Rand Wacker

I got the Powerbook back last week (very impressive three day turnaround), but as soon as I started trying to use it for anything important it would start to crash randomly. Different applications would exit unexpectadly, the computer would freeze up, a couple of times the whole machine just rebooted. Examining some of the crash reports I saw what looked like numerous memory violations and access errors. I tried taking the extra RAM out and things still crashed, so it looks like the new “logic board” they installed was kaput from the start. Called up AppleCare and they suggested what I expected they would, a re-install.

Archive and Install crashed halfway through, so then the machine wouldn’t even boot up. A completely fresh install completed successfully, but the system still kept crashing (in more predictable ways this time at least). When I called AppleCare back they immediately bumped me up to a Product Specialist since it was my fourth call on the issue. They pretty much immediately said, “send it back.” They were going to send me out a shipping box but instead I just wandered over to the local Apple Store (lucky to work a few blocks away) and went through the whole diagnostic process with the “Genius” there. Finally he wrote up a work tag and accepted it to send back.

What I found funny about the whole process was that even though I gave him multiple stack traces that pointed to some pretty specific memory problems, his descriptions of all the crashes in the trouble ticket were simply “kernel panics.” When I pointed this out he told me that pretty much any system-destabilizing crash is wrapped under the umbrella term “kernel panic.” Having a long background in Unix development, I found this rather funny. I guess Apple has really taken the whole make-Unix-friendly tact to the extreme.

Simple Rotate 1.0.1 - MacUpdate

Simple Rotate is an iMovie plug-in that rotates any part of your clip - or your whole clip (it is a combination of rotation and crop). You can set start and end rotation, and the plug will animate the frames in-between.

Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts

NSLog(); - PulpFiction

A new RSS aggregator for OSX with a bunch of interesting new features. Now if I could just get my laptop working again I’d give it a try!

I’ve got a lot of pictures from the wedding that I want to get real prints of. I’ve tried a few of the different online printing services in the past but I’ve never compared them side-by-side, and I couldn’t find a review that covered the services I was interested in. I picked a handful of different images and sent them off a few days ago. I wanted to test to following services:

• Apple - The default out of iPhoto
• Shutterfly - Direct printing from Gallery
• Ofoto - The rumored quality leader, and a fellow E-ville company (I’ve got a few acquaintances there)

For this test I selected a number of pictures from the shots that our friends took with their digital cameras, a mix of outdoor and indoor pictures, and sent a similar combination to each service.

A note on Costco digital printing: I loaded a set of images on to a CF card and took them in to print at Costco since they could very well be the dark horse of the race with the lowest prices overall. However, even after I asked the people behind the counter if there was anything else to do I apparently missed an undocumented last step of filling out a photo envelope and pre-paying for your prints. Since the people behind the counter when I tried to pick them up were real assholes when I suggested they might want to PUT UP SIGNS OR SOMETHING. Costco gets disqualified on two counts.

Ease of Use

Apple’s option is of course the easiest service to use since you can print directly from iPhoto. The web-based services Ofoto and Shutterfly had comparably easy web sites to navigate. For the rare cases when you need to do a bulk upload, the Ofoto client is quite useful.

Print Quality

The final results were surprisingly varied. Hands down, Ofoto had the best quality; I’ve always been a fan of Kodak film now I’m a fan of Kodak paper. Apple had close quality, but the exposure was a little off. It appears that they are using the same Kodak equipment as Ofoto, but maybe not calibrated as well. Shutterfly had some noticable color problems. Fields of lawn looked a little bit like green slime. They were also not quite as sharp as the Ofoto prints.

Price/Performance

Clearly, Ofoto is the winner in this round-up, the best quality with pretty much the lowest price. They also run a number of specials (10 free prints here, 20% off there, etc), so it’s worth clicking around on their site.

After spending three hours at Aaron Brothers yesterday getting frames and albums, it’s time to get a pile of prints made and start laying out some memories!

I got my Powerbook back today, in perfect working order. Impressive turn-around time considering they told me it could take 5-7 business days and they did it in 3. Even better, they replaced the little rubber feet on the bottom which had pulled out. I’m still very impressed with Apple and plan on buying extended support contracts for both this machine and Alexis’s iBook.

I installed MT-Blacklist on Radix this morning and enabled it to protect this blog from the slew of comment spam that I have been getting. I don’t know why I waited to do so for so long. It took less than ten minutes and it’s going to save me so much time!

Someone in my civilian circle used the term “kblog” (knowledge blog) the other day when asking a bunch of people if they were using blogs at work. I’d not heard the term, but we are now using blogs (and of course Moveable Type) at my work for publishing and maintaining certain sections of our Intranet. I’ve been pushing this for quite a while since we’ve gone through two or three iterations on the internal Sales/Marketing web site where we spend a lot of time (and money…ick) on redesigning the look and feel, laying out a grand site map, and then promptly letting al the content get stale. The problem is that while everyone was stressing about what fonts would be the most pleasing and just how many drop-downs each menu should have, NO-ONE THOUGHT ABOUT HOW WE WOULD KEEP THE SITE UPDATED. Even worse, there was a desire to keep around a few pages tailored to the needs of specific groups, like sales-folk, which would be a distillation of other content found around the site, AND WOULD HAVE TO BE MANUALLY UPDATED.

So last summer we hired a contractor to come in to do a new revision of the same old HTML templates and site layout (see my below comment on monkey-driven layout). Of course the plan was still to use the extremely arduous process for updating of download file, edit in Dreamweaver, copy file back, manually update links on pages A, B, and C… It became so that to publish something as simple as meeting notes you’d have to spend about 15 minutes just putting the information up. AND PEOPLE WONDERED WHY THE SITE RARELY GOT UPDATED.

So, as an experiment (this was last summer), I installed Moveable Type and wedged one of it’s templates into the HTML format de jour. I brow-beat two of our Product Managers to publish all of their content to each of their blogs: meeting notes, product release information, sales alerts, external and internal facing documents, etc. I created some auto-categorizing templates for the side bar and then waited to see what happened. The idea stuck with at least one of the guys and it became very apparent very quickly how useful this tool could be. It wasn’t until just recently though that I was able to bite off enough time to do a proper integration and roll the system out to the rest of the people in my department.

After creating individual blogs for the handful of sections working in my wing of the building, I started to look at easy ways to present what could become a huge amount of information to other people in the company in an easily digestable way. What I ended up doing was taking the RSS feeds published by the half-dozen or so individual blogs and distilling them into a news roll-up of all the externally interesting categories. This collection of articles is formatted and published on the front page of our division’s Intranet as the top-level “News Roll-up”. This gives a good general overview to people, but leave it to my boss to come up with a creative extension to that idea.

Instead of creating one general page with all the information that other people throughout the company might be interested in, why not create some special pages targetted at specific groups in the company? For example, sales-types are always very busy “just the facts” kinds of people, and since it’s our job to provide them those facts, we’re creating a “Sales Portal” page that will present articles about and links to all of the information they care about, but in a focused and Sales-attention-span compatible way. It’s a very useful idea that, thanks to RSS and a little Perl, we can now maintain WITH NO EXTRA WORK ON OUR PART…AT ALL! Fantastic. Thank you, Six Apart.

aaronland.info

Some useful stuff, particularly a perl script called rss2rss. Good blog to follow too (when I get my Mac back!)

I’ve been wrestling with an internal website at work for the past few days, taking a hammer to the HTML templates and infrastructure that a contractor came in and put together for us. It’s a classic 1999-era implementation using anal-retentive table layouts, invisible pixels, fixed widths and head-in-the-sand IE formatting. Even worse, it mixes in a number of little Javascript (you know, the programming language for non-programmers…) tidbits that are actually used to build menus on the site in the browser. Anyways, it’s a mess, and if I had a lot more time, patience, and experience I would re-craft the whole thing in to a simple CSS/XHTML layout akin to the default styles used by Moveable Type.

I have a favorite new term though. Every time I run across a website like this where I know the implementor just sat in front of a monitor futzing around with changing the size of a transparent image from 3 to 4 pixels wide, I’m going to label it MONKEY-DRIVEN LAYOUT.