2009-8
29

When your MINI’s window gets stuck…

Category: MINI | 5 Comments

03_MINI_Cooper_SThe driver’s side window on my MINI Cooper has always been a bit temperamental.  Most of the time it works fine, but every so often it takes a vacation and will quit working.

The last time it happened, the car was going in for service anyway (to fix a cracked coolant overflow) so I had them check it.  They wanted $400 to put a new motor in it.  Hrumph.  I said I’d live with it.  Curiously, when I got the car back, it worked fine.  They claimed it was because they disassembled and reassembled the door to check it out.

It worked fine for about six months after that until about a month ago, when once again it took some time off.  I’ve been living with it.

A couple of days ago, I ran into a friend who has a similar ‘03 MINI Cooper and we were comparing notes.  He’s got 126,000 on his MINI, I’ve got 95,000.  Both cars still drive like they’re new.  He just got new brakes (or something similarly expensive), I just got a new A/C Compressor.

Then Donna mentioned that my window has been on the fritz, and Pete blew my mind:

“Oh, that’s easy.  Hold the window switch down and hit the door hard about halfway between the door handle and the speaker.  Then let go of the switch and try it.  Should work fine.  I’ve been doing that for three years.”

Yeah, right.  I said I’d try beating up my car when I got home.

Doggone if it didn’t work!  It was like getting a new car!  I don’t know why I never thought of percussive maintenance before.

Thanks, Pete.

I offer this story here so that if anybody else has a MINI Cooper with windows that periodically stop working, perhaps it will be helpful to them as well…

2009-8
13

Chrome for Mac OS X is here!

Category: Main Page | No Comments

Google Chrome for Mac OS XThe boys (and girls) at Google have finally released a developer version of Chrome for Mac OS X!

They promise that it’ll be buggy and lack features and all of that good stuff, but I’ve downloaded and I’m running it, and I love it.  Ahh…Chrome!

Got a Mac?  Get you some Chrome

2009-7
24

More Mac observations

Category: Mac | No Comments

Today I abandoned the Mac Mail application that comes with OS X in favor of Thunderbird.

In a way, I hated to do it.  Mac Mail is very nicely put together, with an elegant, simple interface and everything right where it ought to be.  But in my experience the IMAP support was flakey — particularly saving sent messages to a folder on the server.  In the entire time I used Mac Mail (about a week), it only managed to save ONE sent message to the server.  Tinkering with every possible setting never seemed to resolve the problem, and I tried every suggestion from half a dozen “solutions” that I found online.

So I downloaded Thunderbird this evening, and right off the bat it worked flawlessly.  Took about half an hour to configure all the bits and pieces the way I like ‘em and set up a custom signature.  Now everything works great and, sad so say, I have banished Mac Mail from the Dock and given its space to Thunderbird.

By the way, Coda is one wicked cool Web Development tool.  Highly recommended.

2009-7
15

Houston, Tranquility Base here. The MacBook Pro has landed.

Category: Mac | No Comments

The proof of the pudding, they say, is in the eating.  And so far, I’m liking what I’m eating.

62288main_aldrin_ladderMy shiny new (refurbished) MacBook Pro arrived this morning via FedEx ground.  The timing stunk — I was up to my ears in alligators due to some network issues at the data center (turned out to be a DDoS targeting another client in the facility, but it was bringing our stuff to its knees).  Phone was ringing off the hook, and I was engaged in some serious geekified troubleshooting to determine if we had a problem.  (“Houston, we have a problem” is a whole different post!)

Anyway, I’ve spent the better part of this afternoon moving in and getting comfortable.  It is not nearly so jarring as I expected it would be.  Nor am I sure why I thought it would be jarring, except that in the past any time I touched someone else’s Mac I was terrified that I’d mess something up.  I guess that since this one is mine, I don’t have to worry about putting something where it’s not supposed to be.

Mail was easy enough to configure, and anything that runs in a browser works just like it does on my PC.  I’ve tried to use the Mac for all of my routine tasks this afternoon.  I figure that’s the quickest way to find those things that I need for day-to-day work: Just start working, and I’ll bump into them along the way.

I’ve installed OpenOffice 3.0, Microsoft’s very nice Remote Desktop Client (which allows me to easily connect to my Windows servers to manage them remotely), Cyberduck (for FTP), and VirtualBox.  My Linux background made it easy-peasy to configure keys in SSH so that I can remote into my Linux boxes; since the Mac runs UNIX underneath, it’s quite happy talking to Linux boxes.  I’ve connected to our file server and updated files with no problems.

As for the hardware itself, all I can say is that i’s stunning, as expected.  The fit and finish is truly amazing, and the little details are wonderful.  For example, close the lid of the laptop and you feel a satisfying pull as magnets lock it in place.  There’s no click-whump of a mechanical latch engaging as the lid closes.  It’s a minor difference, but tremendously satisfying.  The display is fabulous — uniformly bright and crisp.  The trackpad is terrific (although I generally dislike track pads and will likely use a Bluetooth mouse with this one most of the time); gestures are wonderfully intuitive and come naturally — like scrolling through a web pages by dragging two fingers down the trackpad.

All in all, I’m quite happy with what I’ve got here.  Still need to set up a virtual Windows machine for a few things (SQL Server Management Studio, Visual Studio, and Expression Web Developer come to mind).  I’m interested to see how well Windows runs on this thing virtually.

2009-7
13

Switching Sides

Category: Mac | No Comments

Late last week, I did the unthinkable.  I ordered a new laptop…from Apple.

MacBook Pro 15I’ve been watching the MacBook Pro line closely lately, especially since Apple introduced the new unibody design, and I’ve been really impressed with what I’ve seen.  In addition, OS X seems to be maturing to the point that nearly anything you can do on a Windows machine is do-able on a Mac.  Worst case, you can install Parallels Desktop for Mac or VirtualBox and run a virtual Windows machine for those things that are Windows-specific.

The tipping point for me came with fast enough dual-core processors and sufficient memory to make running a virtual Windows box a reasonable proposition.  Until about a year ago, it simply didn’t make sense.

Anyway, the stars aligned, and I finally decided to give the Mac a shot.

The new machine is a 15″ MacBook Pro, 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM, 320GB SATA HDD, with dual video cards and 512MB of dedicated video ram for the discrete video processor.  That’s a heck of a lot of hardware.

I actually went with a refurb rather than new – saving about $400 in the process.  My experience with refurbs has been excellent from Dell.  Let’s hope Apple continues the trend.

So now my big challenge is to start the process of identifying Mac replacements for common software I use.  I’ll try to keep you up to date on how the switch works out, and my impressions as I wade into this new world.  Wish me luck.

2009-7
3

More info on Authorize.net

Category: Geek Stuff | No Comments

Turns out the problem was indeed a data center fire (which is a truly frightening prospect).  As best I can tell, a transformer shorted out and started a small fire.  Sprinklers kicked in and put out the fire but also shorted out generators and caused much more serious problems.  Ultimately, all power to the building had to be shut down, which caused issues on a huge scale. Loss estimates run into the tens of millions of dollars when you figure in lost sales online, etc.

Fisher Plaza in Seattle, site of the data center fire

Fisher Plaza in Seattle, site of the data center fire

More info here, here and here.

2009-7
3

Authorize.net Is Down…that’s bad news

Category: Geek Stuff | No Comments

Looks like Authorize.net is down hard.  That’s a huge problem for online retailers, thousands of whom rely on Authorize.net to process credit cards.

See Authorize.net Goes Down, E-Commerce Vendors Left Hanging for a little more info.

2009-7
3

Can we really tweet new posts?

Category: Main Page | No Comments

I just installed a plugin that promises to tweet any new posts to my blog.  This post is a test to see if it really works.

Results: Yes, yes it does work.  COOL!

Better still, the tweet also updates my Facebook status.  Talk about digital convergence!  Wonder if I can also set it to blog anything I tweet?  (Wonder if I can create a black hole by making every digital tool I have forward everything to every other tool simultaneously…hmm.  Maybe I need to think about this a bit)

2009-7
3

Photos have gone missing, too

Category: Photos | No Comments

It would appear that any photos that were uploaded to a BlogWare photo album have not come across with the rest of the data that I migrated.  Not sure if it’s worth tracking those down…it probably accounts for fewer than 30 posts. 

2009-7
2

Moving to WordPress

Category: Geek Stuff | No Comments

I’m moving the blog to WordPress, so bear with me for a while as things settle.

WordPress Logo

It’s a little sad to move off of Blogware (which has served me well for many years).  I played some small role in the birth of Blogware as one of the earliest beta testers.  Unfortunately, Tucows has essentially abandoned Blogware — they’re still keeping everything up and running, but no new development is underway — and WordPress has just continued to get better and better.

So today I took the plunge and exported my content from Blogware.  It wasn’t too difficult to import it to WP, and I’m up and running.

There will be bumps in the road.  For one thing, the URL’s of all my posts will change, so I’ll have to wait while Google catches up to the change.  But frankly, the blog is here mainly for me (with the exception of a couple of posts that get a lot of traffic from Google and seem to be helpful to a lot of people), so I’m not too concerned about it.  The handful of popular posts will be OK; I’ll install traps to redirect any incoming traffic to the new URL.

The other unfortunate thing is that the identities of those who posted comments in the past appear to be lost, presumably because Blogware and WordPress use completely different systems to identify users.  Not much I can do about that other than to apologize to anyone who’s upset that their comment is now anonymous.  Post some new ones and we’ll be fine.

If you’re a WP afficionado, post a comment with your favorite cool feature so that I don’t miss out on anything.  Thanks!