Iowa caucus prediction

So who is going to win in Iowa?

My predictions:

Among Democrats, Hillary will have the most votes outright, but after the 15% rule the state will go to John Edwards.

Among Republicans, it looks like Romney in a walk.

This is based on data summaries at electoral-vote.

[update: way off in my predictions: Romney came in second as did Edwards]

Timber!!!

Really uninstalling Now Contact and Up to Date

I evaluated Now Up to Date and Now Contact for a customer a while back.  (my evaluation: a once-great product that has been eclipsed by webApps and is now surviving on locked-in users, tho since then they have announced NightHawk which might warrant another look) Ever since then I have had a contextual menu item in the Finder "Add to Now Up to Date" or something like that.

Searching for instances of "Now Up to Date" on my hard drive did not reveal where the contextual menu was applied.

Turns out that it is implemented in the GrabNGo.plugin

/Library/Contextual Menu Items/GrabNGo.plugin

Deleting this plugin has finally freed me from the contextual menu tyranny.  There were a couple of other contextual menu plugins for other software that I had evaluated -- Extensis Portfolio, iViewMedia Pro.  But at least they had names that gave some clue as to their purpose.

Who would guess that GrabNGo.plugin was part of Now Up To Date?

I've always been proud that MacOSX doesn't have the need for system Un-installers (a la "Add or Remove Programs" in Windows), but situations like these almost make your wish for one.

Messages in Apple Mail are grayed out not deleted

This one bothered and baffled me for a couple of days...

In Apple Mail messages that I attempted to delete were not removed from the inbox.  Instead they turned gray.  Same with messages marked as Spam, just grayed out.

I thought this was surely a data corruption of some sort and tried the usual maintenance tricks:

+ Reboot

+ Repair permissions

+ rebuilt Mail index (Mailbox > Rebuilt)

+ vacuumed the SQLite database in Terminal:

/usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum


Still no joy. 

Turns out this is a "feature not a bug".

There is actually a way to turn this behavior on and off:

Mail: View > Show Deleted Messages

It is toggled by Command + L

I think that I must have tripped over the Command + L keystroke at some point and inadvertently activated this feature.  I am sure I will not be alone in being puzzled by the result!

It does appear that this feature was in 10.4 I just never noticed before...

Heating with Gas vs Oil

Our Park Slope brownstone is heated by Oil.  We have gas for the clothes dryer and the oven.

We buy our Oil from Statewide.  They are very friendly and responsive.  They used to offer contract pricing on oil, but haven't mentioned it for a couple of seasons.  Maybe they got burned on options.  It's a big gamble for both sides.

At the moment I am not really sure if our price is fixed or floating.  They don't put a price per gallon on their invoices but I calculated that we are currently paying $2.81/gallon of heating oil. It was only $1.19/gallon when we bought the house only 4-1/2 years ago.  There are 138,690 BTUs in a gallon of oil.  And there are 100,000 BTUs in a Therm. Soo... we are paying about $2.02/Therm with oil.

We get our Natural Gas from Keyspan Energy.  The total delivery and supply charge excluding tax is $1.68/Therm.

So at the moment Gas is definitely a better deal than Oil.  Plus I understand that gas burners are more efficient than oil burners so that tilts the equation even further in the favor of gas.

If this trend continues then at some point there will be a switch to gas in our future.  If so I'll also be happy to reclaim the space taken up by our 275 gallon oil tank in the basement.  A new burner, gas or oil is not an insubstantial expense tho.  So mostly likely we'll be sticking with oil for the time being...

There an article in the Daily News that showed the price trend over the last couple of years.

Tweaking MacOSX Time Machine

I installed Leopard a couple of weeks ago and have been very pleased.  It finally fixed the problem I have been having with iSync.  That alone was worth the price of admission.

I wanted to dump Retrospect which i have been using happily for years and try out Time Machine.  My backup drive wasn't really big enough for Time Machine tho, so  I ordered a 750 GB drive from EagleBit and when it arrived I fired up Time Machine.

All I can say about Time Machine is wow.  Just amazing.  How could you make the dull task of backups any cooler than that?

My only gripe is that there is no interface for setting how often the time machine backups are initiated.  You are just stuck with Apple's setting of one hour.

In my Retrospect settings I just did one back up per day and recycled every 2 weeks.

When the Time Machine is running my computer is noticeably slower and noisier.

But I found a great solution on MacOSXhints:

Just edit 

System » Library » LaunchDaemons » com.apple.backupd-auto.plist

Just change the value of StartInterval from the default value of 3600 (seconds) to the value of your choice.  Mine is now 14400 so for me Time Machine runs every four hours.

If you open the Time Machine preference pane you still that it says "hourly backups" for the past 24 hours.  But if you look at the time of the next back up you'll see that it is four hours later than your last one.  Requires a restart I think.

Evaluating Mac Billing Applications

I've been using MYOB AccountEdge since June of 2001 when I started working for myself.  I believe it was the first non-Apple MacOSX native applications I used and one of the first available.  It is my belief that Apple gave MYOB a pile of money to port the application to MacOSX when Intuit didn't jump to update QuickBooks (which is still a pile of garbage on the Mac, from what I understand).

While MYOB has been adequate to my needs that's about the best you can say about it.  The interface is very cumbersome, it is finicky to customize it has a whole lot of features that I don't need, but worst of all it is a resource hog.  For reasons I don't understand launching AccountEdge causes the CPU time of LaunchCFMA to jump up to 45% and WindowServer to 50%.  This persists even with MYOB in the background.

The final strike against MYOB came with the upgrade to Leopard.  There is at least one hanging bug involving printing that is a deal breaker for me.

At this point I am trying to decide between Billings, iRatchet and TimeNet.  I have already decided against iBiz because of complaints about data integrity.

More here as the evaluation progresses.

Launched IgorMeijer.com today

I launched a new website for a photographer today.

Igor Meijer

I'm generally quite pleased with the site.  I finally got CSS vertical centering working properly, still kind of a kludge, but i found a method better than the one I had been using before.

The last site I launched also had valid CSS vertical centering but the technique meant that in smaller viewports parts of the layout could be hidden with no possibility of scrolling to reveal them.  See here:

Paul Collins

But again I really like Paul's site too.   Paul himself was almost giddy, which was nice for me.