Only a year ago Bloglines beat Google Reader in my tests. Alas, Bloglines stayed about the same (save for a very flaky beta), and Reader kept improving.
Eventually my iPhone moved me to Google Reader, and I discovered the joy of shared posts.
There are still a few things I miss from Bloglines - like the disposable email feeds, the package tracking, and the very easy to share bloglist. Overall though it's no contest now, Google Reader is far superior.
Every Reader account has one 'shared' post feed. The shared post feed is dynamically created by clicking an icon while reading a post. Here’s my shared post list. It’s not obvious or well documented, but this share has its own feed (FF reveals it) [1].
You can embed the shared post feed in web pages, such as in the side bar of my Tech and Notes blog, or in conventional web pages. Alas, the embeded Gadget doesn't show the optional annotations one can attach to a shared post. Only the web view or the feed include the annotations.
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to universally share the Friend feed [3], so I can only see those of people on my Gmail contacts list. Even so, it's great.
I read Jacob Reider's feed regularly, and that spares me hours of reading the tedious journals of our shared industry. Jacob reads them for me, picks out the good stuff, and shares it. I owe you some beers Jacob.
Play with shared feeds -- you won't regret it. It's a lightweight form of blogging, without any authoring anxiety. Now if only my good friends were about 20 years younger, I might be able to enlist more of them in this shared processing and shared memory task ...
[1] Reader won't allow you to subscribe to it as a conventional feed, but other clients will. The feed shows your annotations.
[2] I'd much appreciate it if one of my readers were to try adding the undocumented feed to their Google Reader -- I'd like to know if it shows up as Shared Feed from a "friend". Please add a comment to that effect. Then you can delete it of course!
[3] Apparently due to complaints about privacy?! The default mode is private, so this feels like a user error problem.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Newest Sansa SanDisk STILL doesn't support AAC - weird
File under weird.
My SONY car radio plays AAC. My Nintendo Wii supports AAC. My wife's BlackBerry plays AAC. But the newest Sansa SanDisk still doesn't support AAC ... (note the As in AAC do not stand for Apple).
My SONY car radio plays AAC. My Nintendo Wii supports AAC. My wife's BlackBerry plays AAC. But the newest Sansa SanDisk still doesn't support AAC ... (note the As in AAC do not stand for Apple).
SanDisk Sansa e200 MP3 playerYeah, right ... convert. Ever tried it? Takes ages, terrible results. I'd look at these Sansa things for my kids if they had AAC support. Does Apple pay SanDisk to avoid AAC?
... Sometimes ,there are some unsupported audio format musics you like very much,such as a favourite video movie song.So ,what can you do? Don't worry,there are a lot of audio/video converter softwares which can help to solve the problem. For example ,Xilisoft Audio Converter 2.1. provides an easy and completed way to convert between all popular audio formats, such as MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, FALC, OGG, APE, MP4, M4A, MP2, VQF etc....
Monday, September 08, 2008
Video conferencing tools - state of the Windows market
I'll claim the best low cost video-conferencing solution on the market today is iChat.
It's OS X only of course. On the Windows side, this review lists about 16 iChat wannabes. It's just a list though, it doesn't tell you which are any good and which are on life support. I suspect all but Skype will be gone in a year or so.
The real message is that affordable video conferencing may finally escape from the icky home porn and the annoying 'young-geek-seeking-mate' industries.
Now if any of the competitors can provide an iChat like experience (esp. as with the original iSight firewire), we might get to save some gas money. I have a hunch we'll need either USB 3 (I miss firewire) or on-camera MPEG-4 like compression to really get where we need to go.
It's OS X only of course. On the Windows side, this review lists about 16 iChat wannabes. It's just a list though, it doesn't tell you which are any good and which are on life support. I suspect all but Skype will be gone in a year or so.
The real message is that affordable video conferencing may finally escape from the icky home porn and the annoying 'young-geek-seeking-mate' industries.
Now if any of the competitors can provide an iChat like experience (esp. as with the original iSight firewire), we might get to save some gas money. I have a hunch we'll need either USB 3 (I miss firewire) or on-camera MPEG-4 like compression to really get where we need to go.
Nerdvana now: Our family calendar is working – and how Gmail parses Outlook invites
A year ago I was struggling to reach the nerdvana of family calendar integration.
Now the end is almost in sight.
Emily’s Blackberry Pearl syncs reliably and near instantly to her calendar in our family domain Google Apps suite. My iPhone syncs reliably but only once daily, via Spanning Sync and iCal to my family domain calendar. Our shared Google Calendars allow both of us to see a joint calendar.
Meanwhile, work/home calendar integration may be possible – someday, at some price. For now, however, some appointments need double entry.
I’m pleased to say there’s an easy way to do that – it works far better than expected.
When I create an Outlook appointment that I want on my personal calendar, I invite my family domain email address. Gmail processes the structured message and creates a meeting invite that moves with one click to my Google Calendar.
From my gCal, the next time I sync with iTunes, the appointment will move to my iPhone. It will immediately be visible on my wife’s Pearl.
Wow. We’re making progress … slowly, but it will happen.
Now when iPhone 2.1 comes out and Emily inherits my iPhone 2.0 ...
Update 1/6/10: We did reach Nerdvana, though Emily got the 3GS and I stuck with the old 3G. All of the family calendars are on Google (mixture of Google Apps and personal for historic reasons); we use CalDAV to sync to our iPhones. My iPhone has push sync wiht my work calendar by connecting to my corporate (Microsoft ActiveSync) server and through my iPhone I can integrate all family and my work calendar. I also do a one way reflection of my work calendar to Google using Google's calendar sync -- that's read only.
The Lunarpages to DreamHost transition – summarized
I’ve moved my last lunarpages hosted domain and all my web services now live on DreamHost.
It was a technically challenging migration for me, though having worked through it I could probably do the entire thing in two evenings. Below is a list of the key posts and explanations if you have to ever do this. Note that the posts are updated as I learned things, so you really do need to read ‘em through to avoid my mistakes.
- Migrating a domain with related Google Apps and hosting files to a new service: This one worried me the most, but turned out to be straightforward. I learned a lot about how DNS works.
- The DreamHost migration moving the first domain
- The DreamHost migration getting a transfer authorization code: This stuff works well, I recommend creating a spreadsheet/table to track dates and migration stages for each domain. (Ex: review email settings on domain, get TAC, unlock domain, fill out DH form, get email from DH, authorize, get email from domain host, authorize, get confirmation from DH)
- DreamHost a better Google Apps choice than Google: You get everything Google Apps provide, with more control, a consolidated domain management environment, and the ability to add additional services.
- How to move files from one web site hosting service to another: This was where I floundered the most. I could have done it all in a few minutes of my time (hours of computer time) if I’d understood the archive transfer process.
I’m very pleased with DreamHost – all of the issues I had with Lunarpages seem to have been resolved.
I do want to mention that Lunarpages was very cooperative during the migration; Network Solutions resisted one domain move a bit, but Lunarpages never kicked. They also provided the ability to download an archive of my entire Lunarpages site collection – a good example of data freedom.
Lunarpages is not, by any measure, the worst company I’ve worked with. For several years they provided reasonable service at a good price. My read is that Lunarpages failed to invest in their core business and people, and focused too much on short term returns and cash flow versus long-term health. In the end they weren’t providing enough DNS control to customers, they didn’t stay on top of Google Apps integration, they didn’t provide WebDav services, they weren’t quite honest enough with customers (ex. automatically upgrading customer plans to reflect decreasing costs would have been wise) and they got trapped in a spiral of decreasing quality and increasing support burdens. They’re in a tough spot now, where they need to focus aggressively on customer retention and quality improvement, while taking a large cash flow hit.
Now for my next set of projects: upgrading our main workstation from 10.4 to 10.5, implementing iPhone 2.1, then returning to the synchronization and calendaring wars. (Hint: Our family google calendar is really working – with help from spanning sync).
Sunday, September 07, 2008
DreamHost promotion: unlimited storage - ends 9/10
Figures. I sign up, and a few weeks later DreamHost has a big promotion:
I'm really impressed with them. I think you can do far worse for the price.
If you use my registration code (KATEVA), you might get $50 off (max discount) on sign-up -- though I'm not sure if that applies for the "unlimited storage" promo.
Web Hosting by DreamHost Web HostingThey say "$6/mo", but that's only if you sign up for several years. Really figure $10 a month or so.
UNLIMITED Storage
UNLIMITED Bandwidth
ends Sept 10th
I'm really impressed with them. I think you can do far worse for the price.
If you use my registration code (KATEVA), you might get $50 off (max discount) on sign-up -- though I'm not sure if that applies for the "unlimited storage" promo.
Google: STOP the Page Creator to Sites MobileMess
Google has at least 6 different environments for authoring something like a web page [1].
So it's not hard to understand why they want to discontinue one of them ...
Sure, Sites can embed gadgets -- but I haven't been able to make good use of their other supposed advantages. In particular the "file management" is not a significant improvement over Page Creator's very feeble solution (if you control your domain you can create a Page Creator/domain solution that works pretty well, but that's another topic).
On the other hand Sites pages look awful in Safari/iPhone. Ok, so they look lousy anywhere -- can't Google hire some graphics designers? Still, they're worse than lousy on the iPhone. On any browser the Sites "footer" dynamically expands (why?!), but on the iPhone this tricks Safari/iPhone into filling most of the half-VGA screen with an ugly, empty, footer.
Yes, you can embed Gadgets into Sites pages, but Google has done a lousy job of organizing the Gadget library. In any case, most of Google products generate Javascript code (see Custom Search Engines) - not Gadgets. Sites disallows Javascript (probably for security and CPU burden reasons). So a lot of the things you can embed in Page Creator pages, or even in Blogger posts, can't be embedded in Sites.
There are other issues with Sites -- though Google is slowly chipping away at some of them. Maybe in a year or two Sites will be an adequate replacement for Page Creator.
It's not ready now.
Learn from Apple's foot-shooting blunders Google. Don't migrate until Sites is ready.
[1] Page Creator, Sites, Blogger, Presentation, Spreadsheet, Docs
See also:
So it's not hard to understand why they want to discontinue one of them ...
About Google Page CreatorOk, that's great, but right now Google is doing a "MobileMess". They're replacing one incomplete solution with an even less complete solution.
... We are no longer accepting new sign-ups for Page Creator because we have shifted our focus to developing Google Sites, which offers many of the capabilities of Page Creator along with new features like site-level navigation, site-level headers, control over who can see and edit your site, and rich embeddings like calendars, videos, and Google docs.
If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year...
Sure, Sites can embed gadgets -- but I haven't been able to make good use of their other supposed advantages. In particular the "file management" is not a significant improvement over Page Creator's very feeble solution (if you control your domain you can create a Page Creator/domain solution that works pretty well, but that's another topic).
On the other hand Sites pages look awful in Safari/iPhone. Ok, so they look lousy anywhere -- can't Google hire some graphics designers? Still, they're worse than lousy on the iPhone. On any browser the Sites "footer" dynamically expands (why?!), but on the iPhone this tricks Safari/iPhone into filling most of the half-VGA screen with an ugly, empty, footer.
Yes, you can embed Gadgets into Sites pages, but Google has done a lousy job of organizing the Gadget library. In any case, most of Google products generate Javascript code (see Custom Search Engines) - not Gadgets. Sites disallows Javascript (probably for security and CPU burden reasons). So a lot of the things you can embed in Page Creator pages, or even in Blogger posts, can't be embedded in Sites.
There are other issues with Sites -- though Google is slowly chipping away at some of them. Maybe in a year or two Sites will be an adequate replacement for Page Creator.
It's not ready now.
Learn from Apple's foot-shooting blunders Google. Don't migrate until Sites is ready.
[1] Page Creator, Sites, Blogger, Presentation, Spreadsheet, Docs
See also:
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Misadventures: finding a new home for my Google custom seraches
I'm a big fan of Google Custom Search. I've made my old Page Creator Google hosted custom search page into my start page everywhere.
Alas, Page Creator is going - even though Sites isn't ready. So I really ought to find a new home -- and add some new searches. In particular, I wanted to add a custom search that searched all the web but had the following biases:
Oh, and I wanted the resulting search page to render cleanly in my iPhone.
Of course this turned out to be far harder than I'd imagined. In fact, I'm stymied at the moment.
Creating the new search engine was easy. I exported my Google Reader OPML file and imported into into a new custom search engine using the Advanced feature of "upload annotations".
When I looked at moving the search engines however, I discovered the CSE function that had generated the code for my my old Page Creator Google hosted custom search page was gone!
In its place were a scattered set of ways to embed a search engine. Some appeared in the code tab of a search engine control panel, others appeared only in the "homepage" of a search engine, and one on the CSE overview page that added the entire set to my iGoogle page.
I think there's a bit of entropy setting in here!
I tried adding a Gadget to a Sites page. I knew Sites forbids Javascript, so I couldn't use the other code generation options. I found the code with the hidden Gadget URL on the homepages of my custom searches, I extracted that URL (see prior link) and used the almost invisible "add URL" option you can find in the Sites add gadget dialog.
That worked, but Sites pages look awful on the iPhone.
So then I tried taking the various code fragments generated by the CSE links and embedding them in the (obsolete) Google pages -- but they either failed to work on Google Apps Pages or they worked with Firefox but not the iPhone.
Lastly I tried creating a barebones blog as a faux page management solution. That actually worked well from an editing perspective, but even with some template hacks (remove search bar) the iPhone display was not as good as a simple web page. I tried looking for an iPhone template -- no problem there. I found hundreds of blogger iPhone templates. Turns out there's a mini-industry of Blogger templates and WordPress themes. Trouble is, half the sites look crooked as can be. Blogger doesn't provide an official template.
I've stopped for now. It's sad, but I bet I'll get the best results crafting a page in ... FrontPage 98.
I'll come back to this one -- I feel like I've taken a walk on the dark side of Google.
Update 9/8/08: Wow, was this ever trivial do using FrontPage 98. Instead of wasting an hour with various messed up Google authoring tools, five minutes with FP gave me a decent result. I've created a subdomain redirect, so search.faughnan.com should shortly go to my iPhone friendly custom search page.
It's not quite right -- somehow iPhone is guessing a bit off for initial page size. I'll have to read a bit about iPhone web optimization. Also the code that Google's CSE generates embeds a fairly bulky gadget -- I preferred the old simple forms. It works though, I'll tweak it as needed. ( think this meta tag might help; I used viewport=720.
Proof that Google needs to reexamine their Page Creator/Sites strategies.
Alas, Page Creator is going - even though Sites isn't ready. So I really ought to find a new home -- and add some new searches. In particular, I wanted to add a custom search that searched all the web but had the following biases:
Oh, and I wanted the resulting search page to render cleanly in my iPhone.
Of course this turned out to be far harder than I'd imagined. In fact, I'm stymied at the moment.
Creating the new search engine was easy. I exported my Google Reader OPML file and imported into into a new custom search engine using the Advanced feature of "upload annotations".
When I looked at moving the search engines however, I discovered the CSE function that had generated the code for my my old Page Creator Google hosted custom search page was gone!
In its place were a scattered set of ways to embed a search engine. Some appeared in the code tab of a search engine control panel, others appeared only in the "homepage" of a search engine, and one on the CSE overview page that added the entire set to my iGoogle page.
I think there's a bit of entropy setting in here!
I tried adding a Gadget to a Sites page. I knew Sites forbids Javascript, so I couldn't use the other code generation options. I found the code with the hidden Gadget URL on the homepages of my custom searches, I extracted that URL (see prior link) and used the almost invisible "add URL" option you can find in the Sites add gadget dialog.
That worked, but Sites pages look awful on the iPhone.
So then I tried taking the various code fragments generated by the CSE links and embedding them in the (obsolete) Google pages -- but they either failed to work on Google Apps Pages or they worked with Firefox but not the iPhone.
Lastly I tried creating a barebones blog as a faux page management solution. That actually worked well from an editing perspective, but even with some template hacks (remove search bar) the iPhone display was not as good as a simple web page. I tried looking for an iPhone template -- no problem there. I found hundreds of blogger iPhone templates. Turns out there's a mini-industry of Blogger templates and WordPress themes. Trouble is, half the sites look crooked as can be. Blogger doesn't provide an official template.
I've stopped for now. It's sad, but I bet I'll get the best results crafting a page in ... FrontPage 98.
I'll come back to this one -- I feel like I've taken a walk on the dark side of Google.
Update 9/8/08: Wow, was this ever trivial do using FrontPage 98. Instead of wasting an hour with various messed up Google authoring tools, five minutes with FP gave me a decent result. I've created a subdomain redirect, so search.faughnan.com should shortly go to my iPhone friendly custom search page.
It's not quite right -- somehow iPhone is guessing a bit off for initial page size. I'll have to read a bit about iPhone web optimization. Also the code that Google's CSE generates embeds a fairly bulky gadget -- I preferred the old simple forms. It works though, I'll tweak it as needed. ( think this meta tag might help; I used viewport=720.
Proof that Google needs to reexamine their Page Creator/Sites strategies.
Update 4/11/11: Three years later I adore my custom search engines. I use them all the time. Some things have changed however. When I created a new search engine for special needs services in MSP I couldn't find the code snippets I was looking for on the Custom Search Engine configuration panel. I could only find some ichy dynamic javascript stuff that didn't work well on blogger. The trick for a "search element" hosting option engine is to go to the Google page generated for the search engine and use the "add this search engine" link to get a simple embedded script statement.
Pogue's iPhone tips
I really like Pogue and teams' iPhone the Missing Manual. (emphasis team - Pogue is a brand these days). $17 from Amazon, $25 where I bought it.
You can see how good the book is from the very valuable tips Pogue/O'Reilly gives away for free. Definitely worth a read by any iPhone user -- even if you have his book.
You can see how good the book is from the very valuable tips Pogue/O'Reilly gives away for free. Definitely worth a read by any iPhone user -- even if you have his book.
Friday, September 05, 2008
iPhone work/home synchronization and dual machine sync - not impossible
I wrote a few weeks ago that the iPhone was unlikely to support work/home calendar integration. I previously wrote that you can't sync via the USB cable to two different machines.
Wrong on both counts.
First Alan Faichney tells me he follows this routine:
Wrong on both counts.
First Alan Faichney tells me he follows this routine:
the [home] iTunes machine is the "primary" machine and gets to do the backup. The route I use to synchronise uses Entourage:
The whole Entourage calendar is synched to a single iCal calendar (called "Entourage"!) It means that iCal can't see Outlook categories (Groupcal tried to do this better on Tiger, but it always ended in tears for me), but it does mean that you can keep personal iCal / iPhone calendars out of Exchange Server.
I'm pretty sure I don't follow Alan's setup completely, but it seems the secret is using iCal between the iPhone and Entourage.
So that tells us what's possible if you hack the loopholes, but David Pogue's iPhone Tips and Tricks tells us that Apple has a supported framework for work/home synchronization and an approved method for synchronizing at multiple machines. (Yes, I bought the book. I hate to pay $25 for a computer book, but Pogue had me with these tips. It's a beautiful book and he has the deep knowledge.)
First of all, if you set iTunes to only do manual sync (no auto sync), then you can configure it to sync some things at one machine, and different things at another machine. It can do the backup at home, for example. You probably can't safely sync the same items at two machines however. So this is good for syncing iTunes at home and for what Alan does, but it doesn't get you to easy work/home calendar unification.
To get work/home integration you must abandon the old world of physical connections for calendar and contacts synchronization. Yes, Apple has a vision, and it doesn't involve the USB cable.
The iPhone has a concept of wireless calendar (and contact) providers. So you can have one provider that's MobileMe (personal data) and one that's Exchange server. Both can coexist. I haven't tried this yet myself, but I will research it.
When you go this route I don't think you can sync your iPhone with iCal any longer -- the world of physical cable based synchronization is gone. On the other hand iCal will sync (hourly) with MobileMe, and iCal will sync via Spanning Sync with Google Calendar, so if you're feeling very brave I suppose iCal might bridge gCal and MobileMe, and MobileMe will bridge to the iPhone, which can also connect to exchange server ...
What's the chance of that all working?
Seems low, but the fact that there is some path to work/home calendar sync is heartening.
Now if MobileMe would introduce calendar sharing/subscription or a connection to gCal, or if Google introduces an MobileMe like calendar service for the iPhone ...
Update 11/2/08: North221 has a good comment explaining how Entourage enables selective sync, but it's pretty much read only. I have a later article on work home calendar sync using Google Calendar and Spanning Sync.
Update 11/2/08: North221 has a good comment explaining how Entourage enables selective sync, but it's pretty much read only. I have a later article on work home calendar sync using Google Calendar and Spanning Sync.
Permissions bug in OS X 10.5 - unable to update applications
I hate OS X permissions problems.
There were enough of them before Apple introduced ACLs in 10.4 alongside UNIX permissions. The dual parallel systems hasn't made things any easier.
Evil apps, like just about anything that Adobe makes or anything that uses a VISE installer, are prone to wreck permissions. Rumor has it that using "apply to enclosed items" changes to the Application and Utilities folders can have unexpected consequences.
To add injury to insult, running "Repair Permissions" from the OS X disk utility app never seems to fix anything. (I think that's a Potemkin application).
So, I had a permissions problem. Again.
Since upgrading to 10.5, when I try to update applications by dropping new versions into my (all user) Applications folder I get this message -- despite entering my admin credentials on request: "The operation cannot be completed because you do not have sufficient privileges for some of the items."
The target application will be partly removed at this point. I have to delete it (no problems) and then drop the new one on.
A minor annoyance, but aggravating.
I figured I'd have to fix it sooner or later, but today my daughter complained that her evil Flash using kid sites were crashing. Time to update Adobe's little OS X virus, aka Flash. Except I was getting Access denied errors from the evil VISE (of course) installer. I'd already tried repairing permissions, so I knew I had to do more.
Others had run into the same problem: Apple - Support - Discussions - The operation cannot be completed - you .... VK (level 4!) advised (modified slightly here):
I then did a safe boot restart, then a regular restart, and then I ran repair permissions from Disk Utility. DU didn't like the settings VK recommended -- it changed many of them. I'm not sure who's right here, because an evil app can mess up the permissions database (Ex. an Adobe product) and repair permissions might be getting bad advice.
After that I run Adobe's Flash Installer (drag it from the DMG file to run it). It still gave me access errors, but I was pretty sure I'd removed all Flash stuff by hand. I suspect Adobe's Flash uninstaller is old.
I tried the Flash 9 for Intell installer again (drag it from DMG file to run) and this time I didn't get any privilege warnings.
So now I'll see how my next app update goes. Next step is probably a clean install.
Non-geeks don't have a chance with this stuff - or bad design?
Update 9/16/10: The official fix.
There were enough of them before Apple introduced ACLs in 10.4 alongside UNIX permissions. The dual parallel systems hasn't made things any easier.
Evil apps, like just about anything that Adobe makes or anything that uses a VISE installer, are prone to wreck permissions. Rumor has it that using "apply to enclosed items" changes to the Application and Utilities folders can have unexpected consequences.
To add injury to insult, running "Repair Permissions" from the OS X disk utility app never seems to fix anything. (I think that's a Potemkin application).
So, I had a permissions problem. Again.
Since upgrading to 10.5, when I try to update applications by dropping new versions into my (all user) Applications folder I get this message -- despite entering my admin credentials on request: "The operation cannot be completed because you do not have sufficient privileges for some of the items."
The target application will be partly removed at this point. I have to delete it (no problems) and then drop the new one on.
A minor annoyance, but aggravating.
I figured I'd have to fix it sooner or later, but today my daughter complained that her evil Flash using kid sites were crashing. Time to update Adobe's little OS X virus, aka Flash. Except I was getting Access denied errors from the evil VISE (of course) installer. I'd already tried repairing permissions, so I knew I had to do more.
Others had run into the same problem: Apple - Support - Discussions - The operation cannot be completed - you .... VK (level 4!) advised (modified slightly here):
... sounds like you have incorrect permissions and ACLs on your Applications folder.I tried installing the latest version of Onyx to see if it had a bundled fix, but it didn't. So, with some reluctance, I followed the above.
Run the following terminal commands from an admin account ... copy and paste the commands into a terminal window.
sudo chown -R root:admin /Applications
(This will reset the ownership on /Applications to system defaults.)
You'll have to enter your admin password when its requested. You won't see anything when you enter it. These tasks can take a few minutes to complete, so just wait -- there's no progress dialog. Depending how long execution takes you may need to reenter your password. Wait for the prompt to return before entering commands.
next
sudo chmod -R g+w,+X /Applications
(this should set unix permissions correctly)
next
sudo chmod -RN /Applications
(this will delete all ACLs from everything in /Applications)
next
sudo chmod +a "everyone deny delete" /Applications /Applications/Utilities
(this will put the necessary ACLs back where they belong)
I then did a safe boot restart, then a regular restart, and then I ran repair permissions from Disk Utility. DU didn't like the settings VK recommended -- it changed many of them. I'm not sure who's right here, because an evil app can mess up the permissions database (Ex. an Adobe product) and repair permissions might be getting bad advice.
After that I run Adobe's Flash Installer (drag it from the DMG file to run it). It still gave me access errors, but I was pretty sure I'd removed all Flash stuff by hand. I suspect Adobe's Flash uninstaller is old.
I tried the Flash 9 for Intell installer again (drag it from DMG file to run) and this time I didn't get any privilege warnings.
So now I'll see how my next app update goes. Next step is probably a clean install.
Non-geeks don't have a chance with this stuff - or bad design?
- Having both ACLs and BSD permissions at the same time is just asking for trouble.
- It's wrong that badly behaved installers should be able to wreck permissions. (Apple should at least put up a warning ... something like ... "this ill-bred Adobe product is going to wreck your system, we recommend Aperture instead ..."
- Repair permissions ought to work better than it does. It shouldn't be getting its settings from a corruptible source.
Update 9/16/10: The official fix.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Sync with MobileMe - how to control the direction of the initial sync
The MobileMe help file was useless, but this Apple forum post has the answer. In this case the configuration will overwrite iCal with MobileMe data, but you can invert the direction at step 6.
It's not obvious how to do this for only one of the many sync options you have. I think if you switch to manual sync, then uncheck all but the item you want to sync uni-directionally, you can leave the other sync items untouched.
Apple - Support - Discussions - Help overwriting iCal with Cloud ...I did this with the 10.4 .Mac preferences (after update, the name doesn't change) and it worked there.
1) Open MobileMe Preferences, and click on the 'Sync' tab.
2) Ensure that 'Synchronise with MobileMe' to 'Manual'
3) Click on 'Advanced...'
4) Click on 'Reset Sync Data...'
5) A window will appear, saying 'Replace: {All Sync Info}'. Use the list to change this to:
Replace: {Calendars}
6) Make sure that the animated arrow is flowing from the cloud to the mac. You can change its direction by clicking on the arrows underneath the image.
7) Click on replace.
It's not obvious how to do this for only one of the many sync options you have. I think if you switch to manual sync, then uncheck all but the item you want to sync uni-directionally, you can leave the other sync items untouched.
Google Chrome doesn't like Google Docs
It wasn't hard to see that Chrome doesn't like Google Docs. When I tried to highlight an entire spreadsheet row, the last column was missed. When I tried to copy and paste a row, the results were odd.
Then I pasted into a cell, selected text, and cleared formatting ...
Well, we knew it's early beta.
Still, I didn't expect it to blow up so quickly in Google's own backyard. This ain't subtle, the Chrome team must have know about the problem.
I've seen similar results, maybe a bit better, when I've used Safari on Google Apps. Safari and Chrome both use WebKit, in contrast Gecko browser (Camino, Firefox) work pretty well.
My guess is that there's some bad code in the Google Apps - spreadsheet and probably doc. So maybe the next step is to cleanup Google Apps -- which will help Safari.
At least this bug ain't hard to find!
Then I pasted into a cell, selected text, and cleared formatting ...
Well, we knew it's early beta.Still, I didn't expect it to blow up so quickly in Google's own backyard. This ain't subtle, the Chrome team must have know about the problem.
I've seen similar results, maybe a bit better, when I've used Safari on Google Apps. Safari and Chrome both use WebKit, in contrast Gecko browser (Camino, Firefox) work pretty well.
My guess is that there's some bad code in the Google Apps - spreadsheet and probably doc. So maybe the next step is to cleanup Google Apps -- which will help Safari.
At least this bug ain't hard to find!
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
ATPM's task and GTD app catalog now with iPhone info
ATPM 14.09 - Next Actions: Master List for September is a catalog of OS X apps for "getting things done" -- what we old timers new as a task list (plus).
Now it includes an 'iPhone Presence' indicator. It's a terrific list.
BTW, I'm still pretty happy with the combination of Toodledo (web site) and iPhone ToDo.app. Not cheap, but being able to work with tasks from any computer is worth something.
Now it includes an 'iPhone Presence' indicator. It's a terrific list.
BTW, I'm still pretty happy with the combination of Toodledo (web site) and iPhone ToDo.app. Not cheap, but being able to work with tasks from any computer is worth something.
Picasa web album face tagging - not only fun
I didn't think my wife and her brother looked that much alike, but I can't argue with Google's face recognition algorithm. At a particular angle, in a particular light, there's a definite resemblance!Yes, Picasa's facial recognition software is a grade 2 event ...
It took a day or so, but a lot of faces are recognized. The tagging UI is excellent. I was joking about the Google Profile, but I wasn't far off. Google matches tags against one's Gmail contacts and attaches email addresses in the tags.Gordon's Notes: Singularity alert: Picasa web album face tagging
... Yeah, we all knew it was coming, but it's creepy-cool anyway. Not quite goose bumps, but a grade 2 singularity event. (Grade 7 is when the Great God Google refers you to your soylent green processing station, Grade 1 is personalized search.)
So will Google link the faces to the appropriate Google Profile? You just know they've got that one on their social networking strategy. (So how do kids get their profiles? Is it like Confirmation?)
I love it. Now if there were only some way to sync the tags back to iPhoto ...
I'll report on my tech blog after I try it. I'm sure the servers will be smoking tonight, so it'll take a few days. (Update: yeah, it's pegged. Stuck at 44% of faces.)..
Now we need to sync the tags back to iPhoto. This really needs to be in the next version of everyone's photo management software.
Privacy? Hah. That's strictly for the impoverished and the ultra-rich.
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