Month: November 2008

Organizing E-Mail Archives

I’ve been meaning to respond to this Merlin Mann piece on the best way to organize e-mail archives. And in Mann’s case, his answer is to not bother organizing them . . . or more accurately he never gets around to actually suggesting an organizational structure beyond throw them all in a single archive folder/mailbox.

Part of the problem, of course, is that once people start organizing e-mail they start to over-organize it. I’ve seen people who literally sorted their e-mail into dozens of different topic-based folders. Ugh.

Anyway, I have about 300,000 e-mail messages in my archive, and using a single large archive just isn’t feasible. Instead I simply organize all mail by year and then month. So my Thunderbird archives look like this,

2007
01
02
03
04

etc.

This keeps each archive folder down to a reasonable size while also allowing quick searching just by selecting year/month subfolders (searching on e-mail dates don’t always work because I have e-mail sent or received by systems that did not properly report the date).

It’s a nice compromise between no organizational system at all and some absurdly complex topical/project-based archiving system.

Microsoft Screwed Vista Customers to Placate Intel

Personally, I’ve been using Windows XP on the numeours computers I have to use, and I don’t plan on ever using another Microsoft OS. Ubuntu’s Good Enough(TM) without all the bullshit like this that Microsoft is constantly pulling,

A new court filing reveals disputes at Microsoft’s highest levels leading up to Windows Vista’s release — including CEO Steve Ballmer describing former Windows chief Jim Allchin as “apoplectic” over a move to lower the standards for the “Windows Vista Capable” logo.

. . .

Allchin, who has since retired from Microsoft, took the opposite view [over whether Microsoft should give the “Windows Vista Capable” logo to machines running the Intel 915 chipset]. The filing quotes from one of his e-mails:

I’m sorry to say that I think this plan is terrible and it will have to be changed.

I believe we are going to be misleading customers with the Capable program. OEMs (computer makers) will say a machine is Capable and customers will believe that it will run all the core Vista features. The fact that aero won’t be there EVER for many of these machines is misleading to customers. …

We need to meet on this. Please set this up ASAP. We need something simpler in my view. I know we don’t want to hurt the OEMS, but end-customers must be the top priority. We must avoid confusion. It is wrong for customers. And we probably will have to change your current plans.

Of course Allchin was overruled by Ballmer. What’s a little misleading of consumers between MS and Intel? Allchin resigned from Microsoft the same day Vista was officially released.

Autonomo.us

Ran across the Autonomo.us blog by accident the other day, and now I’m hooked. With network-related services increasingly becoming a significant part of our day-to-day lives, Autonomo.us highlights and advocates for a free/open source approach to both the software and the data side of such interactions.

Of course if you’ve ever tried to get your data out of a popular network service like Facebook, you know what a daunting task that is. Changing that will require a two-prong strategy of developing open data formats for such services while simultaneously offering open source alternatives to these services that can use those open data formats to avoid lock-in and network effects. There’s no reason there couldn’t be a million social networking sites united by a common, open data format and exchange system rather than two or three walled fortresses that hold your data hostage in order to keep you coming back.

Anyway, if that’s the sort of thing that turns you on, check out Autonomo.us

Who You Gonna Call? Master Replicas

Master Replicas recently announced that it obtained a license to create Ghostbusters-based replicas.

Master Replicas is pleased to announce its forthcoming line of prop replicas based on Columbia Pictures’ hugely popular film franchise, Ghostbusters.

“We are extremely excited to be able to enter the Ghostbusters paranormal world”, explains CEO Michael Cookson “If you’ve always dreamed owning an officially licensed “unlicensed nuclear accelerator” or are just looking for innovative collectibles that will remind you of the legendary antics of Ray, Egon, Peter and Winston, the Master Replicas range will offer a wealth of choices.”

Working closely with Sony Pictures Consumer Products, Master Replicas will work its magic to ensure authenticity and accuracy. Master Replicas initial Ghostbusters product range will include authentic limited edition prop replicas as well as a few “surprises” just in time for the 25th anniversary of this pop-culture property.

First up for the line are a limited edition 1:1 replica of the proton pack and ghost trap from the films.

Creationist Psychiatrists Want to Return to Dualism (Seriously)

New Scientist ran a story in October about a bizarre movement among creationist psychiatrists(!) who want to return to Cartesian dualism in order to preserve their religious beliefs — the mind and the brain, they argue, are separate entities. Ugh.

One of the leaders of this movement, psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, perfectly captures the idiocy of this idea,

I’m asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality.

Non-materialist causation? WTF. David Hume would have had a field day with that! But what exactly does non-materialist causation mean? How would you ever measure non-material causation? According to New Scientist,

To properly support dualism, however, non-materialist neuroscientists must show the mind is something other than just a material brain. To do so, they look to some of their favourite experiments, such as research by Schwartz in the 1990s on people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Schwartz used scanning technology to look at the neural patterns thought to be responsible for OCD. Then he had patients use “mindful attention” to actively change their thought processes, and this showed up in the brain scans: patients could alter their patterns of neural firing at will.

From such experiments, Schwartz and others argue that since the mind can change the brain, the mind must be something other than the brain, something non-material. In fact, these experiments are entirely consistent with mainstream neurology – the material brain is changing the material brain.

I can’t imagine how or why anyone would conclude that since the mind can alter the brain that the mind is non-material. In fact, it is only when we posit a non-material mind that this really becomes a problem (how exactly would this non-material entity exert influence of the material world).