One of the unexpected outcomes of the USB spec is it defined a low voltage (5V) standard power source. The only think comparable is a car's "lighter". Too bad 12V firewire never caught on.
Now the USB interface can recharge USBCELL batteries through a built-in USB plug - Engadget.
I want a 10 port USB hub that goes with my iMac.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Apple admits notebook sleep on shut is broken
One of the nicest things about the 10.3.x world was the notebooks went to sleep so well. Shut the lid, go to sleep.
When Apple introduced OS X 10.4, they broke this. A number of processes don't respond properly to the sleep command -- including background data indexing (spotlight). It's easy now to close a laptop and cart it off -- with the drive running.
Now an Apple kb article admits the inevitable (without apology) -- you can't rely on the sleep mechanism to work:
Wait for your Apple notebook to fully shut down before you close the display.
This was a real screw-up in 10.4. I wonder if it might be fixed in 10.5.
When Apple introduced OS X 10.4, they broke this. A number of processes don't respond properly to the sleep command -- including background data indexing (spotlight). It's easy now to close a laptop and cart it off -- with the drive running.
Now an Apple kb article admits the inevitable (without apology) -- you can't rely on the sleep mechanism to work:
Wait for your Apple notebook to fully shut down before you close the display.
This was a real screw-up in 10.4. I wonder if it might be fixed in 10.5.
Monday, September 18, 2006
View web based PPT without Office - Zoho for Firefox
Amit Agarwal writes about the Zoho online service for viewing and editing Office documents -- including PPT: Read or Edit Online Office Documents Without Downloading Them � Digital Inspiration.
Looks like it ought to work on Firefox/Mac. Here's a sample PPT from the St Paul Public Schools (I picked it out of Google at random, but it's incidentally quite interesting reading for me as parent who's kids are in the public schools here). Some slides are garbled, but if you're on a Mac and don't have PPT on hand this works for reading.
Looks like it ought to work on Firefox/Mac. Here's a sample PPT from the St Paul Public Schools (I picked it out of Google at random, but it's incidentally quite interesting reading for me as parent who's kids are in the public schools here). Some slides are garbled, but if you're on a Mac and don't have PPT on hand this works for reading.
iTunes 7: wait for 7.01 or 7.02
Bugs galore. Apple has a well deserved reputation for inadequate software testing, and iTunes 7 is typical. These are typical (Macintouch):
Wait for 7.01 or even 7.02. Same old, same old.
The interesting question is why Apple so often ships prematurely. My guess is it's a combination of their secretive culture (so they can't do proper beta testing) , Jobs historic willingness to ship early, and a marketing need to coordinate various releases and announcements.
iTunes 7 isn't as bad as Aperture 1.0 or iPhoto 4, but it's surprisingly buggy for such a critical mass market product. I usually don't credit CEOs with the influence the media gives them, but this does feel like a Steve Jobs issue.
David SchwartzSlow performance on older machines. Problems with dual monitors. Lots of issues with the gapless feature. Bugs galore.
The fine folks at Rogue Amoeba have posted an announcement regarding the interaction between iTunes 7 and Audio Hijack Pro:
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/forum/ubb/Forum2/HTML/001059.html
In essence, Bookmarkable MP3s are treated as Podcasts, although they don't show up in the Podcast listing. Bookmarkable AACs are treated as Audiobooks, and they do show up in that listing (as long as it is enabled). The latter is likely a feature, while the former is buggy....
... Tom Parrish
Thanks for the tip regarding the removal of visualizer plug-ins. After removing them, iTunes 7 does not crash at the end of each song. Also, the gapless feature is working!
Wait for 7.01 or even 7.02. Same old, same old.
The interesting question is why Apple so often ships prematurely. My guess is it's a combination of their secretive culture (so they can't do proper beta testing) , Jobs historic willingness to ship early, and a marketing need to coordinate various releases and announcements.
iTunes 7 isn't as bad as Aperture 1.0 or iPhoto 4, but it's surprisingly buggy for such a critical mass market product. I usually don't credit CEOs with the influence the media gives them, but this does feel like a Steve Jobs issue.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
The return of multicol - multi-column support in web browsers
In the first golden age of the web, Netscape invented all kinds of markup tags. One of my favorites was MULTICOL. A trivial tag produced very nice flowing multicolumn displays. Alas, shortly thereafter Netscape died and so did MULTICOL. We returned to using tables to produce a crude fascimile of columns. Only the geezers remember when columns worked well.
I was reflecting for the zillionth time how I missed dynamic text flow in multiple columns, when it occurred to me to look for any signs of progress. There has been -- with the big news coming out about a year ago: Introducing the CSS3 Multi-Column Module (2005 article, 2001 spec). Since it's CSS it's doubtless infernally complex and renders slowly and poorly, but, hey, it's progress. Firefox 1.5 and later has partial support. In four or five years we might get back to MULTICOL. I miss the old Netscape ... (Ok, so BLINK was not such a great thing ...)
I was reflecting for the zillionth time how I missed dynamic text flow in multiple columns, when it occurred to me to look for any signs of progress. There has been -- with the big news coming out about a year ago: Introducing the CSS3 Multi-Column Module (2005 article, 2001 spec). Since it's CSS it's doubtless infernally complex and renders slowly and poorly, but, hey, it's progress. Firefox 1.5 and later has partial support. In four or five years we might get back to MULTICOL. I miss the old Netscape ... (Ok, so BLINK was not such a great thing ...)
Update 9/17/06: Actually, the Mozilla/Firefox implementation (Gecko) isn't hard at all, but Blogger doesn't seem to allow the tag to work. Odd ...
The problem with the dSLR: cleaning is much harder than the film SLR
Dust and dirt have long been a minor hassle for SLR users. Dust and sand get in, you open the body and clean it out. Minor.
Not so for the dSLR. Sand from the Indiana Dunes is showing up on my lenses a month after our visit. It must also be on the sensor. How do you clean a dSLR? Simple cleaning can be done with exquisite care -- or you send it to a repair shop. Or you throw it out and buy a new camera.
Not good. The interchangeable lens doesn't work nearly as well in the dSLR era as it did in the film SLR era (fSLR). I think the ideal camera for most amateur dSLR users today is probably not an SLR, but a better, higher end version of the very popular wide-range image stabilized digital camera. I don't think the dust clearing features of the newer dSLR will suffice by itself.
What we need in addition to sensor self-cleaning is a mechanical body seal that activates on lens removal. Pushing the lens removal button would cause the seal to slide in place. Remove the lens, blow the seal and lens clear of dust, attach new lens. An automated mechanical seal combined with sensor self-cleaning could make the digital SLR almost as dirt/dust/sand resistant as the traditional film SLR.
Not so for the dSLR. Sand from the Indiana Dunes is showing up on my lenses a month after our visit. It must also be on the sensor. How do you clean a dSLR? Simple cleaning can be done with exquisite care -- or you send it to a repair shop. Or you throw it out and buy a new camera.
Not good. The interchangeable lens doesn't work nearly as well in the dSLR era as it did in the film SLR era (fSLR). I think the ideal camera for most amateur dSLR users today is probably not an SLR, but a better, higher end version of the very popular wide-range image stabilized digital camera. I don't think the dust clearing features of the newer dSLR will suffice by itself.
What we need in addition to sensor self-cleaning is a mechanical body seal that activates on lens removal. Pushing the lens removal button would cause the seal to slide in place. Remove the lens, blow the seal and lens clear of dust, attach new lens. An automated mechanical seal combined with sensor self-cleaning could make the digital SLR almost as dirt/dust/sand resistant as the traditional film SLR.
Gmail spam filtering: A crisis with Gmail threatens all Google services
I posted this on Google Groups: Problem-solving (Update: 8 hours later, it's yet to appear on the the forum. It's good thing I'm not prone to paranoia ...).
My Google Gmail account is dying from dysfunctional spam filtering. That's bad enough, but the role of Gmail as the centerpiece of Google's identity management strategy means there are surprisingly widespread implications ...
Update: See also.
Update 9/18/06: My post to Google's help group still has not appeared, but really, not much is showing up there. I wonder if they've got a technical problem. I did solve the john@faughnan.com problem for myself at least. If you add a name to your contacts list it won't be filtered out.
Update 9/19/06: Well, it seems Google's Gmail help group has consigned my postings to the bitbucket. I've reworked all my mail streams and I'm back to the old days of POP/IMAP. I tried Yahoo's beta webmail service but really, it's exceedingly ugly. I will definitely miss Gmail, but overall this may work better for me. My guess is that my mail redirection was the problem. All the spam sent to my personal domain account streamed unfiltered at Google with two results -- Google decided my domain was bad news and it overwhelmed Gmail's feeble spam defenses. Now that stream will hit only visi.com (postini filtering) but they've handled it for years. Gmail is forwarding to my visi account as well.
Update 9/21/06: Light at the end of the tunnel?
My Google Gmail account is dying from dysfunctional spam filtering. That's bad enough, but the role of Gmail as the centerpiece of Google's identity management strategy means there are surprisingly widespread implications ...
... On a weekend 80% of my inbox is spam. During the work week 50-70% of my inbox is spam. My spam box has about 2000+ spam in it each month.Google has had a similar problem with their splog detection methodologies. I'm seeing much more of a downside in a close relationship to Google. We have much to learn about the consequences of a corporation owning one's digital identity. It won't be pretty.
On the other hand, messages I send to myself using my visi.com authsmtp account using my faughnan.com return address are ALWAYS treated as spam. Based on my experiments I believe Google has blacklisted my personal domain - faughnan.com (see www.faughnan.com). It's a personal domain that, like many others, has been faked in signatures by spammers for years. Google appears to be using a kind of blacklisting that is lowest form of spam control and hasn't worked for years. No serious ISP uses such a crude approach any longer.
In contrast my non-Gmail accounts get only a few spam every day and almost never treat non-spam messages as spam. Yahoo does remarkably well, but the open source solutions my ISP uses also work well. I have no experience with AOL or MSN. I'm told the .Mac spam filtering is awful too, maybe they use the same approach as Google.
So I have a few questions:
1. How can one appeal what appears to be Google domain-specific blacklisting?
2. Is there a signed email or domain authentication approach that Google honors and that would improve the accuracy of their spam filtering? I may switch faughan.com to an ISP that supports domain signing if that would help.
3. How the heck do we get Google to admit it has a serious problem with its spam filtering methodologies?
I was the first Google users at a our .com startup in the 90s, back when Alta Vista was king and well before anyone had hard of Google. I was one of the very early cohort of Gmail adopters. I "bleed Google". So it's noteworthy that Google's use of Gmail as the centerpiece of their identity management strategy means a problem with Gmail threatens the entire Google relationships,
My Gmail account is my Google digital identity. If I abandon it I walk away from Google checkout and a heck of a lot of other Google services. Soon my blogger account will be tied to my Gmail identity, and I have thousands of postings in my active blogs [jf: also my $30/year Picasa Web Albums]. A crisis with Gmail is a crisis with a huge range of Google services. Gmail's spam issues have now reached that crisis point.
If Google can't fix this I'll have to walk away from my Google identity. They need to give their spam problems FAR more attention that they have to date. They have the resources, how can we get their attention?
Update: See also.
Update 9/18/06: My post to Google's help group still has not appeared, but really, not much is showing up there. I wonder if they've got a technical problem. I did solve the john@faughnan.com problem for myself at least. If you add a name to your contacts list it won't be filtered out.
Update 9/19/06: Well, it seems Google's Gmail help group has consigned my postings to the bitbucket. I've reworked all my mail streams and I'm back to the old days of POP/IMAP. I tried Yahoo's beta webmail service but really, it's exceedingly ugly. I will definitely miss Gmail, but overall this may work better for me. My guess is that my mail redirection was the problem. All the spam sent to my personal domain account streamed unfiltered at Google with two results -- Google decided my domain was bad news and it overwhelmed Gmail's feeble spam defenses. Now that stream will hit only visi.com (postini filtering) but they've handled it for years. Gmail is forwarding to my visi account as well.
Update 9/21/06: Light at the end of the tunnel?
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