But before I laugh, I always think about getting one of these giant (22″ × 17″) monthly desk pads. The only possible explanation is that my mom always had one of these giant calendars on her desk at work, and I’m always tempted to get one as a sort of homage to her and to the office of the 1980s.

I kept up those weekly runs for months, only missing two due to an unfortunate sequence of events that caused me to miss two different runs in May 2010.¹ By that point, though, it was clear that I was going to shatter my original goal, especially when I started running twice a week sometimes during the summer.

So, at some point this summer I came up with a new goal: Each calendar month, I’d run further than I had in the previous month. The goal was inspired by RunKeeper, where I’d been tracking my runs, which notifies you when you set a new monthly distance record. To keep from blasting myself a new unattainable goal though, I’ve sought to increase my record by only one mile each month. In October, I ran 26.3 miles², and in November, I’ll strive for 27. I’m enjoying it, and I wanted to make a few notes on running.

• On my strategy for hitting my monthly goal: At the beginning of each month, I schedule my runs. I count how many I’ve scheduled, subtract one, and compute how far I need to run each outing. I subtract one so that I always have a backup run. My idea was that if I missed a run, I’d know that I already had an extra scheduled. In practice, the result has often been a day off at the end of the month.

• On weather: I hate the cold. So, I mostly stuck to the treadmill last winter, although I figured out at some point that I was comfortable down to 50℉ in my usual garb. I’ve already determined this fall that with a long sleeve shirt and a fleece headband, I can push it down to 40℉ with no problems. I think that’s as far as I’ll take it this year, but it should still get me outside more often, especially in the Fall and early Spring.

• On racing: I intended to run one or two 5k races this summer, but never got around to it. Oh well. When I first moved to Blacksburg in 2003, I was training for a marathon. I made it pretty far in my training—I think my long run was about 16 miles—when a combination of work, lack of an indoor training facility (non-treadmill), and minor injuries caused me to decide to quit. I’m not sure that I have the marathon bug any more, but I’m already starting to look out 2–3 years into the future and think about a half marathon. I think I’ll be easily up to a 10k next summer, if I can find a good one.

• On speed: While I was on the treadmill last year, I was turning in sub-10-minute miles, and I was pretty proud of myself. When I got outside last Spring, though, I found that I was much slower, with a pace of nearly 11-minutes-per-mile.³ As recently as late September, that was still my pace. But suddenly this month my pace has improved dramatically. My last run was 3.39 miles at 8:55 per mile. I have absolutely no idea how or why I have suddenly gotten so much faster. It’s pretty nice, though!⁴

I never met Ritchie, but I knew of him. I particularly knew of his book The C Programming Language. He coauthored the book with Brian Kernighan, and the book was widely known as “K & R.”

I first learned the C programming language in high school. I can’t remember whether I learned it at the Tennessee Governor’s School for the Sciences and Engineering or at the Saturday Academy for Computing and Mathematics (SACAM) at Oak Ridge National Lab. Wherever I learned it, though, I learned it from a book by Harbison and Steele. That link takes you to the third edition, which is the one that I had.

At the time, I hadn’t heard of K & R, but a couple of years after I took the course, someone asked me what book I had used when I learned C. I said that I was unsure, but that it was a thin, white paperback. The person said, “With a big, blue C on the cover?,” and I said yes. They proceeded to tell me that my book was called “K & R” and that it was a classic. I didn’t have occasion to reference the book again for many years. When I revisited C as an undergraduate, I had other texts, and my thin, white book of C was left behind in my childhood bedroom.

Thus, for many years I proudly believed that I owned a copy of K & R, the classic book on programming in C. At some point, though, the thin, white book of C caught up with me and came to my faculty office, where, when preparing to teach a programming course in C++ last Spring, I realized that it was merely an imitator of the classic.

For what it’s worth, the Harbison and Steele book is now in its fifth edition, and its cover no longer bears any resemblance to K & R. Since it’s in the fifth edition, it must be useful to someone; I even use my copy for occasional reference, though I don’t write much C these days. I don’t really blame the authors for the confusion. I know that authors often have little or no say over their book covers. It’s even possible that the similarity was completely accidental, if the cover was designed by someone that was not knowledgeable about the field. However, both books were published by Prentice Hall, making it difficult to believe that no one even noticed the similarity.¹ Still, I think it’s a funny story.

I was looking back at my very first post a few days ago. And I thought: “Wow. They’ve been married for ten years. They sure are old… Oh crap. I attended that wedding with my wife. We’re old.”

I initially thought this would be a something of a photo blog. I’d post a photo and write something about it. But that didn’t last long. In fact, this blog has been pretty indescribable over the years. It continues to be about whatever I feel like posting about, with only minimal discernible themes. It has gone on long hiatuses. I didn’t make a single post in 2006, and the only post before August in 2007 was an email that I decided to post later about the April 16, 2007 tragedy.

I posted semi-frequently this summer, with six posts each in July and August. But then managed to miss another month in September. And this month has been just as intense, if not moreso, than last, though I did manage to slip in a quick post the other night.

Like Steve, I’d like to see my weblog become more active. Unlike Steve, though, I’m not sure I’m prepared for to make a public declaration of specific intent. In any case, I hope you’ll stick around and see where we wind up.

• Assisted puking daughter at 6:30a.

• Received a text alert at 6:45a about an armed robbery in the wee hours. Original reported location was near my house. This would have been a good time to give up and go back to bed.

• Took both sons to childcare preschool/parents’ morning out, starting my work day an hour later than usual.

• Had a long, difficult talk with a graduate student.

• Had a talk with another graduate student, who may need to take a leave of absence.

• Cleaned up puke covered bed and daughter, shortly after children’s bedtime.

• Tucked daughter back into bed, turned out the light, and, literally before I closed the door, had to turn light back on. Cleaned up daughter and bed again. (Parenthood: Not for wusses.)

• Learned that Steve Jobs had died.

I think I’m just going to try again tomorrow.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

— G. K. Chesterson

I saw this quote for the first time last night, and I love it.

But this morning, I ran across this new (though undated) notice, which is being prominently linked on some campus websites. I applied the proposed fix, and now most of my problems seem to have disappeared. The mail crash is gone, and Safari is no longer barfing (or infinitely redirecting) on internal VT websites. The fix makes me a little uneasy, as it disables some certificate trust protocols, but from what I hear about some of the root certificates that are trusted by all major browsers, I’m not sure any of us should be sleeping that well at night regarding SSL security, anyway.

Seeing that those two critical items were fixed, I tried to switch my email to IMAP (which requires adding a new IMAP account and then deleting the POP account) so that I could reactivate access via my phone. When I entered my email address into the auto-discovery form it didn’t crash…but it found the campus Exchange server, which no longer hosts my mail. Sigh.¹ After turning off the WiFi, entering the server details manually, and then turning WiFi back on, though: Success!

All that’s really left is to get 802.1x working again. But 802.1x is a mess on a good day. So, I think I’ll save that one for later.

Update: 802.1x is working now. I can’t tell, actually, if there was an actual bug before or if I was just doing it wrong. The trick, though, which I found on another university’s website, was to follow instructions designed to get 802.1x authentication working with iOS, rather than trying to follow instructions for getting it working for Mac OS X 10.5/10.6.

Systems that are both tightly coupled and highly complex, Perrow argues in Normal Accidents (1984), are inherently dangerous. Crudely put, high complexity in a system means that if something goes wrong it takes time to work out what has happened and to act appropriately. Tight coupling means that one doesn’t have that time. Moreover, he suggests, a tightly coupled system needs centralised management, but a highly complex system can’t be managed effectively in a centralised way because we simply don’t understand it well enough; therefore its organisation must be decentralised. Systems that combine tight coupling with high complexity are an organisational contradiction, Perrow argues: they are ‘a kind of Pushmepullyou out of the Doctor Dolittle stories (a beast with heads at both ends that wanted to go in both directions at once)’.

– Donald MacKenzie, “How to Make Money in Microseconds,” London Review of Books, vol. 33, no. 10, pp. 16–18, May 19, 2010.

Update: In my haste to post this, I forgot to include a link to the original essay, which is quite fascinating. The link has been added. As far as I know, Donald MacKenzie is no relation of mine. (However, I have several close relatives on my father’s side that I have never met. So, who knows. Donald MacKenzie is a professor in Scotland, though, and most of my unknown relatives are American and Canadian.)

To summarize the woes in a single sentence: I crash Mail.app and Safari’s rendering engine at least once a day, and, to prevent additional crashes of Mail.app (which would occur so frequently as to render it completely useless), I’ve had to change my mail setup in a way that makes it impossible to interact with my main work email account from my iPhone.

Luckily, according to Wikipedia, the last three major versions of Mac OS X have had their .1 releases out within a month, and usually their .2 releases out within a couple months after that. So, I’m hopeful that things will resolve fairly quickly. I hear that 10.7.2 has already been seeded to developers. (So, I presume that 10.7.1 will be forthcoming soon.)

Now, for the gory details. I’ll mention Safari’s issues first, because they are easiest to explain. And one of them may be the root cause of most of my problems.

• Whenever I visit any of a number of secure websites (https) maintained by my employer, Safari’s rendering engine crashes or, in some cases, I get infinitely redirected between http and https versions of a page until Safari gives up and presents an error page. I suspect that this has something to do with the fact that my employer uses a self-signed root certificate to sign all of our other SSL certificates, because I have seen rumblings on the internets that this causes problems under Lion.¹ But in any case I have “trusted” this root certificate in my Keychain, and regardless this should cause an error or warning, not a crash. Also, it doesn’t happen on every https site with a self-signed certificate (e.g. I can use webmail), just many of them. I’ve been working around this problem by using Firefox to interact with the sites in question, but usually not until after I’ve crashed the rendering engine again. It is possible that this self-signed root is the ultimate cause of other problems, too.

• An issue too minor to list in my one sentence summary above: I can no longer login to my campus wireless network automatically with 802.11x (which depends upon a local certificate I have, signed by the aforementioned self-signed root). Instead, I have to sign in using a web interface every time I wake my computer from sleep.

• Every day, I get an email from our campus’s spam filtering service, summarizing all of the mail that it has filtered.² Every day, I click on this in Mail, or move to it automatically when I handle another message, and, as Mail tries to render the junk mail summary, it crashes.³ My current workaround is to view the message using webmail, and then to remove it from the inbox in Mail without allowing it to be rendered.⁴

• I can’t use webmail to delete the junk mail summary message, or anything else, and I can’t use my iPhone to manage mail for this account any more, because I’m now using POP (which I haven’t used regularly since about 1997) to download my mail. I’m using POP because attempts to access the campus IMAP server result in Mail crashing every time. ⁵

• And I finally moved my mail account back to our campus’s POP/IMAP mail solution because attempting to get mail to access our campus Exchange server also resulted in Mail crashing every time. (I’ve been planning to move my account off the Exchange server for years, though. Nice to finally have an excuse, I guess.)

• In fact, even adding the POP server to Mail was no piece of cake, because Mail no longer provides a way to add a manually configured mail account until after it attempts to configure an account automatically. And (surprise, surprise) attempting to automatically configure mail accounts on my campus resulted in Mail crashing every time. So, I turned off the internet, let automatic configuration fail without crashing, fixed the default settings that remained, and then turned the internet back on.

With workarounds, none of these are complete productivity killers. But they are pretty annoying.

In addition to seeing how quickly Apple manages to address some of these problems, it will also be interesting to see how fast our campus computing support team can address them. If it were any other time of year, I’m sure they’d just recommend that people not update to Lion yet. But in the next two weeks we’ll have hundreds of students coming to campus with brand new Macs on which Lion came pre-installed. So far, though, not a peep out of them about Lion.