OSC gets a dig in on Bill and Ballmer

From Orson Scott Card's Empire:

"I'm not surprised," said Cole. "What do you think it takes to build one of those? Two million? Six?"
"Real costs or Pentagon costs?" asked Reuben.
"Microsoft costs."
"These are not a Microsoft product," said Reuben.
"Developed in secret, though."
"Yeah, but they don't lock up."

XP or Vista?

So I purchased a copy of Parallels Desktop a few months back, when they were offering it at a reduced price while still in beta. I haven't gotten around to installing it since, mostly because I didn't have a legit copy of Windows to go with it, and I'm not much interested in dinking around with any Linux variants. Lately, I've been intrigued at the prospect of running Windows from a virtual environment on my Intel iMac, mostly for web browser testing. (My sites don't look nearly as nice in Internet Explorer as they do in, well, pretty much every other browser.) And long ago I promised I'd help out with some of our church's web stuff, and they use FrontPage (yes, I know--ick!). The question then is, do I get the latest version of Windows XP, or do I jump in to the exploratory waters of Windows Vista? Let me know what you think.

Today's Gmail spam

Screen shot of spam in Gmail Today's Gmail phishing (as opposing to phisching, which is the attempt to hook a phisch) spam is more humorous than most. A lot of phishing emails one receives are for non-location-specific entities: Citi, Bank of America, eBay, PayPal, etc. This one is highly location-specific: Hawaii. I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. It amused me. Briefly.

Are you a Windows user?

Windows has no users... Warning: adult language on page linked above. [Via the Fontosaurus.]

And Sony wonders why they're losing to Samsung and Apple

We have a Sony DirecTV/Tivo unit my mother-in-law gave as a Christmas gift to us several years ago. In techno-age, it's ready to retire and move to Florida, but it still does the job, and the TiVo interface is still light-years ahead of DirecTV's own DVR receivers, of which we have two. Some of the buttons on the Sony remote have stopped working, however, and it's finally gotten to the point where we need a new remote. A trip to Sony's web site reveals they no longer sell the remote (shocker, I know), but there is an online form with which you can inquire as to parts. So I fill it out, noting we have the DirecTV receiver/TiVo DVR combo unit, as well as putting in the only part numbers I'm able to find any where on the remote itself. This was a month ago. Today, I receive a reply from Sony. Therein, I'm told:

I think you might have model SVR2000. If this is it, the remote is rmtv303 (147603612) which is nla. Please go on www.yahoo.com and type in either the part number of the model number of the remote and do a search. There still should be internet distribuors that carry it. Fine and dandy, this was along the lines of what I was expecting. Except the genius got the model number wrong, and the part number for the remote wrong. I only discovered this after doing exactly what is suggested above, running a Yahoo search. On one page which listed several remotes, I discovered another part number for a Sony TiVo remote, and it turned out to be the correct one. For the record, the SVR2000 is the Sony TiVo DVR; it is not the DirecTV receiver/TiVo combo. That is model SAT-T60. The remote part number for the SAT-T60 is RM-Y809. I found a new one for $55, with a 30-day, money-back guarantee (yay, Yahoo!). This is future reference for myself, as well as help for anyone else who may find themselves in a similar situation. I just think it shows very bad form for a Sony employee to, (a) take a month to respond, and (b) when finally responding, providing the wrong information. I was very explicit in noting that we had the DirecTV receiver/TiVo combo, and not the TiVo-only SVR2000. Sony has rested on its laurels, and formerly well-deserved reputation, for too long, and it continues to result in products no one are buying, and poor customer service after the fact.

Miscellany

  • Thanks to the folks at Xerox, with help from Layer 8 Group, you can send a postcard, with original artwork by a child, to a member of the armed forces serving abroad: Let's Say Thanks. I sent one, how about you?

    [Via Susan via e-mail.]
  • About.com has some good advice in its Back to School section concerning backpack selection for students. The first tip they offer, to get a bag with two straps instead of just one, to help balance the load across the body better, is why I'm a dedicated backpack guy.
  • My new addiction is Armagetron Advanced, an open source 3D game of the lightcycle contest from Tron.

Miscellany

Michael has announced that C-Command now has forums for all of its products. I helped him do some testing with the forum boards--which means we spent about ten minutes on it--and if you're a SpamSieve or DropDMG user, I hope to see you around the virtual water cooler.

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Messy networks. Dear God in Heaven. [Via Firewheel Design.]

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Just when I thought there was never going to be anything interesting on Yahoo's corporate blog, they have races with toy babies triggered by the licking of lollipops.

Stuff a calendar into your Backpack

So the calendar feature for Backpack launched today. I like how easy it is to add items to the calendar, and I realize this is a 1.0 release (Note to Google: it's not a beta.), but I'm greatly disappointed it didn't roll out with repeating events as part of the feature set. I was looking forward to using iCal solely as the desktop conduit between an online calendar I can access anywhere, and my mobile devices with which I would like to sync calendar events. Sure, I can do that with Google Calendar, but I'm already in Backpack so much, and I like 37signals' implementation and interface better. Besides repeating events, other features I'd like to see added in a future update, ranked in order of personal importance: + Events added to Backpack's Calendar do not show the scheduled time within the calendar. Mark Gallagher notes this in the announcement's comments, because to see an event's time, you have to click on the event, instead of just being able to glance at the calendar and seeing all of the times in context. + The ability to toggle the time on the reminder. For some events, I need more than 30 minutes notice, my parents' anniversary, for instance, which I need a few days notice so I can buy a card and put it in the mail to them. Yes, I know I can use Backpack's Reminders feature for this, but it would be more productive to have this built in to the Calendar side of the house. It seems like overkill, and double work, for me to enter the event of my parents' anniversary in to the calendar, then have to switch over and enter a separate reminder to buy a card days in advance.

Commenter "D" notes: "Quick hack to get repeating events: enter them as reminders and then subscribe to your reminder feed within calendar." This is working well for me, so far, but then you'll get in to the situation of all of your reminders being in a single calendar, when you would like to have reminders in different calendars: Personal, Work, Pet, and so on.

In the Backpack Calendar forums, 37signals' own Jason Friedman notes that they weren't happy with the repeating events implementation, and decided not to include it the 1.0 release. So at least for now, the best way to get this function is D's suggestion, but it's nice to know it is being worked on, and we can expect it in the future. I hope this upcoming implementation allows for the setting of a time other than thirty minutes before. + Single, all-day events should be displayed in the same way as multiple-day events. This was a suggestion by Ryan Christensen in the announcement's comments. This would distinguish the all-day event, like my aforementioned parents' anniversary, from a time-specific event, like "Give the dog his heartworm pill at noon". + To-do list implementation for the calendar. Again, from the comments to the announcement, Jeff Croft asks about this, specifically that supported by the iCalendar format. Probably ninety-five percent of what I personally use Backpack for is some sort of to-do list. For short-term stuff, I would love to see this implemented in the Calendar, but have lived without it this far. I would much rather see 37signals devote developer time to repeating events and print styles, something they still need for Backpack's regular pages. All in all, the Calendar function in Backpack is simple and elegant, and on par with what I would expect from 37signals. It took them two and a half months to arrive at this point; I hope the next two and a half months result in usability improvements which put the Backpack Calendar over the top.

Server migration

We're moving servers, thanks to the efforts of Jim, our sysadmin extraordinaire, so this site and its related entities will be unavailable for a while, beginning around 8 PM CST this evening. This includes e-mail, so if you try to send anything to my e-mail address at this domain after 8 PM, you may want to wait until tomorrow.

Miscellany

If only I had room in any of my bathrooms for one of these.

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Just when you think there might be some hope in this world that the tide of sexual immorality would take a turn for the better, something like the Shame On You Kit pops up. How about never putting yourself in the situation to have to have a "Shame On You Kit"?

* * *

As a satisfied customer, I highly recommend KnowledgeNews, which today had a bit on the differences between viruses and bacteria. I loved this analogy:

Imagine it this way. If just one of the 10 to 100 trillion cells in your body were the size of a baseball park, the average bacterium would be the size of the pitcher's mound. The average virus would be the size of the baseball.

Miscellany

The federal government is apparently looking at creating a national SMS alert system. [Via MobileTracker.]

* * *

Congratulations to Kyle MacDonald, who, one year and fourteen trades later, bartered a red paper clip for a house.

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Making sure you tipped the right amount after the fact doesn't do your server much good, does it?

Miscellany

John points to a 94x magnification of Velcro being pulled apart. Wicked cool. You can also see Scotch tape being ripped, more Velcro, still more Velcro, and Equisetum strobilus, all worth a look.

* * *

How much do I love Default Folder? Its functionality should be built in to OS X. (I was just using it quite a bit today, lots of saving in different locales, etc., and I thought a shout-out was in order.)

* * *

After months of waiting, I found it. Part of a pint was consumed this evening. It was yummy. Retrophisch™ Recommended!

Tivoli's latest iPod accessory

It's a shame that at the time I reviewed the Tivoli Audio iSongBook, there wasn't the black version. Such is life. Now, Tivoli has the unusually-named iYiYi coming in the fall. Billed as a digital home entertainment system, the iYiYi doesn't look to have many more features than the iSongBook, but it does have a deeper casing. This means it's not as portable as the iSongBook, but will likely sound better, since the iYiYi will be capable of delivering deeper, fuller bass sounds, one of the areas in which I found the iSongBook lacking. [Wave of the phin to Uncrate.]

Adium 1.0b1

I note with amusement my pal Damien's post on TUAW regarding the release of the 1.0b1 version of Adium, in which he writes, "Please note that this is still in beta, though I was using it last night without any significant problems presenting themselves." I realize TUAW's audience includes many non-geek types, who are happily using iChat, and haven't yet discovered Adium, but it still brought a grin to my face to see a somewhat boilerplate beta-warning line for software that, while technically still in development, has been very stable--for me, at least--over the past year I've been using it. This is the first version I've seen with the 1.0 moniker attached to it in any form. If you don't use the voice and video chat features of iChat much, you should check out Adium (new beta). It supports multiple chat protocols (AIM, Yahoo, MSN Messenger, Jabber (Gtalk), ICQ, IRC, and more...), has a logging feature I have found most useful in finding URIs or other bits of info I forgot to note elsewhere, and is open source, so there's no proprietary lock-in, if that's something you're concerned about.

Another Firefox benefit

Blake Ross gives yet another reason to consider Firefox over Internet Explorer:

People ask me, "Well, gee, if IE7 is starting to catch up to Firefox, and if they've got their hand back in development right now, and eventually they might actually catch up to Firefox in terms of features, what's the benefit of using Firefox? Why are you guys still around if you say that your only goal is just to make the Web a better place?"

My answer to that is, how much can you really trust a company that five years ago completely left you abandoned? If they do, in fact, succeed in taking back some of the market share that Firefox has gotten back from them, who's to say that they're not going to disappear again? My issue is not so much at a product level, it's at a company level. How do you trust a company that left everyone out in the cold for five years?

Miscellany

Photojojo has a review of the Lensbaby 2.0, a $149 retro novelty lens for digital SLRs.

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From the "Things That Make You Go 'Huh?'" Department, Tom gives us Mr. Martin Heidegger. After reading Heidegger's quote, I have the mental equivalent of wanting to get a bad taste out of my mouth...

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In line with my smart-aleck nature, there are more good t-shirts I want, but I would need to perform a serious shirt purge first.

Lee is going to hate me for sharing this...

Just downloaded the 214 MB Mac OS X 10.4.7 Intel Combo updater at a rate of 1.6 MB per second. That's a big B. As in megabytes. Fiber optic rocks.

Miscellany

I love the build names for Ubuntu Linux: "Breezy Badger", "Dapper Drake". Are they all alliteral? [Via Paul.]

* * *

Though I don't do nearly enough of either, I love hiking and camping, and could see myself as a flashpacker.

* * *

Stephen H. Wildstrom has the latest idiotic move by the recording industry, which is suing XM Satellite Radio over its Inno portable receiver/recorder. Even though there's no way to get the XM-specific music files off the Inno (yet), and despite the millions and millions of dollars in royalties XM already pays the music industry, the Inno is obviously a threat to the future of music as we know it and it must be stopped. In other news, consumers welcomed more artists as the latter left the major music labels...

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Entrepreneurs should check out the WSJ's StartupJournal.

Reason #37 to Avoid Internet Explorer

Per Paul Stamatio, as if you needed thirty-six other reasons.

Killing .Mac, part 1

I renewed my .Mac subscription last year, though I did so with reservations. That was the last time I will renew, and come October, I will be .Mac-less for the first time since the service was the original, free iTools. With every feature "update", I am finding less and less value in the service for myself. I am not alone in my feelings, and Khoi Vinh sums up a lot of how I feel. Your own mileage may vary. I thought I would begin the process of replacing the features I use with .Mac, keeping in mind the sum total of the replacements not exceed .Mac's annual price tag of $99.95. Steven Frank offers alternatives, and I will likely touch on many of those as well. Anti-Virus
To begin the replacement process, I started with virus protection. When McAfee began to have issues with Virex 7.5, before and after the introduction of Mac OS X Tiger, I went looking for another anti-virus solution. Granted, we have yet to have a serious virus infection of the OS X community, but it never hurts to be prepared. I now use ClamXav to fend off the nasties. The only downside to ClamXav is a lack of protection from Visual Basic-based macro viruses, which infect Microsoft Office documents. Personally, though I own Office, I use its components rarely, so this isn't a showstopper for me. If the applications of Office are some of your mainstays, however, you might want to investigate Norton AntiVirus or VirusBarrier. It should be noted that Apple no longer includes any anti-virus package with .Mac, so even if I were to pay for NAV or VirusBarrier, it wouldn't be counted against the $99.95 cost of .Mac. E-mail
Besides the former use of Virex, another feature I'm using with .Mac is the @mac.com e-mail address. At the last revision of the .Mac feature set, Apple increased the default storage limit to one gigabyte. This is shared space; it is utilized by your .Mac e-mail, as well as any files you upload to your account. Contrast this with Google's Gmail, which gives you, currently, 2.7 GB of space, and counting. (Google slowly increases the storage amount each day.) My Gmail account has become my main e-mail account, with my account on my own domain coming in second. The Gmail web interface is much faster, for me at least, than the .Mac web interface, though with both accounts I use the POP protocol to route the mail to my local e-mail client. So for now, I've replaced the anti-virus software Apple no longer offers, and I've replaced the e-mail service with one that offers more storage and a faster user interface, both at no cost. More on my personal quest to rid myself of .Mac in a future post.