Archive for the 'IT' category
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
I ended up with thousands of these ghost messages after moving from Eudora to Apple Mail with the help of Andreas Amann's brilliant Eudora Mailbox Cleaner. I didn't worry too much about it, as the messages were there in duplicate.
But after a while I got tired of seeing double messages when searching the old archives. I couldn't find any way to scare away these ghosts. Rebuilding the mailboxes didn't help. Nor did running duplicate message scanners.
Even the fantastic vacuum command line cleanup routine wouldn't get rid of the ghost messages with their "Show in Mailbox" in the top right corner. But vacuum did get speed up Apple Mail (highly recommended).
sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index vacuum;
But finally I found the solution on a long dead Omni mailing list archive.
Here's how to stop the haunting. The issue is with the Envelope index. It needs to be deleted. Steps:
- Quit Apple Mail
- Open up ~/Library/Mail
- Delete Envelope Index
- Restart Apple Mail
- Sit back and wait as the full index is rebuilt
Don't do this if you are in a hurry. For my 270,000 messages, it takes about twenty minutes to index them all (pretty spiffy coding Apple Mail Team, getting through that many messages that quickly).
But when it's done, your messages will all still be in place, but your index will be a whole lot faster. I don't know why vacuum only partially cleans and why Apple Mail doesn't have an effective built-in cleaning mechanism. But I'm happy that all systems are go again. Now that you know this trick to, you won't have to care either.
As a footnote, I should say that I was initially a reluctant switcher from the poor departed Eudora (the most robust and configurable email client ever). But Apple Mail handles my huge database of messages astonishingly well and looks quite a bit better doing it.
By Alec
IT |
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
Yes, everything awful you've heard about these adapters is true. They don't really work right, under Mac OS X. The strange thing is that those who've turned their Mac Minis into either Windows XP or Linux rigs do not have trouble with the adapter. So it's not really hardware related. A bit embarassing that the Apple engineers can't get their own gear working. Another senior engineer transferred to the iPhone video driver department?
Apple Mini DisplayPort Dual Link DVI Adapter MB571Z
Here's what recent reviews on Apple's own store say (just two of two hundred):
Flicker two or three times a day – GM, Dec. 9
I am a totally MAC fan. I love their stuff. It is always quality. This thing is awful. I depend on my monitor as I do a lot of photo work. I had an older macbook pro which had the DVI output. Ok, so I have buy a 100 adapter now, I am sort of ok with that. Then I find it takes up one of my USB ports as well. A little less happy, but give me a product that works. Now this… Two or three times a day I need to cycle this thing. Very poor. I really hope they fix this.
bad, bad, bad – VC, Dec. 9
This thing is junk. Sadly I have to re boot or put my computer to sleep at least three or four times a day because it goes out and comes back with the dreaded TV Snow we all hated as kids when the cable went out. Apple should have gotten this right by now. As a consumer and big spender on apple product I'm disappointed again. Windows 7 anyone? (Joke) Is Apple listening?
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
IT |
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
Until recently, Apple had no good inexpensive computer in its lineup. There was the Mac Mini but the graphics were crappy built-in on-board Intel adapters. As an ex Macbook owner, I knew how weak that chip is.
On the other hand, the Mac Mini with the 9400GF is a real computer. A Core2Duo processor at 2 GHz can handle anything except gaming and high end video editing.
I hope to hell my staff are not gaming and I know we aren't doing high end video editing these days. If we decide to start, I'll get a more powerful computer.
I know that when we do go to video editing, there are no audio and video sync issues on Macs (sync issues are the historic bugaboo of video editing on Windows computers).
We've just bought a total of six Mac Minis and Macbooks to switch Foliovision over to being primarily an Apple company. Here's why.
How Apple Won Our Mini Enterprise Contract
- What is great about the Mini is that it is small and silent and powerful. We spend a huge amount of time finding and configuring custom power supplies and fans to make our Windows computers silent. Minis are silent out of the box (the power supply is on the floor). Silence is goal number one for our computers. That Macs used to be loud (even the G5 towers, I had one) was one good reason they didn’t have our business earlier.
- We can move the OS around from computer to computer without going through a complicated and painful . I.e. we will build a standard setup for our Minis with all the software and extras onboard that we want and just clone it from one machine to another.
- All hardware is compatible (limited choice but what exists works)
- I know all the software so whatever software anyone needs I can tell them off the top of my head which one to install
- We are all licensed software. Which means we are paying for our work tools anyway. As we are paying for our tools, we’d like nice ones. We’ve tried Linux but it is too widely configurable (i.e. too much choices so you end up spending time fiddling) and suffers from the same issues as Windows (driver and hardware compatibility issues).
- Maintenance is minimal and I don’t have to dedicate a staff member to working just on the computers (adding 5 more Windows boxes means that the IT guy would be almost unavailable for anything except computer maintenance).
- I want my programmers to write simpler, more attractive software which means they shouldn’t be on Windows or Linux as Windows is ugly and complicated and Linux is just too complicated. We aren’t writing for other programmers but for real estate agents and best selling authors. Simple and attractive are Steve Job’s watchwords and ours too.
How Apple Almost Lost Our Business
- Minis are very difficult to get into. We almost didn’t buy them at all as it is so difficult to change RAM and hard drives. I figured we are buying enough of them that we will get good at opening up the little devils.
- The warranty period is inadequate. All computer makers in Europe are offering two years. Apple is trying to offer one, along with a paid upgrade to three years. Yes for a laptop, no for a desktop. By the time you buy the extended Apple-Care on a desktop, it’s no longer a cost effective solution.
- There is no reasonable step up. iMacs are lovely computers but it’s next to impossible to change the hard drive. Guess what? We just won’t buy a computer in which we can’t change the hard drive ourselves. Crashed hard drives are the number one hardware issue and we expect to be able to deal with it without lugging a heavy iMac around town. Moreover the top of the line new quad iMac was issued without an external SATA port. For no good reason Apple has limited us to FireWire 800. Even FW 800 raid with 80 MB/sec throughput is not fast enough for HD video and just adequate for heavy duty photo processing.
- Custom video ports. We have to buy five mini-DVI adapters and five miniDisplay adapters for our dual head setups. Fortunately there are third party solutions now which come in at €8 to €15 per adapter instead of Apples €25 to €29. Tell me again why Apple are not using DVI and displayport instead?
Conclusion
The computers are arriving this week. We'll be setting them up over the holidays. I'll be back with some tips on how to set up Macs for enterprise use straight out of the box.
Microsoft had our business until they lost it with complicated licensing.
By Alec
IT |
Sunday, December 13th, 2009
We are moving half the office to Mac computers this month.
Originally I was in the market for a couple of quads with Microsoft Windows. But to be able to buy those two computers, I had to figure out all the troublesome licensing of Microsoft. Originally we just wanted to say with XP, as that's what we know and like. On the way, here's what I discovered about Microsoft Licensing:
- licenses are extremely confusing (8 license levels? come on)
- licenses are not portable
- licenses are restricted to a single language
- licenses have to be activated
- hardware changes require reactivation
- you need antivirus software for every Microsoft computer (we've actually bought it for all ours from Avast)
We were relatively happy Microsoft Windows XP users with five XP licenses and four Windows 2000 licenses. We planned to stay that way, but it's difficult and expensive to buy XP licenses these days and they don't point forward.
Microsoft does offer Windows Professional 7 licenses with the option for downgrade.
When we called Microsoft's telephone numbers for volume licenses, they were very coy about telling us what we could expect to pay. I'm sorry I don't like hidden prices, which can only be revealed after review of your contract. If you have to hide your prices, there's a scam in there somewhere. Moeover, we were also told that volume licenses would not allow us to do XP downgrades.
Apparently with Windows XP, a license is good regardless of what language you choose to install in the end. In Windows 7, unless you choose ultimate version, you have to keep the computer in the language for which you bought the license.
Which brings up the issue of versions. There are over 8 license versions. Guys, make it a lot easier, please. I.e. Ultimate shouldn't exists. Starter shouldn't exist either. Home and professional cover the two usage scenarios. If I buy a license, I should have the right to move it to another computer if I take it off the first computer.
In contrast, with Macs you just install the software. Of course you need the computer, but once you have that you can just copy a working OS from one computer to another.
We spent ten man hours just clarifying what Windows 7 licenses were available and which would work for us.* That's a good start on explaining why we just don't want anything more to do with Microsoft.
Go back to selling software, guys in Redmond. Complicated licensing to confuse and shaft customers is no way to do business. You've just lost ours.
* Once you are done with the licenses, you still have to configure and troubleshoot your own custom computers, downloading and debugging drives. There are hours to be spent here as well. Enough.
By Alec
IT |
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
We are working on some major upgrades to our Foliopress WYSIWYG this month. Our wonderful client Richard Nikoley kicks the pants out of his Macbook Pro and he does the same thing to Foliopress WYSIWYG. He's given us a laundry list of small issues to fix, most of which have to do with minor misbehaviour in the Safari browser.
Given that Safari is webkit and Google Chrome is based on Safari, getting webkit browsers right is a priority for us.
We've fixed the text issues (no need to click the source button and back for proper display) but still have to do our SEO Images upgrade to take us from KFM 1.2.1 to 1.4.3 which will give us full Safari support for image upload and insertion.
While we were at it, Martin and I had a discussion about whether to be using code or pre tags for code extracts.
I advocated both, wrapping slapping an unescaped code tag inside the pre tags. It turns out that wreaks havoc in Foliopress WYSIWYG, stripping the line breaks. So our recommendation for Foliopress WYSIWYG users is just use escaped code inside pre tags.
While I was tracking this down though, I decided to chase down the W3 recommendations for the use of code and pre in the HTML 4.01 specification.
Imagine my surprise to find out that poetry their code example:
The following example shows a preformatted verse from Shelly's poem To a Skylark:
<PRE>
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
</PRE>
Here is how this is typically rendered:
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest
I hadn't read Shelley for years, since I wrote a couple of long papers on wife Mary's Frankenstein. It was a joy to find something so exquisite and uplifting in an otherwise long and dry technical document.
Unknown anonymous specification writer, thank you for bringing this fragment of poetry into this coder's day.
Code is poetry and as the deconstructionists would say poetry is code.
But what does the W3 specification reveal about the code and pre mystery?
It turns out that code is a phrase element and pre is a visual presentation element.
In the end, code is a bit of redundant information unless you are searching a document for code fragments (which honestly could be just as easily done and more certainly with some nice rules looking for certain patterns). Your search could just as easily use pre to bring up most of the fragments for which you are looking.
Visually both code and pre by default render in a fixed-width font, with code tending to get a typewriter style typeface like courrier and pre tending to get a sansserif fixed width font like Monaco. I think I prefer seeing my code in courrier but there is nothing preventing me from adding a typeface for pre to my stylesheet.
For the sake of simplicity, our recommendation is to just use pre for your larger code blocks. We won't be doing further debugging of the double nested pre and code tags as just getting pre not to add unnecessary angled brackets was a formidable task. One of the downsides of WYSIWYG editors is limited capability in handling code samples in text.
Unlike basic written text, in code formatting even a single changed space can render the code useless or even destructive.
When writing a major article about programming, we'd recommend turning WYSIWYG off completely which is also a per post option with Foliopress WYSIWYG. There's nothing more depressing than seeing a carefully built article filled with elaborate code examples crumple and scatter into visual dust. Code samples are tough to rebuild.
For basic use on html or CSS code samples though, pre alone with escaped brackets will take you or us as far as we need to go.
Is there a use for the code tag then?
We do recommend using the code tag for single code elements as in this article.
By Alec
IT, WordPress |
Sunday, August 9th, 2009
A question which constantly comes up on forums and recently on TidBits talk is how to choose a web hosting company.
The rules are surprisingly simple.
Number one: avoid the bottom tier budget webhosts: they sell on unlimited bandwidth and disk storage. It's simply impossible to fulfill those unlimited promises with quality service
This would include popular hosts like
- BlueHost
- Dreamhost (enter promo code FREEIPFORLIFE to get a dedicated IP for life: $4/month value)
- Hostgator
The above names are actually the best of a bad lot and at least try to serve some customers sometimes unlike the real fly-by-nighters. If you insist on cutting your hosting budget to the bone, your chances of not losing your website or your business go up if you use one of the three above.
How do the unlimited guys try to make it work?
- they limit CPU usage ("sure you have unlimited bandwidth but your website is using up CPU minutes serving")
- they slow down your site (if your site is serving slowly, many users will abandon it - not what you want to do with your hard-earned, valuable traffic)
- they slow down larger downloads (large images, video: who wants to sit around and wait for video to come down at 20 KB to 80 K/sec)
As a web design and marketing company we have a lot of experience both on hosts of our own and the hosts chosen by our clients (I've had first hand experience with all of the hosts I mention, including an active account on one of them) run our own hosting for our clients and chose CartikaHosting.com as our hosting partner.
It's not the cheapest but server loads are always under control, downtime is non-existent and the IP's are clean (no porn, no spammers).
For business hosting the following five issues are the big issues:
- speed
- reliability
- availability of tech support
- competency of tech support
- clean IP's for search engines
You want your site serving fast.
You don't want downtime.
You want to be able to reach tech support when you need them by both ticket and telephone (or online chat).
You want the right answer fast, not the wrong answer which will send you on a weeklong goose chase.
You do want to rank well for Google. Which means clean IP's.
By choosing Cartika Hosting as our partners for Foliopress hosting, our own clients get the benefits of CartikaHosting.com but with our additional expertise in Wordpress.
By Alec
IT |
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
Quotes (form systems) that have multiple forms can be a nightmare for a PHP programmer. You have to deal with data carry-over in addition to secure data storage. And these are only programming troubles, not counting quote lightness (in terms of easy and understandable content and questions) and design that makes it perfect.
Yes, I know that nothing is perfect, but in Foliovision we try to make it like that. Making the web work for you and all that.
To ensure the carry-over of data, you have two choices: 1. to use some hidden inputs in forms (therefore using post data to maintain client recognition), or 2. introduce sessions (using cookies). The first solution may be preferred, but in big CMS like Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress may be almost impossible to do.
In Foliovision we use Wordpress and to specifically to manage forms we use John Godley's Filled-In (some Filled-In trivia: Filled-In was originally coded for Foliovision clients and the betas were very bloody - since then Filled-In has become a fantastic tool). Since Filled-in stores the data as one request maintaining hidden inputs between form pages is not possible.
The only solution for us was to use PHP session. We created some useful extensions for Filled-In to make such a quote systems possible. But then we ran into a problem with quote that started on HTTP and continued to HTTPS. When changing from one protocol to another, PHP session is not carried over.
There are two solutions on how to fix this. You can redirect to a link that will contain session ID as GET parameter and then start session with that ID on HTTPS (terribly insecure), or you make the whole quote use HTTPS. Of course second solution is preferred, since it's a lot more secure way to run your site.
If you'll work with sessions and experience similar problem remember that sessions are not carried-over when switching protocols, or from www.domain.com to domain.com. You need to pay a lot of attention to detail.
By Peter
IT, WordPress |
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
A lot of logos on the web look like they were run over by a truck. Blurry, jagged, hideous. Here's how to make your resized logos gorgeous and sharp.
The first point is to always save your graphics and logos as either a GIF or a PNG. Saving solid colour graphics and logos as a jpeg is a catastrophe and inevitably results in nasty digital noise. This sound elementary but I have had three trained graphic designers do this wrong, including a graduate of the Art Institute of California. The only one who knew the right answer (in what format to save a text logo) was our lead programmer, Peter.
For an example, one doesn't have to go further than the website of Royal Bank of Canada.
RBC logo: jpeg text buzz in action
Even billions of dollars won't save you from jpeg text buzz on your logos. Here are the jpeg jaggies in closeup:
rbc logo jpeg text buzz @ 400%
Nasty. Click the logo to see the full image at 400%. Not what you went to design academy to create.
Now that we have the correct save format out of the way (preferably 24-bit PNG - now compatible with all modern web browsers, or if the logo is simple 8-bit GIF with 256 colours can save some space), we can move on to how to handle small size text correctly.
There is one very important rule in icon design which says:
Design your icon for each size separately.
This is because, if you have for example 128 x 128 px icon, after resizing it to 16 x 16 px, you will see nothing or It will not looks how it should. The best solution is design It also for 16 x 16 pixels.
Difference between resizing and designing to small size.
Example how is it doing in Apple (Home folder icon in Mac OS 10.5)
But in some cases is designing smaller version is just too time consuming. During the course of a day a graphic designer needs to resize a logotype or graphic to a smaller size many times. We can't hand draw every one. But if you need the logotype in very small dimensions and you want to maintain quality, it's not easy.
A standard resizing can give your logo or text jagged edges even if you have original vector file. If your find the text blurry or illegible after downsizing, you can start by using the different anti-aliasing techniques in Photoshop testing for the best result. The options are:
None | Sharp | Crisp | Strong | Smooth
Different Anti-aliasing options in Photoshop
(From top: None, Sharp, Crisp, Strong, Smooth).
400% zoomed on the right.
Result with our method. 400% zoomed on the right.
We usually have the best results with Strong. The result will be a bit blurry but usually attractive. But with very small text, photoshop will not get very good resullt. So we need another solution…
This is result after standard resizing.
Edges are too jagged.
The image you want to resize should be in vectors (That means Shape Layers and Text Layers in Photoshop). The idea is to make very big image, and downrez it to 10% size and let Photoshop solve our problem.
- Blow up your vector image to 10 x bigger image size than the size you want in resullt (Photoshop: Image > Image Size… ).
- Open File > Save for Web & Devices…
- Change image size to the values you want (remember, your image is now 10 times bigger, so your new values should be 10% of Size you have before opening Save for Web & Devices…) and set quality of resizing to Bicubic Sharper.
- Save your file.
Now in the small image you can see clean edges of our logotype.
Example: you have 500px wide image and want 150px width. Then Resize it from 500 px to 1500px and export it via Save for Web & Devices… with 150 pixels on width.
Compare the diferences with standard resize and our method:
Normal poor result on left with standard resize.
Result of our method on right.
Some differences can be seen after zooming both images. Especially on letters f and o.
Example 1: Standard resize on left. Our method on right. 400% view.
Another zoomed example. There are not a lot of difference for first look, but on the letter m or a you can see that text on left is too strong and jagged.
Example 2: Standard resize on left. Our method on right. 400% view.
Note: You can do this also with non-vector images, but then you will need to have a four to ten times larger file than your destination size as your starting point.
For best results you should always use round numbers, i.e 10%, 20%. 25%, 50% of Original size for best results.
Why?
With a round number, Photoshop divides the pixels by a multiple (2 or 4 or 5 or 10) which means Photoshop doesn't have to interpolate nearly as much.
If you start form a large enough original, an exact multiple becomes less important as Photoshop has lots of pixels to choose from when interpolating and the rounding will not be as noticeable.
By Alec
IT |
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
Ever have the experience that you send someone the wrong message in Skype or worse yet, you send the right message but to the wrong person?
It happened to me today when I wanted to send one of my staff my client's contact info. Instead I sent him his own contact info.
Embarrassing.
But he was offline at the time. So the message showed as pending.
Is there anyway to cancel a pending Skype message?
It's great when something works the way it should.
Yes, there is a saved by the bell feature in Skype and it works even on the Mac version. If you right click, you can remove the pending message like this:
How to Erase a Skype Message
Once you've gotten rid of the message, unfortunately, you are not completely off the hook.
When your client (or girlfriend, as the case may be with mistaken messages) comes back online, he or she will see the text "This message has been removed". Still, it's a lot easier to explain an error message than errant information.
Traces of a Skype message removed
If the person is online and you are quick, you can remove the message before he or she sees it, apparently for up to at least one hour.
This is a great Skype feature.
By Alec
IT |
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
I don’t know how many hard drives you have but as a photographer and filmmaker I have over a dozen hard drives, scattered across three computers.
It used to be enough just to pair up some hard drives and move a few files around.
No more. Each computer needs its own backup drive/system.
I’ve just been through cleaning up duplicate backups and freeing up about five drives.
While doing so, I had to come up with some principles of backup, which I will call the backup manifesto. Here they are:
- more backup is better
- all drives to be named and labeled at all times (how many Seagate 200 GB drives – first near silent hard drives available – can one photographer have? about half a dozen)
- dispose of dead drives immediately (you have to identify them)
working drives go into USB cases of their own- when in doubt, don’t erase but retire.
- you need backup of your backup. Always pair drives.
- less working drives is easier to manage i.e. 2×1000 GB is better than 10×200 GB
- back up 5×200 GB to 1×1000 GB. This liberates 5×200 GB (second half of the pairs) and leaves you with a single working drive with access to all your archived material.
- bare SATA drives with a SATA external plug is space/power supply efficient.
- drives are cheap – even good ones. Buy top of the line well-tested drives in the largest size readily available (usually one increment down from the current maximum). Find the extra $50. Your time and nerves are worth the expense.
- get a good disk cataloging program. I use CDfinder. You don’t want to have to handplug six ATA drives every time you need to find a single old file.
- if you are serious about using your disks efficiently, get a good disk space calculator (I use Baseline) which will also tell you about duplicate files. Using Baseline, I was able to clean out 30 GB of duplicate files on my Macbook boot drive in half an hour. It would have taken days to do this work by hand with just the finder.
- keep your boot drives only 70% full (maximum!). The last 30% of your hard drive is the slowest part. You don’t want to be booting from the slowest part – your new $2000 laptop will be running at about 60% efficiency. (Different rules apply to RAID arrays but even there you’d want to keep 10 or 15% clean to make sure you don’t crash it by filling all the free space.)
- upgrade your backups to new media when you can put 4 or 5 of them on the new large standard.
- firewire 400 is more expensive and somewhat unreliable. firewire 800 is still more expensive and very unreliable. Use firewire sparingly, only for fast media drives.
- if you insist on snapshots of old boot drives, just make them disk images on the big drives. You don’t really need those snapshots. Trust me – you won’t be going back to Windows 98 or OS X 10.1.5 or 10.2.3 (you might just go back to OS 8/9 for a legacy program or two so there are exceptions). Personally I haven’t. Mac OS X is getting a lot better and so are some of the new programmers. User interface is enough better that using vintage software is really a chore. Running any kind of virtualisation puts a big burden on your computer’s resources. The less of it you can do the better (I don’t even run Rosetta 99% of the time, let alone Classic).
When you are done, you should end up with two workhorse 750/1000 GB hard drives with a bunch of retired backups and a handful of free 160 GB to 300 GB hard drives available for various purposes (scratch drives/backup drives for friends).
You should almost never have to go to the retired backups to pull a file. Put them somewhere safe with a stable temperature. If they have sensitive information on them (no reason they need to – your sensitive information can be kept on one live drive and its two current backups), buy yourself an inexpensive safe and keep the retired drives there.
The retired drives won’t be used except in emergency so they should have a lifespan of another ten years. If you do have to pull a retired drive out due to a workhorse drive going down, you should duplicate it out to new media immediately.
Update - 18 January 2009: I've added an article with specific OS X back up software recommendations including a Bouncer Backup stress test on MimMac.
By Alec
IT |
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
I was reluctant to try mobile internet. I was worried that mobile internet on my Macbook would:
- be clumsy in use
- cause unexplained crashes
- require lots of troubleshooting
- be unreliable
Well unfortunately my concerns were justified.
vodafone a1 e220 modem
Over the last few days since I picked up my trial Vodafone modem at A1 in Vienna, I've had to:
- restart my Macbook a dozen times to get the modem running again
- endure Skype flaking out on me six times while speaking with both clients and staff
- hard restart the computer after kernel panic
- uninstall and reinstall the VodafoneMCInstaller.2.09.01.00 five times
- spend hours finding and diagnosing the problem
This post is to help you avoid these issues and to enjoy troublefree use of your modem.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
IT |
Sunday, June 1st, 2008
From the European Outsourcing Conference last week: it's difficult to do large scale outsourcing in Easter Europe:
The delegates realised that Eastern European nations do not have the scale of staff to resource huge outsourcing deals, with the majority (58 per cent) believing that different geographies are suited to different types of outsourcing projects. Only 17 per cent believed that Indian providers are leaps and bounds ahead of all other geographies.
Absolutely. There are just not the numbers here necessary to be able to do it efficiently.
What you can get are a few good programmers on a project.
Or a lot of reasonably multilingual (we're not talking about the Netherlands or Austria here) customer service bodies.
The very high euro - which seems to be carrying the local currencies with it - does make European outsourcing pretty much a local sport at this point. But there is no shortage of European companies and divisions looking to cut costs without transcontinental travel.
By Alec
Business, IT |
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
Just ran into a time consuming hiccup trying to work with a Clone CD Image. I hope the rather detailed explanation below will help someone else deal with a Clone CD Image faster on his Mac.
I'd downloaded a 600 MB disk image to use with Parallels. The disk image came wrapped in a .rar format.
Unpacking the .rar file was very difficult.
- StuffitExpander crashed
- Forklift couldn't handle it
- Archive Utility just wanted to compress it further.
Finally I was able to unpack it with IAarchiver, slowly but certainly.
After unpacking, I was offered a directory with three files in it:
- image.img
- image.ccd
- image.sub
Clone CD img ccd sub files
I had no idea Windows used the archaic Mac .img format. It turns out that Windows doesn't. What I'd inadvertently downloaded is what is known as a Clone CD image. I was unable to mount it on my Macbook. No known solution or software for Mac OS X can handle Clone CD images. BIN and CUE files are no problem, but CCD files - there's nothing out there.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
IT |
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
Over at LifeHacker a fascinating discussion of monitor size and productivity. It caught my eye as I've recently moved from a 30" monitor to a 24" and 12" setup. Strangely I find I'm more productive on the second setup.
In any case, people have all kinds of strange setups including one guy with six 15" LCD's all on a special mount. I think he's onto something. As I said, I've gone from a single 30" to a 24" (1920 x 1200) plus a 12" (1280 x 960). At home I now have 20" (1680 x 1050) plus the same 12" (Macbook).
I stopped running the 30" as my Macbook can't do Dual-Link DVI.
I thought my productivity would go down. No way. Substantially up. Managing the windows and flipping between applications was a hassle on the 30".
With a dual monitor setup, all the distractions on small monitor. Work on big monitor.
That said, I much prefer the 24" as a main monitor. I am less productive by an order of magnitude except when web browsing and writing on the 20". It's just not big enough to handle two full size documents (without having 8 or 9 pt antialiased type to squint at). 24" is the sweet spot.
simple dual monitor setup 24" and 12" (macbook plus 1920 x 1200)
Finally, if you can avoid TN screens on your main screen. Sometimes you want to stand up and look at your work. Sometimes you want to lean back and look at your work. You can't do it. The colours go all wonky. Things get dark. The monitor distracts.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
IT |
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
I've just been debugging display issues in the CSS in Knowlege Constructs FAQ-Tastic tonight. Firefox and Safari on Mac were a breeze to get right: just pull all the margins and padding off of ol.faq with a .nonumbers ol class that I'd already been using. It was especially easy to figure it out with the Web Developer's Toolbar on Firefox.
Unfortunately a quick excursion over to the Darkside and Internet Explorer (the blinkers through which 92% of the visitors to our clients still see the web - among Folivision vistors Internet Explorer users are a minority), showed that the CSS code just wasn't working. Indentation had gone totally astray.
In the absence of Web Developer's Toolbar for Internet Explorer, there is no way to get instant Internet Explorer preview. The closest thing is to open up the file directly from the server and save it back to the server. Usually, I am set up with two monitors on my desk, a 20" Samsung 205B for the Windows box and an HP LP3065 for the Mac work station. It's just a matter of editing in CSSEdit or BBedit on the Mac, saving onto the server and pressing F5 on the PC keyboard.
We've installed a Linux machine now - the first of many - and I had to give up my 20" Samsung 205B and plug the Windows box back into the HP LP3065. (Both monitors are highly recommended, btw.)
Pushing input and switching keyboards was not efficient (3 movements instead of one, along with a screenflash each time).
So I decided to take the plunge and go looking for a Windows XHTML/CSS editor which would allow me to open up files from the server. It was either that or move a monitor.
html kit screenshot
I'd had a quick run-in with HTML-Kit a couple of nights ago which I found via somed SEO research I was doing (htmlkit are doing some serious link selling) but had not been happy at all with the tool. It was ugly and clumsy. Nothing like being at home on BBedit (which while arguably drab, is not clumsy). The website was particularly stressful with it's ugly and unreadable four column layout. Would you want to trust your html and CSS editor to people who can't build a readable web page? Me neither. While version 292 is free, all future versions and advanced functionality are relatively expensive, with just part of the pro package costing $65. I don't know if the guys at htmlkit have a drug habit they are supporting with their newfound commercial activities and advertising but something is seriously amiss.
Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec
IT |
