Sunday, October 10, 2004

About.com Mac Movable Type Blog

Focus on Macs

I'd forgotten about "about.com". Turns out, it's still out and about.

It came up on a Google search, and on inspection it looks interesting. I'll add it to my bloglines collection.

Paragon CD-ROM emulator

CD-ROM emulator

Third in the series of the CD emulators. One problem with emulation on Windows is the darned drive letter issue. Mac Classic was immune to drive letter confusion. Unfortunately OS X isn't as good about this as Classic was (the biggest single step backwards between OS X and Classic).

SoftDisc: Mount CD Image on Windows XP

CD emulator and CD image maker - SoftDisc is the virtual CD software that lets you copy a CD to an ISO image file.

Competitor to Virtual CD.

Virtual CD: Mount CD Image on Windows XP

Virtual CD Drive Emulator Info and Download

One of 3-4 tools that brings some of the OS X built-in image handling capabilities to Windows.

Saturday, October 09, 2004

American Express | Statement Delivery Options - We're Sorry... (and sorry, and sorry)

American Express | Statement Delivery Options - We're Sorry...: "We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please wait 15 minutes and then retry your request. "
I've been getting the same error message from American Express for five days. It's had to communicate how very unimpressed I am.

Ten years ago when Quicken maile dme a diskette of credit card transactions every month I had no problems. It just worked. It worked for years. Things have never worked as well since.

AMEX has had years of problems with their systems providing online banking support. I wish I knew who did their IT work -- so I could avoid them like the plague!

Disk Imaging for Mac OS X and putting CDs on an iPod

AFP548 - Disk Imaging for Mac OS X Made Easy

This is a rather technical article on an esoteric topic; but it puts a lot of useful information together.

In a much simpler vein, it finally occurred to me that I could put images of the chilrden's CDs on my iPod. Using Disk Utility I easily turned 6 children's games CD into images stored on my iPod. Creating as CDR, compressed or read/write image all worked, but compressed took a long time to open. One or two occasions I had to "dismount" the CD (not eject) using Disk Utility in order to isolate "Session One". I think used the create New Image menu to specify "Session One" as the source.

This is all legal -- they are four our use. We still have the CDs, but it's much more convenient to run off my iPod rather than hunt down the vulnerable CDs. Faster too.

I suspect I can do something similar on my PC, but I don't know how! Disk Images are a natural part of OS X.

Bloggler's Potemkin Permalinks

This is the "permalink" to a post in my test blog (authored using blogger).

Test Blog: OriginalName

Here's the "permalink" after I edited the subject line in the above post.

Test Blog: NewName

Try both. The first now fails. The second will work until I revise the subject line.

These are not Permalinks -- they are Potemkin Links. They look "permanent", but they're fake.

Blogger doesn't support true Permalinks on their post pages.

This is a poor practice. Blogger is encouraging widespread broken links.

There are at lest two things they could do instead:

1. Blogger supports true permalinks on non-post page blogs. They should create a new template tag that would support these old-style in-context links. I prefer in-context permalinks anyway.

2. Blogger could support indirection, so the old link would redirect to the new link.