My MacBook (first series) started to suck recently. It’s getting two years old this week. Maybe the internal death-clock has started to tick…

When switching windows under OS X, more precisely when I bring another window in front, the previously hidden areas of the window are sometimes filled with random pixel garbage. This happens infrequently (say once or twice a day) and the areas are rendered correctly after a fraction of a second. Nonetheless it looks trashy and has never happened before. Maybe it’s caused by 10.5.2…

What’s really weird is that transparent floating windows no longer work in some applications. In QuickTime Player, for example, the fullscreen controls are no longer semi-transparent, but filled with a static frame from earlier in the movie.

The problem disappears after a reboot. But I have a Mac. I don’t reboot.

Any ideas what I can do about it?

I just read that SPAM is getting 30 today. Congratulations!

On May 3rd, 1978, about 400 mailboxes got flooded by the first unsolicited email advertisement in history! According to heise.de it is estimated that the current spam volume is about 100 billion spam mails per year. The signal to noise ratio is as low as 15%.

I just realized that about 42 years ago the well known and often misperceived computer program Eliza was published. It was written by computer science legend Joseph Weizenbaum, who sadly past away a month ago.

Elizas’ most commonly known implementation “Doctor” resembles a conversation between a psychologist and her patient. Basically everything the user says is rephrased into a question by some pattern matching algorithms. The algorithms used in Eliza are actually pretty simple and fit into some hundreds lines of code. No world knowledge or databases to store the conversation are needed.

The program was never intended to serve as surrogate for real psychotherapists. In fact Weizenbaum wanted to show how easy it is to create the illusion of “intelligent” computers and he was shocked when he realized that many people took his simple set of transformation rules so serious, that they even asked him to leave the room while talking to it.

Weizenbaum became a critic of computers and especially a critic of a society that heavily depends on computers and accepts their judgment without doubt, as little errors in small parts of a complex system may lead to fatal consequences.

I strongly recommend reading his famous article “Albtraum Computer” (german) and maybe his book linked on the right.

I think his concerns are especially true today and our society should be extremely careful about how far we trust computer generated no-fly lists, bombing target optimization systems, and automated tools for stock market evaluation.

Have fun with the JavaScript version of Eliza after the page-break and feel free to post your funniest dialogs with Eliza as a comment.

There are several ways to refer to dates. You can use exact dates like "January 1st, 2008", or you may use less precise descriptions like "in April 2008" or "next year". Usually everybody familiar with the western calendar will know what timeframe you are talking about. That's not the case if you're referring to week numbers, as there are several ways to calculate them.

The US have a fairly simple scheme for calculating the week number: The week which contains January 1st is defined as the first week of the year. The only drawback of this approach is that the last days of a year may fall into the first week of the following year.
Most european countries refer to ISO 8601 to enumerate weeks. The first week is the week that contains at least 4 days of the new year.

This is tricky enough if you have to sync an appointment with people who use a different calendar than you, but it gets worse if you need to calculate the week number in an application:

Excel has an build-in function =KALENDERWOCHE() to calculate the week number. However this function can only calculate the US variant of a week number and it does not support ISO 8601.
So: Be aware that there may be cultural differences in the functions you are using and keep in mind that a localized function name does not mean that the function itself is localized, too.

Use the following formula, if you need to calculate the ISO 8601 week number in Excel:

=KÜRZEN((A1-DATUM(JAHR(A1-REST(A1-2;7)+3);1;REST(A1-2;7)-9))/7)

Source: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woche#Kalenderwoche

The first computer I worked on had no hard-drive at all, just wobbly floppy disks. Later, I guess it was on a 80286, we had our first hard drive with a nearly infinite storage of 20 MB. Year after year hard-drive capacities got bigger and bigger and the actual drives got smaller and smaller. Just compare those 5 ½”–douple height drives with 20 MB and current iPod disks with 1.8” and 160 Gigs.

Have you ever asked yourself how this is possible. How can more and more bits be stored on modern hard-drives?

Well, one recent innovation is Perpendicular Recording. Basically the orientation of the magnetic field for storing a bit is rotated, as the old way, storing bits longitudinally, needs more space than storing them vertically (or perpendicular). That allows storage capacity to increase tenfold and data throughput is increased, too.

Didn’t get it yet? Luckily Hitachi has created a nice education/promotion video for you:
Get Perpendicular

Thanks Lutz.