Every time I logged into my Lion machine, Aperture started up.
I checked the Login items option on my user account. Nothing there.
Then I figured it was a bug with OS X 10.7 Lion resume. I deleted all the saved states, including Aperture's (Delete Specific Application Saved States from Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Resume).
Didn't help.
Finally, something clued me. This wasn't a new Lion problem, it was the old 'launch Aperture when iPhone connected' bug. Same thing can happen with iPhoto or Image Capture or Preview or "Auto Importer". This particular machine is connected to a USB hub that had some iPhones attached.
I don't know the proper place to control this peculiar OS X behavior, but I do know it can be controlled through Image Capture. I opened that app, and clicked on the iPhones icons on the left side. For each one I set 'Connecting this iPhone' to 'No application'.
Problem solved.
Surprise! Via Macintouch we learn that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion has Automation features.
It is weird that Apple's official Automation documentation is hosted on macosxautomation.com which is "not hosted by Apple". Even though it's seemingly an Apple site (with a broken icon on page 1).
Even weirder for all of us who figured AppleScript and Automator were dead, is that Lion has a lot of AS/Automator features. Some show up on Apple's Lion Features page, but many do not. Given rumors about Apple's new focus on textbooks and iPads, it's noteworthy that Automator has many new ePub support features.
Apple is eccentric.
The WordPress visual editor doesn't include tables. Neither does Blogger of course, nor, for that matter, MarsEdit.
FrontPage had terrific table support in 1995. WindowsLive Writer has decent support now. Otherwise, web tables doesn't get a lot of love. RapidWeaverdoesn't do tables. Sandvoxisn't any better and neither is Apple's abandoned iWeb.
SeaMonkey inherits the table technology built into Netscape Composer in the 1990s. TextEdit does tables (!) and (unlike Pages) will export HTML. It's hardly a web page editor though.
DreamWeaver does tables - and costs $400 (though I qualify for the $150 teacher edition).
It's too bad. HTML tables are really brilliant. I'm guessing implementation is very expensive especially when tables are combined with CSS; the market doesn't support this level of complexity.
A year or two ago I wrote about how Google and Apple have both failed Parental controls. Since then things have not gottenmuch better.
In response to a comment on an old post, this is the compromise I use for the children's accounts on iOS and OS X.
This works for us, but Apple's Parental Control support is lazy and incompetent. They simply don't care.
Android/Google, as best I can tell, are worse. Note that Google Gmail explicitly states all US users must be 14 or over (COPPA partly, but really this is a Google copout). i don't think Android OS includes any default parental controls.
I don't know how Windows 7 does. I suspect it's a bit better. I can't find anything about parental controls in Metro/Windows Mobile.
See also:
While I wait to see if Pinboard can fix their Google Reader JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) import, and while I consider Google Reader Share JSON import into WordPress, I'm also exploring JSON import/export tools. If, for example, I could import JSON into FileMaker Pro or other data management tool I might be able to manipulate the archive and produce a more useful WordPress import.
StackOverflow and its kin have a good set of references on this topic. Note that CSV can manage only very simple JSON; we really want native importers similar to what Microsoft Access tried with XML [1]. I suspect one approach might be to convert JSON to XML then use Microsoft Access 2010 import.
Incidentally, this topic veered off unexpectedly into something that's actually relevant to my work life and a Strata conference I'm attending in a few weeks.
As of today here are some of my pointers ...
For me this DivConq series was particularly useful because it placed JSON nosql processing in a familiar context - Microsoft Access.
Maybe I should start using Apache Cassandra to manipulate my Google Reader JSON archive and prepare it for WordPress processing. For example ... Cassandra Development Environment in Mac OS Snow Leopard « BigDiver.
[1] I doubt JSON has truly significant advantages over XML as a data interchange format (see JSON Example and wikipedia xml/json). Alas, nobody asked me. Fashion is more powerful than geeks imagine.
Pinboard is the first service I know of that will import a Google Reader Social (shared item) JSON file:
Pinboard: howto page
Google Reader Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the page. Select the Import/Export tab. Choose either items you have starred or items you have shared and click the Reader JSON link (the rightmost column)
When I stumble unexpectedly over something I've been looking for, I look for who else found it. Then I add them to my reading list. Google gave me only these references:
Update: I paid my $10 and imported by Google Reader shared item JSON file. I have 3 days to cancel. I used Amazon payments.
Here are the results; as of today the most recent post is 7 weeks old. I may also try importing the JSON for my Reader shared items, which may produce some duplicates.
I'm still studying the results. So far Pinboard is only showing a fraction of the JSON file, there are not tags, and every item shows with date of '9 weeks ago'. I don't see a convenient way to navigate across the entire collection.
Update 12/31/11: Pinboard has now imported 2 months of Reader shares - about 1100 items or roughly 1% of the total.
Google amputated a portion of my distributed memory, but they left me a frozen json remnant.
(Yes, we are living in a cyberpunk novel. Sigh.)
Across the net there are unanswered questions about what to do with these json archives. Google has been silent. I believe the Google humans who might help are ashamed or demoralized or fearful. Google 2.0 is not a happy place for them.
I want to represent my JSON archives as posts in a WordPress blog, perhaps with some kind of synthetic title. Then they will be available to search and link. Eventually I hope to add new annotations and shares to that archive, though there will be a gap of several months that will be difficult to fill.
This feels doable, but so far Google (the search engine) hasn't told me how. This is what I have found so far. When I do find an answer, I'm going to answer some of the dangling questions across the net ...
I'll update this post as I learn more. Seth's contribution suggests a fix is close; he needs to tweak some of his code.
Update 12/25/2011: Seth writes that he won't have time to work on this further but he recommends downloading his php file from his linked zip. I'll have to learn how to run PHP scripts from my Dreamhost account, but I don't think that's too hard.
Update 5/3/2012: Coping With Google Reader Changes | Much Ado About IT - accessing the lost items.
When my iMac 11,1's 2yo 1TB Seagate drive developed metastatic blockitis I was most unhappy.
It wasn't that the drive is dying young, just two weeks after my AMEX extended warranty lapsed. Two years is short for a drive, but this machine runs all the time and goes through two full disk backups every single night. The drive has had a hard life.
The fact Apple's diagnostics missed my drive's unmasked bad blocks is annoying. There's no magic to a disk scan; I shouldn't have had to buy TechTools Pro to make a diagnosis. Windows diagnostics have managed this for twenty years.
Worse though, is the cost of the repair. FirstTech, a well regarded local shop, gave me a $625 quote to install a 2TB replacement. (They can't get 1TB drives.). I was amazed, I'm used to paying $150 or so for a drive and doing my own installation. That's what I did when my old fully serviceable G5 drive died.
The problem is that the lovely 27" iMac is not user serviceable. Elegant quite design with special thermal sensor cables turns out to have a high post-purchase price. That's why I wrote ...
Gordon's Tech: Mac drive diagnostics: TechTools Pro and Drive Genius find problems OS X missed
... When you consider that iMac 27" hard drives are NOT user serviceable, the iMac is more expensive than it seems. The iMac G5 was entirely user serviceable. Design has its price....
I was wrong though. Today i checked what the cost would be for an Apple store repair. They quoted me about $200 for a 1TB drive replacement. (They don't do upgrades, only like-for-like replacements.)
How do they do that? Apple has a flat $40 service fee, regardless of the complexity of the repair. Apple offsets the ownership cost of their elegant designs by subsidizing repair. (In this case they have another advantage -- they have an inventory of 1TB drives with bundled thermal cables even as the world runs short of hard drives.)
I still prefer my G5 iMac's design -- but that was a hot and noisy machine. My 11,1 (i5, 27" 2009) iMac is quiet and cool most of the time. Apple's subsidy of post-warrany repairs makes that tradeoff more palatable - at least if you live near an Apple store!
Update 1/6/12: One warning: they will want to keep the hard drive. This fits with their out-of-warrantee repair following their in warrantee process. Apple should make this better known. It means if you bring your machine in for an Apple Store repair, you need to do a secure wipe first. Some additional tips:
... TechTool Pro should not normally report bad blocks for these types of drives. The drive controller in them automatically tries to map out bad blocks as they are encountered. It will do this unless either the bad block is in a critical area that cannot be mapped out at the moment or the bad block table is full. If this occurs, TechTool Pro will report a bad block and you will ultimately need to do a low level reinitialization of the drive. When the drive is reinitialized, the entire platter is accessible so that bad blocks can be mapped out if possible no matter where they occur...So the bad blocks I see now are probably a small fraction of the number that have already been mapped out. I'm seeing the overflow, including blocks that went bad after they'd been written to.
.. You can use Apple's Disk Utility to reinitialize your drive. Be sure to choose the Security Option to "zero out data." Choosing this option will map out bad blocks, if possible, during the reinitialization. This may take several hours (depending on the size of your drive). If the reinitialization is successful, the drive should be fine at that point. We suggest, however, that you do a Surface Scan a few times in the next month or two just to be sure no new bad blocks are developing. If they are, then the drive is probably failing and you should consider replacing it. If a low level reinitialization fails, this indicates the drive is faulty and needs to be replaced...
I can't say I feel good about my backups. I believe data wants to die; it wants to be free of the burden of order. Against the despair of data, even the best backup is barely adequate.
Consider tonight, when everything almost failed - Time Capsule and Carbon Copy Cloner alike.
The Time Capsule serves all the machines in our home over a wireless network. I was surprised at first that backup would work over wireless, but it does. Each machine has its own unencrypted disk image; one on the TC's old internal 500 GB drive, two others have images on an external 2TB drive. The TC sits in a closet upstairs; it's unlikely to be stolen but fire would destroy it. I have done 1-2 file Time Machine restores from that image, so I know it can work. The only test of a backup, of course, is a restore.
I don't trust Time Machine as much as old-time DantzRetrospect, but it seems Apple has gotten most of the bugs out.
I trust Carbon Copy Cloner [3] more. Each day it clones my server, on which all the important data lives. It's more than a cloner; CCC keeps copies of changed or deleted files in "_CCC Archives". I've configured CCC to use an encrypted image it automatically mounts every night. Since that backup is encrypted I can take it offsite, which I do every few weeks. Ok, every month or two. Offsite rotation relies on me, so it's prone to failure. Still, even if the house burns, I am unlikely to lose more than a month of images and videos. I can live with that.
So I have two backup methods, both fully automated, both relatively independent [2]. If each is 95% reliable each day, then the chance both fail on a given day is 1/400. If the daily chance of a server drive failure is 1/1000, the odds of all three failing on the same day are about 1/400,000 [2], [4]
Tonight though, my data got within a few miles of the cliff it wants to meet.
My server has been having worrisome memory exception (EXC_BAD_ACCESS) crashes, and a TV show I recently downloaded had a file error [1]. There's something wrong on my 2yo i5 iMac; I need to run Apple Hardware Test (again). So I know my server data is at risk.
Time Capsule has had problems too -- it's reporting a "communications error" periodically. I think that error message is a scarlet herring related to the iMac issues, but clearly I can't trust that backup.
Happily there's good old CCC -- but when I restarted my server for the first time in weeks it reported a problem. The backup drive didn't mount. That was easy to diagnose -- I'd unplugged it. Probably when I was debugging my Aperture crash 3 weeks ago. Why didn't CCC report the error? Maybe it had crashed.
I wasn't that close to data loss -- but I was in a bad neighborhood. As paranoid as I am, I'm almost not paranoid enough.
It's good to have two fully automatic and completely independent backup methods. Data wants to die, and backup is still an unsolved problem.
-fn-
[1] Incidentally, you can't easily report a purchase problem to Apple until they process a charge, and to reduce transaction costs they wait a few days before they process. This is very annoying! Also, the UI for reporting a purchase problem is suspiciously clumsy. More on that experience when I see what they do.
[2] In reality they common failure points of course - me, computer memory, etc. There is the older offsite backup though, so complete and total data loss is probably less than 1/1,000,000.
[3] Donationware. I donated. I wish donation ware apps would let us set a 'reminder' so I could donate yearly. I suppose I should just make donationware donations every year on my birthday against the apps I use.
[4] I'd love to have automated offsite backup too, but I've never foundan offsite vendor I trusted and I expect ISPs to eventually charge for bandwidth use.
See also:
Update 12/21/2011: I was closer to the cliff than I realized.
Weeks after Google's Day of Infamy i'm still failing to fully replace Google Reader Shares. Recently I gave up on Tumblr, Posterous, the zombie version of Google Reader, and some screen-scraping attempts to turn G+ streams into feeds.
Lately I've been focusing on my @jgordonshare tweets and tonight I tried using ifttt to create a WordPress feed-equipped archive of tweets.
It was easy to setup the ifttt task to turn the tweets into WP posts. I used a "1 button install" Dreamhost [1] WordPress instance I've been testing. I had to turn on XML-RPC publishing (used by Windows Live Writer, MarsEdit, etc) and provide a WordPress username and password [2].
The ifttt doesn't trigger immediately after tweet creation. I assume it checks the Twitter stream every 15-30 minutes. I manually triggered a check from the ifttt dashboard.
Here's an example of what I got
Just testing iftt tweeting to wp (sorry). http://t.co/GbR8Qdud
... Just testing iftt tweeting to wp (sorry). http://t.co/GbR8Qdud...
Yeah, not to impressive. The problem is a tweet is simply a string, it has no special structure, no way to distinguish URL from my commentary from page title from annotation (not that there's room for all that). Tweets are much simpler entities than old-style Google Reader shares.
The experiment did work, but the result isn't terribly interesting.
So the quest goes on ...
[1] Use the code "KATEVA" or this link and you are supposed to get 50% off your 1st year costs and I get an equal saving as credit.
[2] Obviously you should create a user for this purpose and create a unique password. IFTTT has to know your credentials.
See also:
AT&T has the lowest customer service rating of American mobile phone companies. Of course that's like asking what's worse - Ebola or Rabies?
This is not because of their retail staff. They must give them powerful drugs, because, despite working for a moderately evil corporation, they're remarkably cheerful.
Their web site though, that's part of what makes them "Rabies" rather than just "Ebola".
For example, for the past few days I've been trying to follow up on some extensive bill slashing changes. In particular I've been trying to find a current contract summary for our family plan. I think I've found the best that ATT offers, but they have one of the worst web sites I've ever come across. [1]
As of Nov 2011 try this. Don't click on the tabs, but mouse over to see the substructures. Note you may have to authenticate repeatedly.
Note that under the Wireless tab is a "Rate Plan" link, but it only shows voice plan.
So, in summary, to determine your actually currently contracted services for a family plan you need to print/view a PDF for each individual family member and do the sums to produce an integrated view.
I wonder if there's a medical term for the psychosis induced by dealing with AT&T?
Next up: How to track SMS use.
[1] The primary flaw is that AT&T mixes marketing with service. There are other reasons, but that's the primary dysfunction. What I want to know is mixed with what they want to sell me. A secondary reason, is that they choose not to invest in areas that allow customers to see what their contracts are. Those investments have a low return on investment and will not contribute to someone making VP. It's just a happy accident that it works this way.
[2] Update: AT different times I got different PDFs for different users. Only my wife, a secondary number, produced the full six page report when I requested a "wireless customer agreement".
Update 12/11/11: I've studied the PDFs in more detail. They are quite hard to interpret, particularly for a family plan, but, with some study, they do show the current contract. I think the "wireless customer agreement" is a copy of the original contract, but the "customer service summary" is the current contract.
I recently deleted my Google Profile. The link explains why.
I expected consequences and I am not disappointed.
Today many of my share links to my Picasa albums have broken. The albums are still gone, but the share links don't work.
It's easy to see why. Here's a link I shared last week to one of my recent albums. I've bolded the problem (omitting the auth key)
https://picasaweb.google.com/113810027503326386174/WildcatVsEagleNov2011
Here's today's link to the same album ...
https://picasaweb.google.com/jfaughnan/WildcatVsEagleNov2011
When I deleted my profile I removed my 2007 identity: 113810027503326386174. With the advent of G+ that identifier was the basis of shared image links. When I removed G+, those links broke.
Fortunately I hadn't shared that many albums recently. I got singed, but not burned.
I feel like I escaped the burning house of G+ just in time. Future exits will be far more difficult -- if not impossible.
