Mac check-in: software

It's been (about) 4 months since I got my MacBook Pro, and here's a quick rundown on the software I've found, and even in some cases paid real money for, since then.

Adium chat client - accesses my MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and most importantly for me, Lotus Sametime chat lists. Full featured and robust with good notifications
Scrivener writing application - ties research, notes, ideas and writing all together. Time to dust off my novel drafts and get them back on track [props to Ryan Chase for passing this one along]
Apple mail client - the integration with Gmail's IMAP capability has made this my main mail client (outside of work, where -- shudder -- Lotus Notes is mandatory).
Alphababy - this locks out your keyboard and trackpad, and turns every key into a letter/shape generator for kids. Awesome fun for those under 5.
Unisudoku - Gets my Sudoku fix fixed. I even paid money for this, so you know it's gotta be good.

That's enough for today. I'll post more another day.

Where Julie meets a Tiger

My last post mentioned my technology resolutions for the year. 18 days in and I can cross one off the list:

Upgrade Julie's G3 laptop to 768 MB of RAM, and push the OS from Panther to Tiger

Upgrading the RAM was fairly painless. I bought a 512 MB stick from the good folks at canadaram.com (this older type of RAM is hard to find, so a big thumbs up to the CanadaRAM crew for having it on hand). Installation was also aided by the step-by-step instructions at ifixit.com. After a reboot, 768 MB shows up on the system info screen. Awesome.

Part two was a lot more complicated. I was originally inspired by this article at lifehacker.com, which suggested using an older iPod as a installation drive for Leopard (I presumed Tiger would follow the same process). As I have a 20 GB model handy, I naively expected this to work perfectly. My first sticking point was that my copy of Tiger (the one that came with my MacBook Pro) was tied to the hardware, and could not be used to install on Julie's G3 iBook laptop, or anything else that wasn't a Macbook Pro.

I managed to track down a retail copy of the Tiger (10.4) installation DVD, but one of the key problems is that Julie's iBook doesn't have a DVD drive. The lifehacker article shows you how to get around this problem by creating an image of the DVD (on my MacBook), then erasing the iPod and copying that image to the iPod so that the iBook can use it just like a DVD drive. This worked great, except that the older 10.2 version of OS X on the iBook didn't have the "Disk Utility" to allow me to define which disk (the iBook hard drive or the iPod) should be used as the start-up boot drive.

The solution was to start up the iBook (with the iPod plugged in) while holding down the Apple and c keys. This made the iBook boot off an external device and showed me the Tiger installation menu. From there, I was able to install Tiger directly on the laptop in about 30 minutes.

Julie seems to be really happy with the new OS and the responsiveness that an extra 512 MB of RAM brings to her laptop. One resolution down, many more to go.

Technical Resolutions

Every year at this time, we all make resolutions for the coming year. Things we'd like to improve, parts of ourselves we'd like to change, etc. I'm no exception to this, as I like to use this time to take stock of what I like about myself and what I could work on this year.

As a bonus for all my 3 o'clock blog readers, I'm going to post some of the technological improvements I'd like to make, and keep you up to date on how things are going.

Here's my list so far:

* Upgrade Julie's G3 laptop to 768 MB of RAM, and push the OS from Panther to Tiger
* Move all my work-based applications onto my MacBook Pro (i.e. stop the dual-system dilemma)
* Reduce my technological footprint - by this, I mean that I want to significantly simplify the amounts of similar tech that I have. For God's sake, I have 4 printers in my office - how did that happen?
* Blog more regularly. Less complex posts means more frequency. I'll try to document steps taken for bigger projects, but expect more brief hits with lesser detail.

Hope to see more of you in 2008!

No joy in Mudville

A few of you may know that I like to partake of the kingly sport of betting on NFL football. This week I decided to put in a slightly larger stake, with the goal of putting together the significant portion of the cost of a new ASUS Eee computer. My potential take was $377.68, about $20 less than the cost of a new eee system.

Bottom line: Every bet came through. Except the (5-6) Broncos, who had won the last 5 matchups against their arch-rival (3-8) Raiders, and wound up committing 4 turnovers, leading to 24 Oakland points, thus not only failing to cover, but actually losing outright; I wound up with a net loss of $15. No new computer this week.

Two Mac quickies

Just a short post today. Wanted to share two cool OSX Leopard hacks that I've found today that are definitely on the useful side.

1. Add "beautifying" icons to the default Stacks. I have the Applications, Documents and Downloads stacks in my dock, and they show the first item in the stack as a miniature icon. Not especially useful, or good to look at, especially because my first document is an all black picture (called black_169.tif).
   This hack from LifeHacker shows you how to add nice "drawer" icons to the top of these stacks, helping you to clearly differentiate them from application icons, and make the entire Stack much better looking.
   
2. Add a "Recent" and "Favorites" dock icon. This hack, again over at LifeHacker, creates a cool icon that allows you to access 5 things:
   
   • Recent applications
   • Recent documents
   • Recent servers
   • Favorite volumes
   • Favorite items
   All right from the dock. Very slick
   

Wither RSS?

People always come up to me at parties, on the street, or during laps in my F1 racecar*, and compliment me on my blogs here, here and here.

"But, Ian," they ask, "what blogs do you read? What catches your fancy during the downtime between skydiving naked and snorkeling off the Great Barrier Reef?"*

Well, kiddos, here today is my listing of the blog feeds I read on a daily basis:

Technology
Ars Technica - Reviews and news on a more techincal bent
Autoblog - The best of what's in automobiles
Boing Boing - The old granddaddy of the internet tech blogs; news and views you can use
Digital Home - Canadian technology news. Brief but occasionally informative
Download Squad - lots of cool software news and trials. Most of the software I've blogged about has come to my attention courtesy of DS
Engadget - Gadgetry, computers, cool tech; winner of best technology blog for the last 4 years
Engadget HD - a sister site to Engadget, dealing primarily with High Definition TV and DVD news
Planet DB2 - DB2 coverage; keeps me up to date on my day job
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) - Coverage of all things Mac; one of my favourite resources

Personal improvement
Lifehacker - lots of quick ideas to help make your work and home life more productive and enjoyable
zen habits - a blog of self-improvement advice and assistance. I don't read it all very often, as I'm too lazy, but I'm sure I'll get around to it

Entertainment (News, Movies, Sports, Shopping, Gossip)
Edmonton Journal - News - My local Edmonton news site

ESPN Feed: Bill Simmons - ESPN's The Sports Guy
From the Pressbox - Elliot Freedman's blog, he works for the CBC and covers NHL hockey, CFL football and a few other lesser sports.
Melt Your Face-Off - A hockey blog
With Leather - Sports news and gossip with more than adequate amounts of scorn; an absolute favourite

Cinematical - Keeps me up to date on the happenings of Hollywood.
My Boring Ass Life - Filmmaker Kevin Smith's personal blog
Pajiba - Hollywood news with equal servings of wit and sarcasm
What Would Tyler Durden Do? - Celeb gossip with a helping of attitude
WWdN: In Exile - Former ensign Wesley Crusher's fantastic personal writings, covering technology, entertainment and his personal doings

seems Artless - A photo blog from my friend David Sky

RedFlagDeals.com - Latest Deals - Deals for Canadian shoppers; my bank account and wife hate me reading this site

Penny Arcade - A fantastic web comic

There you have it gang -- get out and explore my world so you can be just like me.

(*activities depicted may or may not actually have occurred)

Dvorak, when the walls fell

I'd heard of the Dvorak keyboarding method years and years ago, but I never really got a handle on it or why it was better for me. Then last week, I came across this post on boingboing linking to a very informative e-comic that outlined exactly why I should switch.

So I hitched up my pants, spat into the brass spittoon and said "Y'all know me. Know how I earn a livin'. I'll catch this bird for you, but it ain't gonna be easy."[1] Metaphorically, of course.

Literally though, I set up the Dvorak keyboard on my Thinkpad (it's included as a option in the Regional Settings portion of the Control Panel), took an old keyboard apart and reassembled it Dvorak-style -- for referral purposes only, you don't need a new keyboard to learn Dvorak -- and went online to find some typing tutorial software that would help me learn. I eventually went with Ten Thumbs and their cool viking cartoon helpers.

I dug in with both hands (ha!) and began to see why Dvorak can be such a blessing for touch typists. All the main letters (s,t,n,a,d,o,e,i) are on the main "home" row. A lot less finger movement means more efficient and presumably faster typing.

Then I started to run into the problems:

1. O.M.G. was I slow. I'm a pretty fast touch typist on QWERTY, roughly around 75-90 WPM when I really get it going. With Dvorak, I went back down to 18-25 WPM and I could not stand it. Emails, chats, writing technical documentation -- I do a lot of writing in a day, and I literally kept forgetting what I was trying to type because it was taking me so long to type it. I know that it's idiotic to think that I would be as fast a typist right away, and I certainly was improving after only a few days, but it was giving me headaches to try and rewire my brain like this.
   
2. Copy/Paste - on your normal computer keyboard, CRTL+C and CTRL+V are the copy and paste shortcuts. But in Dvorak land, C and V aren't beside each other anymore (for the record C goes in the "I" position and V is in the ">" position, QWERTY-wise). I wound up losing efficiency with my keyboard shortcuts.
   
3. Multiplicity - I work with a lot of computers. A lot. I have 5 systems in my office, plus my wife's iBook, and literally dozens and dozens of other virtual machines both here at home and remotely at work. That's just too much pain to set each and every one of those up with the Dvorak layout (not to mention that my wife was having none of this madness, so there'd have to be both layouts on several systems to support both of us).
   
4. Keyboards - I mentioned that I took apart a keyboard and set the keys up in Dvorak layout, but most keyboards today are "formed" to a physical design and you can't just move keys from one location to another on the keyboard and have it look normal. The alternative is to paint or tape over the letters and put the Dvorak keys in place. Way too much hassle.
   

So in the end, I pulled the plug on the Dvorak experiment. I think for someone just learning to touch type, or someone who only has one computer, it's definitely a great choice, and I admire all the proponents who swim against the stream to keep this alternative alive. But I've got deadlines to keep and miles of documents to write before I sleep.

[Those of you wondering about this post's title: see here]

A post to talk about no posts

I know your all waiting for the follow-up to the gmail post, and it's coming, but I've also started learning Dvorak typing, so I'm too slow right now to do a long post.

Leopard prints

My copy of Leopard came in the mail on Wednesday, and although I was excited to get my hands on it and upgrade my Macbook Pro to the latest and greatest, I confess I was a bit apprehensive. After all, I'm a long time Windows and Linux user, so operating system upgrades are, in my mind, never easy or clean.

I'm used to backing up my entire hard drive, erasing and then installing the new operating system, then I spend days reinstalling various applications and getting my settings back to normal. Needless to say, a highly frustrating experience.

Leopard blows this out of the water.

Everything was well set up for the OS upgrade. I popped the Leopard disk in, clicked one icon, and then ran a complete erase and install (because I had a backup, so I wanted to see how well a completely clean install was going to work).

The install took about 45 minutes, after which it detected my backup drive, and asked if I wanted to import my applications and settings from my earlier backup. Now that's intelligent software design. Impressed, I said yes, and in less than 20 minutes the installer moved all of my existing documents, applications and settings into the new Leopard system. And what's more -- everything works!

Chalk another one up for the lads at 1 Infinite Loop.

I want one

I know I just bought a $2k MacBook Pro. I know that I have 9 computers in the house now (in my defense, 3 of those are not in working order).

But, man, would I love to have one of these:


The Eee computer from ASUS is a perfect, "take along" laptop. Going out for coffee or to watch the kid's soccer game, need to write a quick email, or want a computer for journals and uploading pictures while on vacation?

Take this puppy along: at less than 2 pounds, you'll barely feel it in your bag, and if -- horrors -- someone walks off with it, you're not out a huge wack of cash.

I think I'll be putting this on my "nice to have" list. If you want to buy me one, here's a link.

The Great Email Adventure, Pt. 1

You may have heard that Google has enabled IMAP for all users on their free Gmail web-based email application. What does that mean? I turn to downloadsquad.com for an excellent summation:

Why does IMAP matter again? Because unlike POP, IMAP supports back and forth communication between your offline email client and Gmail. If you set up your iPhone, Outlook, or Thunderbird client to read your Gmail using IMAP, every time you read a message it will be marked as read on the web interface. If you delete a message on your desktop, it will be deleted from the web. If you use POP, you'll have to repeat all of those actions twice.

Naturally, since it's a cool new technology, and my personal emails have been web-based (as opposed to a local application like Thunderbird or Outlook Express) for years now, this interested me.

And I must admit, ever since I saw the cool mail.app features that are in the new OSX Leopard mail client, I've been thinking about how nice it would be to have all of my email accessible and synchronized from both my laptop AND via the web.

After careful thought this week, I decided to plunge in and get everything up to my primary Gmail account. Unfortunately, this is where I hit the big snag. My primary personal email account has been on Yahoo! for years and years, but ever since 2002, Yahoo! has not allowed you to get to your web email from a local client, unless you paid a premium. I never cared that much, so I never paid the cash. Now, however, I'm tired of Yahoo and their old, outdated email interface (don't even get me started on their new, bloated email interface), so I was willing to pony up the dough to get off. But when I tried to actually go and pay for the premium service, I was greeted with this error from Yahoo!:

We Apologize
The service you are requesting is not currently for sale.
We apologize for the inconvenience.

User experience -- Google: 1, Yahoo!: 0

My next step was to track down a method to run through getting Yahoo! emails down from the server. Sure enough, lots of folks have solutions, the most popular being a program called YPOPs!
which installs a little mail server on your system that can interact with Yahoo! mail server and retrieve the messages in your account. This does require a local client to download the messages, so I fired up my old Thunderbird email client and followed these easy setup instructions.

Once the account was configured, I ran a "Get Mail" on that account, and sure enough, the email from my Yahoo! Inbox came pouring down into my client! Success!

Unfortunately, YPOPs! won't delve into my Yahoo! mail folders (where I've archived lots of stuff) to get old mails, so after I moved my "Inbox" contents to a "temp" folder in Thunderbird, I had to go through this laborious process:

1. Move the contents of a Yahoo! folder to the empty Yahoo! inbox, but no more than 40 at a time (the limit for downloading seems to be 40 -- I don't know if that's caused by Yahoo! or YPOPs!).
   
2. Rename the Yahoo! folder (so I knew which ones were done, usually by appending an "_" character to the front of the name)
   
3. Run "Get Mail" in Thunderbird to get these messages from the Yahoo! inbox.
   
4. Create a new folder in Thunderbird, and move the messages from my Thunderbird inbox to this folder.
   
5. Move the emails from the Yahoo! inbox back into the (renamed) Yahoo! folder.
   
6. Repeat, rinse and lather.

As you can imagine, with 1000's of emails, and Yahoo!'s 25-at-a-time viewing and 40-at-a-time download limit, this took a bit of time. But finally, all the emails were down onto my local Thunderbird client, properly organized in folders with the senders and dates intact.

Next time, I'll go over how to upload all these from the local client application, into Gmail!

New release of DB2 Express-C available

I know I spend a lot of time talking about hardware, but software is an important part of what I'm all about here at the 3'oclock blog.

In my work life, I work as a technical marketer for the IBM DB2 database, and today marks the release of our latest version of our free version-- DB2 Express-C 9.5, so if your in the market for a free no-limits database, please drop by our download site and grab a copy (currently only available on Windows or Linux).

Download:
Linux
Windows

What time is it?

That's right -- the 3 o'clock blog is back! Starting today, I'm committing to more posts, more cool stuff, more reviews and more, well more!

Lots of cool tech in the air since my last post, and I personally have invested some hard earned money in some of it. In the last 2 months, I've broken open the piggy bank and bought the following:

500 GB Porsche LaCie external drive
24" Dell widescreen monitor (1920x1200 resolution)

...and...

(wait for it)

a 15" MacBook Pro!

That's right, I'm officially a switcher. Of course, due to various work issues (conferences), illness and other family related business, I've barely scratched the surface of this whole Mac world. My copy of OS X Leopard is supposed to arrive today too, so I've been holding off on getting too deeply involved in learning the previous version. This will likely be the focus of my posts over the coming weeks, so if you're interested in Apple Mac/OSX, stay tuned.

Launchy

I just looked over my last few weeks of posts, and I can't believe I've forgotten to talk about Launchy!

I found Launchy courtesy of my constant perusal of Mac OSX sites that always hype Quicksilver (more detailed explanation here), a powerful keyboard based application launcher. So without having OSX to play with, I went looking for a suitable Windows alternative.

And so I found Launchy.

Launchy is great stuff -- hands down one of the most useful software tools I've installed this year. Just hit the "Alt" and "SpaceBar" together and this slick-looking bar pops up:

Not that much to look at, but if I start typing:


And if I keep typing, I get what I'm looking for:


(I could have also used the down arrow to pick the iTunes program out of the drop down box).

What Launchy does is index your Windows Start menu, programs directory and bookmarks and then helps you to find what your looking for, then launches the appropriate executable file to start the program or bookmark. I've pretty much stopped using my Start Menu, Quick Launch toolbar and desktop shortcuts since I put Launchy to work for me. And it learns too, putting the programs you use more often higher up in the returned results. You can of course, configure it to avoid certain directories or document types that should not be indexed.

Other cool features:
* Built in searches: just type "IMDB" or "Google" and hit the Tab button. You'll get a vertical bar "|", after which you can type your search term and it'll open your browser and retrieve your search results for that engine:


* Directory launching: Launchy also knows all about your "Documents and Settings folder", bringing you the ability to retrieve (and launch) documents from your "My Documents", "My Music", etc. folders:



Give Launchy a try -- you will be glad you did!

My new love (shhh... don't tell my wife)

Apple has bumped the 17" Mac Book Pro specs and somehow managed to shoehorn a 1920x1200 screen in there somehow.



Once Leopard comes out in the fall, I think I'm going to have a third child in the house.

Ars Technica has a good review of the new system here.

Wow: Photosynth

I am pretty surrounded with technology. I work at IBM making software (although databases will never really be on the "cool" side of technology); I love to futz around with computer hardware and software; and I love to see new stuff coming down the pipe.

And then there's stuff that simply takes my breath away because it's so far beyond what I could ever have conceived as possible. Photosynth is one of those things.

Here's a couple of videos that show off Photosynth:

Video - from the TED conference: Video #1
Video - from the Photosynth team: Video #2

This is just jaw-dropping stuff and it will likely revolutionize photo sharing and taking, as Google Earth and Google Maps have revolutionized mapping.

Way cool.

Lumosity

How's your brain feeling these days? Sluggish? Not quite as sharp as it used to be?

Take a look at Lumosity -- a really cool Web 2.0 site that uses games and puzzles to get that mind honed back to razor sharpness. You track your progress through 30 levels using about 10 psychologist-tested puzzles to keep you interested and focused.

It's currently in beta, and it's free (for now), so click through and get your brain choppin' some wood.

http://www.lumosity.com/

Captcha (n.)

You know what a captcha is, right? Sure you do. You know -- those annoying little "tests" on websites where you to type the wacky image text into a form box to prove that you're actually a human being and not a computer.*

Yeah, they bug the hell out of me too.

Well, the folks over at Carnegie Mellon University have done a very smart thing. See, they've tied the text used in those captcha images with a large database of digitized, but not transcribed, books. When a book is electronically scanned, the character recognition software is usually enough to transcribe 90% of what's there into the correct computer text. The other 10%, though, has to be done by humans, who are smart enough to parse the visual part of the text, even when it's slightly blurry, or has lines drawn through it, or whatever.

With the marriage of this slightly illegible text and the constant need for new captchas for website verifications, the Carnegie Mellon group have released "reCAPTCHA" as a web service so that websites can take advantage of the idea (for free!) and all of us poor human users who have to use captchas to log on or sign up will actually be contributing to the digitization of human knowledge via this effort.

Next time you're filling in one of those de-humanizing "human" tests on a website, make sure the site is using the reCAPTCHA system. If they are, you can feel good that once again, you're better than a machine.

* CAPTCHA is actually an acronym for "Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart". See? The 3'oclock blog isn't just about fun, it's also about learning.

Hey Developer: they're MY documents, not yours

A bit of a rant today, I'm afraid.

I've never been a huge fan of how Windows organizes a User's programs and files. The move to "My Documents" and "Program Files" in Windows 95 (if I recall correctly) made things probably worse than in the Windows 3.1 and DOS days. Now we found ourselves subject to programs installing into "C:\Progra~1\Micros~1\" and user files winding up inside a hodgepodge of folders like "C:\Documen~1\Steve~1\Access~1\" and so forth.

Vista has made things a little tidier. Users are still given an individual "home" folder, but it's in a more reasonable place: C:\Users\Steve -- no more spaces in the filenames. However, they're still using the poorly named "C:\Program Files\" folder as a destination for program installs. Why, oh why, can't we just have a "C:\Programs\" directory instead?!?! It's less than 8 characters, and there's no spaces. It would eliminate all the "~1" garbage now and forever.

Honestly, though, I'm digressing. The point of this post is that I took a close look in my "My Documents" folder today, and I was just disgusted to see how many other applications feel that they have the right to install their related files into MY documents folder, without so much as a by your leave. 10 different applications had all dumped settings and output files into my home location!

A few points for every application developer to take note:

1. Settings for your application should go into an appropriately labeled sub-folder under the User's "Application Data" folder, not into this documents folder, where a User can easily change and/or delete your application's settings.
2. If an application needs a spot for temporarily downloading files (for updates or whatever), this is NOT the place for that. Use one of Windows' myriad of temp directories, or create your own under the User's base (C:\Documents and Settings\\) directory. And for the love of all that is sweet and good -- if you absolutely, positively have to, have to, have to, create a temporary folder here -- CLEAN IT UP WHEN YOU'RE DONE!! I have no need to see the ugliness of your update system's directories and files, especially in amongst my personal documents! Augh!
   
3. If you have any sort of graphical installer -- and this is Windows, so 99% of you do -- during the install, make sure to ask the user where they want to install the program. Sure, having a "Program Files" folder preset as a default is great, and some folks will be fine to just hit the "Next" button, but be sure to include an option for users that don't like to default to the C: drive, or who use a separate "Programs" folder. And make sure your application knows how to deal with this scenario. It's no good asking for user input if you're just going to ignore it.
4. Also ask the user where in the Start Menu they want to have your shortcuts. I cannot stand Start Menus that spew out to multiple columns. I have my own organization, and I ask that you respect it.
   
5. If you do require a place for user specific settings and update temp files to live, provide an Options panel choice so the user can pick where to put these files. Don't leave the location option specified in a lonely .ini file somewhere, and the only place that option is documented is in the .ini file itself. Likely the average user won't be bothered to change it, provided your location makes sense, but it's a great feature to have for the advanced user.
   

Anyway, I'm off to get my delete key out for these morons who don't respect my computer, and won't leave my documents alone.

Smart DB2 searches

As a follow up to my earlier post about using keyword searches in Firefox, it's simple to run searches of the DB2 documentation, straight from your Firefox address bar:

1. Create a new bookmark. Select "Organize Bookmarks" from your Bookmarks menu, then click "New Bookmark..."
2. In the Properties for the new bookmark, fill out the fields as follows:
   Name: DB2 Quick Search
   Location: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9/index.jsp?tab=search&searchWord=%s
   Keyword: db2
   Description: DB2 Information Center Quick Search
3. Click OK

Now you can run all your DB2 documentation searches from the Firefox address bar by simply typing db2 in the address bar (e.g. "db2 db2look")