Archive for the 'Computer' Category

You’ve probably heard many Mac fan-boys rave about the quality of software that’s available for the Mac.

I’m here to tell you that they are right.

I, a former open-source junkie, have found myself doing the unthinkable: paying for closed-source software, including an operating system (Mac OS X “Tiger”).

Here are some of the software packages I have purchased recently.

• TextMate - the last word on code editors
• StickyBrain - may eventually replace the ubiquitous sticky notes and scraps of paper on my desk, and so much more
• Speed Download - emulated by many, matched by none
• Path Finder - file management for power users
• CandyBar and Pixadex - okay, this was just for fun
• GarageSale - eBay auction listings made simple

And, of course, where would I be without the free software (no-cost as well as freely-distributable) which has been indispensable?

• Camino - possibly the best web browser for Mac OS X
• Smultron - the second-best code editor I’ve ever used
• CocoaMySQL - the GUI that should have been included with MySQL
• SSHKeyChain - putting a nice face on SSH keys, tunnels, and agents
• Adium - chat. (quack! it’s a duck!)
• iSnip - the best way to copy and paste
• iStumbler - great for troubleshooting wireless connection issues
• CyberDuck - the master of file-transfer, also a duck
• Carbon Copy Cloner - great for duplicating or backing up hard disks

You can tell the true value of an operating system by the applications which are available for it. Therefore, Mac OS X is worth its weight in gold.

OK, I’m going to hammer home a point that’s probably completely obvious to everyone, yet very few of us seem to do enough about it.

BACK UP YOUR DATA.

Buy an external hard drive (USB or FireWire), set up a weekly or monthly schedule, and back it up. Do this regularly. (Mac users like me can be smart about this and use Apple’s Backup application, which makes this easy and automatic.)

If you run a server, back up your data regularly. Whether you have a local tape drive, or an off-site storage vault accessible through FTP, back it up and be ready for the worst.

I’m harping on this because I just got a frantic e-mail from one of my former customers (back when I ran my own web hosting operation) who desperately needed to know if I had any copies of certain e-mails about a list of subjects or senders, because they had lost their copy and needed to refer to some vitally important document regarding their future ability to carry out their business.

I was able to restore the backups from tape, and I think I found what they wanted.

Save yourself the trouble - back it up, or at least keep an off-site copy.

E-mail administrators should seriously consider configuring their mail daemons to save a copy of EVERY message that comes in or out of their server, and saving that off-site. Google Mail accounts are free - set up a blind BCC for all messages to a GMail mailbox, and you’ve got a copy of everything. You’re pretty much assured that Google won’t lose your data, because it’s their responsibility to keep those hard drives safely spinning, and replace individual disks when they fail. If 2.5Gb (or more, as things grow) isn’t enough, get an account with 30gigs.com and do your best to fill that up.

Save it or lose it! Your business or your life may depend on it.

Buying an Apple refurbished computer from the online Apple Store? Be ready for a few problems.

I purchased a refurbished Apple iMac G5 (20-inches, 2.0 GHz) last month, and had to take it in for service, since 2 of the 3 screws that held the chassis together were damaged. One screw was broken inside, so that it would turn freely but never catch (or release). The other screw was tightened so hard that I couldn’t turn it. I ended up partially stripping it.

My goal was simply to upgrade the memory. 512Mb seems like a lot, but even a powerful iMac needs more memory, so I bought two 1Gb modules and went to install them, and then discovered that I couldn’t open my iMac.

I called AppleCare, and they told me to take it to the local Apple Store, which I did. But the Genius at the store took a look, and said that it was “DOA” and should be exchanged through the Apple online/phone sales department. He also suggested that Apple cross-ship me a new iMac while I returned the old one to them.

After 45 minutes on the phone with AppleCare, I was told that no, that repair needs to be done in the store, and no, they wouldn’t cross-ship me a new iMac because it wasn’t standard procedure. Fortunately we were still at the mall, so I dragged the iMac back to the Apple Store and explained everything to the Genius.

After much hemming, hawing, and reluctance, he finally agreed to fix the problem. I left the iMac there while they ordered the replacement parts and completed the repairs. The next day, another Genius called me and told me that the repair would not be covered under my warranty (despite the fact that I purchased the AppleCare extended plan) since it was “abuse”. So I explained the whole story to him again - it came that way in the box, and it needs to be fixed. He finally agreed to repair the iMac at no charge.

A few days later, I got a call from the Apple Store and was told that the iMac was ready to be picked up. I did so, took it home, and upgraded the memory with no problems.

I’m not sure if everyone gets the runaround like this, but I’d feel better about this if somebody at Apple would step up and own this problem and drive it to completion, rather than pointing fingers and saying that some other person/department needs to fix this. It should not take a lot of effort and persistance to convince Apple to fix the product which was shipped to me in a faulty condition.

I’m using the iMac now, and with its 2Gb memory upgrade (and a fast, really fast Western Digital 74Gb Raptor SATA hard drive) it’s the fastest computer that I’ve ever used. Airport wireless connectivity isn’t the greatest, but I’m on an Ethernet connection now, and it just flies.

So we’re having our first snow of the season, here in lovely Hillsboro. It’s sticking to the ground, and I expect it’ll come down pretty heavily tonight.

This winter has been absolutely frigid so far. The air has been so dry, inside and out, and we’ve had to use our puny humidifier pretty much every night since the furnace is running just about all time. I think we need a humidifier for the whole house. Dry air affects my whole family.

My daughter has a favorite toy - it’s a small rattle with Piglet’s head and arms, from the Classic Pooh series of baby accessories. We got it at Target when the twins were very young, and she’s taken it as her companion. She plays with other toys and rattles, but this one is her favorite. When we give it to her, she’ll drop her other toys and give us a squeal of pure joy, take the rattle and cuddle it, chew it, and shake it around until it slips from her grasp. Then we give it to her again, etc.

She’s such a cutie. I’m smitten. She even has my eyes!

I’m in the process of moving my domains over to a new web server, and I’ve been pondering what to do about my vast archives of e-mail that I’ve accumulated over the years.

Managing multiple MBOXes and Maildirs can get very unwieldy, very quickly. In the past I had tried to strictly archive my mail by month, which eventually slipped into every quarter. I kept separate folders for sent mail and received mail, and tried to organize them.

The problem was, as you might guess, searching for a specific message when I needed to refer to something. I used a little PERL script named “grepmail” which helped to search for certain text strings inside the body or header of a mailbox, but it didn’t work as well as I had hoped.

So I could continue doing this, but my new server is fairly slow for disk access, and searching multiple Maildirs for a specific text string might be pretty slow.

Google Mail has the search thing worked out pretty well, at least as far as I’ve been able to test. Their service is fairly fast and generally very reliable, and only rarely does it have any problems. Just on a lark, I created a separate account and imported a bunch of messages (from 2001-2004) with the help of several BASH/PERL scripts that I found.

Disk storage isn’t a concern for Google. My messages only take up 66Mb of space (out of a 2.6Gb account, which is still growing) and I don’t foresee that I’ll fill it up.

Privacy concerns - yeah, I worry about this, but consider that these messages have already passed unencrypted through a whole host of mail servers when they were sent to me (or from me), so all the privacy that I might have had was an illusion. I’ll have to trust Google to not allow anyone else to access my messages.

And even though this would make privacy advocates cringe, I don’t have anything that’s really sensitive in my e-mail anyway. I don’t use encryption, though I could if I wanted to.

I tried using ZOE last year, and while it was an interesting exercise, I was not impressed with the UI at all. The date-based search and domain-based organization were interesting, but the UI really fell flat in most areas that general e-mail users would expect to utilize. The “intertwingling” aspect wasn’t useful to me, since I can generally use search keywords to find whatever I need to.

Also, I had used Yahoo Mail for several years, but never really was impressed with their service either. The banner ads were very obtrusive, the UI was slow, and there was no way to effectively organize and search for messages. They’ve improved their capabilities since then, but I’m still left with a sour taste. In fact, I just saved all my Yahoo Mail messages to my local workstation (with the help of a nice script called YoSucker and I cancelled my Yahoo Mail account last week. (The spam was getting a bit heavy, as well.)

My point here (and I do have one) is that Google Mail will allow me to consolidate all my messages into one place, search for things with a UI that makes sense, and hold everything in a central, easy-to-reach location that requires nothing more than a web browser. The sidebar ads are unobtrusive and sometimes good for a chuckle, since the keyword search doesn’t always relate to the message, but I can live with that. The UI is sensible, the “Save Draft” feature is awesome, and the threading abilities are superb. (The spam filtering is pretty good too, though I haven’t yet been targeted heavily.)

I’m this close to importing all my mailboxes and Maildirs from everywhere, and redirecting my main @gerb.org address to Google Mail. What’s holding me back? An irrational fear that Google will take my data and do something with it, or go offline and leave me without my message history or my contact addresses?

I really like the idea of not running my own mail server.

I succumbed to the temptation and bought myself an iPod Nano (black, 4Gb) shortly after it was first introduced. And I’ve got to say that the Nano is probably the best music player for me.

It’s small - the form factor is great, it’s easy to carry, and it’s still usable. Sure, there are smaller players out there (such as the cube-shaped player from Wal-Mart, and the iPod Shuffle) and some that look geekier (and have brighter OLED screens) but the Nano seems to be more usable.

It sounds great - I’ve tried it with several pairs of headphones, as well as my JBL OnStage (which sits in the twins’ nursery and usually holds my older “3G” iPod 20Gb as a jukebox). The sound is as good as you can expect for a portable device. I’m no audiophile so I can’t speak for one, but it sounds really good, and I can’t hear any difference between the source CD and the encoded AAC file (320kbps).

This brings me to my next point - I have completely switched over to iTunes for managing my encoded music. Previously, when I used a Linux workstation at home, I had ripped a lot of CDs into 256-kbps MP3 files, but never really ended up using them for much of anything. When I first started using my original “3G” iPod, I manually imported a lot of the MP3s, not really trusting iTunes to do its job properly, and irrationally fearing a non-MP3 file format.

Since then, I’ve learned my lesson. iTunes makes ripping CDs easy - almost too easy. Before, I had to worry about things randomly hanging in mid-stream, or for the few mixed-mode CDs I encoded, remembering to manually cut the last audio track by 2:30 to avoid hitting the gap between the sessions. Little nagging things like that kept the ripping process from what it should be - plug and play. But iTunes takes care of all that.

Back to the iPod Nano for a bit. Apple fixed something that always bothered me about the “3G” iPods - the ability to resume playback after the iPod goes into a “deep” sleep. Those of you who have needed to let an iPod sit idle for 2 or more days will probably appreciate this. Thank you Apple!

I’ve put on one of the “InvisibleShield” protectors (which you can purchase here) and it seems to work pretty well. I have noticed that the click-wheel needs a bit more force when pushing any of the four corners, but it’s a small price to pay for having a scratch-free iPod Nano.

So I got myself a new Apple Mighty Mouse a few weeks ago, and I’ve been using it every day. This is probably the best optical mouse that I’ve ever used, period.

The tracking is smooth, without any skips or jumps. The mouse itself is very lightweight, yet not too light to control and skip all over the place. It tracks well and slides very smoothly on my black leather mousepad. The operation is simple, and the mouse-shell-click action is smoother and easier to use than I thought it would be. (I had briefly tried some of the earlier Apple Pro mice, and didn’t like the feel as much as the Mighty Mouse.) The scroll ball took some time to get used to, but works very well. I don’t have the occasion to scroll horizontally, that often, but it’s nice to have it.

And the touch-sensitive shell (to emulate a 2-button mouse) works very well. Amazingly well, I have to say.

My biggest nitpick so far lies not with the mouse, but with its accompanying driver software for Mac OS 10.4.x. The Mighty Mouse control panel gives me the option to change the actions of the mouse’s buttons. By default, clicking the scroll ball will open Exposé. I wanted to keep this feature, but still use my normal pointing device (a Fingerworks iGesture touchpad, the best mousing device *ever* created, period) configured with its normal 3-button mouse operations. No go. Mighty Mouse’s control panel decided to remap all middle-click events to the activation of Exposé, so I effectively lost my middle-click. I use middle-click heavily in Safari and Camino, so I was not amused. Therefore, I had to change the Mighty Mouse control panel back to sane defaults. (I don’t need to access Exposé from the mouse anyway - the F9 key is within easy reach.)

Kudos to Apple’s design team. This mouse is great! If I ever lost my iGesture and TouchStream touchpads and had to use a *real* mouse (i.e. one you have to actually move around) exclusively, the Mighty Mouse would be my pointer of choice.

Hope this works. I’m using a Dashboard wigdet in Mac OS X 10.4, running on my PowerBook G4, to add this post. Woo-hah!