Blizza Blizza

And full of protein. Smokey's recent post inspired me to take a look at the bugs I'd filed or fixed in Bugzilla as well.

I've filed 122 bugs so far, of which I've personally fixed 12. It's always good to clean up your own mess ;) Of the 45 still open, five are still UNCONFIRMED and four are assigned to me. Of the 77 filed bugs that have been resolved, I've filed six INVALID, 11 WONTFIX, three WORKSFORME, and 11 duplicates, making a total of 86 valid bugs out of the 122 filed so far (conservatively assuming the five UNCOs don't ever get confirmed). That's a .705 batting average, which is a lot better than most of our users but not as high as it probably ought to be considering I'm on the triage and development teams.

The good news is that a total of 51 bugs assigned to me have been fixed (although I think a couple were fixed by someone else without the assignee changing), giving me about a 2.4:1 filed-to-ASSIGNED/FIXED ratio, and that's something I'm much happier with. Ideally it'd be something like 1:1, but the only people I can think of who might come close to that figure are doing this sort of thing as a full-time job. We don't have any paid developers on the Camino team at all.

John Gruber, on the new Eudora beta:

I hope it’s awesome. I suspect it’s going to blow.

Let me save everyone the suspense: it blows.

Exhibit A: the import dialog you get upon first launch.

Note the choices of mail clients from which mail and preferences can be imported.

Note that the number of previous versions of Eudora listed in this dialog is zero.

Remember that every single previous version of Eudora was backwards compatible with previous settings files and mail storage, at least enough that simply launching the new version made things Just Work™, which is of course the Mac Way™.

Ponder the number of people who will try this beta release who are not either die-hard Eudora users or Thunderbird users (also conspicuously absent from the import dialog). Hint: that number is somewhat south of both "significant" and "able to be counted on two hands".

If your mind hasn't boggled yet, you're probably a lost cause.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen's most famous line: I knew Eudora. I used Eudora. Eudora was a friend of mine, and you, sir, are no Eudora.

Anyone remember PointCast, the screensaver of news that turned your Internet-connected computer's idle time into a CNN-cum-CNBC ticker of information?

Now that Google has released the Google Objective-C APIs, can someone reproduce that using Google Reader RSS feeds? I would find that tremendously useful.

Actual, legitimate e-mail in my inbox not five minutes ago:

From: [name redacted to protect the guilty]
Subject: what is my user name and password.

Camino is asking for my user name and password. How can i get this information.

I swear I am not making this up.

Everybody hates spam, even the spammers. I don't tolerate it well in general, but at least when I get spam attempting to sell me "Ultra Allure Pheromones" or "A blonde screaming hard after a orgasm" or "BUY WINDOWS XP FOR $49.95!", I can understand the motivation behind it. That sort of spam is like the nerdy kid everyone picked on in school who finally snaps and starts picking people off from the clock tower. You don't agree with what he did, but you can understand where he's coming from.

Then there's the Hitler spam. Like Hitler's irrational hatred of anything not Aryan, nobody understands what the hell the purpose of it is. Case in point:

Subject: you sample is augment

Possible Interpretation: Finishing a task quickly is not about rushing. That I have no time for A beer a day keeps the germs away. Money is honey and the richman jocks is always funny The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Honesty is the best policy. Possible interpretation: forbidden things are the most tempting (Biblical origin) Practice does not make perfect but a perfect practice makes perfect.

There's no time like the present. Waste not, want not. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Possible Interpretation: fancy way of saying that we should play as a team and not as individual players

What, pray tell, is the purpose in sending that message? It isn't trying to sell me software, penis pills, or Asian shemale donkey porn. It's not trying to infect my computer with a virus and replicate itself across the Internet. It's just wasting bandwidth, which accomplishes...nothing. It doesn't really add substantially to the cost of Internet service (the amount of bandwidth wasted transmitting that message was negligible), it doesn't tie up my connection, and it doesn't burden my ISP's servers any more than a commercial spam would.

If you're going to be a cancer on the Internet, at least try to make yourself a buck in the process. Being a cancer just to be a cancer is a good reason for people to hang you from tall buildings by your toenails and slowly gouge out your vital organs with a wooden spoon. Just sayin'.

I don't normally blatantly make fun of bug-filers here because, well, it's not nice. I couldn't pass this one up, though. It's just too funny.

Bug 360402: Browser will not display ad images when "Block Web Advertising" is selected in Web Features preferences.

At the risk of sounding silly, what, exactly, did you expect would be blocked when the "Block Web Advertising" box was checked? And if, as it seems from the actual bug report, that isn't exactly what was meant, why wouldn't you proofread the summary you're submitting to ensure that it doesn't make you sound like a complete moron?

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

From a recent comment:

PLEASE READ

Yo Ok so I Have Just Got A Website And am Now looking For Visiters Ok I Will Make A Deal With You I Own 4 blogs i will add Your Name {Name Of Your Blog} if You Just Add My Website URL to your Blog Ok The Blogs i Own In Witch I Will Add Your Blog URL To are Switchhate i will promise to keep adding Your Blog URL into everywhere it will make sence in//My Website Will Also Have Your URL in it With nice Little Comments. Thank You For Your Time
The Website You Should Add Will Be Sent To You Through Your E-mail Like Yahoo or something

No.

No.

Uhm, no.

And just for good measure...

No.

Idiot.

From feedback:

I just downloaded Camino after reading about it today in the WSJ...

Right hand, allow me to introduce you to left hand. Talk amongst yourselves. Discuss each other's actions.

This week's award goes to Apple's Mail.app for generally sucking at life.

More specifically, it took 12K worth of HTML in order for a correspondent to say this:

Hi,

I am looking for a way to bring in my passwords for websites that I have been using in Firefox.

Aloha,

[name withheld]

__________________________________________________________

[contact info in sig removed]

Highlights from the 11.5K of extraneous HTML code in the message:

SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "

along with

P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"

Note the multiple "0px" values. CSS specifies that 0 requires no units, so that's two wasted characters (at minimum) every single time it occurs. In the second case, Mail's HTML generator has wasted 22 characters (and that string occurs several times in the message). Furthermore, good programming practise dictates that you don't generate output for empty attributes. Since a SPAN tag is an inline element, it will never render with a border unless you specify one in CSS, so you should never have to set its border to 0.

Which segues nicely into point two -- namely, since Mail isn't including a stylesheet anywhere in the message, 2a) why is it giving a named class attribute to all these spans, and 2b) why is it necessary to manually specify default settings in their style property?

Here's another great WTF:

SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "

The above is the very first SPAN tag in the document. HTML parent elements pass their properties on to their children, and "Cascading" is part of the name of CSS, fer Chrissakes. So why the hell is Mail including the exact same (manually specified default) values in the next six (!) SPAN tags?

That brings us to WTF #4 -- why have seven nested SPAN tags all containing the same attributes? Is Mail trying really really hard to make sure that style gets followed or something? Nesting seven <em> tags in HTML doesn't give the tagged text seven times as much emphasis. It just wastes 54 characters! This takes that waste to a whole new level.

Finally, since this HTML/CSS code is never going to be seen by a human (in theory), and is being used strictly to make an e-mail message look like a goddamn glossy brochure (that's another rant entirely), there's no need for spaces after colons or semicolons in the style attribute, and there's certainly no need for a trailing semicolon and space at the end of a style attribute.

Not that it's an excuse for sending HTML mail, but if Mail would bother remotely optimising its HTML/CSS, that message would have been about 3K. Still a waste of 2.5K, but that's at least 75% less wasteful than it was before.

From the gosh-we-never-realised-this-before file: Slashdot has just discovered that John Dvorak is a troll. Not that anyone else has ever said this before, mind you.

Fight back against phishers at PhishFighting.com, a site that allows you to input a phishing scam URL and then pollutes the database with 500 fake username/password entries.

Brilliant!

People like this and this sometimes make me wonder why I bother answering feedback e-mails at all, and then people like Warren Jones restore my faith in humanity:

Dear Chris,

I'd just like to say thanks for all of your help. Even though you were unable to fix the problem, I greatly appreciate all of the time and thought that you spent on the problem. If you worked for a software company, I'd certainly go through their catalog looking for things to buy. Now I'm going to call Earthlink. After that, if they can't help, I'll look again for someway to contact Fox News to see if they are aware of a problem with their website. Thanks again for all of your help. Oh, yes, I'll certainly be recommending Camino in the future. I just wonder why I had never heard of it before I went on a search through Google for Browsers that were designed for Macintosh computers.

Sincerely,

Warren Jones

Names withheld to protect the guilty. From e-mail:

Windows will not permit the opening and installation of the application:

Camino-1.0-MultiLang.dmg

It will not recognize the extension.

Ideas....work around

My reply:

http://www.caminobrowser.org/

Look at the page title.
Look at the header graphic.
Look at the system requirements.

Not trying to be rude, just pointing it out...

His response, irony included free of charge:

Now, I know one thing, never ask a Linux person anything.

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

Before I run off to work, I need to share this. Camino 1.0 has been released after lots of last-minute work. Go download it now.

RSS, spell-check, and a few other oft-requested features will make it into version 1.1. Hey, we had to release 1.0 sometime.

Lee came up with this entry for Apple Bug Friday, with my help: Mac OS X spell-checker doesn't check spelling on focus change. It's pretty annoying if you think about it.

The folks over at Memention, in combination with Nitrozac and Snaggy's well-known geek comic Joy of Tech, have introduced what has to be the best iTunes plug-in ever:

Jumping Steve, an animated Steve Jobs who dances around like those old-fashioned paper dolls in music boxes. The download includes Real Steve and iPod Silhouette Dancer Steve.

(via MacMinute)

MacBook Pro?

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

Also, you nuked the internal modem, the PC card slot, and the FireWire 800. The first two wouldn't be such a huge deal individually, but right now, there are no ExpressCard wireless modems (and a quick Froogle search turned up zero ExpressCard wired modems, too). How the **** are mobile professionals supposed to connect to the Internet when they're not near a wireless connection? Even Podunkville Island has analogue fone lines!

I will not be buying another Mac laptop until the internal modem returns to the product line, or the robber-baron cell fone providers lower their data prices (and Apple includes a wireless modem in the product line).

You just don't know it. ;)

Camino 1.0b1 has been released, and the release notes document a huge list of changes. Amusingly, the top two "General" bugfixes are my work (as is one of the bookmarks fixes), which means two of the three "major changes" listed in the TUAW entry about the release are mine.

I definitely did NOT contribute anywhere near 2/3 of the work on this release. That credit goes to Mike Pinkerton and Simon Fraser, along with the rest of the Camino team and the other hobbyist developers who have contributed patches.

But, uh, thanks, Dave. :)

This is why you should always put your laptop to sleep rather than shutting it down.

Especially if you're going to go study in the University of Michigan's Law Library.

Eric has published a very interesting interview with lead Camino developer Mike Pinkerton. Thanks to Mike for the interview, and congrats to Eric for scoring time with one of the Mac software world's busiest open-source developers.

Those of you who, like me, are besieged with constant comment spam have probably switched to Brad Choate's wonderful SpamLookup plug-in for Movable Type. I've discussed it before.

The problem with SpamLookup is that it uses the MT Activity Log for its log entries. This wouldn't really be a problem except for the fact that three or four weeks' worth of blocked spam log entries bloat the log enough that the server chokes trying to display it.

Under previous versions of Movable Type, you could simply go to

http://www.yourblogurl.tld/path/to/yourblog/mt.cgi?__mode=reset_log

and the log would be reset. MT 3.16 introduces some security features that prevent this from working any longer. Thanks to The Girlie Matters (via Google), we have a new method to reset the log.

Brad Choate is aware of the issue it presents and is working on a fix. Until then, at least the log can be reset again.

Attention, RSS Feed Publishers:

Stop making every single article in your feeds show up as "new" when the only thing you changed was the text (or presence) of an advertisement in the feed.

I'm looking squarely at you, MacMerc, and everyone at Weblogs, Inc., all of whom are about *thisclose* to getting tossed out of NetNewsWire Lite for good, because I'm really damn tired of having to read the same 15 articles every day when you decide to do a manual ad rotation and call them "new."

We now return to your irregular and entirely unscheduled blogging.

The upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" has been mostly flawless, but there's one huge annoying problem with Eudora.

Under 10.3, you could type the first couple characters of a menu item and the OS would select that menu item. It worked wonderfully, and was a very logical extension of the ancient (System 7.5-era) behaviour of the OS in a dialog box.

Being a keyboard type, I prefer to avoid the mouse where possible, so when moving messages around in Eudora, I would click the Transfer menu, then type the first couple letters of the mailbox where I wanted to move the message(s), and then press return. Boom goes the dynamite! -- my messages would go where I wanted them.

The problem, as the other five Eudora users left in the world may have noticed, is that Eudora uses the "-> " (dash-greater-than-space) prefix for mailbox names in the Transfer menu, ostensibly to signify to the user that something is going to happen to that message. This is all well and good, and I didn't mind it at all until Tiger came along.

Tiger's menu selection via the keyboard now respects (for better or for worse) non-alphanumeric characters in menu items. This means whenever I type some letters, every single mailbox is ignored and the menu selection jumps straight to "New..." or "Other...", which is something I want approximately once out of every thousand or so transfer operations.

This wouldn't be a big deal at all except for the fact that <x-eudora-setting:7411> refuses to allow me to set an empty prefix string. To be honest, I don't care whether or not I can change that string or not. Qualcomm needs to fix it so a little graphical arrow displays there, lets the power user turn it on or off via setting 7411, and dispense with this nonsense of putting typable characters in the menu item ahead of the mailbox name.

Rumour has it the entire Eudora application is being re-written in Cocoa (hopefully for version 7), so perhaps this problem will go away by then. There is nothing that would make me happier right now.

Having noticed this evening that TransparentDock has not (yet) been updated for Tiger, and not wanting to install haxies (such as Cleardock), I discovered that the old hack at ResExcellence for doing transparent docks manually no longer works (rather unsurprisingly, really).

Unfortunately, after thorough perusal of the contents of Dock.app and lengthy consultation with Google, I've been unable to find any solution to this problem. Perhaps some of my readers are smarter than myself and could give everyone a few pointers.

I'd really like to see someone write up a thorough description of the various transparency features of TransparentDock. It's written in AppleScript, but the scripts are run-only and I can't get at them. (On a side note, I'd also be very interested if someone knew a way to read run-only AppleScripts.) It seems like this ought to be fairly simple to implement, but I must be missing something really obvious.

I was updating my spam filters tonight and took a quick look through my accumulated spam through 30 March 2005.

Eudora says I've received about 6000 messages so far this year.

By my calculation, just under 4200 of them have been spam, malware, or blog spam notifications.

That means spam and malware is directly responsible for SEVENTY PERCENT of my e-mail traffic, and probably a comparable percentage of my time spent in Eudora. Right now Eudora says I've used it for 44 hours this year. That means I've wasted just over 30 full hours dealing with spam and malware. At this rate, I will have wasted THREE FULL WORK WEEKS by the end of the year. That's more time than the average American gets in annual vacation!

Scott Richter, be glad bankruptcy is the worst you've seen so far. I want to put you on personal notice: if I ever meet you or your ilk in person, I will kill you.

That's not a threat. That's a fact. I'll kill you.

A bill has been sent to the governor of Utah that would require ISPs and content providers to block "objectionable" material, mainly targeted at pr0n. As Techdirt points out, Pennsylvania had a similar law in place for a few years that was thrown out for all the obvious reasons.

What the Utah state legislature, Cnet, and Techdirt all fail to notice is that we already have a system in place to deal with this. It's called the Platform for Internet Content Selection, or PICS for short. While participation is voluntary, the standard is well-established and Internet pr0nographers seem to have accepted it as a fair and reasonable means of keeping their material out of the hands of minors. There are a fairly well-known handful of developers that publish software for Internet filtering based on PICS (and other) ratings. This software is widely available and fairly inexpensive. So why must we rely on government to censor the Internet?

The government isn't responsible for raising your children. You, the parents, are. So stop shirking the responsibility and buy some filtering software. Let your state lawmakers deal with more important things, like declaring Ken Jennings the patron saint of Utah.

In case anyone had forgotten, Steve Jobs is vehemently against Apple's competing in the cell fone/PDA market. And for good reason, it would seem. MobileTracker has a very in-depth review of the PalmOne Treo 650 today, in which reviewer Larry Becker says:

One last observation in the negative column is that the device needs to be reset often. To be fair, as handhelds have become more powerful and PC-like over the years, their capabilities have increased and the need for a reset has also increased. Every new handheld I've used over the years has required more resetting than its predecessor and as a power user who accesses e-mail and web daily and uses the Treo 650 with a Bluetooth headset numerous times every day, I find that resetting the device daily makes things run quite smoothly. I don't even use the reset button, I just remove and replace the battery and it resets. And because of the Flash memory, all my data magically comes back too. The whole process take about a minute.

Is it any wonder Steve Jobs has no desire to deal with the usability nightmare that is having to entirely reboot a fugging cell fone once a day? What is this, Windows 98?

Having to reboot a computer once a day is absolutely unacceptable. Having to reboot a cell fone once a day because it contains a piss-poor operating system designed by the same people who think rebooting a computer once a day is acceptable is also absolutely unacceptable. Added complexity and capability should not mean added instability. Unfortunately, the "Microsoft Mentality" has infected PalmOne as well. Is it any surprise PalmOne is struggling mightily except with the Treo smartfones, where users are forced into a choice of three or four devices (if they're lucky!) that utterly reek of mediocrity or cost as much as black-market kidneys? No wonder no one wants standalone PDAs any more -- they've become as useless as Windows 95 machines!

Even Microsoft's latest OS offerings are more stable than this. Get your act together, PalmOne.

Quick! Someone call Jeff Probst! The Survivor immunity idol has been stolen and turned into a USB drive.

(via approximately every Mac news site in existence)

The MP-02-OTG media player book thing is a pretty cool device in its own right. However, I'm absolutely shocked that they didn't build it in dark green with the title "Simulacra and Simulation" in gold leaf on its cover.

(via Gizmodo)

Expect normal publication to resume within 24 hours.

I gotta hand it to Apple; I was only PowerBook-less for six days. If FedEx hadn't screwed up on the outgoing shipment, it probably would have been four.

Now to migrate everything over to the new 'Book...

That is all.

Oh, and entry #500.

Asanté has given me an RMA number, and the router is going back. Unfortunately, they didn't pick up the tab for shipping, so getting them to honour their warranty is going to cost me about $10. It doesn't sound so bad on the surface, but remember, the darn thing was only $28 to begin with! Back on the plus side, though, it's been working fine most of the day, with only one reset since I got up this morning. If it keeps behaving this well, I just might not bother.

Techdirt explains why I use Eudora:

People simply store information in their email, from contact information that was emailed to them to schedule information to purchase tracking from emailed receipts. Lots of people email messages to themselves, realizing that email is basically the best "permanent" filing system they have. That's part of the reason why good email search is so important.

Though I don't e-mail messages to myself -- that's what Stickies is for! -- I cannot understate the importance of a good search feature in any e-mail client I use. I have about ten years' worth of e-mail archives, and I search the last four to five years fairly regularly. I have yet to find a client other than Eudora that can handle the large archive volume and my searching needs. Eudora is ugly, it's antiquated, it's arcane, and I feel like I'm back on System 6 every time I use it...but damned if it isn't the best mail client for people who use e-mail as a platform.

After an hour and a half on the fone with Apple this morning, I now know some interesting bits of information.

First and foremost, one of these is in my very near future, courtesy of Apple and AppleCare.

Second, it seems that there is a "magic threshold" that initiates this process. If you have X repairs in Y months, your case automatically gets escalated to the Product Support Specialists, who are authorised to issue you an equivalent brand-new retail machine as a replacement. I suspect X to be either four or five and Y to be 12 based on the discussions I had with two different specialists. This may vary by product; I've been told that X for the logic board problems in iBooks is three.

Third, and I can't stress this enough: Get AppleCare! This goes double for any product containing an LCD, as LCDs are extremely expensive to repair or replace, and it's much more difficult to do the work yourself. I have more than recouped my $300 investment in AppleCare; essentially, I got a $2000 laptop, four new hard drives, a new fan, a new LCD backlight, and free shipping on all of it for $300. Problems like this, especially one after another, are very rare, but any one of those six major issues would have been more than $300 to have repaired on my own. Extended warranties from your credit card company and the like are wonderful, and in some cases much cheaper than AppleCare, but if you get a lemon that's constantly in for repairs as Ti Cobb has been over the last three months, your credit card company (probably) isn't going to buy you a new computer.

Fourth: the AppleCare that you get with a new Mac is great, but in my experience, nearly worthless. I can count on one hand the number of problems I and friends of mine have had with Mac hardware in the first year of ownership that were not eventually covered by a massive REA program. (Side note: never buy the first revision of anything, from anybody.) Of course, you don't pay for it, either. The point here is that the argument "But Macs are really reliable, so I don't need AppleCare past what Apple gives me" is specious at best. See "Third," above. Problems crop up after that first year runs out, and they get more and more likely the closer you get to the three-year limit.

Finally, it absolutely sucks to live in the state of Florida, where AppleCare is illegal thanks to a boneheaded law intended to protect Granny's savings from unscrupulous extended-warranty salesdroids. If you live in Florida, I feel very sorry for you.

Now, off to call Asanté. Let's see if I can go two-for-two.

I would have posted this at 0530, when it actually happened, but I couldn't (see below).

It's official. My house has become the Place Where Electronics Come to Die™.

I was awakened at the unholy hour of 0527 this morning by a sound that resembled the dying gasps of my rather loud, and of late very ineffective, alarm clock choking on a lifetime pack-a-day habit and a couple old gym socks.

Fortunately, it wasn't my alarm clock, which I shortly remembered was still set for 0900. (Yes, I need a job. If you know anyone hiring pilots/flight instructors, please get in touch with me.)

Unfortunately, it was my hard drive. In my PowerBook. The fifth such device to grace^H^H^H^H^Hdefile the innards of Ti Cobb since he was new, and the fourth such device to fail just since last June.

Ti Cobb's trackpad died very suddenly Monday night, and I was putting off getting anything done about it until I had time to be without my computer for another week, but the fifth -- I want to emphasise this for the benefit of anyone from Apple who might be reading -- hard disk failure, and fourth in three months, is going to force the date up a bit. To, say, today. Well, tomorrow, really, because Apple doesn't let AppleCare policyholders request a repair box on-line. Instead, we're required to wait until everyone on the California coast can drag themselves out of bed, which by my figuring is another...3 hours and 18 minutes. So perhaps Airborne can get the box today after all.

Now, I alluded to why I couldn't post this when it actually happened.

Ah yes, the router. I reviewed what was, at the time, a fairly wonderful little router from Asanté for the February issue of ATPM, and I stand by everything I said in that review. Except for this:

A word of advice: make sure to check for a firmware update on Asanté's support page right away. There are a lot of routers in the retail channel with the older G1.0 firmware, and AppleTalk support (according to Asanté) requires G1.1 or later. Use the cross-platform Web-based installer to upgrade to G1.2; the Mac-based installer only goes up to G1.1 at this time.

I would like to officially revise that paragraph to read as follows:

DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER, EVEN SO MUCH AS LOOK AT THE FIRMWARE UPGRADE PAGE IN THE UPDATER ONCE YOU HAVE SUCCESSFULLY UPGRADED TO VERSION 1.1 OF THE FIRMWARE. There are multiple and numerous reports on Asanté's support forums of the version 1.2 firmware update causing a horrible, horrible freezing problem, whereby the router requires its power supply be unceremoniously yanked and left to think about what it's done for 30 seconds or so. This wouldn't be so bad, except this godawful firmware requires this be done every 30 minutes or less in normal usage! There have been no -- zero, zip, zilch, nada, none, or, in the immortal words of Jack Miller, "Captain Goose Egg and his trusty sidekick Nothing Boy" -- reports of anyone solving the problem by reverting to an earlier firmware revision (yep, tried, that, didn't work for me either), so FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS HOLY, WHATEVER YOU DO, ONCE YOU HAVE A SATISFACTORY INSTALL OF G1.1, LEAVE IT THE HECK ALONE!

The good news is that Asanté is perfectly willing to give me a new router, as this one is under warranty and their Official Forum Guy™ has already declared it dead. The bad news, of course, is this will likely require I do without a working wireless connection for a few days. Not a big deal, but it also means I'm going to have to drag the busted Netgear out of storage so that there will be an Internet connection here in the interim.

Where Electronics Go to Die™.

Thank God for backups. And OWC's rock-solid-reliable FireWire hard drives. (Furiously knocking on wood lest this long-out-of-warranty backup drive go next...)

Think back to the first time you heard someone say, "Yeah, but that won't work with my iPod" about an online music service, like Napster, or BuyMusic, or Rhapsody. Think about how important iPod compatibility is for a music store right now, with 10 million iPods out there in the world, and with the iPod commanding some 75 percent of market share.

Now, insert "Mac mini" for "iPod" and fast-forward yourself to May 2007.

Makes for a rather tantalising thought experiment, doesn't it?

To go along with the last entry, I give you a typical news story on WOOD-TV.

View the HTML source.

Note the horrifying beauty of six -- yes, six -- nested P tags. Immerse yourself in the appalling grandeur of four nested tables.

Then ask yourself one question:

Why?

What Douglas Bowman has done with his photoblog navigation is simply amazing. Mouse over the main image to see a really cool trick, executed entirely with some very creative CSS.

(via the Retrophisch)

It's "A Laptop Like You," by Jonathan Coulton.

He also has several other songs that are not entirely geeky, and I highly recommend them.

(via MacMinute via CNET via Chris Holland via The Apple Blog. Whew!)

Searching Google by File Extension:

Ever want to search the web for an Excel spreadsheet checkbook? Easy. Type filetype:xls checkbook into the search box at Google.

Oh, the nefarious purposes this could be put to.

Microsoft has agreed to obey the EU's request not to ship a product called "Microsoft Windows Reduced Media Edition."

Other rejected names for the new software:

• Microsoft Windows Crippled Edition™
• Microsoft Windows XPOS Edition™
• Microsoft Windows We Hate Europe Edition™
• Microsoft Windows Antitrust Solution™
• Microsoft Windows-But-No-Media Edition™
• Microsoft Windows Is Now Really Nowhere Near As Good As Mac OS For Anything Not Involving Office Edition™
• Microsoft Windows QuickTime and RealPlayer Edition™
• Microsoft Windows Lost a War to France Edition™
• Microsoft Windows Not-Quite-Full-Featured Edition™

And the number one rejected name for the new non-monopoly version of Windows...

• Mac OS

"1337" has officially jumped the shark.

Why?

Because there is absolutely no way anything could possibly be more 1337 than reading the flash ROM of an iPod using the piezoelectric element that makes the clicking sounds when you scroll.

This is at least 42 times 1337er than the rotary cell fone. It's all downhill from here, folks.

Heck, probably of the week, month, and maybe the coolest Mac-related thing you'll see this year.

The Apple Commercial Archive

(via John)

There's a fascinating article in today's NYT about Apple Stores and the Genius Bar.

Continuing with the proud tradition of Southwest Michigan governmental Web sites sucking is the official site of the Charter Township of Oshtemo. It comes complete with Gratuitous Use of Java™, Unnecessarily Super-sized Fonts™, and Very Little Actual Useful Information™.

The City of Kalamazoo was one of Vincent Flanders' Web Pages That Suck back in July 2003, just for the record, when it was completely infected with Wide Page Disease™ as well as Random Blocks of Ugly Colours™.

Now, from the "you've-won-the-award,-now-do-something-about-it" department: The City of Kalamazoo's site has been drastically improved since then, and Vincent has a guide to the biggest Web design mistakes of 2004.

The great outdoors is about to become wireless.

"But I thought the outdoors was wireless by its very nature," you protest.

And that's where you'd be wrong. California (Official State Motto: "Trying to Have our Cake and Eat it Too Since 1849") has cut a deal with SBC to provide wireless Internet access in 85 state parks. You know, for the always-connected techno-geek who likes to unwind on El Capitàn with his laptop.

Call me dense, but I always thought the point of going camping was to get away from all that.

From Wikipedia:

Christmas tree packet

If you're running OS X, you owe it to yourself to check out Quicksilver, which is the most amazing application launcher I've ever seen.

It sits in the background, doing nothing until you summon the power of this mighty genie with a simple user-configurable keystroke. You can then type a few characters and it will guess what you're trying to find. It's usually accurate, though this depends largely on how much you "feed" it. For instance, if I want to launch Meteorologist (which in itself is a great app, but tends to break often and require re-launching), I can just call up Quicksilver (Ctrl-Z) and then type "M-E-T-E" and boom! it picks Meteorologist as its first choice. I can then hit return to launch it.

Go download it and try it. It will change the way you work with your Mac. The OS X Finder has made great progress since the Public Beta, but as an application launcher, it can't hold a candle to this amazing software.

It's a VNC client for your Mac.

Gosh, that picture looks so wrong.

Many people have predicted that the introduction of the Mac mini would wreak havoc on the prices of used Macs.

Apparently not.

ExperCom thinks that you're willing to sacrifice nearly 60% of your CPU speed, a good deal of graphics capability, DVD playback capability, a free copy of AppleWorks and iLife '05, and Apple warranty coverage and AppleCare eligibility for a $50 savings and an Iomega "Yes, three people really still use those overgrown floppies when they aren't Clicking of Death" Zip drive.

Can I just be the first to say, "Yeah, right?"

Every time Ti Cobb has to go back for another repair, I'm going to dig up another song lyric to use as a blog entry title. My challenge to you, dear readers, is to figure out what song lent its voice to this one.

Meanwhile, Ti Cobb will be getting a fourth hard drive. It seems Hitachi's skill with the Travelstar line leaves something to be desired, as the current drive has lasted the least of any of the three thus far. The first drive lasted 26 months. The second drive lasted five. The third drive lasted less than one. At this rate, either they'll fix the problem completely, or Ti Cobb is going to get stuck in an infinite loop of ever-more-quickly failing drives in Houston, and I won't get it back until Apple finally gives in and gives me a PowerBook G5.

Which should be any day now.

See you all on Wednesday or Thursday, hopefully. While Ti Cobb is off to Texas, I'm off to Mankato for a job interview. *fingers crossed*

Techdirt's article summarising the problem pretty much says it all.

Jason O'Grady wins the Macworld '05 Sour Grapes Award with this gem:

Folks, face it. The new Apple hardware is butt ugly. Was Jonthan Ive involved in these designs? Curiously, Ive was noticably absent from the promotional videos usually played during the keynote.

I know that both products have their market and that they'll sell lots of them, but it doesn't mean that I have to like them. Frankly, I expect more from Apple's design team and I am extremely underwhelmed and disappointed.

Don't be an Apple apologist! Steve has no clothes.

Gee, could this possibly have anything to do with the fact that Jason is being sued by Apple?

(From Leander Kahney's Cult of Mac)

In a related story, Paul Kedrosky was informed by his editors that he'll be fired if he doesn't get his Web page views up this month.

So, of course, instead of writing something intelligent, Paul took the easy way out.

Techdirt is running a very interesting article claiming a computer hacker under investigation by the Secret Service hacked T-Mobile's Sidekick database so that he could track the Secret Service's movements and plans.

Scary stuff, especially if you're a T-Mobile Sidekick user.

From someone who must be a confessed Apple Hater:

All you need is an iPod and a Post-It™ note!

Apple Lovers can check their flames at the door. It's a freakin' joke, people.

(All from Gizmodo)

Leading off the morning's MWSF coverage (Surprise! You didn't know we were covering it, did you?) is this entry, from the now-i-can-store-all-my-klingon-battle-dildos-in-style department:

The TrestleHub by PressureDrop

(From Gizmodo)

Lee Bennett writes:

My dear AWS Convergence Technologies, Inc. friends, it is you who are mistaken. Unless you've grown a conscience for the more recent versions, I know people who've actively tracked WeatherBug sending unnecessary data to remote servers.

His blog entry was inspired by the eWeek story "WeatherBug Miffed at Microsoft’s Spyware Classification", which details a company (that happens to have a lot of lawyers) that now has a beef with Microsoft, whose recent beta release of its upcoming anti-spyware application (which Microsoft, in turn, acquired with the rest of Giant) labels WeatherBug as "adware."

Which is true.

But WeatherBug's parent company, AWS, has taken issue with this, as you might expect. The twist here is that AWS has AOL on their side, since WeatherBug ships with the PC version of AOL Instant Messenger. AWS — and AOL — are now pressuring Microsoft to change their anti-spyware software so as not to flag WeatherBug. An AOL official is even quoted as saying, "The vast majority of anti-spyware providers do not consider WeatherBug to be spyware, including Aluria, our own anti-spyware provider."

Uh, duh. Of course AOL's anti-spyware product isn't going to flag another AOL product (or in this case, sort of a "brand partner") as spyware.

And pretty soon, it appears, neither will Microsoft's.

This raises a disturbing issue: at what price can the "this software is safe" label be bought? How many lawyers does it take to designate a rank, festering spyware application "perfectly-safe-to-run-this-on-your-grandma's-computer"-ware? I realise that the vast majority of true problem apps are written by shady organisations without crack legal teams, but this sets a disturbing precedent. Why, now, should anyone trust any spyware removal tool from a large corporation? Who's to say it isn't intentionally overlooking its own spyware, or its partners' spyware?

Furthermore, in light of various recent and not-so-recent high-profile hacks of various consumer databases, I don't trust anyone, whether they're "legitimately" collecting the data or not, to keep personal information about me secure. And by God, I will do everything I can to prevent any entity that doesn't need data about me — this includes you, AMS — from getting it.

This whole mess also makes me very glad that, for the sake of my PC-using friends out there, there are reasonably independent third-party vendors of software for finding and removing spyware.

First, a bit of background.

Since 17 November, I've received over 150 copies of various Windows viruses, via e-mail, from users at Mount Saint Mary's University. On 03 December, after 75 copies, I had had enough, and I e-mailed the administrators.

I heard nothing.

I got Ti Cobb back a couple days ago, and after downloading nearly 2000 e-mails that had accumulated since it went in for repair, I found ANOTHER 75 from Mt. St. Mary's users. That was the proverbial last straw.

I e-mailed the administrators again.

This time I cc'd every single spoofed @msmary.edu e-mail address, telling them to inform their friends that they were probably infected, and to remove my e-mail address from their address books.

That got the attention of the "Network Manager," who was somewhat less than clueful:

Chris,

I am opening your address just long enough to send this message.
You are experiencing the frustration a lot of people have with being
spammed.

Since you wrote your first message there has NO email traffic to you
from this institution. Your address was blocked from any traffic coming
from our exchange server. [Emphasis added. -cl]

If you need further assistance please call me. I will not be able to
respond via email.

Best regards,
["Network Manager"]

Note the emphasised sentence: "Your address was blocked from any traffic coming from our exchange server."

So now legitimate users can't send me e-mail, but all these Windows viruses, which include their own SMTP engines and don't use a server to send copies of themselves, are free to continue doing so.

<sarcasm>Gee, that gives me a LOT of faith in the network reliability at Mt. St. Mary's.</sarcasm>

In the immortal words of The Donald, Network Manager, "You're Fired!"

Red Forman Dumbass Rating: