Gmail - Inbox -- first spam is eBay account phishing!

Gmail - Inbox

I got my first spam on my beta gmail account. The address has never bene published, so this was a dictionairy attack. It was a "phishing" spam for a fraudulent eBay account. GMail put it into my spam box, from which there's a convenient "delete forever" option.

Soon the deluge will begin. I'm curious to see how GMail will handle this.

We know how to fix spam, now we're waiting for things to get bad enough to enable the fixes. Unfortunately I think the overkilll (Microsoft/Intel's Passport/DRM/"trusted computing") solutions will be the winners.

iPhoto Not enough disk space bug - it's still there. A deeper problem with the OS X cache and file system?

Apple - Discussions - Not enough disk space bug -- it's back!!

An old bug is still there -- but now I don't think it's truly an iPhoto bug (the iPhoto glitch is the meaningless error message). See my other blog postings on this topic!

The "not enough disk space" iPhoto bug has cursed many of us over the years. This is the misleading error message iPhoto produces when something goes wrong during image exporting to the file system or to a client application (Quicktime moviews, etc). (Usually there are GBs free and the export size is a few hundred MB.)

It just means "Something has gone wrong, I don't know what".

iPhoto 4.01 was thought to have fixed this problem, but it just recurred in a new iPhoto 4.01 album of mine that contains only a few hundred images.

There are several workarounds that are thought to help [1].

In the past I've used the approach of dividing up the image set into smaller and smaller exports, until I find the one image (it's always been one image) that causes the problem. I then crop it and undo the crop and the problem resolves.

This time I tried the approach of deleting the "thumb" files in the iPhoto Library (see [1]). It didn't work.

Based on the theory that the most common cause is corruption in an iPhoto cache, I tried out the $10 Panther Cache Cleaner's "deep clean" option and rebooted. The problem resolved.

In the past I've blamed iPhoto for this problem. Now I suspect it's a deeper problem with OS X that just shows up more often in iPhoto because of its heavy use of the OS X caching subsystem. Power user forums, such as OS X Hints, now consider cleaning the cache subsystem to be the modern equivalent of rebuilding the Classic desktop -- the first solution to most problems (even before repairing privileges, which in 10.3.3 seems to rarely make a difference).

A cache subsystem problem may represent trouble in the cache code itself or in the underlying OS. There are lots of nasty interacting layers down there, where BSD Unix meets OS X. I wonder if tracking down those nasty problems is part of the task assigned the file system gurus that came to Apple from BeOS.

This is an annoying problem from iPhoto, but in my experience either tracking down the bad image or using deep cache cleaner will fix it for a while. It may, however, be a bigger problem for the OS.

[1] http://discussions.info.apple.com/WebX?128@6.XeoZaJQWlc5.8@.688eb0a2
lists many of the theoretical solutions.

Review: Edmund Scientific Astroscan telescope (DansData)

Review: Edmund Scientific Astroscan telescope

Dan does a wonderful review of this scope. They key concepts are portability and wide-field viewing -- nebulae rather than planets. There's much to marvel at in the universe at very large scales; match your interests to the accessible!

I'm seriously tempted to buy one. I'm also happy to learn that Edmund is still around, it's been 25 years since I admired their catalogs.

An older but interesting digicam review

Review: Canon EOS D60 digital camera

An older but typically Dan-like review, with many asides of interest.

WordPerfect Office for $99

Eudora Premium Services Directory

WP office is $100 for "Eudora Users". Since Eudora is free to use in ad supported mode, WP Office is $100. Much less costly than Microsoft Office, I doubt it can be a significantly worse experience. OpenOffice would probably be my prior choice though.

Hidden URL for direct download of Palm Desktop

palmOne formerly Palm, Inc., Your Destination for Handhelds, Smartphones, Accessories and Over 20,000 Software Titles

The hidden url is: http://www.palmOne.com/us/support/downloads/windesk414_legal.html

Getting Things done -- test outlook plug-in

The David Allen Company