Upgrade Complete
Looks like the Calendar plugin isn’t working anymore and the theme has a wrong link. That’s all. This was exceptionally easy and fast. WordPress rocks!
Upgrading to WordPress 2.3..
Crossed fingers. This will be the last post in 2.0.
Dual Monitor MacBook Pro Setup
A Flickr Slideshow of a multimonitor MacBook Pro using the Matrox DualHead2Go.
Sharing Files on Vista to XP
Back on the 19th I commented on the inability to connect to a Vista share. Today, I found an article on how to do this at Tom’s Hardware. I didn’t both to finish it. Someone else may find it useful. It shouldn’t take 6 pages to show how to do this.
We all know of Security through Obscurity. “No one will think to look here for the security key”
Vista has replaced this by Security through Difficulty. “Sure you can share these files. Just click around 15 times in all the right places.”
Mac: Day 12
So, I tried to use iWeb today. It’s spectacular if I were to time travel back to 1999. A great competitor to MS Frontpage which was last released in 2003 and discontinued in 2006. Seriously, who makes one web page at a time. I’m blogging 1-3 things a day. There’s no way I’m going to spend a week getting the About Me page just right. WordPress is so slick and handles so much of this for you.
In the mean time, I got FTP going to stephensite.net and it’s downloading all the sites right now. So, maybe WordPress will get an upgrade to the latest version. It’s been ages since I had desktop email at home to Hotmail or StephenSite. I had to submit a ticket for the settings. It would be nice to have Mac Mail or Thunderbird going. The setup on Grandma’s computer has this and it’s very slick. I forgot how well I set that up.
Transmit is great. Better than CuteFTP or SmartFTP. These programs can super overload you with functionality. Maybe it’s the Mac interface limiting this a bit. There was not problem setting up the FTP and saving it in favorites.
I also got Subversion going. Took a little doing and making new repositories still takes a line in Terminal; svnadmin create /path/to/repository. SCPlugin integrates with Finder like TortoiseSVN in Windows Explorer, but with less functionality. Hopefully, they keep working on it. There’s no way to create a repository or customize which SVN commands are in the drop down. You only need about a six, but a dozen are listed.
One last thing. This morning I rebooted of the RSyncX backup on the external drive. It took longer, but everything looked fine. After the backup, reboot and hold down the Alt key. Mac OS will present you with an option for which drive to boot off of. Everything was typical after that.
Mac: Day 11
Wow, DirectX 9 support for playing games in XP and Vista. There is a beta. Impressive. This is the VM I chose.
I’m working on setting up the “docking station” for the MacBook. Setting up a battery backup on the laptop, monitor, and peripherals. And setting up the external DVD burner and large external hard drive.
The Mac makes me nervous about system stability. I built all the Windows machines and have a variety of hardware and operating systems for them. The Mac is unique and a laptop. Very little room for upgrades there. So, after the external hard drive, 200 gig, was installed I looked for backup software. It really surprised me that Backup is not built in. Though awful it is a feature of Windows back to Win95.
However, I did find great instructions on getting rsyncx for free and setting up part of the external drive as a complete copy of the laptop drive. The remaining 110 gig will be data.
As I type, a complete copy of the Macintosh HD is going to the OS X partition. This is the first time I’ve seen the Mac stressed. It stuttered a bit on Pandora and I filled the keyboard buffer while typing. This was at the beginning when the source drive was being cataloged. It’s now copying and stutters less often.
Judge Rules Parts Of Patriot Act Unconstitutional
Yay!
Judge Rules Parts Of Patriot Act Unconstitutional
(AP) PORTLAND, Ore. A federal judge ruled Wednesday that two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow search warrants to be issued without a showing of probable cause.
U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by the Patriot Act, “now permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment.”
..
“For over 200 years, this Nation has adhered to the rule of law — with unparalleled success. A shift to a Nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill-advised,” she wrote.
She said that by asking her to dismiss Mayfield’s lawsuit, the U.S. Attorney General’s office was “asking this court to, in essence, amend the Bill of Rights, by giving it an interpretation what would deprive it of any real meaning. This court declines to do so.”
My Inherited Ideas & Feelings
Interviewing Grandma and scanning her photos brings up many issues. I believe that as you inherit physical qualities you also inherit mental and emotional qualities. Looking at the various members of my family on my mom’s side, these are some qualities I’ve noticed. This led me to thinking about expanding these topics and writing a Welcome to the -insert family name- for new members or their parents like Kayla, Julie, Zoey, Zane, etc. It would be interesting if this were maintained over time and to see how parent’s actions or habits affect their children. The bible says “Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.” Exod 34:7. Is this true? This could be documented over time and verified.
When people dive into genealogy it’s these stories they want. To feel a connection with the past and see themselves in their ancestors. Answering some basic questions about where they come from.
It could also address another problem. When a parent suffers through an issue like addiction, the child is skipped, and the grandchild the suffers the same issue. It’s possible for the child to observe a weakness for addiction in the parent and decide not to follow this path. However, the grandchild may not be similarly warned and fall into the same trap.
Another benefit is to help a parent consider the affects of his or her actions on the children. Are they starting something that they want the child to continue? Ask yourself if this behavior is something that your great grandchildren should do? What would your entry in the book be positive or negative?
My Inherited Ideas & Feelings:
- The need to force someone to agree with you
- Punishing someone with silence
- Feuding with relatives mentality
- Hot, unthinking, destructive anger
- An independence and isolation from others
- Can do spirit, DIY rather than purchase skilled labor
- Poor social skills, limited friends, no or few life long friends
- Good worker, easily becoming indispensable
- More education acquired later rather than earlier in life
This seems like a short list right now. Mom and Grandma both paid attention to some items on this list. I remember the anger issue in particular being curbed while we were children. And for my youngest cousin I participated with them in similar activities towards her.
There are some notable exceptions to this list. Everyone is by no means the same. My brother Christopher is very attractive to most people. I went to college straight out of high school and stayed. Mom doesn’t need to force anyone to agree with her.
Mac: Day 10
The XP box flaked out and lost an hour to put it back up. I was adding hard drives after I had filled them all up. The Vista box also is having problems. For some reason, it worked with the old PS2 KVM, but no the USB/Audio KVM. Even after I installed the drivers from CD. This last bit is hard to get over. It’s basically unusable now. So, I started copying files off like crazy until I filled up the XP box. And now we’re up to today.
Not a lot of Mac news. I copied current projects that I was working on in the Vista to the Mac.
I googled some info on using iWeb w/o an .Mac account ($100/yr). It seems possible using a seperate FTP program to upload the website. iWeb makes a website on your local computer. It copies this up to Apple’s .Mac accounts. But supposedly you can FTP this folder up to another website, like stephensite.net.
iTunes has gotten a lot of attention lately. I deactived Audible on Vista and activated it in iTunes. The books play well. And I began copying selected music from the big XP drive. There’s 30 gig of books and music on it and there’s no way this will all go on the Mac. It has 42 of 68 gig left and there will be some taken by the iDVD, iPhoto, Audacity, and Garageband working projects. It’s probably time to put together the Mac’s dedicated external hard drive and external DVD burner.
DRM Kills Itself?
The iPod is the most popular mp3 player on the market. If you sell digital music, you probably want to include this as a potential device. The iPod plays DRM iTunes music and DRM-free mp3s. Only iTunes sells music with their DRM. If a music company doesn’t like iTunes they have two choices, DRM-free music or exclude the iPod as a potential market.
Is this how DRM “dies”, companies lock-in schemes conflict to such a degree that a non lock-in scheme is preferable? Of course, this is all predicated on the facts above. If iPod did not have the major market share, Apple was willing to license iTunes DRM, or music companies were willing to exclude the iPod from the market this equation changes and room for DRM may appear again.
Like Amazon’s DRM-Free Music Downloads? Thank Apple
Apple: firmware update likely to make unlocked iPhones “permanently inoperable”
This should be illegal. A company can not negatively change the terms of usage of a product after it has been purchased. In the documents purchasing the iPhone, did Apple state it would brick phones that were hacked to work with a different carrier? On top of this the US Copyright Judge (Librarian of Congress) has allowed cell phones to be unlocked in order to promote competition. Where are our congress people to protect us from this sort of uncompetitive, self serving, monopolistic behavior?
Apple: firmware update likely to make unlocked iPhones “permanently inoperable”
Mac: Day 8
The Mac went to Canadian this weekend and play iTunes in the car, scanned photos, and ripped CDs. It worked really well.
While scanning the photos I saved notes written on the back in the spotlight comments. It’s interesting what happens to that on Windows. They are saved in a hidden DSStore file. Mac writes this file, even to Windows network shares. The DSStore file is unreadable to all programs except OS X. I had hoped to copy this to the Windows simple metatags. Unfortunately, this is impossible. It’s really awful that the Mac and Windows can’t read each other’s most basic metafile info.
I used the Win2K VM to copy/paste this info from Mac to Windows on the share. Oddly, Win2K can read this, but XP can’t. So, it’s a toss up how DSOFile will respond. This is the library that my Flickr app uses to read the Windows metadata.
The Mac has worked very well.
Purple $5 Bill
The $20 bill has become red and the $5 will be purple. This is a fundamental change to American money. In 50 years, will we look back and say money used to be green.
Mac: Day 5
Nothing today. Off to Grandma’s house.
Mac: Day 4
Widgets!
I’ve been hearing about Widgets for months. Konfabulator, Mac, Vista, Google, everybody has a Widget/Gadget host. Today, I’ll go check out this Widget thing. Wow, lots of widgets. Most of them useless. Looking for the latest deals on Amazon, Woot, etc. Getting stock prices. Checking the weather. These things don’t appeal to me. But I did find a few Widget and even new programs.
My search put me at Mac/Downloads. Microsoft royally sucks at providing a list of alternative vendors. Apple really excels a this. There are probably hundreds of Widgets and Programs. Each with a screenshot, description, and link to the download or website. I pulled about seven.
- MarsEdit that will let you write blog entries in a simple text editor and then post them to your blog.
- Wikipedia widget does a search on Wikipedia and presents a tree view of found pages.
- A Mac a Day tip looked helpful for learning Mac features.
- YouTube for quick searching YouTube videos.
- WordPress Dashboard for posting to the Stephen’s Garden Blog or perhaps to Stephen’s Personal Blog.
- CocoaConnect for getting to Network Shares easy.
You get to the Widgets by pressing F12. The desktop dims and the Widgets come out of the sides of the screen. Use them, move them, organize them, and then press F12 again to put them away. The Mac comes with a dozen or so Widgets.
I unplugged the external DVD burner from last night and plugged in the Epson 3590 Scanner. After downloading the drivers from Epson again, a little wierdness with the install, I got it working just fine. The Epson printer needs to be checked next, but it’s a little far away. I doubt it will have any problems.
I use a non-name USB adapter for SD memory cards to transfer pictures in the computer. It worked the same as Windows. I still have to get the Mac Flickr Uploader, but I’m rethinking this. The XP box has many large hard drives and should store this. So, maybe I’ll only carry a few pics with no need to upload to Flickr.
There were some excellent pics from the garden this summer. A Hibiscus with two blossoms in bloom, a red, green, white, and black Caladium surrounded by plants, and close up of a sedum looking very arboreal growing in a tree trunk. These are now my backgrounds. It changes pics once a day. I’ll add more pics to this until it’s quite large.
I like the Mac and have begun thinking about getting rid of the big Vista box. Tomorrow, the MacBook is unhooked from the wall outlet and travels to Canadian. It’s first use as a laptop.