SteveX Compiled

Did you know CompuServe was still around?

Did you even know what CompuServe was?

If not, read this. The gist of it is it’s a place that a lot of today’s 40+ techies spent a lot of time.

When I read the article, the number 72627,1325 jumped to mind. I couldn’t believe I’d still recall my CompuServe ID after all these years, but a Google search proves it. That was me.

It’s kind of sad to see these old online services closing down. Some day, Ultima Online will go away. And EverQuest. And World of Warcraft. Each of them taking a set of memories with them.

They say you can never go back home, because it won’t be what you remembered. But in the case of virtual worlds, you can’t go back home because someone turned it off.

I gave up my on 2.66ghz 15.4″ Summer 2009 MacBook Pro, and am sending it back for a refund.

How I’m getting a refund is a little strange. My Mac is a custom built item, because I opted for a 500gb hard drive. Normally you can’t return a custom built-to-order product for a refund, but apparently you can if you have a service case open.

Apple has great support. One aspect of their great support is that you can visit their website and basically start a service call before calling them, by entering your Apple ID and some basic information about the problem. What do you get when you do this? A Case ID. What do you need to return a custom order for a refund? A Case ID. Seems like a bit of a loophole, but that’s how I’m getting a refund.

I’d be getting a refund anyway, because on top of all the other problems I have with this Mac, it’s developed a hardware failure. Twice in the week I’ve had it, it’s developed some sort of problem that’s caused the screen to go crazy and the laptop to lock up. Both times I’ve had to do a hard shutdown (by holding down the power button) and then when trying to turn it back on, it would give me one long beep and refuse to boot. One long beep apparently indicates no ram installed. It’s a RAM problem, or a system board problem. Either way, it’s going for a ride in a brown truck.

I’ve opted for a refurbished MacBook Pro 2.4ghz replacement. The refurb is significantly discounted, comes with a regular warranty and is eligible for AppleCare. Overall I think I’ll be happier with it than with this one, and it’s cheap enough that I can buy the bigger hard drive and still have quite a bit left over.

I will miss the better keyboard and longer battery life of the newer model.

John Nack blogged about Adobe’s summer shutdown, and I just wanted to chime in and say I agree with him 100%. The idea of a week where everyone is of is much preferable to random weeks off. It would be bad if someone have a specific reason they wanted to take some other summer week off (like a trip booked way in advance or an event they wanted to attend), but given the amount of notice we had, I don’t actually know anyone who was in that situation.

John mentioned teams incorporating the shutdown into their scheduling. Isn’t that a radical idea?

My wife’s MacBook Pro broke and was facing a $1700 repair out of warranty. Fortunately my Visa features extended warranty protection which extended the warranty by a year, and gave me the opportunity to replace it with a newer model. My wife volunteered (okay not exactly willingly but in the end it was her choice and did I mention that I love her?) to let me have the new system and she’d take my laptop.

In the end, I’m not sure that was such a good deal for me.

I ordered a MacBook Pro 2.66ghz 15″ system with the GeForce 9600M GT video option and a 500gb 7200RPM hard drive.

The big drive is great - I love having a drive big enough to keep all my photos and music nearby.

But in most other ways, the “features” of this new laptop are working against me, not for me.

For example, the new trackpad. This is a big deal on this system - a much larger trackpad whose entire surface works as a button. You can click anywhere on the trackpad except near the very top, because the whole thing is hinged from the top. In other words, you can use what used to be the button area as trackpad surface in addition to being a button.

The problem here is that the separation of button and trackpad was apparently something my fingers depended on. I find that quite often my middle finger is moving the mouse and my index finger is clicking, but the two fingers are close enough together that the trackpad registers it as a mouse move before it sees the click, and I end up clicking somewhere below and to the left of where I meant to. This happens *all the time*. I’m trying to train myself to click with my thumb, which helps, but we’ll see how this goes. I didn’t feel like there was anything wrong with the old trackpad, so this is an upgrade that I could have done without.

Another upgrade I could have done without is the new screen. While the new glossy screen does make photos look much better than the matte screen on my old MBP, and some colours are much richer, I find that text has become just ever so slightly blurry or fuzzy. It’s not much, and again maybe something I’ll get used to, but right now, every time I open up and start using the new system the lower quality text strikes me. I have my old MatteBook Pro next to the new one and the difference is minor, but noticeable.

The glossy screen sucks. At work, where I frequently use this system, the overhead fluorescent lights make parts of the screen very difficult to see. I find myself adjusting my position or the screen position as I read through a screenful of text, or moving the window containing the text around the screen to somewhere where the glare isn’t so bad. This is a silly way to have to use a computer. I’m going to look into a matte overlay and see if that helps - I expect it will, but it’s a $35 expense I shouldn’t have to make.

There’s another $50 I shouldn’t have to spend, on the DisplayPort adapter I need to buy. Nobody has DisplayPort compatible hardware, and the system doesn’t come with an adapter. That’s just an annoying $50 Apple tax.

The closing mechanism is different than the old MBP. The old system had a button you have to press to unlatch the screen before you could open it, and this one uses magnets to hold the lid closed. This means it takes a bit of force to get the lid to move, which can be awkward when you don’t have the laptop sitting on a desk. I’ll get used to it, but I don’t see it as an improvement.

Also, the screen hinge is much looser than previous laptops. You ever hand an open laptop to someone? Picking this one up and moving it by the corner (which we probably shouldn’t do but I’ve seen lots of people do it) seems risky because the screen is so loose that it can flip closed or (more troubling) all the way open as you move it, which has got to be bad for the hinge. (Apparently I’m not the only one who has a problem with this)

Ah well, I’m sure in a few weeks I’ll forget about most of this. But so far my experience with this “upgrade” hasn’t been very good. The keyboard is an improvement, photos look better, I like having an SD slot and the bigger HD, but that’s about it for positive aspects of the new model in my experience. I’d actually consider returning it and opting for a refurbished older model but because I went for the 500gb HD it’s a custom build-to-order purchase and Apple’s return policy doesn’t allow me the option of returning it.

The Mac version of The Sims 3 is built using Transgaming’s Cider portability technology.

How can I tell?

The game runs great, but it’s funny seeing this much “Windows” under the hood.

I have had tethering working with the iPhone betas (I’m in the developer program), but now that I have the GM version of the OS installed, I don’t have the option to tether. It just doesn’t show up.

My theory on what’s happened is that the iPhone betas didn’t use the carrier settings file (which identifies your carrier to the phone - things like the carrier name to put at the top of the phone or the default choices for the Stocks app) but now that it’s started using it, my old carrier settings don’t have the setting to allow tethering.

If you go into Settings / General / Network and don’t see the Tethering option, check Settings / About and look at the “Carrier” line. Mine says “Rogers 4.0″, and a friend’s phone, which does have tethering workin, says “Rogers 4.1″.

For some reason, iTunes isn’t noticing that my carrier settings are out of date. It may be as simple as acquiring an updated carrier settings file, and I’m trying to locate one - I’ll update this post with the results.

Update: So you need two things. The updated carrier settings, which I’ve attached rogers_caipcc (Download and then rename to “Rogers_ca.ipcc”), and you need to set iTunes to allow you to use them. There’s information on how to do that here.

it’s odd to be posting a pleasant surprise concerning Rogers and the iPhone but here it is: Rogers was one of the carriers listed as supporting iPhone tethering with iPhone OS 3.0. Makes me glad I held onto my 6gb $30 “limited time” data plan.

Rogers even has text on their website that explicitly allows tethering:

Tethering is the use of your phone as a wireless modem to connect to the Internet from your computer. For a limited time, if you subscribe to a data option which includes at least 1GB of data transmission between June 8, 2009 and December 31, 2009, you may use tethering as part of the volume of data included in your option at no additional charge. Tethering cannot be used with data options of less than 1GB.

Now the question is when will Rogers send out a carrier profile that allows the phone to enable the tethering option.

I’ve been posting tweets as events_ottawa on Twitter for the Ottawa Events site. Some people use an app like TweetDeck to show the results of searches and having a “what’s going on this weekend” very sporadic post is, I think, useful - more useful than the spam that some of the other event type sites generate, listing every single thing going on. This means I’m editorializing somewhat, but in my opinion that’s adding value.

I’ve been posting to Twitter more often than I’ve been posting to my blog - although even that isn’t that often. Twitter takes away the requirement that I write enough to make a real blog post - it’s more like IM than blogging.

It’s fun tweeting but I have no idea why anyone would follow me.

One of the things that makes Google Ads so, well, not good, but at least tolerable, is that the ads are usually relevant to the page you’re looking at.

A style of ads that has been popping up on many sites (literally) are the ads that appear when you hover over what looks like a link (often double-underlined).

For example:

See the word “video”? Hover over it and you get an ad:

… an ad for home insurance??

I’m reading a page about digital cameras. I’m hovering over a link whose text is “zoom”. And the pop-up is an ad for home insurance.

And they really think I need home insurance, I guess, because it shows up when I hover over “DVD Players”:

Or even “control panel”:

There is zero value for me in this ad. It’s not going to make me buy RBC home insurance; it actually does damage to RBC’s brand in my mind. All it does is make me try to avoid accidentally hovering over any text on the page in case one of these dumb ads pops up.

This isn’t a big app but it’s an app I’ve been meaning to build for a long time, and the barrier to entry - having to write a login system - made me keep putting it off. But now that I’ve got FlexAccount, I was able to go from File New to a deployed app in just a few hours.

Chore Tracker isn’t a fancy app (and there’s lots of room for UI improvement) but the gist of it is that you enter household chores that you’d like to happen at some regular interval, like vacuuming the stairs or changing the furnace filter, and it keeps track of them for you, giving you a sorted list of chores that are due with a “Done” button that you can press when you’ve completed a chore.

This app is really my proof of concept for FlexAccount. It let me go from nothing to a working cloud based rich client application in no time. I leveraged the account management, login, password changing, and forgotten password mechanism of FlexAccount and just spent time working on the stuff that was unique to this application.

I did discover one flaw in FlexAccount building this and I’ll post an update for that. There’s no setter for the User’s userData field, which is where you can store whatever data you want to easily associate with a user - which in the case of Chore Tracker is the list of chores. The data is managed properly once it’s set, so if you want to use FlexAccount in the meantime, add this line:

public function set userData(value:XML):void
{
vo.userData = value;
};

To the org.stevex.flexaccount.model.User class.