SteveX Compiled

Most of the time when you hear about Occasionally Connected applications, it's in the context of airplanes. These days, with cellular data available in most cities, for most people who need to be connected, the only time they're not is when they're on an airplane.

We're going on a cruise next month, my first time, and I've been looking at connectivity options. We're sailing on the Norwegien Gem, a fairly new ship, which has WiFi available throughout the ship. Cool, right?

Wireless Internet on the ship costs $0.75 per minute, or $45 an hour. You can buy blocks of time to bring that down a bit, but the point is, it's expensive. Interestingly, it's billed by the minute, and not by the amount of data transferred, which would make more sense given that bandwidth to shore is the expensive part.

So I'm quite happy to see that in addition to having offline support in Google Reader, Gmail this week added offline support. Both of these use Google Gears to establish an offline database of items, and Gmail even goes so far as to give you an an icon you can put on the Dock on the Mac that will bring up Gmail when you're offline.

So my plan is to get online, sync both of these, and then get back offline. Read, respond to emails, and then sync again. How's that for Occasionally Connected?

Yes, it's a vacation, so I'm not going to be compulsive about checking my email. I might forget altogether. But it's nice to have the option.

Ottawa's 52-day-so-far transit strike is apparently over. Both sides have agreed to binding arbitration with no conditions, something they should have done a long time ago.

I wrestle with whether I think unions are a good idea in some cases or not. Generally I don't like them, but I have seen cases where they have been necessary.

No, not the folks making coffee (or pushing buttons as Chuck would say) at Starbucks, but the espresso machine by that name.

The Barista is a fairly simple low end or mid range (depending on your perspective, I guess) espresso machine and mine just stopped pumping. It whirred and vibrated like it normally did, but no water came through.

It stopped working the same day my Mac battery broke. Armed with a tip, also from Chuck, to try forcing water into the pump to try to force it to prime, I turned it on, and, well, it just worked. It fixed itself.

Just like my Mac did.

Maybe I should go check my investments.

Two comments on the current state of DVD, Blu-Ray, and this transition period.

First, during the lengthy transition from DVD to Blu-Ray, stores are stuck having to stock two copies of every movie. This is going to last for years, and was the reason I originally predicted HD-DVD would win, since you can have one disc that stores both formats. But now, you walk into Future Shop or Wal-Mart and you see a growing section of Blu-Ray in addition to the regular DVD section. So be it.

Second, there's the transition to digital media in the home. Windows Home Server is a great way to store movies, Apple is surely coming with something similar, and a $139 1.5 Terabyte hard disk is big enough to store 1500 movies. Yowza. Think of all the shelf space that would save.

Most people have made the digital transition already with their music collection. I don't know many people with a wall full of CDs anymore. The same thing happening for movies is a logical next step.

Blu-Ray is somewhere in between. 50 gig of storage and an awesome 1080p picture are worth having the actual piece of plastic for, today, because 50gig is a bit too big to store online and stream to your TV. Someday it won't be, but right now, it's not really practical to treat Blu-Ray quality movies the way we treat MP3s.

And there's the added complication that, again, today, there are no inexpensive Blu-Ray players.

Some of the best Blu-Ray movies are the animated movies like Cars and Ratatouille, kids movies. But my son's portable DVD player can't play them, and he's probably not going to have his own Blu-Ray player for a while.

Some Disney movies have come with a bonus DVD version. That's not a bad compromise, but I'm sure that won't last - the idea of selling two unrestricted copies of the movie for one price can't be appealing to the studios.

A solution that many studios seem to have settled on is the idea of including a Digital Copy version of the movie when you buy the Blu-Ray. Here's the Fox Digital Copy page, and here's the Disney Digital Copy page. This version of Wall-E, for example, is a special edition that includes a third disc. This third disc is standard DVD format, and includes a Windows Media and an iTunes compatible version of the movie. This movie uses the standard iTunes DRM and the Windows Media DRM to protect this copy of the movie, and the box includes an activation code.

So in practice here's how it works:

1. Insert the Digital Copy disc
2. Double-click the icon on it
3. iTunes appears and asks you to enter the code
4. Type in the code
5. The movie is copied onto your computer

I can't speak to how the Windows Media DRM works but the iTunes FairPlay DRM is permissive enough for me. It means I can copy the movie to my Apple TV, to my iPod, and play it on my computer.

In my opinion this is a pretty good compromise. If I had a Blu-Ray drive and some software that would reliably rip Blu-Ray discs then I'd prefer that. During this transition when not many people have a Blu-Ray drive in their computers, including a disc with a DRM-ed version of the movie that works with your existing computer is a pretty nice bonus.

Of course it's not a free bonus - most studios charge an extra $5 for the Digital Copy version.

The 39 day old bus strike in Ottawa is still going strong. The two sides are negotiating now, which is progress, but there are still a couple of key issues that they just can't find common ground on.

A major one is scheduling, and today's Ottawa Citizen has a pretty good overview of exactly what the issues are. And, to me, they seem minor. Certainly not cripple-the-city-for-39-days-so-far scale differences. I don't understand why the two sides can't find a resolution; it seems more about egos than issues.

There's a table in the paper comparing the deals that the cities of Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver have with their transit unions.

The table isn't clear on how much drivers make in one city compared to the other; it notes that the average wage in Ottawa is $24/hour, but gives ranges for the other cities. If the average is in the middle of the range, then the salaries are comparable.

Ottawa guarantees fewer hours than the other cities, and the city's proposal involves changing that. That seems like a reasonable change.

On scheduling, it seems the only major differences is regarding shift work. If a shift is split, current practice is for the spread between when the first shift starts and the last shift ends is 12 hours; the city wants to extend that to 14 hours. The city says that in practice that happens already, but the union doesn't want the city to be able to force drivers to have a 14 hour spread.

Okay, so that's a reasonable complaint. But if that particular issue is the fundamental disagreement, how much money is that particular issue costing the city? I'd like to see an estimate of that. Maybe it's worth caving on that to end the strike, if the money to be saved isn't significant, or can be made up somewhere else in the agreement.

A lot of web forms ask for your email address. And most of these ask you to re-type it, to verify that you typed it in right.

Am I the only person that just selects all in the first one, copies, and pastes it into the second one?

That was painless... I upgraded WordPress to 2.7 and nothing broke.

I mentioned a couple of days ago my battery problem with my MacBook Pro. The menu bar battery icon, when clicked, said "No batteries available". This story has a happy ending.

I took the machine in to Carbon Computing where it spent 2 nights waiting to be diagnosed. What do computers do when you try to have someone diagnose a problem? They somehow manage to resolve the problem on their own. The problem went away. I hope I've seen the last of it.

For years I've been accumulating domains. It's just natural when you get an idea for a website or development project to start thinking up domain names. Registering a domain name is the individual developer equivalent of the corporate new project T-shirt design.

And for years, I used Yahoo Domains to register domains. Their service was generally pretty good and I didn't think much about them.

But once you've got 15 or 20 domains, the annual renewal cost starts to really add up. So this year, I started doing two things.

First, I started pruning my list of domains. It's natural to think that some of these are valuable but you know what? They're not. There are domain name appraisal services (like this one) that claim they could tell me what my domains are worth, but I suspect they're worth less than the cost of the appraisal. I could maybe sell them on one of those domain auction sites for a few bucks, but it's not like I own pets.com or broadcast.com; nobody's going to pay a million dollars for inandaround.ca.

But that still leaves me with a dozen or so I want to keep.

Back when I registered some of these domains, Yahoo's $34.95/year price wasn't so bad. Today, it's expensive. They use MelbourneIT as their registrar, and that's their price. It's high, and there's no reason to pay that much simply for domain registration.

My long term plan is to move all these domains to DreamHost, where the domain costs $9.95/year and I get free hosting. $9.95/year isn't the lowest price I've seen, but I've been very happy with their service and their online tools, and the $3/year I could save isn't worth the trouble of having my hosting and registration with two different companies.

I have nothing but trouble with Mac laptop batteries.
First there was the original PowerBook with it's defective battery, replaced by Apple under warranty.

Then my wife's MacBook Pro battery ran out of ability to hold a charge after just 15 months - far below it's expected life, but of course, out of warranty. And those suckers aren't cheap.

And now.. my MacBook Pro is having battery trouble.

See that black "x" where the battery's remaining charge indicator should be? Bad sign...

Yeah, it says "No batteries available". Funny thing is, the Mac is running on battery right now and there's no power adapter plugged in.

At least this time my Mac is (just barely) still under warranty.

But seriously, they're selling a Mac that doesn't have a removeable battery? No thanks.