This one drove me crazy for a while. There’s a really good tutorial on macosxhints, but I couldn’t make it work. Allegedly Apple has documentation at: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleApplications/Conceptual/MailArticles/

Now having said all of that. Here is how *I* did it.

1. Create a Contents Folder to hold your project.
2. Create a Resources Folder inside your Contents Folder.
3. Create a content.html file inside the Resources Folder.
4. Layout your HTML File. You can use images (even background images) but just keep everything
   in your Resources Folder for simplicity.
5. I used inline styles to format everything. I didn’t try to use a separate stylesheet, or
   <style> tags in my document.
6. Create a Description.plist using the Property Editor supplied with XCode.Inside the Description.plist create the following pairs:
   

   Property List	Class	Value
   HTML File	String	content.html
   Display Name	String	My Stationery
   Folder Name	String	My Stationery
   Stationery ID	String	AFC42FAB-1760-49FF-A3F3-EB251E96254E
   Thumbnail Image	String	thumbnail.png

7. After you create the basic structure, create an Images Array. then inside that array you will need one entry for each picture you reference in your content.html file.
8. If you used background images in your HTML file, then you also need to create a Background Images Array. Just like the regular Images Array, you need one entry for every background image you used in the file.
   Here is what my working plist looked like when I was finished.
   
   
9. With your Description.plist complete, you need to create a folder called
   English.lproj inside your Resources Folder.
10. Inside the English.lproj create a File Called:
    DisplayName.strings. Originally I had a key/value pair in my Descriptions.plist But I couldn’t get that to work. This did work.
11. Inside the DisplayName.strings file you need to put one line.

    "Display Name" = "My Stationery";

12. Save it.
13. The Last Step – Take the folder that contains the Contents / Resources and label it My Stationery.mailstationery

Installing it

Allegedly, you can double click the My Stationery.mailstationery file and Mail will offer to install it. I never got that to work. In the end, I installed the stationery package by hand. To do that, navigate to:

/Library/Application Support/Apple/Mail/Stationery/Apple/Contents/Resources/

Copy your newly created stationery into the sub folder that makes the most sense to you. For example, I put mine in: ./Stationery/Contents/Resources

Once you drop the file in there, I edited the TableOfContenst.plist to add my stationery to the array.

Some Hints

My biggest trip-ups were in the plist file. All those things are case sensitive. Pay extra close attention to the key and value capitalization.

What the Heck is a Stationery ID?

It’s a unique string for the resource.   Run uuidgen in the Terminal window to generate your own unique Stationery ID. (At least unique for your mac).

While this is not comprehensive, this is the most direct path I took to get a custom html stationery running in Mac Mail.

If you don’t have XCode

You can also create the plist with a text editor, it is simply an xml file. Here is mine as
an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Background Images</key>
	<array>
		<string>background.gif</string>
	</array>
	<key>Display Name</key>
	<string>Test Advantage Coupon</string>
	<key>Folder Name</key>
	<string>TACoupon</string>
	<key>HTML File</key>
	<string>content.html</string>
	<key>Images</key>
	<array>
		<string>trucktrailer.jpg</string>
		<string>gametruck2.jpg</string>
		<string>phone800.gif</string>
	</array>
	<key>Stationery ID</key>
	<string>CFBE284A-C9D4-473B-80B9-1AFC8115C62C</string>
	<key>Thumbnail Image</key>
	<string>thumbnail.png</string>
</dict>
</plist>

GameDay Screen Shot

Baseball is a form of problem solving. The new Gameday application is a crazy way to better understand how to solve baseball problems. In a nutshell what they have done is insane. They are capturing the pitch trajectory in real time with 3 video cameras, analyzing the data and then converting the film into trajectory / location points ans streaming it over the web. Yes a human (two actually) are still involved in the process (at least until they can integrate tracking markers into the player uniforms and bats – then they could get it down to one guy). Never the less, that they can do this at all is amazing.

That they are willing to stream it across the internet for free blows me away. This is seriously cool stuff.

So how does it show up in your world? Through a nifty browser plug-in IN 3D. They actually let you rotate the camera around the path of the ball to get a better feel for how it actually is traveling through space.

What’s more, now that the ball flight path is digitized they can apply real time analysis to tell what kind of pitch was thrown. They can tell if it’s a breaking ball, a fast ball, you name it. And they have invented two metrics to tell how much the pitch moves (PFX or pitch-f/x) and how much it breaks (BRK, or break). They have found a way to quantify the split finger fast ball and apply metrics to curve balls.

Crazy.

What’s even more impressive is that they are archiving this stuff and providing it in historical games.  I’m having a ton of fun with it sitting down with my son and analyzing pitchers and their approach to certain batters.  It’s hard to watch an MLB game without it now.

It is amazing the creativity the internet has spawned.  That this is available for free, to any baseball fan with a computer and an internet connection is just incredible.  Check it out.  To find it head over to Mlb.com and look for the little baseball diamond icon in the next to the scores of active games. If you check out todays scoreboard, there is a hyperlink for Gameday above each box score.

It’s Never Done

I watched video game developers for about 10 years struggle with the problem of producing something awesome on time.  We produced stuff that was on time, but the sacrifices necessary to make it hit our date often left a trail of bruised egos and accusations a mile long.  No one was happy.  A good friend of mine (Adam Kraver of CaptiveMotion) once said, “We could really make a great game if we didn’t have to ship it.”

So I took that as my excuse to just focus on getting something running.  I definately worked with people that took the time to design out their solutions – and then I watched them cry when their beautiful architecture died at the hands of relentless users and reality.  Now I’ve had the good experience of working with Pixar when I heard this awesome quote, “You can’t experience it until you build it.“  Man is that the truth.

I have tried to explain this to so many people I’ve worked with over the years, but I believe that software represents solidified learning.  One of the founders of Rainbow said it best when he said, “Our code base represents our best understanding today of how to make a game.”  The implication is that tomorrow, we’ll learn something new so our understanding will change and so will the code.  Hopefully every day we’re learning, and so every day we evolve our code.

I believe that can be extended to practically all virtual media.  If you build it with electricity, chances are it will never be finished.  At best what you get are snapshots in time that reflect an understanding about how to solve a problem.  As soon as you have a solution, you will have a new experience which will lead to new learning which in turn will lead to a new approach to your problem.

I call this iteration.

Iterative Development

ID Is the path of learning while you code.  Some people call it hacking.  I kind of like Paul Graham‘s thoughts on hacking.  Focus on the hardest problem, solve it, and ship the least crappy thing you can get into the market.  Learn fast, relentlessly improve.  That’s kind of how I approach software development.  And now I find myself doing a lot of web development.

Man, it’s different

The last time I did any real serious coding was when Bill Gates said, “640K aught to be enough for anybody”.  Dealing with memory management and segments with the biggest challenge of the day and everyone wrote their own mouse driver.  Jumping into web development is really quite strange.  I keep looking at these text problems going, how on earth am I going to load that into memory?  Then I remember that right next to this little itty bit of text is a flash movie that’s playing and I go oh yeah, 1G of RAM is standard in most machines and everyone I use or my company uses has at least 4GB.  So why should I be afraid of an array with 1024 elements?

So I’m not what you would call a general purpose web developer, just a guy who uses web technology to solve some very specific problems for my company.  But wow has it all changed.  I did a web search on how to manage memory with JavaScript and all I could come up with was – don’t worry about it too much.

So The Big Question

So after going through all this change, and learning how to build a website from the ground up using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL – I’m starting to wonder if it is really worth the effort to do it on my own.  I know that’s a silly question, and there are certain aspects of building a website from the ground up that are very appealing but what I’m starting to see is real power and flexibility in open source tools like WordPress and Drupal.  To be honest, my LAMP skills have prepared me to be a halfway decent skinner of other peoples solutions.  I’ve now done two light weight integrations (one WordPress and one SMF) and after just a couple of days I had all the functionality I was looking for dressed up just like it was a natural organic part of my custom website.

I even spent some time on Drupal until I realized their coding style clashed way too much with my own.  When there are more <?php  ?> tags in the code than HTML tags, that’s a bit too much for me.  I think it is a very impressive system and if it hadn’t been for that – nearly unreadable template – files I probably would have taken the plunge.

But it doesn’t change my opinion that I think going forward, I’m going to start building sites around existing opensource solutions and skinning them to create the visual effects I’m looking for.  I guess at the end of the day I am extremely impressed with how much a few simple technologies have empowered someone like me to be able to create my own solutions in a fraction of the time it would take me to write it from scratch or at a fraction of the cost it would take to buy something.

Forums and Search together have made it possible to distribute esoteric platform and application specific knowledge.  If I Google a particular problem and nothing comes up I know I’ve wondered too far into the weeds.  OpenSource Linux has made it possible for me to try many different flavors of solutions to find one that fits my sensibilities.

Is that hacking?  Or good old fashioned iteration?  Or is it or entrepreneurship?  I don’t know but these are exciting times when the only limits seem to be your creativity, your time, and perhaps your bandwidth.

VMWare Fusion 2.0 to the rescue… nearly.  VMWare Fusion 2.0 has some very nice features.  I like the virtual machine menu and it’s screen snapshots.

The machine settings are greatly enhanced and one feature I really like is that you can resize the hard disk.  However, adding more space to the virtual machine doesn’t mean your guest operating system will see it.

To get the guest to see it, you need a tool called gparted.  GParted-Live CD is a nifty application that comes bundled with a linux kernal.  It essentially lets you boot off a CD and run a program so none of your hard drives are mounted inside your virtual machine.  What I did was to shut down my virtual machine, resize the hard drive, and point the CD Rom Drive at the GParted-Live CD.

I then restarted the virtual machine, and hit F2 entering the Bios / System Setup.  I escallated the CD above the hard drive in boot order and saved my changes.  GParted Booted like a champ.  That’s when I got stuck.

GParted Wouldn’t Let Me Resize My Partitions

I had added plenty of partition space but GParted, refused to let me resize my primary partion.  After a lot of reading I came across this tid-bit.  GParted can not move the beginning of a partition.  Because I had a swap partion at the end of my old logical drive, I couldn’t expand into the new drive space.

The Fix That Worked For Me

You’re milage may vary.  Long story short, I deleted the swap partion.  This allowed me to resize the initial partition.  I then created a new Swap Partion (ext2) and then added a logical partition (linux-swap).  Saved all my changes.  (It took a good 5-10 minutes to for Gparted to added 10GB of storage (I went from 10 to 20).  Then finish the other changes.  After a restart I was up and running.

It wasn’t completely clear why I couldn’t resize my partitions, but this change worked for me.  I hope it helps someone else.

References:

VMWare Fusion Expanding a Disk – A Well written guide with screen captures.  It apparently was written before VMWare Fusion 2.0 so doesn’t mention that VMF2 has built in resizing.  No need to download a tool or use command line.  Just delete your snapshots and resize the disk.  After that the real fun begins.

How To Resize Linux Partition – Mentions GParted Forums that eventually lead me to the solution.

The Dark Knight

I finally saw The Dark Knight. And the moment the movie was over two thoughts ran through my mind. First, I was so glad I got to see it. Second, Thank God my kids didn’t see it.

The Dark Knight is probably the most amazing super hero movie I have ever seen and it is one of the best films I have ever seen. It is also not a film for young children. While I am disappointed in the rampant commercialism of Hollywood (and they wonder why they get in trouble) – creating all that Batman Merchandise for kids clearly too young to see and enjoy such a movie borders on the grotesque. When my son’s best friend (who is 8 years old) says, “That was not a movie for children” You have to wonder that the powers that be on the left coast are so blinded with greed that they can’t see what a third grader can.

The Dark Knight is cinema bordering on art – but it is not a movie for young kids.  At least not the age that all the toys and lego video games are aimed after.  And The Dark Knight is art.  It is one of the most amazing social commentaries of a film I have ever seen.

A while ago I started watching the original Star Trek TV episodes and I was surprised to see the world view that they embodied.  One of optimism and faith in human nature and our ability to master our universe.  They believed we would build amazing vessels and master them as well as ourselves with sheer determination and a sense of humor.

My how things have changed.  The Joker Movie Poster just about sums it all up.  We live in a much, much darker world 40 years later.  I was shocked in the movie when they first referred to the Joker as a Terrorist.  And then it hit me.  That’s exactly what he was.  The joker had come to embody everything we fear and loath about the world we live in today.  He is the enemy that can’t be understood.  He is the insanity that can not be reasoned with.  He is the malevolence that can not be intimidated.   In short the film captured a national frustration.  We are angry with each other – bitterly divided in fact because both sides of the argument passionately believe there should be a solution.

But with the Joker, there isn’t a solution.  You can not negotiate with him.  And you can not intimidate him.  If you slap him around he only laughs.  If you try to reason with him you find only madness.

One scene in particular really struck home with me.  When he was sitting in the a cell, in front of the police and they could not figure him out.  He had no name, no finger prints, no DNA match.  Even his clothes, custom made had no label.  He was right there in front of them in a cage and they were no closer to understanding him than before he arrived.

And what a brilliant use of the constraints.  This movie pulled out all the stops to remain PG-13.  There was no blood, no swearing and no sex.  Yet it was one of the most disturbing violent films I have ever scene.  It rivaled Dexter (exceeded it really) in it’s gruesome fascination with the macabre.  It rivaled every Vietnam war film with it’s brutality and a plot that drew the hero to nearly lose his soul.  At the peak of it’s tension you didn’t want to cheer, you just wanted to survive it.

One of the greatest juxtapositions was Heath Ledgers ability to do unspeakably horrible things while at the same time making us laugh.  Without that laughter the film would have been unwatchable.  And they kept the Joker secret even from us, the audience.  While we knew that each of his gruesome tales of how he scarred his face were untrue- we began to realize that even we would not be privy to the source of his madness.  Like some biblical scourge he appeared whole, fully formed and evil incarnate.  We would not know what created him because that would lead to understanding and the crux of the Joker is to be confused, disturbed, afraid.  We fear that which we do not understand.

While the Joker is a fictional character built to exploit our fears, his inspiration draws a parallel all to closely with the world view we have today.  We can’t negotiate, and we can’t fight.  What do we do?  In a strange but clever way the movie showed Batman taking our plunge into the ethical boundaries of souls.  Is it right to sacrifice the personal privacy of others in the pursuit of justice?  Or conversely, is our privacy worth the lives of innocent people?

Of course it is a movie, and it must come to an end, and I’m quite confident I’m not the only person to make this observation, but the pointed irony of the Jokers last line left me feeling almost haunted.  Walking out of that theater I fully expected to see the Joker and Batman do battle again and again and again – for fifty films.  But we all know that can’t happen again.  The franchise that could have been ended as quickly as it had begun.

I would be shocked if Heath Ledger did not win the Oscar posthumously for his amazing work.  While I enjoy watching Christian Bale in his many action roles, it was Ledgers portrayal of the Joker that really impressed me.  Not just because he was funny, and clever and convincing.  But rather because he transcended the medium he was working in to show me something about the world I live in.  He personified my own fears about the world we live in and gave me a chance to look them in the eye.

We have entered an era where there are no simple solutions.  Complexity blossoms in every corner of our lives.  I believe we will adapt to cope with it, but it will not be easy and it will come at some sacrifice and there is a fighting chance that to save our selves we may lose what matters to us most.  I hope it doesn’t play out that way in the real world, but art is merely a reflection of the way we see our world today, and already many of us perceive this as the reality.

In all likelihood some of what we imagine today will become real – like sliding doors and small personal communicators – but most of the significant parts won’t (like star ships and transporters).  Ten years from now we will see the world differently.  10 years from now this movie will remind us of a time when finally started to grasp what we are fighting against  What an amazing movie.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.  Just don’t take your kid.

And in my Blog Roll is a link to a guy that addressed the usability of free software so much better than I did.

So after one completely wasted day and nights sleep, I realize that Linux bane is also it’s boon. My real issue is not that Linux is so irritatingly incompatible (where are the default web pages?  Really?  We can’t standardize that?) – it’s that there’s not a Linux out there that would do it exactly the way Iwould do it. But there are many Linux distributions that fit the way man different groups of people would approach a particular problem.

In otherwords, Linux allows people motivated enough to change things… to do so.  When I compare that to the Microsoft / IBM one size fits all approach.  It’s no wonder that I moved away from Windows.  If it weren’t for Linux would we really have so many great web host choices?  Would we have WordPress and Drupal?  Maybe, but then maybe not.  But I also think things would be a lot more expensive.  I also think that OpenSource allows us to create a forest of opportunities.  I was not condemned to pick the one and only available solution, there is a sea of all equally valid choices out there.  My frustration was that I wanted to learn one and get good enough at that to become proficcient.  I really don’t think I can get good at all of them.

My rant was also not so much that there are 9585098348109 different ways to do things in Linux.  It was more that my Hosting provider decided to select some of the worst implementations and then not support them.  SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is actually really a wonderfully simple machine to setup – if you setup the from the install disk.  Unfortunately 1and1 decided to butcher it and make it nearly unusable.  That was quite frustrating.  Had that worked out of the box, I think I would have been a lot happier. (Can you tell I’m still bitter?)

Here’s the deal in a nutshell, it’s amazing there are so many choices, so many varieties of Linux.  There shouldn’t be only one distribution and only one way of doing things.  I wish it was easier to learn.  I wish I didn’t have to enter some esoteric uphill struggle every time I sit down to do something new, but the fact that my service provider at least made the attempt to provide a solution that I would be familiar with is not lost on me (it’s just mostly ignored).

The cumulative effort of so many people, contributing to so many solutions is actually quite amazing.  It speaks volumes to Linus Torvolds quote, (and a paraphrase) “This is evolution, not intelligent design.”  The evolving growing nature of Linux gives people the freedom to choose, and I’ll take that over a one size fits all solution every day of the week.

I got an Ubuntu server up and running on my Mac using VMWare Fusion.  I really like Hardy Haron (especially with Komodo Edit and Rapid-SVN) but 1 and 1 doesn’t support Ubuntu Server.  Just Debian.  They’re similar, but I figured I’d go with SUSE.

No Joy for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

I have this burning desire to be able to run the same virtual machine (mostly) on my Mac with VMWare Fusion that I’m running on 1 and 1.  I really want to be able to test stuff locally then upload it and make sure it works as expected.  I was very impressed with SLES 10 so I figured I would try it on 1 and 1.  It’s not one of their recommended servers but it is on the list.  What a mistake that was.  I just couldn’t get anything to connect to it.   Not NoMachines, FreeNX, not VNC.  Nothing.  No matter what I tried I couldn’t get a GUI running remotely on 1and1.  Why was I trying to do this?  Becaus the command line YAST2 didn’t work.  I couldn’t add users.  I couldn’t upgrade software.  Nothing.  And I needed a more advanced version of PHP to run the latest version of Drupal.  Arg.  So now what?

No Plesk for me.

After nearly 6 hours, I gave up and went back to CentOS 5.  I wasn’t really thrilled about that, but it was the recommended OS.  So I fired it up.  I probably could have saved myself a lot of heart burn by learning Plesk – Except, I really didn’t want to try and run plesk on my local machine.  I just wanted a very simple server.  One name, one website.  That’s it.  Plesk for me was overkill.  What’s more, the garden variety SLES tools were plenty good enough to setup what I wanted to do.  I got the SUSE server running on my local machine in 20 minutes.  Half a day later I had to abandon my efforts to get it running with my VPS.

CentOS 5… the other OS

So, I re-imaged my server and then went to town.  Eschewing PLESK, I logged in via ssh and started installing everything.  My journey went something like this:

I installed freenx with:
% yum install freenx
That seemed to work fine, so then I went to NoMachines and downloaded their Mac Client.  I was able to connect, but right at the very last step… the whole thing failed.  I now think it’s because I didn’t have the gnome desktop installed.

So I went back to VNC, and used similar commands.
% yum install vnc
% yum install vnc-server

I found a really nice writeup on using vnc  on Egopoly.  The big change is that on CentOS the installed application is called: vncserver.

After installing vnc, I was able to use log into my VPS using FireFox with host.com:5801.  The RealVNC logo popped up and I could actually connect.  It was pretty cool, but I had a completely empty gray desktop.  It was the farthest I’d gotten, but I still couldn’t do anything useful.

So I dug some more.  Turns out if vnc shows you “nothing” it’s because it can’t fire up any of the programs in your ~/.vnc/xstartup batch file.  vncserver starts up the applications it finds in the batchfile when it runs.  So every time you update the file you need to kill the Xvnc client that is running and restart the server.

% killall Xvnc
%vncserver

I had to install xterm:

% yum install xterm

And suddenly when I logged in, I had an xterm on my gray desktop. The next thing I needed was a real gnome desktop. Turns out there is a known bug with CentOS and Gnome and the nautilaus-sendto. If you just do a:
yum groupinstall "Gnome Desktop Environment"

It will fail. I found directions on how to fix it at: bugs.centos.org But I had to find the 64 bit version of the sendto library to work with 1and1. I found that (by poking around) here: mirror.centos.org. If you install that library with the command:
% wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/os/x86_64/CentOS/nautilus-sendto-0.7-5.fc6.x86_64.rpm
% rpm -Uvh --nodeps nautilus-sendto-0.7-5.fc6.x86_64.rpm

You can then install the Gnome Desktop with the groupinstall command successfully. The net result is 154MB of downloads later, I can vnc into my VPS and I see the CentOS5 desktop JUST LIKE my virtual machine. With access to my graphical tools and excellent online support at centos.org I can now get about setting up my server.

With Gnome successfully installed, I can now get to my desktop with NX Client for OSX and it looks great.

Then I decided, I should probably set up a real test server that matches my online environment.  I’m looking for a good virtual server and I can pick from SUSE, CentOS, Debian, Fedora.  (All old versions).  I scan the internet looking for iso’s and install discs.  I’ll use VMWare Fusion to simulate a server.  I’ve done it before with Ubuntu8 (Hardy Heron) and that is the closest I’ve been to a really useful desktop.

But… this always happens… I spend more time fighting with obscure Unix lore and searching for what seems like an obvious thing then I ever do getting the stuff to work!  I’ve spent HOURS on getting a system running I haven’t spent 5 minutes learning the software I set out to learn.  And this happens EVERY TIME.

I alway get sucked into the Open/Source/Linux mess.  Why are there so many stinking versions of this operating system?  Why do they all do exactly the same thing in ways that are annoyingly, trivially incompatible.  Are you kidding me?  Where are the Apache2 files stored?  Just exactly which version of what operating system does this .RPM install on?  None of the 6 OS’s I have seem to be able to handle it.  What’s more I can never seem to replicate the environment that my hosting services employ making my testing slightly dodgy.

It very much reminds me of trying to get into Counter Strike 4 years ago.  I went to the store, shelled out $20 for a version of the game.  Installed it on my computer then had to wait 2 days on a bandwidth capped community server to download 1GB of patches and updates (more than what was shipped on the CD with the game).  In the end, I paid to have faster download access, discovered my “key” had been stolen so the product I bought was obsolete and after a week never played a single game.  In the mean time, I bought a PS2 Modem and Sony’s SOCOM and played that while my PC chugged away helplessly in the background.

Original SOCOM on PS2

My friends complained about how lame it was to play a shooter with two joysticks.  They never seemed to give merits to my complaints about how lame it was to not play because you were downloading patches.

I love opensource.  I love the creativity and initiative that the Internet has unleashed, but man oh man, am I sick and tired of how inconsistent, incomplete, and incompatible all this stuff is…  I just wish it didn’t have to suck so bad.

But the part of StarTrek that really impressed me is not the archive of special effects – it is the world view that is quietly entombed in each story like a secret timecapsilile waiting for anyone willing to look for it.

The other day I tried to figure put why I enjoyed the show so much – of wasn’t that our idea of beauty that had changed (a “buff” captain kirk would be puny by today standards). It was the optimism that intrigued me. Back in the sixties we had absolutely no idea of the infinite complexity that waited for us just three decades later.

In the sixties it was more than plausible, it was easy to believe that in the future man would build massive pieces of technology that could be controlled by a very few people using devices that were simple to understand. The very design of the ship, her graceful lines and smooth surfaces provided a visual metaphore foe this point of view. There was nothing complex beneath the surface. The enterprise was the Hoover dam in space, massive, graceful and yet completely under our control.

My how things have changed. A halo of complexity surrounds everything we touch. We went in not out. We went smaller not bigger. We stopped believing we could control anything – of any size. Cell phones barely work. Armies of IT professionals are required to keep our poweful yet fragile computers working. The answer to skyney is to leave it running for a few months – it’ll bog down in the pools of unclaimed memory and accumulated null pointers. The real danger is not that computers run away – it’s that they achieve a level of complexity and obfuscation that prevents them from working at all.

And that brings me back to star trek – it is not the hokey effects or the sometimes tepid drama that appeals – it was the confidence in a future were man kind could go boldly forward. A future where we accepted our weaknesses and turned them into strengths. A future built from optimism out of a history of hope. Unfettered by details the sixties man was free to dream. Sometimes today I think we just dream of being free.

But I don’t think we are so different today than 40 years ago. Evolution happens over millenia, not decades. Within us the capacity to imagine that bold future. And that’s why I watch. Because we need to dream again.