MidKnight Gallery

For a while now it’s been obvious that the Mac and Apple have been picking up more and more mindshare and steam. Yet another example comes to light today in this article at Ars Technica, a site that was formerly very MS-centric, and has gradually shifted to a more platform agnostic atmosphere.

One quote on the second page is one that’s interesting to hear from a self-professed die-hard Windows user. It’s something I’ve long felt, and a point that many mac users had made even in less popular years about quantity vs. quality when it came to available software:

…and there’s a real sense that their developers care that they don’t suck.

Windows software has never struck me as being like that. The third-party software ecosystem for Windows is big, no doubt about that. But it’s also incredibly shoddy. Most Windows applications—from both major software companies and minor ones alike—are ugly, poorly-thought-out, clunky pieces of crap. While there are a few artisan developers for Windows, most Windows devs just don’t care.

If you have time, there are a lot of in-depth articles and reviews of the various OSX releases that are perhaps the most comprehensive and best-written reviews you will find anywhere in one place.

I’m not typically a wal-mart basher. Nor am I typically an Apple basher. My complaint today revolves around a problem that arises when Apple’s self-interest, combined with a small dollop of cluelessness on the part of WalMart, makes things more difficult than it should.

The background – my wife is used to using Picasa. There are several things about it that drives me nuts related to organization, etc (many of which they had since fixed), but my wife really can wrap her brain around it better than iPhoto. One of the things it did brilliantly was export for online prints. Especially to wal-mart.

Now, it’s understandable why iPhoto only prints to Apple, and the iPhoto print services (especially cards!) are top-notch. Nevertheless there are now plug-ins to easily export from iPhoto to flickr, picasa web, etc. Most of these are free, or at worst (like the free stand-alone flickr tool) play well with iPhoto by allowing drag and drop.

Now. If wal-mart didn’t want to integrate at all with iPhoto or the Mac and play dumb just like they do for firefox, that would be fine. What bothers me is the “quickload” tool they provide is not even as functional as the “open” dialog box that’s the default in Leopard, as it does not give me direct access to my iPhoto albums and events.

Here’s what they should do. They should either create an iPhoto plugin like the guys at Google and Facebook did, or do like Flickr and create an uploader that allows you to drag pictures from iPhoto into the uploader.

I’ve had backup means in place before Leopard came out. Specifically, a snapshot based setup using rsync and hard links on my linux box. Nonetheless, it hasn’t been half as useful as time machine – if for no other reason than the ability to do bare metal restores.

I’ve had to do them twice now.

The first time was when my laptop was dropped shortly after closing the lid while still writing out. The drive had to be replaced and restored from an external TM backup. I’m writing this on it now, as a matter of fact.

The second time was the other day – discovering my desktop hung up (which has effectively become a household media server and sandboxed surfstation for the kids). Turns out the boot drive was suffering from a string of communications errors, though the diagnostics and file repair programs said everything was fine. One trip to Staples and a few hours later and I had a restored desktop.

I’ll say it now. It isn’t perfect. Super Duper would have allowed me to have a bootable replica of the entire drive that I could have switched to and continued to work off of.  It would have been just as effective for a bare metal restore if that had been needed. I’m a huge fan of super duper.

What SD doesn’t do is snapshots. Changes in files overwrite old files. Deleted files are never erased and just accumulate. There is effectively no way to go back and recover the email, file, picture, or system state that existed at time x before you accidentally made the wrong change and hit “save”.

Ideally, I’d use both.

edit: cut down next-to-last paragraph to save space and clarify meaning.

Over the years I’ve delved into the Apple Interface guidelines a few times. While somewhat geeky reading, it’s also not as dry and boring as you’d expect, and lays out what is expected of a “mac-like” app. So it was nice to see a good article on exactly what the HIG was for, and why it is still relevant.

The compatibility of the text editor with Safari has simply grown by leaps and bounds.

We’re going through several here.

First of all, I’ve moved to a new host. 

Second – I’ve upgraded the blogging software at the same time. Actually this was less scary than doing the upgrade in place because I not only had a local copy of the website, but a fully functional one online I could always flip back to. The only headache was getting the old database uploaded to the new server as phpmyadmin didn’t want to handle that much data…..

Next step after another post on DNS stuff and filtering: Get my theme updated.

One of the best known SF acronyms outside of Science Fiction is TANSTAAFL, from Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It means “There aint no such thing as a free lunch.” more to the point, it means that there is a price for everything in time, money, sweat, or effort.

This to me holds true in the Linux world, and with many of the often brilliant “free” programs that are available.

You can probably see where this is going.

I’ve been trying to set up proxy services on my G5 running Leopard, so I can get rid of the Suse box that currently has no purpose in life outside of acting as a network proxy server for controlling web access. Running one less computer is good, even if the toaster-box doesn’t add much to my electric bill, and the G5 is becoming less and less my primary workstation anyway – my MacBook Pro is.

Getting squid installed – the proxy software – was pretty simple. The problem? I wanted to run it in conjunction with some filtering software called Dansguardian. This is the part where you shake your head, tsk, and say “ahh… foolish mortal.”

OSX launches background programs in a whole new way from traditional Unix/linux methods. The package I installed was fairly up to date and had a proper startup entry in it. or so it seemed.

The long and the short of it is I have the proxy working, but not the filter, and I’m spending much time on this simply because I want to figure the puzzle out, not because it’s cost-effective.

It’s fun, in a way, but usually I spend too much time fixing other people’s computers to want to have “fun” tinkering.

*sigh* It usually helps you sell stuff if it doesn’t have big, fat error messages on it.

One of the many things I cannot stand about Vista and Office 2007 is the packaging. Opening it up is not just a job, it’s an adventure. And a puzzle. So I get some admittedly snarky entertainment to see the following article on Microsoft’s website: Opening the Windows Vista Box

Yes, I loathe the ever-changing stacks icons, and the workarounds needed to make a stack a consistently identifiable target.

That said, there are a few features that you look at and wonder how you lived without it.

For example.  A new file gets downloaded to your inbox. You click on the stack and the stack pops open. Click on the disk image file and the disk mounts. Then you install your software. Now it’s time to clean up.

Now, my past practice has been to open up my inbox and drag the image file from the inbox into the trash. Unthinking, I clicked on the stack again since my selection arrow was nearby,  clicked on the image file, and stopped.

I didn’t want to reopen it. So still holding down the mouse button while kicking myself mentally and expecting to see a new “disk” pop up on my desktop, I instead see the file move with the arrow. Before I realize what I’m doing I drag it into the trash.

Not quite believing what I just saw, I open up teh trash, and sure enough, the file is there.

Wow.

UPDATE: As of OSX 10.5.2 Apple fixed the stack issue. You can now have the icon in your dock show up as the containing folder, and keep a nice, easy to identify target. They’ve added some more improvements too.