Musings of a Trained Monkey

Here is a product marketing disaster in the making. Who is the target market for the “Stuffed Cabbage Meal”?

I associate cabbage with the diet of “older people”, we will say people born before 1950, another group that might like cabbage could be Vegetarian and Vegan diet/lifestyle-choosers. The problem with this theory is the “Stuffed” in name of the dish refers to a meat stuffing. The box does not describe or specify what kind of meat this might be, but we’ll assume that it makes unpalatable for the Veggie crowd. I think most people born before 1950 would just assume boil their own cabbage versus pay for a frozen dinner version. Assuming that was the target audience, looks like it is a complete miss. So who does the packaging sell to? Slick graphics with soothing colors, comforting fonts, and a very questionable, unappetizing shot of the entree.

I wonder what other variety of Lean Cuisine was rejected in favor of this unsellable pablum?

Inkscape is an insanely cool open source vector graphic editor that uses SVG as its native file format. I installed it shortly after reading about it with no problem, except that when it starts up it complains about X11 not being installed.

Apple provides a download, X11User, that will set things up if you haven’t already. The download page says something about a version on the Tiger DVD installation disk, but I assumed the download would work as well. (After the fact I see the System requirement is 10.3.8 – 10.3.9)

Ouch, don’t do it. If you install X11User from Apple’s website it decides your OS X version is 10.3.8 and iTunes and other applications won’t work anymore! I tried to figure out what files I had blindly installed, but the damage was done. I tried several efforts at getting Software Update to work, but it felt my Panther 10.3.8 system was up to date :-(

Long story short, here is a good file to know about: /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist It contains the version of OS X that most of your applications will care about, including Software Update. I altered the 10.3.8 to 10.4, then ran Software Update and Software Update got everything repaired to 10.4.8. As a special bonus the X11 stuff continued to work, so I am now Drawing Freely, with Inkscape.

I am happy to see that ActiveMessaging (a13g<-corny) is returning to life. It was announced with a bit of fanfare by Obie in early 2006 and then disappeared.

Jon Tirsen sent out some invites for a new Google Group and introduced Andrew Kuklewicz as the new maintainer of the project. I think this will become the premier way for RoR apps to interact with Java backends in 2007. Take a look at the code and see how you can contribute!