Claim Your Vista

A Firefox vs IE comparison is one thing, but Paint vs The GiMP proves this is a spoof..

Technically, Sir, I was never alive - but I appreciate your concern

I saw Sir Ian McKellen crossing The Level today - he was walking with a stick, it was definitely him. Gandalf! Magneto! I was with James, scootering.

Hate

From 'I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream' by Harlan Ellison:

HATE.
LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE.

THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD 'HATE' WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU.
HATE.
HATE.

Always useful. Today, to the woman in front of me in the canteen queue who ordered three ("no, can I make that four?") coffees at the last poossible minute - that's you that is.

Yes, you may

I Can Haz Cheezburger is a site for what seem to be called "cat macros". Funny pics & stuff, for the rest. I get bored of things quickly, but it's consistently very good - the pictures are great, the captions are funny. The spelling is atrocious deliberately, especially in the comment section which it becomes exhibishioistic.. Here's my favourite today:

Layout fucked up by blogger.com

They said I could get my old layout back if I tried a new one. They lied. Now I have a stupid ugly navbar and I can't get the old one back, and now I miss it. Stupid ugly narrow design. Stupid ugly Trebuchet (oh, no, please, name >all< my fonts after the medieval siege engines their ugliness resembles). Stupid ugly header. Stupid ugly spacing. Double stupid doubleplus ugly "interface" for editing the stupid ugly layout. Stupid ugly stupid blogger.com

Edit: OK, I have vented and am tinkering. Stupid me for letting them do it, stupid me for trusting them and not saving a copy of my template, stupid me for not being able to figure out how to fix it. (The navbar is now an iframe, which save having to hide the individual bits, but they've used variables in the template which makes it hard to edit the file externally, and browsers are shit for that kind of thing work with the auto-resizable textatreas which are fashionable now (and generally nearly work). I was very close to deleting this blog out of anger, both of your personalities will be relieved to find I didn't :)

Catastrophic security idiocy

So, a CD with 25 million sets of personal details of child benefit recipients has been "lost". We will be on this. How tragic! I have never known such fear: anyone who knows my name and address will be able to look me up in the phonebook or the electoral roll! If they know my bank account details they will be able to deposit money in my account! If they know I have children they might paedophile them!

The end of Safari and other browsers

The new version of Safari on OS X Leopard still doesn't have a "New Tab" button in it's toolbar options and the hacks that used to let you do it don't work anymore and aren't being re-developed. This is no good for me as I always customize browser toolbars to stick a new tab button just to the left to the location bar where the web address is, always have, always will (where possible of course, Mr IE.). I'm a big user of separators as well, back/forward, separator, refresh/stop (I don't really approve of integrating the two, especially as Ajax style apps often make them redundant but not consistently enough to do without the functionality of both), separator, print on it's own, and new tab. I can live without everything else customizable, but not without new tab: you can't double click the tab bar to get a new tab in Safari like you can in Firefox (Edit: you can now do this in Safari 3.1) and you can't drag a bookmark to the tab bar to open it like you can in Firefox (as Safari deletes it, and there's no Undo available!). I use Camino myself but the rest of the family use Firefox, it was my baby daughter's word for "Computer": having more than one browsers installed is always handy (especially as none of them are any good at identity management).

The sky is not falling in, and it is not onerous to cmd-T and click/type or command-click a link in your Safari bookmark bar to open it in a new tab. Using modifier-key commands don't really scale though: I can substitute cmd-c for ctrl-c easily enough using Stuart Logic (i.e. "always get it wrong the first time") as ctrl-c was 'break' for me long before it was 'copy', but remembering what variant to use for UI operations is annoying cross=platform. What's command-click going to be in Safari for Windows (control-click, but I don't want to have to think about it, that's the point of usability, plus I have to remember which browser I'm using and make it a special case)? What if I'm using Parallels Desktop to run Windows within OS X, which is it? If I am running programs via remote desktop, which isn't good at all at recognizing the differences in keyboard layouts? Not exactly Jane User maybe but not rocket science.

The other annoyance is that switching from mouse to keyboard or keyboard to mouse is what you might call a "high cost user activity" - it takes time, and attention - you have to look for the device, orient to it, use it, and then return to the task. When I watch people using programs I often feel myself wanting to say "You could just press enter" as they switch from text entry or selection to using their mouse to click the OK button in a dialog. I don't, though, as the first 500 times I did it made no difference.

Usability means offering as many ways to achieve your user goals as possible, in the hope you find the right one for a given value of 'user'. Why can't Safari have a new tab button I don't know (Dave Hyatt adamantly doesn't want one, is my guess, but why?)

It's a shame, as Safari has fantastic CSS support for exciting new capabilities, and is the browser du jour as regard iPhone development. Ho hum.

Another thing that annoyed me about Safari was that I couldn't configure it to search with what I typed from the location or address bar. Firefox by default does a semi-optimized "I'm feeling lucky" ("I'm feeling useless" more like) search, but I always set the keyword.URL preference to http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q= in about:config (keyword.enabled needs to be true, but that's the default anyway) to always search google.co.uk as searching from the location or address bar is just so obvious to me, it's a textbox, you can type in it, let's search. I have nothing against the location box (which ironically I have started enabling after all these years of address bar searching and I had even trained myself to type cmd-c cmd-t tab cmd-v enter instead of old faithful cmd-c cmd-t cmd-v then enter when I wanted to search for selected text from a webpage. Most browsers now have a context menu option to search for a selection using the default search settings.

Oh, when you type text in the location bar in Firefox 3, it searches the full text of your history URLs as well as the title of he web page, so when you type foo it matches "http://bar.com - my foo web page" as well as http://bar.com.snafu.foo/zomg - it's much easier to find what you're looking for.

Got to be quick..

My employer has introduced new rules: you are allowed three 10 minute sessions on "social networking" sites like Facebook or blogger, and I've already used one slot playing the movie quiz on FB (access is completely blocked from 10-12AM and 2-4PM)



Anyway, I've found a whole new way the BBC is deceiving and manipulating viewers: you know on the weather forecasts they seem to be standing in front of the UK - it isn't real, it's a fake! People should be told.

Amazoooh!

Tog On Interfaces for £6 delivered. Thank you Amazon! You can get very good prices on popular books secondhand.

Shooting fish

Core Image Fun House is a lot of fun, installed with Xcode from the Leopard CD. The Edit menu's a bit obscure though..

Not on the Radar

Radar is Apple's bug tracking system, but you have to be a paid member of ADC to access it, and I haven't made that plunge.. yet. If I did, I could report this error which is consistently reproducible, updating Camino from a disk image as a non-admin user: first the update fails to request my credentials to authenticate the update (the copy fails) then as a bonus the existing version fails to run until the copy failure sheet is dismissed.

Edit: seems to be fixed in 10.5.1

Time Machine

In order to make Time Machine complete a backup on my G4 before the heat-death of the universe I had to disable Spotlight indexing on both of my drives as well as the drive I am backing up to. Now it's running nicely (albeit still slowly). This will be the first system backup I have ever made in more than 10 years of personal computing, which says something about Time Machine (as well as me).

I need to get it to run at a reasonable speed (ie one that will complete in my lifespan) as I can't just leave the disk connected, as I could only get it to work with no actual enclosure, so currently it's just the naked hard disk and external IDE connector, and I don't want Monsieur Garcon getting hold of either. Serves me right for buying cheap shit enclosures, I am finally learning the lesson that the 3.84 unit is no good and I should always buy the 20.84 unit - when I finally bought a proper USB2.0 card to support my iPod touch it worked out of the box, but the 3 other cheap ones I bought never worked properly.

Incidentally, is there a nerd in your life??

(Edit: it worked eventually, but it took 3 days. Then it took Spotlight another day or so to reindex the volumes..)

Looking for a Wii online?

My Wii was stolen along with my MacBook, dead iBook and iPod in a recent burglary. It's been tricky to replace: my local Blockbusters had them in stock straight after I got my insurance settlement, but I really hate them so I didn't buy one. Then I regretted that particular decision, and couldn't find one anywhere: step up to the plate the realtime 'Wii In Stock webpage', which I kept open in a browser tab yesterday lunchtime. After only an hour or so it popped up with Amazon having stock, and although it seemed to be being drip-fed onto the site - I kept trying to buy one but it was out of stock by the time I reached the checkout - I got one eventually, and I just got the email to say it's been shipped so it's non-virtual and will arrive next week. I paid £1.69 for delivery, which I frankly couldn't care less about: there were websites selling the basic Wii package for £279, a premium of £100 over the usual selling price. I bet they sold them, as well.

Just in time for the release of Super Mario Galaxy! While I can't believe it can be as anything like as good as Super Mario 64 it will be fun finding out, though Becky has persuaded me to wait for my birthday: fair enough, it's only one more month and I've waited a long time.. I need to build up my Wii Sports tennis rating to something respectable first, I think I peaked at 2200 or so on my old one. I thought about buying Tiger Woods golf because I am an old fu- sorry, because I enjoyed the Wii golf game, but I'm not sure - have you tried it? Is it good?

iPhone/iPod Touch SDK

My iPod Touch runs some variant of OSX Leopard, that seems pretty obvious. So why am I not surprised Apple haven't released a SDK for it given that the whole of Leopard is still under a strict non-disclosure agreement which is still being enforced?

Arse-backwards

I was reading this advice about running as a non-Admin user on your Mac, when I realised it's totally backwards.

It advises setting up and using a new account, to which administrative privileges are not granted. It advises

If you want to transfer any data (such as preferences files or e-mail messages) from your current account to the new one, drag the items from their current location in your Home folder to the corresponding location in the new account’s Home folder.

Oh, just like that? All my preferences, bookmarks, settings, documents, music and photos? This is bad advice. Setting up a new user account for a little change like this is quite unnecessary and practically destructive of your data as you can never migrate everything (1). If I'm not mistaken, it's perfectly possible to remove the admin privileges from any user account created in OSX, including those created with Setup Assistant (2). Another reason it's bad advice is that if you can't stand running as non-admin because of some behaviour of other, you can't just Go Back. Which you should always be able to do with changes spouted in an online column.

Far better to set up a new account called Admin, with admin rights, then remove those admin rights from your current account. If you ever do anything in Terminal using sudo then add your current account to the sudoers file using visudo before you do this as it's a pain to do it afterwards (believe me, if you don't understand that or have never heard of sudo you don't need it). (3)

I did it to see what it was like, having experienced nightmarish scenarios in Windows trying to run as a non-admin user (this is much mitigated in Vista, more on which later) and it's just fine - I love OSX's admin escalation paradigm anyway, being able to set/unset with the little padlock is much nicer than Windows Vista's UAC, but the only extra time I've noticed having to authenticate is adding an appliction to the Applications folder, and I don't do this very often. (well, every day if you count getting the nightly trunk build of Camino, but I don't mind that). In fact, I have a Camino image waiting now.. I have to enter the admin user name and password, which is mildly annoying compared to just password, but I can also disable auto-login on my current account knowing Beck can enter the password, and keep the viciously complex password for my admin account. Yes, I know that all of these passwords can be bypassed with OSX install disks, but I am thinking of mitigating that by using Filevault to encrypt my home directory. I just need a backup strategy first!

Ordinary User stuartd

(1) Creating a new user profile is a good way of losing cruft but it has to be deliberate and consensual.

(2) As a software consumer I think "Assistant" sounds a lot more promising than "Wizard", but is that just because I have read Terry Pratchett / JK Rowling? Shop Assistant, Library Assistant, Teaching Assistant, Rincewind, Harry Potter. Which one do you want helping you?

(3) I missed the old sudo warning when I got my new MacBook.

New speed cameras on the A27

I went to Eastbourne today, and noticed there are two speed cameras between Falmer (Sussex/Brighton University) and Lewes where I work, one just after the University bridge and another a mile or so further on. They're both currently pointing East, ie Brighton -> Lewes. It was hard not to notice, as the cars in front slowed down to 30 mph (which is not in fact the national speed limit, no matter how much people who drive on Sundays wish it was)

Not really a problem for me in my old car. They look a bit temporary, I wonder if they're the harbinger of catastrophic roadworks?

Edit: the cameras have been covered up ever since, and the sign saying roadworks are scheduled has been taken down.

Touch notes

A couple of things I have noticed about my iPod Touch:

1) If you do a big swaparound of music, several GB or so, the portrait-mode cover art and the thumbnails are wrong but the right picture is displayed in coverflow (landscape mode.) A full restore fixes this.

2) Before restoring the device, iTunes has to download a 150 MB disk image. Not surprising after the fact, but it increases the already long time it takes to restore over USB. I don't suppose it's feasible to have a connector which could connect to either USB or Firewire, which is a pity as USB is noticeably slower than Firewire.

3) Turning off wireless increases battery life hugely.

4) It optimizes photos - I added a thousand or so, expecting to fill up the Touch. iTunes spent all night optimizing them, as there's no point storing 2460x1280 on a little screen like that: it's a pity this can't be done offline, as this means I have to leave the Touch plugged into the computer all night and thus within reach of the children in the morning. But, when they're on the device, they look great and in slideshow mode you can fast-forward at 20 images per second at high quality. And they only took up a gig or so. [Edit: it doesn't take that long, even for lots of photos]

5) It's tough putting a decent sized music collection on 16GB: my old 40GB 4G used to have everything on it that I would ever want to listen to, but you need a different strategy for 16GB . I won't bore you with mine but it uses half a dozen playlists and smart playlists, fortunately you can drop them all in a folder to keep them out the way (of accidental deletion, mostly!)

6) The back scratches whatever you do. My case hasn't come yet because of the postal strike. I'll be having words with Danny (who works for the PO) when I see him about it!

7) It is a beautiful, wonderful device. And it sounds brilliant, I think even better than my old iPod.

Straighten up and fly right

I've moved my dock to the right hand side of my screen on my macbook - when the display resolution is 1280x800 then vertical space is far more premium than horizontal, especially as a decent sized dock could be 100 pixels high, thus being 12% of the vertical viewing space even without the menu bar vs being 100 px wide and 8% of the horizontal aspect. It bugs me hugely, obviously, that the dock is away on the right but I'll get used to that and I do already really appreciate viewing documents and code without it breaking up my reading eyeline. I've left it at the bottom upstairs, it seems OK on 1280x1024 and I don't do much reading on that Mac, more pictures. Gruber made me try it out and I like it.

Incidentlly, I noticed that a car number plate in Heroes tonight was NCC-1701..

Maggie And Boris

Scary future:

Better than us

Check out these Japanese manhole covers. I love the way the page's margins move when you scroll down, and the idea of having public art just to be walked on.