Benz Blog

Just tried 3 separate times to download a 186mb file from BEA’s web site. Each time it stopped short of the total – no warning – no error. FireFox in Windows worked just fine. Ridiculous.

KVMs: just say no. I’ve already stated how unhappy I was with the IOGear KVM switch (which only supported VGA), but I’m equally unhappy with the new one I bought: the Linkskey LDV-202AUSK. The DVI connection resulted in a much brighter picture, but there were so many “display artifacts” that it’s just unusable. By “display artifacts”, I mean streaks of blue or green dots that appear in various places. It’s most noticeable on the desktop and when viewing photos. So both products are going back and I’ve got the monitor hooked directly to the Mac now. I can use either Remote Desktop to access the Dell, or use VNC. (Note: rebooting the Dell via Remote Desktop results in weird stuff happening on startup. For example, the Cisco VPN service fails to start properly. Rebooting via VNC works just fine, although using the Dell with VNC produces a weird high pitched frequency which I think is coming from the Dell but I’m not sure. It gets really annoying after a few hours).

As expected, I modified the key bindings as stated here to enable the home/end keys to work as they do on Windows. Too bad this doesn’t seem to work everywhere (like in the text box I’m typing in right now in Firefox), but it works in every text editor I’ve tried so I’m content. IMHO, the key commands for cursor movement make much more sense on Windows than they do on the Mac. (This doesn’t apply to window management, though: Command+W and Command+M is much better than CTRL+F4 or ALT+F4 and ALT+SPACE, N, respectively).

Also as expected, I’m back to the 2-button mouse with a scroll wheel. Rumor has it that Apple is working on a 2-button mouse of their own. Good. Although I honestly could have done without the 2 buttons, I really missed the scroll wheel.

I have a Canon i860 printer and a Canon LiDE 50 scanner. The printer was originally hooked up to my Dell, but when I tried to print to it from the Mac, nothing would happen. No error messages on either machine. Nothing. So I decided to hook it up to the Mac. Installing it was easy and now I can print just fine from the Mac, but after turning on Printer Sharing, I can connect to it from my PC but I get the exact same problem when trying to print to it.

The scanner is another story. First let me comment on how bad the software is for this thing on the Windows side. The install process involved several different types of installers, each with their own quirks, and then when you finally get all the crap installed, there is no facility for viewing freshly scanned images. Instead, you get an error that the external application is not “linked” properly (or something to that effect). Then I try to link it to ACDSee’s viewer but it causes the viewer to crash on startup.

Now on the Mac side, the problems continue. I first try to download the latest driver thinking that would make more sense than trying to install from the CD I had, which was already a few months old. Running the install, however, results in 3 different nasty looking error messages complaining about permissions or something, and then I get a window that says: “Driver Installation was Successful”. Yeah right. Nice coding, idiots!

So I proceed to try and install the software from the CD that came with the scanner. First, I was amazed at how stupid things are organized on the disk. You would think there would be a single setup program, or at least some clue as to what to click on without having to read anything. Nada. This is what it looks like:

Edit: sorry – image no longer available

I go on to figure out that the program I want to install first is the CanoScan Toolbox, so I go ahead and double click that program and wham: Error creating file. 1008:5,-5000 Access denied error. I fire up the Disk Utility program and repair the file permissions on the disk. Turns out there were pretty screwed up! (HOW they got this way I have no idea). This allows the setup program to get a bit further, but I quickly get the same error again. So now I’ve sent an e-mail to Canon. This should prove to be a barrel of laughs.

I KNOW there are a lot of people who hate that the Home and End keys do not take you to the beginning or end of the line while editing text on the Mac, but face it – the standard way to do this is Command+Left or Right arrow. There IS a way to enable the Home/End keys to work as they do on Windows which I mentioned previously.

Now I haven’t been a Mac user for more than week, but Command+arrow works in Apple Mail, Text Editor, and even in this browser edit box, so that seems pretty “standard” to me. Why then, should Microsoft make this key combination work differently in Entourage, while enabling Home/End to work as they do in Windows? Isn’t it more important for standards to be followed across all applications rather than forcing your own way on people? It’s precisely this kind of arrogance that I find pervasive in various MS products, and it’s one of the many reasons that prompted me to consider the Mac as an alternate platform. It’s a shame that this attitude seems to have carried over to their Mac software.

Then again, maybe I’m just over-reacting and this is just a minor bug. Could be, but there are too many of these “minor bugs” that never seem to get get fixed.

Ok so it’s really not an adventure, but I’ve got to find a way to persuade you to read about my keyboard problems somehow, don’t I?

I finally got fed up with the keyboard double character problem and called Apple. I didn’t have to wait for more than a few minutes to speak to a friendly lady who spoke perfect English with no discernable accent. She painfully walked me through what I strongly felt was a useless but understandably necessary process, ultimately resulting in a new keyboard being shipped out to me which arrived the next day.

To my surprise, the new keyboard is not the same – in the photo below, the one Apple sent as a replacement is the one on the bottom:

Edit: sorry – image no longer available

It turns out that this is the Apple Pro keyboard, which if I’m not mistaken is not manufactured any longer. To my eyes (but not my wife’s), it doesn’t look as sharp as the new keyboard, but it works and it solved the double character problem, so I really can’t complain. (It’s also missing the F16 key – big deal). The Matias Tactile Pro keyboard was modeled after this one, btw.

Look at how the labels overlap the box lines in this dialog from Entourage. Very sloppy work.

I know I bitched earlier about the non-intuitiveness of dragging apps to the Applications folder, but seriously, once you’ve got the Applications folder on your doc (or at least know how to get to it quickly), the process of installing and uninstalling applications on OS X is a breath of fresh air. I actually don’t mind downloading and trying out all sorts of different programs! I’m not afraid of clobbering DLLs, corrupting my system registry, or leaving crap on my hard drive that I no longer need if I uninstall something I don’t like. When I wasn’t happy with iView Media, I dropped it in the trash, downloaded iView Media Pro, tried it out, and when I decided to stick with iPhoto, I dropped it in the trash too! Great stuff.

Obviously I was pretty upset when I created my last post. To make matters worse, after I got Elements installed, I discovered that the Mac version does not include a photo organization tool (i.e., Album), like the Windows version does! Good thing that uninstalling apps is such a breeze.

There is an excellent series of articles here that compare iPhoto with iView, and I’ve recently downloaded both the “regular” and the “Pro” version if iView to compare them myself. To summarize as briefly as possible, iPhoto is a memory hog and can get really slow at times, but it came with my computer (so it’s essentially free), and it seems to get the job done. I’m a bit concerned about performance as my 5,000+ library continues to grow, but I think I’ll stick with it for now rather than jump to iView.

If you’re going to try iView, don’t even bother with the non “Pro” version because you can’t even create a hierarchical catalog structure with it! iView is a great program, but I have 2 major problems with it:

1. It’s $200!
2. For $200, there is no way to automatically resize a photo for e-mailing! You’d have to get a plugin for an additional $10.

So while iPhoto has its shortcomings, I’m going to try and stick with it. I’m also looking forward to trying out Gallery, and especially the iPhotoToGallery plugin.

I’m typing this on my Dell – WHY?? – because while trying to install a trial version of Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0, I’m staring at the lovely rotating ball of colors. I can’t Force Quit anything, and I’m considering hitting the power switch. This is bullshit and totally unacceptable – a system hang while installing ADOBE software on a MAC?? I can’t believe this.

On Windows, I’ve been a user of Trillian Pro for probably about 2 years. The latest version, 3.0, is fantastic, but unfortunately there is no version for OS X.

I first tried Adium, which is cute but just didn’t cut it for me. The menu extra icon was totally useless in that it didn’t let you change your status – only connect/disconnect from the various services. Also, I did not like that I could not view my contacts that were not online (on ICQ and I think Yahoo, you can send IMs to these people and they’ll get them when they connect).

I next tried Proteus. I found this to be closer to Trillian that Adium was, but I could not find a way to display the offline contacts in a separate group, so they were constantly in the way. Also, the bubble chat window was very annoying, altough I think this could be changed.

So now I’m using Fire, which is clearly the best of the bunch so far, even though it crashed the first time I started it.

None of these hold a candle to Trillian though.