I just started using Evernote and so far I’m really liking it. Evernote is a web based information organizer that also has desktop clients for Windows, OS X, and Windows Mobile. (Other phone clients are listed as coming soon.) I’ve only been using it a couple of days but so far I really like it. The local clients means it can be used offline and all the clients are kept in sync via the web. When I’m on another computer the info is available via the web. I currently use Yojimbo and Evernote doesn’t have quit the same features but it does have a lot of them along with some that Yojimbo doesn’t have.  Evernote is currently in beta (of course) and there’s a free version. A paid premium version adds some bandwidth, additional security and other benefits. I’m still on the free version but I suspect I’ll like it enough to seriously consider the paid version.

I haven’t started using it yet but I finally got on “the twitter“. I figure I better get on before the melt down is complete. I also joined Friendfeed which seems a lot more useful that Twitter alone. To manage the feeds I’ve been using Twhirl. Twhirl is based on Adobe Air so it currently works on Windows and OS X. I’ve been using the OS X version. I’ve been using these for less than a day so I’ll avoid any comments for now.

I’m still working through my DVD library, ripping them to files so I can watch them from anywhere. I’ve ripped about 290 titles and just crossed the terabyte barrier for video files on my Windows Home Server.

Software Updates

Apple released OS X 10.5.4 at the end of June and by now I’ve installed it on all my Macs without any issues.

The other recent big upgrade was Firefox 3. I’d been using Safari on my Macs, with Firefox 2 having too many problems. I’m back to Firefox on my Macs, at least for now. I just made it the default browser.

Ubuntu Server Project

The Ubuntu Server Project has been moving along. I’ve got WordPress installed and running, I just need to write up the article.

That’s it for this installment. Hopefully it won’t be another two weeks before I’m back.

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When I noticed the lack of traffic the next morning I checked the real site and found WordPress had gone into install mode. A repair on the WordPress DB showed the config table was corrupt and now fixed, although it took awhile to get to that point. Surprisingly the settings themselves were fine when I went through them. I later found the the WordPress portion of the .htaccess file had been blow away (I assume by WordPress when it went into install mode), breaking all URLs except the main one. That was easy enough to fix from a restore. The last thing I noticed was that all the static pages were missing. They had been converted to regular posts. I considered blowing everything away and just restoring from backup and maybe I still should. But I decided to restore the pages via cut-and-paste and make sure the URLs stayed the same as the pre-crash URLs. It was certainly quicker than a full restore although I waited until Saturday to do it.

Bluehost continued to have problems earlier in the week. SiteUpTime reported 4 more outages over April 1st and 2nd. Three were under 30 minutes each and the fourth was between 30 and 60 minutes. Not a good week for Bluehost, or me. I experienced the biggest downside of using a shared host.

On the fun side of things, I scoped out running a website on Apache, using my Ubuntu Server VM. I think I’m ready to install WordPress and get a test site going.

I was looking at my site stats and noticed that in March there was a pretty big jump in visitors using Windows, although Mac users still account for over half the visitors. Mac users dropped from 60 to 53% with Windows picking up those 7% to hit 39%. Linux was level at 7%. IE users were up almost as much, by 6%. Firefox and Safari lost 3 points each to IE although IE is still in third place at 20% of visitors. Most visitors (43%) use Firefox and 32% use Safari.

Software Updates

Apple released some software updates this week. I usually apply them right away, at least to one of my Macs, but this time I didn’t want to take the chance of encountering any more problems so I delayed everything. On Saturday I finally went ahead and updated my iMac although my MacBook and Mac Mini remain unpatched for now. iTunes 7.6.2 was described as having “…bug fixes to improve stability and performance.” There was also QuickTime 7.4.5 which includes security and other fixes. There’s four possible QuickTime download, depending on the OS and this one requires a reboot on Macs. Front Row 2.1.3 was released to improve iTunes compatibility. Finally, Keynote 4.0.3 addresses problems when dealing with large documents (not something I worry about). I didn’t have any problems installing these on my iMac, but like I said, there was a restart.

Frustrations

The web site problems were certainly on the top of the frustrations list this week. But there was more. The main reason I installed the updates on my iMac is because I was having iPod problems and figured I try the new iTunes. While infrequent, my iPod has developed the ability to crash iTunes when it connects. And then when iTunes restarts and connects it sees my iPod as a new device. While the iPod retains all the information I have to re-establish my sync settings. It’s a pain but at least it doesn’t try to replace everything on the iPod at the first sync. I’ll see if the iTunes update helps. If not, it’ll be an iPod restore next.

I’ve also noticed that Safari is crashing more since the last update. It’s not a lot, not even once a day. Maybe two or three times a week since I installed it, but it’s still up from zero before the update. No noticeable pattern and it’s on sites I visit frequently. Anyone else seeing this?

Mozy also contributes to my frustration every now and them. It’s still pre-release (although now officially a release candidate) for Mac so problems are to be expected. The most annoying one is where the status reports nothing is backed up and last the last backup(s) sent nothing, although it shows a status of successful. The log file usually either says the user account is in use or it couldn’t register the machine on the account. Mozy doesn’t provide a way to unload and reload the software so I end up restarting my Mac and the next backup works. Since the backup after the restart always works this seems to be a client problem.

The Week Ahead

I think it’ll be another slow week for site updates unless something unexpected catches my attention. I’ll probably work on getting WordPress running on my Ubuntu VM and look into upgrading to WordPress 2.5. I figure I’ll hold off on the upgrade until I check out my site a bit more to make sure I don’t need a full restore due to remaining problems.

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The big update news this week (at least for me) was the release of WordPress 2.5. I had the energy to update my test site yesterday afternoon but quickly ran out of steam. So the upgrade to this site will take place next weekend. This provides the added benefit of being able to to see the experience others have with the upgrade.

In addition to the updates I already mentioned, Apple released Apple TV 2.01. If Apple mentions this update anywhere on it’s website they hidden it well. The only change I noticed was the addition of a Genre button on the My Movies screen which is a useful addition. The update wasn’t problem free. After the update I could no longer stream anything from iTunes. It would sync fine but I could only play the synced items. Reboots and toggling the setting to enable/disable streaming did nothing. Eventually I broke the connection to iTunes and re-established it again. This erased everything from Apple TV and re-synced everything. Then streaming was fine.

That’s all for this week’s log - nice and short.

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Apple’s Time Machine also made a comeback. I’d stopped using it just prior to the release of OS X 10.5.2 but I recently freed up an external USB hard drive so I hooked it up to my iMac and enabled Time Machine. Like before, I excluded my virtual machines. This time I also excluded my iTunes library. Due to the podcasts and videos that come and go it would eat up my Time Machine disk rather quickly, limiting the time I could go back. An old problem returned, when the external drive goes to sleep and the iMac reboots it doesn’t always see the drive again so the backups stop.

Software Updates

Apple pushed out four OS X updates over three days - Safari 3.1, a large security update, a Time Machine and Airport Driver Update, and an update to Camera RAW. The Safari 3.1 update meant I also needed a update to my 1Password software.

In addition to the updates I wrote about, I also upgraded to Vista Service Pack 1 later in the week. I upgraded Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate running on VMware Fusion and Vista Ultimate running on Parallels. The upgrades all took about 90 minutes and went without incident. In each case the download was just 66.9MB (out of a possible 427MB). I don’t use Vista enough to notice any change.

WordPress 2.5 still isn’t out yet, although a release candidate was published a couple of days ago. I’m waiting for the final release before I start testing. Rumor has it that it’ll be out next week in keeping with the original roadmap.

I’d been holding off updating the firmware on my 5th-gen iPod and was at least two firmware updates behind. I finally decided to go ahead and update it. It updated fine, although the iPod restart was unnervingly long. No noticeable differences, which at this point is a good thing.

Frustrations

There were  few this week but I’ve been having problems with sound on Windows Vista running on VMware. It works, but sounds like a AM radio with a lot of static. Unfortunately after switching the driver from stereo to mono the VMWare Fusion would pin both CPU cores at 100%. This required a force quit of VMware and then an iMac reboot to kill all the orphaned VMware processes.

My Apple TV has become another source of frustration. Its minor, but really annoying. There’s a noticeable delay in the menus when it loads the preview image. This causes dropped clicks and missed menu choices. I rather do without the previews and save the clicks.

The Week Ahead

That rounds up this week. I’m pretty close to finishing my Ubuntu Server build and WordPress 2.5 will probably be released within a few days. Logically it would make sense for me to finish the server build then use it as the test platform for WordPress 2.5. But the reality is if WP is released soon I’ll probably update my current test site and take a look at it. It still remains to be seen what will catch my attention in the week ahead.

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I also managed short amount of time last weekend to take some new pictures. During the week I was able to use those shots as my introduction to using the new Aperture. So far I find it a lot more approachable than Aperture 1.5. I found it easy to make slight adjustments to exposure and color but haven’t gone any deeper. Based on my first look Aperture 2 looks like a keeper, unlike Aperture 1.5 which I stopped using. Macworld has a review of Aperture 2.01 and Ars Technica has a extensive Aperture review by Dave Girard.

Frustrations

This weeks frustrations were all wrapped up in the OpenSUSE install. It’s mainly just annoying because it was an unproductive couple of hours. But not all that bad since I had no plans to use OpenSUSE, I was just curious.

This site experience another outage this week according to SiteUpTime. Like last week, this one was for less than thirty minutes.

Software Updates

It was Microsoft patch Tuesday this week, but since I don’t run any MS Office apps none of them were for me. Then there was the Apple Airport updates, the only change I noticed was that now the message saying the router will restart is clearer that it means connections will be lost.

I’ve also have a firmware update pending for my 5th-gen iPod but I’ve been holding off updating it. This will make the second firmware update I’ve ignored. I haven’t been having any iPod problems so I’ve decided to keep holding off. Some have reported problems with the update.

ISlayer released a update to iStat Pro which is now at version 4.6. Most of the updates are improved support for various hardware but they did add a new skin (purple) and the uptime panel now displays the number of processes running. iStat Pro is a standard widget on all my Mac dashboards.

From Around The Web

There’s the possibility that my Windows Home Server could get Power Pack 1 in April instead of waiting for June. June is also the eta for a fix to the data corruption bug. If PP1 was released in April it wouldn’t contain the bug fix. The MS Windows Home Server blog has this news. Since I’m on the subject of the data corruption bug Anandtech has a good analysis of the bug and why it will take so long to fix. The bottom line, it’s not so much a bug as a faulty algorithm that needs to be rewritten.

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My interest in the customized feeds was driven by a redesign I’m considering for The OS Quest. I’m still bouncing around ideas but I’ve already started making changes to the current site. Even if I don’t go there visually I’m thinking about the site as a magazine with three main sections - OS X, Windows and Linux. So, if you pay way too much attention to the site you’ll notice that there’s been some changes to the categories and tags.

I also found time to go through Apple’s Aperture video tutorials and install Aperture 2. Aperture 2 seems a lot less dense and easier to get into that Aperture 1.5. I’m taking things a little slower with Aperture 2 rather than just diving in like I did with Aperture 1.5. I started off with the video tutorials to get an overview of Aperture and I installed the sample projects to play around with in the coming week.

Frustrations

This week’s frustrations were relatively minor and short-lived.

First it was my Apple TV, which is supposed to list content that’s both local and on in iTunes on my iMac. decided to ignore content on my iMac unless it was synced. I tried various things to fix it - reboot the Apple TV, disconnect and reconnect it to iTunes and disable/re-enable the streaming option - all without success. Then yesterday it just decided to start working again on it’s own.

My iMac had a brief bout with forgetfulness. I have it set to require a password when resuming from the screensaver. It decided that it didn’t want to ask for the password anymore. I figured a reboot would help but the iMac just didn’t want to shut down because it couldn’t stop Finder. I ended up having to power it off which I hate to do. But weren’t any problems after the reboot and the password was again required coming out of the screensaver.

And lastly, according to SiteUpTime this site had a outage on Saturday that lasted less than 30 minutes, Without the monitoring software I wouldn’t have noticed.

Software Updates

Technically, my Aperture 2 install was an upgrade. But I wanted to start fresh so I removed all the remnants of Aperture 1.5. Of course, right after installing Aperture 2 from CD I received the Aperture 2.0.1 update through Apple’s Software Update.

I did install Acorn 1.1, an update to the image editor from Flying Meat. There’s a long list if fixes and additions in the release notes. While Acorn is my primary image editor my needs are so small the changes don’t affect me.

I didn’t have any other software updates this past week, although WordPress 2.5 is due out in the coming week. That also means I should go through and update my plug-ins.

That’s it for this week’s trail log.

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On the Windows side of things I’ve completed a migration from my Windows XP Home virtual machine under Parallels to a HP Vista Ultimate virtual machine under VMware on my iMac. This wasn’t much of a migration. The only thing I regularly use Windows for is running Windows Live Writer to create these blog posts. Other than that it’s minor stuff to amuse myself. My change to VMware was motivated by the minor feature of being able to share the same shortcut keys between OS X and the VM. I also find that VMware provides a bit better support for non-Windows OS’s.

Frustrations

I got hit by the Windows Home Server data corruption bug this week and had to revert to the backup of my iTunes library. I can’t complain, I knew of the bug and I knew iTunes was on the list off possible problem software. At least the backups worked and I didn’t lose anything more than a little time. Well, I can complain - the bug needs to be fixed. Home Server is a less useful when data can’t be saved directly to the server.

Software Updates

I already mentioned the minor iPhoto update. I still have three updates waiting. Even though it’s been out awhile I still haven’t updated to the latest Skype software for OS X. It’s also been out awhile but I’m still a minor update behind for WordPress, although I did apply the security component of that update. The latest addition to my to do list is a release of Acorn 1.1.

All of the pending updates fall into the category of software that’s working fine for my needs now and I don’t want to spend time troubleshooting new problems that might appear. But Acorn and Skype probably get update this week. The Acorn update is pretty significant but I lack the motivation for a WordPress upgrade even though I could probably get away with just copying out the new files.

Website Pages Updated

I’ve updated a couple of other pages on the site.

What I Use has had the hardware I use updated. No major additions.

Backup Strategy & Tools has been updated to reflect a few minor changes.

Microsoft

It seems I’ve been very Microsoft centric the past two weeks, between the Windows Home Server and installing a couple new Windows VMs. So a couple of the recent Microsoft stories caught my attention.

The most recent story was the price cut for some retail versions of Vista. Microsoft is cutting the retail price (this is boxed copies on store shelves) for Vista Ultimate and Vista Home Premium. Some have said this is because Vista is a damaged product:

Vista is a damaged product that lacks many of the important elements a good operating system would boast. And although it may be a bit cheaper, it’s still not the OS XP was. Say what you will about Windows, but as it stands, XP is one of the best operating systems on the market today and Microsoft shouldn’t lose sight of that.

While I don’t dispute the assertion that Vista has a bad reputation today, if we go back it time to 2005 we see that CNet was also reporting problems with the acceptance of Windows XP at the time.

I seem to remember Windows XP being beaten up pretty good until recently. personally, I dumped Windows XP at home from Windows to OS X. I’d agree it has the largest installed base. I’m not sure I’d agree it’s better than Vista, it depends on how "better" is defined.

On the other hand I don’t see much benefit to the price cut. If people bought a new PC in the past year they had an opportunity to get Vista. Maybe this will spur them the upgrade to a higher flavor? If they didn’t buy Vista with the PC at the time are they really going to spend more money now to get Vista? I think not, although the price drop will coincide with Windows Vista SP1 so there might be a few people who take the plunge. If people bought a PC in 2006 they probably shouldn’t upgrade to Vista, unless they bought what was a high-end machine at the time, so I don’t see price doing much. And if people do buy it and install it on older machines it will only hurt Vista’s reputation even more.

Most copies of Vista will be sold with new hardware, as it should be. No one has mentioned an OEM price drop so this doesn’t seem to be big news. Now if Microsoft was to reduce the number of Vista flavors - Vista Home Premium, Vista Enterprise and maybe Vista Ultimate seems like a good mix (although I’d drop Ultimate - sell the added features as an add-in pack if you must) - then it would be big news and a real improvement. Then reduce the price even more.

The second story was the news that Microsoft had internal dissension over the Vista Capable program. To me this is a bigger problem for Microsoft (and I don’t mean the lawsuit itself) than any Vista problems.

Based on the e-mails it appears Microsoft was more concerned about keeping their partners happy and able to meet their profit targets. They needed to sell older chipsets to do this. These chipsets didn’t have the graphics power needed for some Vista features.

We have removed the requirement for Vista Capable machines … This was based on a huge concern raised by Intel…

This let Intel keep selling their older chipsets. What’s interesting here is that companies which were closer to the PC end-users didn’t seem to like this change. Even though on the surface it appears their marketing departments would have liked the change (assuming marketing always has a short-term view)

Ramano [John Romano, Senior VP of HP's Consumer PC Group] specifically told Jim that HP will invest in graphics if MS would give him 100% assurance that we would not budge for Intel.

So HP was willing to invest the money to meet the requirements of Vista as long as they knew they could count on Microsoft to force Intel’s hand (Oh well). Even Wal-Mart was unhappy with the change, and they sell low-end, low-cost PCs.

Wal-Mart was very vocal today regarding the Windows Vista Capable messaging. They are extremely disappointed in the fact that standards were lowered and feel like customer confusion will ensue. … They also went so far as to say they wish Windows Home Basic was not even in the SKU lineup. … Please give this some consideration; it would be a lot less costly to do the right thing for the customer now than to spend dollars on the back end trying to fix the problem.

It appears Wal-Mart was able to predict the future. Yet, despite these protests from retailers who sell directly to end-users Microsoft appears to have been more concerned with keeping Intel happy.

I’ve been of the opinion that Microsoft has lost site of their customer and it’s their biggest problem. Now Microsoft is a big company and not everyone is completely desensitized to the computer user, but once the bureaucracy kicks in it seems territories and internal politics take precedence over product quality and customer experience. Hopefully Microsoft will learn from this and focus on the product and customer experience again.

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With the WHS sorted out I was ready to start using it. I’ve been ripping some DVDs and saving them up to the server. I’m using MacTheRipper which extracts files from the DVD. It doesn’t do any encoding or format conversion. Unfortunately these files are too big to stream to my Mac Mini (on 802.11g) and can’t be used with the Apple TV.  So I’m considering ripping the DVD’s using Handbrake to re-encode and compress the files. I still need to figure out which will be the best format for me to use.

Once the Windows Home Server was sorted I installed Windows Vista Home Premium under VMware on my MacBook. It replaces the Vista Ultimate WM which I’ll move to my iMac. The main reason for this (besides being a new flavor of Vista) is that Vista Home Premium doesn’t support remote desktop. This won’t be a problem on my MacBook and I get try out WHS remote access to Vista on my iMac.

Software Updates

The updates slowed down this week. Just a quick keyboard firmware update for my MacBook and a minor iTunes update. There’s also an update to Skype that’s been out awhile but I still haven’t gotten around to updating it.

Then there’s the Aperture 2 update that I still haven’t gotten around to trying.

Frustration

It was a nice calm week on the quest without an frustrations worth mentioning.

The Upcoming Week

I’m not willing to guess what I’ll be doing this week. I started working through the Apple videos about Aperture 2. I have to give Apple credit for coming out with a complete series of tutorial videos.

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In among these updates I moved my dormant Spam Chronicles site to be hosted as a WordPress.com blog and had my first full week with my new inkjet printer.

Canon Pixma iP3500 Photo Printer

I’ve been running the Canon Pixma iP3500 Photo Printer for a little over a week. I bought it at Amazon (aff) for $57 delivered so I can’t complain about the price. That’s barely more than the cost of the included ink, which may say more about ink prices than the printer price. It’s a basic printer in every sense of the word. There’s no card slots or networking connections.

One feature I really like is the two paper feeds. There’s a rear feed that folds out from the printer and can handle any paper type. There’s also a front feed that’s just below the output. The front feed can only be used with plain/regular paper because the paper path has to bend around a roller. I set the driver to print from the front whenever plain paper is selected and keep about 80 sheets in the feed (the manual says 100 sheets can be fit there). In rare cases where I want another paper type I can put it in the rear feed and still have plain paper available.

Another nice feature is the auto on/off. The printer will power itself on when a print job is sent and will power off after 5 minutes of inactivity. The power off timer is configurable as 5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 minutes.

Because the printer is not within reach of my desk I really appreciate these two features.

When the printer is actually printing it’s pretty quiet, but it’s noisy when the paper is first fed into the printer or when it’s charging the ink. There is a quiet mode but a didn’t notice a difference when it was enabled. Print speed is very good.

Some people complained about jamming but I haven’t experienced any problems yet, with my largest document topping out at 12 pages.

I would call the print quality very good for a general purpose printer. The test photos I printed weren’t a good as the output from my Epson, but this printer is a fraction of the cost. The printer uses four inks, black, cyan, magenta and yellow. CNet has a full review and rates the printer a “7.4 - very good”

Software Updates

Since getting all my Macs on OS X 10.5.2 things have been a bit more stable. In the end I had to recreate the local iDisk on each of my Macs just like I had to on my iMac.

I did have a problem with SuperDuper on my iMac after the 10.5.2 upgrade. The scheduled updates were failing when it got to one of my WHS shares (which it had always correctly ignored in the past). But then there were other problems, such as not being able to change the target or source drives. The solution to the last one was to reboot my iMac and then I could do a manual clone. By the time a scheduled update rolled around I had rebuilt my Windows Home Server so it’s hard to say whether the reboot or the rebuild fixed the original problem.

Apple TV Take 2 still seems nice. I like the way both the content on my iMac and content local to the Apple TV is mixed together in the menus. I did notice some slowness in Apple TV performance in the menus. Sometimes it’s a bit slow organizing the podcasts or tv shows which can be confusing as things appear multiple times until they’re organized. Scrolling though content can also be slow at times as it tries to load the preview picture. This causes missed clicks which can be annoying. They also seem to put store content ahead of my own content (in menus) which struck me as a bit self-serving at first. But the more I thought about it maybe it may make sense for the way people will use the device - to find rentals and online content.

I haven’t installed Aperture 2 yet but I’m looking forward to diving into it. I’m thinking of starting over with an empty library and going through Apple’s video tutorials. Since I never really got into the old Aperture it’s not a lot of rework.

Frustrations

My main frustration this week was with my Windows Home Server. I was having two very annoying problems:

1. It would power itself off randomly. Nothing in the event logs other than the typical “Previous shutdown was unexpected” message. It happened occasionally for the last couple of weeks. Never when I was using it and usually overnight. Then it recently became more common with two occurrences on Saturday alone.
2. My Macs were having problems connecting using IDs/Passwords saved in the keychain. I actually considered this more of a OS X keychain problem introduced by by 10.5.2 but there’s a slight chance it was WHS.

Possibly related to the second problem, the WHS name matched my .Mac ID. While I don’t really think this would cause any problems renaming the WHS would eliminate it as a potential problem. It would also allow me to use a less confusing, more appropriate server name.

So I Saturday I did a factory reset on my HP EX475 Windows Home Server. This wiped out everything (user IDs, data, etc…) on the server. I didn’t have much unique data on it so saving the data wasn’t a problem. Rather than take half-steps to troubleshoot the problem I went right to the “rebuild everything” solution. I’m considering upgrading the memory (to allow more add-ins) which will probably void the warranty (at least complicate things) so if there are hardware problems I want to identify them now and HP will probably require a factory reset before replacing the box. This wasn’t too bad, it took about 90 minutes to do the rebuild, excluding the time needed to copy my 150GB media library back to the server.

The Upcoming Week & Beyond

The aforementioned Windows Home Server upgrade will hopefully take place next weekend if the parts arrive. I’ve ordered memory and two 500GB hard drives to max out the internal bays. I’m also trying to figure out how to re-organize the ever growing size of my files and still have good backups. My 500GB iMac disk is over 80% full and it’s growing.

I hope to get back on track building the Ubuntu server but I just haven’t had a block of time big enough to concentrate on it. Didn’t I say this last week?

That’s all for this week’s Trail Log.

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I’ve had even more updates than the ones I’ve mentioned in previous posts:

MacMozy was updated to MacMozy 0.9.1 and the release notes call it a release candidate. It seems to be working fine but I haven’t had a chance to do my usual backup/restore testing. Mozy has since posted MacMozy 0.9.2 although I haven’t downloaded it yet. I hope to download it this week and do my backup/restore testing.

VMware Fusion was updated to version 1.1.1. I didn’t have any problem installing it on my MacBook. I did have a problem on my iMac. I think I have the iMac issue worked out although I haven’t tested all my VMs yet. I’ll have more about VMware Fusion once I’ve had a chance to use it awhile. But so far the way it maps the OS X keyboard shortcuts to windows is a big hit for me.

WordPress 2.3.3 was released on February 5th and it’s primarily security update although it includes a could of bug fixes. I didn’t want to go through a full WordPress upgrade so I followed the procedure in the release notes and just applied the security fix. The bug fixes can wait for another day.

Firefox also received an upgrade to 2.0.0.12 which is called a security and stability fix.

In total, I upgraded a dozen apps since the trail log two weeks ago.

Frustrations

Of course, the past week wasn’t without it’s frustrations.

As I previously mentioned I had problems upgrading VMware on my iMac. I should have remembered a lesson learned from Windows - sometimes it helps to reboot before doing an installation. I don’t know if it would have helped to do the reboot first thing, but in the end I had to reboot before the installation worked.

Then there was the death of my Epson Stylus Photo R340 printer. Naturally it’s out of warranty. Also, the ink it used is now obsolete so my choice was either a used printer to save the ink I had. Luckily I had just re-supplied so I could return some of the ink for a full refund. I decided to replace it with a low cost ($56 from Amazon) Canon iP3500. I was barely more than the cost of ink and actually about the same price as a full resupply of ink for my Epson. I’ve only had it two days but it prints fast and the quality is good so far. I haven’t tried photo printing on Canon photo paper (which should give the best quality) but I don’t  expect it to be as good as the Epson.

The Upcoming Week

I just finished the first week at my new job so things should be back to normal and I can get back to the Quest. I want to finish off testing the latest version of SuperDuper and Mozy along with getting VMware upgraded on my iMac. I’ve also been playing around with a few add-ins for Windows Home Server which I want to pay more time with. Unfortunately I have to keep my day job and those things will take up my free time this week, but I hope to get back on track with the Ubuntu server project next weekend.

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I’m starting a new day job next week so this week will be busy transitioning the old stuff and next week will be getting up to speed on the new stuff so the next week or two are likely to be light ones on the Quest. But then again, I need to have some fund.

Software Updates

Transmission 1.01 was released which was a minor upgrade to the 1.00 version of my favorite bittorrent client. The update is available through the programs own auto-update feature. Changes are covered on the Transmission page and include performance and OS X specific improvements.

1Password by Agile by Agile Web Solutions has been updated to version 2.5.9. The update is available through the programs own auto-update feature or as a direct download. Changes in 1Password 2.5.9 includes a new password strength meter among over 40 new features, changes and fixes.

WordPress now using PHP 5. I switched over to PHP5 on my server and all seems well. I’m using the latest version of WordPress and what few plug-ins I use are also current and actively developed. I’ll post more info once I know things are working OK. Let me know if you have any problems with the site. Active development of PHP 4 ended at the end of 2007 although security updates will continue until August 2008.

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The MacBook Air was the big new product of the event. To me, this fulfilled the rumors about Apple moving into the enterprise. This is a executive suite computer if I ever saw one. It’s not intended to replace the MacBook or MacBook Pro and if success is defined as selling more than either of those models then it’s doomed to failure. But if success is defined as raising Apple’s image then it’s a hit. All ultra-portables have compromises. A built-in optical drive is a frequent compromise and Apple’s Remote Disc solution seems like an original solution. Besides, there’s an optional external drive which is usually the case for other ultra-portables.

The lack of an ethernet port is an interest compromise but probably not a huge problem for the people who’ll buy this. There’s a USB adapter for those who want it. In my home, where my MacBook is my second Mac, I never connect via ethernet and always use 802.11n. I don’t think I’m alone and I do think the MacBook Air is a second Mac, not a persons only Mac.

In any event, the Air isn’t for me. Hopefully some of it’s technology will work it’s way into other Macs by the time I’m looking to replace my current machines.

I see iTunes Movie Rentals and Apple TV Take-Two as related products. The updates to Apple TV break it’s link with a computer. It can now stand on it’s own in the living room. The price drop helps too. As an Apple TV owner (and fan) I’m looking forward to the update.

The Rental service is interesting. The terms are hardly unique to Apple (Amazon Unboxed as the same 30-day/24-hour windows for one) yet a lot of people seemed to think Apple is the first in the space. It will be interesting to see if Apple raises the profile of online rentals. Even though I’m an Apple TV fan, I’m skeptical about this really taking off.

The last product introduced was Time Capsule. This product falls into the “why not?” category. Can’t say I’ve seem similar products but it’s hardly revolutionary. Integration with Time Machine on multiple Macs is nice. The pricing is reasonable when compared to the original Airport Extreme and considered a hard drive option. I’m just not going buy this to replace existing hardware and I don’t think many others will either. Hopefully this means an update to Time Machine will enable it to work with any networked disks.

Software Updates

Apple pushed out some security and Macworld related updates this week. In addition the QuickTime 7.4 and iTunes 7.6 I also received two other updates.

iMovie 7.1.1 was described as addressing…

…issues when publishing movies to a .Mac Web Gallery, improves overall stability, and addresses a number of other minor issues.

I don’t use iMovie so couldn’t say what affect, if any, this update had.

Front Row 2.1.2 was also released and has the generic description…

…provides for bug fixes and improved iTunes compatibility.

I use Front Row mainly for playing DVDs and iTunes Videos on my Intel Mac Mini. I haven’t noticed any difference when using it.

Ubuntu Server

Things are moving along with my Ubuntu Server VM. OpenSSH was set up on the server and public/private keys were set up to connect from my Mac. This week I hope to get the firewall setup (with just basic settings for testing) and then start installing the actual server software.

Frustrations

This week was remarkably free of frustrations.

The week ending was uneventful. I’m hoping the week ahead lets me spend time with Windows Home server in addition to continuing to build the Ubuntu server.

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I can’t say I’m all that excited about MacWorld either. Curious? Yes. Excited? No. Rumors are flying of course. Apple got the Mac Pro upgrades out of the way this week so they aren’t looking for keynote filler. My lack of excitement has more to do with the fact that I won’t be buying any of the rumored products, at least not this year. The iTunes Store movie rentals is intriguing, depending on price. I won’t pay ten bucks to “own” the iTunes locked movies when the extra laden DVD is usually only a few bucks more. But the movie rental may be worth it. My Netflix DVDs have been sitting in the house longer and longer lately so pay as I go may be cheaper. Still, it’s hardly a earth shattering change.

The big event at on the OS Quest this week was a complete cleaning of the OS Quest data center. Same old hardware a software but now nice, shiny and uncluttered. The post for the picture is data center desk one week after it’s cleaning and still uncluttered.

Frustrations

.Mac gave me my first real bit of aggravation in a long time. For performance reasons I sync my iDisk to the local disks of my Macs and it’s worked remarkably well since the changes to .Mac around the time of Leopard. But this week was shades of .Mac past when the same 16 files were always out of sync between the remote and local iDisks. No matter how many times I told it to use the .Mac version it would ask again the next sync (I also told it to keep the PC version numerous times with no success). These were all files which hadn’t actually changed. So I ended up having to blow away the local iDisk (simply by turning local syncing off) and then turning it back on which pulled everything back down. It’s been fine since.

This led to my Mozy surprise, which actually wasn’t caused by Mozy. When local disk syncing is turned off it creates a copy of your old local iDisk in a sparse image file on your desktop which can be quit large. My ~1GB of iDisk data resulted in a 34.3 GB disk image, even though .Mac itself is limited to 10GB and I’ve allocated up to 9GB to iDisk. The next day I noticed Mozy was backing up over 35GB of new data.The iDisk archive file didn’t hit me right away, especially since the amount of data was so large. At first I thought it was backing up everything again. I didn’t notice the large file size until I traced back the new files in the Mozy log.

I’m a fan of Apple’s Mighty Mouse but it added to this week’s frustration. One came with my iMac and I gave it a try over my previous trackball and liked it so much I since bought another. The scroll ball was the clincher. But the scroll ball develops an annoying habit of scrolling every way but down. My original had the problem and I relegated it to a little used Mac. But the newer one developed the same problem this week and it’s relatively new. So it was either fix the problem or go for a warranty replacement. A quick Google search found this thread at Mac OS X Hints showed I wasn’t alone. In my case holding the mouse upside down and pressing down hard while scrolling, along with compressed air fixed the problem. The thread has other solutions all the way up to a link to how to take the mouse apart. I’ll have to try it on my original Mighty Mouse the next time I fire up that Mac.

And of course photography brought it’s own frustrations but those are covered below in the photography section.

Software Updates

TextExpander 2.0.4 was released from SmileOnMyMac. According to SmileOnMyMac the update:

fixes a problem with Dvorak-Qwerty keyboard layout, as well as a problem with the snippet type failing to stick.

The update is free to version 2 owners.

I did have a minor problem with the install. Despite following the install directions to the letter I ended up with two TextExpander icons in my menu bar. Further research showed I had two textexpanderd processes running. I killed them both then went into System Preferences and selected TextExpander and the process started up again, just one of them.

I’ve been using Transmission as my BitTorrent client since upgrading to Leopard. It’s a small, nice and simple but fast client. It recently left beta and is now at version 1.0.

NetNewsWire went free with version 3.1 earlier this week and then cam out with NetNewsWire 3.1.1 later in the week. The version fixed a crash on startup bug, a split version bug and won’t collect attention data for authenticated feeds. I’ve been using NetNewsWire since it went free and I like it so far. I haven’t experienced any of the bugs so can’t say if they’re actually fixed. I’ve been less enthralled by Newsgator Online and FeedDemon. NNW is for Mac and FeedDemon is for Windows although they are not the same app for different platforms. The change from Google Reader to NNW was easier than for the the online and FeedDemon versions. The upgrade is done by the application itself and is automated but NNW will shutdown and restart.

Jungle Disk 1.50 was released for Windows, OS X and Linux. I like the concept of Jungle disk and spent the twenty bucks to buy it. I still don’t use it as my primary backup tool but it keeps getting better. At twenty bucks for lifetime upgrades it’ll never be cheaper. Since it’s cross-platform and allows files to be opened while on S3 it’s inevitable that I’ll start using it. The main downside (for me) is that the Amazon S3 pricing is open-ended and after about 30GB it costs more than Mozy’s $5/month. Until this release it also lacked some of the features of Mozy (like block-level backups) but this release support Jungle Disk Plus which adds many of those features. All the changes to this version are covered in the release notes.

Jungle Disk for Windows Home Server 1.02b Beta was released back on December 16th, the day after I installed the previous version. When I saw the regular Jungle Disk update I went an checked the WHS version and sure enough, it was updated back in December. I had experienced one potential JD problem. At one time I logged off the console with the Jungle Disk pane the one active in the console. When I tried to log back into the console from any machine the console wouldn’t display properly and wouldn’t respond to the mouse. I had to reboot the server. Other that JD has been fine but I updated anyway. Jungle Disk for WHS is still in beta so the software is free at this time and is available here. You still need an Amazon S3 account.

Ubuntu Server

I got back on track with the Ubuntu Server project. It’s been added to my Linux page and you can follow along there if you miss it in the feed. You should see my next post on Monday or Tuesday. I purposely didn’t install any GUI with Ubuntu Server to force me to the command line. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in that situation so I had some fun just getting familiar with using the console.

Photography

I finally got around to processing the pictures I took over the holiday. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. I bought a new flash to get away from the built-in flash. This did result in more even lighting , although they came out on the dark side and had to have the exposure bumped in processing. That wasn’t really the frustrating part, I just need to get used to the flash and camera by using it more. I was happy the spotlight glare and redeye were gone.

The frustration started when I went to Aperture. Now, I admit much of the frustration was due to my lack of knowledge about Aperture and digital photography post-processing in general. But for a company with a reputation of elegant UI’s I found Aperture to be one frustrating piece of software. Just to make sure I wasn’t nuts I installed the LightRoom demo again and did find that to be much easier to get into and fix up the photos. Still, I’m sticking with Aperture and I’m sure things will improve over time.

I also pulled the pictures into iPhoto and again found that much easier to fix up. And iPhoto was much easier when it came to printing. Despite having calibrated my monitor and using the ICC Profiles for printing from Aperture the printout was much darker than the screen. While from iPhoto, which doesn’t use the ICC profiles came out much closer to what was on the screen. To add to my confusion with Aperture the best printout came when I used the ICC profile and left ColorSync on in the print driver. My understanding is this is just wrong as ColorSync should be off when the ICC profiles are used.

Just makes me realize I have a lot to learn and need to take a lot more pictures.

So I did take some pictures around the house to work with the flash and some natural lighting. But I put the SD card into the card reader and several photos show as bank in iPhoto. I open Aperture and it either can’t read them at all or it renders them as garbage. Before swearing at my Mac I popped the card back into the camera, and sure enough even though it saw picture files, it wouldn’t display them either. So, some time lost and a lesson learned that I’ll set the card as read only before putting it into my computer’s card reader.

Website News

The News & Links section usually appears at the end of the Trail Log posts but I’ve decided to kill the feature, at least for now. Based on the stats I have for clicks they won’t be missed, but feel free to chime-in in the comments if you want them back.

The Links and Articles pages are also going to see a exit in the near future. Neither gets much activity so they’ll be dropped so I can eliminate the plug-ins.

The Security Quest articles which usually appear on Wednesdays will also be cut back. Probably once a month following Microsoft patch Tuesday or when I have enough to write about. It’s all about eliminating having to post to meet a schedule and posting about whatever I’m working on instead. They weren’t getting much traffic as it is, although there were exceptions. If all you want is the security content you can subscribe to the Security category rss feed or register to get the security articles via Email.

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Actually I think the first topic is more for me than for you. I’ve become hooked on posting to the site and I figure it’ll be easier to break the addiction if I write down that I’m breaking it. I’ll be posting less so I can spend more time working on projects and learning new stuff. I’ll post about the progress when there’s something worth talking about. It’s more a mind set change on my part since I’ll no longer be working on things based upon how well they fit into a posting schedule.

The initial project I want to work on is getting WordPress running on Ubuntu server (in a VM). It’s not about getting WordPress up and running and more about getting a LAMP stack running. It’s just easier for me if I have an goal that can define success, instead of “install and play”. Windows Home Server is also intriguing me and I look forward to spending more time with it.

Coinciding with my plan to post less and learn more,  I came across a couple reviews for software that was on my list to write-up since I use and like them. These reviews are so good I crossed them off my list and link to them in the “Reviews” sections below.

Frustrations

Like it says up top, it is a frustrating journey and there were a couple minor scares this week.

I’m currently working on an iMac where Spaces has decided to stop jumping to the Space where the app is when I switch to or start an app. Instead it brings the menu to my current Space, leaving the application windows in the far away Space. I suspect a reboot will fix it but I haven’t wanted to shut everything down. But this is the second night and it’s become most annoying.

Not to be outdone when I started my MacBook yesterday the keyboard went south. The numlock LED was on (I forgot it had one and where it was). The caps lock LED was also on, although the indicator in the password field was indicating the opposite status. But that didn’t matter since I couldn’t type in the password field. The mouse worked so I powered off and on and then things were fine. I think I’d have felt better if it stayed broken or if I at least had to do something to fix it (disconnect a drive, uninstall software, anything). I hate intermittent problems.

Software Updates

Mozy

I upgraded MacMozy to version 0.9.0.0 a couple days ago. When this update notice first came out the link was broken (both in Mozy and on their website) and the software couldn’t be downloaded, but I was able to get it Wednesday. I haven’t noticed any real problems but did come across one anomaly. Activity Monitor reports Mozy as not responding.

As you can see Activity Monitor does show CPU activity (it changes). This is both when no backup is occurring and when they are occurring. Backups run just fine and on schedule. I’ve also restored a couple newly created and edited files and they’re fine. Among the changes was “decreased cpu usage of status icon” but the status icon is the “Mozy Status” process.

Another change in this version is an option to show hidden files. The timing of this was ideal as I had begun to back up my iDisk using Mozy. When I selected the entire iDisk it told me I was going to backup up a couple hundred gig, even after I deselected all the common .Mac hosted folders such as Groups. What I found is a hidden file in iDisk called .filler.idsff that Mozy saw as almost 200GB. By enabling hidden files I could exclude it. This is important for me because selecting the entire iDisk and deselecting directories I don’t want means new directories will be backed up. If I had to select directories individually I’d have to have remembered to add newly created directories.

In case you’re wondering I keep my iDisk local on my Macs so I get better performance. Even though .Mac can be considered a backup there’s always the possibility a deleted or corrupt file will get synced out of existence so I wanted a backup and I wanted Mozy’s 30-day history.

WordPress 2.3.2

WordPress came out with a security update and I installed the update over the weekend. I took the opportunity to update my plug-ins and Mint at the same time. There’s not much to add beyond what I already said.

On a related topic, WordPress 2.4 will be skipped and WordPress 2.5 is still scheduled for March. I have to say I’m happy. I like to keep software up to date but quarterly version releases is too much for my taste when those releases add or change features. And that’s from someone who likes updating software. It would be different if the threat of a forced update wasn’t always looming over the horizon due to a newly found vulnerability. It’s easier to upgrade when the only changes are security related, updates that include feature changes take longer.

Windows Home Server

I continue to like Windows Home Server. I copied my Aperture library to share and it seemed to work fine. But I decided not to keep it there. I was uncomfortable leaving it there. Between being a network drive and not being a native OS X format I was concerned about stability. Besides, Aperture isn’t really an application I share between Macs and it would screw up my backup plan which centers around files on my iMac’s local drive.

I have been running a small iPhoto library off a share without an issue but I haven’t done thorough testing.

A alternative for Aperture, iPhoto or any Mac software that saves data in a bundle is to create a sparse disk image file and put that on the network share. It can then be mounted to access the data. I didn’t have any problem running this off a home server share either while doing so quick testing. But that also affects my backup plans as it’s now one big file. Even though the bundle looks like one big file my file syncing and backup software sees the files inside it and can deal with them individually.

HP has announced that my HP MediaSmart Server will be getting an update involving PacketVideo technology which should add “advanced graphics such as thumbnails of photos, in-menu browsing and album art” and improve streaming to other digital devices. 64-bit Vista support will also be added along with McAfee anti-virus software (for the server side). McAfee will only be free for seven months. I’m not sure I want McAfee running on any of my boxes. My experience with them (years ago) is that they took over the machine almost as bad as Symantec and I swore off both them and Symantec.

Jungle Disk has a beta version of their backup software for Windows Home Server available for free. Jungle Disk doesn’t have all the features of their current Windows/OSX/Linux software but they seem to have plans to add the features that make sense (like block level backups). The software is free during the beta but requires an Amazon S3 account. Their regular software is a reasonable $20 for lifetime upgrades so I wouldn’t expect the WHS version to be more than that. I’ve been running the beta with just minor and already reported issues.

News.com has a short article about how Windows Home Server remains a tough sell. It’s the last two lines that caught my attention:

One area that Microsoft may look at to boost the popularity of the Home Server is having the software work better in households that have both Macs and Windows PCs.

“That’s something we are taking a close look at,” VanRoekel said, though he added that Microsoft has “nothing to announce.”

That can only be good for me.

Reviews

Transmit

Transmit by Panic Inc. is an FTP client for the Mac and it’s become a favorite of mine. I started with Fetch because it did what I wanted at the time but I eventually added Transmit and it’s what I now use exclusively. I use it every day if scheduled tasks are taken into account.

Shawn Blanc has written a thorough review of Transmit. Like Shawn, favorites are one of my favorite features (pun intended) since they’re more than just links. I like his idea to add a notes feature to favorites. He also mentions my biggest pet peeve about Transmit:

The basic interface of Transmit is perfectly blunt. You’ve got “Your Stuff” on the left and “Their Stuff” on the right.

Your Stuff is what’s on your computer, and Their Stuff is what’s on the server. I like the idea, but I do think it could be named better. Just because a file is on another server doesn’t mean it’s “theirs”. I would prefer to see these named as “Here” and “There”, or “Local” and “Over Yonder”.

Every time I see the screen I mutter “it’s all my stuff”. It’s probably embarrassing to admit, but I had a hard time getting my head around that, I would always have to think twice or even three times when I did a synchronize that would delete files. At least now I’ve used it enough the automatically think local and remote.

The next review is also by Shawn and both are part of his series of reviews titled “Some of the Greatest Software Available for your Mac“, which is still a work in progress. NetNewsWire (a desktop RSS reader) is already reviewed and 5 more apps along with one piece of hardware are also on the list. The reviews are so good I can’t fault him that Mint isn’t Mac software (although there are OS X widgets available) and his ninth item isn’t even software.

Mint

Mint is web site stats software. Like the Transmit review, Shawn’s review of Mint is extremely thorough, starting with some history. If you’re looking for a web site stats package check out Mint and Shawn’s review of it. Mint is hosted in your domain and requires MySQL and PHP. There’s community support (and in some cases plug-ins) for WordPress, Moveable type and others. In my case I was able to implement Mint with a plug-in so I didn’t have to even edit any templates.

News and Links

WPCandy.com published a new advanced reference sheet for WordPress to add to their previous WordPress help sheet.

Firefox has a bug that can allow a malicious hacker to spoof a validation dialog. The link is more appropriate to the Wednesday security links but Firefox will probably be updated by then.

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