Five Days of Leopard

I’ve spent five days with leopard now, installing it four times on three different computers, the most recent one two days ago. It’s left one heck of an impression on me. Mostly favorable. If your Mac can run Leopard, you should install it. The sheer scope of the improvements is worth it. Having another computer, or a .mac account and integration with calendar and other services on a Leopard server will make it even more worthwhile.

Other people have given their short little overviews. Others have released articles in dribs and drabs on different features. Yet others have released a veritable book on the subject. As a result, this review will be heavier on my impressions and what I went through.

I got the install DVD on Friday. The packaging was, as usual, wonderful. I chose my Macbook Pro to install it on as between the three Macs that could be upgraded, it was not only backed up (as they all were), it was the machine I could suffer the most disruptions with.

So in goes the DVD. Reboot, choose “upgrade.” So far so good. I click through the initial menus and let the install procedure start as I go off to make dinner. A while later, my son wanders into the kitchen. “Dad? Is it supposed to have a blue screen?”

Uh-oh. Try the usual precautions. Safe mode boot didn’t work. Doing a file-system check in single user mode proved that the hard drive is still in good shape. I decided it was worth some time doing tinkering. I’d have to help other people out of their troubles after all, so I didn’t want to jump the gun and do an “archive and install” or “clean install”. I may be backed up but I didn’t want to spend hours rebuilding my utilities and preferences.

A little research and I dug up a thread in the Apple Discussion Boards where people were already fighting with the same issue. About halfway down someone had decided to poke around on the premise that a set of system extensions referred to as APE was at fault. APE, or Application Enhancer was a third-party system hack used by Cleardock, Shapeshifter, and other programs that modify the appearance and behavior of the OS. Needless to say this can make the system… unstable.

The official Apple page (recommending an archive and install but giving the instructions I followed) is here. Daring Fireball also has more on the subject, including how the Logitech drivers for mice and keyboards, among other things, can install APE without your knowledge.

So I reboot holding down COMMAND-S on the keyboard into the single-user command-line mode, type in the commands needed to check and mount the hard drive, delete the relevant files, and reboot. Viola! It works.

Finally I got my .mac information set up, verified I still had my mail library and signatures (Mail predictably updated the library) and started to see what changed and testing what broke.

Insofar as the kerfluffle with the stacks and the dock… I don’t mind the new dock, but I prefer to apply the default side-dock format to the dock as it’s cleaner and easier to tell what is running. I found the new stack behavior a little frustrating at first because I had several folder shortcuts that I wanted to go and open up the folder, but most of them I used by right-clicking to get a menu of the contents anyway. So, once I recalibrated my expectations and realized I was trading submenus for easier-to click targets and a slight inconvenience in actually opening up the folders (when actually needed) I was more than happy with the effect. In a roundabout way, this is a return of the “drawers” behavior of OS8 and 9, complete with spring-loaded folders that you can drag files and documents to.

I hate the icons for the stacks. I hate them for the simple fact that as an aggregation of the icons for the contacts, I’m trading a minimum of useless information about the contents of a folder for an easily identifiable target to click on. Without wasting time to hover each one, it’s almost impossible to identify which is which reliably. While I’m not a huge fan of the new dock, and less a fan of the hard-to-differentiate new folder icons, I cannot understate how much I loathe the dock. Please please make it possible to keep a stable icon there!

 

I discovered to my annoyance that the calendar does not keep a side drawer open with the details of the currently selected event. I can deal with this change because it also makes it clearer when I’m looking at vs. just editing an event, and minimizes screen usage when I don’t need the details. That said, I love the “current time” bar that runs across the window. It did miff me a bit to discover that all of the subscribed folders had been pulled out into their own category from the groups I had them in.

I checked out the new syncing preferences for .mac, and decided to forego the syncing of widgets and preferences. My laptop and desktop have many overlapping uses, but they are fundementally used in different environments (field vs. office) with different tools needed at my fingertips.

Parental controls now allow for remote control of other macs on your local network. Hmmm… so now if all my future computers are macs I can administer the ones my children will use centrally insofar as web access, and get rid of the proxy server I run. I can also set hours for when they can get on online. I can also run Fusion to let my kids play some W98 games like Zoo tycoon… and probably faster than the current old Win machine they have access to.

When waking from sleep, I get to the password prompt consistently faster. The wiki feature in the dictionary is cool, and makes a program I already use regularly vice pulling down my volumes even more useful. I also trashed a “refresh finder” script I had available because Apple finally, finally made it update in a consistently timely manner when new files are added.

Spaces took some time to wrap myself around. The biggest problem was me – trying to figure out a separation of work modes that would allow me to maintain different virtual desktops. That said – if you use it as a clutter remover it works great, because unlike many variants I’d seen, you still have access to all of your apps through the Dock or COMMAND-Tab – which instantly switches you over to the correct screen. After I figured this out I don’t do any manual desktop switching – which is easy enough to do. The one hitch I’ve had is I often use CNTRL-Arrow in text editing, so I have to find another default key to switch my spaces.

Screen sharing is easily turned on if you want to use the “Back to my Mac” .mac feature or just access your desktop from across the house using Chicken of the VNC or the built-in Screen Sharing app. Like all of the network services it’s off by default. The only thing that threw me was that turning on file sharing automatically allowed guest access to the public folders – though the guest account was otherwise disabled. While it’s easy enough to stop sharing out public folders or turn off ALL guest access, it did throw me.

Actually, I like how they implemented guest access in general. You can log in as “guest” and get a temporary, restricted workspace that erases itself when you are done. The next “guest” again gets a pristine, sandboxed space to access the web. This is a great way to give my kids access to my main desktop when they’re online…

Back to screen sharing for a minute. This has a few other implications. First, those of us in tech support and consulting can now easily access the computer of any client that we can iChat with. This feature also reduces the future need to install the more flexible VINE server on many client desktops, though the jury is still out on servers, depending on security needs. This is yet another way that a user-friendly feature will also be a big help for IT folk. it alsomeans that those of us with .mac accounts have less need for a service like GoToMyPC or LogMeIn.

Speaking of big help – Time Machine. This is possibly the biggest single reason to get Leopard – so that you can have effortless, consistent backups. I’ve lost count of how many clients do a poor job in maintaining backups. While it won’t help with keeping copies offsite, this feature will save a lot of headaches where it comes to “oops I deleted my file” or “oops, my hard drive died” in shops where we don’t have our hands on Retrospect enough to make sure that the users files are regularly backed up. Time machine makes this process almost effortless. One thing to beware of – If you have any Paralells or Fusion windows images, you may want to make them exceptions or back them up separately unless you’ve got a much, much bigger backup drive than your main drive. Aperture also has some issues with Time Machine

When installing this on my desktop, I noted a few other things. First of all, while the Sharepoints prefpane was still available, all of the SMB and Appletalk share configuration data had been wiped out. instead, those share points now were in the Apple sharing preference pane. Also, after opening Cronnix, I noticed that ALL of my scheduling CRON scripts were gone that I used for mounting my backup disks. Not much of a loss since I’ll be using time machine anyways, but you may want to back up your Crontabs if you’re geeky enough to use them. (I was using CRON to schedule applescripts and other scripts that I only wanted to run on my desktop instead of through iCal).

Insofar as most of my programs, here’s the rundown:

Mail improvements. Here’s where I got hurt the worst. While I don’t mind saying good bye to mail.appetizer (it can be obtrusive), Mailtags and Mail act-on effectively don’t work. The good news is that the creator is already making it Leopard-compatible, and the “Leopard” beta of mailtags is available. I’ll just hold off for the final version. That said, the note-taking ability is useful, the contact-data sensing is just phenomenal, and it can now indent without quoting! The templates are fluff, but slick fluff, and very well implemented. mail has always been great about letting you pick an alternate outbound server if you can’t reach your default, but now you can also choose a different outgoing server as you compose your email.

Inquisitor, an app that gives me instant search results as I type in Safari doesn’t work. It may never be updated as it relied on access to parts of the Safari WebKit code that Apple has severely restricted access to. I will miss it.

Transmit and Quicksilver seem to work fine overall (with updates) though the “open all files with this tag” feature of the tagging module needs updating. The growl notifications are working just great.

Chax has disappeared, but most of the features it provided were rolled into iChat anyway. As it is I’ll still be using Adium except when I need the new “theater” and “screen sharing” modes.

I haven’t run mine yet, but apparently Photoshop works, though may “crash” upon closing out the program. I know Adobe has posted some other issues but apparently the main graphics programs all work OK.

As noted previously, APE is (very) broken. Wouldn’t matter to most non hardcore geeks except Logitech uses it as a basis for their mouse and keyboard drivers.

LiteIcon, an App that allows you to change the default system icons is broken. We’ll have to wait for an update on that or Candybar (from the iconfactory).

Desklickr doesn’t change the desktop out.

Google Earth needed me to reinstall/download the latest version on my laptop.

My Cisco VPN settings were wiped out. I am not sure yet if simply reinstalling will fix this. I WILL get a Time Machine backup first….

Tinkertool says that it is not fully compatible, but shouldn’t break anything, even if some effects are unexpected.

The Wacom drivers needed to be replaced with a new version.

Internet Explorer 5 (OSX version) still works as well as it ever did, for what it’s worth.

Other things that apparently still work:

  • Bonjour Browser
  • MagiCal
  • Aleph One
  • MythII
  • MS Office
  • FlickrUploader
  • Synk (with an update)
  • Canoscan drivers

Stuff I still need to test:

  • Blender
  • Emulators
  • Freeciv
  • Handbrake
  • Lingon
  • NeoOffice
  • nethack
  • Pic2Icon
  • Picasa Web Albums

That’s it in a nutshell.

Leopard Features

My initial impression upon looking at Apple’s 300+ features page was “Good Lord!” The second was “A lot of these are pretty minor.” Remembering that Apple has built its success on making the little stuff work so well it completely changes how you do things, I dug deeper, and came away impressed. When I get around to reviewing it the review will end up being a long one.

Many of the features are actually minor ones, small usability enhancements such as doing a Google maps search by clicking the address in the address book, or the ability to add a new contact to your address book by clicking on an address in the mail body even if they didn’t send you a vcard. Each of these is minor. Each of these nevertheless saves you time by minimizing the jumping around needed to do each task. That way you get back to your work quicker.

In other cases, it’s the combination of features that’s the big deal. Sure, 10.4 had parental controls in place and workable whitelisting that made similar controls built into Windows look anemic and weak. Apple didn’t rest on its laurels, and made improvements. I’m not impressed by “dynamic” filters, but they are now available for filtering web pages if you want. What really blows my mind is that on top of whitelisting allowed websites, email contacts, chat contacts, etc. you can also now control when certain users are even allowed to be on the computer at all. You can also do this from a remote computer across the house so you can centrally manage your parental policies.

For parents geeky enough to be using these features in the first place: whoah.

The biggest deal to me is that Apple, in conjunction with their iWork update, has taken one more step towardsa replacement for Exchange/Outlook/Office that many workplaces rely on. The iCal server integration features offer what 90% of Exchange users use shared calendars for. Now if we could get shared address books (a real one that can be easily updated like Exchange, that LDAP schema doesn’t count) and a Access-like database program integrated with iWork…

The long and the short of it is that it looks like a number of the small features may be small, but they can change how you work in ways that going back will feel like being crippled. Other features work together to be a really big deal. To tell the difference, as well as which features really are just fluff, will take time. To explain how this could  affect you or improve your computer usage will likely use a lot of space.

Don’t expect a full review from me anytime soon.

This is Not Customer Service (I’m looking at You Comcast).

I am about this close to canceling my account with Comcast. After all, I don’t really watch TV and my life would be much more peaceful if I didn’t have to listen to anything else on the Disney channel for a while either. I’ve already been less than exceptionally happy with their response time for connection issues due to cabling (several days to a week), and level of knowledge. What really takes the cake is the experience that a neighbor just had.

Cue up Gilligans Island: “Sit right back and we’ll tell a tale…”

Four days ago my neighbor called and complained that her computer couldn’t get online. I had her check her cable modem and sure enough, the lights weren’t right, and we reset the modem. It worked. For a short while.

The next day the problems came up again. I went over to look, and sure enough, the cable modem was flaking out and not consistently showing a connection light. I had her call Comcast, and amazingly, they were able to get someone out the next day.

The technician came out yesterday, and angered my neighbor to no end. She felt she was being bossed around. She was also suspicious of how often he called in to HQ, though I can’t say how necessary or unnecessary that was. What really got my goat was that after replacing her old Motorola “surfboard” modem with a different modem, he didn’t get it registered. Apparently the system was down at HQ, or possibly Comcast still uses IE5 for their config utility (which of course won’t work on an Intel Mac), or he didn’t know enough about Macs to get them setup, or something, but he couldn’t get the modem registered and activated, and left it that way with her confused about what to do. Note – this can easily be done by calling in the serial number. He also told her that she couldn’t have her cable modem split off the same wall point as one of her TV’s, and that he’d have to come back to run a separate line.

The last tweaked my antennas, because I’ve seen competent cable installers before. I know perfectly well that with decent splitter fittings and filters and tight connections that you can split the signal all sorts of ways and still have it work. Since there is only one cable coming up to the house the biggest practical advantage to splitting the cable indoors is that it’s not exposed to the weather. From previous experience weather can make a big difference. The fittings don’t like to have water in them.

Either way, I went over this morning to get the modem registered, and immediately had problems. It took a long time to get a valid address, and I couldn’t resolve the download site for the software (incidentally this is why I don’t know if they still use IE 5 for mac configuration). I called it in to tech support, and they registered the modem serial number, and I got an address. I thanked them and switched back to the wireless router.

More trouble. Mail started coming in but I couldn’t get to any web sites reliably or get a full page to load. Ping checks were showing 30-60% packet drops – meaning about half of the data was randomly wandering off into the wastelands never to be seen again. So I reset the modem and called tech support. While on hold for “slow connection” I realized I had not yet gotten an address but finally managed to pull up a valid public address as the phone flunky answered.

I refuse to give out this name, because the following help desk idiot is a perfect example of how not to ever talk to a client, even though he started out pleasantly enough.

We went through the script, resetting the modem and rebooting the computer (I actually rebooted in addition to the DHCP renew which would do the trick most times. I also tried disabling/enabling the ethernet port). I slowly received a new address. I even managed to ping the router. What I couldn’t do was resolve names. I tried to point this out to the helpdesk but he insisted that a) I had a valid IP and b) he could communicate with the modem so c) there was no problem and I’d have to take any other issues up with my manufacturer, i.e. Apple.

Here’s where he really proved he earned idiot, and then some. I patiently explained to him that yes, I had an IP address, and I was apparently getting some proper comms as I could ping known IP addresses (at least the router) but I could not resolve names and until I could I couldn’t get a website.

“Well try to open a webpage.”

I stopped for about thirty seconds, and told him “Okay, I’ll humor you.” Of course, no response and no web page. Again, I was told “Call Apple.”

We went through several rounds of this with me explaining that a) I make my living at this, b) I was using my own laptop from across the street and also on Comcast so I bloody well know the computer was fine, and c) I knew for a fact that the network wasn’t, and until they fixed the problem on their end so I could resolve names I never would get online.

I was told effectively “I don’t care,” “I don’t care how many computers you use there and who makes them you have a valid IP so you need to call the manufacturer,” “If it was our problem we’d have other people complaining,” and finally “I don’t know what all this stuff is about names.”

Oh yeah. And “I can’t help you, call Apple.”

After a couple more rounds trying to explain to him that a name lookup was needed to get a website and being told “I can’t help you,” I finally asked him to “please bump me up to someone who can help.”

For anyone paying attention who ever, ever has to manage or work in customer service, yes, this was a mildly open-ended question. I didn’t specify “your supervisor.” Yes, by now I’d told him quite bluntly that he was ignorant of networking, though only after I’d already explained to him for the umpteenth time that name resolution was needed for web browsers to work and that both computers in question worked fine elsewhere so the problem was their network (and I didn’t yell). Nevertheless what happened next left me speechless. This is filed under “Let’s see what we can do to piss our customers off.” It’s also filed under “never ever ever ever ever do this.”

He transferred me to Apple.

That’s right. The next thing I heard on the phone was the automated prompting system at Apple Inc.. Not a supervisor. Not someone who actually understood how networks worked or would listen to me when I told him I wasn’t getting all of the required network data or consistently getting a valid IP address.

He transferred me to Apple.

Wow.

For what it’s worth, there is a tech who at least listens over there. Tom, here’s to you. I called back five minutes alter after I’d regained my composure, explained to you that I still had problems getting an address and that even with an address I couldn’t look up names, and you listened. I also told you I tried several machines including known working ones from other households, and you listened. You also checked the data on the modem, and realized the signal levels (despite the visit the other day) were still not quite right by enough to cause problems.

They had two trucks there the next day replacing cables. Everything there works fine now.

I guess calling Apple wouldn’t have solved the problem after all.

I will be pricing out the local Bellsouth (wups, AT&T) service though. Even with the hassle of getting new internal lines installed so I can have the DSL modem where I need it and the outbound mail policies at Bellsouth, this experience coupled with past unreliability in my own house left such a bad taste in my mouth I’m inclined to never pay a dime to Comcast again.

9/11

There is a lot that can be be said. Much of it really doesn’t need to be, to many people. My own family had a short discussion of this last night. I didn’t watch the french documentary of the firefighters that I taped when it was aired last year. I know that I once rented United93 – and didn’t watch it, though I intend to at one point. My wife likely never will.

One thing I know I share with a lot of people who remember that day vividly is the sequence of the impressions. The shock at the first crash: no-one knew what was going on, and many of us thought of it as a tragic disaster, but no more. Bad things, after all, happen. This is despite our best efforts, and often our failings at proper attentiveness contributes.

Then we heard of the second jet, and a cold certainty sets in. One I last felt with the USS Cole. This was no mistake.

Once again I stared at the debris left over from an act of war against our nation, by an enemy we had refused to acknowledge.

We are still at war. We have been since at least the 1970’s. It changed its nature in the early 1990’s, and without the will to enforce the cease-fire and finish the war, we kept our troops in a position that was lose-lose for our nation. We are now stuck in Iraq. Whether through bumbling, conscious choice, or subconscious strategic brilliance, that country is now a honeypot for AQ, Syria, and every fanatic that wishes to lop off heads and stone people over a cigarette or skimpy clothing. Iraq is the decisive battlefield and AQ has dug in and defined what they term victory – kicking us out of Iraq so they can take over.

If that is what happens, it will be a strategic disaster of unimaginable proportions. As a result, regardless of what we call victory, we must not allow what Iran, AQ, and their ilk call victory. That means that failing all else, we must not leave Iraq until there is a stable government that will not be a breeding ground for terrorists, and will treat fairly with the West.

Even when that is done, the war will go on, but we must still fight. If we are not willing to fight for the survival of our culture and our identity, despite our imperfections and hangups, then all of our vaunted tolerance, freedom, egalitarianism, and relative lack of class structure will vanish along with our sins.

Why I’m Glad I Don’t Depend on Windows…

except to make money off the fact that other people do depend on it.

To make a long story short, Microsoft had some issues with their database that determines if your computer has a valid copy of Windows Vista or XP on it, and the validation servers were unavailable. Many people all over the world had their computers automatically check in over those few days because they were installing a new copy of Windows or updating or installing something like Windows Defender that required a validation check. Those people were immediately placed in a “reduced” mode that shut off features on their computers.

update: Of course, this all makes my earlier rant on the problems of software activation schemes look prescient.

update2: And the guys from User Friendly throw in their two cents…

A Look Further Afield..

I normally don’t pay much attention to what John Dvorak has to say, but in this case I think he’s got a point. He’s taken a look at the further implications of the Windows Activation outage and applied it to all web services by asking the question – is it any safer to depend on online access to your data?

Me, I take it with a grain of salt. I use online backups as a slower, redundant system in case a fire or something takes out the much faster backup system at the office. I use Flickr, and this blog as a way to communicate with other people. Both of these are things that I cannot do without the web.  There’s a bit of a gray line when it comes to services like Google Calendar – which I  sync or subscribe to via iCal so if I don’t have online access I still have a copy of my data from the last time I got online, and a backup if they ever cancel that service. I go to the trouble because it allows my wife and I to keep a common calendar where I can refer to it when I’m off at work.

The only place I use an online document system is Googles notebook – and that is also used strictly for communicating with the people I work with.

Anything else I do – image manipulation, document creation, general writing, I have my own tools on my own computers that will work whether or not the internet is available, and can always be attached as files and sent to people. Not wanting to depend on the availability of servers is one reason why I work this way. It just hadn’t occured to me to think in terms of “What if you have internet access but the service gets shut down.” After all, who’d have thought Google would shut a service down, especially after people paid for it?

Software Piracy Prevention…

DWBlog, from the maker of NewsFire (the first RSS reader to hook me before I outgrew its feature set at the time) has an entry on a subject that I’ve often felt conflicted about: product activation. In many ways, I agree with his points, even this one:

What activation allows is for reasonable limits to be placed on licenses. One has to realize that people will try to pirate software, and that in cases of rampant abuse it must be possible to stop the bleeding. The use of activation means that while honest users are given very liberal boundaries, rampant and excessive abuse can and will be stopped. 99.99% of users will never have an issue. In the few cases where the liberal boundaries are broken, there’s probably something suspicious happening.

First of all – I absolutely loathe “copy protection.” In software this is the practice of deliberately manufacturing a CD or other disk so that it violates the spec but is still readable – on the majority of readers – but the “bad” sectors can’t be copied. Time after time this has resulted in disks that are bought and paid for that don’t work on some fairly small subset of perfectly functional CD-ROM drives. Given software return policies at most stores this is usually money down the drain. In the music industry this has resulted in everything from CD’s that won’t play in the fancy DVD/CD player you now use for your home system or in your car stereo, to CD’s that run software to prevent your computer from reading the audio tracks. Some of the latter, such as the Sony rootkit, have gone as far as completely hijacking your computer.

To add insult to injury, if anything happens to the original media it gets scratched or your 4-year old decides it makes a shiney frisbee you are stuck, with no recourse, because you cannot back it up.

That said, I think every software distributor deserves to be paid for his work if you use his product. That leaves us with the question of what is fair value and how to best enforce the programmers/distributors end of the bargain.

He’s right. programmers need a way to tie “you paid for this” to “you can use this,” and serial numbers are so easily distributed and cracked that it’s practically worthless. My point of disagreement with his article is the following many people pushing activation and digital rights management are very restrictive in their activation licenses, and the boundaries are not liberal and are very easy to slam into. There are also other issues relating to activation vs. serial numbers that can make it a pain to use and need to be addressed.

Let me get one triviality out of the way. There are a few other methods of piracy prevention. One that is common with higher-end and specialty software (Lightwave, Nobeltec) is to use a “dongle.” The huge disadvantage with this methodology is the same as copy protected media – if the key is lost or damaged then poof, no software. That said, it allows you to install a copy on several machines that you may sit at use the software at whichever one simply by bringing the key along.

Another method is to not even bother. Apple takes this approach with a good percentage of their software, though not Aperture and their “pro” apps. The sci-fi publisher Baen Books, one of the few to make significant money off of ebooks not only doesn’t lock theirs down at all, but gives away an entire “free library,” the better to hook you with. All of the books are available in numerous, standard, easy-to-transfer formats. If you want to know why they did this:

If I can’t make a living as a writer by the quality of my writing outweighing any losses I might suffer from theft — without trampling all over blind and crippled people in order to stop the theft — I’ve got no damn business being a writer in the first place. I’ve still got my tool box, and I haven’t forgotten how to be a machinist.

Eric Flint

Entire pages of this material on copyright and why they did the ebooks the way they did are available at the old Library still available at: http://www.baen.com/library/ under “Prime Palaver.”

Back to our topic. Our remaining issues are these: What constitutes fair use and what problems does “activation” bring to the table for users?

With serial numbers/etc. if you lose the number, well, you’re toast. That said, it’s easy if you’re reasonably careful to keep duplicate copies of your serial numbers and disks so that if anything happens, you can still install and use the program.

What happens if the company providing the software or service goes away or is bankrupted, and the computer you originally installed the program on had to be replaced or reinstalled? Suddenly, even though you have a product bought and paid for that you can reinstall off of your backup discs, you can no longer use the program because there is no activation/authentication database to activate it against.

This to me is the biggest achilles heel of any centralized activation system, and one reason why despite the weaknesses of serial numbers, etc., I avoid “activation”-based schemes where possible.

Lest you think I’m merely fearmongering, even worse is already happening. Google just shut down their pay-for-download video service. Everyone who bought a movie through the service will no longer be able to play those videos because Google will not even continue to run the authentication servers for the rights management embedded in the movies. Since they can’t verify the copies are authentic and on the approved computer they will not play. Google may decide to do something different, but right now they are only giving partial credits towards new purchases that expire after 60 days. At least with iTunes you can backup your music store purchases to a real CD that can get re-ripped, in the event the iTMS gets shut down – and your music will also still keep playing on any authorized computers.

So what is fair use? Obviously, that depends on what the software maker decides, to some extent. The blogger that inspired this article obviously “gets it.” Some of his products feature “family pack” pricing that allow several users in a household to use the program without buying entire separate copies. Apple does the same with OSX. For $200 you can buy a family pack for up to five users instead of the usual, one-user standalone copy that goes for $130. Contrast this with the price of Windows, which “mere mortals” like us can only get one very expensive copy at a time. While required to have some sort of DRM for the iTunes Music Store, Apple made the policies very liberal by any other retailers standards: You can burn a song to CD any number of times, just not the same playlist more than 7 times. A song you buy on iTMS can be copied to, authenticated, and used on up to 5 computers. Songs can be shared via streaming to however many computers are practical that are also running iTunes.

This concept is just perfect for a typical household. it is becoming more and more common to have multiple computers in a house. I personally have two: a workstation at home and the laptop I use on-site. Ponying up for two copies of everything just so I can use it as the sole user where and when I need it at the best computer for the job is ridiculous. So is having to pony up for separate full-price copies of an office suite just so the kids don’t have to take over my workstation to work on a school project – one more reason I’ll be getting the newest version of iWork. I’d gladly pay extra for Windows if it gave me the right to run several copies concurrently in virtualization or on several computers in my household. As it is – I don’t buy the extra copies (still running a w98 and a w2k machine) – and MS will get an even smaller cut via Dell or a similar vendor when I finally do replace my computer.

Piracy is an issue that needs to be addressed. The problem is that many of the cures are either only marginally effective, or worse, actively interfere with your ability to use a product you paid for. A lot of software vendors could look to Apple and Baen for ways to effectively deal with piracy without ruining their own image – by providing a better value for the reality of how people wish to use the software they paid for, and being very careful not to step on the toes of those self-same customers.

Safari vs Firefox

As a web designer, I get to deal with every major web browser in existence on a weekly basis. As a Mac user, I use two, as a matter of practicality. As a computer geek, that means that I’ve developed a favorite I consistently use, though at least I’m not fanatic enough to draw blood over it.

This is a tale of my attempt to shift my day-to-day browsing from Safari to Firefox, and why I went back to using Safari for most everything.

This is not to say that Firefox is a bad browser. First of all, it has built-in AJAX handling that makes it easy to edit online weblogs such as those driven by WordPress with a convenient formatting toolbar. I may be a hand-coding web geek, but when I’m writing the last thing I want to do is remember tags. Second, it has a dedicated plug-in and theming architecture that allows you to add some absolutely fantastic tools. Third, many web designers who care if their site works with a browser other than IE on Windows will make sure it works and looks good in a Mozilla-based browser first – especially if there’s extensive Javascript or css changes.

Since google had added a bookmark synching capability, as a long-time Safari user I decided to copy all my bookmarks over and give it a try.

All in all, it was nice. The plugins worked as advertised. Full AJAX support was a joy. With the appropriate theme the windows didn’t hog the screen any more than safari did.

Over time, several things drove me nuts. First of all, Firefox is noticeably slower, especially on an older G4-based iBook like I was using at the time. Secondly, the bookmark synchronization was nowhere near as smooth as I’d hoped between my office desktop and my iBook – often failing if I forgot to completely shut down Firefox on the other machine. Lastly, while they finally, finally put the close boxes for tabs somewhere sensible (on the individual tab), the behavior still wasn’t consistent. Once I’d opened up enough tabs, the tab closure box would disappear off of all the tabs except the current one, still forcing me to shift to the tab I wanted to close before closing it.

Safari might be missing a few features, and isn’t expandable or themable, but it doesn’t use up excessive real estate, it’s faster, and in a matter of utterly personal stylistic preference it behaves more like I’d like a browser to.

That said, I still bring up Firefox to do weblog updates, and to reserve books at the library.

Over the Hedge and to the stars.

I think I’d just seen the best sci-fi movie I’d seen in years, and it’s about talking animals.

Seriously.

Sure, it’s a pean about the excesses of modern suburbia. It’s even a trifle overdone. I could also argue that we don’t “worship” the food enough – we care too little about what and how much we put in our bodies. The potential message of “what will the poor animals do now that we’ve encroached on their habitat” is undermined by how easy it is for the animals to scam food off of the people.

Nevertheless, despite the lack of futuristic gizmos, and the modern, nigh-fairy-tail setting, it’s a SF story at heart, simply in how it’s told. It deals with social change in the face of external, technological progress. The gizmos that JR pulls like a rabbit out of his bag may seem everyday, but work as well as any gadget from the bat-belt. Even the scene where the animals first see the hedge and wonder what it is feels like something straight from 2001 A Space Oddysey. There’s also a scene at the end that most obviously pays homage to the Matrix, but again involves the use of technology and cleverness to overcome obstacles. Several other shots are presented in a way that would be completely at home in a sci-fi movie.

It’s been a while since something so completely “not” Sci-Fi so completely really was. The Truman Show with Jim Carrey is the last such that I remember.

Finally, the casting was perfect. From the previews you can gather that William Shatner is the voice of Papa Possum. You can just imagine…..

What’s amazing is how much better everyone else was. Garry Shandling as the turtle, Nick Nolte as the bear, and Avril Lavigne as the daughter possum were all just brilliant, and breathed life into the characters.

Finally, the storytelling is tight. Rare is it that something comes out of the blue to change the path of the story. For that matter, some things that look like throwaway references and digs at modern life end up becoming crucial.

I highly recommend it.

Sticking My Nose In

Wow. For a while here the website’s been like a timeshare/condo property. It’s mine, but I’m never here.

Excuses and reasons aside, that little thing known as a real life has been getting in the way, and as a result, I not only haven’t had the time, but I haven’t really missed it. Still don’t.
So why am I here?

Because every once in a while I still need to vent. Or brag, or simply record the ins and outs of my life and my thoughts.

My son is still with me, and I am blessed to have him around. Despite all the chaos things are settling in, and having him in football/etc. has given him a lot of the things he’s missed. Despite all the money poured into support payments over the years his clothes, medical needs, etc. were neglected. Despite tight budgets we are seeing to that.

The girls have gone through their birthdays. The eldest, especially is going through growth spurts, as the markings on the wall will attest.

Dakota, the dog, just had his birthday on halloween. He’s three. Still thinks he’s a puppy when someone comes to the front door.

My wife? What can I say? I love her. She helps keep me pointed in the right direction while I work my magic.