There’s a comedy coming out called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead, about a guy directing a Hamlet adaptation to the horror genre, written by a vampire. Just in case you thought that the Gary Oldman movie and Shadow of the Vampire weren’t meta enough.
Speaking of which, I’m keeping a development blog at my company site. I’ll continue to publish the Grails plugins and any other code I create over there. Enjoy!
Thunderbird kept crashing on me on Leopard, at least three out of four times that I launched it. At first I thought it was Enigmail, because it seemed that the crash was if I attempted to view an encrypted message while it was still loading mail from the servers, but testing that hypothesis revealed it to be false. Much mucking around OS X got me to the ~/Library/Cache/Thunderbird/Profiles, which contains some files supposed to help with a fast launch. I deleted the whole thing (Cache directories are expected to be regenerated by the application), and that has Thunderbird working back to normal.
This might be related to the other Leopard problem I’d mentioned. If you’re having Thunderbird problems, I suggest you start by killing the cache.
So what have I been up to? Working. A lot. Getting a regular dose of Wii with Vero. And reading. A lot.
One of the books I’ve recently gone through is The Medici Effect, also available as free PDF from the author’s site.
I’m glad I managed to fight the impulse to pass on it – the oh-so-clever title and Tony Robbins-like site were a bad augury – by figuring out hell, I can dump it any time if it sucks. It’s a very quick read on creativity, full of interesting anecdotes, interviews and stories from inventors, enterpreneurs and innovators. It can easily summed up as it’s damn near impossible to be creative if you focus too much only one thing, expect immediate success or don’t take any risks. It’s a simple piece of advice that you probably already knew, but which the myriad of examples will help you grok.
VMware server has been in beta since November, 2007, and you can try it out for free by going to their site. Don’t. It’s unstable and has performance problems – I had to manually reboot our machine at least twice a week because the virtual servers became unresponsive. I originally thought that the problems were caused by the CentOS kernel I was using, but while the problems were lessened after changing it, they persisted.
After downgrading to (the also free) VMware server 1.0.4, the virtual servers have been working like a swiss watch for a couple weeks.