Crossing Over.

Slashdot ran an article this week about CodeWeavers, a company whose main product has been porting windows apps to the Linux environment. Their primary application is CrossOver, a tool which allows an OS X user like myself to run a Windows app without emulation on an Intel Mac, and they were giving it away, free, for one day.

I was very interested whem I read the description. Instead of having to boot up an entire virtual environment (in this case, an entire install of Windows XP) just to run one program, CrossOver builds a version of the PC app that runs on its own, saving CPU resources and memory. For anyone running a 1st-gen MacBook Pro like me, which caps out at 2GB of RAM, this is important, because my typical workday involves running Photoshop, two web browsers, a mail client, an FTP client, iTunes, several smaller utilities, and XP under emulation with several Windows applications; RAM gets scarce and the machine bogs down.

I downloaded and installed the app, and followed a helpful wizard to install a fresh copy of HomeSite (my authoring environment), which wasn't actually on their list of supported software. Everything ran smoothly, and within minutes I had it working. After installing a copy of Explorer 6 inside the "bottle" (their term for a virtual partition), I had everything I needed to work with, minus the hassle of booting up XP.

Comparing the footprint of the two approaches, Parallels/XP (at rest) uses 209 MB of RAM, plus 12.86 for HomeSite. CrossOver uses a mere 69MB, plus an equal amount for HomeSite, which should make things zippier in theory.

So: on the surface, it looks great; I'll try it out for a week and see if it supplants Parallels as my Windows alternative and report back here.

Posted on November 1, 2008 10:04 AM | link to this entry | comments (0)

Badvertising.

So they've announced that the Seinfeld/Gates ads for Microsoft are officially ending. While I understand the underlying concept of the two ads I've seen (are there more?) I'm still puzzled by the execution.

They are using Bill Gates to personalize Microsoft, making it less of a monolith and more into a friendly, cheerful entity. Seinfeld is there to be the comic foil and provide the yuks, showing how Gates can be an everyman like the rest of us. Seems simple, right? It would be, if the jokes and execution weren't so oblique. It's like the writers tried so hard to be hip and self-aware that they forgot the concept completely, so the situations and dialogue become a 30-second riff on shopping and "Real America", subjugating the message behind "We're stinking rich and look how funny it is to live with the little people" jokes. Yeah, so we all have a bitchy grandmother who lives with us, and we eat leftovers, and we have lousy taste. I'm sure you have an ugly lamp somewhere on your estate too, Mr. Gates.

So what does this say about the brand? To me it emphasizes the divide between the huge, wealthy corporation (Gates) and the customers it services (the family), and the tone of the jokes highlight how it looks down on the rest of us. Seinfeld is there for some unknown reason; his presence is pretty much superfluous in the context of the setup. The same effect could have been achieved without paying him millions to show up, and could have humanized the Gates character even more.

Let's examine the Gates character for a minute, too. I'm calling him a character because he is there to portray the human side of the company, and the in-joke is that he's "just like the rest of us", even though he could buy and sell any country on earth. He does get humanized, and they even show his sense of humor, something the Microsoft PR machine was never really able to achieve. But no amount of kidding around will change the fact that he is one of the five wealthiest men on the planet, and that he will never be "one of us." When his Vista install crashes, he has five of the smartest men at Microsoft immediately parachute into his billion-dollar estate to fix it, while we all have to sit on hold with the Geek Squad for three hours. They also never made a visceral connection between Microsoft and Gates. It's implied, but it doesn't go any further than that, and his reason for being in the commercials is never really explored or explained. Finally, and this is the most obvious and perplexing point of fact: He doesn't work there anymore. He works for a foundation he started which tries to find creative ways to give away billions of his dollars in aid. Yes, he will always be the figurehead for the company, but that just underlines their most serious problem: They have no real brand identity.

So what does this million-dollar marketing effort achieve? Absolutely nothing. It leaves us all scratching our heads attempting to divine the message. Is it about Seinfeld? Is it about shoes? What is it supposed to mean? The end result is an ambiguous celebrity endorsement that showcases the failure of Microsoft to be able to connect, on an individual level, with the billions of people it touches every day. My guess is that a lot of people are in big trouble as a result of this campaign, and that there is a scramble to reshoot new ads which will be as bland and cold as the previous attempts to promote the company.

Posted on September 18, 2008 9:27 AM | link to this entry | comments (0)

Continue? Y/N

Onsite again, attempting to migrate a MySQL database to a new version of OS X Server. I've got the machine live on the internets, but now I have to move the database, get a Perl script to talk with it, upgrade passwords, and get a table of users to be able to log in.

Update: MySQL is installed differently on OS X Server, from what I can tell, and so does not work the same way as with plain old OS X.

Posted on May 15, 2008 12:58 PM | link to this entry | comments (0)

More Distractions, or: MySQL and PHP on OS X for morons.

I'm on bedside watch this evening with my pops, who is dealing with fluid drain and a tracheotomy tube, so I decided to find something light to occupy my downtime: Installing MySQL and PHP on my laptop and setting up a development environment. Because what could be more easy and fun than wading through pages and pages of forums to try to install and talk to an open-source database?

Disclaimer: I'm not a grey-haired wizard, so these instructions are what worked for me, but not the One True Way. I'm including them here to maybe help someone else save some time. I'm running 10.4.11 on an Intel MacBook Pro, and I've never installed or started MySQL, Apache, or PHP on it. So here goes.

First, I checked to see if MySQL was installed on my machine with this terminal command (which should return a tidy list of applications):

ps -axc

If it's installed and running, there should be something in the list called "mysqld". It wasn't there for me. I also searched for any files called MySQL, and didn't find anything that looked like it was a running module. So I downloaded an Intel installer package from the MySQL site, ran the installer, and installed the Preference Pane.

After wondering stupidly for a few minutes why I couldn't get anything to come up at http://localhost/ in Safari, I remembered to turn on Personal Web Sharing in the Preferences, which starts Apache. This is why they call me the Idiot.

Next, I looked to see if PHP was running on this machine by writing the following file and saving it as php_test.php inside /Library/WebServer/Documents:

<html>
<p>This is an html line</p>
<?php
echo "this is a php line";
phpinfo();
?>
</html></span>

Opening up Safari, I pointed to it here: http://localhost/php_test.php

Safari dutifully printed the code without parsing the PHP, so I knew it wasn't working. I do know that PHP is preinstalled on OS X but not configured to run out of the box, so I did some looking.

Following directions here, I opened the http.conf file in Pico (I'm a dork, yes)

sudo pico /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

and uncommented (remove the #) the following lines:

# LoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.so
# AddModule mod_php4.c

I went back to the Preferences, turned off Personal Web Sharing, and turned it back on (thereby restarting Apache without having to resort to 5 minutes of Google searching and arcane Terminal commands). If all was done correctly, Apache should now be loaded with the PHP modules on.

Reloading the php_test.php file in Safari, I got a happy PHP config page (you'll know it when you see it).

OK, so next I have to see if I can talk to MySQL with PHP. I'm coming clean here and admitting I'm using a copy of PHP & MySQL for Dummies, which doesn't really get into the issue of passwords and root users until Chapter 5, and then it sort of glosses over things. A simple fact it took a while to find is that MySQL starts up with a superuser of "root" and a blank password. (I think I already knew this, but then forgot it). Anyway, I used a script found here, and changed the following lines from

$host="hostname";
$user="mysqlaccount";
$password="mysqlpassword";

to

$host="localhost";
$user="root";
$password="";

All this page will do is talk to MySQL and return a list of variables, thereby confirming that it's running and available to connect.

When I loaded the page in Safari, I got the dreaded "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/mysql/mysql.sock'" error. As much as the Idiot here can figure out, this is some issue with the OS X install of MySQL and the pathways it uses.

Looking around the web, I found this page in Apple's forums which seems to fix the issue. In a nutshell, I followed the instructions at the bottom of the page to create a symbolic link to the lock file, like so:

cd /var
ls

If there's no directory in there named "mysql", then do this:

sudo mkdir mysql
cd mysql
sudo ln -s /private/tmp/mysql.sock mysql.sock

Then, I reloaded the mysql_up.php file I'd made earlier, and I got the result I was looking for: A table with a bunch of numbers that made no sense (variables). but the important thing was that there were no errors, which meant that PHP was talking to MySQL.

Now, I just need to learn how to program so I can use this shit.

Posted on May 9, 2008 7:17 PM | link to this entry | comments (0)

Fun With Automator, Part 17.

I'm pretty good with backups. I have six CD sleeves filled with digital media that spans my professional career back to 1997, and there's one Holy Grail cataloging app which indexes the entire collection. I've been looking, though, for ways to make the process easier and more automated. After all, these are computers, right?

I suppose I could learn UNIX shell scripting and use rsync to do the heavy lifting, but I don't have that much time. Instead, I've decided to bang my head against Apple's Automator. I've been down this path before, as you may remember. This time, I found some help in various places and used a little more common sense to solve my problem.

My needs were this:
On a specified recurring date, make a copy of my Mail folders.
Compress it into a Zip archive.
Move it to my Backups folder.
Open my mail application, and email me a notification.

Simple, right? Some trial and error and six scripts later, I had a working application that did what I wanted it to do reliably, and I'll share it with you here. (These instructions are for Automator 1.0.5; I haven't updated to OS X 10.5 yet on this machine).

First, from the Finder actions on the left, drag Get Specified Finder Items over into the right window. Pick whatever files need to be backed up. (This was the step that stymied me last time, for reasons I can't remember.)
Then, drag Create Archive from the same list. Rename it something that makes sense (instead of "archive").
Drag Rename Finder Items over from the list. I added underscores for separators from the pulldown lists.
Drag Move Finder Items over from the list, and navigate to the place you want the final zipped file to live.

Note: I'm using Mail.app for my email, so there are prewritten Automator actions that ship with this program. If you're using some other email client, this may not work for you.

Now, drag Launch Application over from the list. Select Mail.app from the pulldown list. In the gray action title bar, click the Files/Folders arrow and select Ignore Results From previous Action (otherwise you will email the documents to yourself).
From the Mail.app actions on the left, drag New Mail Message over, and fill out the appropriate information. (I wrote a short email that notified me of a successful backup.)
Finally, drag Send Outgoing Messages over to the right.

When all this is done, go to File -> Save As and name the action. Be sure to save it as an application. Test it out and see if it works. Make sure it doesn't move your files from one place to another as opposed to copying them. I had issues when I used the Copy Finder Items action, where it simply moved the files instead of duplicating them, which meant I lost my email for about five minutes.

Now, to set it up as a recurring event, go to iCal and click on a date sometime in the future. Name it whatever you like. In the Alarm section, choose Open File. Directly under that pulldown, choose Other... and navigate to the Automator application you just saved. Once that is selected, you should be done.

And there you have it. An automated application that will back up a folder(s)/file(s) and send confirmation email on a specified date. I could add multiple things to this archive, set it up to compare two folders, write a log file, or a number of other scripted functions, but this works for the present day.

Coming up: An Automator 2.0/10.5 workflow to automatically mount an FTP server, compare two directories, and back up the local version. Handy for people who have multiple websites, like me.

Posted on March 11, 2008 3:31 PM | link to this entry

Add It Up.

Did you feel the earth swivel on its axis last night at about 11:30 EST? Did plates fly out of the cupboards and crash on the ground? Did you feel a sense of unease at any time last night while you laid in bed watching Leno?

Well, that was me, sorry. See, I failed math in the 11th grade. Miserably. I never paid attention in class, so any math concepts I picked up on were purely by chance, not due to the shining success of the American public school system. I thought I was safe when I went off to an art school for my undergraduate degree, but I should have known better than to try an escape. In a career that's seen a few shifts in direction, eventually settling into web design, I've found that my lack of math skills is an anchor preventing me from doing a lot of things that might make me more money.

At the library yesterday, I found a book called Algebra Demystified which had a good mixture of explanation to examples, and cracked it open last night before going to bed. Starting out with fractions, I made it through to page 15 or so before turning the light off, remembering some things and relearning some others. The goal is to get through most of the book before I have to return it (a total of about four weeks). It's 422 pages, which means I've got to crank through fifteen pages a night—last night that took about half an hour, which sounds just about right.

Posted on March 7, 2008 9:22 AM | link to this entry

Shiny New Toy

I went ahead and did it, even though a chorus of voices in my head told me not to spend the money. The Apple Store was a zoo last night at 5:30, and I had to wait around a while for a concierge to see me standing in line behind a flock of interesting people:

Hipster Dude and Friend, who sat idly at the otherwise empty workshop desk playing with Photoshop, checking out the chicks across the store,

Obsessive Compulsive iMac Man, who unpacked and packed and unpacked and packed an iMac about six times in front of the Genius Bar, standing directly in the way of any tech who tried to come out to the showroom floor,

Tiny iPhone Girl, who walked in expecting to talk to someone immediately about something, and when faced with the idea of making an appointment, blinked no less than seventeen times while the shiny perfumed gears in her head crashed together in an attempt to make a decision,

Screamy iPod Return It NOW Woman, who kept throwing an old Shuffle on the iPod Bar and yelling at the tech, who calmly repeated the store policy about reservations five times while she huffed and wheezed and screamed and interrupted someone else's reservation, causing all of us other people to roll our eyes and stare plainly.

Once I caught the young concierge's eye, and told her quietly that I'd like an iPhone, we did a dance around the screamy woman and all the other people sitting at the Bar to complete the transaction, and I got the hell out of there.

Setup was a breeze, and it took minutes to sync up with my calendars and address book, as well as my Safari bookmarks. It's a beautiful piece of gadgetry, really—the first time the phone, iPod and Palm have come together in one package to be useful. I think I'm going to be very happy with it.

Posted on January 22, 2008 8:32 AM | link to this entry | comments (2)

Con for firmation.

Looks like I'm cleared for takeoff on a new iPhone...no new updates to the hardware, just software additions for the time being. I kind of figured they'd wait until fall to refresh it, but I wanted to be sure.

Posted on January 15, 2008 12:49 PM | link to this entry | comments (0)

Automator 2.0.

A few weeks before Christmas, I was given a Leopard install disc to play with. A few days later I found a fantastic deal on an iMac through Craigslist, and finally upgraded my desktop workstation from an ancient G3 built in 1999 to a maxed out 17" G5. Good grief, what a difference. Apart from a loud fan and a tendency to spit CDs out the side slot like a pissed-off llama, the iMac has been perfect. And playing around with Leopard has been educational; there's lots of new features and upgrades to the system that I love.

One of the things I got excited about was Automator 2.0. I'd like to be able to use Automator in Leopard to make my life easier, now that I've got a faster workstation. I have a laundry list of specialized workflows I'd love to be able to script, not only for me but for my consulting clients, for example: A folder action that wakes up, scrubs newly added fonts through Font Doctor and adds them to Font Agent Pro in a new set when they are dropped into a specific folder. (In my experience, Font Doctor's Automator action does not recognize single fonts and instead runs a check of all fonts on the hard drive. Annoying.)

I've already created one with the built-in actions that ship with Transmit to back up all files on this site on a recurring date in iCal and then email me upon completion. This is how it should work: easy, intuitive, functional.

However, I'm finding that simple tasks that should be easy are not easy at all—like connecting to a server on a local network. Now that I've got two machines again, I'd like to set up an action that keeps specific files on both machines synchronized. Sounds simple, right? Nope. Using the "Connect to Servers" action presents me with an action that has no inputs: I can't specify what server I want to connect to, or figure out how to do so. From the looks of things, I need to have a server pre-chosen somehow. Where? How?

Why is this so hard? And where is the documentation? Lazyweb has no helpful links yet.

Posted on January 1, 2008 11:05 PM | link to this entry

Remote Entry.

Writing from the Panera this morning, because Verizon DSL is slow as dirt and the tech support dude couldn't fix the problem inside the tight confines of his script. We have limited connectivity at the house, which means slow upload is now no upload, and download speed is somewhere around a 28.8 baud modem. Meanwhile, I still can't post pictures to Flickr because it's banned at this location. Good times!

Posted on November 28, 2007 10:21 AM | link to this entry

Update: Consumer Affairs Desk.

So, I didn't buy the Vespa. Nor did I buy the Kustom bass amp (which, incidentally, sold for $401 with no reserve on eBay). Instead, I found a couple of deals on Craigslist that I'm rather happy about this morning:

For $35, a HP LaserJet 4000n: After adding a $98 toner cartridge, I upgraded our office printer to an EnergyStar-compliant 1200dpi workgroup printer that both Macs and PCs can use. Our previous printer, a 14-year-old Apple Laserwriter, was showing its age: printing any document, no matter how trivial, took at least three minutes to process and spool up before spitting out paper. It didn't like expensive paper anymore (accordion jams look so good on invoices). It had no provision for PCs, and the only reason we hung on to it was because I found two OEM printer cartridges on Craigslist for $30 last spring.

For $200, I found a 22" Apple Cinema Display to upgrade Jen's 19" LCD—almost doubling her viewing area. Now she can see two-page spreads on her monitor without scrolling. I may need to replace the backlight at some point, but for now, it looks pretty as hell.

Posted on November 21, 2007 10:55 AM | link to this entry | comments (4)

Can You Hear Me Now?

When I was a freshman in college, I decided to build a pair of stereo speakers from scratch. With help from a book I bought, I learned the basic theory behind acoustics and drew up a checklist of parts required. While they were all available at the Radio Shack, I knew I wanted something made with more quality.

Looking through some audio magazines at the bookstore, I copied the addresses of the most local showrooms I could find, and then took the train down to New York City to visit every car audio shop on Canal Street to find a pair of 12" bass speakers. With the spec sheet in hand, I did all the required calculations (yes, the guy who failed math in his junior year figured out algebra, proof that if one is motivated enough, miracles can happen) to get the correct dimensions for a speaker enclosure, and I cut the particle board by hand in my parents' garage. Finding the correct tweeters was difficult, but not as difficult as finding the crossovers, little electrical capacitors that send the right frequency to the right speaker: this was before the internets, when we had to do shit like go to the library to look stuff up.

With a $8 soldering iron, several feet of dampening foam, and a cordless drill, I assembled the cabinets, sealed them up and plugged them into my amplifier. And to my surprise, they sounded good. Really good. It got so that I could crank them up to half my amp's volume and they'd shake the windows without distorting—but, then, the speakers were built to lift the wheels of a car off the road. They came in handy for parties that way.

The only downside was that they are butt-ugly; unfinished particleboard is as aesthetically pleasing as wet cement. My hand-held circular sawing job now just looks like I hired a drunk to build them. So they sit in the basement, where Geneva has been using them as a scratching post (thankfully I have guards over the speaker cones). During the Great Flood, they got their toes wet and a permanent stain set in.

I saw this article on Toolmonger today about DIY speaker cabinets, and it made me think about my project again. I've wanted to buy some quality poplar and put my carpentry skills to use rebuilding the cabinets for some time now, but I've put it on the back burner. Perhaps after Thanksgiving, when I get the cabinet finished, I'll take a weekend or two and show my speakers some love.

Posted on November 19, 2007 3:20 PM | link to this entry | comments (2)

Curiosity Satisfied.

This afternoon, I decided to check out the Vespa I was threatening to buy a couple of weeks ago. In the time since I first saw it, it had been listed on eBay and failed to meet the reserve—which should have been the first hint.

The sales guy was helping some other folks outside, so I got some quality time alone with the scooter. It was quickly apparent that the photos on Craigslist did not really describe the condition that well. The chrome is all there, but the deck is bent on either side from several accidents. The "paint job" looks even worse in person than in the photos, and the previous owner decided to slap some dumb stickers over top of that. The seat only had a few rips, but there was a lot of rust evident in the bodylines and underneath the deck, and I'm not interested in battling rust again.

It was a nice dream, but I'm passing on this particular scooter. I'll have to spend more money for a fixer-upper that's got fewer fundamental problems, which is a lesson I've learned the hard way.

Posted on November 17, 2007 2:29 PM | link to this entry

Bulge

I had to stop into the Apple Store to have them look at my MBP— it recently started shutting itself off after one or two minutes' battery usage. The Genius looked it over, verified I had the correct firmware (apparently there was an update that fixed random shutdowns), and then pulled the battery out...to find a good-sized bulge along the bottom. WHOA. Without another word, he said, "OK, we'll get you a new one," and when he couldn't find one in the back (internally identified as a "part") he walked out to the store, pulled one off the shelf (identified as "stock"), opened the box, slapped it in, and bid me farewell with a smile.

God, I love proper customer service.

Posted on October 10, 2007 10:41 AM | link to this entry

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties.

I'm sitting in a Panera (thank GOD for you, Panera) with all the other laptop warriors wishing I had a pair of headphones to drown out the sound of a bleached blonde selling a Ponzi pitch to a frumpy middle-aged couple. Seriously, when anybody shows you the pyramid diagram and gives you the subscription shpiel, big fireworks should explode over your head spelling out the word SCAM. Or, maybe SUCKER.

So far, it's Big Monopoly Carriers 2, Bill 0. Our DSL modem, a Westel unit stamped with a Bell Atlantic logo that dates back to the early days of DSL service at my old house circa 1998, finally crapped out yesterday at 3PM. A half-hour of dropped calls, one conversation with a perky CSR in Bangalore, and $39.99 later, we'll have a new modem in 6-8 business days. I think one of the reasons they shipped customer service overseas is that it becomes painfully evident the person on the phone can't do anything to speed up the process, even when threatened with cancellation of service. I'm tempted to call the cable company to see how long it would take to get someone out to install a cable modem, but I'd bet it would be about the same.

Speaking of Comcast, they sent a tech guy out to a consulting client of mine to hook up a new cable modem with digital voice. When faced with an Airport Express, he balked, loaded some kind of proprietary Comcast setting on her laptop to get it online, then cleared out. My client's Airport Express won't pick up a DHCP address from the modem, nor will my laptop, and I'm stumped. All efforts to renew the address from the command line met with the same result. Even sharing the connection wirelessly from her laptop did not work, which tells me something's funky with Comcast. But, then, is that really a surprise?

The bottom line is that my email connectivity will be spotty for the next week or so while the new modem gets shipped by donkey from Tasmania.

Posted on October 5, 2007 10:40 AM | link to this entry

Wayback Machine.

I have a new friend sitting on my desk this week: a working Powerbook 160. I don't know why this particular model struck my fancy—I suppose it was always something I wished I could afford back in my poverty days. Manufactured in 1992, it originally listed for $2,430, or about two months' salary at the time. Last week, it cost me $10 in postage and a DOA powerbook gathering dust on my shelf.

It's not small. It doesn't have a battery, and still weighs quite a bit. The screen is tiny. But it feels solid—something my fancy color 520 never did. It boots up in about 10 seconds, running System 7.1. The keyboard is springy and tight. The trackball (remember those?) is smooth and fast.

There are applications for modern Macs which are supposed to aid in productivity—going so far as to black out the entire screen so that the writer isn't tempted to check email, surf the internet, etc. My solution? I installed a copy of Word 5.1 and was writing within minutes. I can't get the machine on the internet without a dial-up account and a lot of patience, so there's no temptation to fool around reading the IMDB. I've already used it to produce some writing for work, which means it's paid for itself already. Sometimes the simple solutions really are the best ones.

Posted on September 27, 2007 12:14 AM | link to this entry | comments (2)

It's On.

If I am hearing the news correctly, Apple (among other cool things) just lowered the price of the 8GB iPhone to $399. Which means when I get the next big check in for my Orlando trip, I'm going straight to the Apple Store and buying one.

Update: Ok, so let's analyze the backlash here a little bit. Jobs writes a letter and says, in effect, Whoops. Sorry I pissed you off, fanboys early adopters, so here's what we're going to do: I'll give you each $100 back in credit at the Apple Store, and I hope that makes you feel a little better.

Gadget-blogs, whose sole purpose on God's green earth is to salivate over grainy camera-phone pictures of techie shit only available in Japan, are heaping on the abuse, crying foul over this development. "$100 doesn't go a long way in Apple land... Either way, the money's going back to Apple."

Well, guess what, asshats? You stood on line to buy the phone. You had to be the guy with the shiniest toy on the block, the guy who just threw your last latest-and-greatest wonderphone in a shoebox in the closet with the scores of other phones you've had since you got a cell plan. Now you're upset 'cause they dropped the price? Did you scream and cry this loud when your Xbox went on sale or the price on your RAZR dropped $300? Nobody made you buy the iPhone when it was $600—you did that yourself.

I happened to read a fantastic essay buy a guy who was an editor at Gizmodo, then left, then came back, wrote said essay, and got fired for it. (Now he's the gadget editor at Boingboing.) In essence, it says something like this: knock it off. Quit spending your time, money and energy buying every brand-new techie piece of hardware out there to fill the empty void in your lives.

It's pretty sobering reading, because I lust after the unobtainable shiny gadgets as much as the next guy. I want a 42" LCD TV, a TiVo, a PDA, a tablet PC, a robot that does my laundry, my own unmanned surveillance plane, and a supercomputer whirring quietly in my basement.

But I don't have any of that stuff. I have a 15-year-old TV and a three-year old Motorola phone that I can't wait to throw in a lake. I am a fan of Apple, I believe in their products, and I try to be an evangelist without being an annoying fanboy. I'm going to buy an iPhone in a month or two, not because I need to show it off, but because my current phone sucks, I already have an AT&T plan, I use a Mac daily, and I think it would help me do business. If I'd gone out and dropped $600 for the iPhone two months ago, and then found out they were giving me $100 back in credit, I think I'd have to be pretty happy—show me another company who's publicly admitted a mistake and taken immediate action like that in the last year.

Posted on September 5, 2007 2:50 PM | link to this entry

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

I have deliberately shunned social networking sites for years now. Actually, I've shunned pretty much everything about the social networking scene ever since the first chat clients came out years ago. I don't have a ready explanation for this aversion, other than the slimy feeling I get whenever I ask someone to link to my site or for their chat name: I feel like it's high school all over again. I don't keep IM up and running a whole lot, nor do I just randomly IM people for the hell of it. I look at it sort of like making a phone call: I need to have something good to say in order to take the time out of someone's day.

I've dipped my toes in the pool a few times, through Flickr (where my linked friends number in the teens) and through IM (begrudgingly; some people conduct the entirety of their business on IM, but I find it distracting) but I've never gotten over that feeling of wheedling supplicance, as if I was the freshman asking a senior if I could come to their party. I suppose this attitude throughout life has meant I haven't been to many parties, but I have to look at the people with 900+ buddies and wonder if it's just another game of collection and posturing. How can I be expected to maintain relationships with 900 buddies on a daily basis when I'm bad at maintaining flesh-and-blood relationships with actual people I know and love? Oh, and stay married, run a business, and spend at least a half-hour of waking time away from the computer?

Last year I was invited to join a business-oriented social networking site, and I considered the offer for a while before acting. Perhaps this would be different from the other sites I've poked around on (it was better-looking, for one thing), and perhaps it might help me from a business perspective, I thought. With reservation, I signed up and created a profile, entered some employment information, and then poked around to see who else was signed up. The results were pretty slim at that point—a few people on the margins of companies I'd worked for, but nobody I'd actually consider contacting.

At that point, I decided my criteria for linking to other people would be twofold: I would have to had direct working contact with them, and I would have to be reasonably certain they'd link back to me.

Over time, I got a few invites from friends I knew, but the account lay mostly dormant for a year until recently, when I got an invite from a friend at a company I'd not listed in my history, which I accepted. After I updated my profile, suddenly I got three more invites from people I didn't remember and two that I did. I noticed that certain people had contacts in the upper two digits (and sometimes three) while others had numbers like mine.

Asking around with some connected friends, I found that several of the people asking me for links were people we couldn't remember—the names were familiar, but the faces and roles were mysterious.

Also, with reservation, I took the larger step of inviting several people I'd worked with for links, feeling sheepishly like a freshman again. Thankfully, the people I invited all linked back to me, which was affirming. I guess it's something that I need to just get over, because there are millions of people out there linking and inviting and connecting and buddying who have the faintest connection with each other, and they don't seem to have a problem with it. For me, though, I look at it like the friends I've got—it's not the numbers, it's the quality.

Posted on August 30, 2007 9:46 AM | link to this entry | comments (3)

(Not So) Certified Technician.

After waiting patiently in our closet, the $300 Powerbook I bought a few months ago finally got some attention this week.

To recap, I bought a G4 Powerbook off Craigslist with a very wobbly display knowing I'd probably have to do some work to it, but not soon after I got it home the display completely crapped out. After doing a bunch of research, I found the parts I needed and an english PDF of the Apple Service Guide on a German website after a lengthy Google search.

I replaced the DC power board, the display inverter, and the display cable in May, but the problem still persisted, and my budget for parts was depleted. So we put it on the shelf and waited. Later, my MacBook Pro had a similar problem, and the Apple Store replaced my LCD under warranty. I knew the only thing I hadn't replaced was the culprit.

In the meantime, I got a call from a client who needed a larger drive in their Powerbook, which turned out to be an identical model. So, having dissected one laptop, I had plenty of experience opening another, and I used the fee for that job to pay for a new LCD.

After two hours' work this evening (I'm getting faster as I go) I had the new LCD in place and tested out, and after buttoning up the top case, she was ready to go.

Posted on August 28, 2007 10:00 PM | link to this entry

Old-Skool.

Oh, yeah, nothing brings me back to the great Wild West days of hand-coding HTML for the internets like connecting through a VPN and using Remote Desktop (accurately replicating the joy of working with Windows NT on a slow workstation) to edit ASP files with WordPad.

Posted on August 16, 2007 1:41 PM | link to this entry | comments (1)

Extra-Special Super Bonus Free Inside!

I almost forgot—there's a launch over at Cape Canaveral tomorrow, something I've never seen in person. I'm picking Jen up from the airport somewhere around 5, and then we're gonna haul ass out there to see if we can see anything. Southwest, please, please, please be on time.

Posted on August 7, 2007 12:54 PM | link to this entry

Return of the King.

The Apple Store called yesterday to inform me that IdiotCentral, my MacBook Pro, was finished and ready to be picked up. "We didn't even need to replace the logic board," the Genius told me. "It was the LCD."

I stopped in this morning, weaved past the consumers ogling the iPhone display, and a nice tattooed associate brought my baby back to me. Within two minutes I had signed the paperwork and was ready to leave—with a gentle reminder that AppleCare might be a good idea for a portable.

My new screen is bright and clean, and the hinge is actually a little tighter now. After a failed attempt to migrate my data back onto the machine this afternoon, I rooted out the cause (permission issues) and I'm now 2 minutes away from restarting into my old work environment—not a day too soon. At the client site where I worked on Friday, the guys helping me get up to speed (and the IT guy they sent over) looked at my battered eight year old stunt laptop and shook their heads in amazement. (Apart from a failure to be able to connect to their wireless network, my eight year old laptop worked fine, thank you.)

Overall, besides a week's wait to have the unit repaired, my customer experience was flawless and professional, something I've come to expect from Apple, and something I always recommend to friends.

Posted on July 15, 2007 6:15 PM | link to this entry | comments (3)

Brownout.

Our power blinked out at a little before 2PM this afternoon. I hope this is not a common occurrence this summer, because handling conference calls at the local Panera with my backup laptop is not optimal.

Posted on July 9, 2007 3:04 PM | link to this entry

Authorized Repairs.

Last week, after six months of faithful service, the screen on my MacBook Pro started acting up. The lower half of the LCD displayed thousands of vertical lines from the middle of the screen to the bottom, obscuring everything underneath it. No amount of cajoling, adjusting the display, or resetting the PRAM would fix the problem, so I made an appointment at the local Apple Store and spent the better part of yesterday getting my laptop ready for its journey.

The first thing I did was to repair permissions and purchase a large external backup drive: a 250GB Seagate I dropped in an enclosure I had laying around. Next, I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of the laptop drive, and tested it by booting from it successfully. Then, I wiped the internal hard drive clean by doing a seven-pass erase, and reinstalled 10.4.6 from the factory disks.

The Genius at the Apple Store took one look at the screen and said, "Whoa." He didn't blink, though, and within ten minutes I had a work authorization for a new LCD and logic board, all covered under warranty. I should have my laptop back within seven days, although the iPhone launch may back things up a little.

While I was at the store, I got my first hands-on look at the iPhone, and it's official: I'm going to buy one. Probably not this month, but within the next couple of months to be sure. It's light, sexy, responsive, and the UI is a thing of beauty.

Posted on July 7, 2007 11:44 AM | link to this entry

Phone Lust

Yeah, well, even though I've bitched at Cingular here before, I'm glad I still have the service, 'cause now it's AT&T again, and they have the iPhone. I'll have to wait a month or so before I can actually afford one, but if the commercials are to be believed, it's the single appliance I've been waiting for to finally replace my iPod, long-deceased Palm, and Motorola 551.

Posted on June 4, 2007 1:20 PM | link to this entry | comments (1)

Internet's Busted.

Yesterday, in a bit of cosmic irony, I spent seven hours onsite trying to untangle a client's backup system (Retrospect, you lovable, miserable bitch, you) while here at the house our seven-year-old DSL router, a SMC Barricade, decided to finally bite it and stop switching packets.

The "Backup Solution", a Belkin wireless router I got in trade somewhere, is servicable, but I'm now faced with the strange phenomena of downlink hubs that suddenly don't work anymore. All of this means that the Lockardugan Command Center is wireless until we can get a new router on the case--looks like I'm making a trip to the Office Depot this afternoon.

Posted on May 24, 2007 11:02 AM | link to this entry

Tech Support.

Things I've learned as an (un)official tech support contractor:

• There will never be any documentation. Usernames, passwords, machine specs, repair histories, netowrk diagrams...the list goes on and on.


• The first 1/3 of my time at a new client's office is always spent trying to figure out just what the hell is going on.


• I've followed a consultant who routinely recommends, purchases and installs software, and then leaves with every scrap of hard copy and media. No kidding. If I was advised to spend $1K on a piece of software, I'd better have every damned disc, manual, and box it came with sitting on my desk when the lights get turned off.


• Clients are ridiculously grateful when I fix something and take the time to answer their questions politely. I think they are amazed that I am not a raging asshole like other IT people they may have worked with in the past.


• Never be caught without one of every cord, widget, and utility. It beats a long round trip back home.


• Clients are also grateful when I supply them with a list of things I've done-new passwords, updated software, repaired hardware, and recommendations for future work. It seems like a no-brainer to me, but apparently it's kind of a rarity.


• I have seen some very sad computers in my brief career. Today I worked on a PowerBook that had the numbers worn off 3/4 of the keys. It made entering passwords very interesting. A corollary: Macs are tremendously resilient machines.


• Most people don't have a backup solution. And if they do, there's something wrong with it.


• As an outside contractor, I can leave whenever I want to, and I don't have to worry about being interrupted at my desk to go take care of something.

Given all that, I like working on Macs as a sideline job. It's a nice switch from sitting behind a desk, and it seems to stimulate the problem-solving part of my brain that likes to organize and fix things. It also means I'll be at a design or print shop, and that means the people are interesting and fun.

Posted on May 15, 2007 6:10 PM | link to this entry

As far as my rental car can go.

We're back for a whirlwind couple of days before we leave again, this time to Ohio for a graduation which might not even happen. (More details on this as we get them.)

Getting upstate to see the family was great, and long overdue. My parents hosted my grandfather's birthday party at their house, and apart from a minor crisis involving aluminum foil, butter, and forty ovens worth of smoke, everything went off without a hitch. The weather even cooperated enough for us to get a few peaceful, warm hours on the front porch, something I always look forward to when we're up there. Grampy enjoyed the party and kept us laughing through the entire celebration, even though he hasn't changed the battery in his hearing aid this year and is as deaf as a post. Luckily he always had one of his children sitting with him and translating whenever anyone posed a question from across the room.

Back here in Maryland, we have finally picked up our new rug for either the blue room or our bedroom, whichever it looks best in. Choosing carpet is difficult at best in flourescent light, with small paint chips, and under the watchful, predatory eye of the carpet salesman, so we narrowed the possibilities down to two rooms. Unfortunately, the room it's most likely to go into is also one of the least used rooms in the main section of the house.

I've spent the last two days alternating between paying work and computer maintenance; the parts for Jen's Powerbook came in while we were away, so I stripped it down to the bare frame to replace the DC/power board and both display cables. I spent many nervous hours consulting various manuals and writing notes to myself while organizing tiny screws in yogurt containers. Strangely enough, what took me about six hours to disassemble took only two to reassemble, and it was with a deep breath and a long prayer to the Sky Pilot that I pushed the power button. I got the lovely startup chime, a few minutes of nothing, and then...the same two-thirds-black screen I had before I started.

Rooting around for answers, I'm hearing that it's the LCD itself from a parts vendor ($300), or could be the inverter board itself, the only part I didn't replace ($60) when I had the monitor assembly open. I'm now about $500 into this thing and the prospect of spending another $300 does not please me.

However, we did find a workaround for Jen to be able to run InDesign CS and CS3 on the same machine (to recap, CS3 takes control of all InDesign documents regardless of their creator version after it is installed and run for the first time, making it impossible to re-edit them in CS) by creating a second user on the same machine and using CS as that user. Not elegant or ideal, but it gets the job done for now. Adobe gets the big Middle Finger for that one.

Meanwhile, I have been afflicted with record-player disease for the past few weeks: this is when a snippet of one song repeats endlessly in the back of my head, all day long. Last week, it was Rental Car by Beck, which wasn't so bad, but this week I got the chorus to a Counting Crowes song stuck in my noggin when we heard it in the Korean grocery. I hated this band when they were big, and now I am cursed with the melody of their second-rate hit day and night. It got so bad yesterday that I stayed up until midnight to try and resuscitate our music server, which suddenly up and died a few weeks ago. From what I can tell, it stopped booting completely, so I transplanted the drive into a spare, only to be met with a flashing questionmark. This was too much to deal with at midnight, so I tested the third machine and realized it was my old work music server, the one with about 65% of my collection on board. Good enough! The main drive with all our music is fine, but it just won't boot in that particular machine. Strange.

Posted on May 9, 2007 10:05 AM | link to this entry

Parts is Parts

Posted on May 8, 2007 3:40 PM | link to this entry

Coda

I use an older Windows-based program called HomeSite daily to do my heavy lifting when I'm building sites, with a liberal sprinkling of Dreamweaver and some BBEdit for the things HS can't do. When I heard that Panic, the shop behind Transmit (an excellent FTP client for OS X) just came out with Coda, billed as a new editor/ftp client/reference app all in one, I was very interested.

I'm downloading it now to give it a test spin this week-it's always hard switching from one workflow to the next, but I like the reasoning behind creation of the app: ...our web workflow was wonky. We'd have our text editor open, with Transmit open to seave files to the server. We'd be previewing in Safari, running queries in Terminal, using a CSS editor, and reading references on the web.

This sounds much like my workflow—I've usually got Parallels running HomeSite and Explorer in a virtual window, Safari and Firefox open for testing in OS X, Transmit to upload (HomeSite's "built-in FTP client" is a joke) and another two or three browser tabs open for reference. (Plus Photoshop, Illustrator, and/or ImageReady.) Usually I'll offload some of the testing and viewing duties to a secondary machine, usually the Thinkpad to my left, so that I don't have to continually cycle through windows to see what I need. But that's clunky, and it takes time to set up each workflow—especially when I'm cycling through multiple projects like I often do on a daily basis. One of the promises of this new app is that workflows are saved exactly as they are left, so one would be able to pick up right where one left off on a day-to-day basis. (This feature is implemented somewhat crudely by HomeSite, but not in a way I've been able to make useful.)

While I usually have a strong dislike for having multiple UI views in one app, I'm interested to see how Coda handles all of these functions and how Panic implemented them. I hope they have some kind of quick key for tabbing through views so that I don't have to rely on the mouse to move around. I also hope it's more stable than Dreamweaver, which still acts like a narcoleptic teenager.

More thoughts as they come-I'll give it a test run tomorrow morning.

Update 4.25: I played with it for a while yesterday, and while it's fast, and clean, it didn't light my fire as much as I was hoping. I think this is due partially because I'm entering the middle of a project as opposed to starting a new one with it; it's got a lot of nice features that I could use, but I've not had enough time to really find them all yet.

Posted on April 23, 2007 5:35 PM | link to this entry

Bill's Laptop Barn, Part Two

I'm beginning to see now why the $300 Powerbook was $300. When I first picked it up, the screen was fine, but I noticed some play in the hinge clutch—not anything to worry about, I figured, because Jen's Pismo had an equal amount of play and it's always been fine. (I also noted that the case on this G4 has been opened at least once, because there are two screws missing on the right side in the display and by the video port.)

Over the course of the last few days I've been getting more and more artifacting on the lower half of the screen. At first I was able to get rid of it by altering the LCD display angle, but now it's to the point where the lower half stays black and no amount of adjustment will get rid of it.

Doing some sleuthing, I found some excellent sites with detailed instructions on disassembly and part swapping for everything from the display to the DC board, which makes mucking about inside the guts that much easier. (I've had my old Pismo down to the motherboard without directions before, and it was a dicey affair, but I did it.)

I'm assuming I'll at least need to replace the video cable, and while I've got the case cracked I want to swap out the DC board to repair the damage done by the previous owner. Because the display hinge has some play in it (and I'd guess this is the root of the video problem) and because I already have to pull the display off to get to the DC board, I might as well see if I can replace the clutch hinges on both sides.

I figure about $200 plus an afternoon of surgery should get us a production/backup laptop in fighting shape and ready for action.

Meanwhile, my $40 Powerbook 1400 is still being flaky when it comes to wireless connectivity. I can get a couple of minutes of pure signal (or hours, on occasion) but then the connection will drop and I'm offline. Restarting, reseating the wireless card, and cursing have no effect. I even pulled an identical wireless card from my spare Base Station and tried that, but had no luck with a constant signal.

Update 4/21: I cracked the G4 case last night, and came away with mixed results. The case itself is full of dust and grit—it's a miracle the thing hasn't shorted out already, honestly. There are more than a few case screws missing, and the hard drive is a Samsung notebook drive, not the Apple original, confirming my suspicion that someone's been in here before. As much as I don't want to pull the rest of it apart, I'm going to order the DC board and replace that before I put the whole thing back together.

I cracked the upper bezel this morning, and it looks like the clutch assemblies are in fine shape, but the screws that held them to the display frame were exceptionally loose. I think I'm going to reattach the display to the case and see if the display flicker problem is gone, but I'll still buy the monitor cable just in case.

a previous installment of Bill's laptop barn

Posted on April 19, 2007 4:11 PM | link to this entry

Here It Comes To Save The Day.

I've been using a MacAlly two-button mouse for, well, as long as I've used a USB Mac—ever since I pinched it borrowed it from my dot-com in 2000. It's a good mouse, even though it's not laser-based and it doesn't have a scroll wheel, but it does have green blinky lights that flash when the buttons are clicked. OOOOHH, BLINKY LIGHTS. The clicking action is easy and it tracks very well for a roller-ball mouse, even if I have to clean the ball every evening. Which leads me to my first complaint: the disgusting gunk that magically collects on the bottom of the mouse. I don't know which camp you fall in, dear readers, but I am that guy who needs to have a clean mouse. Some people are able to design whole magazines and create buildings and write novels with the contents of a landfill stuck to the bottom of their mouse; Mine must be spotless. I've pulled entire animals from the trackball of some mice because the hair kept jittering the cursor. This drives me insane. But I lived with my blinky mouse because, at heart, I'm cheap, and I couldn't justify $50 for a new one, which they used to give us for free with a new computer in the olden days.

All was fine with my mousing world until I graduated to a big-boy laptop, and the short cord of the mouse failed to reach the two USB ports on the left side of the machine. Instead I had to use the right-side port, which meant I was constantly bumping the front of the mouse into the cord and the plug base. This was, to me, about as annoying as having a monkey following me around repeatedly poking me with a cattle prod: My primary interface with the computer needs to be as seamless as possible, hence my anal-retentive cleaning habits and hatred of desktop obstacles.

The idea of the wireless desk appeals to me, so I tried an early Apple bluetooth mouse a few years ago which drove me insane in two minutes: the action was jittery and laggy, and I felt like I was working during the middle of an epileptic fit. I've tried several laser-based PC mice, which the MacBook Pro immediately made friends with, but I couldn't find one that felt right in my hand or didn't cramp my wrist. Then, I tried a Kensington bluetooth mouse a consulting client had, and I was smitten immediately. It was smooth, the mouse had good weight (manufacturers, listen: a heavy mouse feels good) and the action was very snappy. I looked at the local Computer Superstore (the one laying off 1/3 its workforce) and found entire pallets of mice that had cords, looked painful, were painted with fanboy FPS graphics, or defined 'wireless' as 'dependent on a USB dongle', which is just stupid. Browsing the the local Apple Store, I didn't find full-size Kensington mice, but they did have another brand which I bought and tried out.

The Logitech V270 looks and feels nice, but I found it hard to press the buttons without use of a sledgehammer: within five minutes my carpal tunnel was vibrating all the way up my arm and down the back of the chair. The scroll wheel was big and felt good under my thumb, but the action was just like scrolling through text in MS Word: Select something and begin to drag it slowly, and suddenly the cursor is five pages below where it started. I boxed it back up after three hours and talked Dave into going to the Apple Store with me Wednesday night to return it.

I was happy to walk out with a refund and empty hands until the helpful Apple Specialist showed me the new Mighty Mouse, which I'm led to believe is an improvement over the old version. Right and left clicking that doesn't require years of weightlifting, a scroll button that doesn't leave me in the dust, and a great feel for my wrist. I'm a day into it so far, and I like what I have. It's not quite as precise as a rollerball or a wired mouse, but it's pretty damn close. And I don't have to battle any cords other than the ones that lead to all the other crap on my desk, which is a nice change.

Posted on April 6, 2007 10:10 AM | link to this entry | comments (1)

What a Colossal Waste Of Time

The Netgear FVS114 router is a small little box, but don't let it fool you: It's the biggest pile of shit I've ever had the displeasure of trying to configure. VPN on the whole seems to be some kind of smoke-and-mirrors, propellerhead handjob involving IP addresses (check), shared keys, certificates (uh...), authentications, policies (WTF?), and seventy-three other acronyms that make my eyeballs bleed. This product is billed as an easy-to-configure product for the average homeowner, but this is LIES. The only homeowner doing any configuring on this thing is that guy who ran the computer lab in college who smelled like cheese.

Buying the box and configuring it is pretty straightforward, I guess. I say "I guess" because it could be continually pinging every server in the Czech Republic and I wouldn't know; after I stepped through their wizard, there was a pretty simple little screen that came up and connected with the Netgear website, and I could see the internets, and so I figured it was working OK.

Attempting to connect using the built-in VPN client in XP met with a big zero: Netgear wanted to read a menu in Mandarin Chinese and XP wanted to recite times tables in Swahili. After looking around for open-source help (hint: don't bother), I found that Netgear sells VPN client software which is supposed to work seamlessly with the box, and come with pre-configured setup files that I could use to connect to the router. Not wishing to waste any more of my client's time, I ordered it, and it arrived this afternoon.

My installation process went something like this:

1. Install the software.


2. Use the "wizard", which misconfigured my client software so badly that I had to uninstall and reinstall it.


3. Follow the PDF "Manual," which was written for the entire family of VPN routers but mainly focused on the more expensive FVS318 VPN router, and includes multiple menu items that our router doesn't have, making configuration impossible.


4. Folow the software "Help" files, which recommend a THIRD, COMPLETELY DIFFERENT METHOD OF CONFIGURING THE SOFTWARE. Which doesn't work. And results in another uninstall/reinstall cycle.


5. Research the downloadable profiles, and find that there are only two files written for routers that I don't have.


6. Realize there is no online help, and that support via Netgear is fee-based.


7. Uninstall the software for the last time.
   

Netgear's documentation is the most poorly written, incomprehensible mess I've ever been forced to read: each of the manuals were written on different continents by different engineers about different products. And none of them worked; if I'd been able to get one of them to function properly, I'd be happy.

Consider yourself warned: This is crap. Stay away.

Posted on March 20, 2007 10:50 AM | link to this entry

Going Back To Cali.

It's not quite official yet, but OK, it's official. The word on the street is that I'm headed back out to San Francisco at the end of this month for a project kickoff meeting with a new client (I'm keeping names and places confidential). I will be spending the next two weeks brushing up on several new technologies, a content management system, and my sparkling personality.

* * *

In other news, a brief interruption in Movable Type service here at Idiot Central was traced back to a botched install of MT-Akismet in hopes of stemming the tide of comment spam. I was about to freak out yesterday when all I got after logging in to the management section was a blank page, but I walked away from it for half a day and remembered what things I'd monkeyed with when the site started to go south. So, to sum up: When the manual says that MT-Akismet doesn't work with MT 3.1, it's not kidding.

* * *

I'm finding that installing and configuring a private VPN is about as easy as assembling a nuclear reactor underwater with directions in Chinese. I'm not a stupid man, but do they make this shit impossible to understand on purpose? Seriously, I haven't had to deal with this many acronyms at one time in my life! And it seems like the vendors all have different acronyms for the same thing. Just call it one word and be done with it, you dorks.

* * *

After a good bit of time in development, I've posted a replacement for (what I considered) one of the weaker illustrations at the Alphabet Project, the letter Q. I was trying something different, but I wasn't ever really happy with the solution. The new solution is in the form of a concert poster for a show I didn't attend, and it stars a lady I figured I'd find much more about here on the internets-but didn't. I wound up using screen grabs from a video I found online for photo reference.

I'm also working furiously on new art for a larger project, something I've been threatening to do for years, and something it took a well-timed and much appreciated push from my wife to actually begin: I made a down payment for an advertisement at the Directory of Illustration last week. The Directory is a combination of marketing tools which include a searchable website, a hardback book which gets distributed in the fall, and a pile of other resources for promotion. This means that my work will be seen by a ton of new people very quickly. This also means I need to have a page layout for the book by the beginning of May, and I have space reserved for 20 illustrations on their website right now. Part of my revisit to the Alphabet Project is to clean up the work I'm not entirely happy with, which means that Paul Bremer will get a rework. Mark Felt will probably get looked at (or maybe replaced). And Interpol will probably get cleaned up too. Once I've got that stuff looking tight, I'm going to post a handful on the other site and see if anything happens.

I don't think I'm going to be sleeping much in the near future...

Posted on March 15, 2007 10:30 PM | link to this entry

It Is Alive

Last night, after much wrangling, reading, dissecting, and cursing, I finally got a working copy of OS 9.1 on my Powerbook 1400. Bored readers may recall that I was having problems because the machine didn't come with a CD-ROM drive, so anything I was installing internally had to come on floppy discs. Thus, a long process of pulling the hard drive and putting it in a FireWire enclosure, then swapping it back into the machine or testing began, always resulting in a flashing floppy icon (OS 9 speak for "I can't find a System Folder.")

Last night I finally had my eureka moment: for whatever reason, after installing the OS, the system folder wasn't "blessed", and therefore not viable. I read up on blessing system folders and followed the proper proceedure while booted into OS 9 on my old blue and white tower, and then swapped out the drive one last time: Success!

After that, it was frighteningly easy to get it on my wireless network: I have an old Lucent silver card pulled from a dead AirPort Base Station, and Proxim still has working drivers (behind a login/password, unfortunately) that install quickly and painlessly—I was up and running in minutes. Because it's a newer, larger hard drive, response time is much zippier.

Pageloads are painfully slow, but I wasn't expecting lightning speed. My MacBook Pro can see the drive when it's shared and I can dump files on it (Photoshop 3! Illustrator 5.5! Streamline 4!) so that it can back up my emulated copy of OS 8.5 here on the MBP. I have yet to test out webmail or Movable Type yet, but that's coming.

I have a perverse love for old electronics, and an even stranger love for fixing them. This old Powerbook was giving me fits because every ninja method I tried to get around its limitations (and believe me, I was ninja) failed for some reason or another. I'd all but given up on it until some spare brain cells began firing in a different way, and once I'd given it some time and thought, a simpler, easier solution presented itself. One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn as I've grown older is to be patient and wait for solutions to percolate, instead of rushing ahead and getting myself into more trouble down the line: I was the kid who put my plastic models together way too fast because I wanted to play with them NOW, not wait for the stupid glue to dry. This seems to be my M.O. as I get older, from everything to mantle construction to website building to illustration concepting— a little time, patience, and waiting for the tinkering part of my brain to come up with alternate solution usually pays off in the end.

Posted on February 28, 2007 8:25 AM | link to this entry

Bill's Laptop Barn.

I spent almost the entire weekend nose-deep in various laptops, attempting to get one or all of them to wake up and tango again. My first patient was a client's 700mhz iBook, which had stopped booting up after sleeping down its battery to empty. After spending an hour attempting the various revivification techniques, I called it dead and got the OK to pull the hard drive. Apparently this was the most complicated, difficult model Apple ever designed, because it took two hours, three different websites, a package of bamboo shish kebab sticks, and a lot of patience to crack the case. Once I'd gotten it out, it was a no-brainer to slap in an external drive, and the files appeared normally.

The second patient was a $40 Powerbook 1400 I got off Craigslist for reasons I still can't explain entirely; it has something to do with having a working OS 9 machine that doesn't take up half a desk's worth of space. (I own a Powerbook 100, which is essentially a Mac Plus, for the same reason.) It came with an ethernet PCMCIA card, and I've got a compatible wireless card scavenged from a dead AirPort Base Station, but the complicating factor is that this unit came with a floppy drive and no built-in Ethernet. The version of OS 9 on the disk is faulty and it won't load the PC card drivers to activate ethernet or wireless. I don't have a SCSI CD drive anymore (my No More Beige rule is skirted by the fact that these laptops are all Powerbook Black) and Apple stopped shipping OS installs on floppies back in the OS 8 days. So I pulled the hard drive and spent hours attempting to install a fresh copy of OS 9.1 on it via a FireWire enclosure, but the 9.1 update kept hanging, resulting in an incomplete System Folder and a flashing disk icon at boot.

I hate it when I can't solve a problem on my own.

So I'm going to borrow a SCSI CD drive from a client down the street and see if I can get this @$*!&! thing to install. Then, providing it works, I'm going to get the wireless working and set it up as a support machine to run all the OS 9 apps I still use (PhotoVista being the latest in a long line.)

Finally, I set up Jen's father's new laptop to work with his wireless network, installed Office, and made sure his email was set up correctly. Vista seems nice, but at first blush, there are a lot of useless bells and whistles that get in the way of what I want to do. I'm happy I'm still running XP here.

For now, I have a small mountain of obsolete Apple iron beside my desk, waiting for some non-billable time I can waste making old things useful again.

Update: No luck. DRAT!

Update Update:This link doesn't really help much (I want OS 9, not OS 7) but I'm wondering if I can connect it via SCSI disk mode and install from another Mac (My B/W G3 here has Ultra-Wide SCSI, which means I'd need to score a MiniD68 to DB25 cable somewhere—an expensive proposition, most likely) but it's hard finding any documentation on this. Also, it looks like drives above 4GB aren't supported on the 1400, which dorks that avenue. So I'm back to an internal CD drive on eBay.

Posted on February 19, 2007 11:24 AM | link to this entry | comments (4)

Dateline: Philadelphia.

After rising at the ass-crack of dawn, we drove to the City of Brotherly Freezing Love to attend an Adobe seminar on the CS 2-3 suite. We're still working in earlier versions of Photoshop and Illustrator (after having been burned by Illustrator CS) and now that we're both on Intel Macs, we decided it's time to upgrade.

Posted on February 6, 2007 9:21 AM | link to this entry

Goodbye, My Child

It is with a heavy heart that I bid my trusty iBook adieu; after about 50 emails from various flakes, kooks, scammers, hosers, hustlers, dorks, cheapskates and losers over the course of a month, I had one very nice gentleman email me this afternoon, make an appointment, keep it, pay me cash money, and leave with the merchandise this evening. Which means this MacBook Pro is almost 1/2 paid off.

(The previous guy that emailed asked me all kinds of questions about the input jacks that he obviously knew the answers to, mentioned GarageBand, and tried to get me to come down on the price because there's no audio input on that model. Sorry, dude.)

So, sayonara, little guy; thanks for the memories. I'll miss your portability but not your little screen. I'm certainly not missing your keyboard, although it's taken me a full month to get used to this new one.

Posted on February 1, 2007 6:32 PM | link to this entry | comments (2)

Apple's New iPhone

Oh, thank GOD we stuck with Cingular Wireless. I am going to buy myself an iPhone as soon as I can afford one and ditch my thankless Motorola 551, and it will be a Good Day. OSX (Safari on a phone!) Touchscreen dialing, bluetooth, improved contacts, syncing with my Mac and more. I only hope the reception is better than a RAZR. This sounds too good to be true, honestly.

Posted on January 9, 2007 1:14 PM | link to this entry | comments (2)

OS 9 on an Intel Mac

Everything with the new MacBook Pro has been going swimmingly, up until this afternoon when I ran headlong into a brick wall. You see, I've got this one little utility which was written in 1991 or so which takes Mac fonts and converts them into PC versions so that I can transfer files back and forth, enabling my PC programs to edit Mac-authored files, and vice versa. Now that I'm on the Intel Mac, I can't run OS 9 in the background under emulation like I used to on my iBook. So, I booted up the trusty old G3 tower under my desk to use the application there. Because I've hooked my second monitor to the MacBook, I don't have a monitor on the G3—no problem, I'll just use Remote Desktop, right? Wrong. Remote Desktop 2.X is incompatible with Intel Macs, so I have to upgrade to 3.0, which costs $300. Argh! Now my iTunes server, downstairs on the porch, is cut off from remote administration. Double Argh!

I found a website which points to a little application called SheepShaver, which purports to run OS 9 on Intel hardware, but apparently one must have the boot ROMs handy to be able to get the thing hooked up—something I don't have time to fool with right now. When I get a moment to get it sorted out, I'll write about it here. But for now, I have to dive under the desk to swap the monitor cables. Again.

Update: After a bunch of false starts and failed attempts, I found this article, which is a lot more detailed than the first. Knowing which ROM to use, which install CD to use, and the correct keyboard file helps out a lot. Still no success, though.

Update 12.27: I got Basilisk working with a copy of a Quadra 650 ROM linked from the second article above. SheepShaver just didn't seem to like the ROM I pulled from the OS9 disk; whatever. Basilisk is running OS8 with no problems, and that's all I need.

Update 1.1: I'm going to run through this so that folks can benefit from my experience:

Download Basilisk. Uncompress the Basilisk file.

Download the Quadra 650 ROM found here (and good luck if it's not still available.) Drop it in the Basilisk folder.

Open Disk Utility (found in Applications->Utilities.) Click on New Image, and make a disk image at the size you'd like (my image was 500MB, and after installing OS8, I had 350MB of free space left.) name it what you like-I called mine "OS 8 Disk". Drop that in the Basilisk folder as well.

Start up the "BasiliskGUI" application. Cringe at the UNIX-tastic UI goodness!

Under the "Volumes" tab, click Add and browse to the image you just created (in my case, the "OS 8 Disk" volume.) Inside this volume, you'll install the operating system.

Under the "Keyboard" tab, click browse and navigate to the BasiliskII_keycodes file in the Basilisk folder. This way you'll be able to use the keyboard under emulation.

Under the "Serial/Network" tab, select slirp in the Ethernet Interface pulldown. This allows the OS 8 emulator to use the ethernet interface.

Under the "Memory/Misc" tab, bump the RAM size up to 128MB or so. I have the Mac Model ID set to Quadra 900 and CPU Type set to 68040. For ROM File, click Browse and navigate to the quadra650.rom. This is how Basilisk gets to the point where installation can start.

Additionally, under "Graphics/Sound", I changed the refresh to 15mhz and width/height to 800/600.

I used an OS 8 install disk for my installation. Put it in the machine and click the "Start" button. This should bring up a window with the happy mac and start booting off the install CD.

Install OS 8 with whatever options you like. Restart the emulation; it should bring up the installed OS. From here, you should be able to get online, bring up a web browser, and use OS 8.

If you'd told me a year ago that I'd be running OSX, Windows XP and OS8 on the same machine concurrently, I would have laughed at you.

Update 3.19.07: I was able to get the shared folder working with Basilisk, finally, and it's much easier to use than mounting and unmounting the disk image.

Posted on December 21, 2006 4:55 PM | link to this entry

Life With Parallels, Day Two.

This is so strange, and very hard to get used to, but... I have two monitors on my MacBook, the laptop screen and an external monitor. The native display runs all my Mac stuff, and the external monitor is handling Windows apps, so I've got HomeSite runing in fullscreen on my left side, where a blocky ThinkPad used to live, but there's only one laptp on my desk. Mousing between the two environments is seamless and easy. About the only thing that I had to alter was disabling my Mac's default F12 quickkey (which toggles the Dashboard, something I find worthless) so that I could see quick previews in HomeSite. Oh, and remembering Command+( ) combination vs. Ctrl+( ) for basic modifiers like Cut and Paste wil take time, but that's minor.

Shiny new Macbook Pro!

Next I've got to change my workflow around completely so that all my working files are in the same place (I had working files on both my PC and on my Mac, and some of them didn't ever get synced up, a situation that I've had no luck fixing over the last ten years, and something that has caused major heartburn.)

I've noticed the MacBook runs pretty hot (the strip directly above the keyboard is very, very hot) so I'll have to keep an eye on temps and the battery.

This is, without a doubt, a jump far into the future. How did I get by without it for so long?

Posted on December 18, 2006 1:17 PM | link to this entry

This Laptop Goes To Eleven.

I just got a delivery from FedEx with a new toy inside. It's a shiny 17" MacBook Pro, bought refurbished from the Apple Store (saving me $700). On first blush, this thing is beautiful. The keyboard is so much better than my iBook. And the screen? Well, let's just say I have more than twice the room I had before. Moving all my data over via the Migration Assistant took about an hour, and when it came up on the new computer, everything was smushed over in the upper left corner of the screen. I don't know how I put up with that tiny thing for so long.

I have another stick of memory to drop in it and then I'm going to install Parallels and a fresh copy of Windows XP, and try to get a decent development environment organized. This is very, VERY nice.

Update: Things are humming smoothly along; I've found that my external monitor only does 1280x1024, so I can't make things any bigger than that, which is a slight bummer. I also just realized (slaps forehead with hand) that I can't run OS9 on this machine, which means that a little legacy piece of software I've got called FontMonger is an orphan. I'm going to have to keep an OS9 machine around here just to convert fonts, I guess. The keyboard is sexy and feels great, but it's taking me some time to get used to the tactile feel, and the backlighting feature is the bomb. Props to Other World Computing for their clear, easy to follow RAM installation guides. If you are buying gear for a Mac, I strongly recommend this company.

I'm also officially in love with the Apple Remote; I don't know how I survived without one for so long. For those with more than one Apple Remote in the room, this little Technical Article will come in handy: pairing your remote with your particular computer.

Posted on December 15, 2006 2:40 PM | link to this entry

Changes...

Well, things are definitely moving along here at Idiot Central. Today is voting day, which means there's been a steady stream of people walking down the street in front of the house to and from the elementary school. We're going after lunch to stand in line and (hopefully) make our voices heard; I'll be happy when I've ceased getting calls from Rudy Giuliani and Bill Clinton exhorting me to vote one way or the other, and the piles of direct mail switch back over to Christmas catalogs.

I'm looking at email a little differently this morning, as well. I got my hosting switched over to a new service, one which lacks in helpful configuration what it makes up for in sheer number of services at a rock-bottom price. I'm not going to recommend it just yet (although it would be in my financial best interest to do so) until I've wrung it out somewhat, but all looks to be working correctly so far. Now, I have to read up on