MidKnight Gallery

I’ve taken to joking that I love my Macs, but Microsoft does more to give me business… fixing problems.

The latest? Installing an upgrade from the student/teacher version of Office for the Mac to the full version. The installer never asked me for the new license key, which should have been a sign of something going tremendously wrong, but I missed it.

The first sign I caught was not being able to open the existing email libraries. It turns out the S&T version had been updated to 12.1.5, and the version on the installation disc was still 12.0.0, so the libraries could not be opened by the “older” version of Office 2008. Not a huge deal, just run the updates, right?

Well, unless the updates won’t run. I tried running the built-in updater, and downloading the updates separately, but I kept getting the error that there was no software to update, or that the update could not run.

For whatever reason, either the key not being checked against the software version, or the patchers seeing more recent files spread across the computer not affected by installing a fresh copy, would NOT upgrade the older version until I not only uninstalled the application with the built in uninstaller, but deleted all references and preferences in both the system and user directories.

A completely clean install later, and the updates ran, and everything worked. Getting there only wasted five or six hours of working time for two people as well as my time fixing it for a process that should have only taken thirty minutes.

Well. It has now been a whole year since I got my iPhone.

Insofar as changing my life, well, I’m not making millions in Hollywood, and I don’t have hundreds of devoted followers.

All in all, I’d say that’s a good thing.

It definitely has been a boon though. The ease of email, texting, keeping my calendar on me, etc. has made it much easier to keep my life in order. My wife called it the first phone she didn’t want to throw across the room. It definitely is the first phone she knows how to use everything. Of course, I would not be as happy if the iPhone were still stuck with its original capabilities, as the added software has made all the difference in the world. Google maps and street view have helped me get directions and verify them. Facebook has let me keep in touch with friends. Remember the milk has made todo lists that I can keep with me EASY. I can even read ebooks from Baen and other publishers, IM, check bank balances, keep up on Twitter, or write entries like this to my blog. And then there are the games.

All is not perfect. While most places had better coverage under AT&T, my home coverage continues to be flaky at best. It’s an awkward shape for a phone (though no worse than many Blackberries), and sometimes you trigger something you don’t want to because of the touch screen.

But I’m glad I have it.

–fixed some typos due to my fat fingers while punching it in on my iPhone

The kind of iPhone app I’ve been waiting for the longest….

One word: Amen

On an iPhone related note, there is now an app in the iPhone app store that allows you to post Worspress-based blog entries and edit them on your iPhone or iPod touch.

One of the new features that has been added that’s a no-brainer in retrospect (though none of my previous phones had it) is an ability to take screenshots of your iPhone screen. This means documenting iPhone features, showing off how cool your game looks, etc. all are much easier to do.

This also makes it very easy to note one thing that many people “know” but don’t give much thought to. If your website is Flash heavy, or worse, almost exclusively Flash, here’s what it looks like to an iPhone:

That little blue building block? That’s the “I don’t know how to play this content” icon where a website decided to have everything Flash-driven.

Yes it’s true that Google has arranged with Adobe to index flash files. This mitigates, but does not eliminate the argument that Flash-heavy content hurts your search rankings, even in Google. Nevertheless, creating Flash-heavy sites, especially sites that have no easy way to bypass the Flash, means that anyone without access to a full desktop is unlikely to dig up any useful information about your company, such as phone numbers to contact you.

Just a thought.

I’m very impressed by what the guys at Google have released so far. They’ve already addressed several obvious issues that made it an intriguing development platform in development, if you’ll pardon the expression, but useless for me. The biggest one is image resizing and manipulation.

Hearing this, I revisited it and am quite impressed. For ajax-based work (like custom coding an editor) it’s more complicated than straightforward PHP/Javascript development for small sites. This is mostly because of the need to tell at least two sets of files what’s handling a request for a web page before you even get to wiring up the python code to the template. What it gives you in return though is an absolutely stunning level of scalability, as well as a very rapid method for prototyping all of your changes.

The remaining headache is the need for some form of version control. You can have different ”versions” of an app posted, and roll back to a prior version, but there’s no integrated access to a common file repository where people can independently work on different files and see the combined changes before deploying them to the server. Guess I’ll have to figure out how to set up my own repository and how to make it so my fellow developers and I can work on it, along with a workflow that won’t cause headaches in deploying to the Google apps site.

I’ve seen this several places now but the best summary is at Ars Technica. I’ve heard plenty of people say the naysaying was just as bad when XP was introduced.  Well, it was pretty bad, but not this bad. Not “We’re trying to figure out ways to sell Windows 2000 with new computers because people just want to avoid Vista and many of the businesses with custom-built apps won’t certify them on Vista without a lot more time stomping bugs” bad.

Ars Technica, the source of many fine articles related to computers, just published an excellent little primer on how to keep your computer secure. It includes information for Linux and Mac users as well.

I’ll admit. Some of my home stereo gear is old. As in better than fifteen years old. So?

It works.

It also makes no difference to what I’m about to discuss, which is: It is wayyyy too complicated for normal people (non-technical adults who are not gadget-geeks of some sort) to work their TV / home theater setup.

Case in point: Our widescreen gets cable piped directly in. It also gets the DVD player and VCR piped directly in, and echoes the sound out to the surround sound receiver.

So far so good. Unless I really want to listen to my iTunes library I never, ever change my stereo inputs. Turn on the TV and select the right input and *bam* there ya are. TV goodness.

But, we stumble into the first conceptual obstacle. You see, the TV remote, like many remotes supplied these days, is a universal remote. This means it’s universally useless for anything except perhaps the TV because the one critical feature you need for any other device (separate play-pause buttons, forex), are just not included on the remote surface, and the TV is complicated enough that little widdy biddy buttons require you to squint through bleary eyes.

The conceptual problem comes when Unsuspecting Normal Average Person with a Life picks up the remote, and, following your instructions turns on the TV and the stereo and cannot get it to change from the TV tuner.

Someone, recently handling the remote, must have hit the “dvd” button, and so neither the remote nor the TV care that you are mashing down the “source” button to change the input. The geeks response, knowing that the remote has multiple modes, will be to switch the remote back to TV mode.

This is NOT intuitively obvious to the normal average person. I’ll have to look at getting one of the programmable Logitech remotes because I’ve been told they actually really work – and divide up the settings by what you’re doing rather than by what device you need to control at the moment. The upshot is if you’re “watching a DVD” it controls the stereo volume via the volume buttons, sets the TV to the input designated as “DVD”, and the play controls manage the DVD player – all without you constantly switching modes.

The next common bugaboo, and one I’ll fix at my house with a little piece of RCA patch cable, is the famous “why is there no sound?” Receivers and pre-amps have many input selections. When my Onkyo was made, equalizers were common, and commonly hooked up at the in and out ports for “tape 2″ (in case you actually bought two separate tape decks). For the EQ to do it’s job the receiver had to route sound back out from its selected input via the tape 2 “record/out” jacks, and listen to the tape 2 input no matter what the original source was.

Needless to say, if you don’t have an EQ or a second tape deck there are probably no cables there. The secondary consequence is that accidentally turning on “Tape 2″ effectively mutes your stereo, with very little indication that it’s even in Tape 2 mode as you’ll still see the input for “Tape 1″ or “Video 1″, etc.