Sparrow — How not to do marketing

Sparrow's value proposition is that it works with Google's email much better than OS X Mail.app (even Lion OS X Mail), but it also uses the OS X Address Book.

It's a great solution to problems I face.

They don't market this though. If they had, I'd have tested it out long ago.

Aperture 3.3 is iPhoto Pro. At last. Sort of.

After years of false claims of iPhoto to Aperture migration support, and four months after I realized iPhoto was going down the wrong road for me, and three months after I began my extremely painful iPhoto to Aperture migration, Apple has released iPhoto Pro (aka Aperture 3.3).

Imagine my joy.

The only saving grace is that I might have saved a few people by advising them to wait for Aperture 4, which has now come in the form of iPhoto Pro 1.0/Aperture 3.3.

According to Apple's marketing claims, the latest (Lion-only) versions of Aperture and iPhoto  share a single database model. So, in theory, both apps can work on the database.

I doubt it works as advertised, but it has to be an improvement on my experience! I'd strongly advise waiting until September before doing a major iPhoto to Aperture migration. Now that you know the end is in sight the wait should be tolerable.

Personally, I'm looking forward to, at the least, using iPhoto's Picasa uploader and iPhoto's superior UI for Event/Project and many common image management operations.

Assuming the inevitable bugs get sorted out, this is an extraordinary conclusion to what must have been a formidable software effort. At one point Apple had two completely incompatible photo management products. One was a natural Mac app with an elegant UI and some infuriating limitations. The other looked like a port from NeXTStep [1]. They had almost nothing in common.

Slowly, painfully, Apple turned these two disparate products into iPhoto and iPhoto Pro. To do that they had to reconcile very different functional models and data models. It would have been a very hard, very long, glamor-free slog. I hope the team was at least paid well.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go cry in my Scotch.

[1] I was never able to learn where the heck Aperture came from. It's neither Windows nor Mac.

Update: I remembered my underused MacBook Air runs Lion, so I tested the new Aperture and iPhoto together. Unsurprisingly, they failed my first test.

First -- the good news. Annotations on an iPhoto Event are now visible in Aperture.

The bad news -- Album annotations (descriptions) are still not viewable or editable in Aperture.

Maybe in another year or two?

iTunes Store: "Error (-50)" - try GoogleDNS?

A few weeks after an intractable -100000 error iTunes error that only resolved when I uses SSH tunneling to download from a California server I ran into a iTunes Store: "Error (-50)" when downloading purchased content with a TV show my son wanted.

I cleared the download cache and deleted the partial download but I was stuck with the problem. I'd already ruled out all the other issues Apple mentions. I certainly didn't use a 'web accelerator' ...

But wait. "Web accelerator" gave me an idea. That suggests a networking issue...

So I used OS X Location switching to swap my CenturyLink DNS services for GoogleDNS (I had both configured). That did it. My download streamed normally.

I wonder if DNS issues with iTunes will get more common; after all, iTunes is a competitor for many DNS providers (though not, I think, CenturyLink).

Perhaps more likely, I wonder if this is related to Apples IPv6 transition.

I'm leaving GoogleDNS running for now.

Access 2003: Join expression not supported with VBA type conversion

One of the stranger bits of my life is that I often do data manipulation using Microsoft Access 2003 in a Windows 2003 server VM.

 

It's a long story. I suspect I'm not completely alone however. Access 2003 is unbeatable for certain kinds of data wrangling across disparate data sources. Access 2007 was a quite severe regression (post-2000, software  regressions are increasingly common).

 

So perhaps it's worth sharing the weirdest bug I've seen in a while. I was unable to do a "left" join on two subqueries where one of the keys involved a type conversion (string/long using VBA CStr() or CLng() - I tested both ways). I got a meaningless "Join expression not supported" error message.

 

I think this has worked fine for years. I wonder if a forced security update broke something. I found if I switched the query from 'Dynaset' to 'Dynaset (Inconsistent Updates)' it worked. Snapshot didn't work.

 

Now you know.

 

For me, it's a sign that I either need to switch to Access 2007/2010 or switch jobs. (I don't think 2010 is 64bit, so I still face the problems with ODBC drivers and bitness. I might be better to try Access 2007 in an XP VM.)

Update: I'm seeing other issues. It feels like something very bad has happened, probably as a result of a Microsoft security update, but I can't tell what.

 

Update 7/4/2012: I'm not quite sure what's going on, still having some issues. It might be an ODBC issue. I think the error message is a red herring.

My Google Custom Search just died. Did I offend the GoogleNet? (fixed)

Two days ago my much loved Google Custom Search was working beautifully (emphasis added) ...

Why coupons? Price concealment information and memetic archeology in the pre-web world 

... I found that reference through my pinboard/wordpress microblog/memory management infrastructure now integrated into my personal google custom search...

My latest enhancement was paying off; my ("free" = ad supported) personal custom search engine was now successfully indexing a blog that archived my pinboard.in shares and annotations [1] as well as my ancient web pages (archived) and my tech.kateva.org and notes.kateva.org blogs.

My extended memory was better than ever!

Until it died. [2] As of yesterday my custom search engine is returning very few results.

My first thought was that I'd unwittingly committed a Class One transgression against the GoogleNet. Perhaps Google considers my link/annotation blog to be a link-farm-equivalent -- and had blacklisted my entire kateva.org domain. Perhaps I had broken an unwritten rule of the GoogleNet (formerly known as the Internet, home of Archie and Veronica [3]).

I'm still able to find my notes.kateva.or and even kateva.org/sh posts in Google's standard search however (if I restrict by domain). So I'm not certain I've transgressed. If the search doesn't work soon I'll try recreating that engine. If that doesn't work, or if I detect more signs of transgression, I'll have to remove my pinboard archive and beg mercy of The Google.

I've a broken iPhone I could burn. Perhaps that will appease.
--
[1] It's my tawdry substitute for my long lost and much mourned Google Reader Share page. I hate the way it looks, but it's primary use is RSS consumption and index fodder. I am looking for a better template but WordPress themes/templates are a rats nest of complexity.
[2] Echoes of losing Google Reader Share!
[3] If you know what that means you either used Google or you are a very old geek.

Update 5/31/2012: It's back.

I followed some of advice that "omr" (not a Google employee) generously gave on the Google Search product forum. Instead of creating a new CSE however, I replaced many of the entries of the old CSE with the patterns he suggested. Perhaps most importantly, I changed the setting for indexing kateva.org/sh.

I'd previously opted to index all entries and all linked pages. Considering I add about 20-60 links a day I think that was a tad ambitious. I now index only the text of this shared items/pinboard (micro) blog.

For reference, here's an edited version of omr's recommendations:

In the "Sites to search" box, enter this URL Pattern:
  *.kateva.org/*
If you wish to include some of your other sites, enter additional URL Patterns to match them.  (Enter one URL Pattern per line.)  For example, if you want to include the msptrails site, add:
  *.msptrails.org/*
For more information about URL Patterns, see
Please include only a limited number of sites.  Start with the minimum number of sites that you consider necessary to include; or, if you wish to include several, preferably no more than ten.  (If you own some older or less-active sites that you don't need to search anymore, don't include them.)
Click the new CSE's "control panel" link (which takes you to the "Basics" page of the control panel).
Leave the "Search engine keywords" box empty.
Near the bottom of the page, note the "Show automatic thumbnail" option.  The automated thumbnail-image selection is not always ideal, so perhaps you may want to turn off that option.  (Click to remove the check-mark, then click the "Save Changes" button BELOW the option.)

The mysterious iTunes -100000 error: This file cannot be downloaded - Fixed

I think I need to sacrifice a goat to the spirit of the Nameless One. How else can I escape the curse of really weird Apple bugs?

This bug isn't quite as weird as the Apple ID vs. MobileMe verified forwarding email bug, or even the mysterious Image Capture Slowdown, but it's bad enough. 

The other day an iTunes track download failed. First time I'd seen that. So I tried with iTunes. It made 3 tries and failed there too; the download list showed an error code of "-100000" and iTunes told me:

There was a problem downloading ...

The file seems to be corrupted. To redownload the file, choose "Check for Available Downloads" from the Store Menu.

I tried several tricks including changing user accounts, trying it on another machine from my home network, trying it again from my iPhone, trying it on AT&T's network, etc. Of course I restarted my machine, different version of iTunes, etc etc.

Nothing worked. 

I tried downloading to my wife's phone. Everything downloaded ok except for that one Arcade Fire track: "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels".

So I went through Apple first tier support, then to 2nd tier. They reset my password so they could try downloading -- and it apparently worked for them. So they washed their hands of me.

Of course it doesn't work for me, no matter the device. The one track is bad.

So what's going on? Well, I'm not the only one. There's a clue in an iTune's Discussion:

...I  also tried all of the suggestions to no avail.  As an experiment this weekend I tried accessing the "corrupt" file from my daughter's  network in the Chicago area.  Logged in, downloaded, bam. Worked like charm. I have no security software on my home network, but by golly I worked from another network...

I bet this is a geography problem. The file is corrupt on a server that manages my geographic area.

One way to test this would be to travel and try it.

Another would be to connect via VPN to a different region and then retry.

It's late for me to try that tonight, but Dreamhost (California) does support SSH connections. Tomorrow I'll try that one ...

Update 5/23/12: VICTORY. I connected via SSH Tunnel to Dreamhost then downloaded again (clicked Buy). It worked instantly. This supports the theory that an instance of the tune was corrupted on the iTunes server for my geographic region (Minneapolis St Paul).

Apple ID Hell: Apple's identity mismanagement and an insanely obscure ID bug with MobileMe send as email

Apple has long had trouble with truly basic concepts of authentication, but lately they've gone off the rails.

It's not just the new and quite demanding Apple ID password requirements that will lead most customers to put them into iPhone Notes -- since it must be entered each time you buy something.

It's not just the bug in their password instructions; when they say "no more than 3" repeating characters they mean "no more than 2" repeating characters (test it yourself).

It's not just that Apple prevents one from seeing the ugly and unmemorable Apple ID that we have to type in -- while also disallowing copy/paste into the password field (take that password manager!).

It's not just that Apple's Apple ID maintenance UI wants me to change my primary email address to match my .mac ID -- which doesn't have email.

No, it's even worse than all that.  The big problems are the proliferation of Apple IDs, and a bug that hit my very old Apple ID.

By trial and error I've discovered I have no less than four distinct Apple IDs.

I have an Apple ID that matches an old MobileMe account I abandoned years ago.

I have an Apple ID that matches my current MobileMe account. When I changed its password I also changed my MobileMe account password.

I even found an old developer account that is now an Apple ID too. (Apple merged these databases). So that's #4. It has yet another email address of mine and so I verified that. 

Lastly I have the Apple ID that is associated with hundreds of dollars of purchases. That's the one I care about -- and that one has two email addresses associated with it. That's critical for password security. One of the email addresses is my personal Gmail address.

Except ... neither of them are "validated". That's bad.

Apple won't let me validate them either. It claims both are associated with other Apple IDs.

One of them is my current MobileMe email. Since I've discovered that account morphed into yet another Apple ID, that makes sense. I removed that one and added a new email that I was able to verify (I own my own domains, so it's easy to make email redirects).

Then I tried removing the Gmail address and adding it back in. Uh-Oh, that's no longer allowed. It's been orphaned.

I check each Apple ID in turn, including my mother's and the kids. The Gmail address is not associated with any of them. So is there a fifth AppleID somewhere? Is there a bug? Is there a security breech?

There's more. After I changed the email address and password for my mac.com Apple ID, Apple enrolled me in iCloud for that account! So now it has an email address too?

I'm beginning to understand why Apple's share price is relatively low. If they can't manage something this basic, they're in trouble.

Apple, if you need a clue, here's a few:

1. We need a way to delete Apple IDs. Unwanted IDs are a security risk.
2. Or we need a way to merge Apple IDs!
3. You need to fix my gmail bug Apple.  If #2 is not a bug, you need a way to reclaim that address (does someone else have it as "unverified"? Is that part of how iTunes accounts are hacked?

See also:

• Apple's messed up Apple ID system: what are they smoking?! 7/2008 (!)
• Apple's identity and account system is screwed up. Again. 10/2008
• Apple is again messing with Apple IDs – pay attention! 6/2009

Update: I've figured out the bug. It arose as a side-effect of changes to the way Apple IDs work, and it only impacts people who are still on MobileMe accounts and who have the same email address associated with two Apple accounts prior to the time Apple made that illegal. In brief:

1. The Gmail address was a validated 'send as' forwarding address in Mobile Me Mail.
2. The Gmail address was the primary email on my mac.com Apple ID.
3. Then Apple created an Apple ID for Mobile Me email. Somewhere in Apple's databases the Gmail 'send as' address became an alternate email for the new Apple ID. HOWEVER, it was already a primary email for another Apple ID. So it didn't display in the AppleID maintenance screens for my Mobile Me account.
4. Since it existed in the database, however, it couldn't be validated in my .Mac account.
5. When I removed it from my .Mac account I wasn't allowed to add it back, since it was associated with my MobileMe account -- but in a partial state there.
6. It couldn't be located using my First and Last name in the Apple ID locator page because it wasn't properly associated with the MobileMe account. However, Apple's 2nd tier phone support was able to see it there.
7. I went to the MobileMe account and added the email manually. It suddenly appeared -- as verified! I removed it, but Apple Support confirmed it didn't remove completely. So I left it "verified" with the MobileMe account. Now I know where it is.

Apple is closing MobileMe, so there's no way they'll ever fix this bug. I'm glad I seem to have fixed it however, it might have screwed up my iCloud migration. I think before I go to iCloud I'll remove that forwarding email address.

Postscript: Apple's Support Profile is supposed to show the products associated with my Apple ID. I think it used to. I don't see them any more. It says my home number is associated with a different Apple ID...