iChat - weirdest computer experience

This was one of my weirder computing experiences.

I was testing iChat AV, connecting my G5 iMac to my MacBook through our wireless LAN. I was surprised to learn I could use our Gmail accounts for identity establishment.

The connection worked. I showed up on both sides of the video conversation, seen from different angles. There was something odd going on however.

The person I was seeing seemed less and less like me. The image was ... drifting ... in time ... backwards.

Soon I was looking at myself on one screen several minutes in the past.

Eerie. I felt as though I was seeing myself in another space-time continuum.

I have a feeling that the G5 isn't going to cut it. I think iChat might have worked with the G5 under 10.4, so I'm a bit suspicious about Apple (again)

I'll try with the AIM account to see if there's a difference, but I think the accounts are only used to locate IP addresses and ports so I don't expect anything to change.

Update: I tried the Bonjour chat discovery approach; it works on a LAN. There was no change -- the G5 pegged the CPU and gradually fell behind. I then set a bandwidth limit on both clients. At 200 kbps the G5 was able to keep up but the image was obviously inferior. At 500 kbps the image was pretty good, but the G5 gradually fell behind, after about four minutes the lag was pretty severe.

I also tried the Chax Input Manager to modify iChat preferences. I wanted to see if I could use it to make it easy for me to access and control my mother's Mac Mini. Unfortunately when I tested with Bonjour Chax prevented a connection. When I removed it the connection worked. Input Managers are often problematic, so I removed Chax.

So the good news is that there's no need for an AIM account any more -- a Google account works well. The bad news is that the G5 is pretty limited and that Apple's iChat doesn't degrade gracefully. Google's Video Chat does a far better job of adjusting to machine and network capabilities, but it's even less elder friendly than Apple iChat.

Update 2: On the same LAN I connected the MacBook to a 5 yo XP box -- an older machine than the G5 iMac with Google Video Chat. Both machines used the superb Logitech Quickcam Vision Pro webcams. (GVC won't run on the iMac, but in theory the iMac G5 and the old dual core CPU in the XP box should be comparable). GVC absolutely spanked iChat -- it was a far better experience. Unfortunately while iChat is not particularly elder friendly, Google Video Chat is absolutely elder hostile!

PS. Apple's Discussion Forum for iChat is for the 10.4 version of iChat AV. Abandonware?

Update 5/30/09: Just to add the general iChat debacle - if you enable any sort of "parental control" for an OS X account, even if you just lock the Dock, then iChat Jabber and Google Talk account options are mysteriously grayed out. No documentation, no explanation. What a steaming pile.

Update 7/13/09: How to configure auto-answer for iChat.

Safari 4: Google compatibility, PPC performance

I've tested Safari 4b OS X for G5 performance (where Firefox is noticeably slow) and Google compatibility (where only Firefox works).

It failed Google my compatibility test. When I pasted text into the Blogger BlogThis! window it rendered outside the window borders.

This is also true of Safari 3, and since I know there are of text pasting issues with S3 and Google's various products I didn't bother with any further Google testing.

On the other hand PPC performance is noticeably better than FF, which is slow in every way (especially keystroke processing). It's comparable to S3 or Camino.

I won't use Safari 4 any more than S3 -- I really need Google compatibility.

Eudora email archive conversion

I’ve painfully moved all the files that used to be on my XP box to the iMac. I’m still using Eudora XP with the files now on the iMac server; performance is quite fine.

The email archives, however, aren’t indexed by Spotlight. Not to mention that Eudora died about two years ago. I can read the Eudora .mbx (mbox variant) files with TextWrangler, but that’s not terribly useful.

So I’m looking into conversion options. I’d prefer not to import the entire multi-GB archive into OS X Mail.app; I expect it would keel over and die.

I used my custom OS X search tool to look for “eudora conversion” and came up with:

• Eudora vCard Export: get the nicknames out
• Eudora Mailbox Cleaner: this is the most used approach and it’s free. Note the warnings “Mail 2.0 introduced a new mailbox format which uses a SQlite database (~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index) in addition to the mailboxes themselves. Until the imported messages are added to this database, the imported mailboxes will appear to be empty in Mail. Select "Mailbox → Rebuild" from the menu in Mail to rebuild each of the imported mailboxes and all your messages will show up correctly. For a little less cumbersome way to do this, you can use the AppleScript included in the download to rebuild all imported mailboxes - please don't interfere with the script's progress until it has finished - the script is using UI scripting which has some issues.”
• Emailchemy: The personal version is $30. It has a wide range of export options.
• eMailman® – Conversion: links to just about every mail conversion option available.

I’ll probably go for one of these four. I want to research a bit more about just what Mail.app’s limits are.

Gmail’s undocumented POP3 download limit

Maybe this is why it’s “beta”.

Gmail’s POP documentation doesn’t mention anything about a message retrieval (download) limit.

In fact, there is one. It’s not new not new; I’ve found mention of it from 2007.

In my case I can download about 340 messages at a time. I think the limit is in place for a few minutes; I’ve been able to download about 3,000 over 9 or so sessions.

I discovered the problem while dealing with another geek tribulation (these things seem to come in multiples). I’d moved my ancient Eudora archive (abandoware) and, when testing it after the move, I saw my most recent messages were from August 2008.

So I tried again – but I was still in August. It took a few tries and cleaning up some other unrelated (but real) problems to sort things out.

Each time I fetch mail I get about 300-340 messages. It’s been that way for years, but I’d always assumed that was all there was. I didn’t spot the problem because I don’t read the email in Eudora, it’s just my local repository. Gmail is where I read and write.

Now I see that I’ve been slowly slipping behind the email wave front. Each time I downloaded I fetched about 300-350 messages, but there were always more in waiting. So the backlog grew.

This afternoon the backlog was seven months, but I’m down to two months now. I should be caught up shortly.

I haven’t noticed any particular limit with IMAP synchronization, so this may be a left over for a service they’re gradually deprecating.

Shame on Google for not documenting this limitation.

Google taketh away: no more calendar editing on the mobile web app

Five months ago I was able to use Google's web app to edit appointments. In particular I could mange invitees, something the iPhones inadequate Calendar.app doesn't do ...

Gordon's Tech: Google Apps calendar on the iPhone - the top secret web display

It's not the OTA blackberry-like iPhone gCal sync we want, but it's something ...

The official update feed from the Google Apps team: New Google Calendar features for the iPhone

... Google Calendar users in the US can now add new events, invite attendees, and see daily and monthly views of their agendas from the iPhone. This release also includes speed improvements for the iPhone interface....

... The iPhone Google App didn't show me the new calendar. I had to use the URL: http://www.google.com/m/a/faughnanlagace.com (our family domain) to see the new calendar.

Today I can add events using Google's natural language interface, but that's it. No editing, no attendees. I sync with my iPhone using the new Google Exchange server interface so I don't know if

1. This is a side-effect of activating OTA sync between iPhone and Google Calendar.
2. Google has permanently terminated this feature.
3. They've shut it down for repairs.

Very annoying.

Stop using Abobe Acrobat Reader

Another day, another huge Adobe security hole ...

Adobe Acrobat, Reader vulnerability affects Mac | MacUser | Macworld

Your first response might be to panic at the disco, but take a deep breath. Yes, the vulnerability affects all platforms, and yes, there are reported exploits in the wild, but don’t worry, Adobe will put out a patch for version 9 by, oh, March 11th, with patches for version 8 and version 7 to follow. Hey, that's only a mere nineteen days from now.

This is on top of their installer disasters.

I removed Reader from OS X 10.5 a year ago, and I've never missed it. Use Preview.

Karelia iMedia Browser - solving iPhoto and video library problems?

Macintouch mentions that Karelia has made iMedia Browser a free "BSD-style" licensed open source app (it's a component of their commercial Sandvox website authoring app) ...

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about Apple Macintosh, iTunes, iPhone and more...

... Karelia Software's free iMedia Browser 1.1.3 is a browser and viewer for photos, movies, music, and bookmarks. It includes support for iPhoto and Aperture image libraries, the iTunes library, GarageBand songs, iTunes and iPhoto movie and video libraries, major web browser bookmarks, Finder folders, and more. This release brings enhanced search (including keywords and comments in iPhoto libraries), a fix for a problem with redundant search results from iTunes, support for much larger iPhoto libraries, and other changes. iMedia Browser is free for Mac OS X 10.4 and up (Universal Binary)...

I'm going to see if this app helps with four problems I have that Apple doesn't care about:

1. My wife wants to be able to browse the family iPhoto library, but it's tied to my user account, not hers.
2. Network access to an iPhoto Library
3. Access to images scattered over multiple iPhoto Libraries. In this case Apple does "care"; Apple product management is obviously opposed to enabling iPhoto library management, probably to preserve Aperture's market.
4. Managing a video library. Apple has a half-baked (asinine, really) approach to video management distributed between iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes and the Finder.