The Megabyte Myth

It's been shouted out again, and again, and again: RAM is better. More RAM buy more RAM. If you run OS X, BUY MORE RAM. If you're buying a Mac, BUY MORE RAM. It's almost as if all of the Mac pundits and Mac users on earth have been employed or bought off by the memory manufacturers for the last three years. Even above upgrading your hard drive or graphics card, memory is always said to be the first thing to be upgraded. It's this mantra which inevitably led to me putting my G4/400 out to pasture, after buying an inadvertently bad 512 MB memory module for it.

Now Macs Only! has decided to boldly challenge this almost zombie-like mantra with a variety of informal benchmarks using the controversial utility Xbench and a variety of other benchmarking stalwarts like Quake III: Arena.

It makes me wonder now if Apple knew this all along, and it was for that reason that they decided to ship many of their consumer-level and even mid-range professional level hardware with an apparently paltry 256 MB of RAM. Their arguement and evidence is convincing, though not fully conclusive; I'd be more interested if they shifted away from reliance on Xbench and used more "real-world" -style benchmarks. Note that they stress that the real reason why you should buy more RAM -- to kick ass at manipulating huge Photoshop files -- is far from what the intended target market of the Mac mini is supposed to be. And that kinda makes sense, doesn't it? You surely don't need a Dual-2.5 Ghz G5 to check your email, pay your bills online, or type up your letter to grandma...so why do you need 1 GB+ of RAM to do it?

11:30 pm Rant

It seems that people have some kind of elitist idea to what a "blog" is supposed to be. Now granted, I'm all for putting the kibosh on bloggers who tYp3 Lik dis jUsT 2 LeuC Kewl (see MSN Spaces), but I think that the whole point of a blog is as a personal means of self-expression, whether it be poetry written in red text on a black background set to the music of Korn or Slipknot, or a review on the latest Hilary Duff CD. There are a whole lot of bloggers out there whose writings run the gamut from sublime to silly, but surely Hilary Duff fans have just as much a right to have a blog as the Mac pundits and the random URL-gathering bloggers who fancy themselves to be the next Matt Drudge.

The "It's my damn blog and I'll post what I want to" arguement is tired and clichéd, but that by no means makes it any less an arguement.

It's silly to go online and think that every person who sets up a Blogger, Xanga, or LiveJournal account has to be the next John Gruber or P. Z. Myers. For some people, a blog is all they have. Just look at Riverbend. No, wait, it's not just silly, it's just plain stupid. It's absolutely idiotic to expect that every blog you're going to see on the internet is somehow going to be a fountain of witty insights or spellbinding storytelling. You don't go into a bookstore expecting every book you pick up to be like a Shakespearean play, do you?

If you think that bloggers and their writings are somehow inferior for posting aspects about their life, then you have no right to post your filthy Flash-infested, websites packed full of bloody annoying bandwidth-clogging animated gifs and 1290x1680 jpegs. I'm not interested in your crummy fanboi art direct at the inane worshipping of some pointless sci-fi show or computer/console game intended for an audience with a collective IQ of a deck chair. In fact, I think I'll go over and post a link to your site over to /. for the sake of seeing your host be brought to its knees begging for mercy. Ah, Schaudenfreüde. It's a wonderful thing.


Ahh...all of a sudden I feel so much better now. I should do these late night rantings more often.

Cats: For TRUE Christians?

When I first learned about this article by way of Pharyngula, what I immediately thought of were...well, not necessarily members of the genus Felis, but another species entirely.

There really isn't much I can say about this, that hasn't been said by Professor Myers already. But I did rather enjoy this choice tidbit:

The Bible does not say that cats were not present at Herod's birthday party when John the Baptist was beheaded. History shows that cats were most likely present at this tragic party that Jehovah did not approve of. Clearly then, as loyal Christians, why would we even want to associate with animals that are without a doubt of such bad influence, remembering how true are the Bible's words: 'Bad associations spoil useful habits'! -1 Cor. 15:33. Some have exposed themselves to possible spiritual contamination in this way. To invite cats in our house is to toy with disaster. Can one deny that the chance exists that the same grave consequences could visit your home that fell upon John? Clearly, God disapproved of this 'birthday' party. Should we not then disapprove (without showing any malicious intent, only Godly hatred) of cats the way the scriptures recommend?

Right. So these are the Christians who think that a strictly, no-nonsense 100% purely literal interpretation of Scripture is the end-all and be-all for everything under the sun, from martial relations, to international law, to historiography and the study of science and tech. If the Bible doesn't say it happened, then the Bible says it didn't happen.

So...the Bible doesn't say that cats had anything to do with the death of John the Baptist...and all of a sudden, that's perfectly okay? The Jehovah's Witness who wrote this just keeps on trucking paying no attention to the fact that he has, for all intents and purposes, just told a total lie.

Ah, to be a Christian.

Request Permission to Update, Sir.

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball's been involved in an interesting exchange with various other people on proper procedure for software updates. He gives some very good advice all in all, and it's something that all Mac newbies and OS X converts should look at.

What's worth noting is his adressing of the now-classic troubleshooting technique, Repair Permissions:

I still stand behind my original advice, that Repair Permissions is something you should turn to as a troubleshooting tool, but many of you disagree. For those of you who report that Repair Permissions frequently turns up files with incorrect permissions, however, I suspect it’s a sign of some deeper problem with your Mac OS X installation. File permissions and ownership don’t have a half-life — they don’t rot or “go bad” or even change over time. If they’ve changed, some software had to have changed them.

Of course, the reason people tend to run Repair Permissions immediately after installing system and security updates is that installers are the software most likely to modify these file attributes. It’s anecdotal evidence at best, but for what it’s worth, I have two Macs on which I’ve never run Repair Permissions, which have been updated with every system and security update over the last two years, and which exhibit no permission/ownership-related problems whatsoever.

On both of my Macs and on my friend's Macs, Repair Permissions always reports some error with Permissions, even though I religiously try to keep my system as clean and tidy as possible, using Disk Utility and Disk Warrior to scan and check my disk. Often times it's something with the filesystem or Microsoft Word. I've also noticed after iCal, iSync, or QuickTime updates that some permissions do get changed, and are reported as such by Repair Permissions.

Now, what I don't know is if this is simply natural, just a byproduct of the installation process which isn't really indicative of any significant change to the system. Maybe it's just an artifact of the installer shuffling files around during the installation process. What I'd like to see is a UNIX guru step up to the plate and give some explanations to how the Permissions system in OS X works with respect to what we see in the Repair Permissions report window.

I'll totally agree with Gruber's assertion that Repair Permissions is needed only when you have problems that are strongly indicative of permissions-related issues. Beyond that, repairing your permissions is truly another perceived panacea on the level of rebuilding your desktop or zapping your PRAM in the old OS 9 days. Yes, these problems did happen, and they were an issue -- but they didn't happen often enough to cause the problems that people thought could be solved by using those measures. But I still personally think that a permissions repair after a system update would be good idea. And yes, I do agree that the actual empirical evidence for this is flat-out zero. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some sugar pills to take for my headache.

Anyway, next:

However, a vocal minority of users swear by the use of combo updaters. The idea being that there are occasional problems caused by the delta updaters, which problems can be avoided by using combo updaters. After every system update, sites such as MacFixIt and MacInTouch publish reports from readers claiming that update problems were fixed after running the combo updater.

However, I don’t think it’s necessary. I use Software Update for all the machines in the house, and the delta updaters have never caused a problem. Again, I’m not arguing that the three active Macs here at Daring Fireball HQ constitute a statistically significant sample size, but my guess is that most of the people who run into problems with delta updaters have diddled with files they ought not have diddled.

Gruber then cites an example of one L337 Mac user on MacInTouch who fixed a graphical issue on a newly upgraded 10.3.7 system by using the ATi driver from his previous 10.3.6 installation. Now, I agree with Gruber. Unless you *really* know what you're doing, you should never, ever, ever mix and match system components. Back in OS 9, this wasn't so bad, since it usually involved an extension or control panel that you could easily toss out if it caused problems. But this is UNIX now -- files you may transfer from an old system aren't so easy to get rid of. It's easy to confuse files in the deep UNIX underpinnings of the system, and you may end up changing something else in the process, and the system may not let you delete it easily.

Now with respect to delta vs. combo updaters, the arguement to me is similar to the update vs. clean reinstall issue when dealing with major system updates (i.e. 10.x to 10.[x+1]). Since the delta updaters only give you only the extra files your system needs, the files you may not need for the update are still kept from the old installation. These files may have been corrupted or changed in some way, or even missing. Since the combo updater gives you fresh copies of those files too, any "wronged" files will have been replaced with clean ones.

Of course, this is based on my own limited understanding of the distinction between combo and delta updaters and yes, there isn't a lot of factual evidence to back this up. Maybe I'm totally off-base with this. But better safe than sorry, I think.

Another problem is that, from my own observations, the updater seems to base the composition of the delta updaters based on the current state of your system. Hence, the size and composition of a delta updater may change from system to system, depending on what updates you have and haven't installed. So the update itself may be quite variable. Isn't that what delta means?

When I decided to do a clean reinstall of Panther on my system after a botched security update, after painstakingly reapplying all of the updates up to 10.3.5, I applied the 10.3.6 delta updater. It didn't work. It said it couldn't be used on my computer, even though I'd made sure I installed everything system related up to that update. But then I got to thinking that I hadn't updated everything. There was still Safari, the various freeware iApps, and other Apple miscellany (like ADC developer stuff). Maybe those updates changed aspects of the system that Software Update had reported to Apple when I downloaded my delta updater. Since those changes weren't there, the installer had nothing to work with.

I bit the bullet and downloaded the combo updater, and lo and behold, everything worked out fine.

I don't by any stretch of the imagination think that my situation is indicative of any widespread problem with delta updates. But I think that it should give pause as to the reason why people prefer combo updaters over delta ones.

Biogeography Burn-Out

I've been working two straight weeks non-stop on my research project, working on nothing but biogeography. It's because of that that I've felt really burnt out from working so hard on my project, and have pretty much ignored everything else. Which isn't a good idea, seeing as how I've got a lot of stuff coming up in the next two weeks; my ZOO 354 assignment, and my ZOO 462 test and assignment -- and studying for the upcoming BOT 251 test...

It's a shame though, because I was really looking forward to Dominic Halas' GAS seminar talk on the "Crisis of Biogeography". But sitting there in the Ramsay Wright lounge, I felt that if I'd ever hear the words "taxon-area cladogram" again today I'd scream.

Ah well. I suppose I could email Halas and ask him for papers/references on his talk.

Sliding Away

After much soul searching I decided to send the essay on Vincent I'd written earlier. I don't think I got a reply from Nicky about it. Then again, she doesn't check her email often and takes a while to reply to her emails, since she's very busy with her work and with school. I wonder what she'll think of me now. Better to have it this way, rather than explode in front of her and the others at VCF.

It almost feels as if the time I spent there was all wasted. I know I won't make that same mistake again.

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

I read an article on the Focus on the Family uproar over Spongebob Squarepants in today's Metro, written by Rick McGinnis. Wow. I thought I'd post the article here in its entirety, if only because I found it very witty and insightful:

“Does anybody here know SpongeBob?” asked Dr. James C. Dobson, the founder of conservative lobby group Focus on the Family. Dobson was speaking at a Tuesday night black-tie dinner for members of Congress and political allies to celebrate U.S. election results, according to a story in yesterday’s New York Times. One would assume that, if they had kids, many would probably say “yes” though not, perhaps, in the biblical sense. According to the Times, SpongeBob is not only a hit among kids, but with “adult gay men, perhaps because he holds hands with his animated sidekick Patrick and likes to watch the imaginary television show The Adventures of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy.” (You don’t say? Next thing you’ll be telling me rude things about Bert and Ernie, or Batman and Robin.)

And that might be part of the reason why Dobson and other religious conservatives are targeting the animated show and its unmistakably fey star as part of a “pro-homosexual” agenda. The main reason, however, is the appearance of SpongeBob in a children’s video made by former Chic front man Nile Rodgers’ We Are Family Foundation.

Rodgers, who wrote the disco hit that gave the foundation its name, set up the organization after 9/11 to teach children about multiculturalism, and the main project so far has been a video featuring appearances by a galaxy of children’s TV characters, from shows like Arthur, Barney, Bear in the Big Blue House, Blue’s Clues, Bob the Builder, The Book of Pooh, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Dora the Explorer, Jimmy Neutron, Kim Possible, Madeline, The Magic School Bus, The Muppet Show, Rugrats, Sesame Street, SpongeBob SquarePants and Zoom, among others.

Dobson and his group insist that the video is a recruiting tool, based on a “tolerance pledge” that Rodgers’ foundation borrowed from the Southern Poverty Law Center, and which appears only on their website. “We see the video as an insidious means by which the organization is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids,” said Paul Batura, assistant to Mr. Dobson at Focus on the Family.

Now, it’s one thing to make allegations about SpongeBob’s invertebrate sexuality, but isn’t it a bit much to implicate beloved children’s shows like Barney, Rugrats, Sesame Street and The Muppet Show in some kind of gay conspiracy? (Of course, everyone’s been wondering about Barney for years, and doesn’t Bob the Builder go overboard on the whole butch thing? Just kidding.)

The author of this column, for the record, is a card-carrying Tory, and a religious Roman Catholic at that — ergo, a “religious conservative.” But it’s winceworthy to watch prominent religious conservatives like Dobson make such pitiful statements to the media, so apparently ignorant of concepts like “optics.” In the context of SpongeBob, Dobson makes religious conservatives look like the sort of low-ranking classroom bullies who lash out at the clueless, dateless wonders with which they share the low reaches of the social totem pole by calling them “queer.”

And for the record, sea sponges are hermaphrodites who practise asexual reproduction, so SpongeBob can’t help looking a bit light in the loafers. Lay off already, man.

I couldn't help but be amused by both McGinnis' disclaimer and his observation on sponge biology. Something's definitely wrong with groups like FoF if they start putting off other religious conservatives.

But really, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that this sort of thing has happened, given the meteoric rise to fame and utter ubiquity enjoyed by Spongebob Squarepants. While I was at the Dufferin Mall No Frills with my mom, I noticed the massive piece of Spongebob paraphernalia held by a child as his parents were checking in their groceries. It's everywhere. It's as if these guys are targeting anything left, right, and centre that's part of pop culture but isn't Christian. I'm sure that the only reason why these guys haven't targeted the iPod is because you actually can put all sorts of Biblically-related goodies on it.

I wish that I could just as easily disregard and scoff at such wanton and callous accusations of "brainwashing" with the nonchalance that I could give to someone like Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist Church. Sadly, it's just not possible.

Through the dark/What do I see?

I suppose I owe my readers an apology for going back on my word earlier. But damn it, I have enough science in my life that if I do any more writing or reading about science I think I'm going to go insane. Not that I can go any more insane than I already have. So I suppose I'll have to make do with more emotional vomitting punctuated with momentary flashes of scientific insight and commentary.

Four people messaged me on LiveJournal out of the blue and gave me their condolences. One of them, Rachey, was once a close friend of mine from the old -InTheSky- YahooGroups! list-serv, but we lost touch as time went on. Nothing like a funeral to bring people closer together, hmm?

I'm thankful that they've let me have what I think is rightfully mine. I find the concern and apparent compassion of people around me stifling and condescending at the same time -- I would rather have indifference; hence the extreme reluctance I've had in telling many of the people I know. I think back to all of the things I tried to keep of his but couldn't save; the least they could do is let me suffer in peace.

untitled

There's a quiet emptiness now. We've cleared the house of so many things now, and the walls have taken on a somewhat eerie blankness. There's now an empty space in the bedroom where the bed -- our bed used to be. My voice now echoes in the hallway leading to the door of the apartment and the bedroom; we removed...or rather, mom removed all of the things we all kept that served to fill the spaces with our voices, voices of joy, sadness, laughter, and of the mundaneness of everyday life that I now so sorely miss. I cannot return to any routine because I have to routine to return to. I've trained myself to not expect him to come out of the bedroom from an afternoon nap to say a friendly hello as I'd come home from school, forced myself not to expect him to be in the kitchen cooking my mother and I a fresh, hot, warm meal, served, as always, with a generous side of hugs and smiles.

All I have left is a box of mementos from his knapsack, and a memory of a dead body lying in a casket, dressed in a blue suit that was probably two sizes too small for his bulbous form. I fight to maintain the memory of warm tanned skin brushing upon my face as he hugged me, pray each and ever day that it doesn't get replaced in my mind by the sight of grey cold flesh with caked on makeup, a callous and contrived likeness of life.

They say I should forget...that I should move on. That it's time to stop grieving.

Fuck them. Fuck them all. Fuck each and every one of you for telling me that I should all of a sudden flick a switch on in my mind and forget that for 22 years and 11 months I had a father. I will have my grief. I will have my pain and sadness and I will wrap myself in it like the shroud that wrapped the body of Christ as he lay hanging, humiliated, broken, and beaten on the cross. I will revel in my sorrow and it will be as much a part of me as my jealousy and my rage and my anger.

And damned be anyone who dares to stand in my way.

Regarding Vincent -- a short essay.

The text below is slated for an email I intend to send to the iVCF youth worker and the only remaining friend I have at VCF.



When I first heard of Vincent, I was told to avoid him. They never told me why -- only that he was someone who the rest of us didn't need and didn't want to talk to. I tried to ask the people I knew at the Group but the answer they gave me was evasive, misty, as if a dense complicated fog of "umm" and "er" had been thrown up to foil my quest for a simple answer.

And then one night I finally realized why.

When he came into the room, the meeting was already a half-hour underway. He came in with a friend of mine, almost gingerly, as if each and every step was a fight against some primal instinct that upwelled within him, compelling him to do something that was almost certainly unpleasant. Like the Red Sea before a desperate Moses, the circle parted way and gave him a wide berth. Some smiles were exchanged, though only half-hearted. He was a thin, wirey young man, his face boney and his eyes neatly contained within circular thin-rimmed glasses. His shirt, and coat were grey, all grey, perhaps an advertisement of what he was going to bring coming into this meeting, and what he was going to take away with him coming out. But what really struck me was his face -- an oriental face, but one without the bulbous joy I had seen in the faces of his countrymen and countrywomen. The skin on his face had been tightly bonded to the bone of his skull, giving him a sleek, streamlined look. But there was no mistaking what it radiated. A profound sense of loss, as if someone had jabbed a fat syringe into his head and pulled back on the plunger, draining away all emotion of happiness, leaving a cavity to be filled with a dark remnant, a growing anger.

Yes, anger, and it was his anger that I now remember them warning me about. A strained, controlled anger that burst out in radiating quanta of negativity, in every contrary statement he made against whatever some wide-eyed, beautifully freckled and athletic girl stated about her faith in God and Christ. Tension filled the air and a dull pallor was eventually cast. Even the wide-eyed girls and boys who were there were silent.

I don't remember her name anymore, but one of the youth leaders tried to enact some form of damage control. She'd interject and correct him, tried desperately to quell and silence any discussion, the frantic fear in her voice made all too clear that soon a fight would break out. But would it? We were after all, a meeting of young Christians, come together to discuss their faith.

"Discuss their faith"... and of course, in any proper, mature discussion, we are bound to expect dissent. Is it proper to destroy such dissent?

And then it was clear to me, right then and there. In a meeting where a world was painted in rosy shades of glorious, happy colors, Vincent's sadness was not welcome. It was an unwanted presence that could not be tolerated, the sudden thunderstorm that rains out the biggest game of the year. Vincent had used his grey and splashed it all over the happy, bright, rosy-colored painting of Christianity that the bright-eyed, athletic young men and women of the group had tried to paint for all of the weeks that I attended those meetings. They tried to contain Vincent, to somehow isolate him, so that his infectious sadness would not weaken the fire for God that had been set. And all the while, he was left, his head looking down, his legs held tightly together as he sat, the expression on his face set in stone.

Almost a year later, I'm left with the memory of the night of that meeting, seeing in Vincent's face all of the anger, sadness, jealous, pity, and depression that I have carried with me in my journey as a "Christian". I've seen Christians capable of unbelievable and unfathomable acts of cruelty and inhumanity -- the shooting of abortion doctors, the sanction and encouragement of sexism, racism, homophobia, war, violence, and conflict; the ignorance of reason and the worshipping of ignorance. God is an entity of hate, I am told. God so hated the world that He sent a flood, a flood after the holiday celebrating the birth of His Son, to annihilate the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, to joyously cast down His suffering upon millions more. Entire cultures, whole nations, whole races of people are to be nothing but fodder for Winepress of the Wrath of God. Yes. Hatred is good. Because God is good. And God is hate.

And so I am left with a question: what is to be done about the Vincents of this world? The people who, like I, are supposed to have the light of Christ within them? We are a disenfranchised people, people who want to believe but yet cannot believe or reconcile that belief to a hatred which is all too real, a hatred and quest for violence and terror which instills in us not fear, or anger, but an overwhelming sorrow. It is a sorrow that we cannot simply whitewash with sterile words of kindness and happiness.

I am told that those who spew hate and war in the name of God are only but a few Christians, simply a marginal few. But where are the ones who rise to fight them? Where are the Christians who choose to take up their crusade not against the perceived satanic nature of Harry Potter, or the exposure of Janet Jackson's breast on national television, but against racism, sexism, greed, war, homophobia, and all of the offspring of closed-minded bigotry?

I'm left with just a realization that Christianity can't pained as a rosy, brightly colored, happy painting. It can't be a simple as a black-versus-white, us-versus-them quest for spiritual warfare, where God can so nonchalantly cast into the fiery Hell those who do not or simply cannot worship at the same altar as the people who would have you think that they and they alone are privvy to the mind of God. I have seen this spiritual warfare, with preachers and pastors scrambling to gather and use the ammunition of rhetoric and scripture, and it is just as terrifying as any demon or devil or Satan that any human mind can conceive.

I know that Vincent and I are only just two people. Two people only united in their common sadness and lament at a religion that to them, appears to be only father and farther away. But we are growing in numbers, with every word of hate than is spewed, every feeling of separation and indifference that is put up to separate You from Me. There is a divide, a growing divide, between we, the spiritually poor, and you, the spiritually rich. Like panhandlers with their hands outstretched for change, all we need or ask is a sign, any sign, that humanity and common decency do indeed exist amongst the chaos of the darkness that we carry with us from day to day. In this world, in this life, our impoverishment lies within our hearts and minds, a poverty I wear around me as I struggle to find another reason to get out of bed and live through yet another day.

That night, when the small group meeting ended, I packed my things to go home, but when I turned around, Vincent was gone. Just gone. I wished I'd given him a hug before he left. No one else in the room was ever going to do it...why not me?