Kateva.org home page offline

I don't visit the modest Kateva.org - home page very often -- but I do reference it from some of my blogger pages.

I guess I should visit more often, because today I learned it was offline. It's probably been offline for months. It looks like it was a forgotten casualty of Google's botched retirement of Page Creator. During the transition the domain was reset to block public pages and the layout was garbled.

I've made the page public again and given it a new, simple, layout.

Google search tip: eliminating the wikipedia based splogs

Great tip in a rich but rambling article ...

Nerd Skill Number One (Dans Data)

... suppose you're looking up some fairly obscure subject, and the "best" page Google finds for you is a small, badly-written Wikipedia article with no references. The PageRank-zero personal site with the answer to your question is out there somewhere, but it'll be pushed well off the first results page by umpteen copies of that Wikipedia article on podunk ad-farm "encyclopedia" sites that take advantage of - or completely ignore - Wikipedia's generous licensing terms.

To avoid seeing all those, you need only add -"[some string from the Wikipedia article]" to your Google search. Usually, it only takes one such minused phrase to clear sufficient of the copies that the page you really want will bubble up onto the first page of results.

This is connected to an interesting, and immensely useful, property of human language, which is that the combinatorial explosion of possible grammatical sentences (as opposed to random strings of words, or of letters) means that most sentences of only six words are likely to be unique...

There are more tips in the essay. This one's a gem though.

It's a bit surprising Google can't dump the wikipedia splogs though.

OS X 10.6.3: Preview PDF merge has a very weird interface

In 10.6 you're supposed to be able merge PDFs by dragging pages from one PDF sidebar to another.

Except it doesn't work. It seems to work, but when I save and reopen the pages aren't there. Even the seemingly functional behavior is erratic.

Obvious bugs like this one make OS X seem forgotten and neglected.

Thanks to a tip from anonymous I now know that the problem is a very weird interface - and an undocumented and unwanted extra "feature". This blog page explains it best (emphases mine):

.... You can now drag the second pdf file (from a folder or from your desktop) into this sidebar window, and it will be added to your pdf document as an additional page.

NOTE: In Snow Leopard you need to drag the new pdf ON TOP OF the existing pdf’s thumbnails ( a little red box shows you that you are doing this).

If you drag it into the sidebar but not on top of an existing page it will appear as a red line instead of a box.... The new file will be added as an external link – not merged into the original pdf document.

If you drag the second file on top of an existing page in the sidebar, it will appear as a red box, not a line, and the file itself will be added into to the original file. The original filesize will grow and the file will actually be merged in.

So Leopard used to behave like Adobe Acrobat - to merge PDFs you dragged a thumbnail into the sidebar. In Snow Leopard, however, this creates an external link. It only looks like you've merged PDFs, but you're seeing a link.

If you follow the "drop on top" directions they do merge.

This is so cute. Who the #$!$!@% wants to create an "external link" in a Preview sidebar?

It's hard to say, because there's nothing about "external link" in the Preview Help file (of course there's nothing about PDF merge there either. Apple has transcended mere documentation.) There's nothing about "external link" in the Mac OS X Reference Library, and nothing in my Google searches.

Sigh.

Anyway, merge does work. It's just undocumented and hidden by a bizarre UI decision.

If anyone can explain why some apparently misguided Apple engineer bothered to add an undocumented "external link" feature to Preview I'm all ears.

Review: MacKiev Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 2009 - Mac OS X Edition

After evaluating much cheaper alternatives, I purchased the $40 Software MacKiev version of "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing". This product is not to be confused with the similar sounding "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" product sold by Encore. (There's an interesting back story to this -- note the MacKiev Mavis Beacon manual still says "Broderbund" on the front.)

As best I can tell the Encore Mavis Beacon OS X software is a derelict and abandoned product that's sold cheaply but worth nothing. Sadly, that's the only version Amazon ships directly. I think they're confused.

Apple sells the MacKiev version. This is a new version of an old product, as noted in the manual ...

Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing was created more than twenty years ago, and was first published in 1987. Software MacKiev’s involvement goes back to 1998 when our company developed version 9 for the Macintosh — both the US and UK editions. Then, a decade later, we had the opportunity to get involved with Mavis Beacon again — this time as the developer and publisher of a new generation of Mavis Beacon software for Mac OS X. We are so pleased and proud to be bringing the kind of quality you’ve come to expect from the creative labs of Software MacKiev to this new edition.

They really should change the name of the product. By the way, Mavis Beacon is an invented person, but her image is from a 1985 picture of Renee Le'Esperance.

It took me quite a while to sort out the Encore vs. MacKiev story, but now you know.

Once I had the package in hand, but before I bothered to use it, I could score this product using Gordon's Laws of software acquisition:

1. Excellent web site and a current updater: +1
2. Proprietary installer: 0
3. Needs uninstaller, none provided, no uninstall directions: -1
4. No DRM: +2
5. Can use without CD installed: +1
6. No trial version: 0
7. Support site quality: +1
8. No developer blog: 0
9. Obvious pride in work: +2
10. Beautiful full color paper manual (as well as well formatted PDF): +2

Overall score: 8 out of a max of 13. A passing score, but they'd do much better if they'd document an uninstall procedure. The paper manual, which feels like a relic of another era, pushed them into a respectable range.

The install is a 600MB package in the normal Applications folder. As best I can tell it doesn't install anything else. I suspect the uninstall is a simple package to trash delete. If they'd only documented that they'd have gotten 11/13!

I installed from my admin account, removed the CD, and launched from the kids user account. I downloaded and applies the latest patch. That patch was labeled as a "10.6 upgrade" but it includes some functional changes. It installed well in 10.5 and 10.6 in my testing. You don't need the CD to run the software, everything is installed to disk (you do need disk space, but that's not an issue for most users any more).

The only minor glitch was that I installed in an account that didn't have iTunes setup and it complained. It asked me to install iTunes first. It comes with its own music set, so iTunes isn't even needed.

We've just begun using the product, but, really, I'm impressed. It's elegant, fast on my older G5 as well as the iMac, and it's a rich product. Two of our three kids went at it immediately, the girl doing lessons and the boy doing games. It's designed for multiple users. In the "Learning account" each user gets their own login. User profiles can be exported and imported.

I'll update my review as we learn more, but it looks like a winner.

PS. Amazon version of this review.

PPS. Amazon's top rated Mavis Beacon is 1994's version 8 for Windows 3.1 by "Mindscape"- it's still for sale. I wonder if there's any other 16 year old software sold on Amazon? Thanks to that version we can see how Mavis Beacon has changed over time. I wonder which is closest to the original model?

1994 - Windows

2009 Mac

2010 - Windows

21st century divorce – pixels, points and screen resolution

Once upon a time, pixels and points were happily married. In the days of the Mac Plus and, a bit later, 17” 1024x768 CRTs, developers could expect a 10 pixel line would be 10 points long.

That’s no longer true. The 9 pixel fonts that were readable in 2000 are now impossibly small, but the 9 point fonts of 2000 should be as readable as ever. (Assuming well behaved software and same aged users!)

This seems rather esoteric, but many of us still carry habits and assumptions from that old world. Happily I just wrote up a refresher for my own use, so I’m happy to share :-).

First a quick refresh for non-specialists (see [1] for definitions):

• A pixel is an attribute of the computer screen. Higher resolution screens have smaller pixels.
• A point is a unit of length with a laughable history. The current “point” is the “DTP” point popularized by Warnock/PostScript – 1/72 of the anglo-saxon “inch” [2].
• Pixels and points correspond when a screen has 72 pixels per inch (PPI [3]). The original Mac had a screen res of 72 PPI (pixels/inch). So did the old 17” 1024x786 CRT. On those screens, a 9 pixel font looked like a 9 point font.  Some UI standards may be based on 72 PPI screens where 9 points = 9 pixels

Modern screens have much higher resolutions, and thus more than 72 PPI. Apple’s 30” cinema display is 100 ppi and the 27” iMac is 108 ppi. The iPad is 132 ppi, the iPhone has 160 ppi, the Droid has 265 ppi, and the next generation iPhone is rumored to be 330 ppi (so HD video might fit in the phone)

A 9 pixel font that was readable at 1024x760 on a 17” CRT would be about ¼ the size on iPhone 4. Obviously, it would be unreadable. Of course that wouldn’t happen right? Developers would specify everything in points and apps and OS would translate to pixels properly.

In practice the latter happens a lot – often for good reasons [4]. OS X 10.6 applications, for example, have fonts that render at too small points on a 108 ppi display. XP is similar. Windows 7 and OS X were supposed to both be resolution independent, but it didn’t seem to take [4].

Things are different on new age computers. The Droid, iPad and iPhone expect and respect points, not pixels. That’s good, if they didn’t then documents would be unreadable on those high PPI devices.

If we’re lucky, a few years from now, only OS designers will need to know the difference between pixels and points …

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/604203/twips-pixels-and-points-oh-my

PIXEL

The smallest dot you can draw on a computer screen

POINT

996 points are equivalent to 35 centimeters, or one point is equal to .01383 inches. This means about 72.3 points to the inch. We in electronic printing use 72 points per inch

1 point (Truchet) = 0.188 mm (obsolete today)

1 point (Didot) = 0.376 mm = 1/72 of a French royal inch (27.07 mm)

1 point (ATA) = 0.3514598 mm = 0.013837 inch

1 point (TeX) = 0.3514598035 mm = 1/72.27 inch

1 point (Postscript) = 0.3527777778 mm = 1/72 inch

1 point (l’Imprimerie nationale, IN) = 0.4 mm

[2] 72 has a LOT of divisors. That’s probably why it was chosen.

[3] PPI is pixels per inch, not points per inch. Unfortunate ambiguity there.

[4] I’m simplifying a topic that’s really beyond my ken. Fonts are the easy part of resolution independence. The real problem is all the raster images that are a part of a “modern” UI. If you want your font to scale along with it’s nice “tab “background, it has to be specified in pixels, not points. Maybe one day SVG 6.0 will take care of the rest of the problems …

Bento 3 (desktop) has encrypted fields

[This is not new -- it came out Oct 2009. I even wrote about it then. Looks like I simply lost this one in the noise. I'll put it on my task list to try.]

At long, long last ...

Mac Software | Bento 3

... Bento 3 now lets you create encrypted fields to store sensitive data, like web site logins and banking details...You can assign a password to your entire database and shared libraries to keep your valuable information more secure...

Sniff. I could cry. This has taken eons.

I despise Bento, but clearly FileMaker is dead (no iPhone client = dead). So this feature means I have to think about whether I can use Bento. It all depends on iPhone support for encrypted fields.

FM claims that the encrypted fields in Bento 3 will "sync" with Bento for iPhone 1.0.3. Does that mean they're still encrypted on the iPhone? Seems logical, but I wouldn't make a bet either way. This will take testing to verify.

Incidentally, it's funny to read about "meal planner" in the Bento 3 Family Organizer.That's how personal databases were sold in the 1980s.

Update: With Bento 1.3 the database encryption doesn't work (stupid but not shocking - the comment to "use pass code lock" makes me grind my teeth though) but supposedly the field level encryption does work.

Here's what you have to do to move data into an encrypted field:

... No, you cannot change an existing non-encrypted field directly to an encrypted field. However, you can create a new encrypted field. Then, go to Table view and display the non-encrypted field next to the encrypted field. Copy the column contents of the non-encrypted field and paste into the encrypted field. You can then remove the old non-encrypted field and rename your new encrypted field back to the name of the old field....

Social wrestling: Google Reader, Twitterfeed, Blogger and Facebook

I might be close to a use for Twitter, bringing Google Reader closer to what Buzz should have been, and distancing Facebook.

The most important of these is distancing Facebook. For the past year I've been reluctantly using Facebook. Why reluctant? It's not distrust. I trust Facebook completely. I trust Facebook to lock in my data, and to exploit any information I provide. So while I like some of the things FB gives me, I want to keep it at a good distance. I want to be able to leave at any time, and I don't want to entangle friends in FB's world.

My latest solution is to combine blogger with the misnamed twitterfeed social network routing service. Twitterfeed consumes feeds, and generates output updates to (currently) Facebook, Twitter, Ping.fm (a rival actually), Loconica/Status.net and Hellotxt (another rival). Unlike rivals I've looked at before (Ping.fm), twitterfeed understands and implements Oauth and OpenID. Twitterfeed doesn't Fail by storing my credentials.

Oauth and OpenID are imperfect, but just right for this task. Now the equivalent of my Facebook Profile page is a special purpose Blogger page. I own the blog, I own the posts -- Google Data Freedom means I can even move the blog. That's where I post stories I want to remember, and where I post about albums I've put on Picasa web albums (or anywhere else). Twitterfeed consumes the RSS (Atom, technically) freed from my blogger "Profile" page and creates posts to Facebook with a shortened URL. It could also create posts to Twitter from the same source. (I used to do similar things with the uber-geek-cool Yahoo Pipes, but they have been shut out of FB and seem to be waiting for an acquisition.)

Twitterfeed does all this with modern authentication protocols - I never gave 'em a password. I write my posts using blogger tools and the updates show up, about 30 minutes later, in Facebook (no pubsubhubbub or even ping support yet - hence the delay). They come out pretty well in FB.

In a related experiment I'm using twitterfeed and my little used twitter account to create prefix-tagged tweets from my Google Reader Shared Items. So far I'm just experimenting, but I might find something useful there. (Back when it worked, I used to share the Reader Share feed with Facebook -- see the long list of post refs below for other permutations).

This approach looks promising, but of course Facebook may break it at any time and, sooner or later, Twitterfeed will either run out of money or become part of Google or Twitter. In the meantime I continue to wait for Google to publish a GR Share API (maybe as a special case of a Buzz API, though I fear Google's tweet to Buzz feature will forestall this). Then someone is sure to make it possible to tweet to Google Reader notes.

More to come I'm sure ...


Update: The Twitter feed of shares doesn't really fly. It chops off my annotations, and the link, of course, goes to the unannotated original.

Update 10/26/10: I switch to using Feedburner to do tweet my reader shared items.

See also other stuff:

• Scrape Shared Notes from Your Google Reader Feed into WordPress | DQuinn.net
• How to Post to Twitter From Google Reader with A Single Click ~ Web Upd8
• How to Tweet your Google Reader Starred items
• Unofficial Google Reader API
• Howto: Post your Blogger comment actions on Twitter automatically
• RSS Graffiti Shuts Down Yahoo Pipes Users (Feb 2010)

my stuff:

• FreeMyFeed - Getting Twitter feed to Google Reader (April 2009 - via Feedburner - still works)
• Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Google Reader: Update with FB feed information (April 2009 - Facebook disabled this)
• Google reader shared items to Facebook (March 2009 - Facebook disabled this)
• The Buzz profile problem: I am Legion (Feb 2010 - Google bombs)
• Google Buzz, Chat and Reader - together at last. Farewell Twitter (Feb 2010 - alas, my optimism didn't last)
• Good-bye Buzz – for now. (Feb 2010 - we're still divorced)
• Reimagining realtime focalcast communication – Buzz and Twitter 2.0 - how to fix Buzz and/or Twitter
• What can I do with Twitter, and is it CB Radio redux? - (Dec 2008. I'm still wondering)
• Why Twitter? (Oct 2008 - SMS and RSS)
• My latest take on Twitter (Oct 2009)
• Twitter and Facebook - because feed readers didn't make it (Mar 2009)
• Ping.FM: a router for status updates ... with just one small problem. (May 2009 - no way I'm giving them my google credentials!. I rechecked and they still feel like they're failing; the lack of OpenID support is a give away.)
• Filtering my Google Reader Share with Yahoo Pipes (Sept 2008)
• How do I share my Google Reader Shared Items Feed and process it via Yahoo Pipes? (Sept 2008)
• Using Bloggers undocumented label (category) feeds and Yahoo Pipes to create a tech opinion feed out of Gordon's Notes (Feb 2009 - good way to get tagged by google as a splog, alas)
• Yahoo! Pipes: what they're good for (Mar 2008)
• More of me: My Google Reader Shared Item Feed