November 2005 Archives

So FireFox 1.5 is here. I've made the jump, and it seems mostly OK. But now I really need to fix the plug-ins I depend on... mostly Bookmarks Synch and Live HTTP headers.

I found a very nice site, beatnik pad, and the author has conveniently hacked up some FireFox Extensions that were unworking in 1.5. Righteous. I'm a beatnik subscriber now!

I find it very annoying that FireFox doesn't have a better bookmark sync built-in. This is the greatest single feature of Safari for people that have more than one computer. Don't an awful lot of people have at least two? One at home and one at work?

Thomas Driemeyer at bitrot.de has a nice critique of Mac OS X as a unix implementation. (thanks julie for the link!)

On the whole, I would agree with his technical criticisms of Mac OS X, especially regarding the "spinning rainbow of death." The rate of its appearance has seriously stepped up, for me at least, since tiger. I feel like I am back on a crappy Windows machine waiting for floppy drives to spin up, whenever I open a file dialog.

His UI criticisms are on softer ground: I would say they are mostly a matter of taste, and the same old thing: either you like menu bars attached to windows, or you like them on top of the screen. I used to be a big fan of having them inside the windows, because that's what I was used to from Vax VWS, X11, Motif, and Windows. But there are distinct usability advantages to having the menu in one place on the whole screen, specifically:

1. You can be a lot less precise with your gesture to get to the menu bar: you just "slam" the cursor up to the top of the screen, and only have to fine-tune the horizontal position.

2. there is that much more screen real estate  in each window for the application.

Many people still have email addresses like [email protected] or [email protected] If you are such a person, you should stop doing this now.

In the early days of the popularized Internet (starting in 1993-1994),and even earlier than that when services like AOL,  Compuserve, Delphi and Prodigy were how people connected to online services, your online identity was tied to your connectivity. The ISP provided an email address, a dial-in number, and maybe even some server-side storage and a unix shell account. That was the only way it could work, because people didn't have their own vanity domain names, most businesses didn't have email systems that could talk to the world, and the web-based hosted email (hotmail being the first really successful version) didn't exist yet.

But now there are lots of choices, and there is no reason why you should link your personal email to the company that provides your connectivity. In fact, I would argue that there are lots of reasons not to create such a link.

First, you are likely to change your ISP periodically. You might move, you might decide to switch to cable from DSL, or from cable to FIOS, or from DSL to WiMax. If you don't know what these things are, it doesn't matter: the point is that you have choices you can make, and it's likely you will change once or more, to save money or get better service. Or you might move, and have to change for that reason. Think of the headache it is to tell all your friends, and all the web sites where you shop your bank or whatever that you have a new email address. It's a pain. So you should pick an email address that you can commit to. That you know will be resistant to changes over the years.

Let's face it, running an online service isn't easy. Stuff happens; servers melt; files get lost. Whoever you decide to trust with your email should be someone who's main job it is to run an online service. An ISP's main job is making sure your connection is available. Furthermore, there is something to be said for being part of a big population. If you have a small ISP, you are in a small boat, with a small number of other people, being captained by a crew that really doesn't have billions of dollars of stock valuation keeping the pressure on. The boat could go under, the crew could mutiny and the world wouldn't really notice.

So, get on one of the big boats. That means Yahoo! Mail, GMail or Hotmail. All of those services are battle-tested, used by millions, and probably never going away. At least, "never" on internet time scales.

It's also a good idea to set up your mail so that you can download a copy from your hosted email provider. Just in case they do go under, you won't lose your history. GMail and Yahoo! both let you do this, by using a regular email client to POP download your messages. (One caveat here: do not EVER use outlook express. It's closed, single-file mail storage system is the source of many horror stories. Use Thunderbird, or any other email client that stores mail in widely understood formats.)

If you can afford it, and if you can acquire the technical expertise, you really should get your own "vanity" domain on the Internet. It doesn't cost much, as little as $5/year. But it puts your email address  under your control, even if you have to change hosted email providers and/or ISPs. Yahoo! and GMail both allow you to set "from" addresses to your vanity domain. I'm sure hotmail is not far behind.

I've had my own vanity domain/email address for 8 years. In that time, I've gone through 6 ISPs, five hosting companies, 7 email clients, 3 anti-spam solutions. But my email address has been the same, and it was well worth the investment.

Matrix of email goodness

In the chart below, substitute "Yahoo!" or "Hotmail" for GMail; they are basically the same as far as this chart is concerned.

Until recently, I hosted my email myself, and even had my own web-based access. Recently, that has become a bear to maintain, partially due to dealing with ever-increasing SPAM, partially due to having to keep up with security patches on the webmail. So now I have everything going to gmail, with a backup copy only kept on my own server.

I have this cheap Canon USB flatbed scanner that I bought about a year ago. I use to have a fancier HP scanner that I bought about 8 years ago, but it is SCSI, and I don't really have any computers that do SCSI any more. (It's really annoying that there is no Mac OS X support for the Adaptec 2940 SCSI PCI card that I have, but that's a rant for another day.)

When I got the scanner, I had a hard time getting it working. Mostly this is because (unsurprisingly, I guess) the drivers that came with it were complete garbage. When I got it, the drivers were for the Mac OS version that was already old, and they haven't updated their downloads on their web site.
In any case, I needed to use the scanner the other day, and I realized I had reinstalled my OS since the last time I used it. And whatever hacks I did to get the scanner to work before, I didn't remember. Or maybe they just wouldn't work with Tiger.

After some googling around, I found Vuecan, a third-party scanner software package that claims to support most scanners. I tried the free download, and it worked perfectly. No setup, just copy the app into place, and it works. It's a really nicely usable package too; it strikes the balance well between being a data capture tool, and a useful imaging application.

They have a Linux version also, so I am going to try to revive my old SCSI scanner on my Ubuntu Linux machine.

So, if you're on a Mac, need to scan, Vuescan is well worth the $49. Just toss those junky OEM drivers in the trash.

SBC is buying AT&T, and is adopting the brand name of good old Telephone. That's a smart move, because I'll bet 3/4 of Americans have no idea who or what SBC is. But they are changing the logo. Russell Beattie has a little write-up on how idiotic the new logo is. I think he might be overstating it a bit, because the old logo was met with some ridicule when it was introduced. The AT&T "death star" logo isn't quite as recognizable as the IBM logo, the Apple logo, the Dell logo... hmmm, sensing a pattern?

The pointless blue globe never added anything to the brand to begin with. How does a blue ball relate to AT&T? It's sort of like "the earth" and AT&T is a company on the earth? It never made much sense to me, but I'm certainly no designer.

Seems like it would have been a better investment to refocus the design on the letters: AT&T. I'll bet a talented person could do some nice work with just those letter.

I'm very sensitive to this, because right now the company I work for is picking its own logo. We've got a branding firm, and two final designs to choose between. It's not at all clear which is the right one. I hope we don't pick the equivalent of the pointless blue globe, but only hindsight will tell us which one that is...

LXer has a post about how OS X could crush windows.

It's a nice fantasy. I wish it would come true. But I just don't buy the idea that long-time Windows users would really switch in droves if they had an alternative OS on, for example, Dell PCs. I'm the big computer nerd in my family, and I've had a difficult time getting anybody convinced of the wisdom of ditching Windows. I finally got my mom to get a Mac Mini. But she still focuses on the few things that aren't the same as they were on Windows. And not on the thousands of things that are better.

And that's the thing: sameness is what people want. Not goodness. If it's the same, they like it. It's what keeps a lot of folks on OS 9. They would probably stay their forever, despite the awesome crappiness of OS 9, unless Apple forced them off by not supporting it on newer hardware.

The other part of the problem is that I just don't see Apple having the balls (insanity?) to instantly vaporize their hardware revenue. They still make a ton of money on PowerMacs. And while I can maybe see that they could compete against Dell with Powerbooks and iMacs (notebooks and living-rooms being places where style actually matters), I do not see how they could with workstations, servers, and even minis. Not that Dell has anything like the Mini; but there are a bazillion companies making micro-ATX and smaller machines, often custom. They are way cheaper than a mini.

Maybe it's my innate pessimism, since I grew up as a Red Sox fan. I just don't think the team I'm rooting for can possibly win.

Then again, there was 2004...

I set up Google Analytics on two web sites at work. One is a test site, and one is the production site. There were quite a few problems setting it up; I gather from the support groups on google, and blog chatter that they are having a hard time meeting demand. I can totally sympathize. If my company's web site were dropped in front of 50 million users at once, we would crash and burn. Hard.

But the problem I'm having now is that I set up the production site and the test site. But only the test site has the actual javascript on it to activate the tracking. However, Google is reporting that both sites have had the analytics installled. So I think they are still having a lot of trouble.

I'm rooting for them. I still feel like Google is the underdog.

A friend of mine is having some hardware problems. He explicitly asked not to be told to get a Mac. So of course I wrote him this email:

I've become a huge Mac fan in the past 4 years. Well, not really a Mac fan, but a Mac OS X fan.  I could care less about their beautiful but not necessarily much different hardware.

Mac OS X is the difference.  And not because it is more beautiful or elegant or anything than Windows.  I think that is largely a matter of taste.  I think it could be objectively argued that Apple does a better job of thematic and design consistency than Microsoft, but I don't think that really matters either when you are counting your dollars spent and hours used working.

Here then, are the big wins of Mac OS X over Windows:

1. the home directory.  It is very, very difficult as a Mac OS X user to put anything anywhere on the machine EXCEPT in your home directory: documents, preferences, music, EVERYTHING is there.  If you back up your home dir, you will not lose anything important.

2. installing == copying.  To install an application on OS X, generally all you need to do is copy the   application "file" to your hard disk.  That's it. (there are a rare exceptions to this).  And (here is the important part): since your settings, including license keys, etc, are in your HOME DIRECTORY, there is no registry synch.

3. there is no registry. The registry was a monumentally idiotic idea. The person who thought it up   should be retroactively fired from every job he ever had.

Minor wins that you are sick of hearing:

1. security: I've never installed anti-virus software on any of the 6 macs I have owned since 2001.  I have never had a virus.

2. uptime: my macs at home regularly go for 30-60 days between reboots.

In your particular situation, here's why the first 3 wins should make you never want to go to Windows again.  You need a laptop to do your business, so you should have two laptops all the time.  Nobody is going to be able to fix your laptop in a timeframe that you need.  So just buy two.  Keep one as a "warm" spare.  That is, turn it on now and then, download any system updates, maybe install a snapshot of your home directory backup on it.  Once a month should be often enough to give you confidence that the warm spare is still working.

Or don't keep a warm spare.  Just drive to the Apple store and buy a powerbook if/when disaster strikes.

So if your primary Mac dies (it will happen as often as your IBM: Mac hardware is basically the same as everything else), you just take out your spare mac, copy your backup home directory to it, copy your extra apps to it, and you are back up and running in between 10 minutes and 1 hour, the time depending solely on how many gigabytes of stuff you need to copy.  SOLELY.  It would take you 6 hours to do that on any moderately customized Windows.  At least.

Seriously, how can you not love a book with this title? This is an update to the title Panther for Unix Geeks. It's got a lot of the same stuff, but it does add some interesting stuff about spotlight, launchd, and directory services in Tiger. It has lots of practical documentation for command-line access for user management, and disk utility stuff.

There's a ton of stuff about sharing files and printers with Windows and Linux, and guides for installing free x86 emulators (such as the free  qemu).  There's also a guide for setting up the PowerPC emulator PearPC on a Linux machine!

There are also some very good, if basic, tutorials on setting up and building open source programs. If you are a Linux or BSD geek who is new to Mac OS X, then this book will make you very comfortable, very quickly.

Here is the amazon link for the book.

For a while, I've had problems with my flash plugin acting flaky in FireFox on Mac OS Tiger. I finally got fed up and tried upgrading to the Flash 8 plug-in. No luck. So I deleted my entire FireFox profile, down to nothing, and voilà, it worked again.

Then I started to add my FireFox extensions back in. Turns out AdBlock (which I love) was somehow interfering with Flash. I don't know if this affects Windows FireFox. It's annoying, because there are some useful Flash sites out there, notably the new Yahoo! maps.

I always knew Tim Bray was smart, but hist pitch on emacs makes me a huge fan. (I'm always a huge fan of people who are smart and agree with me.)

He, in turn, references Neal Stephenson's essay about open source, emacs and operating systems, which is a classic, and worth referencing again.

technorati tags: emacs

There is a new browser spun off from FireFox called flock. It has some cool shit, like it uses your del.icio.us account for bookmarks.  And I am posting this blog entry directly from it's self-configuring blog-posting über-client.

Pretty sweet.

technorati tags: browser, firefox

Yahoo just started fighting back against google maps. They have a developer kit and a beta site for maps. I love google maps, they are so sweet and the API is totally awesome.

But the yahoo maps are flashed-based, and completely stomp google maps for interactive deliciousness, about to the same level that google maps squashed mapquest. They don't have satellite overlays, but they do have awesome driving directions, integrated local search, super fast zoom.

I'll have to give their developer kit a try to see if they have the same idiotic licensing protection as google.

Windows is now the target of corporate-backed hackers who put a rootkit on your system to stop you from exercising your legimate rights to make personal copies of music. Mark Russinovich has the scoop at his sysinternals site.

If you are a Linux or Mac user, there is always an annoyance that this or that web site or software application doesn't support anything but Windows/IE. This illustrates the flip side: those lazy enough to ignore 5-10% of the user base also do so with their idiotic malware. Hooray.

This is the part where I get to make fun of people I don't know, in order to vent my frustration at their crappy products.

Item #1 on my list is the "screen saver" feature on Sony DVD players. This idiocy was introduced a number of years ago, presumably to prevent burn-in on plasma and projection televisions. OK, that is maybe a worthy goal, but that is not what I am complaining about.

The geniuses at Sony said "screen saver... existing paradigm from computers: the computer stays in screen save mode until the user moves mouse, or hits any key. that input is swallowed up, since the user can't see what they would be typing or mousing, and the screen saver exits."

So the Sony screen saver acts exactly like that. If the screen saver is "on" then you can hit any button on the remote or on the DVD player itself, and nothing will happen, except that the screen saver goes away, and you get back to the DVD menu or whatever. Here's the funny part: suppose the TV is turned off. You can't see the screen saver, and you hit the EJECT button to open the disc tray. Nothing happens. You wonder why. You hit EJECT again. The tray opens. Eventually you learn this behavior, and you tend to hit EJECT, wait 1.3 seconds and hit EJECT again. However, sometimes, the screen saver is already OFF (but you can tell, because the TV is off) and the tray starts to open, then you hit the second EJECT, and it closes again. So THREE hits are needed to open the freakin tray. Why must I be subjected to this will-it-open anxiety?

The problem is, of course, that the screen saver notion of eating input works for a computer, because you can't possibly know what a the "Z" key would do if you can't see what is on the screen. So it's right to eat all input. However, the EJECT button on a DVD player does one thing. It ejects the disk. There is no dangerous ambiguity to avoid.

Every time I use my DVD player, I seethe: the design team on this feature should be retroactively fired and banned from ever doing industrial design.

Gosh I feel better now.

Golly, I am some kind of futurist predictor guy. The new OS 10.4.3 patch does break Aqua emacs.

And here is yet another emacs build that works: EmacsInstaller.dmg

Update: this build, which works for me, complains about ncurses versions for other people. I suspect that it is the same old FINK pollution I have had in the past, but I built this version with all fink stuff turned off. So I'm not sure what is up. I'm working on it.

Update 2: OK, Apparently my G5 is corrupted beyond repair with some weird-assed ncurses library. I built a new EmacsInstallerFull.dmg that is nice and clean, and I had to do it on my mini.  This version is a full /usr/local installation that will even work from a terminal, which is nice because it supports desktop  save mode, unlike the version 21 emacs that ships with OS X.  Enjoy!