Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

I am writing this on a brand-spanking new Apple MacBook Pro (yes, I know, clumsy name). One of the reasons for my purchase is because I have been spending quite a bit of time in trains lately. Trains are one of the most civilized ways to travel, Caltrain certainly beats being stuck behind the wheel in the gridlock that is U.S. Highway 101. A laptop is a good way to get things done during the 3-hour round-trip to Santa Clara.

My last few laptops were company-issued Windows models. I only ever purchased two laptops before, both Macs, a PowerBook 180c in college (it sported a 68K chip, proof that Apple could have kept the PowerBook moniker on an Intel-powered machine) and one of the original white iBooks in 2001 when they first came out around the same time as Mac OS X. For the last ten years or so, I always managed to have ultra-thin and light models (less than 2kg / 4lb) assigned to me, and the MacBook Pro is certainly heavier than I would like. That said, it has a gorgeous screen and a decent keyboard.

Subjectively so far, it does not seem appreciably slower than my dual-2GHz PowerMac G5. I ran Xbench for a more objective comparison, you can see the benchmark results for more info. Unsurprisingly, the disk I/O is in the desktop’s favor, but the Core Do processor holds its own, and even beats the G5 handily on integer performance benchmarks.

I prefer desktops to laptops, for their superior capacity and peripherals. With its relatively puny 80GB of storage capacity, the laptop (it doesn’t really qualify as a notebook given its physical size) is not going to usurp the G5 soon. It doesn’t even have enough capacity to store my complete music library, for instance. I am not looking forward to the usual hassles of synchronizing two computers. Apple’s synchronization solution requires buying a $499 Mac OS X Server license, and third-party solutions are a bit thin.

Now, Apple is a designer PC company, and you want to protect the casework with a decent amount of padding, but the protective case itself must look sharp. I have always had good experience with Waterfield Designs bags made right here in San Francisco, so I naturally got one of their sleevecases. It is made of high-grade neoprene rubber rather than the foam used by other manufacturers, but in exploring my options, I couldn’t help but notice the dizzying array of choices for design-conscious Mac users. For some reason, Australian companies are over-represented, I counted no fewer than 4 manufacturers:

• Crumpler
• STM

  • Foof

  • Bitolithic

  As for the MacBook Pro itself, it is too soon to tell. One thing you immediately notice is how hot it gets, even though the entire aluminum case should act like one big heat sink. I haven’t played with the built-in iSight yet so I can’t compare its quality with that of the stand-alone iSight I have mounted on my desktop.

  The 512MB of RAM installed are woefully inadequate for a supposedly professional machine, but I would rather not pay Apple’s grossly inflated margins on RAM compared to Crucial. I bumped it up to the full 2GB. This upper limit is kind of disappointing when you come from a 64-bit platform (my desktop has 5.5GB of RAM). Laptops benefit even more than desktops from RAM, as free RAM is automatically used as a disk cache, and reduces the need to fetch data from slow and power-hungry 2.5″ hard drives.

  Update (2006-04-05):

  Don’t try to use Monolingual to strip non-Intel architectures to save some space. You will end up rendering Rosetta unusable… I used to disable Classic, I am not sure I would go that far in only allowing Intel binaries to run on my machine.

  Update (2007-08-02):

  More Australian laptop bag manufacturers:

  • Toffee
  • All the Kings’ Men

After a brief period of 100% digital shooting in 1999–2001, I went back to primarily shooting with film, both black & white and color slides. I process my B&W film at home but my apartment is too small for a darkroom to make prints, not do I have a room dark enough, so I rent time at a shared darkroom. I used to go to the Focus Gallery in Russian Hill, but when I called to book a slot about a month ago, the owner informed me he was shutting down his darkroom rental business and relocating. He did recommend a suitable replacement, which actually has nicer, brand new facilities, albeit in not as nice a neighborhood. Learning new equipment and procedures was still an annoyance

Color is much harder than B&W, and requires toxic chemicals. I shoot slides, which use the E-6 process, not the C-41 process for more common color negative film. For the last five years, I have been going to ChromeWorks, a Mom-and-Pop lab on Bryant Street, San Francisco’s closest equivalent to New York’s photo district. The only thing they did was E-6 film processing, and they did it exceedingly well, with superlative customer service and quite reasonable rates. When I went there today to hand them a roll for processing, I discovered they closed down two months ago, apparently a mere week after I last went there.

I ended up giving my roll to the NewLab, another pro lab a few blocks away, which is apparently the last E-6 lab in San Francisco (I had used their services before for color negative film, which I almost never use apart from the excellent Fuji Natura 1600).

Needless to say, these developments are not encouraging for a film enthusiast.

Update (2007-12-14):

There is at least one other E-6 lab in San Francisco, Fotodepo (1063 Market @ 7th). They cater mostly to Academy of Arts students and are not a pro lab by any means (I have never seen a more cluttered and untidy lab). In and in any case they are more expensive than the New Lab, if more conveniently located.

Update (2009-08-27):

The Newlab itself closed as well few months ago. I now use Light Waves instead.

One of my cousins works for Symbol, the world’s largest bar code reader manufacturer. The fashionable action today is in RFID, but the humble bar code is relatively untapped at the consumer level. The unexpected success of Delicious Library shows people want to manage their collection of books, CDs and DVDs, and as with businesses, scanning bar codes is the fastest and least error-prone way to do so. Delicious Library supports scanning bar codes with an Apple iSight camera, but you have to wonder how reliable that is.

If you want something more reliable, you need a dedicated bar code scanner. They come in a bewildering array of sizes and shapes, from thin wands to pistol-like models or flat ones like those used at your supermarket checkout counter. For some reason, the bar code scanner world seems stuck in the era of serial ports (or worse, PS/2 keyboard wedges), but USB models are available, starting at $70 or so. They emulate a keyboard – when you scan a bar code, they will type in the code (as printed on the label), character by character so as to not overwhelm the application, and follow with a carriage return, which means they can work with almost anything from terminal-based applications to web pages. Ingeniously, most will allow you to program the reader’s settings using a booklet of special bar codes that perform changes like enabling or disabling ISBN decoding, and so on.

The problem with tethered bar code readers is, they are not very convenient if you are trying to catalog items on a bookshelf or read in UPC codes in a supermarket. Symbol has a unit buried deep inside its product catalog, the CS 1504 consumer scanner. This tiny unit (shown below with a canister of 35mm film for size comparison) can be worn on a key chain, although I would worry about damaging the plastic window. Most bar code readers are hulking beasts in comparison. It has a laser bar code scanner: just align the line it projects with the bar code and it will chirp once it has read and memorized the code. The memory capacity is up to 150 bar code scans with timestamps, or 300 without timestamps. The 4 silver button batteries (included) are rated for 5000 scans — AAA would have been preferable, but I guess the unit wouldn’t be so compact, but it is clear this scanner was not intended for heavy-duty commercial inventory tracking purposes.

I bought one to simplify the process of listing books with BookCrossing (even though their site is not optimized for bar code readers), but you have other interesting uses like finding out more about your daily purchases such as nutritional information or whether the company behind them engages in objectionable business practices. I can also imagine sticking preprinted bar-coded asset tracking tags on inventory (e.g. computers in the case of an IT department), and keeping track of them with this gizmo. People who sell a lot of books or used records through Amazon.com can also benefit as Amazon has a bulk listing service to which you can upload a file with barcodes. An interesting related service is the free UPC database.

You can order the scanner in either serial ($100) or USB ($110) versions, significantly cheaper than the competition like Intelliscanner (and much smaller to boot). I highly recommend the USB version, even if you have a serial port today — serial ports seem to be going the way of the dodo and your next computer may not have one. The USB version costs slightly more, but that’s because they include a USB-Serial adapter, and you can’t get one retailing for a mere $10. The one shipped with my unit is the newer PN50 cable which uses a Prolific 2303 chipset rather than the older Digi adapter. Wonder of wonders, they even have a

Mac OS X driver available.

The scanner ships without any software. Symbol mostly sells through integrators to corporations that buy hundreds or thousands of bar code scanners for inventory or point of sale purposes, and they are not really geared to be a direct to consumer business with all the customer support hassles that entails. There are a number of programs available, mostly for Windows, but they don’t seem to have that much by way of functionality to justify their high prices, often as expensive as the scanner itself.

Symbol does make available a SDK to access the scanner, including complete documentation of the protocol used for the device. While you do have to register, they do not make you go through the ridiculous hoops you have to pass to access to the Photoshop plug-in SDK or the Canon RAW decoding SDK. The supplied libraries are Windows-only, however, so I wrote a Python script that works on both Windows and Mac OS X (and probably most UNIX implementations as well, although you will have to use a serial port). The only dependency is the pySerial module.

By default, it will set the clock on the scanner, retrieve the recorded bar codes, correct the timestamps for any drift between the CS 1504’s internal clock and that of the host computer, and if successful clear the unit’s memory and dump the acquired bar codes in CSV format to standard output. The script will also decode ISBN codes (the CS 1504 does not appear to do this by itself in its default configuration). As it is written in Python, it can easily be extended, although it is probably easier to work off the CSV file.

The only configuration you have to do is set the serial port to use at the top of the script (it should do the right thing on a Mac using the Prolific driver, and the Windows driver seems to always use COM8 but I have no way of knowing if this is by design or coincidence). The program is still very rough, specially as concerns error recovery, and I appreciate any feedback.

A sample session follows:

ormag ~>python cs1504.py > barcodes.csv
Using device /dev/cu.usbserial...  connected
serial# 000100000003be95
SW version NBRIKAAE
reading clock for drift
clock drift 0:00:01.309451
resetting scanner clock... done
reading barcodes... done (2 read)
clearing barcodes... done
powering down... done

ormag ~>cat barcodes.csv
UPCA,034571575179,2006-03-27 01:08:48
ISBN,1892391198,2006-03-27 01:08:52

Update (2006-07-21):

At the prompting of some Windows users, I made a slightly modified version, win_cs1504.py, that will copy the barcodes to the clipboard, and also insert the symbology, barcode and timestamp starting on the first free line in the active Excel spreadsheet (creating one if necessary).

Update (2007-01-20):

Just to make it clear: I hereby place this code in the public domain.

Update (2009-11-06):

For Windows users, I have put up videos describing how to install the Prolific USB to serial driver, Python and requisite extensions, and how to use the program itself.

• Installing prerequisites
• Setting up the USB-Serial adapter
• Using the script

Update (2012-07-05):

I moved the script over to GitHub. Please file bug reports and enhancement requests there. Fatherhood and a startup don’t leave me much time to maintain this, so I make no promises, but this should allow people who make fixes to contribute them back (or fork).

I ran the Cyrus IMAP server for almost a year on my home server, but I recently switched to Dovecot. I originally used Cyrus because of its demonstrated scalability and in part because it is a product of my father’s alma mater, but it is quite hard to set up, and quite brittle to changes in its dependencies.

The last straw was when I tried unsuccessfully to set up another instance of Cyrus on a server, with the exact same configuration files and permissions, but different versions of the Berkeley DB and Cyrus SASL libraries, and it simply wouldn’t cooperate. In disgust, I downloaded Dovecot, compiled it and installed it in less time it took me just to figure out that Cyrus wouldn’t allow me to authenticate because the ever-crufty SASL library failed in a new inscrutable way. I had also never managed to get Cyrus’ SSL to work reliably, it is nearly effortless with Dovecot.

Dovecot is much easier to build and manage, does not have dependencies on unreliable cruft like the Cyrus SASL library, and is much easier to integrate with procmail, SpamAssassin and other goodies thanks to its use of the Maildir format rather than a proprietary database cum filesystem structure like Cyrus. From what I have seen of the internals of the Cyrus 2.2 “skiplist” database back-end (which replaced the BerkeleyDB back-end used in previous releases), I have a hard time believing it is significantly more efficient than Dovecot, if at all.

One problem was migrating my email – I have pretty much all my email since 1995 in my IMAP mailbox, migrated from various Emacs Babyl mailbox files or Exchange PSTs over time. The Dovecot Wiki points to this migration script, but for recent versions of Cyrus like the 2.2.12 I ran, it has two major shortcomings:

1. It will not preserve the flag that indicates whether an email was read or not.
2. It does not preserve the delivery timestamp for the emails so they all look as if they were delivered at the time you did the conversion.

I wrote my own migration script in Python, cyrus2maildir.py, to avoid these shortcomings. It does not preserve the “replied to” flag, but the Read flag is carried over, as is the delivery timestamp (in some edge cases like emails you sent, it has to guess, though). This is not a very polished program because I spent far more time on it than I had anticipated, and basically stopped once I got it working, but it should be usable, or at least a starting point for anyone with some Python skills. Of course, it can also be used by users of other Maildir++ based servers like Courier.

The script should guess most parameters, and will dump the emails to a directory named Maildir.cyrus/ in your home directory. By default, your user will not have read access to the Cyrus mail spool, you may have to alter permissions (I do not recommend running the script as root). For the syntax, just type: cyrus2maildir.py -h

On an unrelated note, Solaris 10 users may find the SMF manifest and method useful to automate service management and fault recovery. To install them, copy the manifest to /var/svc/manifest/site and the method to /lib/svc/method and install them into SMF with the command: svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/site/imap-dovecot.xml

I am pleased to announce the release of Temboz 0.8.

The main change in this release is its ability to work with either SQLite 2.x or SQLite 3.x. SQLite 3.x is now the recommended version, see the Temboz Wiki for upgrade instructions. SQlite 3.x improves performance, database file sizes and concurrency, but it also introduced a condition where Temboz could deadlock, hence the long incubation time for this release.

Another enhancement is the ability to sort feeds by Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). The default view for the all feeds page will list high-quality feeds with unread articles first. If you are catching up with many articles, it pays to concentrate on the richest lodes of information first, and possibly prune those that no longer provide an adequate level of interesting information..

I have a number of feature requests I received from users or thought up myself. You are welcome to suggest others on the ticket page for Temboz CVStrac.