January 26, 2003
NetNewsWire Adds Category Support
So I should now be able to use it to post to the blog more conveniently than through the web interface. So should many other people -- it supports ten different blogging packages. This post is something of a test, so I'll fire it off now and see how it looks.
January 25, 2003
Another Accident
Well, I had another accident today. But it wasn't as bad as it could have been.
The original plan with the Powerbook was to use my old 17" CRT monitor with it when at my desk, possibly using its monitor spanning facilities to spread the desktop over the built-in screen as well. Unfortunately, the Powerbook's built-in screen turned out to be so much better than the monitor that I never actually used the monitor.
And I got addicted to higher resolutions -- the Powerbook does 1280x864 compared with the 1024x768 that I generally run the monitor at (it'll do that at 85Hz. It'll do 1152x864 at 75Hz, which I find just about tolerable, and 1280x960 at 60Hz, which flickers so much that I can't use at all). All in all it seemed like time for a new LCD monitor.
The best one that money can buy, pretty much, is the 23" widescreen Apple Cinema HD Display. 1920x1200, with superb picture quality and it looks great too. Unfortunately, not only is it over £3,000 but you need an adaptor to use it with a Powerbook, or any computer except a Powermac, which costs another £150. Even I'm not that overpaid. The smaller 22" Apple Cinema Display is 1600x1024, but still costs over £2,000, and still needs an adaptor.
Apple aren't the only people who make displays designed for Apple computers. Formac have a nice line of LCD displays with DVI interfaces (as used in the Powerbook and many PCs) instead of/as well as the Powermac-specific ADC. Their 20" Gallery 2010 display actually has more pixels than the 22" Apple Cinema Display, and is only mind-numbingly expensive.
So I headed off to Tottenham Court Road this afternoon planning to drop in on MicroAnvika and take a look at one, with a view to probably buying it. But I also dropped into the regular weekly computer fair that is split across two venues nearby, and I discovered a dealer selling the Dell UltraSharp 2000FP for about two thirds of what the Formac unit would cost, and with VGA and S-Video inputs as well. It's 20" and 1600x1200, although in truth the image quality is not quite up to the Apple or Formac displays. But the price was a lot more attractive, and one swipe of the credit card later I was faced with the problem of getting it home. As soon as I discovered just how big and heavy the box was, any thought of taking on the train evaporated, and I ended up with a fifty quid taxi ride home.
Here's a picture of the new display next to the Powerbook. Click on it for a bigger version. This web page is open in the top-right corner, but as you can see there's plenty of screen space left. Between both machines, I can open 13 simultaneous 80x24 terminal sessions without any of them overlapping each other or the Dock.
The Internet Is Down
And it's all Microsoft's fault. Again.
It seems that there is a worm that exploits a vulnerability in SQL Server spreading fast, and flooding the net with traffic, not to mention compromising sites that use SQL Server.
On the web site I manage for a living (which does not use any Microsoft products), I'm seeing about one hit per second from infected machines trying to propagate the worm (UDP connections to port 1434), which are all being blocked by the firewall. But all sites are likely to be affected just by the volume of traffic degrading the net.
Check here and here for current Internet status.
[Updated 09:45 25 Jan 2003] I'm seeing about one hit every thirty seconds for port 1434 on my ADSL connection at home, too. If the worm is hitting IP addresses at random, that's about a hundred million packets per second globally.
January 24, 2003
Dr Plokta's Switching Ad
Hmm, I don't recall having made a Switching advertisement, but here it is (via Instapundit).
January 23, 2003
On Safari
OK, I've got Safari to remember my LiveJournal login between sessions. It seems that it needs third-party cookies to be enabled -- I disabled them as is my habit in order to stop advertising sites from tracking me. And Alison posted a handy hint on opening new windows in the background. So I'm switching over to Safari as my primary web browser. It still doesn't offer ad blocking, but its bookmark functionality is good enough to make up for it.
January 22, 2003
Music In My Ears
The iPod is certainly a remarkable gadget. It's hard to adjust to having all of my music on a gadget the size of a (largeish) cigarette packet. Alison is rather scornful of my scant hundred or so CDs, of course, and seems to think that any real music lover would be unable to get their collection onto even a 20GB model. And she's probably right. But wait for next year's model.
There are things to adjust to. It is probably inadvisable to sing along or sway rhythmically to the music unless one wants to look like a complete dork. I'm not entirely sure how safe it is to cross roads with one's sense of hearing greatly degraded. On the other hand, there are some unexpected fringe benefits. The chuggers who lurk permanently around the Ritz and Piccadilly Circus appear to be put off by the prospect of having to try to communicate with someone who can't really hear them.
The integration with iTunes goes further than I was expecting. When you plug the iPod back into the Mac, it updates your most recently played list with what you've been listening to on the iPod, and increments the play count. It's exactly as if you'd been carrying the computer around and listening to the music on it.
Now all I need is some more music...
New Categories
Since my titles for "Switching (Part 1)" and "Cool Mac Tricks (1)" imply there'll be future posts on the same topics, it actually seems like a better idea to create a couple of new categories. There are likely to be more adjustments as I get the hang of this.
Cool Mac Tricks (1)
So it turns out that if you're chatting with someone in iChat and you want to send them the URL for a web page you're looking at, you can just click on the little icon to the left of the URL in Safari and drag into into iChat, where it'll create a nice hyperlink whose text is the title of the page and which links to the page, all ready for you to send. Furthermore, while adding the link to iChat at the beginning of this paragraph, I discovered that you can drag it into web-page forms as well, although it'll only paste the URL and not a complete hyperlink.
There may be something to this notion of integrating all of the applications.
January 20, 2003
A New Toy
I went out today and bought a 10GB iPod, having failed to do so at the weekend because MicroAnvika couldn't answer my questions about PC/Mac operation, and PC World were out of stock after I'd done the research for myself.
The answer to the question, for those who are interested, is that no one should buy a Mac iPod. With the PC one, you get extra PC software (the Mac equivalent comes with the Mac) and a six-pin to four-pin Firewire adaptor, which will be handy if I ever want to switch back to PC for some reason. I had to reinstall the software to convert it from PC to Mac, but I had to do that anyway to downgrade it from version 1.2.2 (which has volume limits set by EU regulations) to version 1.2.1 (which doesn't). Not that I plan to damage my hearing by cranking it up to 11 through the ear-buds, you understand, but I might want to use it to drive something else some time, and need higher volume settings.
In fact, if you don't want to reinstall the software, the PC iPod works fine with OS X (though not, I understand, Classic) without reinstalling, except that you don't get a pretty iPod icon on your desktop, but just a generic mounted drive icon. I thought about installing the PC software version 1.2.1 so that I could use it as a Firewire drive on PCs as well, but I couldn't be bothered.
More on its performance when I've actually had a chance to try it out. At present I am charging it, syncing my address book and calendar onto it, syncing my iTunes library onto it, ripping a CD in iTunes (about twenty to go) and copying a 420MB file from the PC to the Mac over the wireless network. Try doing all that simultaneously on a Windows machine while also updating your blog.
Gaaah
I pressed the sync button on my Clié this morning and it hung. This is not unprecedented—it happens once a week, or thereabouts. But this time, when I reset it, it did a cold reset and wiped everything.
Fortunately, I'd previously synced it the night before, so I hadn't actually lost any data. I synced it and everything got put back. But Clié Launcher caused a reset whenever I tried to go into it to run programs, and my font settings were messed up. I managed to delete Clié Launcher, but I'm still having font problems at present. The default fonts in the Clié are terrible, so I use FontHack to substitute a better one. But it's putting garbage on screen at present. I'm sure I'll sort it out, and at least I've got my diary and address book.
January 19, 2003
Switching (Part 1)
About seven weeks ago, I bought a Macintosh Powerbook G4 1GHz. By adding a Superdrive DVD writer, Apple had finally come up with the perfect laptop, doing everything I might want a laptop or desktop machine to do. So, as a Microsoft Windows user since version 1.0 (I say "user", but 1.0 was in fact completely useless for anything more advanced than playing Othello), I've been having something of a learning experience in switching over.
I don't regret it. The Mac really is more stable and more fun to use, with a generally better feel. I've had exactly one kernel panic, and that was due to Alcatel's dodgy OS X drivers for their Speedtouch ADSL adaptor, which don't like the adaptor to be unplugged. I've since purchased a D-Link DSL-300g+ standalone ADSL modem and a D-Link DI-614+ wireless router, and now the Powerbook and my PC can both talk to the Internet, and the Powerbook is using its built in Airport card for wireless networking.
What's taking longest to get used to is the editing keys. Things like Ctrl+Home to go to the top of a document, Ctrl-Shift-End to select to the end of a document, Ctrl-Right to move one word to the right, and so on, are hard-wired into my motor cortex, and they're all different on the Mac. It's not helped by the Powerbook having a slightly abbreviated keyboard that doesn't even have a Del key, and needs the Fn key to be pressed to access Home, End, Pg Up and Pg Dn.
There are various problems with OS X (I've never even booted into Classic, and have no intention of ever trying to learn how to use it). The Dock is not as bad as some people say, but it's not perfect. It's trying to do too much at once. I can cope with the idea of mixing together running and non-running programs, and OS X's memory management really does seem to be good enough to make it work, at least with 512MB of RAM. But the trash can doesn't really belong on the Dock, and the magnification is tremendously disconcerting. You can turn the magnification off, of course, but the icons for minimised documents are too small to actually see what the document is, unless you're doing a demo and deliberately using documents with 300-point type.
Its font handling is not as good as it might be. It's supposed to cope with Windows Truetype fonts, but it seems very fussy about them. It also seems that it needs a reboot, or at least a logout and login, before it recognises new fonts, which is rather against the spirit of OS X.
It doesn't have a perfect web browser. Safari has superb bookmark handling, but isn't finished, and its rendering has some rough edges to be smoothed out. Chimera has appallingly bad bookmark handling, and doesn't look quite as good, but is more polished in most other respects. They should both reach final versions some time this year, and I have high hopes. Internet Explorer is the one to try if the others don't work, because it's the most widely supported by web sites, but it is slower and doesn't feel as good as Safari and Chimera.
To be continued in Part 2...
Template Problems
There seems to be a problem with the default Movable Type templates. If the main column here doesn't go down at least as far as the right-hand column with the links and stuff, the right-hand column expands below the main column. It does this on Gecko-based browsers such as Chimera and Phoenix, but not in Internet Explorer (for Mac; haven't tried on a PC).
It appears that the div element containing the right-hand column, <div id="links">, is changing width. I'm not sure whether or not it's supposed to according to the CSS2 spec. Does anyone know more about this than me?
Meanwhile, I'll just have to crank up the article retention to eight weeks and make sure to post frequently enough to keep the left-hand column longer than the right-hand one.