Marc's Outlook on Productivity: FILEHand - a Google-like search for your desktop
I don't have much hope -- all the full text search tools I've tried lately have been very flaky or worse. Still, I'm obliged to try.
Friday, May 07, 2004
iPod -- Apple customer service debacle
iPod doesn't appear in iTunes or on my Mac desktop
1. At age 6 months 30GB iPod battery is aging fast.
2. At age 9 months battery has < 1 hour life. Instead of paying $30 for S&H I paid $60 for AppleCare and one year postage free service.
3. Get replacement iPod under AppleCare.
4. Replacement iPod is non-functional out-of-box. Won't mount (see http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60950). The firewire hardware on the iPod is broken.
5. After the usual 45 minutes on phone support I worked up to a Tier two tech with an overflowing voice mail box. In a week or so I should have ANOTHER replacement iPod.
Update 11/27/05 ... to round out the story ...
6. The next iPod had a non-responsive central button. This was fixed by a full reset, but the problem would occur every 6 months or so. This final iPod was eventually discovered to have a non-functional USB port.
So Apple sent me two defective iPods, the last of which I have used for the past year. In November of 2005 Macintouch reported a 30% failure rate on the 3G 30GB iPod -- atrocious even by the standards of complex consumer electronics. I was bit by a defective product line, and then by Apple's practice of sending "refurbished" devices to replace defective products. The "refurbished" devices are supposedly repaired or shown to be working, but my experience suggests the "repairs" are very "low cost".
The experience with my 3G iPod has made me very cautious about trusting Apple products. It's also taught me the limits of AppleCare. Since that experience I do not purchase the extended warrantee, instead I follow the rules required by my credit card company. I try to have repairs done by people I trust, such as twin cities Apple store that's privately run.
1. At age 6 months 30GB iPod battery is aging fast.
2. At age 9 months battery has < 1 hour life. Instead of paying $30 for S&H I paid $60 for AppleCare and one year postage free service.
3. Get replacement iPod under AppleCare.
4. Replacement iPod is non-functional out-of-box. Won't mount (see http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60950). The firewire hardware on the iPod is broken.
5. After the usual 45 minutes on phone support I worked up to a Tier two tech with an overflowing voice mail box. In a week or so I should have ANOTHER replacement iPod.
Update 11/27/05 ... to round out the story ...
6. The next iPod had a non-responsive central button. This was fixed by a full reset, but the problem would occur every 6 months or so. This final iPod was eventually discovered to have a non-functional USB port.
So Apple sent me two defective iPods, the last of which I have used for the past year. In November of 2005 Macintouch reported a 30% failure rate on the 3G 30GB iPod -- atrocious even by the standards of complex consumer electronics. I was bit by a defective product line, and then by Apple's practice of sending "refurbished" devices to replace defective products. The "refurbished" devices are supposedly repaired or shown to be working, but my experience suggests the "repairs" are very "low cost".
The experience with my 3G iPod has made me very cautious about trusting Apple products. It's also taught me the limits of AppleCare. Since that experience I do not purchase the extended warrantee, instead I follow the rules required by my credit card company. I try to have repairs done by people I trust, such as twin cities Apple store that's privately run.
dbVisualizer and MySQL for OS X
Marc Liyanage - Software - Mac OS X Packages - MySQL
I use dbVisualizer at work with Oracle. Very nice application -- the full version is only $70 or so. I noticed it claims to work with MySQL; some quick research supports this.
MySQL can be freely downloaded (open source).
Both dbVisualizer (Java) and MySQL apparently run quite well on OS X.
The combination of dbVisualizer and MySQL is nowhere near as user friendly as FileMaker, but I'm not sure it's beyond the comfort zone of a Microsoft Access victim. I may play with this on OS X a bit.
I use dbVisualizer at work with Oracle. Very nice application -- the full version is only $70 or so. I noticed it claims to work with MySQL; some quick research supports this.
MySQL can be freely downloaded (open source).
Both dbVisualizer (Java) and MySQL apparently run quite well on OS X.
The combination of dbVisualizer and MySQL is nowhere near as user friendly as FileMaker, but I'm not sure it's beyond the comfort zone of a Microsoft Access victim. I may play with this on OS X a bit.
Thursday, May 06, 2004
Tasks 2.0 (Macintouch)
MacInTouch Home Page: "Alex King released Tasks 2.0, a web-based task and to-do list manager with hierarchical views, creation of iCalendars, reminders by email, and other features. The new version brings the single-user version up to par with the multi-user Tasks Pro, adding features such as RSS feeds for every task, time tracking, file attachments, and smartphone/PDA access. Tasks is $29.95 for any server running Mac OS X, Linux, Unix, or Windows with PHP, MySQL, and Apache."
Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Conflict Map: Nobel eMuseum
Conflict Map
This is staggering. What a terrible view of humanity. North America is almost uniquely quiet.
This is staggering. What a terrible view of humanity. North America is almost uniquely quiet.
Apple - Discussions - iPhoto "Not enough disk space bug" -- fixed by ONYX and PCC Cache cleanup
Apple - Discussions - Not enough disk space bug -- it's back!!
Hey, we're learning something. At least with 4.01, the major source for this bug appears to be related to the system caches. ONYX and Panther Cache Cleaner both are known to fix the problem. We don't yet know which cache must be removed.
This is progress. The problem could be in how iPhoto works with the cache subsystem, within the cache system itself, the cache/file system interaction, or the file system/hardware level. Given the on/off problems OS X has had with corruption of disk drives, especially firewire drives, I would worry about the very low level OS functionality. I dimly recall reading at one time that the code layer between OS X and BSD Unix was pretty ugly.
If it's a deep problem then it probably occurs with all apps, but shows up more in iPhoto because of the way iPhoto works. That would fit with what I read on OS X Hints -- cache cleanup is the common fix for many application problems.
If it is a 'deep' problem it won't get fixed before 'Tiger'. (10.4) at the earliest. In the meanwhile, I will configure ONYX and/or Panther Cache Cleaner to run every week automatically. PCC is $10, I think ONYX may be free but maybe they accept donations. Either way I'd like to pay something.
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