June 2009 Archives

There's nothing more wonderful than having high expectations exceeded. I love the music to the reimagined Battlestar Galactica - music is a pivotal element of TV and film for me - and I expected the soundtracks to be good. They are exquisite.

A great deal of TV soundtrack is generic and predictable, either badly written, poorly produced, or both. I loved the Sopranos' use of recorded songs, largely because it would have been criminal to ruin a great show with predictable score. That's definitely not the case here - the variety and poignancy of Bear Mccreary's music for Battlestar is a simple delight.

It's a dark show, and a lot of the music reflects that; but I like the tone of the show, and I feel it in the soundtrack. In Battlestar there were even a few opportunities for the soundtrack to lead, and lead it did - especially the fantastic version of 'All Along the Watchtower' that ends season 3. It's great to hear it in full, with no distractions.

What amazed me on listening to the OSTs is how so many of the themes and one-offs were etched into my memory from watching the show. I've not heard the soundtrack separately before today, but I feel like I've known much of it for years. I had the same experience with the glorious soundtracks to Lord of the Rings and Gladiator; it was a beautiful surprise to feel again another, somehow more personal, aspect to a fine piece of art.

For years I've only done development work on Unix machines. It's just easier - everything is there, and for the most part it works. Compilers, debuggers, parser generators, they're all there, they're all free and standard.

My memory of Windows development is rather different. You used to need Visual C++ (better yet, full-on Visual Studio), and that meant either a cash layout or a trip to dodgy software land. I have a rule with my new development machine, that there will be absolutely nothing on here that's not 100% legit. That means no Visual Studio, because I refuse to pay that much money for a toolchain and an IDE, however good they might be.

Now I'm trying something different. I have Eclipse, for my sins. I have installed the C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) feature, and now I'm going with MinGW. I have Cygwin as well, but that ties me to the GPL and to having the Cygwin DLL present. I have no problem with the GPL, but it's annoying to not have a choice. So: MinGW it is.

Eclipse is a fine IDE, but it's a complete monster - Visual Studio was a lot easier to grasp at first. I've been using Eclipse for a little while now, and it still feels like I'm barely in control of it. Luckily we spent big on my dev machine, because a lesser laptop would struggle.

To my amazement, the instructions that ship with the CDT are right, the toolchain installed as documented, and the sample application built and ran first time. I almost feel cheated - I was ready for a fight.

After a couple of months of transition from hyphen address (previously moaned about here and here) I have turned off the default address for my Google Apps account. No more having to check another account and fixing up web accounts, most of which I never, ever use. It gets really boring, really quickly.

This has another nice side effect: I've had Google Chrome set up to look at the 'spare' account, whilst leaving Firefox to handle my main account. Oddly enough, Chrome is really, really good for Gmail, so I think I would like to start using it in anger. I still miss Adblock Plus and the awesome FoxyProxy too much to have Chrome as my general-purpose browser, but for my Googleverse it's perfect.

 A while ago, I wrote about having to work around the way I used my old email system. In short, I had a lot of email coming to myname-<something> @ ae-35.com delivered to  the mailbox myname @ ae-35.com, using the 'hyphen address' feature that's a function of how Qmail works, and is supported only by Qmail. I've used quite a lot of these hyphen addresses over the years, and the only way I could move to Google Apps whilst still getting those mails was to have everything, regardless of address, delivered to my mail inbox. It's cool that Gmail (and Postini, a service you can have with Google Apps when you pay money) support this 'default address' feature, but it comes at a price as I'll demonstrate shortly.

The solution, as documented, was to set up another mailbox that got the big chunk of everything, and thus keep my own mailbox reasonably pristine. I'd log into the other mailbox periodically and remove the hyphen addresses where I cared, and unsubscribe where I didn't. What I wasn't prepared for was the sheer volume of spam addressed to nonexistent mailboxes.

In Gmail, mail placed in the Spam label (for our purposes a label works kinda like an IMAP folder) is cleared down after 30 days. For the whole time I've been using Gmail, the Spam label on my account (whilst it was the default address) contained between ten and twenty thousand items. That's a lot of spam. This doesn't count the great many mails that Postini blocked or quarantines before Gmail even saw it.

Now that I've removed the default address from my primary account, I have 477 mails in the Spam label.

Of course, the other account now has 20,000 mails in the Spam label. I can only conclude that spammers, in addition to being extremely rude and annoying, are also stupid. The only reason any of it gets through is because I have this legacy migration feature enabled; and that's hardly something most people would ever do. I understand that spammers use other people's resources for their nefarious purposes, but that's no excuse for sloppiness! :-)

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