Gordon's Tech

Monday, July 03, 2006

iWeb: The good, the bad, the ugly

I've been experimenting with iWeb. I publish to a local folder then upload to server. I'll update this. I am using it only for small projects because of 'the ugly'. I don't know of good alternatives on OS X, or for that matter, for XP either [1]. Sandvox is the obvious alternative, but the lack of documentation suggests that its future is very limited. [2]

The good

iLife integration is pretty darned impressive, particularly iPhoto integration.
Suppose you want to link to a local file. Click create link, then choose the file. iLife copies the file to its store and creates a local reference. Elegant.

The bad

Fixed width pages.
Does it ever empty out its database store? I opened the package and found lots of unreferenced stuff from deleted pages. Maybe there's a garbage collection? This could get ugly.
No importing of existing web pages.

The ugly

You can't switch templates. The template you start with is the template you live with. (And this is a database driven application?!)
Template customization is insanely hard.
Your work is stored in a proprietary data structure. You can't migrate your work easily to other environments.

[1] Things were much better in the mid 90s. The consumer web publication niche has since been supplanted by professional products, blogs, Ajax web-apps and minimalist tools like iWeb.

[2] Documentation is to software as facial symmetry is to humans. It's costly to do and has no obvious immediate survival advantages -- so it's a marker for an optimal genome that can afford to "splurge" on hard to do things. Hence the value in mate selection, or so the evolutionary biologists claim. The pathetic state of Sandvox documentation tells me that, no matter how good it may be, it lacks the capital to compete and survive.

OS X: Use / in Open or Save As dialogs

Saturday, July 01, 2006

Next generation airfare pricing services

A good set of links in here: Arms race in the [airfare] market: Dynamic vs. predictive pricing.

Google translate now does Korean to English

I think Alta Vista did one of the best early translation services, but it was all western languages. Google Language Tools
now does Korean to English and vise versa. That's new and noteworthy!

Firefox running in XP won't render the Korean output, I'll try on a Mac.

Update: it works fine in both Safari and Firefox in OS X. Ahh, the beauty of a Mac. Incidentally, the all-but-forgotten OS X Sherlock utility also provides a wide range of translation services, including Korean. It's a bit more convenient. If I were using these things I'd keep sentences short, grammar very simple, tense present, and words long and formal. (Longer words tend to have more precise meanings.)

Friday, June 30, 2006

Great advice on using encrypted disk images

Tidbits has an excellent essay on using encrpyted disk images. I particularly like the technique that requests a password on startup -- storing the password in the keychain is a bad idea, but having to remember to open the image each startup is a nuisance ...

TidBITS: Unintelligible Garbage Is Your Friend

... Add the encrypted disk image file to your login items. Choose System Preferences > Accounts and click the Login Items tab. Click the plus sign button, find the .sparseimage file, select it, and click Add (or just drag the file into the Login Items tab). Now, whenever you restart or log in to your account, your Mac will ask you for your decryption password and mount the virtual disk on your Desktop. You can eject the virtual disk to protect the files if you're putting your computer to sleep, or even just stepping away from your desk.

For extra convenience, put an alias to the virtual disk where you used to keep the unencrypted files, so it behaves just like the folder it's replacing. If you give it the same name, other programs that expect the unencrypted folder to be there should still continue to work while the volume is mounted. If your encrypted volume isn't mounted, trying to open the alias will prompt you for your password...

Thursday, June 29, 2006

Information visualization goes mainstream

Crooked Timber: Data ain’t just for geeks anymore

Gapminder. A great exercise for the next time I teach information visualization.

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

JBL On Time Time Machine Alarm Clock/Dock for iPod - worst purchase ever

After some research I bought the JBL Time Machine Alarm Clock/Dock for iPod - White (JBLONTIME).

Here's a quick list that I'll expand on over the next week or so, after which I'll put this on Amazon.

It does not work with my 5G iPod. The iPod wakes up and starts to show the last song played (as designed), but it then starts playing the first song in the Library. It is unacceptable that the vendor sells this device as though it worked.
With my old 3G iPod it behaves as designed. It awakens to the last song played. I use it with my 3G iPod so I won't return it.
It has a really dumb eerie blue glowing LED at the top. I guess that's for those who want to dream of alien abduction. It serves no purpose, it doesn't even illuminate the clock controls (that might have been useful). I taped over it.
It starts quietly and the volume ramps up. You can't control this. That's the worst "feature" so far (and a surprise -- so much for the Amazon reviewers!); I'd prefer disable this depending on how I arrange my playlist. A remote would have compensated a bit, but ...
There's no remote. I decided that was ok because it's one less thing to lose, one less set of batteries, and one less place for designers to move controls to. This thing is, after all, an alarm. We don't get to sleep in. Ever. The volume ramping does make me miss this more than I'd expected however.
The documentation is weak with multiple typos and grammatical errors. It doesn't tell you what the RDS On/Off setting does, for example.
The sound is ok, very acceptable for an alarm clock. It's not a high fidelity system but it's fine.
The buttons seem flimsy and cheap.
It has a big, heavy, wall wart power brick. At least the color matches.
It's not documented, but if you have young eyes and good light you'll find text describing the matching iPod beneath each of the cradle inserts.

The system reminds me of the gulf between Apple and most other consumer goods manufacturers. Apple stuff does not have ugly wall warts, mistranslated manuals (of course their printed manuals are rather brief, but they're good), ultra-cheap buttons and gratuitous glowing diodes. Apple would have given us the option to disable volume ramping.

So how come design nuts like me are so rare in the world? Grump. Two stars for users of older iPods.

Update 2/16/07: Since I bought this thing about 6 months ago it's been no end of bother. The internal OS would crash every few weeks, then it began losing time. To make the alarm reliable, I have to mount the iPod, press the mysterious "on" (really is a Play button, not an On button) button, and double check that the play state of the JBL is in sync with the "play" state of the iPod. I'll eventually check out the warranty. Blech.

Update 11/30/09: This was one of the worst purchases I ever made. It was so bad I couldn't get it to die. The horrible UI, the frequent crashes, the missed alarms ... Today, after my son was late for school, we bought an extremely crummy clock/radio and the JBL became a basement mini-stereo. Ironically, as a mini-stereo, it's not bad. I've got an old, unused iPod in the cradle loaded with music, an aux-in from one of our two half-broken combo DVD/VCRs, and it gets FM and AM stations. My kids may get some use from it at last.