Zevils

To keep track of people's birthdays, I use Mac OS X's Birthday Calendar feature of Address Book/iCal. I was going through my calendar the other day, and I noticed that a birthday which I knew was sometime in January wasn't showing up. It was on the corresponding Address Book contact, though. I deleted the birthday from this contact and reentered it, which fixed that entry, but on the suspicion that more birthdays might be missing, I flipped through my calendar and found: The Address Book birthday field has the misfeature that it forces a year to be specified. What a rude thing for Address Book to be asking! Anyway, I'd arbitrarily picked year 1 for the year for any contacts whose birth years I didn't know. Maybe, I thought, the Gregorian reform was throwing things off. However, changing the year to 1900 didn't help matters, and in fact made them worse: Turning the birthday calendar off (which wipes out iCal's backing store for the calendar) an

Names are complicated What's in a name? The answer turns out to vary quite widely around the world. When an English-language form, either electronic or paper, asks for a person's name, it usually provides separate fields for first and last name, and sometimes middle name or middle initial. Aristotle Pagaltzis linked to a post by Jim Clark on Thai names, demonstrating that this approach, or even the alternative "given name, family name", falls down pretty quickly outside the English-speaking world. Thai names consist of: A given name, similar to the English first name, except that it must come from a list of government-approved names; A family name, which is also government-regulated; all people with the same family name are related, and new Thai citizens must select an unused name. Like all non-namespaced identifiers (domain names, instant messenger handles, user names on popular web services), the good short ones are taken; and A chue len , which is typica

I'd set up a Trac installation for wedding planning, instead of using MediaWiki (the system Wikipedia uses, which I already had a couple of installations of) since we wanted both a wiki (venue data, possible honeymoon destinations, guest lists... shut up, it's useful!) and ticket system (useful for tracking things like thank-you notes and being able to assign specific ones to either Liz or myself). However, Dreamhost doesn't support mod_python, so pages were taking way too long to load. I decided to switch over to MediaWiki for the wiki part and just use my existing Bugzilla installation for ticket tracking. Hence, a new script over on the code page, trac2mw . Our wiki was fairly tiny, so caveat user. I didn't bother having it migrate tickets tickets or attachments, since we didn't have any data there that was worth preserving. The input format, a MySQL XML dump, probably isn't ideal for a lot of people (since Trac runs on SQLite by default.) It does fi

A New York Times blog post on holiday tipping linked to a gem from the Times archives, its own ancestor from 1911 . The most striking feature of the article, which appeared on page six of the magazine section, is the large political cartoon-like illustration in the center (drawn by Reginald Russom, who evidently went on to help found what later became the Australian Cartoonists' Association .) From what I've noticed, while the Times Magazine still employs plenty of illustrations, they're mostly charts and graphs; when there's a lead image that's not a more or less realist photograph of the article's subject, it tends to be a photo like this one. I love how one old newspaper article can shed light on: Other concerns of the period (the legality of a state (or city?)-wide income tax debate was argued before the State Supreme Court) Typical incomes and wages (a bit over $1M/yr in 2006 dollars is their example income for a "well-bred" New Yorker) Ty