She gave me a pouty look.

“I want to have three more carrots!” she exclaimed.

So I thought over her offer. “Ok,” I said slowly. “You can have some crackers after you have three more carrots.”

Kaitlyn ate her three carrots, looking supremely pleased with herself.

The next night (no joke), Kathryn asked for some more milk during dinner. We’ve been working hard on “please” and “thank you” recently, and since Kathryn didn’t include “please” as part of her request, I responded with the typical punishment: “Well, since you didn’t ask nicely, you’ll have to wait 2 minutes. They you can ask again.”

She gave me a pouty look (surprisingly, it’s quite similar to Kaitlyn’s).

“I want to wait five minutes!” she proclaimed.

“Are you sure you want to wait five minutes?” I asked.

“YES! FIVE minutes!” Kathryn was very sure of herself.

“Ok, you can wait five minutes and then ask again,” I said.

The expression on her face indicated that she thought she had pulled off a remarkable feat. But the worst was yet to come…

“Is five minutes over yet?” she asked (repeat about 6,000,000 times).

I definitely plan to be there when my daughters buy their first car.

We have identified you and you are now ON RECORD. We are happy to contact you directly at your residence to inform you that you have been confirmed to receive this notice for a Vacation Package. This offer is real and is no mistake. Please respond prompt so that we may process you.

AS SOON AS WE RECEIVE YOUR CALL, WE WILL PROCESS YOUR VALIDATION NUMBER AND TELL YOU ALL ABOUT YOUR 2 ROUNDTRIP AIRFARES TO ANYWHERE IN THE CONTINENTAL U.S.!

(all caps and emphasis are theirs)

Do people really fall for this stuff? That is both slimy and sad at the same time.

I pulled out my laptop and my cryptocard, hooked up to the complimentary wifi, connected to my VPN, and was fully connected to my work. I chatted with colleagues in London and Israel and across the United States. I sent dozens of e-mails. I downloaded some data files and an update for my instant messenger program. I logged into servers in California and worked on resolving some bugs in Open MPI. I did all this without even thinking twice about it.

But for some reason, I abruptly stopped working, sat up, and looked around. I saw cars being dissected in the garage through the window. I saw an obviously newlywed couple signing papers to buy a new car. I saw a woman at the receptionist’s desk scheduling some future maintenance work on her vehicle. I saw other salespeople chatting by the water cooler.

And then it hit me: I’m sitting in a car dealer’s waiting room. And I’m fully connected to everything that I need to do. I’m talking with people on different continents. I’m working on servers thousands of miles away. Wow! Isn’t that just cool?!

We tend to such connectivity for granted these days. But take a step back: isn’t it amazing? You can be anywhere, any place, any time, and be connected to your friends, family, and colleagues around the globe. Such things weren’t possible even a few years ago.

That was my moment for the day. Then I went back to work. ☺

1. I actually filed a tech support ticket with Quicken (I paid for support, after all…) asking how I’m supposed to migrate my Mac data to Windows. I finally got on the phone with them on Thursday and, after convincing the tech support lady that Win Quicken 2008 would not import the QIF file from Mac Quicken (#$%@#$@!!!!), she put me on hold to check other resources. She came back a few minutes later with a one-time download link for me for Windows Quicken 2004 (which does support importing QIF files). Schwing! So I installed WQ2004, imported my QIF, upgraded to WQ2008, and voila!
2. Well, not quite. :-) I actually had to run my QIF file through a perl script to scrub it for two things before I imported it:
   • Several account and category descriptions were corrupted (repeatably so — they were corrupted the same way every time I exported the QIF file) such that they contained characters above ASCII 127. I clipped that stuff out.
   • All the years were expressed in 2 digits, so Quicken 2004 imported them as (1900+2_digit_year). Hence, lots of my transactions were dated 1900-1908. Ick. Supposedly you should be able to open the OS X Sys Preferences/International and set the “short” date format to have 4 digits; the MQ2007 QIF export should then use that format (i.e., 4 digit years). But it didn’t seem to work for me — the QIF export always had 2 digit years. [shrug] So I set my perl scripty-foo to convert the years to 4 digits. Then everything imported to WQ2004 fine (and subsequently upgraded to WQ2008 fine).

Woot!

I’m still getting used to WQ2008; it’s quite different (plus, it’s in Windoze). But it already seems far more powerful than MQ2007.

I also got Final Cut Express 4; it should be quite a few steps up from the latest generation of iMovie (I was quite disappointed in iMovie ‘08; it’s significantly “dumbed down” compared to iMovie ‘07). I didn’t get much chance to place with FCE this weekend, most of my time was spent…

Installing Windoze (and the required 100+ (!) Windoze updates — and accompanying dozen or so reboots). Yes, that’s right. Another reason I wanted to get a new iMac was to have an intel chip so that I could run virtual Windoze.

Why? To run a real version of Quicken, of course! (Quicken for Mac just sucks — don’t get me started) But let me digress once again: when wanting to run Windoze, which should one choose: Boot Camp, Parallels, or VMWare Fusion?

• Boot Camp: not even a contender for me. I want OS X and Windoze to run at the same time.
• Parallels: I run Parallels on my work laptop (MacBook Pro) and it works just fine. I’ve been pleased with it.
• VMWare Fusion: But I’ve been hearing good things about Fusion lately.

I did some googling, but most of the “Parallels vs. Fusion” info out there is 6-12 months old, and based on Fusion betas. There’s a few recent articles, but not much at all. Since Fusion offers a free 30 day trial, I gave it a whirl. Before describing what I found, let me review my criteria:

• I don’t care too much about performance differences. I’m mainly (only?) going to be running Quicken under Windoze, so if Parallels or Fusion is 5-10% faster than the other, I don’t care.
• For the same reason, I also don’t care about super-duper graphics.
• I don’t care about Vista support. I’ll be running XP.

After trying Fusion v1.1.1 for 24 hours, I am sorely disappointed. It is a very basic VM application and lacks a lot of features (at least compared to Parallels!). I admit it: I’m spoiled by Parallels. Here’s some random points:

1. Parallels 3.0 build 5584 has much better integration — its “Coherence” mode is far superior to Fusion’s “Unity” mode. For example, Fusion consistently shows overlapping Windows in expose incorrectly, and also is slow to update / doesn’t update overlapping windows in some scenarios.
2. Parallels’ “smart select” is also truly cool: be able to associate a file type in OS X with a Windoze application — double click on the file in OS X and have it launch under Windoze [launching Windoze if it’s not already running, mind you] with that data file. That’s both cool and genuinely useful! Read between the lines: associate .doc files with Windows Word (ditto with the other Office file types), if you do have Windoze Office but do not have Mac Office.
3. I also very much like being able to “natively” share Desktop / Documents / Pictures / Music between Windoze and OS X. It takes the whole “if I edit the file in one place, do I have to transfer it to the other?” issue out of the equation. Awesome.
4. Parallels also has a nice GUI for managing disk snapshots that Fusion lacks.
5. Parallels VM’s also have many more configurable options than Fusion VM’s. I like that, but I recognize that others might find Fusion’s simplicity/lack of options easier to manage.

Fusion seems fine as a VM, but appears to be missing many of the nicer features that Parallels has (which makes sense; Parallels got quite a good head start).

So I’ll be letting my Fusion free trial expire and purchasing another Parallels license.

This unfortunately means that I’ve had to load XP twice (and all 100+ (!) Windoze updates each time). That’s why I spent lots of time installing Windoze this weekend. Sigh.

I’ve been using Mac Quicken for a few years now. It clearly does not receive the same development effort that Windoze Quicken does. There are many bugs and annoyances (which have not been fixed in multiple major Mac Quicken releases), and its capabilities are far inferior to Windows Quicken. So it was a relief to have the ability to move back to Windoze Quicken. The Mac Quicken has instructions about how to export your data into a format that the Windoze Quicken can import, so I thought I was good to go.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

It turns out that those export-from-Mac-import-to-Windoze instructions are a few YEARS out of date (even though they are bundled in Mac Quicken 2007!). The Windows Quicken no longer supports importing of QIF files (despite the fact that the Mac Quicken does not support exporting to anything other than QIF files). There’s a few scripts and programs around the internet that supposedly help, but I haven’t been able to get Windoze 2008 Quicken to read any of my data yet.

Unfortunately, I’m outta time this weekend, so I’ll have to try again next weekend…

Grumble.

I should note that I’m quite happy with everything else with my new iMac. It’s nice and fast, the display is huge, and I was able to transfer over all my old photos and movies files in about an hour or two (yay firewire Mac-to-Mac transfers!).

“I’m calling from the US Department of [unintelligible] about your tax refund. Tracy is supposed to get a refund of approximately $1000. Can I confirm your street address of …[my actual street address]…?”

I even asked him to repeat the department he was from, but it was still unintelligible.

Right off the bat:

• It’s January. I haven’t filed my 08 taxes yet. And when I do, I typically get my refund within weeks (i.e., May, or possibly June).
• I am well aware of my tax situation from 07; everything that was supposed to happen tax-wise for 07 was concluded long ago.
• He specifically asked for my wife by her maiden name.
• He repeatedly would not give a distinct US government agency name.

He wanted me to confirm my address. Without confirming anything, I asked why. He said that “we need to direct deposit this refund, so we need to confirm your address, bank account, and routing number.”

What on earth does my street address have to do with a direct deposit to my bank?

Answer: nothing. There’s no reason to ask for this information. Hence, if there was any doubt in my mind that this was a phishing expedition, his statement about needing my address confirmed it for me.

At this point, I literally laughed (I couldn’t stop myself) and said, “I don’t think so. Good luck!” and hung up. I’m now watching my bank activity and whatnot quite closely.

Were it not the wrong time of the year, this could be a fairly successful scam for those who are not savvy to this kind of thing. If you get this fake “IRS refund” call, be aware that when you filed your 1040, you indicated all relevant information about how to receive a refund (either snail mail a check to you or you had to have provided all the relevant bank information for direct deposit). Specifically: the IRS will not cold-call you to get information about how to send you a refund; they already have it.

My rule of thumb: always, Always, ALWAYS be extremely suspicious if someone cold-calls you and asks you to confirm your personal information. Even — or especially — if you think you already have a business relationship with whomever you think is calling (remember that it is trivial for scammers to forge what comes up on the caller ID screen for both land lines and cell phones!).

I resisted buying an iPod for a long, long time, mainly because I don’t listen to music on headphones very much. But I do listen sometimes (especially when traveling, while on planes, etc.). However, I had a better rationalization reason: Tracy and I maintain all of our music on our home iMac (several hundred CD’s — all of which we own, thankyouverymuch). I’ve kept copies of select music on my work laptop for convenience (e.g., to listen while traveling). But I keep running out of disk space on my laptop — it became annoying to balance the disk space I needed for work while maintaining a decent selection of music to cycle through. A good solution seemed to be to use an iPod to hold all of our home music and listen to it through my MBP (as a bonus, it’s a backup of all of our music). The 80GB model is more than enough to hold all of our music and seems to work well.

After buying the iPod, I spent an hour or two yesterday “cleaning up” our digital music collection — finding some missing album art, ensuring consistency of artist and album names, etc. I find myself doing this every few years, especially when moving to a new technology. Just for perspective: my digital music collection started years ago (early/mid-90’s?), using Grip and LAME/Bladeenc on Solaris to rip my CD’s to MP3s (some of the MP3’s I edited yesterday still had “Created by Grip” comments in the ID3 tags — wow).

While in the Apple store, I also played with an iPod Touch — just for the heckuvit. It’s quite a yummy device. The interface for the Calendar / To-Do stuff and adressbook stuff is classic Apple: elegant and simple.

Our Christmas holiday was in Louisville this year; my wife’s family came to us. I put up some pictures (warning: not a permanent link; it will be stale someday).

Google’s Grand Central looks quite interesting. It offers some of the same features as Vonage and some of Cisco’s IP telephony products, but also some others that I haven’t seen before (disclaimer: I’m nowhere near a telecom expert). When/if Grand Central enters the Google product mainstream, I think it could be quite useful for a specific set of use cases. For example, between Tracy and myself, we have 6 phone numbers: land lines and cell phones for each of Tracy’s work, Jeff’s work, and our home. Our families are always confused about which number to call to reach us. It’s not uncommon that they call/text/leave a message somewhere that is not seen for a while simply because we’re not currently watching that phone number / voice mail / text messages. It could be useful to be able to unify all of these for family purposes, for example — we’ll have to see. It will be an interesting balance between privacy, work policies, and home.

I notice that Kaitlyn and Kathryn will eat anything if you put ketchup on it. Including chocolate cake.

There’s been slow progress on a long-standing Adium bug that I filed in Feb 2007. Just today, we discovered that it may be a libpurple bug.

I still hate my Blackjack phone. I repeat this mantra not infrequently because something goes wrong almost every time I use it. The phone locks, bluetooth doesn’t work (or unexpectedly does work), it takes way too many clicks (on a tiny wheel which my big fingers frequently accidentally hit the wrong way) to do common actions, …or one of several other annoying things. The next version of Windows Mobile (v6) may solve some of the problems (the next version always solves everything, right?), but apparently it’s too buggy to deploy, and/or has incompatibilities with some Cisco corporate stuff. Our IT crew is pretty careful about that kind of stuff… Just like Grand Central: we’ll see what happens. ☺

I started [re-]using QuickSilver recently on my Mac. I tried using it long ago but was kinda confused and ended up ditching it. But I found a Google Talk video about QuickSilver recently that was quite helpful in orienting me to the whole zen / philosophy of using QuickSilver, and I’ve been enjoying using it since then. I’m sad to see that there won’t be any more development on QuickSilver; I didn’t quite get the zen of the new stuff that the author is working on (radially navigating pie-shaped wedges — I tried it and found it a bit klunky / hard to navigate, but then again, I think it was quite an early beta).

I’ve been trying out Google Reader over the holidays. It seems useful and allows me to have one central place to keep on top of several periodicals that I’ve previously been following individually (Reader will track anything with an RSS feed). We’ll see if I keep liking it over time.

As usual, I also gave about a billion presentations about Open MPI, open source, etc. Since I come from an academic background, I also find those to be quite fun. After one of the presentations, Rich Wellner from the GridGuru blog came up to me to chat about my talk. This talk in particular was about open source and the Open MPI project — why Cisco is participating, how the project works, etc. He invited me to send him the slides from the talk and a few paragraphs for those who didn’t attend.

It took me a few weeks, but I finally got the cycles to do a short writeup and send him the slides. Rich posted them here:

I notice that yesterday, Network World also picked up this entry:

I don’t know if that appeared in the print version or only the online version.

For whatever reason (as compared to my first blog entry), the phone appears to be more stable now — it doesn’t lock up nearly as much, but the list of things I don’t like is still pretty long:

Windows problems:

• The “done” button location is inconsistent; sometimes it’s on the left, sometimes it’s on the right.
• You can create “speed dial” shortcuts (press-and-hold a number on the keypad to trigger an action), but: a) they’re not actually speed dials; they’re actions (e.g., run an application), so it took a long time to figure out that this functionality could be useful, but b) there’s no indication anywhere of what your “speed dials/actions” are after you set them. So you’d better have a good memory.
• It’s a minimum of 7 clicks to get to where you can send an SMS (not counting the clicks to find the right contact) — sometimes more. Why should such a common action be so difficult?
• If you cancel an SMS message, it goes to drafts. Then you have to delete it from the drafts folder (it takes 11 clicks to get to the drafts SMS folder).
• There is a nice feature to turn off all transmitters (phone and bluetooth). But sometimes when you turn them back on, the bluetooth transmitter refuses to turn back on. It requires a reboot to fix this problem.
• The Java on the phone is unusable; Java pops an authorization window every time an application uses HTTP or HTTPS. You cannot setup Java to say “this application is allowed to use HTTP/HTTPS forever.”
• Windows loses my bluetooth headset settings upon reboot (and other random times).
• The phone plays any annoying (and very loud) noise upon startup/shutdown that you cannot turn off (I suspect this is AT&T’s doing, though — not WM5). The noise is accompanied by an animated fireball, supposedly to indicate AT&T’s blazing fast network. My wife, who heard the sound but didn’t see the accompanying graphic said, “Did your phone just flush?”
• Internet Explorer provides no way to clear the current URL. If you want to go to a new web site, you either to have to go a bookmark or you have to fully backspace out the current URL and type a new one.
• I find that Internet Explorer does not render many popular web site; it just stops in the middle of loading the page. Some sites work fine; other sites just hang.
• The phone randomly reboots every once in a while. It rebooted while I was typing up this list, for example.

Good problems:

• In all Good screens, small yellow banner comes up when new mail arrives, but there’s no way to get rid of it (despite there being an “X” on the right hand side of the yellow banner, implying that you can click on it somehow). So the banner stays there until you go read the new mail.
• There is no integration between Good contacts and SMS. This is highly frustrating; I get SMS messages that simply show the phone number that they’re from; it doesn’t show me who they’re from. Who remembers phone numbers these days?
• Good messaging does not automatically start when the phone boots (!).
• When a reminder alert appears for a to-do item, you have to clear the alert to get back to the phone (vs. leaving the alert there because you haven’t actually done the item yet — like Outlook’s Alert’s window).
• In the inbox, there’s no way to jump to the beginning or end of the inbox (or current message) — there’s only the thumbwheel to scroll up and down (which is difficult if you have a few hundred messages in your inbox, for example).
• Good only shows the last hundred messages or so in your inbox. I understand conserving resources/memory, but there’s no way for the user to control how many/how few messages appear on the phone.

Credant problems:

• Credant will lock your phone while you’re on a call. Even if you want to go on/off mute, you have to unlock the phone (which can be many clicks if your PIN is lengthy). To be fair, I don’t know if this is a Credant problem or someone set a policy that Credant would do this (i.e., I don’t know if it’s a bug or a feature).
• Credant is schitzo about what you can/cannot do when the phone is locked. For example, you can see/clear to-do reminders when the phone is locked.

• I found a bug in OS X’s Mail client regarding plain text and rich text composing (short version: I have “plain text” set as my preferred format, but still Mail composes some mails in rich text). I filed a bug about this with Apple and they closed it as a dup and something that they’re supposedly already working on.
• Spaces is “ok” (vs. great). I wouldn’t say that it’s much better than Virtue Desktops. It gets many of the same things “wrong” as Virtue; if you switch to a different application (via cmd-tab), even one that has an open window on the current Space, you may still get switched to a different Space. I once got Spaces to “lose” all the windows on space 6 (i.e., the windows were supposedly there, but Spaces wouldn’t display them anymore — the windows in Spaces 1-5 were fine. I could even make new windows in Space 6 with no problems), but I haven’t been able to repeat it, so I haven’t filed a bug with Apple.
• Quick Look is great, especially for e-mail attachments. It doesn’t always do a perfect job; I’ve seen it fail to show any details on some files (e.g., even powerpoint files that it should know how to display) and I’ve seen it skip some details that are in other files (e.g., not render some of the text on a powerpoint slide). But I guess that’s ok — it’s a quick look, not a detailed examination, after all…
• I’ve caused Leopard to lock up a few times (requiring a soft or hard reboot); I’m not entirely sure what I did to make that happen; I was just using the machine normally.
• Twice when I’ve rebooted, Leopard has associated the wrong application for opening Powerpoint files. I had to reset it to the right application (and then make all similar files open the same way). I don’t know why it seemed to “forget” how to open the right application.
• Open MPI’s build system can make Leopard’s ld throw a bus error. Awesome. Technically, our assembly isn’t exactly correct, but it’s the minimum that will compile on all the linkers that we care about. Making ld on OS X throw a bus error is new, though.
• tcsh still sometimes aborts for no apparent reason (it did in Tiger, too). It has something to do with typing ctrl-C on a command line. It is very difficult to reproduce this error; I’ve not found a consistent formula to make it die (i.e., just typing ctrl-C doesn’t make it happen). It doesn’t dump a corefile in /cores, either, so there’s little additional clues as to what happened.
• X11 support is weird, as noted in Brian’s blog.
• Open MPI is included in Leopard as universal binaries for 4 architectures. Woof!
• I’m not much of a designer kind of guy so I won’t comment much on the aesthetic changes Apple made, but I will say that the light blue dot on the dock indicating that an application is running is kinda hard to see sometimes.
• The printing subsystem is a bit nicer than Tiger’s, but it no longer automatically finds the CUPS/IPP-advertised printer on my home LAN; I had to configure it manually. Tiger’s printing subsystem would always automatically find the printer.
• The network subsystem is also a bit nicer than it was in Tiger.
• DTrace looks pretty cool, but it has some differences compared to Solaris’ DTrace (making portable integration into Open MPI a bit more difficult).
• I haven’t been able to make iChat AV work (audio/video/or vnc — regular chatting works fine), so I can’t comment on it. But I wasn’t able to make it work in Tiger, either — I’m guessing that there’s something weird in my network/ISP setup that is not letting the connections go through (need to setup weird port forwarding or something). I haven’t yet spent enough time with it to figure it out. Shrug.
• Spotlight seems slightly faster. I’m guessing that it’s still bogged down by the few hundred thousand e-mails I have in Mail.
• I love Mail’s new “export a folder” feature. It allowed me to archive off a bunch of really old mail to some permanent storage on a different server. Removing about 200k mails from Mail seemed to speed it up a bit (yes, I could have done this before by going into $HOME/Library/Mail, but I didn’t really think about it until I found the feature in Leopard Mail and thought “hey, this seems like a good idea!”).
• Safari’s text search is waaaay better than the old one; I love how they visually pop the search items out at you when it finds matching text in the web page.
• I really like the uniform use of the “Downloads” folder (why didn’t they do this before?); both Safari and Adium download things there by default and it makes the resulting files easy to find (without cluttering up my already-busy desktop).

So is it a huge improvement / worth it?

There’s a million small little things that are nice. But probably the main thing that changed my day-to-day usage is Spaces (I’m trying to use that instead of Virtue Desktops) and Quick Look. Aside from 1-2 new quirks in Mail, it seems handle very large mailboxes a bit better — and that’s important to me. I would really like to get iChat VNC working so that I can help with some of my relatives’ Macs when they have problems (this was actually the “killer feature” that had me go out and buy Leopard).

I also saw D. and D. for Halloween, which was quite cool. They bought me my very own pumpkin (how many friends do you have that would pre-emptively buy you a pumpkin?). I discovered that my pumpkin-carving skills suck; apparently I should be using the pumpkin-carving stencils that all the cool kids are using these days (when did competitive pumpkin carving become a hot market? and how did I miss the memo?). I also got to play with D’s iPhone. Wow, that thing is yummy! I still can’t rationalize buying one (mainly since Tracy and I both have smartphones for work that do e-mail, etc.), but the iPhone is still cool as hell.

(benefit of publishing this entry [long] after I wrote it: apple keeps releasing updates with new, cool iPhone features)

In the “it’s a small world” category, D. is now using Open MPI at work on a regular basis. He’s reported a few bugs in the past (fixes for which made it into the production releases), but now I understand that it is actively being used in at least some capacity. Neat!

It seems that Notre Dame’s football team took the season off. Oh well; I’m guessing that there’s some strange things happening behind the scenes that we are unaware of. Hopefully they’ll pull it together — there’s always the ‘08 season…

However, recently I’ve been running into a problem on my MBP — it simply wasn’t syncing (and not telling me that it wasn’t syncing). I noticed it when I added a bookmark on my home iMac but several days later, it still hadn’t shown up on my MBP. Doh! So I started digging deeper.

Upon closer investigation, I found two distinct failures on my MBP:

1. If I forced a manual .Mac sync, I would get an error like this sometime during the sync, and then the sync would stop:

   Sync Error:
   [ISyncConcreteSession pushChange:]: 
   you can't modify a record that doesn't exist: 
   <ISyncChange 0xblah>{ modify record id 'blah blah blah'
   set com.apple.ical.type = local
   set title = Unfiled }
   

   (that’s not verbatim — the important part is “you can’t modify a record that doesn’t exist”)


2. If I went to the .Mac system prefs, I could see that I had my username/password entered correctly (because it would accurately show how many days I had left in my subscription and how much space I was currently using on my iDisk), but if I went to the “advanced” tab, it would popup a window saying:

   An error occurred during this operation.
   Could not retrieve .Mac configuration.
   

   (I’m parphrasing the first line because I never wrote it down, but I know the 2nd line is right)

   And then no computers were listed in the advanced tab. Checking the same Advanced tab in the .Mac preferences on my iMac, I saw that both computers listed.

So it seemed to be a problem that was local to my MBP.

I googled around a lot and trolled through the .Mac help. Most of the information that I found consisted of the following:

1. Backup your data, unregister the problematic computer via the .Mac system preferences, and then register it again, and/or
2. Use the ‘Reset sync data’ button in the .Mac system preferences

Well, I couldn’t unregister or reset the sync data on the MBP because the “Advanced” tab was greyed-out on my MBP (assumedly because of the error message that it couldn’t retrieve the .Mac configuration information for the entire Advanced tab). I tried unregistering the MBP on the working computer/iMac, but I still got the same errors on the MBP.

It seemed that the MBP thought that it was still registered, even if it wasn’t. Hrm.

I found older help posts (circa 2003-2005) that talked about removing sync history through iSync. But .Mac is no longer performed through iSync, so that seemed a dead end. Indeed, I don’t use iSync for anything at all. But since I was desparate, I poked around in iSync anyway. I found the following two things in iSync preferences:

• A “reset sync history” button
• A master checkbox for “Enabling syncing on this computer” that specifically mentions .Mac (which seems odd, since iSync isn’t use for .Mac syncing anymore).

Here’s what I did:

1. Launched iSync, went into preferences menu
2. Unchecked the “Enabling syncing on this computer”
3. Clicked the “Reset sync history” button (and confirmed to erase when prompted)
4. Closed the iSync prefs window
5. Closed iSync
6. Closed System Prefs (I still had the .Mac system prefs open)
7. Re-launched iSync, went into preferences menu
8. Checked “Enable synching on this computer”
9. For good measure, reset the sync history again
10. Closed the iSync prefs window
11. Closed iSync
12. Launched System Prefs, went into .Mac prefs
13. Went into Advanced tab — it worked!

Doing this allowed the “Advanced” tab in my .Mac system prefs to start working again. Woo hoo! I could then perform the other suggested recovery actions, such as unregistering the MBP and then re-registering it, etc. Now things seem to be working (let’s give it a week to see if it keeps syncing properly…). As I’ve been typing out this entry, I see that my new bookmarks have appeared in Safari. Woo hoo!

But since I played with both options in the iSync system prefs at the same time, I unfortunately don’t know which of the two fixed it, or if both are required. YMMV.

Hopefully, others will find this entry via googling and find it useful…

Here’s what happened: I was trolling the web yesterday and happened to find the past few years of IRS form 990s filed for this organization (“Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax” — it provides details of the organization’s income and expenditures for a given year). For the past three years, this organization has collected fairly large sums of money in contributions (e.g., approximately $5M in 2005).

But here’s the kicker: 70% of those contributions has gone to overhead. Seventy percent!! The majority of which was reported to pay for “fundraising costs.” That leaves slightly less than 30% to actually help disabled veterans.

But wait — there’s more. That 30% didn’t actually go to any disabled veterans; they apparently gave a few seminars here and there to tell disabled veterans how to get benefits. Hence, that 30% assumedly paid for renting building facilities, folding chairs, and donuts.

This 70/30 ratio was the same in 2005, 2004, and 2002. I didn’t have the heart to look back any further than that.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it just costs that much to run a decent fundraising campaign. But seventy percent seems like a helluva lot to me. My dad tells me that he gives to charities that have overheads as low as six percent. Yes folks, that’s more than ten times less overhead than this organization.

I will definitely not be giving any more money to this organization. The moral of the story here is that you need to do your homework when deciding which charities to give to. Don’t take my word for it — I’m just some random guy with a blog. Do your homework on your favorite charities and find out where they’re actually spending their money.

#$%#$%@#$!!!!!

A complex question came up recently on the Open MPI mailing list about embedding Open MPI in an R or Python language plugin. After 48 hours of extreme confusion and off-list discussions between myself and Brian B., I came up with a chart that helps lessen the confusion at least somewhat. It took me all day to write up that chart. Woof.

For your amusement, here’s the chart: https://svn.open-mpi.org/trac/ompi/wiki/Linkers