Shutterfly provides print services for Picasa

I've used both Picasa Web Albums and SmugMug for photo services. I've favored SmugMug for several reasons, including that they're much more serious about color profiles, password protection, backup services, unlimited uploads, and they're less expensive [1]. On the other hand Picasa has much better iPhoto integration. (I use PictureSync with SmugMug.) Most of all, however, Picasa hasn't offered print services.

Tonight SmugMug was very buggy. Not just one repeated bug, but several nasty time consuming bugs. I became seriously annoyed, and went back to Picasa. They offer print services, now, and one of my very first photo vendors, Shutterfly, is a featured provider. (I probably still have old albums on Shutterfly.)

So now Picasa offers reasonable print services, even if they may not be the equal of SmugMug's. On the other hand, Picasa has never been as buggy as SmugMug was tonight...

I'm still moving back and forth, but I'm going to use Picasa for a while. Sure SmugMug wins on big by the feature count, but time-eating bugs are intolerable. Also, they're incredibly late with good iPhoto integration.

[1] In fact an old blog posting of mine still generates sufficient SmugMug referalls that the service is free for me. If I really do switch I'll have to turn that link off, but maybe SmugMug will fix its bugs.

Windows Live OneCare: quarantined TightVNC and blocked Microsoft's Advantage update

I was unable to update Microsoft's finkware tool "Windows genuine advantage". I disabled Windows Live OneCare's active scanning and the update finished.

So Live OneCare was blocking Microsoft's update?!

I decided to see what else it was doing. Turns out it had "quarantined" the installer files I had for two VNC products because:

"This program has potentially unwanted behavior ... Remote Control Software ..."

Wow. Anything to do with VNC will evidently be quarantined by OneCare. It's just too risky for regular folk to have.

I'm so glad I mostly use OS X.

Retrospect error -556

My creaky old copy of Retrospect Professional for Windows was returning "error -556": Can't access volume Users on iMacG5, error -556 (backup client: network interface unavailable). Retrospect couldn't find its Clients from the Configure menu either.

I figured it was something to do with "Windows Live One Care". I disabled scanning and firewall, quite Retrospect (necessary), restarted Retrospect, and it found the clients. I then re-enabled everything, but Retrospect could still find the clients. (I did incidentally enable "Network Discovery" in Live One Care -- it had been disabled, but I didn't expect that to make much difference).

So I don't know what's wrong. I'm hoping it's not some odd effect of my relatively new gigabit switch.

Sony Car FM/CD Head Unit: iPod/Audio-In/USB Car FM/CD Stereo: a review

The stock cassette/CD player ("heat unit") in our 10 yo Subaru wagon hiccuped the other day. That was all the excuse I needed, I began shopping for something with an audio-in jack. I'd gotten tired of using the iPod through a cassette adapter -- they kept wearing out and I hoped a better interface would get better sound out of my feeble stock speakers.

I couldn't find a cassette/CD player with an audio in jack. In fact, it was hard to find a cassette player at all! That's a shame, as we've quite a few books on tape. What I found, instead, was the Sony In-Dash Player (CDX-GT610UI) for $170 with installation (+ $40 for wiring harnesses I didn't know about! Clearly the margin on the harness is enormous.).

I'm not an easy going consumer, and I've found a few warts (especially when listening to podcasts), but I still like it. Here's an edited marketing blurb, emphases mine:

52 watts x 4 peak power: Sounded very good until my speakers started rattling. A big improvement on my original player.

MP3/WMA playback: MP3/WMA/AAC and ATRAC3Plus on USB mass storage, CD/CD-R and CD-RW. The max supported bit rate is 320 kps. I've tested with CD-R Joliett format around 715MB, burned by iTunes at only 680MB (data disk, not mp3, because both AAC and MP3), and Disco burned Hybrid CD. All of them played. There was something quirky about displaying the albums, I think I had to wait until the entire metadata of the first tune scrolled by to be able to scroll albums. I've tested with a USB thumb drive and that worked very well. Of course DRMd media (ex. FairPlay AAC) won't work. You have to burn those to a regular CD then re-encode them, or use a transcoder that does something similar.

Satellite-radio/iPod ready: ...XM™ and SIRIUS satellite radio compatible... more on the iPod below

Set of pre-amp outs: A set of pre-amp outputs..

Detachable face: The fluorescent design face flips down and is detachable...

Remote control: Can do everything on the face plate, but the remote may be handy.

Auxiliary input

Installation instructions: A vehicle-specific wiring harness, antenna adapter, installation kit and in-dash player wiring harness are required to install this in-dash player. Use our car audio fit guide to find the accessories that fit your vehicle.

XM™ and SIRIUS Radio require a subscription, tuner and antenna.

I had the installation done by Circuit City. It was a bit hard to schedule the install, but they did a good job over an hour or so. I was surprised by a $40 charge for two wiring harnesses, one that's vehicle specific and one that's device specific. I suspect Circuit City's "free" installation is paid for by the harnesses. The original harness was left in the car. The CC installer told me they'd switch the old player back for free if I sell the car. I didn't get the install tool or directions back, you may wish to ask for these. The iPod cable was routed through the glove compartment.

The Circuit City web site, by the way, implies you need one harness. That's wrong.

I plugged in my iPod and it started up playing some great Jazz (default is "resume mode"). It sounded fabulous. I thought I had a new car. Evidently the speakers have been underutilized for a decade. I did notice that I had to spin the volume dial a bit to crank it up, but there's lots of ceiling -- more than my speakers can handle. Here are my comments so far:

• you should download a manual, you don't want to be without one. As of 4/07, about 6 weeks after I complained, SONY has fixed their web site. You can also try these shortcuts to the install manual and the owner's manual.
  

• I could detach the face plate easily, but I had a very hard time restoring it. I had to put the top right corner in first, then the bottom right, then I could lay in the left side


• You can use the iPod with the aux in or through the iPod cable. The latter charges, has a bit better sound, and has a much weaker UI -- but it's easy to control while driving. On balance I think I prefer using the iPod cable; the ease of pause/skip/replay while driving outweighs the clunky UI. I select my Playlist before I plug in the cable. I'm going to rename the Playlists I most often use in the car so they'll be at the top of the SONY's alphabetic sort. If you study the manual and use Playlists I think you can make the SONY UI work tolerably well - except for podcasts (see below).
  
  
• the preprogrammed equalizer modes are silly
  
  
• support is supposedly via www.sony.com/xplod (awful web site)
  
  
• the USB connection is powered, so you might be able to run a USB powered hard drive with a single cable. A car is a tough place for a hard drive, but it sure is tempting. Be careful, I tried charging my despised Motorola RAZRZ with mixed results. The phone detected a "data cable connection" and started charging, but when I unplugged it neither the USB drive nor the CD were working (the tuner worked). I had to turn off the car for a couple of minutes to restore everything. I think I crashed the sound system.
  
  
• I've experimented with leaving some old thumb drives or adapted CF cards in the car with specific excerpts from my music. I also now have 4 mixed AAC and MP3 CDs with music and podcasts arranged in folders -- for children, me, etc. Given the limits of the unit's interface, I advise having no more than 4 folders/device. A half-dozen CDs each with 2-3 folders is just right for many purposes. I keep my podcasts on the thumb drive since they change often.
  
  I tried a 2GB "thumb drive" but it "wasn't supported". The Windows 'remove hardware' utility may explain the issue. A standard "thumb drive" shows up as: "USB Mass Storage Device/Generic USB Flash Drive ...", but this 2GB SD card/reader shows up as "USB Mass Storage Device/Generic- SD/MMC USB Device". I think this "thumb drive" holding a SD card appears to the SONY to be a "hub", and the manual explicitly states that USB hubs are not suppored.
  
  I also found a problem with copying music from OS X; OS X creates hidden "dot" files on SMB shares to hold metadata and resource forks, the radio treats these as tracks but can't read them. The symptom is that the player seems to skip every other track, this is annoying but not serious.
  
  
• The volume dial is the "select" control and the source button is also power on.
  
  
• The "resume" support works very well. I switch from the CD-R to the USB and it plays where it last left off.
  

Some notes from the all too easy-to-lose manual

• set the clock

press and hold select button

press repeatedly until clock-adj

press seek + to get hour indication

rotate the volume control to set hour and minute, press Seek +/- to toggle time unit

press select to complete.

• a reset button is located behind the front panel. RESET if buttons don't work or CD won't eject. If the unit loses power, you need to reset on startup. (ex. disconnected, battery dies, change battery, etc.)
  
  
• if press seek twice within 1 second and hold on the second press it will "skip tracks continuously"
  
  
• the setup options change based on the selected source. A bit confusing!
  
  
• press and hold DSPL to change display brightness
  
  
• BTM is "best tune mode": press and hold and it will very quickly autoassign the first 6 stations to numbers 1-6. Probably best when traveling, switch to FM 3 for example. I don't know if it will remember what station was last assigned, if it did you could auto-assign 12 stations between FM2 and FM3. Save FM1 for memorized using the standard "press and hold" number to memorize.
  
  
• iPod starts in 'resume mode'. So you can select on iPod where you want to start, then sleep, then connect and it will play. Press 1/2 to enable the repeat, shuffle, and scan functions. 1/2 also skip and (if held) skip continuously. Mode changes album -> artist -> playlist. During play 3/4 give options to repeat or shuffle track/album/artist/playlist/all. In non-shuffle play hold 5 to enter scan mode, play 10 seconds of each track. (Press again to stop scan?)
  
  
• Press select button to get balance/fade/subwoofer and to customize equalizer curve (spin dial) and to enter setup and change setup menu options. Volume dial selects. I turned off "beep" but I'm still getting an annoying 4 tone warning when I turn off the ignition. It's a reminder to remove the face plate, but I don't want it. I don't think this can be disabled. You can also set "Local-On" here, that limits radio pickup to stronger stations. (Note: to get the radio options you need to select radio in source.)
  
  
• USB (thumb drive - Flash Drive only?, etc) mass storage device. Press 3 or 4 to move between track, album, shuffle album and shuffle track modes. Select shuffle off or "orff" to return to normal play mode. Folders show up as albums. Max 512 albums, 65,535 tracks.
  
  
• CD: Folders show up as albums. Max 150. Max 300 tracks and folders. 32 char for names is safest. Don't use multi-session CD.
  
  
• iPod's supported: all recent, first generation Nano and beyond, 3rd generation iPod and beyond, iPod photo.
  
  
• Error messages:
  OFFSET error message: it's broken. Bring to dealer. (Try reset?)
  OVERLOAD: bad USB device

Some iTunes notes for use with this device

• You can burn your Data CDs from iTunes, mixing MP3 and non-FairPlay AAC. iTunes prefixes each file item with a number and puts everything in one folder. Note you can't create an MP3 CD from iTunes if your music is AAC, but this car stereo doesn't care. AAC is just fine. I prefer to define my Playlist in iTunes, then drag and drop the files to the desktop, organize them there into folders as desired, and then burn the CD from the desktop. There's an iTunes bug with this, if some files don't make it restart iTunes and drag 50-100 at a time.
  
• iTunes can change your ID-3 tags to different versions or adjust character strings for you.

Update 5/7/07 and 7/26/07: What's not to like?

Now that I've used this device for a few months I have a few nits and one nasty.

• nasty: The engineers weren't thinking about podcasts. The UI is optimized for navigating 3 minute tunes, not 60 minute programs. For example, the fast-forward and rewind buttons work with fixed 15 second increments, and if you slip a bit and press twice you hop to the beginning of a podcast! You can spend 5-10 minutes pressing the button as you try to find your way back to the last 10 minutes of the program (best to do this while waiting for lights to change!). Even if you're using an iPod, you're stuck with this UI because the SONY iPod interface disables the iPod's native controls. SONY should have had the fast-forward and rewind intervals scale, so if you keep pressing it would start to jump at 30 second, 1 minute, 5 minute and 10 minute intervals. This has become a bigger issue the more I use the unit. It's an interesting example of how a device incrementally adapts to new technologies. I think there were examples in early cars of devices that really only made sense in horse drawn buggies.
• nasty nit/nasty: For weeks I thought some insane marketing droid had betrayed the engineering team and forced a marketing message to blink whenever the device was off. It was so irritating I began to fantasize about hacking the ROM. Mercifully, a comment (see below) put me out of my misery. This is the demo mode. Page 12 of the user manual tells you how to disable it. I turned this into a "nit" when I figured the "demo mode" was my mistake, but I've since learned this is the default setting. Grrr. So it's nasty nit.
• nit/nasty: Be careful to use true USB "thumb drives", anything that "looks" like a hub (ex. removable SD card in some holders) won't work. I don't know how well a USB hard drive will work, but a car is not a great place for a hard drive.
  
• nit: Every time you turn off the ignition it chirps 4 times. This can't be disabled. It's reminding me to take off the face plate, but that's a pain and I don't bother. There should be an option to turn this off.
• nit: It would be nice to have a dedicated "play/pause" button.
• nit: You need to really study the manual to get full value from this, but that's an inevitable consequence of a product that does so much. It's generally well designed.
• nit: Silly equalizer presets.
• nit: the display is not very effective. I don't really need to know the song format - ever. They could have made significantly better use of the limited real estate.
  

Update 8/20/08:

I've now been using this device for over a year. I suspect SONY doesn't sell the original model number by now. My original conclusions stand up well. I would add these from longterm experience:

• I've never had to deal with the reset button.
• You do need to keep the manual around. It's easy to forget how to adjust bass, treble, etc.
• The head unit iPhone cable won't charge iPhone 2.0. This is because Apple removed "firewire" charging from iPhone 2.0; many care devices turn out to use the 12V firewire option (since cars use 12V electrical systems). This is a royal nuisance, though I wonder if Apple removed firewire charging to reduce the risk of electrical problems that have been found in some iPod devices.
  
• The embedded software that controls a connected iPod/iPhone is quite awkward and can get confused by a video device. I prefer to choose my playlist, etc prior to connecting my device, then use the head unit only to pause and play.
• The fast forward and rewind controls are inadequate for navigating podcasts (ex. on my USB thumb drive). It takes too long to move through 30 minutes+ of audio. SONY needed to add an "acceleration" behavior.

I hope SONY will resolve some of the above limitations in a future release. I still very much appreciate the unit and I'm glad I bought it.

Update 5/5/09: The Griffin Firewire to USB converter works for me. I can use my car stereo connector again.

Screen capture to clipboard

Another bloody kb combo to learn:

Apple - Pro - Tips - The Secret Screen Capture Shortcut

...Okay, you probably already know the ol’ Command-Shift-3 shortcut for taking a screen capture of your entire screen, and you may even know about Command-Shift-4, which gives you a crosshair cursor so you can choose which area of the screen you want to capture. But perhaps the coolest, most-secret hidden capture shortcut is Control-Command-Shift-3 (or 4), which, instead of creating a file on your desktop, copies the capture into your Clipboard memory, so you can paste it where you want.

It works.

Sigh.

Cmd-Opt-Eject to lock screen

OS X now uses hibernation instead of old-fashioned sleep -- at least on MacTel machines. Risky, it's easy to shut a laptop, sling it into a bag, and walk off with the hard drive still spinning. (The way too small sleep indicator on the MacBook contributes to the problem.)

Worse, hibernation mode means someone can browse the disk image and extract the content of memory -- including usernames and passwords.

So this OS X Hint tells users how to: Disable Safe Sleep for faster sleep on lid close.

Personally I'll skip this one, but from comments I learned how to lock a screen quickly from the kb: Hold Command-Option and then tap the Eject button. The machine doesn't go to sleep any more quickly than tapping Power-S, but the lock is instantaneous (if you have the machine set to request a pw on wake from sleep). Handy when you're trying to get the laptop away from the kids. It doesn't work on every laptop apparently, but it's fine on my MacBook Core-2 Duo.

Export a book as a QuickTime movie in iPhoto 6

Another undocumented iPhoto feature:

macosxhints.com - Export a book as a QuickTime movie in iPhoto 6

...Create a book in iPhoto. With the book selected, Option-click on the Play button. The slideshow settings panel appears as it normally would. The difference, however, is that when you click the Play button in the panel, you're prompted to save the slideshow as a movie. Pick a save location, name the movie, click Export, then wait. No need to invoke iDVD...

Amazon S3 and a Firefox based file manager

Coding Horror: Using Amazon S3 as an Image Hosting Service is another excellent CH article and comment collection. S3 is said to be a favorite startup storage facility. CH describes a Firefox based S3 file browser.

Windows NTFS almost has basic file system indirection

Shell-Shocked :: Windows Symbolic and Hard Links. It's in there, it just doesn't work very well. Reminds me of NTFS forks, which include MacOS-like resources and other alternative file streams.

I think WinFS was supposed to replace all of this semi-hacked technology. If Vista had really come with WinFS, I'd have been seriously interested in it.

A tutorial on website bandwidth, RSS outsourcing, and image outsourcing

Coding Horror: Reducing Your Website's Bandwidth Usage is an excellent, brief, tutorial on the state of the web art. Among other things, I learned about image outsourcing with Imageshack, why people use FeedBurner (outsource the RSS burden), the huge cost of badly written RSS readers, HTTP compression (ok, I knew about that, but it's rarely mentioned), JavaScript and CSS optimization. An excellent reference to keep at hand.

I do need to learn more about FeedBurner. There's evidently a reason it's so popular.

Update: check out the comments too. S3 is mentioned a content host a few times.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: Impressive

I'm impressed. I tried Adobe - Photoshop Lightroom (OS X) when it was in beta and I wasn't that keen on it, but it's come a long way. Editing tasks are quite fast on my G5 iMac, certainly faster than Aperture, but even quicker than iPhoto. You can actually edit a date in Lightroom, which you can't do in Aperture (still). (Ok, so there are bugs in dates prior to 1600 or so ...)

The relatively small number of keyboard shortcuts are just right to make quick work of editing. I quickly got the hang of ~, R, G, Cmd-U, etc. The auto-correction and several tools for saving and applying sets of editing operations worked quickly and well.

I don't see the powerful querying and image management tools I used during my Aperture trial however. They may be there, I haven't finished looking at the app yet.

If Adobe had decided to support migrating from iPhoto I'd be strongly tempted to buy it. Of course they didn't. Lightroom is not a good option for anyone with a great deal of metada in iPhoto, but it may be the best bet for just about everyone else. This 1.0 release of Lightroom seems better put together than Aperture 1.52.

Did I mention the user interface is clear and readable -- unlike Aperture's bizarre non-Apple GUI?

Apple needs to get in gear. They're already losing a race that's barely started.

Update 3/8/07: I've found my first nasty bug. On occasion Lightroom reports it cannot import an image. It may even say it can't be read. On a retry Lightroom reads it. Image Capture, iPhoto, etc have no problem with the same image.

Jon Udell tackles the multiple calendar problem

Jon Udell wrote some fabulous columns for BYTE magazine in its heyday [1]. He always looked harder and farther than anyone else. So I'm delighted to see he feels the multi-calendar pain, and he's writing about it ...

Calendar cross-publishing concepts � Jon Udell

... The private URL [Google Calendar] is what we’re looking for. And in particular, the iCal flavor of the private URL. That’s what other calendar programs, including Outlook, can latch onto to subscribe to this calendar. The URL that Google produces starts with http:// and, when you plug it into Outlook 2007, bingo, there’s the family calendar nicely merged in with the work calendar...

Huh!? Outlook 2007 will integrate an iCal source with the work calendar? Maybe Office 2007 isn't all bad after all.

This does mean that family events go into the work world, which I dislike. I'd much rather have the work events to to a secured family calendar, but of course my employer doesn't care for that. Jon says Outlook 2007 will publish to a WebDav server:

... When you publish your Outlook calendar to WebDAV and then try to subscribe from Google Calendar, you’ll fail if the calendar is secured with HTTP basic authentication. (However, Apple iCal will succeed in this case.) If you instead allow anonymous access to the WebDAV-hosted calendar it’ll work in Google Calendar, but only if you alter the sharing URL produced by Outlook, changing webcal:// to http://...

Hmm. If I sign up for .Mac I get a WebDAV server and a family Calendar sync. If I can also integrate my work calendar ...

The multi-calendar problem is driving me bonkers. I remember the blessed days when I could sort-of-get Outlook to selectively sync certain categories with my Palm. Back then, I had a full calendar view on my Palm and at home, and a work only view at Work. Alas, an immense number of bugs and design flaws made me give up on that solution; I've had two cursed calendars ever since. The problem is all the more painful given that there was once a pretty decent solution ...

[1] There's nothing like BYTE in the world today. I'm convinced its demise set back progress in personal computing by several years. I'd always felt Microsoft's relative enmity (PC Magazine wrote whatever they wanted, so they got the goodies) was partly responsible for BYTE's demise, so it's a bit ironic that Jon now works for the Empire.

How to manage office space for growth

Office Space Calculations - Joel on Software

A handy guide for anyone considering a startup.

Vista is slow. How to make it tolerable, the perfomance penalty of antivirals, and OS X rules

Coding Horror is a Windows guy. So when he says that the default configuration of Vista is substantially slower than XP, you know there's a problem. It turns out, however, that you can configure Vista to behave a bit like OS X, in which case it's about as fast as XP. Until you add anti-viral software, then it's slow again.

I particularly appreciated the comments on antiviral software. I'm surprised this doesn't get more attention, any serious geek has loathed the performance drag and bugginess of antiviral software ever since it came out. I had to retire my mother's Win 98 box, for example, not because it was too slow to run Firefox, but because it was too slow to run Norton Antivirus. One of the reasons OS X is faster and more stable than XP is because you can use it quite safely without antiviral software. Here's more from CH (emphases and annotations mine):

Coding Horror: Choosing Anti-Anti-Virus Software

... For best performance, the first thing I do on any new Vista install is this:

1. Turn off Windows Defender
2. Turn off Windows Firewall
3. Disable System Protection
4. Disable UAC

I've had friends remark how "slow" Vista feels compared to XP, but when I ask them whether they've disabled Defender or UAC, the answer is typically no. Of course your system is going to be slower with all these added security checks. Security is expensive, and there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. [jf: I'd say OS X is still a free lunch. For now.]

You might argue that three out of these four security features wouldn't even be necessary in the first place if Windows had originally followed the well-worn UNIX convention of separating standard users from privileged administrators. [jf: I'm amazed that some people run OS X as an admin. There's no reason I can think of to do that. It's just dumb.]...

... If you're really serious about security, then create a new user account with non-Administrator privileges, and log in as that user. This isn't the default behavior in Vista, sadly. Post install, you get an Administrator-But-Not-Really-Just-Kidding account which triggers UAC on any action that requires administrator privileges.

...Vista is probably the first Microsoft operating system ever where you can actually work effectively as a standard, non-privileged user. As a standard user, you get all the benefits of UAC, Defender, and System Protection.. without all the performance drain. [jf: This is how OS X works, except escalation to admin privileges is available when needed at the cost of entering a username and password. It's no bother, I rarely switch to my admin account.]

... Speaking of retrograde, band-aid, destroy all my computer's performance security, the one security feature Vista doesn't bundle is anti-virus software. And nothing cripples your PC's performance quite like anti-virus software. This isn't terribly surprising if you consider what anti-virus software has to do: examine every single byte of data that passes through your computer for evidence of malicious activity. But who needs theory when we have Oli at The PC Spy. Oli conducted a remarkably thorough investigation of the real world performance impact of security software on the PC. The results are truly eye-opening:

Percent slower: Boot CPU Disk

Norton Internet Security 2006 46% 20% 2369%
McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8 7% 20% 2246%
Norton Internet Security 2007 45% 8% 1515%
Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006 2% 0% 1288%
ZoneAlarm ISS 16% 0% 992%
Norton Antivirus 2002 11% 8% 658%
Windows Live OneCare 11% 8% 512%
Webroot Spy Sweeper 6% 8% 369%
Nod32 v2.5 7% 8% 177%
avast! 4.7 Home 4% 8% 115%
Windows Defender 5% 8% 54% [jf: Microsoft's product. I bought this on the theory Microsoft would be most likely to limit performance hits]
Panda Antivirus 2007 20% 4% 15%
AVG 7.1 Free 15% 0% 19%

The worst offenders are the anti-virus suites with real-time protection. According to these results, the latest Norton Internet Security degrades boot time by nearly 50 percent. And no, that isn't a typo in the disk column. It also makes all disk access sixteen times slower! Even the better performers in this table would have a profoundly negative impact on your PC's performance. Windows Defender, for example, "only" makes hard drive access 54 percent slower...

...I've never run any anti-virus software. And Mac or Linux (aka UNIX) users almost never run anti-virus software, either. ..

I don't agree with removing antiviral software from an XP box, though I do disable antiviral realtime software when I need to do major database work. Sooner or later some goof-up happens, and before you know it the machine is a spambot. I do think that Windows 95 or 98 users might be able nowadays to go without, a lot of viruses won't run on such old machines and OSs.

I may end up switching my Parallels Win2K VM to Vista Lite if I can get a cheap license, so it's nice to have this recipe at hand.

StuffIt Expander: A parasitic spawn and hideous evil

My new MacAlly keyboard came with stuffit compressed drivers. I almost returned it. StuffIt, once a respectable product, became a scourge under new ownership. It's buggy, adds no value to native solutions, can break the native OS X zip archive, and the distribution process requires one to sign up for spam.

I kept the keyboard, because it's about 10 times better than the egregious junk Apple ships, but I did pass on my concerns to MacAlly. Alas, they didn't seem to get the problem.

All of which is to say I found this blast from an ex-"Apple Genius" very validating:

ungenius - Third Party Apps

... I have some special words about StuffIt Expander, though. StuffIt Expander is a scourge upon our industry and should be viciously and stubbornly squashed, mashed, neglected, and uninstalled from all encountered computers at every opportunity. With the prevalence and openness of ZIP, up to and including its status as the default archiver for OS X, and The Unarchiver there is absolutely no reason to inflict this hideous evil upon another soul. Expurgate it from your repertoire and don't hesitate to call upon the services of a licensed exorcist if necessary.

If you ever see .SIT on a file you download, send the vendor this link or a link to the Apple Genius site. If you can suggest better links please add them in the comments below. We need to get vendors like MacAlly to see the light.