Archives May 2013

Removing Missing Podcast Episodes from iTunes

So I figured something out today.

I add and remove podcasts in iTunes all the time. And every so often, iTunes loses track of, er, tracks. This usually shows up in a smart playlist, where a podcast episode exists in iTunes’s database, but there’s no corresponding MP3 file on disk. You can’t manually delete entries from smart playlists; and if I’ve deleted the podcast, then I can’t even go back to the podcast list to delete the bogus episode. Nor does it show up in the “Music” list, since it’s a podcast episode.

What I finally figured out is that if you change the Media type from “Podcast” to “Music”, that’ll move the episode to the Music list, where you can delete it.

You can change the media type with “Get info” (⌘-I) → Options → “Media Kind”.

Unfortunately, if the file is missing, iTunes won’t let you edit the media kind. So first you need to associate the podcast episode with an MP3 file. The easiest way is to copy an existing MP3 file to /tmp/foo.mp3 or some such. Then, when you ⌘-I and iTunes says no such file and “Do you want to locate it?”, say yes, and point it at /tmp/foo.mp3. Then you can edit the media kind, and delete the file from the Music list.

Paley’s Computer

(I could’ve sworn I wrote about this earlier, but I can’t find it in the archive now. So sorry if this is a duplicate.)

Let’s say you’re visiting a foreign country, along with a native. As you’re wandering the forest, you see a mechanical watch on the ground. You pick it up, open it, examine its mechanism, and wonder among yourselves how it might have come to be in the forest, who designed it, who manufactured it, and so on.

After walking a bit further, you see a computer in a glade, its LED lit, its fans whirring, its power supply connected to an array of solar panels, its monitor showing a CAD tool with plans for a watch. It says “Dell” on the side.

You ask your guide about this device: who designed it? Who built it? Who decided to install it in the woods, of all places, and why? He says, “It’s always been here. As far as anyone can tell, it’s been here since the beginning of time.”

Satisfied, you nod your head and move on.

This is, of course, ridiculous. A computer is a big complicated thing whose presence demands an explanation, and you can’t get around that just by saying that it’s always been there.

For those who didn’t recognize it, what I’ve done here is to combine two common Christian arguments. The first is Paley’s Watchmaker, which says that a complicated thing requires a complicated designer.

The second adapts the Kalam argument to Paley’s watch. Briefly: the First-Cause Argument says that life/the universe/everything is a big complicated thing that didn’t just happen on its own, and therefore demands an explanation. If everything has a cause, we can ask what caused life, and then ask what caused that, and what caused that, and so forth. Eventually, we’re bound to come to the Ultimate Cause, which has no cause of its own. And hey, let’s call that God because that’s what we’re trying to prove.

At some point, someone realized that if everything has a cause, then it’s fair to ask what caused God, and what caused the thing that caused God, and so forth. So the argument was modified to say that everything that begins to exist has a cause, and BTW God is eternal and therefore never began to exist, and therefore doesn’t require an explanation.

I hope I’ve demonstrated, above, that being eternal is not sufficient for not requiring an explanation. Heck, the four-color theorem, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Pascal’s last theorem are all eternal, yet they’re all complex entities that demand an explanation. If “it’s eternal, therefore it doesn’t require an explanation” were true, math class would be a lot shorter. In other words, Kalam is basically a very fancy and roundabout way of saying “I don’t need to explain God because shut up is why.”

(Some people might object that I’m casually using “cause” and “explanation” interchangeably. Yes, I am. Because for my purposes, they’re close enough that the distinction doesn’t matter.)

No, what short-circuits the infinite regress of explanations is when we get to something simple enough not to require further explanation. An explanation for Paley’s watch might be “the watch was designed in the same way as a ship’s rigging or a water pump, but smaller, more delicate, and more complicated.

But if “God” is the ultimate simple explanation, perhaps a principle of logic, like “0 = 0”, then that god loses a lot of the attributes that people who want God to exist really want that god to have. Like caring about their welfare. Like being aware of them, or indeed, of the Milky Way galaxy. Like being capable of noticing those sorts of things. Which “0 = 0” doesn’t. I’ve had people tell me that there are arguments to show why the Ultimate Uncaused Cause must necessarily have been a Jewish carpenter who was executed 2000 years ago, but somehow they never got around to presenting these arguments.

In Arkansas, You Can’t Spell “Graduation” Without G-O-D

From KAIT, an ABC affiliate in Jonesboro, AR (via Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, of all places):

It starts out in pretty standard fashion (skip if you’ve seen this before): the Riverside school district has been having prayer at sixth-grade graduation ceremonies for a while. This year, a parent complained, the ACLU sent a letter telling the district what’s what, the district dropped prayer from the school ceremony, and the parents coordinated with area churches to have ceremonies before and/or after the one at the school, complete with prayer and pot-luck lunch.

Ha-ha! Just kidding about that last part. I meant to say that the district decided to be dicks:

LAKE CITY, AR (KAIT)- The Riverside School district has decided not to have a 6th grade graduation this year after a parent protested against prayer during the ceremony.

Local mom Kelly Adams presents the case for allowing prayer:

“As Christians and a mainly Christian town I think, there were a lot of people hurt that our rights were taken away,” Adams said.

“My daughter graduated last year from 6th grade and my son is graduating this year from 6th grade, and we had a pastor open our ceremony and my daughter actually closed the ceremony in prayer,” she said.

So there you go: “We’re in the majority, and we’ve always done it this way. Checkmate, civil-libertistas!”

The current plan is now to pile dickery upon dickery and have the graduation ceremony at a church. Never mind the students and parents who aren’t Christians, because Jesus loves them too. Adams again:

“A lot of the parents, the Christian parents decided to get together and do it at the church,” she said.

“We're not trying to be pushy or ugly to anybody, we just want them to know there is a God who loves them,” she said.

Because when you’re recognizing students’ achievements and ushering them into the next phase of their education, you can’t possibly do that without also proselytizing to everyone. That’s just common sense!

Wait, I think I hear a small voice from the back, some rabbi from way back when:

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

That’s cute, but clearly this guy knows nothing about Christianity.

Death of the Desktop

I’m a geek. If you didn’t know this, it’s because you’ve never met me or talked to me for more than five minutes.

I keep reading that the desktop PC is dying: , even as tablet and smartphone sales are rising. One popular theory, then, is that people are doing on their tablets and phones what they used to do on their desktop PCs.

I hope this isn’t the case, because frankly, tablets and phones are crap when it comes to doing real work.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been using PDAs, and now a smartphone, for well over a decade. I also have an iPad that I use regularly. I also have a Swiss army knife, but while it’s a wonderful tool in a pinch, I’d rather have a real set of tools if they’re available.

The same goes for laptops, tablets, and phones: they’re portable, and that certainly counts for a lot. But size matters, too, and size is intrinsically non-portable.

I’m not terribly picky about keyboards: as long as it’s full-sized (i.e., the keys are roughly the size of my fingers), has arrow keys, function keys, a keypad, and reasonable action (in the piano sense of the word), I’m happy. I know people who swear by the industrial-style IBM keyboards, and while I don’t share their enthusiasm, I get it: not only are they nigh-indestructible, they also have decent springs and make a satisfying “click” noise when you type. When you’ve typed a key, you know it. It’s a small thing, but it makes a difference.

At home, I have a 20-inch monitor, and wouldn’t consider anything smaller. In fact, I wouldn’t mind adding a second one, the way I have at work, to be able to have more windows in front of me.

I see people who resize their browser or spreadsheet or whatever to the full size of the display, and I don’t get it. Half the screen seems ample, and would allow them to see what else is open at the same time. Even worse are people who have a full-screen browser with multiple tabs open. How can they see what’s going on in those other tabs, with the current one blocking their view?

I’m not terribly picky when it comes to mice, though I do prefer a mouse to a trackball or laptop-style trackpad (though I find myself tempted by Apple’s super-sized trackpad). It’s more a matter of dexterity and fine control than anything else. I’m not as good zeroing in on a small button with a trackpad that lies between my thumbs as I am with a mouse that has its own area to the side.

All of these things are relatively minor: they don’t stop me from doing work, they just make it a little easier, a little more pleasant. But then, what makes a workspace pleasant isn’t so much the things it does, as the things it doesn’t do: the annoyances that aren’t there so they don’t get in the way. Not having to look down at my fingers to make sure they’re on the home row. Not clicking on the wrong button by mistake.

But the other thing, the thing that keeps getting me awed reactions about how fast I work, is keybindings. I’ve taken the time to either learn or customize my environment—both the windowing environment and common applications—to be able to do common operations from the keyboard, without having to move my hand all the way to the mouse. Again, I see people who raise their hand, move it over to the mouse, click on the window they want to switch to, then put their hand back on the keyboard. It’s like watching someone with a 1970s-era TV set get up off the couch, turn the station knob on the set, and come back to the couch. You’d want to say “Why don’t you just use the remote?” just as I want to yell “Why don’t you just alt-tab through to the window you want?”

(Also, in both Firefox and Chrome, did you know that you can set up a URL with a keyword, that’ll fill in whatever you type after the keyword? If I want to look up Star Wars at IMDb, I don’t type in eye em dee bee dot com into the browser’s URL bar, then click on the search box and type in the name. I just type “imdb Star Wars” into the URL bar, and the browser replaces that with “http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=Star%20Wars”. Try it with images.google.com, Wikipedia, or Bible Gateway and see how convenient it is.)

Yes, these things only take a few seconds each. But a few seconds here, a few seconds there, and it all eventually adds up to significant time.

So when I hear it suggested that people are abandoning desktop machines for portable ones, what I hear is that people are switching from dedicated workspaces where you can get stuff done comfortably, to something fundamentally inferior.

In principle, there’s no reason why a portable device running, say, Android, couldn’t be as flexible and configurable as a Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris box running X11/KDE/GNOME/what have you. But in practice, they’re not. Whether it’s a matter of limiting the configurability to simplify development, or the fact that Android apps are sandboxed and can’t talk to each other, or something else, I don’t know. But the fact is that right now, I couldn’t bind “shake the phone up and down” to mean “create a new appointment in the calendar” if I wanted to.

And then comes along something like Ubuntu’s Unity, which aims to be a common UI for both desktop and portable devices. Which is to say, it aims to strip down the desktop to allow only those things that are convenient on tablets.

That’s taking away configurability; it’s simplification that makes it harder to get work done, and that annoys me.

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
—Doug Gwyn

Bigoted Amendment Is Bigoted

Today, according to the Dallas Morning News, Greg Abbott, the Attorney General of Texas ruled that

Domestic partners can’t receive health benefits from counties, cities or school districts because doing so defies Texas law on traditional marriage, Attorney General Greg Abbott said in an opinion made public Monday.

This fuckery was made possible by Texas’s 2005 amendment to its constitution that said that

This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

(Others have already pointed out that marriage is identical to itself, and therefore this amendment bans one-man-one-woman marriage. Go read them for yucks, then come back.)

A Dallas Fort Worth CBS affiliate writes:

Tea party-backed state Sen. Dan Patrick of Houston asked Abbott, a fellow Republican, to review the matter in November. […]

In a statement, Patrick said the measure, known as the Marriage Amendment, was passed by “an overwhelming majority of the Texas Legislature and ratified by more than 75 percent of Texas voters.

“This opinion clearly outlines that cities, counties and school districts cannot subvert the will of Texans,” Patrick said.

At first I thought that maybe AG Abbott’s hands were tied: after all, the 2005 amendment is—and by all appearances was always intended as—a big ol’ fuck-you to the gay community. As much “we don’ like your kind ’round here” as they could get away with. In which case the AG may not have had a lot of legal leeway.

At the same time, he could have said, “Look, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on DOMA in the near future. Depending how they rule, the 14th Amendment might come into play and invalidate Proposition 2. So let’s wait and see.” But he didn’t. Presumably either because he prefers the conclusion he came to, or because he thinks the Texas constitution is so clear that it doesn’t matter how SCOTUS rules.

At any rate, it looks as though an amendment introduced to make doubly sure that only straight people get to enjoy the benefits of marriage—it’s a well-known principle that what makes a thing enjoyable is knowing that someone else can’t have it, right?—is working as expected. Congratulations, Texas! Just don’t come whining when you’re not allowed to change voting laws without getting an okay from the feds because you have a history of discrimination, okay?