Monsters from the Id 怪獣大悪脳

Ok, now I've done it.

I am a Mac guy. There's no question about it. My job, my sensibilities, and the enjoyment I get from computers all points me down the road to Cupertino. Unfortunately sometimes the rest of the world decides to stand in the way of that path.

Now to be honest, I haven't always used Macs. From the time my dad first started bringing computers home from the office when I was in grammar school---remember the Compaq luggable?---all the way through high school I used various DOS computers to do my school work. However, when I went off to college I bought my first computer and it was a Macintosh LCII. I'd used them in the computer lab in high school and they seemed so much cooler.

In college I always had a Macintosh sitting on my desk in my dorm, but I used a mixture of Macs, Windows, DOS, and Unix at my work-study job in the campus computing center. Later when I entered into the "real world" of life after college and got a job working on post-production sound for film, I found that a large percentage of Hollywood makes use of Macs.

There was a period of time when I was working that I didn't have a lot of spare money to throw around and I've always enjoyed tinkering with computers, so I built my own Windows machines for a while. They were much less expensive than my beloved Macs and since Apple was caught in the doldrums of System 8, I only felt occasional pangs of abandonment guilt.

It wasn't until a few year later when I started working for some other companies when I saw the coolness that was System 9 on Blue and White G3s and Graphite G4s that the longing became unbearable and I had to return to the fold. Step back into the warm, embracing arms of Steve Jobs' goodness. And that's where I've remained until yesterday. Actually it's where I will remain, period. Unfortunately like I said, sometimes the rest of the world gets in the way.

I've started working on a project that pretty much requires me to run Windows. I fought against it as much as I could but not even my copy of Virtual PC could fill the gap of an ugly grey box sitting on floor of my apartment. So after talking it over with some people, a bit of internet research and a lot of soul-searching, I stopped by a local "build-your-computer"-type store and picked up a new motherboard, processor, some RAM and an OEM copy of Windows XP.

Last night after work I dusted off the last of my FrankenPCs, an unwieldy 500MHz Celeron running Windows 98---first edition---in the largest case you've ever seen, and ripped the guts out of it. By 2:30 in the morning I had an AMD Athlon XP 2800 nestled in the socket of a new ASUS motherboard, a 120GB second hard drive removed from one of my Macs reformatted (of course only after moving 80GB of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix bootleg concert FLACs to the safety of an external Firewire drive) and Windows XP installed.

I crawled into bed and lay snug while dreams of DDR RAM danced through my head. At least until 5:30 when the alarm went off so I could get a couple more hours of work in before I had to go back to the office for a temp dub. The update to SP2 went down without a hitch and I installed the 5 CDs of material that I need for the project. Unfortunately when I went to fire up the application for the first time it crapped out on me when the first of the 3D graphics were drawn on the screen.

It was a crushing blow to spend all those hours and be so close to the finish line and have my hopes dashed. Suddenly I started to remember why I enjoy Macs so much more. Of course I've had programs crash on me, or strange bugs have popped up that I've had to diagnose. But it's been a fairly rare occurrence. Maybe I've had good luck or maybe I just know more about how to head off trouble from Apple's computers, but firing up a new system in the world of Macintosh is a pleasurable experience. On the other hand, my travels in the Gatesian realms usually leave me feeling like I've been mugged by a street gang "saying hello" to foreigners.

Thankfully by 7:30, right around the time I was giving careful consideration to seppuku, I was forced to pull myself together and get in the shower or there was no way I was going to make it into the office at 8am. And in the hours since, I've had time to reflect on the joys of Windows system construction and do some research on the ASUS and NVIDIA websites. I'm crossing my fingers that it's just an issue of old video drivers being used in Windows XP SP2. Tonight I'll find out when I go back to fight some Redmond dragons.

Posted by Jon at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Here's a neat little trick that you might find useful for your Classic only applications, like Tape, and printing. If you have the LaserWriter driver selected as your printer in Chooser, when you tell a document to print, you can select "File" as the destination to save a Postscript file to your hard drive.

You can double-click the file to open it with Preview. This will convert it to a PDF file that can be saved by selected "Save As" from the File menu. Not quite as simple as the "Save As PDF" button in the 10.3.x print window, but still pretty easy.

Posted by Jon at 7:44 PM | Permalink

Are there any CSS web designers out there who can offer a guy a bit of advice? This problem is bugging me:

My webpage in Firefox looks like this:

Which is correct. Unfortunately, IE5 for Mac looks like this:

This is not correct. I added the red, white and blue lines to differentiate the various divisions. White is "header", red is "main-body", and blue is "content". The code right at that point looks like this:

</ul>

</div> <!--End div "header"-->

<div id="main-body">

<div id="content">

For some reason, IE5 for Mac insists on putting a bit of space between the header and main-body divisions. It's not the end of the world but it's also not correct and I'd like to know why. I'm sure it has to do with yet another CSS bug in IE5Mac which has to be compensated for with a hack.

I would appreciate any help people can offer.

Update:

Nevermind. I fixed it. It turns out the <ul> directly above the end of the "header" division was the issue. I had defined it with an id of "text-size". The problem was that in the CSS for "text-size" I set a top margin of 5 pixels. When I changed all margins to 0 pixels, the gap closed up:

#text-size {
    text-align: right;
    color: #ffffff;
    font: bold 10px Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    margin: 0px;
    padding-top: 0px;
    padding-right: 5px;
    padding-bottom: 0px;
}

The margins on the <ul> and <li> tags don't seem to matter---at least in terms of the bug. It's the margin on the id object itself which causes the problem.

Posted by Jon at 3:16 PM | Permalink

Following up on the idea of configuring Apache with virtual hosts on your own computer, you will probably need to install some extra software to more closely resemble your web host.

So after spending some time with this and my PowerBook this weekend, I have a few key Mac websites, mostly about installing various UNIX programs in OS X. (You'll need Xcode installed for much of this.)

Marc Liyanage's site is the place to go for updating your PHP, information on installing MySQL, and ImageMagick.

Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) has every Perl module you'd ever want or need. Mac OS X 10.3 ships with the cpan installer. Just type "sudo cpan" at your Terminal prompt and follow the initial setup procedure. After that, most modules can be installed with a simple "install module::name". If you're trying to install DBD::mysql because for example you're trying to setup Movable Type with MySQL, TruerWords has the information you need. Or if you'd rather go the Mac installer route, there's this.

Fink of course is the program that everyone talks about for installing UNIX software on your Mac. There are lots of pre-compiled binaries ready to go. It's very easy to use. I am a bit annoyed that it puts things in /sw/bin. Call me a purest, but I like /usr/local/bin better.

Even though it offers 4000+ packages I found several that I was hoping to use that it didn't have. Screen, jhead, and jpegtran were either not included or listed as being unstable and only available as source. That's why after a bit a poking around I found what I think might be a better thing:

DarwinPorts seems very cool. I have not used this yet but on initial examination it passed several of my tests. Even though it only has 1700+ packages it did have the 3 that I was looking for. In most cases, the versions on DarwinPorts are newer than the version on Fink. It also looks like I can install these in /usr/local/bin. (To be fair, there's probably a way to get Fink to install in /usr/local/bin as well.)

I'm seriously considering deleting Fink and going with DarwinPorts.

Posted by Jon at 9:55 AM | Permalink

As previously mentioned, I have a new Motorola V600 cellphone and I got it setup with all the Wireless Internet fun you could hope for from Cingular Wireless, including getting it to talk to my Mac PowerBook via Bluetooth. It was quite a struggle, let me tell you. I'm going to document the salient points here so maybe others can learn something. If you're a Windows or Linux user, it doesn't mean there isn't good stuff here, it just means not all of it will be applicable. There's probably some useful stuff here for Cingular Wireless customers with other phones too. I should mention that I'm in Los Angeles. The settings should be the same here as in other parts of the country, at least for GPRS, but who knows.

[Update: You need to have some form of Cingular's Wireless Internet Express turned on for this method to work.]

At first let me just say that I couldn't have gotten through this without the help of information from a lot of useful websites. The NSLog(); post about the V600 and iSync is chock full of good information in the comments. And in particular, Ross Barkman's homepage has a lot of great modem scripts. He also has a ton of information about GPRS networks around the world. This MacInTouch page, this page from All The Pages Are My Days, this Unofficial Apple Weblog page, and this MacRumors forum topic all have handy info. (Notice the lack of a mention of the Cingular website.)

Actually that's not entirely true, Cingular has---in my opinion---nothing but fluff on their regular homepage. However, if you notice down at the bottom, there's a link for "Developers Forum". Here's where the strings come in. I actually only discovered it after going through several "customer service" agents on the phone.

"I'm sorry, sir, we don't offer email on the phone you have. Only on the Blackberrys."

"No. You're wrong. Let me talk to someone else."

Finally they put me on with the floor manager of customer service or something like that. He tried to tell me that if I wanted to check my email on my phone, I'd have to get information about that from my Internet Service Provider. I informed him that since I was trying to do it on his phone, he was my ISP. He wasn't buying it though.

Finally I said, "Let's forget the whole email thing. What if I wanted to use the phone as a Bluetooth Modem with my laptop? What settings do I need for that?"

Again we went around with it and he finally suggested I sign up as a developer---no charge---because they could probably give me all the settings I was looking for. And for once he was right.

[Update: Actually those support people were kind of correct. It's not a question of offering, Cingular doesn't officially support setting up email on phone. Basically it works but the tier one staff isn't trained in how to do it, and tier two staff will try to talk you into paying extra for Data Connect services.]

This little treasure of a document I found over at their developer site. All the dial-in phone numbers, APN, Username, and Password information you could ever ask for from Cingular. Some of this information is over at Ross Barkman's site. There basically seems to be two different APNs---WAP.CINGULAR and ISP.CINGULAR---to connect to, and a few different usernames depending on compression---WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM, ISPDA@CINGULARGPRS.COM, and ISP@CINGULARGPRS.COM.

Here's how I got mine to work:

Continue reading "Motorola V600, Wireless Internet, Bluetooth And The Macintosh" »

Posted by Jon at 6:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (42) | TrackBacks (6)

Last night I decided to update the templates for my website. Movable Type basically uses webpages with custom variables to generate the pages on the website. MT3.01D was released a couple weeks ago. I upgraded the server software then but nothing else. There were several fixes to the way comments worked so I knew that I was going to have to update my templates if I wanted to use those. Plus they were supposedly truly XHTML 1.0 Transitional which the 3.0 versions were not.

I was a little nervous about it but it actually turned out to be quite easy. My templates are not much different from the ones that it ships with. Of course what tool made it so easy? BBEdit. What else? :)

I went through each template saving the original 3.01 version and my version as text files on my computer. Then I used BBEdit's "Find Differences" command from the Search menu. After selecting the original and my version, the two documents where displayed side-by-side with a third window at the bottom listing the lines numbers with the differences. By clicking on the line numbers, the effected areas where highlighted in each document. With that it was quite easy to make the necessary changes.

Of course I being who I am, was not quite satisfied with that easy step. I needed to make sure that my documents were XHTML 1.0 Strict. Which took a lot of debugging and running through W3C's page validator. That part took a bit longer. But now I am. Or at least I am with all of my recent posts. I still need to check some of the early ones. Plus it's not necessarily that easy to check all the comment pages that can be generated---preview and error and whatnot---since they are generated on the fly. I'll still have to look at those at some point.

BBEdit saves the day, yet again. You are using it yourself, aren't you?

Posted by Jon at 7:39 PM | Permalink

You know those commercials where they say, "What can you get for a buck?" and then some ex-athlete proceeds to inform the public of benefits of dialing 7 extra digits for long distance phone calls? Well I often feel like, "What can you get for 5 bucks?"

And then I found Synergy. (Ok, so it's actually 5 euros---something like $6.32 with the exchange rate.)

You listen to iTunes while you're working / reading / hanging out / living, right? Of course you do. We all do. That little shrunk down iTunes window is pretty handy. It's small. Gives you the song information. Let's you play/pause and move forward and back. Everything you need, but it still takes up space. You need to position all your applications so that you can use it. And it can easily disappear behind a window if you're not careful.

Synergy is the perfect iTunes remote. It gives you all the same functionality and it doesn't take up the space. The control buttons wind up in the menu bar next to things like your clock and volume control.

And the track information? It shows up as an overlay over all your windows when the song starts.

It includes a Pref Pane where you can set everything from the position of the overlay to hot keys for switching tracks to the look of the buttons. And a ton of other things as well.

Clean. Simple. Easy. And just 5 bucks. (Or it would be $5 if our economy wasn't in the toilet.)

Posted by Jon at 4:58 PM | Permalink

I have talked about how cool I think BBEdit is. Bare Bones Software, the makers of BBEdit, is offering a discount on the software from now through Thursday, July 15. It's $150 instead of the usual $180. Plus you get a free t-shirt.

Now's your chance to pick up a great piece of software and save a little cash.

Posted by Jon at 2:34 PM | Permalink

I'm looking to hire a good Macintosh programmer to help me develop a Carbon application that would run in both OS 9 and OS X. Interested people should send me an email by clicking the link in the sidebar. Include a resume and your desired salary. I'll get in touch with you with all the details. You don't have to live in Los Angeles, but I think you would have to live in the US. I don't know how the whole international employee thing would work out. I'll have to check on that.

Posted by Jon at 3:38 PM | Permalink

I have a day off today. In fact I have this entire weekend off. I went from no work for 3-some-odd months to two weeks straight work including the weekend and it was a bit of a system shock. It’s nice to fart around.

Yesterday at work we were enjoying the fruits of our newly installed OS X 10.3. Doing cool things like labeling things with color. (Hey, when you’ve been using Panther for nearly a year on your home computer, trying to deal with Jaguar everyday at work is a real pain.)

We have a server in our office that holds our entire sound effects library. Any computer in our building with a username and password can get to the FX. It makes editorial much easier. We also have a drive that holds things like the digital picture files of the movie we are working on. Change notes to help conform edited material from an earlier version to the most current version of the movie.

Every editor who works with us also has a personal folder on that drive. A place to put your stuff. This makes exchanging files so much easier. Before we started using a central server 3 years ago, we had to rely on moving hard drives from computer to computer or [involuntary shudder] Jaz drives to transfer files. Now it’s a simple matter of “Hey, I put a mixdown of that line of dialogue you were looking for in your folder. You can get it whenever you want.”

So in our Panther-induced joyous mood yesterday we decided to drop Cameron’s personal folder into the Finder Sidebar—that list of drives and folder on the left side of every Finder window. That would make things really easy we reasoned. Need to get to your personal folder fast? Click on the folder in the sidebar. It seemed really cool yesterday.

Today during my day off I got a call from Cameron who decided to go into the office for a few hours to finish up on some sound design he had been working on. Anything he clicked on on his desktop caused the computer to hang—spinning beachball icon. The only way out was to Force Quit the Finder. He couldn’t open drives. He couldn’t open folders. He could run programs from the dock though.

I asked him to see if he could open a new Finder window. That didn’t work either. This time though it asked him to log into the server. He tried doing that but he got the spinning beachball again. But this gave me a clue to the problem. I suspected it had something to do with Cameron’s personal folder on the server being in the Sidebar.

Thankfully I always insist that we put the Applications folder in the Dock. By clicking and holding on it, he was able to get the list of all installed applications. After a little research on my end, this is how I had him fix the problem:

1. Run Terminal. I keep it in the Dock so I would have been set. Cameron doesn’t but he had the Applications folder there so he could run it from that.
2. Type cd Library/Preferences
3. Type mv com.apple.sidebarlists.plist side.old
4. Quit Terminal.
5. Select Apple Menu -> Log Out
6. Log back in.

All better. You can of course delete the offending plist file as well—the Finder will gladly rebuild it when you log in again. But if you had other things in there you wanted to save, it’s best to rename and fix it after you can work with your computer normally. You could also go in with a text editor and delete the lines from the plist about the remote volume.

If you aren’t lucky enough to have Terminal or the Applications folder in your Dock, but you’re on a network, you can remotely log into your computer and do the same thing. You’ll need to know the IP address of the non-functional computer. You can get it from the Network Preference Pane in System Preferences which you can get to from the Apple Menu.

Run Terminal on the other computer. Type in ssh username@ipaddress where “username” is your short name on the non-functional computer and the “ipaddress” is the address you got from the Network Preference. You’ll have to enter your password when it asks for it. If you’ve never used ssh before, it’ll ask you about adding the address or something like that. You’ll want to say “yes”. Now you’re logged into the non-fuctional computer. Do steps 1, 2, and 3 listed above. Instead of step 4, simply type exit to logoff and close the connection to the remote computer. Now you can do steps 5 and 6 on the non-functional computer.

I suspect there’s probably a way to get a folder on a remote volume to work properly in the Sidebar. Probably with a symbolic link of something. But my first mission was to get the computer working again. Thankfully I can say, mission accomplished.

Posted by Jon at 12:25 PM | Permalink

Yesterday I finished most of the system upgrade I did on my Pro Tools workstation. I still have a few programs to put back on, but it’s mostly there. Probably the coolest thing about the upgrade has been the new driver for my ATTO ExpressPCI UL3D SCSI card. The new 3.10 driver for Panther is brilliant! Finally we can once again hot-swap hard drives like we used to do under OS 9. It doesn’t work exactly the same way but it is still much faster than a shut down and reboot.

You have to download the driver I mentioned above and the ATTO Configuration Tool v2.61. Once you have those installed, run the Configuration Tool. You turn down a few of the arrows on the left like opening folders in List View in the Finder, until you see the ExpressPCI SCSI card listed. Click on it to select it. Click the “Advanced” tab on the right side of the window. Then click the “Rescan” button. The software will look for any drives attached to your SCSI card and mount them. Very easy.

I did notice a couple of things to watch out for.

1. Pro Tools grabs a hold of all drives on your desktop while it’s running. You have to quit it before you do any SCSI mounting.

2. You have to remove all drives from the desktop before mounting any new drives. (Even if you want to continue using drives that are currently mounted.) Throw all drives into the trash or hit Command-E to eject them. Then do the steps I mentioned above to mount all the SCSI drives you want to work with. If you don’t eject all drives first you will get an error message when you run “Rescan” telling you that your drives were improperly put away and that you may have lost data. Better safe than sorry.

The ATTO 3.10 driver is (dare I say it?) “The Bomb”. I strongly encourage everyone running Panther with a UL3D SCSI card to check it out.

Posted by Jon at 11:15 PM | Permalink

Right now I am sitting at my desk in my office watching a little blue bar crawl across the screen of my computer. I’m in the process of upgrading my Macintosh Pro Tools workstation to Panther. The average end user might not realize it but tall these system updates wreak havoc with those of us in speciality hardware and software situations. Apple basically rewrote the underlying audio framework when they made OS X 10.3. Suddenly those of us with laptops or home computers were enjoying all the cool benefits that Panther brought, but couldn’t use it on our Digital Audio Workstations because nothing was compatible.

Even now, I’m technically setting my system up in an unsupported configuration. But I already tried it out on another computer with good success so I’m now doing it to mine—

Oh! My computer just restarted. Time to pop in disk 2.

Maybe I make it harder on myself than I need to with these upgrades but I’m paranoid about bad updates leaving lasting problems. So I left my OS 9 stuff untouched, but after making a copy of all of my files onto a firewire drive, I deleted my entire OS X 10.2 installation. I’m now putting on a clean version of Panther. Yes, they have that “archive and install” option but somehow I just feel better doing it all by hand. It probably takes we way longer than it needs to, but I know that I have a 100% Panther system this way.

Anyway, my computer now says I have 10 minutes left on disk 2. (And there’s still disk 3 ahead of me.) So I’m just sitting here waiting. Writing this. Surfing some websites, and listening to a CD I picked up recently, “The Greatest Hits of Jackie Wilson”.

Posted by Jon at 9:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Ok, maybe I'm not using the program the way it's supposed to be used. Here's what I'm doing. I've subscribed to all the feeds I want. PulpFiction automatically checks for new posts every 30 minutes. They are downloaded to the Inbox on my machine. I read the posts and the ones I don't want to keep, I delete by hitting the delete key. For some reason though, I those same posts that I've read and deleted are sometimes re-downloaded a few hours or even a day later. It's very strange. It's not the end of the world. But it's a bit annoying.

Posted by Jon at 7:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've been using PulpFiction Lite for several days now to keep up with the websites I read a lot and it's working out great. Once I got over the initial onslaught of hundreds and hundreds of posts to slog through it's fairly easy to stay up to date. One super important thing for people to do though: do not subscribe to more sites than you can handle. That was my initial problem. I added all the sites I read regularly to the ones that were already in the program and I got so overwhelmed so quickly that I almost gave up.

The best way to go about doing this is to only add the sites you normally read with your web browser and maybe one or two new ones. Try that out for several days and get used to it. If you can keep up with the volume of posts and want to add more, only then add a few more.

So I'm happy. I'm reading all the websites I read previously plus a few more and it's pretty easy. The new posts come directly to me. No more loading and reloading of websites to see if there's something new.

I have one big problem with PulpFiction Lite right now though. When it checks for a new posts in a feed--I have it set to check automatically every half-hour--it scrolls the preview panel where you read the post to the top. This is a big pain in the butt. Some RSS feeds like MacMinute only include a few words of the post, you have to click the link to really read it. Others like anything from Livejournal.com, include the full post. So I usually just read it right there in the preview window. Since feeds are checked every half-hour from the time they were last checked, if you leave PulpFiction running for a while, you might end up checking feeds every few minutes. This is a lot of interruptions when you're reading a long post.

Posted by Jon at 12:23 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

So I've only been playing with this a few hours. This isn't the be-all, end-all of the RSS newfeed thing.

First, let me say that the My Yahoo RSS module is not very good. I don't know where how it gets it's automatic feeds when you search for things but they're not quite right. The feed for my own site only seems to show the last post I made. Whereas, if you link directly to my feed (you'll find it on the sidebar), you'll see the last 10 posts. And it's slow as all hell to update. It finally added the post I made about two-and-a-half hours ago. (Of course that's because I linked it directly to my RSS feed.) Wil Wheaton's excellent site, however, is not showing the two posts he made today so far. Maybe by default it gets feeds from Feedster or one of these other sites that compiles lots and lots of blogs.

PulpFiction doesn't have this problem. The Lite version, which is the one I'm using, will automatically check for new feeds every half hour.

I am having two problems with it right off the bat. First, it gets really slow after being on for a while with a couple hundred posts listed. Grabbing the elevator in scrollbar and dragging up and down really chugs. I just checked it again and I'm seeing it with only 43 messages in the Inbox.

The second problem is getting overwhelmed. Quite a while back--6 months ago maybe, I don't really remember--I tried out NetNewsWire for a bit. I had the same problem with it. Posts keep coming in. The first time you run it, there will literally be hundreds of pages to look at. It takes hours to go through things. You finally get it down to something managable and the next day you've got hundreds more to look at.

I think some of it has to do with the different method of working. I added a feed for MacCentral which is one of the sites I read everyday. That one site alone might easily post 30 articles in one day. If I'm going to it through the web, I see the list of articles and only click on the ones I want to read. When I'm getting a feed to an RSS reader, all 30 articles show up as unread and unless I do something about them they sit there and multiply.

I'm not sure how to get around this. Maybe certain high volume sites like MacCentral, MacMinute, Fark, Boing Boing, need to stay web browse only. So I only click on the links I want to click on. Whereas something like Wil's site that's only updated one or twice a day is sent to the reader. I don't know. I'm going to have to play with this more and think about it.

Posted by Jon at 11:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I'm starting to look into RSS newsfeed aggregation. I know big words. Basically it's kind of like the list of news stories you get on a lot of web portal homepages like My Yahoo, Earthlink's Start Page, MSN, etc. Instead of reloading a thousand times a day all those websites that you read regularly to see if there's a new article, you subscribe to the RSS feed and use a news aggregator to do the checking for you. Like checking your email. You get a little synopsis of a new post when it's available, and clicking on "Read More" takes you to the website to read the whole post.

I'm trying to simplify things. And as much as I love Safari, there's some kind of memory leak / resource hog bug that if I leave it running for a few hours, it'll consume all available CPU power on my machine. So I figure if I can leave a more system friendly program running and just load Safari when I need to, that might be better.

The two big Mac OS X RSS programs are NetNewsWire and PulpFiction. PulpFiction is brand new and I'm checking that one out first. One thing that I immediately like, is that it uses Apple's WebKit to include a built-in browser. It's like having Safari without running Safari. I wonder if it has the same CPU problems?

I use My Yahoo as my default homepage when I browse the web. Over the years I've fine tuned the modules it offers to make sure that I have everthing exactly where I want it. Weather immediately in the upper left hand corner with movie releases and box office immediately below it. A news photo in the top center, and all the different Reuters, LA Times, E! Online and other feeds below that. I've found that it's a good thing to take a look at that "Choose Content" button every few months because they sometimes offer up new things.

One new feature that is in beta testing is, you guessed it, an RSS newsfeed aggregator. So I'm also looking into that for keeping up with all the weblogs, Mac info, and game news that I read. Of course that means running my loved and hated Safari. But I'm really used to that. And I'm also really used to quitting it and restarting it every few hours. It's very possible that I will prefer to stick with what's familiar.

Posted by Jon at 8:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

Yesterday was nominated "Fun With Windows XP Day!"

I spent nearly 10 hours in Long Beach working on my Aunt and Uncle's computer. I mentioned before that I took a look at it on Easter and found it to be chock full of virii and adware.

After backing up the essentials like bookmarks and Word documents, I restored the computer to its original factory state using the CDs that Gateway provided with the computer. That was all very painless and easy.

Problems started to arise when I tried to get them back on the internet. They have a Charter Pipeline cable modem, just like I do, so I didn't think it would be any big deal. Wrong. The cable guy who'd installed the modem hooked them up through USB which meant that I needed the driver installed to talk to the modem again. No Charter Pipeline installer CD anywhere to be found. I'm hooked up to my cable modem through the ethernet port and I find that to be much easier. But we didn't have a crossover cable. So it was off to CompUSA to pick one up.

When we got back I could not get the ethernet to work. I plugged the cable into the computer and the modem. Restarted both many times. The Network Connection window in XP kept saying that the network was not plugged in. I tried different combinations authentication methods listed on the setup screen to see if something was conflicting but nothing worked. Finally in frustration, I pulled my Macintosh PowerBook out of my bag, plugged it into the ethernet cable, and what do you know... I was online. I went back to fiddling with the XP machine but I could never get that Network Connection to say it was plugged in.

I tried downloading the Charter Pipeline software from the internet (on my Mac) but they don't seem to have it on their website. I tried looking for it in their customer support pages but I was kindly informed that they don't support my computer. (Gotta love the WIndows bias and the fact that they shut you out of their webpages because you're not currently sitting at a Windows machine.)

I was beginning to think that we were going to have to run over to the cable company to pick up a Charter Pipeline CD and my aunt was about ready to pass out from lack of food (I get on my problem solving kick, and I tend to forget about things like that), when it occurred to me to check for a driver from the manufacturer of the modem.

After about 30 seconds on the Motorola webpage I had the drivers downloaded, copied to my USB Flash Drive and over on the XP machine. I got them installed and we were back in business. FINALLY!

Even after all that we still had to go through another hour or so of critical updates to patch problems with the software. At some point in the WIndows Update process something got installed that caused the monitor to go black whenever Windows loaded. Thankfully they have that system restore feature so I was able to back up a few steps and continue on.

I put their Norton Internet Security program back on and within a few minutes it was already popping up messages that the system was infected with the Walchia virus! One of the ones we where trying to get rid of with this whole reinstall process! Luckily Norton was able to delete the six copies that had already propagated throughout the system.

Things were finally beginning to settle down with the computer. I installed Mozilla Firefox as their web browser and Mozilla Firebird as their email program. I showed them how the Microsoft stuff was still there but that with Firefox's pop-up blocker they shouldn't have the as many of the virus and adware problems as they had before. We spent a little looking at some of the easy was to find things on the internet--like the Google search bar at the top of the Firefox window. And I called it a day around 9pm.

Boy am I glad, I have a Macintosh!

Posted by Jon at 8:28 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I'm still working away, behind the scenes, on my new version of Monsters from the Id. The first release probably won't look much different from what you're seeing right now, but trust me... it is. I have to say that I'm very impressed with Movable Type. It's a very slick system. And so many people make use of it that there is a lot of information online about tips and tricks that you can do.

I've been trying to set it up in such a way that it will be very customizable once it's up without redoing the structure again. I am going to have about 60 files that won't exist anymore, but I think I've found a couple of PHP scripts that will allow me to create an array of redirects in the "404 File Not Found" page. The cool thing is that I'll only need one file--not 60--and I won't have to keep the old folder structure that iBlog created. Plus with this script, it will literally say, "Oh, you tried to find this page? Well, it's now this one." And send you on your way.

Every page of the new weblog is now a PHP file (you know with a .php extension). I don't actually have a single line of PHP code in any of those pages yet. And I might not have any in there by the time I go live with this update. But by naming the files .php from the get go, I'll be able to add code to the pages later and I won't have to do yet another round of redirects when the name changes from .html to .php.

One thing I did notice in the course of this redesign... despite my best efforts during the previous conversion of my website from tables-based layout to pure CSS, I definitely did NOT have XHTML 1.0 Strict code. I thought I did. I knew there might be a few issues with the stuff that iBlog was generating but I didn't realize the extent to which my code was bad. Well I'm happy to say that I ALL of my new pages are XHTML 1.0 Transitional. They're all good. I've run them through the validator and they check out. I might even be able to bring them up to strict but there's one variable embedded in Movable Type which produces a image tag with the 'border="0"' attribute and that's a no-no in Strict. So we'll see.

The biggest culprits in my code were the links I made to sites with databases. Often the URL in address bar in my web browser would have several of the "&" symbols separating the variables that were sent to the server. I would just copy and paste this URL in my link but that's not quite correct for a webpage. You need to encode the "&" like this "&". Using that will give you valid XHTML code.

It's too bad that I outgrew iBlog so quickly--it's always nice to support Mac software. But Movable Type is so much more flexible, I'll be able to make posts on computers other than my own--even *shudder* Windows machines!

Posted by Jon at 4:33 PM | Permalink

Did everyone have a nice Easter?

I did. I drove down to Long Beach and spent the day with my aunt and uncle. They are going to get a new TV soon because their current one is a twelve-year-old projection set and it is definitely showing its age. The picture is warped, it's losing its brightness, the focus is soft, and the colors aren't that spectacular. I was telling them all about the Sony Projection LCD that Cameron recently put in his house and I think they are going to go that way. They are looking at the model that he has and also the next step up. My uncle is into having a huge picture so he feels he needs the 60" one. That 50" just isn't good enough.

I will very likely wind up in Long Beach again later this week because they are having trouble with their computer. I took a look at it yesterday and it is a bit messy. They have a Windows XP machine that they bought a year ago or so. It is now infected with 4 different viruses which have oh so conveniently attached themselves to necessary files like the winlogin.exe. Plus they have about 25 different adware and spyware programs that are now running on their computer. Norton Anti-Virus wasn't able to get rid of any of it. Unfortunately I'm probably going to have to do a complete re-install. It's possible that I might be able to boot from the system CD and replace the 4 infected system files with clean ones from the CD, but I'm not sure. Then I still have to track down all those adware programs try to disable them manually. Pain in the butt!

I told them that after I get this done, we'll have to sit down and I'll show them a bit about what kinds of things not to trust. And what kinds of things not to install on their computer.

It's so much easier on a Mac!

Posted by Jon at 11:10 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Stupid IE6.

Ok, so here I was thinking I was done with my website redesign. Unfortunately I didn't preview it in a bunch of browsers. Safari in OS X is my browser of choice. I guess I'm at fault for using an extremely standards-based browser. My website looked great in Safari.

There were a couple little glitches in black areas of the header and footer under Firefox and IE5 for Mac but they were easily fixed by adjusting the border setting in those areas. I think Firefox looks almost as good as Safari--though their forms display needs a little help. I'll have to look into tweaking that.

Internet Explorer 5 for Mac looked worse of all but hey, what do you want from a browser that hasn't been updated in years?

Imagine my shock when I fired up Windows 98 in Virtual PC "just to be sure" and my website looked like a disaster.

It seems that wonderful Internet Explorer 6 has a wonderful "feature" that floating elements like my nav bar don't behave as expected.

After a lot of research and "trial and error", I was able to fix the problem. My XHTML code is pretty simple: There's a container <div> which is everything that is not the grey background. Inside of that there's a header <div>, a navigation <div>, a content <div>, and a footer <div>. Obviously there's more going on than just that but those are the basic elements. In my CSS, I floated the #navigation to the right, set the #content exactly next to it (to the pixel), and told the #footer to clear both.

Ultimately I discovered that IE6 can't handle the #content touching the floating #navigation. I had to leave 8 pixels between the two. I'm sure it could be a little less but 3 pixels had the same problem and I got sick of playing with it so I left it at 8.

I am SO glad that the web browser that something like 70% of the world is using doesn't actually properly support standards. Ugh!

Anyway it's now working. I would however appreciate it if anyone who happens to actually read this site who is using some other operating system / browser combination, would be kind enough to send me a screen capture from their system. Or at least drop me a note in my email or in the comments letting me know how it's working. Thanks.

Stupid IE6.

Posted by Jon at 6:00 PM | Permalink

I've spent the last two days learning XHTML and CSS. Actually I didn't spend ALL day both days working on this. I had a very enjoyable several hours on Saturday in a park in the mountains here in Burbank--I'm still a little red from the experience. I read a lot more in the Robert Jordan book I've been working on, "The Eye Of The World." Watched a little TV last night.

It's been interesting to get back into web design. I have been away from it for several years and things have definitely changed for the better. When I was designing the mostly monthly Right Turn Clyde in 1999, I was using Dreamweaver to put together the site in HTML4, and boy was it messy. I shudder to think of what the code looks like on those pages. Lots and lots of tables to attempt to position things correctly

There was this mysterious thing called Cascading Style Sheets but it had different versions based on your Document Object Model (DOM) and because of the non-standard nature of Internet Explorer and Netscape at the time. Even now I'm getting a little nervous just writing this. So I ignored that and stuck with trusty HTML and tables.

The cool thing I've discovered is that XHTML is even easier that HTML4. It reminds me of when I first started writing web pages by hand back in college in 1994. Back then I had to compile and install my own server just so I could have a website. I worked in the computer labs on the Norwestern campus so I had accounts on every computer. So a little Sun workstation in a lab was my web home for several years (http://crow.acns.nwu.edu:8080/). Don't bother looking for it. It's been gone for a long time.

The thing that made me so excited about the web was this program that had just come out on the Mac (my trusty Quadra 840 AV at the time), NCSA Mosaic. It was a web browser and YOU COULD PUT PICTURES IN THE PAGES! The year before I saw a web program called MacWWW but it was just pages and pages of unformatted text. You could click on something that was underlined and it would take you somewhere else. I couldn't see that it was any better than our Gopher server. But then the pictures came and everything was different. In fact I got my first internship in Hollywood because of my web site, but that's a story for another day.

I used to use BBEdit Lite to write my webpages. It was all by hand but there weren't that many tags to learn. And it wasn't all that different from using a word processor like WordStar for DOS--which I used to write all my papers in high school. Instead of putting a ^U on either side of text that I wanted to underline. I would just use the <u> and the </u>. Nothing too scary.

Now I find 10 years later that we've come around to those days of simple tags again. Simple tags. Focus on meaningful content. Let the CSS handle the layout of the page. The idea is to separate the content from the layout so that the content can easily be displayed on lots of different output devices. The computer screen is the obvious one, but more increasingly: web-enabled TVs, PDAs, and cell phones. Not to mention allowing visually handicapped people access to this wonderful internet with programs like screen readers. Imagine a screen reader program trying to make it through the mess of tables of HTML4? Yuck.

The wonderful thing about XHTML is that it has standardized some of the non-standard tags, and there are a whole list of tags that should no longer be used. It's great. Simple. The thing that takes all the time now is messing around with CSS trying to get your layout right. But even that's not too difficult one you've learned how it works.

I'm back to coding web pages (mostly) by hand with BBEdit. The full version has a great set of markup tools to handle all your HTML needs. It'll handle the CSS for you too, but I've been using a program called CSSEdit to do that. Mostly because it has a bunch of categorized fields to fill in. It's easier while I'm still learning CSS to say, "Ok, now I need to work on the font. Go to the font tab, fill out the appropriate fields. Now let's change the background. Go to the background tab. Change the color." Instead of trying to remember all the selectors, just type in the fields.

I use iBlog to make my weblog entries and deal with generating all the various archive pages and whatnot. It makes a series of static webpages and uses a bit of javascript trickery to generate a few things on the fly. It means I can have a weblog on my $3/month server that doesn't allow server-side scripting at that price. Not the most flexible program, but it works well and it's easy. One of these days I'll setup PHP on one of my computers and figure out that whole thing. (That's one of the nice things for us geeks about OS X, it's a Unix operating system.) And then maybe I'll move up to a $5/month or -shudder- $7/month server and MoveableType or something like that. But not today.

For now I'll just keep messing around with my CSS. And someday soon, perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, you'll see a new Monsters from the Id website in all its XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS glory.

Posted by Jon at 8:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)