things (err, expand all maybe?)
• Doesn’t remember my preferences, for thread expansion, source viewing, etcc.
• Can disable image loading, but can’t disable HTML rendering completely

Some tools that may help:

• zoe – email search engine
• Haystack – ‘universal information client’
• Mail.app plugs and suggestions

I’ll be teaching a Friday night (wee, fun!) workshop on UNIX, trying to concentrate on essential tools, and ways to make working in the shell much more convenient: Stupid UNIX Tricks. RFC: Anything I’m missing?

The Awesome Destructive Power of the Corporate Power Media

This commentary, however, is not about the merits of Howard Dean. If a mildly progressive, Internet-driven, young white middle class-centered, movement-like campaign such as Deans flush with money derived from unconventional sources, backed by significant sections of labor, reinforced by big name endorsements and surging with upward momentum can be derailed in a matter of weeks at the whim of corporate media, then all of us are in deep trouble. The Dean beat-down should signal an intense reassessment of medias role in the American power structure.

In an unscientific poll, currently, over 93% of voters would prefer a peanut butter sandwich over George W. Bush as the next president.

• MagpieRSS with REX parser – to handle invalid feeds using REX: XML Shallow Parsing with Regular Expressions
• U.S. rejects Japan’s mad cow test
  

  Investigators have found only 27 of 98 animals that were raised together and may have shared the same source of feed before being shipped to the United States in 2001.

  More discussion at: Mad Cow Killer Worries About ‘The Magic Burger’

Excuse me while I pick up my jaw.

Cory Doctorow has published his second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. Like his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory’s made his book freely available for download under a Creative Commons License.

Cory has a write up of what he’s trying to do:

The future is my business, more or less. I’m a science fiction writer.
One way to know the future is to look good and hard at the present.
Here’s a thing I’ve noticed about the present: more people are reading more words off of more screens than ever before. Here’s another thing I’ve noticed about the present: fewer people are reading fewer words off of fewer pages than ever before. That doesn’t mean that the book is dying
— no more than the advent of the printing press and the de-emphasis of
Bible-copying monks meant that the book was dying — but it does mean
that the book is changing. I think that literature is alive
and well: we’re reading our brains out! I just think that the complex
social practice of “book” — of which a bunch of paper pages between
two covers is the mere expression — is transforming and will transform
further.

(The comments are also quite worth reading.)

While sitting in your chair, lift your right foot slightly off the ground and move it in clockwise circles. Now draw the numeral “6” in the air with your right hand. Your foot will involuntarily reverse direction.

• The Center for Public Democracy: Who Bankrolls Bush and his Democratic Rivals?
• SF IndyMedia: Kerry & Bush are both of Skull and Bones (Secret Society)…see the streaming video (FYI, Kerry is also a member of the Bildeberg club [more info])
• Yale bones dug up in fight to be president
  

  The phenomenon of the “Yalies”, as Yale alumni are known, has provoked intense debate, since in a democracy of about 300 million people, the battle for power will be waged among candidates drawn from the 4000 who graduated from Yale in different years of the 1960s. [Bush, Kerry, Dean, and Lieberman]