www.xkcd.com

I typically try to avoid reacting like the guy in the cartoon here.  Hopefully I’m continuing to do that, because as long there’s an internet someone, including myself, will be wrong on it.  And in that vein this will  hopefully be brief because I have more important things to do than correct people that are wrong on the internet. But (here I go) IMHO, there is a bunch of junk being said about Apple’s newest device, the iPad.  Now, before you turn me off, this is not (hopefully) a glowing, koolaid-drinking, fanboy review of how the iPad is going to change your life and be the greatest thing since sliced bread.  Still with me? Good. My thoughts will be organized around several major complaints I have read/seen/heard in the last couple days.

It’s disappointing/underwhelming.

Well, duh, it’s your own fault. There was so much hype about this device and how it was going to have this feature and that feature and change this industry and be a __(fill in the blank with your device of choice)__-killer and serve breakfast in bed and be bathed in unicorn tears and everything else.  I’ve followed the Apple rumor mill for several years and I don’t think I’ve ever seen more hype over the announcement of a single product than this one. Of course this is only fueled by all these “leaks” from “sources” and every Mac blog analyzing them for every detail. Puh-leez!  If the device had every feature that people wanted it would end up looking like some Franken-tablet.  Remember one of Apple’s goals (and i think a good one) with every product is intuitive simplicity (“it just works”).  The iPad succeeds at this.

Despite all the hype, I refused (tried to at least) to get caught up in it. (I was still eagerly tuned in to the liveblogs Wednesday afternoon.)  I realized that there was no way they could deliver a product that would meet everyone’s wishlist. And they weren’t trying to. Personally, I deliberately tried to set my expectations low, so that whatever was delivered I would hopefully be able to view it objectively. I was hoping for a big iPod Touch (more on my expectations at the end).  And that’s pretty much what we got.

It’s not a netbook-killer.

I most recently saw this basically voiced as: “But Steve Jobs said that a netbook doesn’t do anything better, and a netbook does a lot of things better than the iPad.” That’s wasn’t Jobs’ point.  His point was that a netbook doesn’t do anything that a laptop or a phone can’t do better.  In other words, the iPad fills the gap between the phone and the laptop better than a netbook does.  The things that Jobs targeted (email, browsing, personal video watching, reading, viewing photos, etc.) the iPad can do better than a laptop or phone.  This is largely due to the iPad’s multitouch interface.  People like tactility (for lack of a better word).  It’s fun to touch stuff and make it respond. The iPad succeeds at this.

It doesn’t have flash.

And may its tribe increase.  No single item has caused Apple more trouble than flash support.  As a web developer, I view flash as a necessary evil, kinda like IE 6.  The sooner it dies the better.  And if one of the main reasons Adobe comes up with to encourage Apple to support it is so that people can view immorality (the link is safe, believe me), may it die faster.  And along this line, if you want to accuse Apple of having a “walled garden” (more on that in a moment) you can lay that blame at the feet of Adobe and their proprietary plugin too.  At least I can develop for the iPhone/iPad for *free.

It’s locked down.

This, as a geek and amateur “hacker” is probably my biggest beef, as I like to be able to tinker with things under the hood.  But I understand why Apple does this.  It’s another one of their commitments to the user experience. All the apps in the App Store I’ve seen have nice GUIs. And as I almost entirely download free ones, which are the more likely to have “ugly” designs, I think I’ve seen a fair sampling.  This is not true for programs as a whole.  When I was primarily a Windows user, one of my favorite things to do was find “new” freeware, so I know how bad GUI designs can be.  This is not the case in the App Store.

It doesn’t have X feature.

There are two ways to answer this question.

1) It doesn’t need it. At all.  USB? SD Card? Use bluetooth or the cloud.  As they say, “there’s an app for that.” (Dropbox is an excellent one, btw). There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and there’s more than one way to do most things on an uber-wirelessly connected device.  Even some uses of multitasking (running multiple apps at a time) fall into this category.  (Oh, and remember there’s still push notifications, so you can still know when you get a facebook/email/SMS update.)

2) It doesn’t have it yet. This is another thing I’m not completely crazy about, but again, I understand.  Would it have been great and possible for Apple to include a camera (front/rear/both) and keep it at the same price point? Probably yes. So why didn’t they? As a consumer, I don’t like this, but it’s called built-in obselecense. Apple is a business, and their goal is to make money.  Lots of it, as Jobs reminded us with the brief history at the beginning of the keynote.  Some of these features could have been added in, but if Apple waits and adds them in later, the consumer has more reason to upgrade.  For that reason, I rarely, if ever, buy first generation products from anybody.  Also, some of the desired features (multitasking in particular) is not a hardware issue but a software issue and can be updated at anytime.  It’s very likely we’ll see some type of multitask support in an iPhone OS 4.0 upgrade later this year.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. So were my expectations met? To be perfectly honest, no.  I was expecting multitasking ability, and maybe we’ll still get it when iPhone OS 4.0 (or will they start calling it iMobile OS?) ships later this year, according to the rumor mill. Will I be getting one when they come out in 2-3 months? No. (Of course, if you want to get me one, I won’t refuse it ) As I mentioned earlier, I think it’s wise, and in addition, good stewardship to wait for the second generation for technology purchases. Let someone else work out the bugs.   What about it particularly excites me? Well, for one, I really like the looks of the new iCal. For another, I’m looking forward to use it for reading. I don’t mind reading on an OLED screen; it doesn’t bother me. And it will be an improvement over my iPod Touch (or maybe I should call it an iPad Nano now ) I’m excited that they decided to use an open book format (epub), and besides that there’s still the Kindle app and Stanza (my personal favorite).  Not to mention Logos

Ok, I’m done now, the internet can go back to being wrong

No related posts.

Snow Leopard in my opinion has lived up to its claims of faster boot/shut down time, increased disk space, more eye candy, etc. Btw, speaking of increased disk space, the increase is not as large as it initially appears. Before I installed Snow Leopard, Finder reported 32.28 GB of free space on my hard drive. When I finished, it reported 49.14 GB. Sweet, I gained 16.86 GB’s! Not quite… Although Snow Leopard does remove a lot of legacy code used by the older PPC architecture, they also changed how GB (and KB and MB) are calculated. The easiest way to explain this is what consumers see as the discrepancy between what hard drive vendors report the size of a disk as and the size it appears to your computer. For example, I recently bought what was advertised as a 1 TB (1000 GB) external drive. However, Finder on my mac only reported it to be about 909 GB. Hey! Aren’t I getting gypped 91 GB? Not really. Computers and hard drive vendors measure KBs, etc differently. To a hard drive vendor (and most consumers) a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, a megabyte is a 1000 kb, etc. But to a computer, which use a binary (base 2) system of calculating, a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, a megabyte is 1024 kb, etc. (The technical term for these units of measurement is a mebi-, gibibyte abbreviated MiB, GiB, but hardly anyone calls them that.)

Ok, if i lost you somewhere in there among all those bytes, let me explain why that is significant. The reason is because Snow Leopard changes that. Instead of using the binary system where a kilobyte = 1024 bytes, it uses the base 10 system where a kilobyte = 1000 bytes. So although it looks like i saved 16.86 GB, in actuality I only gained 14.48 GB going by the new system or 13.49 GiB going by the old system. Still a significant savings. Clear as mud? Ok, moving on.

I’ll finish up this post write an additional post later with some of the things I really like about Snow Leopard, but first I’m going to deal with some of the quirks i ran into due to software that had not been updated to work with Apple’s new big cat, etc.

Upon first reboot, I was greeted with a couple boxes asking me to find System Events.app. This is obviously a system app, and was changed in Snow Leopard. I quickly googled and found it was located at /System/Library/CoreServices/ and selected it. I believe the culprit apps that were asking for it were Caffeine and Isolator. These are free apps that run in the menu bar. Caffeine keeps your mac from going to sleep, and Isolator puts a background behind the current window, preventing any other windows or items on the desktop from being distracting.

As I attempted to find the location of System Events.app, I was met numerous times with a box from PlugSuit.app that needed me to authenticate. PlugSuit.app is used by an app called Afloat, which allows you to set transparency of Cocoa windows and force a certain window to always be on top. It appears this app is not compatible with Snow Leopard, and they provide instructions on their website of how to disable Afloat to stop the requests for authentication.

Next up were a couple Apple Mail plugins that notify me when I receive new mail, Growl Mail and MailUnread Menu.  I wasn’t terribly surprised to find them incompatible as Mail is known for breaking these plugin bundles whenever it updates.  I was able to find a script that could communicate with Growl through use of a rule, so I am still notified about new mail.   That script can be found here

The biggie that didn’t work that I was concerned about was Quicksilver.  Thankfully all that was involved was installing the new version and trashing the preferences folder (located at ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksiver).  Some of the plugins still do not work with the latest version (such as the Services Menu plugin) but hopefully they will be updated soon.  Let me just put in a plug for Quicksilver while i’m at it.  Quicksilver is much more than a application launcher or file finder.  If that were all it were, I would pass because Spotlight does that very well.  Quicksilver’s strength is being able to do anything you can think of on the computer, with the keyboard.  Say i have a file on my desktop and it needs to be put on a folder some where in Documents, with Quicksilver, all i need to do is click on the file , invoke QS (or invoke QS and type the name of the file), tab, type “m” (for move), tab, and type the name of the folder I want to move it to.  And it can do a lot more than this like, control itunes, append the selected text to a file, etc. For more information see here and here.

Another app that didn’t work completely was Logos, the most extensive Bible software available for Mac.  However, a quick check for updates, and we were on our way.

A third app was Reader Notifier, another menubar app.  This one checks updates on Google Reader.  Again, a check for updates, solved this as well.

Although this wasn’t a serious problem, I was annoyed by the fact that Snow Leopard breaks all 3rd party screensavers, of which i have several.  Thankfully, my favorite one, Skyrocket a fireworks screensaver, has been updated for Snow Leopard (and probably many of the others will be soon).  What’s cool about Skyrocket that I haven’t see with other screensavers is that you can control it from the keyboard to create your own fireworks show.  You can also control the camera the views the show as well.  Pretty neat. (It is also available for Windows and Linux, as it’s OpenGL)

This next error was brought to my attention by a friend as I don’t use this particular feature, but it appears that afp network shares do not seem to work correctly.  I was using smb shares, so it didn’t really affect me, but a quirk, nonetheless.

Two final things.  I like tweaking how my mac looks, so I installed Docker, to change the default appearance of the dock and Drawers for stacks (see TUAW writeup here)  Since Snow Leopard restored the default appearance of the Dock, all I needed to do was open Docker, change the preferences to what i preferred and apply them.  For drawers, I needed to add the .app suffix to my drawer file, change Display as to Folder, then back to Stack, and I was good to go.

Well, as this post has gotten rather long, I’ll actually post what I like best about Snow Leopard in a later post…

Related posts:

• “Meep” me!

Ok, just geeks left?  Good, here we go.

Last night I was trying to correct a syntax error and came across a helpful way to determine if all the parentheses in my if statement matched each other.  Basically how it works is like this.  Start counting each parenthesis in your statement. Each time you see an open parenthesis you increase your count by 1 and each time you see a close parenthesis you decrease your count by 1.  Let me illustrate:

// 12                 1    23   4           3      2    3      4                3210
if (($condition1 != $a) || ((len($condition2) == $b) && (!isset($_POST['submit'])))) {

Don’t know if that helps you or not, but as the editor i was using (online) didn’t have a syntax checker, it helped me a great deal.

No related posts.

First, xhtmlpro.com, where I previously hosted my blog was my the home of my web development/design company.  Our company did some realignment this summer, and now exists at http://waldenwebdev.com.  Xhtmlpro was too unwieldy of a name for those not familiar with web design and coding and such, and since we primarily market ourselves to churches and other Christian ministries, most of which aren’t familiar with terms like xhtml, we (my brother and I) decided we needed to charge our name and branding.  It also gave us an opportunity to redesign our site which needed a facelift.  (Btw, xhtmlpro.com is for sale, if anyone is interested. It would be a great domain for, say, those that convert Photoshop layouts to web templates.) So all that is to explain why I’m not still at andy.xhtmlpro.com.

But why not at say, andy.waldenwebdev.com? Well, the main reason is i thought it would be good to go ahead and get my own exclusive domain.  Not that i’m really concerned someone else will snatch up andyanglea.com (afaik, i am the only one in the world), but I can do other geeky things with it too, like setting up Google Apps for your domain, email server, backup/storage, roll your own URL cruncher, etc.

Now if you’re wordpress savvy and read my previous post, you might be wondering why i had to get my old posts from google cache, as wordpress has an export function in the control panel.  Well, I would have loved to do that, but due to some shenanigans by our web hosting company, that was not an option.  (Short version, they took down xhtmlpro.com before they said they would.)  As you might guess, this site is not hosted by that company.  Depending on how the service goes, I’ll reveal who that is sometime down the road. If you’re really curious, you can look at my whois record. So far so good, and I technically have more than I did with my previous host (storage, bandwidth, etc) for about half the cost.  Next up, the semesterly (or yearly) life update…

Related posts:

• Thank goodness for Windows security holes
• Coming to you live from Linux
• Back online…

There were several things I wasn’t sure I was going to like about it, but either the aroma exuding from the package caused me to forget all of that or they weren’t as bad as i thought they would be.  For example, I was previously a ThinkPad user, and was in love with the little red eraser trackpoint and had never had much success with the trackpad. So I was afraid i would have difficulty adjusting to the MacBook Pro’s trackpad.  But i’ve been using it without a hitch pretty much from day one.  It’s much more “intelligent” than trackpad’s i’ve used in the past with only moving or clicking when i want it to.  I love the 2-finger scrolling, in fact it annoys me when it doesn’t work on the Dells in the Media Center

I obviously still use Windows at work, and I actually dual-boot Vista via BootCamp and VMWare Fusion (once Logos for Mac gets completed that may change…)  I’m still pretty much of an Apple n00b but i’m planning on delving into AppleScript and Objective-C this summer as time allows (XCode is sweet!).  I may also add a triple-boot option of Ubuntu Hardy Heron, we’ll see how it goes…

If anyone else out this is thinking about switching and you have any questions, fire away in the comments.

Related posts:

• Christmas present
• getting it going…

Customizations i’ve made to the default install include (but are not limited too)…

• Firefox 2 (not in the dapper repositories yet)
• Automatix – nice installer for lots of common plugins (flash, quicktime), apps (gFTP, Gaim beta 3, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Bluefish and much more), codecs, etc. that make Ubuntu much more friendly to my everyday use.
• xorg.conf customization for Thinkpad scrolling
• Copy of file browser running as root
• Standard Firefox and Thunderbird icons (not the ubuntu versions)
• msttfcorefonts (Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Arial, Tahoma, ect [since almost every website we’ve created uses at least one of those)
• other tweaks such as theme, screensaver, fonts, wallpaper, etc, to give it “my” touch

Before i sign off, i suppose i should register at least one complaint, and others have mentioned it before… If linux is ever going to go mainstream, linux support is going to have to stop referring users to the terminal. I personally like using it, but my brother dislikes it a good deal. Eh, as a designer, he just wants a Mac, anyway.

Current System specs:
Thinkpad R40 2723
80GB Western Digital external USB hard drive
1.3 GHz Centrino processor
Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 (I’d upgrade to Edgy, but it seems to have been giving too many users problems)

Related posts:

• Free from dependence on Window$
• Christmas present
• Hello, I’m a Mac…

So after downloading and installing Firefox I disconnected and called AOL (The number was 1-888-265-8008). After talking to a friendly sounding computer voice for about 5 minutes to which i gave all the account information, they finally connected me to a human. He, of course, was from India or somewhere they can’t speak English worth beans. In addition, he would not talk to me, because it wasn’t my name on the account. So the lady had to listen to him give a high-pitched shpeel about the greatness of AOL, why on earth would she want to cancel, yada, yada, yada. She must have told him, “No, cancel my account,” at least a dozen times. Then after verifying bank account numbers, etc. He connected her to their Cancelation Legal Disclaimer. Another computer voice read off this litany of how cancelation is in effect today, any charges you have incurred, yada, yada, yada… If you would like to continue your AOL account, hit 1, etc. I noticed that this computer voice was much less friendly sounding than the first one =).

Total time: 21 minutes, give or take. Not as bad as some accounts I’ve read online, but still way too long for something you should be able to do with a couple clicks on a website.

Related posts:

• Thank goodness for Windows security holes
• “Meep” me!

“Well,” I thought, “it’s windows, BSOD is pretty common.” I do a force power down (hold in button for 5 secs), reboot, and wait.

**Windows/System32/Config/System file missing or corrupt**

Great… A registry hive error. Pretty much irrepairable with an OEM XP installation. Oh well, I’ve been wanting to do a clean install of Windows anyway. Nevermind the fact that today is day we’re supposed to upload all the content for our client’s new site. Oh well, how long can this take? Probably not past lunch, No biggie.

So I attach my external hard drive, and boot into Ubuntu to recover my data in case I have to wipe the drive. (Unfortunately I forgot to get my 3+ years of email… too late now.) That done, I attempted Windows recovery console. No dice there either. Well, I’ve got my IBM recovery partition, let’s try that… Good, that’s working. Let that run for 30-40 odd minutes. During the process it asked me to set an administrator password, which I did. It finishes, reboots and presents me with the login screen, and the user name of Administrator. I enter the password I chose earlier and wait.

**Bong** Password incorrect. Please retype your password. Passwords must be typed in the correct case.

Oops, my bad, try again. **Bong** Stupid me.. **Bong** What! **Bong** Good grief **Bong** Try blank… **Bong** **Bong** **Freeze** **Bong** **Bong** (you get the idea…)

Not good, I must have mistyped it. How could I have made the same typo twice??? Wrong home keys? Oh well, it’s only 10 o’clock or so, I’ll reinstall again.

This time I set the password to something really easy: abc. How could I mistype that? Reboot, and login screen.

**abc** **Bong** Ai yi yi **Bong** Ok, the Admistrator account has a problem… Let me try some other things… **Bong** An old account name? **Bong**

I should probably explain that because I bought my laptop from the school, the recovery partion I’m using has a custom image on it with school software. So I thought, “It must have a custom Administrator account too.”

Well, I have another option. Because I was an IT minor last year, I was able to take advantage of Microsoft’s Academic Alliance program which allows computer science students to download free M$ software including Visual Studio, VPC, and XP. I downloaded an iso of the XP install CD complete with academic license and authentication code. This disk image was on my harddrive and part of the files I had recovered. So I used another computer to burn it to a CD, and as Nero, for some reason wouldn’t recognize the .img file type of the iso, I used a free program called Burn 4 Free. Once that was done, I put my new XP install CD in my laptop and waited. After another 40 mins or so, I was able to log in. Yea!! But I had absolutely nothing. No OEM drivers, no internet, zip, zero, nada. So I decided to try the IBM thing again, just to get that. I had an Administrator account now that worked, after all.

Same as before, installed, rebooted, login screen… **Bong** AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!

How can i reset this Administrator password? So a googling we go. Oops, sorry! I mean, I did an internet search using google.com. Much info abounds on how to attempt, both legally and illegally to get around the Administrator password. But the article i found most useful was this one… I Forgot My Administrator Password!!. It informs the reader of a (may I say) scary access hole during the install process. At one point you can hit SHIFT+F10 and bring up the windows command line, from which you full access to the system. Simply call up nusrmgr.cpl and you get the familiar windows gui for changing passwords. You can wipe out the admin password, or create a new admin account. I assume you could use this access hole to retrieve data using notepad.exe “<file name>”, and who knows what else. And as this can be done during a XP repair install, it could give you full access to all the data on the computer as Administrator once the repair is done running.

As it turned out, there was no Administrator account, just one called dormsupport (still on my computer and with no idea as to the password for it). So I created one, saved, closed and exited the command line and continued the reinstall.

Finally, after 13 hours, I was back in. Next to install XP SP2, and 62 other critical updates, and I was back in business around midnight. Meanwhile, we got the content for EBC-EBCA’s site uploaded, and began the process of domain registration transfer and DNS propigation.

So that was my weekend. How was yours?

Related posts:

• Free from dependence on Window$
• getting it going…
• Christmas present

“The person you are trying to reach is not available. Please leave a message after the ‘meep’… Meeep!”

Find out about the updates here: Google Talk

Related posts:

• Merriam-Webster’s Christens ‘Google’ a Verb
• Thank goodness for Windows security holes
• The horror stories are true…

Well, this birthday boy probably won’t be blowing out any candles, and definitely not eating any cake, but it’s still worth celebrating.  Happy Birthday to the personal computer (PC).  Or more accurately, happy birthday to the IBM 5150, the first computer model that really took off in the business world.  Sure the Apple II was out, as was Atari’s model, but as a business manager would you rather buy a machine from the International Business Machine company or the company named after a fruit?

IBM 5150

The IBM 5150 has much in common with the desktops today. Separate keyboard and monitor, for starters.  It ran what IBM called PC-DOS which it got from Microsoft (MS-DOS), who bought it from a Seattle based company (QDOS – Quick and Dirty Operating System).  Most computers still run it today, although hidden.  The first program made for this program, a spreadsheet called VisiCalc, can still be run on computers today.  (You can get it here.) And it had an Intel processor.  Using off-the-shelf components made by someone else’s was new for IBM, which made it possible for other companies to clone its machine.  Thus the sale of personal computers exploded.

Price?  $1265 + monitor, floppy disk drive (upgrade from cassette drive), and $40 for PC-DOS.  Other OS’s were available but they cost from $400-600 (M$ hasn’t always been the most expensive).  One other impressive note for the time, both upper and lowercase letters could be used (the Apple II only had uppercase).

IBM sold their first unit 25 years ago today.  So Happy Birthday to you personal computer, how would we function today without you?

Related posts:

• Thank goodness for Windows security holes