I don’t recall this in Leopard or earlier, but I noticed this today. I like that Apple has included this as most people don’t know when their battery is dying until it’s already dead. Sure, there were other 3rd-party utilities that could do that, but now it’s rolled into the battery menu. Good stuff.

Some people may have noticed that FCS was down yesterday. It wasn’t actually down, but all of the database applications that it depends on were down. The reason is that I switched to a more server hosting server and the database servers were also changed. I had forgotten that the announcements on these servers were sent to an older email address and Mail had recently forgotten the password to this email address. I, too, had forgotten the password, but long before Mail had. In any case, I missed the announcement that my databases were about to go away and scrambled today to get them back.

Sensationalist headline of the day: “Obama administration gives British distiller $3 billion to move from one American territory to another.” Sure, it’s a small blog that thinks that it’s journalism, but that doesn’t stop it from being completely untrue. Well, okay, the guys who make Captain Morgan are British and they want to move from one territory to another. However, the Obama administration has nothing to do with it. How do I know? I followed the links back to the original story from the Chicago Tribune.

In a nutshell, the Captain Morgan factory was looking to move and the Virgin Islands offered subsidies if it moved there. This is nothing new. States have been in a bidding war to the bottom, offering land, tax breaks, and much more in order to entice companies to move in. In theory, if a company agrees to stay long enough and hire so many people, the increased tax revenue from the additional income and spending should make up for the subsidies. It’s a tricky system, sure, and there’s a lot of distrust in how it is handled, especially in trying to get factories from other places by devaluing the state. However, it happens, it is common, and the President has nothing to do with it.

And that brings us back to the point that I originally wanted to make. Regardless of your opinion on subsidies, you can’t blame the President for them (unless you really wanted subsidy reform to be a part of the political platform). Obama is not giving away $3 billion. The Virgin Islands are offering subsidies worth up to $3 billion. This isn’t $3 billion in cash, but rather tax breaks, the building of a factory, and other benefits. Furthermore, the rum tax law indicates that a portion of every dollar paid for rum goes directly to the rum-producing nation. In effect, the Islands are borrowing against their future returns. Whether or not this is a good idea is another political matter. The point is that the Virgin Islands, as a political entity, have made a rational decision to offer these benefits of their own accord. Furthermore, the $3 billion is not a cash payout but a package of tangible and intangible benefits that takes into benefit the expected tax revenue generated from such an agreement.

In trying to connect this to the Obama administration, I Hate The Media shows just how far out they’ll go just to further a radical political point. Rather than look at the facts, they’ll willingly and intentionally lie in order to try to connect Obama with a negative story.

I spent part of this morning chasing down a bug that’s bothered me all through Paperclip’s life-cycle. I kept thinking that the problem was with me. Perhaps I wasn’t utilizing Applescript correctly. I remained stymied as I couldn’t figure out anything that would resolve the issue. Well, I think I stumbled upon the problem today. I was about to take one more shot at it before I saw this. Apparently, Applescript is crash-prone when Cocoa’s Garbage Collection is turned on. I suspect that it also crashes when Garbage Collection is merely enabled. In any case, I turned it off and haven’t had a problem since.

The worst part of this is that it’s not a consistent crash. It happens whenever it feels like. I’ve run Paperclip for several days before a crash. Other times, Paperclip will run for a few minutes. It was impossible for me to reliable diagnose and resolve since I never if I had fixed it or not (for those times when Paperclip would run for a while).

In the end, Apple still hasn’t resolved this bug. Perhaps it’s fixed in Snow Leopard (10.6). In any case, I find it rather disheartening that Apple would release Leopard with a buggy bridge between Cocoa and Applescript. Imagine, every Cocoa app built with GC can and will crash during some Applescript operation at some point. How did that get based QA?

A few weeks ago, I ran across this article revisiting “The Game Show Problem.” The Game Show Problem is the form of statistical reasoning that people are generally really bad at, even really smart people. However, Marilyn Vos Savant gave an accurate and correct answer and even provided the correct statistical chance of winning.

This morning, I was looking for a small exercise to get going and decided to model The Game Show Problem. The Python script that I wrote can be found in the extended section. I was surprised when I started it. I found a few programs that pretty much replicate the game show but I didn’t see any that modeled it. Of course, I didn’t look very hard. Besides, this was just to stimulate me a bit before I dove into something more substantial. (more…)