Monthly Archives: October 2007

Window focusing

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The user interface of OS X has many things to commend it. Its click-to-focus function is not one of them.

OS X, by design apparently, lacks a click-through capability. As far as I can tell there is no way to enable it. This generally means that when you click on a window to select it, the window itself will be blissfully unaware of the event. If you want to press a button in an unselected window, you must click once to select the window and once again to press the button.

As far as I can tell (and I could have missed something here), this is designed to prevent you activating some random hideous piece of functionality by accidentally clicking off the edge of the selected window, on the window underneath. However, while in certain somewhat undesirable states of mind, this subtle obstacle can become unimaginably irritating.

But surely Dave, can’t you just get used to double-clicking to press a button in an unselected window?

But I damn well shouldn’t have to! What if you have more than one screen (something that OS X in general handles quite smoothly)? The whole rationale falls to pieces. You have multiple screens so that you can rapidly switch your attention between multiple windows without worrying about the mechanics of the window manager. That’s not to say I haven’t tried getting used to it, but unfortunately OS X provides only a subtle visual distinction between selected and unselected windows. It’s rather counterintuitive to have to modify your actions based on the colour of the buttons in the top-left of the window.

Even if I did get used to it, I’d still be screwed because if you double-click on an unselected window, the window receives a double-click event, not a single-click, and something unwanted is bound to happen. For instance, my text editor (Smultron) lists the currently-open files down the left side of the window. If you single-click on a filename, that file will be displayed. If you double-click, the file will be displayed in a whole new window. That in itself is a perfectly reasonable and useful thing for a text editor to do, IMO, but couple it with OS X’s window management and it can become a headache.

What you actually have to do is click once to select the window, wait a prescribed amount of time, and then click again to do what you wanted to do. Gah…

Cron just keeps going and going…

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What happens when you set a cron job to run every fifteen minutes, generating mail, and then leave the computer in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what a cron job is? 266MB and 54500 messages stuck in a mail directory that would never be read. Today it was turned off, and all trace of its existence (bar this post) has been wiped out. It had been running since January 10, 2006. It could have gone on much, much longer.

As a geek I set these things up as a convenience, but somehow I’ve never really trusted the technology enough to believe it would run for more than a few weeks without my intervention one way or another. I wonder how many other abandoned, forgotten cron jobs are out there, like the vestigial body parts of a species that has evolved away from them…

When statistics attack

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I swear stats is trying to kill me. I’ve redesigned my experiment so that it’s a nice elegant “two-factor repeated measures” flavour. I won’t trouble you with exactly what that means, or exactly what the nine separate hypotheses I’m testing are. What I will trouble you with, for it’s certainly been troubling me, is this:

To analyse the data I will collect I need to use a stats test, which broadly speaking is a factory that converts numbers into truth (or lies if you’re not careful).

Jim, Mr Stats, has a stats handbook that tells you how to do this. It has a nifty little flowchart at the beginning that you can trace through to work out which of the several dozen different kinds of stats tests you need to use. Easy enough, I think to myself as my fingers follow the little arrows across the page. And where do I end up? At a little box that states helpfully: “It may be possible to devise an ad hoc statistical test for the design under consideration.”

That’s right – with my new, improved, elegant design, the Oracle of Statistics reckons it may be possible, with not so much as a hint as to how one might actually go about it.

Not to be defeated, however, I turn to the Oracle of Everything – Google – with which I stumble upon something called Factorial Logistic Regression. I certainly won’t trouble you with what this means, not because I don’t want to but because I currently have no idea myself. Neither of my two supervisors – one of whom is Jim Himself – does either.

My only hope appears to lie in a library book entitled Regression Modeling Strategies. So the campaign continues…