Ben Galbraith’s Blog

After a few previous blog posts on this topic, I’m glad to finally wrap it up. To import footage from the Sony HDR-UX1 into iMovie ‘08, create a disk image using Apple’s Disk Utility, mount it, copy the entire contents of a Sony HDR-UX1 DVD to the image, and then launch iMovie ‘08.

If you don’t have a PC around to read the data from the Sony HDR-UX1 and transfer it to your Mac, the ~$50 ReadDVD! program is said to enable your Mac to mount the Sony HDR-UX1.

All of this bother is somewhat ironic after learning that iMovie ‘08 took the “HD” out of iMovie, but, now that I can get the AVCHD footage imported for editing, I’m done.

As stated in its help file, iMovie ‘08 doesn’t support DVD-based AVCHD camcorders.

That bites. I guess I’ll just manually import the AVCHD files. Not so fast! iMovie ‘08 doesn’t recognize the .m2ts files as valid. Ugh!

But wait! Apparently, I can copy the DVD files over to an external USB hard drive and iMovie ‘08 will think it has mounted an HDD-based AVCHD camcorder and import the video.

Nope, didn’t work for me, and there’s a lot of contradictory advice on this topic in the forum. I’ll try formatting the hard drive with FAT32 (instead of Mac OS) or creating a DMG with the files on them. Ugh.

For those having trouble articulating what exactly “the Mac Way” means for spreadsheets, may I offer this excerpt from the Numbers help file describing its Keyboard Shortcuts:

Riiiiiight…

I realize the Zune-bashing bloodsport is over so I’m late to the party in posting this link, but:

I didn’t realize Microsoft had fanboys. That’s like some weird intersection of the Young Republican’s Club and MIT…

Thanks to Disqus, a new start-up focused on hosting web discussions, I’ve decided to re-enable comments on the blog. Integrating their system with Wordpress was a one-minute exercise; hopefully they keep the spam away.

Unfortunately, their system will only work on stories that presently don’t have any comments, so existing threads will remain closed.

I think it’s a great idea to have a service specialize in making a great discussion engine, rather than force me to constantly deal with the spam wars, find new plug-ins with new discussion features, and so forth. Here’s hoping the Disqus integration works out!

Steve Jobs talking about the new iMovie in iLife ‘08, as quoted by Engadget:

Takes video from any source. HDV, still cameras that do video, brand new AVCHD camcorders.

Just ordered it today. Here’s hoping it works with my Sony HDR-UX1. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t let you download the new bits, I have to wait for FedEx to fly them to me. Weird.

I’ll update the blog with the results.

I’ve been very annoyed with my Mac for a while now. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time get my working set of applications open and ready after a reboot (which sadly happen at least once a week). I timed it at 10 minutes once.

Eventually, after some experimenting, I narrowed it down to Apple Mail sucking up system resources on start-up and causing the entire system to get sluggish.

I finally got around to resolving the problem. It boiled down to the following:

• SpamSieve, my spam handling plug-in for Mail, had a much larger dataset (”spam corpus”, the central database for determining whether an email is spam) than it should have. I reset it, retrained it, and cleared out some of the other data structures. Because Mail blocks on SpamSieve after it receives two emails, this led to Mail starting up faster. This will also lead to a smaller memory footprint at run time and/or faster spam-marking performance. Because I get a ton of spam a day, this goes a long way towards making Mail faster.

• My spam folder had reached over 140,000 emails. Because SpamSieve doesn’t use Mail’s default spam mechanism, Mail doesn’t auto-delete SpamSieve’s spam folder. As a result, it just grew and grew and grew. Furthermore, Mail didn’t know that all this mail was in a spam folder; it was just another folder than some third-party rule was populating. Thus, any optimizations Mail has to treat spam as a second-class citizen weren’t be performed (if any).

  Deleting the spam through the GUI would have taken a long time (trust me), so I blew it away in the file system. Instantly, Mail became much more responsive because it turns out simply marking email as spam causes a 1-2 second UI delay when the spam folder has so many pieces of mail.

  To prevent this from happening in the future, I turned on Mail’s spam filter (but effectively disabled it by setting a custom non-sense rule) and I know route SpamSieve’s spam to Mail’s spam filter, which among other things means that I could configure Mail to auto-delete the spam folder every month.

• Partly because of all this spam, Mail’s index database was over 100 MB (after vacuuming). Undoubtedly, this was also causing some sluggishness. I blew away the index database and let Mail rebuild it.

After all this, Mail is like a whole new application: totally responsive and fast to start up. This is turn has resulted in my system becoming usable much sooner after a reboot — and has eliminated a bunch of lag while I used Mail. Woohoo!

And that’s not all. After making these changes, using my Mac is a whole new experience. Applications launch faster, searches in Mail are instantaneous, everything works faster. MenuMeters failed to convey the massive performance hit that SpamSieve and Apple Mail (and the SQLite run-time) were incurring on my system. Wow.

I can’t keep up with the spam bombarding this blog; the Akismit plug-in is no longer working effectively. Until I have time to resolve this issue, comments by non-registered users have been disabled. I am allowing self-registration for now, but since WordPress is a big target, I’m expecting spambots to be able to self-register, and should that be the case, I’ll disable self-registration, too. Once I get a few minutes, I’ll put in some other form of anti-spam and open up comments once more.

Also, due to a few folks asking for it, I’ve released the source code to my GroupWise Exporter thingy.

UPDATE: I’ve tentatively re-enabled comments, adding the latest Spam-Karma plug-in to Akismit, and perhaps together they’ll take care of the spam issue.

Cha-Ching seems to be exactly the money management software package I’ve been seeking. After playing around with it, I’ve some observations:

1. It actually looks like an OS X application and doesn’t require installing X11 unlike so many alternatives I’ve seen.
2. It is tag-based (instead of category-based), has a very responsive and easy-to-understand interface, and is fun (!) to use.
3. It lacks some basic features (splitting transactions, for one) and is really buggy.
4. The development team has no published road-map and seems to lack any real experience being an ISV. This is not the app to which to trust your money.
5. $40? Seriously?

Ugh. Maybe in a year it’ll be viable…

I’ve just recently come back home after a month on the road. Consequently, I’m running behind on a few things, such as my email. Ah yes. My email. I hate email.

I find my emotional state is governed too often by my email. Or more specifically, the vertical scrollbar in the email application. What I long to see is:

Sadly, what I see lately is:

Whenever I am that far behind, my general mood becomes quite anxious. My apologies to those who feel slighted or ignored. I have some good friends languishing somewhere in the scrollbar gutter. I’ll get to you, soon, I hope.

At some point in the email-whacking exercise, I always get distracted by how much every email application sucks. They all do. With Gmail, I get great searching in exchange for an awful user interface. With OS X Mail, I get a pretty interface with amazing UI latency and a search that seems to actually be more an exercise in generating some form of grinding noise from the hard drive than actually finding what I’m looking for on a timely basis. And the spam! Oh, that horrible spam.

There was a time in my life I thought I’d make time to write a really cool email client. But I never got the time. Can someone please get around to it?

In any event, if you’ve tried to reach me and haven’t heard back, shoot me another email. FIFO is out, the squeaky wheels are in. Sorry.

(Three tracks into the new Björk album and I’m very disappointed; hope it gets better.)