September 15th, 2007 — /etc
I’ve had an itch to update my theme and it’s finally rolled over. My inspiration for starting this whole process came from seeing this great (and informative) post. That theme is elegant in many ways — and looking at it makes my theme far less creative than it might have appeared. I really liked the stationary sidebar concept since a mobile sidebar ends up either wasting space or overstaying its welcome. Oh, and if you’re curious, I based the theme off of Jelly which has a well organized style.css file that even a certified anti-design code diva like myself can almost understand.
I’m hoping this will inspire the blog writing juices (and hopefully in ways other than referring to inspired juices, whatever that means). We are working on some cool new sites and I’m eager to talk about them when they get to the talkin’ ’bout phase. I’m also working on becoming more social, or at least a little less anti-social, so if you are a user of any of the drop-me-a-line social sites next to my Wii headshot, drop me a line.
August 8th, 2007 — iPhone
I got a kick out of something that Apple sent me. My iPhone has intermittently been acting up (not making sounds when it ought to — when typing or, less importantly, talking to someone). I’ve worked both ends of so many hardware support cases that I’m fine with that, stuff happens. The mark of a good company is how easy their tech support is to navigate, how quickly you get results out of their tech support, and the magnitude of those results. So far, Apple rocks.
Quick phone response, intelligent questions, and I had a replacement service loaner iPhone this morning, the next day. The very best part came when I opened the box and surveyed the contents.
Before I opened the box, I thought about looking for something to open the SIM card holder with. Then I thought, meh, I bet they have some tool in there for that. Indeed they did and it’s now my favorite support tool included by any company with any product:
Sure, they could have developed some elaborate tool to fit this purpose. But I applaud them for the simplicity of this solution. It’s the tool I would have rummaged for in my desk drawer for 10 minutes, so it’s really great that they included one. I like the packaging, too, the little plastic bag with the worth-a-thousand-words directions.
The recovery of my original iPhone’s contents onto the new one was remarkably complete. I was impressed by this — even the log of my phone calls made it back.
Of course, I’d rather have had no problems with my beloved iPhone, but it may have been worth it for the chuckle I got when I saw the paper clip in the bag.
July 18th, 2007 — iPhone
Newcomer to the growing list of supported iPhone instant messaging clients, FlickIM is, in my opinion, the best of the bunch if you are an AIM user. To try it out, hit http://flickim.com on your iPhone. The experience is very iPhone-like. What impresses me most is its ability to retain and reconnect to the service after longish periods away from Safari. This has not been a feature of most other iPhone IM clients that I’ve tried.
FlickIM also supports sending YouTube or movie trailer videos via IM. References to the videos are sent so that another iPhone user running FlickIM will see the video play immediately, otherwise a clickable link will be sent to users of other clients.
Orange talk bubbles pop up to indicate other chat sessions and allow quick movement among them — a very nice feature.
All in all, FlickIM represents an as-near-to-fully-functional iPhone IM application as we can expect from a webapp. The biggest thing lacking from IM clients using a browser approach is full-iPhone integration. When my iPhone is locked, it’s smudgy screen black, I would love for it to make a little sound and vibration and pop up a little growl-like notification of the new IM that’s arrived much like SMS messages do. I’m reserving a little tear for the day this happens.
June 28th, 2007 — iPhone
One of the loudest complaints about the iPhone is the absence of built-in instant messaging capabilities. This may change in the future, but the public approach of web-based applications filling the 3rd party application void raises the question: will my favorite web-based instant messaging application work with the iPhone?
The short answer as of June 28th is, “we don’t know!” In fact, perusing blog posts of web-based IM services suggests that none of them have had their hands on an iPhone to test them yet and will have to wait for iDay to find out. Some services we know now won’t work, notably Yahoo! Messenger for the Web which uses Flash and mabber which uses Java. Other services are known to work in Safari. Will they play on an iPhone? We’ll find out. I’ll keep the chart below updated as each service is tested.
General tips: Most web-based instant messaging applications launch pop-up windows as part of their normal function. The iPhone browser has pop-ups blocked by default. To enable pop-ups (not a big deal since it will still ask you to confirm each new popup before opening), follow these taps: Home screen -> Settings -> Safari and tap or slide the switch next to Block Pop-ups. Also, there are security issues with using online instant messaging clients since you are giving them your login and password that likely access systems other than instant messaging.
iPhone Chat is written specifically for the iPhone and, while it is the prettiest and most iPhone-friendly AIM interface at the moment, it does have some issues. There is a 10 minute limit on sessions (which I understand because I know that it’s a mean server load). More limiting is the interface when chat sessions fill the screen. Although there is a scrollbar in that pane when using non-iPhone Safari, the scrollbar is missing on the iPhone making it difficult to use. The application is beautiful with a clever means of switching between chat sessions (small colored squares for each, although the user’s icon would be an improvement) and easy access to the buddy list. If the message pane scrolling issue is resolved, it will be the best of the bunch.
Yahoo! Messenger for the Web, while touting “from any browser. anywhere.â€? uses Flash which the iPhone doesn’t.
Google Talk as a potential web-based client is out of the list. Once signed in, Flash is required.
eBuddy’s mobile site does work with the iPhone, although using it is rather difficult since each page reload rescales the page to it’s wee-est and requires a rescaling each time to be able to see it. Chances are they can easily address this to make it more iPhone friendly and I’ll update this information when they do. eBuddy’s main service does not yet support Safari, so it is out.
I had played with Meebo quite a bit on Saturday and I was able to login once, but the experience was torture. Oh, and not being able to send messages was a bit of a drag. I’m putting it into the Not Supported category although as the Joshmeister pointed out, they have expressed interest in making it work with the iPhone. I think this will be great and when they get it working, I believe it will be a strong combination. UPDATED: 7/3/07: Thanks for the heads up in the comments, Meebo has improved their support for the iPhone and I just tested it out. It works quite well, actually, although don’t try it in landscape mode.
Kool IM is also in the Not Supported list since even login appears to be impossible. Has anyone else been able to get data into their forms?
AIM Express is also confirmed not to work. I was able to login and I was able to see the top of my contacts list, but I was unable to scroll through them. When attempting to IM a contact that was visible, I got a Javascript error. Brian McNitt also saw a Javascript error as mentioned in his comment below.
Snimmer allowed me to login, but I was unable to see my contacts or send messages.
RadiusIM also allowed the login, but didn’t allow messaging through the iPhone. The layout of the page would not work well on the iPhone even if it worked.
ILoveIM is the first IM web client that I would say works pretty well on the iPhone. The size of the window it opens requires a little scrolling up and down, although once a conversation gets going, the active content will be down near the text entry field. Receiving messages through the interface is fast. While ILoveIM worked for AIM, I had problems with it using Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger. I was able to login and see my contacts, but my clicks on them had no effect as they did with AIM. Since there is no right-click functionality in the iPhone Safari, this may limit the capabilities of ILoveIM on the iPhone.
MSN Web Messenger was an easy one to exclude as non-functional from the message on the landing page: Your web browser is not supported by this version of MSN Web Messenger. Probably no urgency in changing that, either.
Easy messenger worked as I recall when I put it on the list last week before the iPhone release date, but when I try to connect now it gives a timeout. I’ll leave it on the list for a while and keep checking on it.
IMUnitive provides a pretty blue screen but nothing else.
Updated 7/2/07: Thanks for all the comments. If anyone knows of other web-based instant messaging services or has noticed different results with one of the messaging services listed above, please leave a comment!
Updated 7/9/07: Just added iPhone.BeeJive.com, the new iPhone-compatible Jive Talk application. It’s more like what a native iPhone chat client should be than anything else on the list. It’s in an alpha stage at this point, so connections are intermittenly odd, but when it works, it works beautifully. It’s proudly sitting at the top of this list for now.
Updated 7/18/07: Added FlickIM ( http://flickim.com ) which is a great iPhone AIM client. It fits the iPhone user experience and also supports sending youtube video or movie trailers to other iPhone users. The interface is simple and quite resilient, more so than other services I’ve tried. If you use AIM, give FlickIM a try.
March 6th, 2007 — Technology
We’re the proud owners of a new TV. And I feel like we earned it. Our neighborhood had a community garage sale and we spent days going through every room, one of which was a “closet annex,” and got up an hour before sunrise (both of us are anti-morning people) on a cold Saturday morning to face scores of bargain shoppers. The net result of this was a stack of cash that paid for a Samsung LN-S4695D 46″ 1080p LCD HDTV. Despite the exhaustion of a long day, Saturday night we hoisted the new TV upon its perch and I fell to my knees before it (to start knotting the inevitable cable spaghetti behind it) amid a chorus of groans and popping joints.
It started a month earlier when I had the brainstorm to sell our old TV at the upcoming garage sale. With that one gone, we’d be forced to buy a new one. We’ve been living with that rounded-front, CRT-based TV for about 4 years and, while it was a decent set, we were missing out.
When shopping for a new TV, most people will need to go through the five stages of grief as a result of sticker shock. Good quality TVs, especially HDTVs, are not cheap and while there are cheap models, the trite but true “you get what you pay for” consumerism mantra has clear consequences when adopting a TV into your home. Here are some things to think about when buying (or justifying) a new TV.
1) TVs are hard to buy and harder to get rid of. Given the expense of TVs, most people hold on to a TV for several years (if not decades) and will be resistant to frequent purchases. TVs depreciate quickly and, in my experience, it’s difficult to recoup much of your investment in a two year old TV.
2) Bigger is not always better or more expensive. Size matters, of course, but there are many other factors to consider. A set that is too small in one room can be too big in another. The resolution of the TV has a great influence not only on price but also on viewing pleasure: a resolution that is too low is hard on the eyes, but excessive resolution is hard on the wallet. Carlton Bale’s detailed analysis of screen size vs. viewing distance vs. resolution is an essential read before you get too far along your selection process.
3) Garbage in, garbage out. One of the biggest factors in my selection process was the collection of inputs each candidate TV offered. More than half of the columns of the spreadsheet I created detailing each contestant were related to the inputs. I spent a lot of time thinking about what sources I currently had, which ones I knew were impending (so perfect that the Apple TV is coming out a week or so before my birthday!), and considering what else I might want to connect in the future. Chances are, skimping on HDMI inputs on an HDTV will lead to future sadness.
4) Seeing is believing. We had the opportunity to see several of the “short list” candidates at local stores. It’s difficult to compare sets in different stores, but if any happen to be nearby in one store, the relative quality of each can be observed. While not the optimal environment, the internal speakers can be tested, too.
5) Pay as much as you can. This seems like an awkward thing to recommend, but I feel it’s a reasonable guideline. It pains me to see people watching a 30 year old TV. It actually hurt me to hear a family member brag about snatching up a deal on a super-cheap display-model TV from a local electronics store. Why?
Lets look at the economics of watching TV. Working under the assumption that you are a cable or satellite subscriber, you are probably paying between $50 and $100 a month (US Dollars) for the service, maybe more with premium or HD channels and other digital services. At $100/month, programming for your TV costs $1200/year. Over a reasonable lifespan of 5 years for a new TV, this programming will cost $6,000. It pains me even more that my family member will probably keep her “new” $200 used TV for at least 10 years, probably paying $10,000 to watch it.
Lets take it a little further:
| Cable/Satellite programming |
$75/mo |
$900/yr |
| Tivo service |
$15/mo |
$180/yr |
| DVDs |
$20/mo |
$240/yr |
| Video games |
$25/mo |
$300/yr |
| Total |
$135/mo |
$1620/yr |
| Total over 5 years |
|
$8100 |
Paying $8,000 over the life of a TV provides some perspective on the difference between $300 and $3000 TVs. These numbers make some assumptions like buying or renting $20 worth of DVDs per month or buying a new video game every other month. There are other uses for TVs and different people emphasize different usages. Chances are you can add and subtract values from this table, but unless you only use over the air broadcast signals and don’t own a DVD player or video game console, you spend a good bit of money feeding your TV. Keep this in mind the next time you find yourself trying to justify that extra zero at the end of a TV price tag. It will also help when getting up really early in the morning to sell your unwanted junk (or spare organ) in the name of entertainment.
February 14th, 2007 — /etc
During an IM conversation today, the topic of an in-law of mine and her reaction to something unexpected (my wife’s instantaneous answer of “microwave” to the question “which would you give up first, our Tivo or microwave?” ) caused a reality shift resulting in an apparent mental blue screen of death.
Made me think.. if you had to reformat your brain and install a new operating system, which would you choose? And why?
February 10th, 2007 — /etc
When I think back (too) many years ago, I think I remember the day that my dislike of Microsoft began. It was the day I installed Office 97. And that dang paper clip reared its ugly, twisted, metal head. My relationship with MSFT has never been the same since.
This morning, abanks sent me a link that made me chuckle. What if Vista had vim.exe? Click below to see the whole thing:
January 6th, 2007 — /etc
My wife and I are in the greatest city on any Earth, New York City. To be honest, NYC has ruined all other vacation destinations for us, so we come back here time and again. I must confess that, in addition to being a confessed Apple bigot, I’m also a theatre junkie. NYC is well established as the place to go for musical theatre, but it’s now also a destination for those made for Apple, as well. I remembered reading posts buzzing about when they opened their store on 5th Avenue and had seen photographs, but I completely misunderstood what I saw. Here’s my attempt to capture the scene:
I didn’t appreciate the location of the store, although it makes sense now. The red canopy seen through the glass near the bottom is the entrance to FAO Schwartz. They’ve been doing construction there for at least two years to build the Apple store — I just never knew that’s what it was going to be. Pictures of the store certainly do not do it justice. It’s a massive glass cube sitting over an opening in the roof of the store below. A cylindrical elevator is surrounded by a helical staircase. While much larger than a typical Apple Store, the contents were more or less the same (the software selection was larger and there were dozens of most products on display, all surrounded by shoppers). On a Friday afternoon, there was a considerable crowd throughout the store. Overall, it was quite an experience.
I must admit, the show we saw this evening was a much greater experience. We were privileged to see Company, a Sondheim revival. I’ve seen many shows, but never has an audience been so utterly enthralled by a performance. There were many dramatic (and comedic) pauses in the show and during every one, not even a whisper was heard breaking the moment. I know there were many a husband dragged there against their will, but I saw quite a few people sitting forward on their seats, their gaze intent on the players. If you are unfamiliar with this show, the cast is also the orchestra, each actor playing instruments as well as singing (as was done in the recent revival of Sweeney Todd). The effect of this is as hard to imagine as it is to describe, but it worked well. Raúl Esparza sang the crap out of Being Alive, which was definitely a plus. If you have the opportunity, see it!
December 18th, 2006 — Mac
I wrote a while ago about the utter coolness of Sun’s new filesystem, ZFS. There were rumors back then that it was being ported to OS X. I’ve been running a ZFS RAID-Z volume on my home file server since before that article and absolutely love it. Members of Apple’s Developer Connection have seen ZFS options in the latest build of Tiger suggesting that this support is near. When it comes out in prime time (and has had it’s tires adequately kicked) I’ll have no reservations about reformatting my MacBook Pro.
December 11th, 2006 — /etc
For a beloved project (and for few other possible reasons) I’ve dusted off my old laptop.. I needed to test some code on a windows platform. The things I do for bettering humanity!
Leaving out the details of the viral contamination that cost me a good 8 hours of productivity, I found it interesting to revisit XP after three months of OS X use. I have to say, I forgot about some of the many, many little (and moderate) nuisances and, upon experiencing them again, I wonder how I could ever have put up with them. I wondered if I was on candid webcam for a while as I repeatedly clicked the little popup balloon that said “There are updates…” It disappeared for a split second only to return again and again. Who needs that?
Anyway, after reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling XP (since MSFT’s snazzy Windows Defender didn’t detect the problem, nor did anything else I tried) I got down to business. Apart from typing ‘ls’ whenever I wanted a directory, I really needed to run a ‘tail -f’ against a log file to monitor and debug stuff. I don’t know of a good alternative to this. For those of you who haven’t employed this tool, just using ‘tail’ will output the last 10 lines of a file. Occasionally useful. But ‘tail -f’ will dump the last 10 lines of a file and keep it open. Any new lines added to the file will be output to the screen. Nothing better for watching log files.
So, where is tail? It isn’t. Very sad. However, although there are some other alternatives out there like cygwin, which is impressive, I have used these natively compiled GNU utilities for a while now. They are Windows executables, and quite a few of them, that run without any external libraries. You can copy as many as you want to somewhere in your path (I put them all in \windows\system32, but I love living dangerously). If grep, bzip2, tar, and, oh, yeah, tail are your old friends, then enjoy. If not, they’d love to meet you.
Oh, a nice executable included with the utils is pclip.exe. This will dump the contents of the clipboard to standard output. I bet this would be useful for someone… sometime. And gclip.exe which does the opposite. Very nice. Enjoy! And, if you have to use Windows.. I’m really sorry.
– Untested