I’ve decided to start a page on PC virus/firewall protection (for my PC friends who know nothing about these issues)

Please make comments with web sites you like for virus scanning and applications you like for firewalls, virus removal and web bug scanning.

And if the perfect, one stop shopping site already exists, comment with that URL too, makes my life easier.

Or something like that would make the place a better world. I am the classic bitcher, I won’t change because communication helps make us better people, but I will try to be more constructive.

On a positive note, I had a realization today. People have been bitching about Apple doing this wrong, or doing that wrong, or charging too much. I just had an experience that will shut me up for a little while.

I just got a Quicken dialog asking for my password to download transactions. This is normal, it happens every day. But something was odd. Then it hit me. I had just done this 2 hours ago. That’s strange, it only happens once a day.

Oh! The dialog I used 2 hours ago had been patiently waiting for me since noon yesterday. Oh, that’s right, my Mac is pretty stable now. Unlike those OS 1-9 days, where you were lucky to not rebuild your hard disk three times a week, especially as an engineer.

So, kudos Apple, for making stability a non-issue. Yes, there are plenty of problems with OS X and their hardware, keep bitching, they’ll fix em. If not, they’ll go out of business, then we all lose.

I have been learning Smalltalk and Squeak this month and it made me realize just how little we have progressed since 1963. However, if Apple bites the dust, what loss would that be to our momentum of moving forward? Time will tell.

I think I am finally growing to the fact that my education is about grade 11 and my knowledge of the world is about 20 years out of date. Rather than bitching about how much others screw us around, I’m going to try and see what I can do to move myself in a forward direction, personally, emotionally and physically, through education and taking better care of myself. I think that the woes of OS X will become less important as I travel that path.

Moaning can be good at times. It gives us feedback, be it due to pleasure or pain, agreement or disagreement. A moan at a bad pun is as much positive feedback as it is negative feedback. Attacking someone may not help us move in the proper direction, so, to the Apples, Adobes, Microsofts and all those others I have bitched at, I apologize. Let’s solve our problems, move forward, and see how long it takes me to forget I wrote this piece from the heart.

Nice job, Panic. Transmit was getting some “stalled” errors to some sites last week, so I paid for Interarchy 6.2 and it was even slower. Now Panic has released Transmit 2.5 and they fixed things like dragging a large list of files (which used to stall the Finder for 20 seconds).

I ran my upload folder test, an album of photos. The results (the first two run back to back a week ago, 2.5 ran today)

Interarchy: 12 minutes Transmit 2: 8 1/2 minutes Transmit 2.5 6 1/4 minutes

As my friend Simeon would say. So I download the new Adobe Acrobat Reader 6. I run the installer, and it asks where to save it, so I say Applications. Then I realize it is downloading the installer (I never pay attention, I am a Mac user!)

So I cancel it and it asks what I want to do. Resume next time, resume on restart, or cancel and delete the partially downloaded file. I choose the later, so I can download to the desktop.

I relaunch the Adobe Download Manager and now it says “No files to download”

ROFL. Why on EARTH do engineers continue to have to show the size of their slide ruler by writing overly complicated, more likely to break software? Why why why?

Just let me download the damned installer already. Sigh.

Update: I have tossed every Adobe file I can find modified today, and yet the Adobe Download Manager refuses to let me download Acrobat 6. Too bad for them I guess.

Some people are complaining that Apple took away internet streaming and thus something they “paid” for in iTunes 4. Because they downloaded AAC files they paid for the feature and thus Apple duped them.

Ya know I am kinda sick of everyone having their own voice. Ok, I’m not, it is just annoying at times

Apple took out tunes sharing most likely because some jackasses wrote apps to take the streams iTunes sent and save them as a file. This negates any protection of the file. I had actually been told that you could not stream Protected AAC files (without the remote person being authorized) but still, this turned iTunes into a P2P music swap system.

This in turn might have put strains on the iTunes Music Service, and I sure don’t want to see that go away. So, thanks assholes, for trying to circumvent the community from sharing a tune now and then, you thieves have forced Apple to plug a hole for potential theft.

Sure, people can still steal music, even Protected AAC (burn and re-rip, at a quality loss) but Apple is not making it easy to distribute in that regard. Internet streaming was making it too easy and when someone decided to change the rules, Apple had to respond.

Someday we’ll grow up and realize that there are consequences for our actions, stop acting like children who never had enough discipline when we were, oh yeah, kids.

Oprah Winfrey gave away 15gb iPods to today’s audience in a “things I like” show. I gotta say, that is pretty cool.

I got my votes in for Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuben Stoddard. Yes I watched American Idol. I liked the guy.

I have seen them on NBC during ER and quite abit during Sports Center on ESPN.

I guess they have their demographics nailed!

Taco Bell wins the moronic site of the week club.

Not only do they use some weird plugin or show times (which won’t load in Chimera or Safari) their location finder page has no phone #s nor hours either.

I mean, my God, they paid someone to make finding an open restaurant this hard? We hope to cure cancer and someone cannot even make it easy to buy their product?

USE TEXT PEOPLE!

Poor humanity!

And to top it off I went to use their forms to send feedback, so it asked my birthdate, I entered it and got “Sorry, you need to be older to use this feature of the Website but there are many other exiting areas for you in our kids section to explore.” and now it saved a cookie so I cannot get in. LOLOL what crap. Just like their food.

I wanted a playlist that

a) Was at the top of the playlists b) Contained all of my purchased music c) Was sorted Alphabetically

I can achieve B and C by just sorting the auto created “Purchased Music” playlist by name. You can achieve A by renamed the “Purchased Music” playlist to have a “-” in front, so it is named “-Purchased Music”

Much faster than MS fixes their holes, too!

Check Software Update…………

If you have not seen Matrix: Reloaded, don’t read this. (more…)

Heart soaring, winds of change, making decisions with others in mind. Not wanting to hurt, sometimes necessary, healthy to move on, alone to heal. Testing the waters, like a new silk shirt, time sliding over my skin, feels so soft. What is next, winds of change. Change to behavior, change to habits, change to dedication, change to basic appreciation of life. Wind can destroy, but wind can also heal.

I really like SpamFire from Matterform software, but today I and my friends got a little dialog stating that my filters were only good until a year after date of purchase?

I went to their site and they have added a little link about getting your subscriptions up to date, and put something in the FAQ, but the smoking gun is that they never changed their product benefits page nor their page on updates themselves! I have cached these off in a web archive.

The text is as follows:

From http://www.matterform.com/spamfire/benefits.html

* Always up-to-date. Automatic internet updates keep the spam away for good

Then if I click “Automatic Internet Updates”: (http://www.matterform.com/spamfire/b_updates.html)

Spamfire Filter Updates

Spammers are always trying to sneak through anti-spam filters. They change their tactics, their email addresses, their messages.

We constantly monitor the latest spam outbreaks and combat them with new filter updates. We publish these updates on our Web site and Spamfire downloads and installs them automatically. (Pro version only)

With Spamfire, you always have the most up-to-date spam protection available.

Back to main page

Spamfire informs you when updates are installed, but doesn’t interrupt your work

THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT A SUBSCRIPTION THERE. I hope they change this policy before they have some form of action on their hands.

A lot of us rip our own cds and use sources like the CDDB to get our initial meta tag info, like artist, title, album, etc. Then more data is added to the songs, such as rating. Or we might change the title to remove the artist name.

That meta data is stored in the music file itself. What happens when a new codec like AAC comes out? We have to re-rip our music, and thus lose all of our tag customizations.

Apple tried to make this library management easier in iTunes 4, but if any of the tags don’t match the current CDDB tags, you get new songs. This is horrible because even the CDDB corrects it’s databases over time.

I suggest the following proposal. When a tune is ripped, that a tag be stored in MP3 or MP4 files, the MTST tag. This tag would initially hold three items of data:

Source: example is ‘CDDB’ ID: the cddb id for the album Track: the track number initially ripped Checksum: A checksum of ID against track, to allow even more uniqueness

This would let an application uniquely identify a song regardless of its current tags, allowing a user to replace the music but keeping their current meta tag information.

In July of last summer I bought my first iPod, a 10gb generation one model with the physical wheel. I loved everything about it, except I always wanted a line out for my stereo and car. When Apple announced the new iPods this week, I drooled, but I was not willing to spend the money for one.

Then I remembered that I had a slightly busted headphone jack (caused by a cable in the car) and that I had paid $30 for a 2 year Comp USA warranty (half price, cuz I am a lucky guy) I called Comp USA and they verified that I would receive a new iPod! I then asked about the cost for upgrading from my 10gb to the 30gb. They asked how much I had paid for my 10gb, which was $499. Since the new 30’s are also $499, I was to get that model!

So I quickly headed off to Comp USA and swapped iPods, after restoring mine to factory 1.3 software. Seeing as the warranty is a “one shot” warranty, I bought a new one for $60 on the new iPod. Still a great deal, as it covers accidental damage as well.

So what does The Geek think? Overall these new iPods are very, very nice. I’ll start off with my criticisms, and end with the positives.

First off, the screen seems harder to read in the daylight. I don’t know why, it just does. It is darker and has less viewing angle or something. I can live with it, however.

This iPod also has full touch sensitive controls. Mine was all physical. The plus is that there are no moving parts to break. The minuses are that I end up touching buttons by accident a lot, and sometimes buttons like Menu just don’t respond. The jury is still out on these new buttons.

The hold button is smaller, has no ridges on top and thus is harder to slide.

Becase the new iPods are so thin, there is no longer a firewire port. Apple has a proprietary thin port on the bottom, which plugs into the dock. I am worried about the connector, which use spring loaded connectors to hold them in place.

The battery life is claimed to be 2 hours less.

So, why do I like the new iPods? Sound, sound, sound. The line out, coupled with no sound check nor equalizer, sounds amazing. With my Apple Powered Speakers, my Denon receiver, or my car stereo, all three sources are bright and crisp. Songs that I purchased with the iTunes Music Store that sounded muddled are now bright. What really made the change, I don’t know, but it is there.

I was worried about connecting to line out in the car, as the current method to get line out is by using the dock. However, the dock fit perfectly on my center console, above the shifter, and stayed put, through some hard turns and over speed bumps. The only problem was those touch sensitive buttons, which would activate every time I went to pick up the ipod.

The 30gb disk space and smaller size/weight are indeed nice. I am really happy I upgraded and i hope Apple listens to customers on the buttons and refines the design. Sometimes, a tactile button is the best solution.

Read all about the iLoo, or how MS admits they can design a shitty UI with the best of them.

iPhoto 2 now writes an XML file titled “AlbumData.xml” every time you make a change to a photo. This file contains all of your image references, your comments, titles and keywords.

As iPhoto rewrites the entire file on every change, you can safely add this file to your .Mac backup list.

The file can be found in your iPhoto Library folder.

For all you iPod lovers, Apple releases the sleep new iPods this Friday!

All Apple Stores will have events, and here in Portland, several dealers, such as The Computer Store and MacForce will also be holding events.

I’ll be headed to MacForce to check them out!