Happy New Year!
Posted on December 31, 2009 at 17:22 by caw
Filed under: Social Commentary | Leave a Comment
Here’s to a safe and happy new year! And remember, if you drink, don’t drive – the child you kill might just be your own!
The Concrete Jungle
Posted on December 13, 2009 at 06:58 by caw
Filed under: Social Commentary | Leave a Comment
Call me silly but I hate highways. Sure, they sometimes get you where you want to go a bit faster (that is debatable; c.f., rush-hour in you favorite dictionary) and I guess they make it easier to locate things (again, debatable) but they totally lack character. They all look the same. Just miles and miles of concrete, frequently with concrete walls embracing them to cut down the noise that would otherwise flood nearby developments but that’s it!
Recently, a friend showed me a "back route" out of Anthem that gets me to the Loop 101 (yes a freeway!). The nice thing though is that it takes you through developments and by businesses. You get to see trees and cactus and other flora. What you don’t see are miles and miles of concrete or smell the diesel fumes of the truck front of you or get cut off by the idiot who wants to get somewhere 0.2 seconds faster!
There’s beauty in side streets, you just have to find it!
Something New
Posted on December 9, 2009 at 08:45 by caw
Filed under: Technology, iPhone | Leave a Comment
Thanks to a post on Terry White’s Tech Blog, we have something new here at the Edge: a better view on your handheld device. The WordPress plugin, called WPtouch by the folks at BraveNewCode.com, does all the heavy lifting. Configure the options (and there are lots to play with) and get just the look you want!
Just point your mobile web browser at blog.cawilliams.us and you should see something like this (at least until I fix the colors):
Book mark it on your home page and you’ll see my stylish logo!
Push the down arrow and get access to the home screen and an RSS also get access to the list of categories posts are filed under. Push the search button and find every post with your keyword or phrase. Pretty cool if you ask me and kudos (again) to Mr. White for finding it!
ClarisWorks to Pages – With Office in Between
Posted on December 6, 2009 at 16:54 by caw
Filed under: Microsoft | Leave a Comment
A little history… When I purchased my first Mac laptop in late 2005 I also bought Office for Mac:2004. All I knew from work was Office and iWork seemed…slim…shall we say. It only had Key Note and Pages- both version 1 I think. When I updated to Leopard on my Intel-based Mac, I also switched to iWork – Apple had added Numbers after all and I was tired of Microsoft quirks messing with my Mac. And there was no way I was going to go to Office for Mac:2008 – no VB and macros, just AppleScript?
Times change and things usually come back to byte you.
A little more history… I was recently asked to get some files off a PowerMac 520. For those of you without the score card, a 520 and an MBP have no common interfaces. The 520 lacks FireWire, the Ethernet is an older style interface, the MBP doesn’t have a modem or floppy disk, etc. Oh one other thing: all the files the client wanted were done in ClarisWorks!
My solution was to buy a USB floppy drive, and then - file by file – convert them to Word 4/5 format. Then copy ‘em to the floppy and load them into the MBP. One hitch: the Client wanted them in Pages ‘09 and Key Note ‘09 format. Pages doesn’t speak Word 4/5 format and neither does Key Note.
I loaded Office for Mac:2008 onto my pristine Mac – so sad. I could read the files in Word:2004 but I couldn’t get to output an RTF Pages could read. I figured Word:2008 would. Yeah, I went and bought Office for Mac:2008!
And the process works: read ‘em in ClarisWorks on the 520, save them as Word 4/5, write to a floppy, load to the MBP from the floppy, read them into Word:2008, write them as RTF, read them in Pages ‘09 and save. Of course all of it has to be done manually – you can’t automate much.
And yes, as soon as I’m done, Office for Mac is toast – I hope…
Did I Miss Something?
Posted on October 15, 2009 at 12:14 by caw
Filed under: Photography | 2 Comments
Did I miss something? I looked at some other web sites / blogs and nobody is saying squat about Nikon’s newest wonder, the D3s. Now either they aren’t reading their email or they are more taken with Adobe’s Photoshop app for the iPhone (which has gotten a lot of airtime). This new camera has HD and everything!
I guess I just don’t get it.
Nikon D3s
Posted on October 14, 2009 at 09:21 by caw
Filed under: Photography, Technology | 1 Comment
The guys at Nikon are at it again and have released the D3s. My uneducated guess is the D3Xs will come out in the spring and the D4 will come out November of 2010.
(Image © 2009 Nikon, All Rights Reserved.)
This is definitely a everything including the kitchen sink. Major new features:
- ISO 102,400 equivalent. I remember falling out of my seat for ISO 800 without push processing!
- 9 FPS for up to 82 JPEG (fine) or 36 14-bit NEF (RAW) images.
- 24 FPS HD video, leveraging low-noise D3S image quality along with high fidelity stereo sound.
- 4200 images per battery charge!
Why is everybody putting HD video into a still camera. Ever since Canon came out with the 5D Mark II and Vincent Laforet’s Reverie video, the industry has just gone nuts! Nikon now has four (4) DSLR cameras (D3s, D300s, D90, and the D5000) with video. Put one in a box of Frosted Flakes and maybe I’ll get excited!
Call me a dinosaur but I think there is always going to be a place, no a need, for high-quality still photography made with cameras that aren’t video-cams with a shutter release on the side. If nothing else, a still photograph gives the viewer time to interact with the image – to think about it and decided what it means to him. It’s damn tough to do that with video.
If this is the direction of the future, I may just save my pennies for a D3 and call it done.
Welcome to an Old Friend
Posted on October 13, 2009 at 09:39 by caw
Filed under: Apple, iPhone, iPod | Leave a Comment
If you have been a fan hand-held computing for any length of time, then you have probably read one of Hal Goldstein’s (thaddeus.com) magazines. He and his team (most of the content comes from the readers themselves) have published several over the years: The Portable Paper, Pocket PC, and Windows Mobile and Smartphone. There are probably a few I’ve forgotten to mention. They publish a single magazine at any one time and it tracks the leading technology. Now they’ve put Microsoft to bed and brought out something new: iPhone Life (iPhoneLife.com).
Just like their other magazines, there are articles about applications for the iPhone and iPod touch, stories about how people use their devices, how to use your iPhone or touch at work or home or with your kids. When I was into PocketPC and Windows Mobile devices, I had copies of every issue I could find, with articles tagged so I could find them when I needed to look up a tidbit. I shared more than a few of them with my friends to answer their questions.
If you have an iPhone and/or iPod touch (yeah, I have an iPhone 3Gs and a 1G iPod touch), or are thinking about getting one, you need to pick up this magazine. It may not change you’re life but then you never know. The Fall 2009 (Vol 1, No 4) issue is on the newstands now. Cost is $7.99.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve a subscription to order.
iTunes Gets a Disk Upgrade
Posted on October 7, 2009 at 06:39 by caw
Filed under: Apple, Macintosh, OS X, Snow Leopard | 1 Comment
Something I’ve been wanting to do for a while is to put redundancy back in our iTunes server. Originally, I had two LaCie 500 GB drives that were mirrored (RAID 1). (See (a) in the figure below.) The iTunes library grew as we bought more seasons of TV shows, movies, and music, and we finally ran out of space. For a while I was copying older stuff to another drive but that quickly lost its luster.
The "second generation" of our iTunes server had no redundancy; just a single 1TB Western Digital My Book Home Edition drive. Now everything was back on one drive. I started burning DVDs of the files but a family of four with different tastes in audio and video make it really hard to keep up. Plus, we were over the 80% mark on drive utilization so…
In accordance with Moore’s Law, drive capacities goes up, prices come down. What cost me $159 last Christmas now costs me $119. I bought three (3) more of the WD 1TB drives and hooked them up. This time though, I grouped them a bit differently.
First, I created two sets of two drives each. (See (b) in the figure above.) Each set is configured to be Striped (RAID 0) so that half the data lives on one drive and the other half of the data lives on the other drive. This more for performance that data protection (no check bits). Then I Mirrored (RAID 1) the two sets to get redundancy. In theory, if any single drive fails, you can replace it and rebuild the RAID.
Is RAID 1+0 better performance-wise than RAID 0+1? I don’t know. Apple’s computers1 come with software-based RAID built into the OS. Software-based RAID is going to be slower than hardware-based RAID solutions. Add in the lag time from USB 2.0 or FireWire 400 and it may not matter in the end.
In any case, I have a 2 TB RAID-enabled set-up that should provide enough storage through say, Christmas?
—–
1. Apple’s Xserve offers RAID 5 support in hardware.
CSS Sculptor 3: Don’t Bother!
Posted on September 23, 2009 at 09:30 by caw
Filed under: Technology | Leave a Comment
I don’t, as a rule, write negative reviews. Sometimes a company does something that merits a "that was dumb" comment but as I said, I generally don’t slam products – except for Microsoft of course!
That is about to change.
Web Assist, a maker of extensions for Adobe Dreamweaver, has recently released Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor 3 for the bargain price of $99.99. If you were unlucky enough to purchase CSS Sculptor 2, the upgrade price is a mere $49.99. Save your money ’cause it isn’t worth it!
I originally bought CSS Sculptor because I wanted something that would generate the bulk of the CSS code for me. I wanted to focus more on content and less on presentation. While I like Dreamweaver CS4 (love is too strong a term but it is miles ahead of Dreamweaver CS3), its CSS interface isn’t the most intuitive.
The Sculptor 2 interface is not user friendly in the least. Maybe it would be if you thought like Eric Meyer but it appears I don’t. When Web Assist announced Sculptor 3, I figured things must have gotten better. Wrong. It started with a common error message that looked like this:
(This is from Vista but it was the same text on the Mac.) After digging for a while through their support database, I found an answer. I had to hunt down a cache file in my system and delete it. Then re-install Sculptor 3, start Dreamweaver, re-enter the license code and activate it, and then I was able to start playing around.
I shan’t bore you with all the details of my agonies. Because I was still in the 15 day window (bought it the September 18th) I asked for a refund. The lady at Web Assist told me I could only get a refund if
- Our product has design flaws and/or bugs preventing you from working properly.
- Our product did not work as advertised.
So I gave her a list (edited here – I thought of a couple of things after I sent it).
- I am returning it because as far as I am concerned, the product fails to work as advertised. It is billed as the next best thing to sliced bread and even easier to use. It isn’t – writing code by hand would be quicker.
- I find the user interface to be non-intuitive, particularly the color selection scheme. I can set colors in three different places and there is no way of knowing what will take effect when.
- It runs slow (I have a MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo with 3GB RAM).
- If you update a value (say a color) Sculptor may or may not save it.
- It wants to put its files in its place and God help you if you want to move them. In fact if you do, you may suddenly discover all of your CSS "vanished" from your page (i.e., you get content but not presentation).
One other annoyance: when I uninstalled Sculptor 3, I now get the following message every time I start Dreamweaver CS4:
BTW, don’t bother with the 800 number – they don’t seem to answer the phones!
My recommendation: don’t waste your money on CSS Sculptor 3.
Momentary End to Chaos
Posted on September 23, 2009 at 07:51 by caw
Filed under: cawilliams.us | Leave a Comment
Just an FYI, the chaos is over… for the moment. Most of the web site has the right colors and logos. Now the real work of a re-design begins. I haven’t decided if I am going to roll it out in pieces or wait for the big bang. Both have advantages.
Thoughts?
keep looking »