A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to actu­ally upgrad­ing to Leop­ard on my laptop. One of the things I was inter­ested in trying out once I got upgraded was Apple Mail’s new Note feature.

I fired up Mail and clicked on the note icon and…nothing hap­pened. Hmmm, check the Menu bar. Go to File → New Note…nothing again. Well okay, I thought to myself, some­things wrong here. Maybe I should do a Google search. Hmmm, what to search. Mail Notes Error. Umm, okay too generic, I’ll try being more spe­cific. Apple Mail error open­ing new note. Grrr. Try sev­eral other search strings. #@$%*! ¹

Okay, so it’s become clear to me at this point that Googling the prob­lem is just not going to work. I decide to fire up Con­sole to see if there are any enlight­en­ing error codes. Con­sole does at least offer me some­thing, in the form of “Mail[471] font-​family cannot be nil”.

Hmm, that looks like gib­ber­ish to me. I do some more unsuc­cess­ful Google searches. Finally, I decide to attempt to decode that error again. That error means that some­where a font family is not selected or unavail­able. We know it’s hap­pen­ing when a new note is being cre­ated. I opened up Mail again and started pur­su­ing the pref­er­ences. Low and behold, under the tab for Fonts & Colors, I found this:

The field for the Note font is com­pletely blank. I selected a font and attempted to open a new note. Success!

As it turned out, this hap­pened to be a very simple solu­tion for a very silly prob­lem. That solu­tion took me over an hour to figure out. Unfor­tu­nately, I’ve never been able to figure out why that field was blank in the first place. I wonder how many other people have had this exact same prob­lem and just given up on trying to figure it out.

1. Side Rant: What exactly was Apple think­ing when they named their email client “Mail.” Could they have thought of a worse name? It is impos­si­ble to search for infor­ma­tion about a prob­lem with the pro­gram because “mail” could refer to so many things. It’s kind of like buying a com­puter, that has the model name of “computer.” Then say said com­puter one day won’t start up. You find another com­puter and start doing a search for the prob­lem. Your query string is going to look some­thing like this: [brand name] com­puter won’t start. Com­pletely use­less.↩

I just got a chance to try out the new Spore Crea­ture Cre­ator, for which you can down­load a trial ver­sion. There are only a few dif­fer­ent options enabled in the trial ver­sion but it is really neat. You can make all sorts of funny look­ing creatures.

Here is my cute little guy, which I named Morsel.

The best part is when you get to go take the crea­ture for a spin and tell it to do all sorts of pre­pro­grammed actions. You can also take video of your crea­ture in this screen.

Make sure to check this one out. I can’t wait until the game comes out in September.

A couple of weeks ago when I was brows­ing through Google Earth, I came across some pho­tographs of the MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center, more com­monly known as simply the Stata Center.

This build­ing has always amazed me ever since the first time I stum­bled upon it. It is quite an impres­sive sight. Oddly enough, I live within walk­ing dis­tance of this build­ing. I didn’t real­ize until I read the Wikipedia entry on the build­ing that sev­eral notable people have their offices in the Stata Center, includ­ing Noam Chom­sky, Tim Berners-​Lee and Richard Stallman.

The fun­ni­est thing for me about the archi­tec­ture of the build­ing is that it has always given me a very vis­ceral reminder of Ayn Rand’s novel The Foun­tain­head. Every time I see the build­ing I think that it looks like some­thing Howard Roark would have built.

I have no idea why I always have this reac­tion, because when I actu­ally stop to think about it, I believe that Roark would hate the Stata Center. He would hate it because it doesn’t make any sense. Excerpts from the Wiki entry only high­light this fact:

There is also one lec­ture room where, because of the slight lean of the wall panels, some people have been known to expe­ri­ence ver­tigo. Sound insu­la­tion is almost absent. The build­ing has also been crit­i­cized as insen­si­tive to the needs of its inhab­i­tants, poorly designed for day-​to-​day use[...]

Also later in the entry:

On Octo­ber 31, 2007,[9] MIT sued[10] archi­tect Frank Gehry and the con­struc­tion com­pany, Skan­ska USA Build­ing Inc., for “providing defi­cient design ser­vices and drawings” which caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, drainage to back up, and falling ice and debris to block emer­gency exits.[8] A Skan­ska spokesper­son said that prior to con­struc­tion Gehry ignored warn­ings from Skan­ska and a con­sult­ing com­pany regard­ing flaws in his design of the amphithe­ater, and rejected a formal request from Skan­ska to modify the esign.

This is most cer­tainly not some­thing that Roark would have done. If not this though, what would one of Roark’s build­ings actu­ally have looked like? It is appar­ently a common spec­u­la­tion that Rand based Roark’s archi­tec­ture on that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Although she has specif­i­cally denied this, it seems to me to be a very close match based upon her descrip­tions of Roark’s architecture.

AFP548 is report­ing a bug with Fire­fox 3 where appar­ently it doesn’t work with Macs that are set up to use a net­worked home directory.

When I updated to Fire­fox 3, I imme­di­ately noticed that Book­marks were not vis­i­ble under book­marks menu. The Search engine field had a generic icon and when I selected ‘Manage Search Engines’, the dialog box was frozen and I couldn’t get out of it with­out quit­ting Fire­fox. When I tried to enter a URL into the URL field and press ‘enter’, noth­ing hap­pens. How­ever, when double-​click on a URL in an e-mail mes­sage, that appears to work. […] When I switched to a local admin account (i.e., Fire­fox pro­file on the local hard drive), it seems to work fine. How­ever, when I switch back to my net­work home account (on our XServe), it still dis­plays the prob­lems described above. I tried other user accounts on our XServe with the same problems.

This is kind of unbe­liev­able to me that Fire­fox 3 was released with such a show-​stopping bug on the Mac side. I’m pretty sure that most com­pa­nies that use Macs use them with net­worked home direc­to­ries (at least in the Aca­d­e­mic world). It’s good to know though before I start adding Fire­fox to the images for fall semester.

Appar­ently this is a doc­u­mented bug and as a com­menter sug­gested, will be fixed in the future. You can read the bug track in Bugzilla to see how the fix is progressing.

Artist Chris Gilmour has a whole bunch of pho­tographs of his amaz­ing life size card­board sculp­tures. Here are two samples:

Via Kottke.