Applepie

"One Photo a Day" Project

In 2010 I decided to do a "one photo a day" project - sharing a single photo per day for an entire year. There are lots of different ways to accomplish this with various different rules or guidelines. I found a blog entry by Jason Webber to be particularly helpful in setting out initial guidelines for having a successful "photo a day" project - "Tips for a ‘One photo a day’ project".

The idea is simple and fun. I select the theme for my project to be "our family life", mostly taken with a point-and-shoot camera.

I am hosting the project on my web site at Picture a Day.

In practice, even though I am only 12 days into the 365 days, this project has proven a lot more difficult than I thought. What I am quickly realizing is that my daily family life is not that different from one day to the next. I am away from the house for a large part of the day, and when I am home it is often dark outside - restricting me to indoor shots. Net result is that taking interesting snap-shots has been more difficult than I expected.

In order to keep the photos interesting, I have started to experiment with different post-processign techniques, such as OOB.

Ultimately, for this project to be successful, I am going to have to branch out from my original theme and expand from "family life" to day to day objects and scenes.

Sierra to the Sea Bicycle Tour

The Seattle area has the Seattle to Portland tour, here in the Bay Area in California we have the Sierra to the Sea bike tour - "a scenic and challenging 8-day bicycle and camping tour through Northern California." This year tour will be help on June 19-26, 2010. "Starting in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the tour traverses the Sacramento and Napa Valleys, passes down the Pacific Coast, crosses the Golden Gate Bridge and concludes at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco." A total of 420 miles, with an average of 60 miles per day.

Seems to me that this is less strenuous than a one day STP ride (~206 miles). Not sure yet about elevation gains in the Sierras - which could make this a more interesting tour. One can also add a Lake Tahoe Prologue which ads 3 extra days of riding around Lake Tahoe.

Registration starts on January 19th, 2010 at 6:00pm and can fill quickly - based on past tours this can be 1h to 1 day. If you are interested, you need to be ready to sign up on the 19th at 6pm.

Garmin Edge 500 Cycle Computer

The 2010 cycling season is about to start for me and I am looking at upgrading my cycling computer. I currently use a Polar watch with cadence and speed sensors in addition to the typical heart rate data. In my new system, I am looking to adding GPS data for accurate altitude information, and for tracking my routes. I would also like to add an Power meter. I am currently considering the Garmin Edge 500 cycle computer. The basic Garmin Edge 500 setup tracks distance, speed, location and elevation with high sensitivity GPS. The Edge 500 is compatible with the Ant+ devices, making it easy to expand the system to add heart rate monitor, speed / cadence, and power meters.

Out of Bounds Photo Editing Technique

I have been experimenting with a photo editing technique called "Out of Bounds". It enables you to give your photos a 3D look by having the subject "step" out of the frame. I found a great tutorial created by Serrator in the Flickr community -- "OOB Tutorial". The tutorial does a great job of walking the the user through step by step instructions on how to create OOB photos using Adobe Photoshop.

Lots of fun. Here is my initial attempt at an OOB photo.

Photo Library Disaster

My entire photo library of original RAW files has been, temporarily, lost.  I have been an Apple Aperture user for 4 years now - since its launch on November 2005.

I have kept my entire library in Aperture project, and I have kept a backup vault.

Late last year, I went to access my Aperture library and found it to be corrupt - Aperture will not load my library.  Attempts to restore the vault have also failed.  While I have some JPGs of my Aperture library available on iPhoto, the original RAW files, and much of the collection itself is available only in the Aperture project.

As a last resort, I can probably recuperate the RAW files by manually opening the Aperture project in the Finder.  However, I will loose the post processing, sorting, and all meta-data that for the entire library - rebuilding this data will take many many man hours (1000s).

I need to tackle this project soon, and then re-consider my choice for photo post-processing tool, and my backup system.

How do you spell RECORD!!!

While it is not official yet, we have broken the rain record for the wettest rain month in Seattle. How do I know? Check out this radar image from the National Weather Service - 11/30/2006 9:57PM

Cool!

Cris Pierry

Breaking the record

"By Sunday evening, more than half an inch of rain had fallen at Sea-Tac, making November's total 15.20 inches, less than a quarter inch away from the 15.33 record set in downtown Seattle in 1933"

Unfortunately, the weather forecast is for mostly dry weather until Thursday.

To compound to the difficulties of breaking the record, check out this juicy tidbit from Answers.com

"Rain gauges only indicate rainfall in a localized area. An extreme example of this is the annual rainfall in Seattle: the official weather station for the city is at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the driest part of the city, and the gauge itself was placed, by chance, at the driest part of the airport. Actual annual rainfall for the city is around 254 mm (10 in) greater than the official records indicate."

Cris Pierry

The rainy city?

Seattle ranks 44th among US cities for rainfall with an average yearly rainfall of 36.2 inches (92 cm).

This compares to:

145 inches (368 cm) in the Hoh Rain Forest (part of Olympic National Park in Washington State),
129 inches (327cm) in Hilo,
65 inches (165 cm) in Mobile,
60 inches (152 cm) in New Orleans,
58 inches (147 cm) in Miami,
49 inches (124 cm) in Atlanta,
45 inches (114 cm) in Houston,
44 inches (112 cm) in Boston,
40.3 inches (102 cm) in New York City,
39 inches (99 cm) in Washington, D.C.,
34.5 inches (88 cm) in Chicago,
19.5 inches (50 cm) in San Francisco,
15 inches (38 cm) in Sequim (on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State,
12 inches (30 cm) in Los Angeles and
4 inches (10 cm) in Las Vegas.

Beautiful Wet Seattle

"When in Rome, do like the Romans". My kids were all born and raised in the beautiful Pacific Northwet. What is a WA native to do if not to cheer and celebrate rain? You see, everyone in our house is currently cheering for more rainfall. Why? It seems so natural, it is so we can break the record for the wettest month on record.

We have a pretty good chance. We already smashed the record of 12.92" set in Jan 53 since the National Weather Service began measuring Seattle rainfall at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in 1945.

We currently sit at 13.11" of rain and we still have 9 days to go before November is done.

The target right now is 15.33" set way back in 1933 (measured at the Federal Building downtown).

Go Hawks Rain!

Technorati Tags: Rain, Seattle

Corporate Life

"A view from inside"

Canon EOS 5D, EF 24-105 F/4L, ISO 200, Aperture Priority, 4 sec at f/22, Tripod

Technorati Tags: Canon, Photography

OS X 10.4.8 Wi-Fi bug "proven"

I just proved to myself that it is indeed Apple's OS X 10.4.8 that is causing a critical Wi-Fi bug on my Intel based iMac. (see iMac wireless Network troubles) Today I got fed-up with this issue and restored my iMac back to the original factory software - my iMac is from March 06, and Apple's OS X back then was version 10.4.4. With the original version of OS X installed, my Wi-Fi network works flawlessly, it hasn't dropped a Wi-Fi connection even once, not even when the microwave is in use.

It is so nice to have a working computer once again.

The problem is that I now have a working computer but also have a computer that has known security vulnerabilities that have long since been fixed.

I won't upgrade my computer to 10.4.8 until Apple acknowledges this issue and provides a fix.

I will contact Apple and try to get this issue addressed.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: 80211, Apple, Bug, iMac, OS X, Software, wi-fi, wireless

Anakin Skywalker

Photo taken during Halloween 2006. I was carrying around my big EF 28-300 f3.5-5.6L lens that I had used at my son's soccer game earlier in the day, I had just taken a bunch of natural light indoor photos and had my ISO set to 3200.

I set out to capture the motion of the light-saber, so I set the camera to shutter priority at 0.5 sec. Unfortunately, I forgot to reset the ISO back to a lower range - I should have used an ISO between 100 to 400 ISO as the only light I was interested in capturing came from the very bright light-saber. Nonetheless I quite liked the results on the image below.

EOS-1Ds Mark II, EF 28-300 F3.5-5.6L, hand-held
Shutter priority at 0.5 sec, Aperture 5.6, ISO 3200

Technorati Tags: Canon, EOS-1Ds Mark II, Photography, Star Wars

iMac Wireless Network Troubles

I haven't been home much since my last blog entry; as a result, I haven't had to use my home iMac (Intel Core Duo). This week, however, I was unexpectedly at home and had the unfortunate opportunity to use my home iMac.

Ever since upgrading to Mac OS X 10.4.8 I have had nothing but trouble with my Intel iMac and our home Wi-Fi network. The iMac will drop the wireless connection unexpectedly and it will refuse to reconnect until it is rebooted.

This is unbearable, I have tried everything I can think of and nothing solves the problem - I tried no Wi-FI security, WEP, WAP, WAP 2. Nothing seems to make a difference.

Of course Apple's support policy requires me to pay $50 for talking with customer support, or to carry my computer to the local Apple store (for the 3rd time now). I would not mind paying the $50 phone support charge if Apple would refund it once they found out that the problem is no a user issue and instead either a Mac OS X problem or a hardware problem.

The irony here is that I have re-formated my iMac clean 3 times now as a result of yet another hard-drive failure (covered once again under warranty). I have reproed this Wi-Fi problem using just the standard OS X bundled software.

No other computer in my house has this problem (the MacBook (Intel), the Mac Mini (Intel), my wife's Windows laptop, a G5 iMac) they all work flawlessly with the same Wi-Fi network.

I guess to prove or disprove my suspicions, I will re-format my iMac yet again and install the original 10.4.7 OS and refuse software upgrades. This way I will know once and for all if this is a hardware problem or an OS X 10.4.8 problem.

Heck, computers are so so so far from ever being a standard appliance that can be used by everyday folks. These things are supposed to make our lives easier, but yet, they seem to require an inordinate amount of maintenance well beyond what most folks are prepared to do.

Of to backup and reformat I go...

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: 80211, Apple, iMac, wi-fi, wireless

Seattle Skyline

Seattle skyline as seen from Kerry Park in Queen Anne Hill, Seattle.

EOS 1DS II, 15 sec exposure at Aperture 13, ISO 100, EF 100-400mm

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Kerry Park, Landscape, Moon, Photography, Seattle, Space Needle

TV Shows on iTunes - are networks having second thoughts?

Apple seems to be struggling with TV networks to provide timely release of TV shows on the iTunes store. Various new TV shows this season are not currently offered on iTunes at all - NBC Kidnapped is just one example. While ABC'S Heroes is on iTunes, it is still missing the series opener - episode 1. Battlestar Galactica season 3 took 5 days from original TV showing until it was available for purchase on iTunes. BSG episode 2 is still not listed for download even though the episode aired on TV last night.

It is too bad that TV networks have yet to truly embraced the internet as a viable medium for their programming. ABC's free internet streaming is a far cry from iTunes' commercial free downloads - user experience, quality, and accessibility are just not there with streaming videos. While I have never watched a single streaming show from ABC, I have purchased over 50 different TV shows from iTunes.

Hopefully Apple will be more successful in convincing TV Networks that iTunes provides the networks with an audience that is willing to pay for legal content and an audience that would not be watching TV shows otherwise.

TV Networks should be embracing iTunes as a legal vehicle for commercial distribution of their content instead of driving users to downloading shows from torrent networks.

NBC's Kidnapped was one new show this season that peaked my interest, but its absence from iTunes means that I will not be giving it a chance at all.

At our house, we switched to using iTunes exclusively for watching our TV shows (mostly Lost and BSG, and now 24). TIVo became relegated to simply pausing live sporting events.

BTW - we prefer iTunes over Tivo because iTunes gives us the ability to watch a TV Show remotely - on our laptop, desktop, TV or iPod. What ever happened with the Tivo to Go initiative?

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Battlestar Galactica, iTunes, TIVO, TV

Nintendo Wii - lesson learned

At our house we currently have "old" generation video game consoles - Nintendo GameCube, Sony Playstation 2, Microsoft Xbox. We have yet to purchase the latest generation consoles.

While I enjoy playing video games, the reality is that I hardly ever get around to doing it. My son is still too young to play too much, but I am slowly introducing him to some games - mostly on Nintendo GameCube (Super Mario Striker, and LEGO Start Wars II).

However, all of this talk on latest generation game console from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo has gotten me interested in upgrading our systems. The first thing you notice while looking at the latest generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony is that they are expensive! XBox 360, when you add a HD and a couple of wireless controllers, costs close to $500. Sony's new PS3 will be around $600. Nintendo's Wii console will retail for $249 with Wii Sports. On price point alone Wii sounds like a winner to me. But what has really gotten me interested on Wii is their new controller with the hand movements for game playback.

I learned yesterday that EBGames would be taking pre-orders for Wii starting this morning. Naively, I arrived to our local EBGames store at 9:58am to reserve a copy. Big mistake - apparently people had been lining up at the store since 6am. Even though it wasn't even 10am yet, the store's official opening time, the store was already sold out.

Bummer. I should have known better. Hopefully I will be able to pick up a Wii once it officially releases in November.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: game console, Nintendo, Video Game, Wii

Cleaning House - RSS Feeds

Phase 3 of my get organized process and shedding the summer months behind for good is getting a handle on the RSS feeds that I read. I was up to reading nearly 300 feeds a day - over 1200 posts a day. Way too many to be productive and efficient.

My first step in the clean up was to delete any and all RSS feeds that did not include the full article -- any blogs/sites that only post partial RSS feeds have been deleted - period.

Next I organized my feeds into groups, selecting 20 top feeds that go into a "Morning Read" group -- the goal is to read this group first thing in the morning.

I also created a work, technology, VC, and photography groups. Work will get scanned throughout the day - as appropriate, while photography, technology, and VC groups will only be read at night - and then only if time permits.

To further cut down on the number of feeds, I also deleted any feed that did not produce an "interesting" post in the past two week.

I am down to around 100 feeds now - still too much, but much better than what I started with.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: blog, RSS

Cleaning House - IM, VOIP, and Contacts

Phase 2 of my re-focusing effort is to clean out my IM, VOIP, and Address Book contacts. First, I use 4 different IM accounts and 2 different VOIP accounts -- way too many. Some of my IM accounts have hundreds of contacts in them, some of whom I haven't IMed in months if not years.

It wasn't until I noticed that 3 of my IM contacts had actually died in the past year that I realized that I need to clean out my contacts to a manageable size. I may have gone to the extreme here, but I now have single digit contacts on my personal IM clients, and will expand from there very very carefully.

Yahoo and Microsoft now can IM with each other's contacts - this will enable me to drop one of my IM accounts. Since off-line Hotmail access on Macs is problematic, and Yahoo offers POP access to their email (for a fee), I am retiring my hotmail account. My AOL account is hardly ever used and since iChat can IM with AOL users, I can retire my AOL account completely.

On the VOIP front I currently use Skype and Gizmo. Skype supports video calls, and Gizmo's free calling is temperamental at best. Gizmo is getting the boot, and I will hang on to Skype a little longer.

Not bad, I am down to using two IM accounts and a single VOIP client and my contact list has now dropped to a very manageable size.

I have a feeling I will have a lot more time on my hands now.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Blog, Digital, IM, VOIP

Cleaning House - DVDs, LDs, CDs gone.

It is time to re-start, re-focus, and get re-organized.

Phase 1 -- going digital.

First step for me has been to shed unnecessary clutter in my life and convert to digital as much as possible. Last week, I donated over 5,000 DVDs and 2,000 LaserDiscs to my local library. For one, we would never watch most of those movies again (except maybe for the complete Start Trek series in both DVD and LD formats). Second, I actually donated all of my AV equipment as well - LD player, DVD player, DV player, 200 disc CD carousels, HI-8 player, cassette player, VCR player, radio, receiver, power amp, etc -- 3 complete systems. It is all moving digital now or it will not be part of our house. Bulk wise, those DVD's and LD occupied a huge amount of physical space - boxes that moved with us to 3 different house moves now - but no more. If there is a movie we want to watch, I hope it is on iTunes or a similar digital service or it won't be watched.

Our CDs have all been converted to digital files, and the physical media will be donated or recycled - no CDs will be moving around with us anymore either.

Photography wise, all of our photos have been digital since late 1999. Unfortunately, we still have maybe 20 albums full of old photos that must still be converted. This is a slow process that I am hoping to complete within the next 12 months - then the albums will all go - no point in carrying around hundreds of pound of photo albums while digital solutions are so readily available.

Now I better make sure that I have a secure and reliable digital storage solution to ensure that all of this media stays secure.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Digital

OS X 10.4.8 Wi-Fi Bug

My Apple iMac Core Duo has been having constant Wi-Fi problems ever since upgrading to Apple's latest OS X 10.4.8. My Wi-Fi connection drops unexpectedly and refuses to come back until the system is rebooted. Even after a reboot, the Wi-Fi only returns after the access-point is manually re-selected.

Needless to say, this makes using the iMac completely unacceptable.

Interestedly, the MacBook Pro does not have the same problem.

Totally unacceptable lack of quality control, and not something I have come to expect from Apple.

Technorati Tags: 80211, Apple, Bug, Software, wi-fi, wireless

Wireless Network Security or lack off

I had always heard that WEP encryption used on Wi-Fi products was easily cracked. Yet, I myself continue to we simply use 128 bit WEP encryption for my home network - but not anymore.

Check out this article on Tom's Networking, it walks you through a step by step guide on how to crack any WEB wireless network in a matter of minutes.

Time to switch from WEP to WPA or WPA2.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: 80211, wi-fi, security, wireless

Not your typical street sign

Photo taken around Mount Rainier

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Photography, Volcano, Street sign

Missing Album Covers

My excitement with iTunes 7 automatic album cover art download quickly waned after I asked iTunes to download the cover art for my music collection. iTunes was only able to retrieve less than 20% of the cover art for my CDs. A search through Amazon enable me to find another 40%, but it still left me with 40% of my music without a cover art.

A painstaking process of manually searching on Google, Yahoo, and Live yielded maybe another 20% and manual search on ebay and various Brazilian music websites yielded another 10%.

It would be cool if I could in turn "share" my cover art and music discography to other users on the net and save them the painstaking manual process of finding cover art on their own.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Apple, iTunes, music

411 Information on Cingular Wireless

While living in London, I appreciated the fact that most (all?) wireless operators would text you the phone number and address after a call to information (411 here in the US). This was handy for various reasons - if the number was busy, if I needed to call again the next day, etc. It frustrated me that US carriers (t-mobile and Cingular at least) did not send the information to my mobile, forcing me to write it down or call again if I needed the number once more.

It turns out that Cingular offers this feature if you simply say "Text me" during the reading of the 411 information. Best of all, you can subsequently request that they always send the information via SMS for all future 411 requests.

Pretty neat. Too bad my Motorola Razr does not detect phone numbers in an SMS and enable me to click dial it like my Windows Mobile and Symbian phones did.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: 411, Wireless

Missing Album Covers

Cool new feature of iTunes 7.0 - if you ripped your CDs and don't have the covers, iTunes 7.0 will find missing album cover art for all the music in your library, and it will automatically download it for free.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Apple, Music, iTunes

9/11/2001

Happy Birthday Star Trek!

Happy 40th birthday Star Trek Enterprise! September 8th marks the 40th anniversary of the original television series' debut on NBC in the fall of 1966.

Star Trek: (1966-1969)
Star Trek: The Animated Adventures (1973-1974)
Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999)
Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001)
Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005)

How long will we have to wait until a new Star Trek series in launched? Please...

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Star Trek

How To: Add a Favorite Icon, favicon, to your Typepad blog

A favicon, short for favorite icon, is a personalize icon that is displayed with the website name/favorite listing. Most professional web sites customize the favicon with their corporate logo. Here is what my News favorite folder looks like -- you can see the personalized corporate logo for each favorite entry.

You can personalize your typepad blog with your very own favicon as well - as I have now done with my applepie blog.

1. First thing is to create a favicon.ico file - a 16x16 pixel file. I used an online website called FavIcon from Pictures to convert a picture to a favicon size and format. Once created, make sure to name the file favicon.ico
2. Next you need to upload your new favicon.ico file to the your blog home folder.

That's it. Most browsers now will find and display the favicon automatically when the site is viewed in that browser.

You may need to clear the cache from your existing browser or to hard refresh the page (CTRL + F5 on Firefox) before your new favicon is displayed.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: blog, favicon, How To, browser

How To: access built in OS X Dictionary and Thesaurus

OS X includes a system wide dictionary and thesaurus, many native OS X applications make use of this feature to provide instant spell checking. Users can also benefit from it by invoking the dictionary or thesaurus at any point.

• Highlight the work in question
• Press Command + Control + D (for dictionary or define)

To access the thesaurus, select Oxford Thesaurus from the Oxford Dictionary drop-down menu.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Apple, Dictionary, How To, OS X, Software, Switcher, Technology

Happy Anniversary! September 4th, 2006

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: anniversary, love

How To: BitTorrent Information

TorrentFreak has a series of articles on BitTorrent, it is good primer on the technology for those who don't know it yet.

• 9 Bittorrent how-to’s
• Mac BitTorrent Clients Reviewed
• Why Bittorrent Works

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: BitTorrent, How To, Technology, TorrentFreak

Rethinking email

I have to re-think what it means to me to email someone a photo. I don't send many photographs via email, certainly less than 2 per month. Most of the time the photos I send are related to a birthday or an event. The photos are always resized for quick access, they are always hand-selected and of high quality (no snapshots), and I only send a few photos at a time (less than 5 photographs per email).

The photos are sent to people with direct connection to the event or to the subject photographed. They often go to grandparents, uncles, ants, godparents, and the likes. Yet, without fail, 95% of the emails go unanswered - it is rare to get even a single reply. This really used to bother me, to the point that I started trimming down the email distribution to fewer and fewer recipients. If I keep this up, pretty soon I will be emailing these photos only to myself.

Maybe I am looking at this all wrong. I don't photograph because I expect others to comment. When I blog, I don't blog with any expectation that the entry will be read by anyone other than myself, and I don't blog with the expectation that it will be commented on or linked to. I blog because I like it, because it means something to me, because I think it will help someone. Maybe that's how I should look at the photo emails that I send - not expect a reply, not expect a comment, and certainly not expect a photo in return. Just send the email with a grandchild or a wildlife subject and hope that it will bring a smile to the recipient, that it will bring fond memories of the event, that it will bring a distant relative closer to our daily lives - no more, no less.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: email, Photography, spam

CS 101: Saft - How not to offer a free software trial

Saft is a Safari browser plug-in that adds some much needed functionality to Apple's browser. I have heard of Saft ever since I switched to the Mac over 1 year ago. Until now, I had shied away from installing it as Saft can have compatibility problems when OS X is updated; but from what I hear, the Saft developers are always very quick to update the application soon after a revision to Safari is made public.

I finally broke down today and installed a demo version of Saft on my MacBook Pro. The key features that I am interested in are full screen mode, and the ability to save and re-open multiple browser tabs when re-launching safari. The full screen mode is particularly important to me as I like to read books online via O'Reilly's Safari bookshelf.

Unfortunately, the demo version of Saft is more irritating than any value that it brings. Saft forcefully displays a pop-up dialog box when Safari is launched, preventing Safari from being used until the user manually dismisses the dialog box -- extremely irritating. Instead of reminding me that I should upgrade my demo version, this dialog box reminds me that I must quickly and promptly remove this virus from my computer.

There is nothing wrong with displaying a credits dialog box, but it should be displayed briefly and quickly dismissed without user interaction. As it stands, Saft makes my browsing experience slower not faster.

If you are offering a free trial of your software, do so freely and do your best to provide users with the best customer experience possible. Give the trial a fixed time period when the product will stop working, and be confident in the value of your application to know that users will purchase it after they have a chance to experience its functionality. As it is, with Saft, I used its full screen feature only once, and I was bugged by the software at least 10 times before I finally gave up and uninstalled it. Instead of Saft bringing me value, it slowed me down - not really the experience the ISV wanted out of a free trial. It is too bad, because I really could have benefitted from some of the features available in Saft, but I won't give in to such poor tactics and purchase the final product.

Luckily, uninstalling Saft is quick and simple: move Saft in /Library/InputManagers to the Trash.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: CS 101, Saft, Software

ImageWell - quick, simple, elegant image editor

ImageWell is a free utility that makes it very easy for you to do simple image editing:

• Resize, crop, shape, rotate and add a watermark, border, or drop shadow.

• Add text, labels, arrows, circles and squares to your image.

• Add a thought cloud or talking balloon.

Very handy utility for creating and adding images to a web page or a blog! And better yet, it is free!

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Apple, Software

Apple Warranty Repair: iMac hard drive

My iMac's hard drive has died - surface scan errors. A quick chat with Apple Care and another visit to Apple's Genius Bar has resulted in my iMac being sent for a hard drive replacement - a 2 to 5 day task.

The machine is just 4 months old and it has a factory installed 500GB hard drive. The repair cost, covered under warranty thankfully, is a whopping $660.00 ($525 for the HD, and $135 for the installation). Simply outrageously expensive considering that you can purchase a 750 gb hard drive for $335.

This is a good reminder that once the 1 year warranty is up, all service repairs will be done at home.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Apple, genius bar, iMac, warranty

Rainy City No More!

Here is something you don't see in Seattle very often - Barely a drop of rain in August in Seattle: just 0.02 inches of rainfall, less than the 30-year average of 1.02 inches in August.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Seattle

Windows Vista RC1

Windows Vista RC1 is available for download now to Techbeta members, and more broadly available next week. I am downloading it now, the last build I tried was very solid, it will be fun to see what RC1 brings to the table.

I am still missing drivers for the built-in video camera on the Sony SZ laptops.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista

Genius Bar - A good customer support experience

I visited my local Apple store today to get some help fixing a problem with my MacBook Pro. Before heading off to the store, I booked a 20 minute appointment at the Apple Genius Bar - ensuring that I would be seen by a technician when I got there.

Not only were they able to help me fix the problem with my Mail application, but I was able to replace my MacBook Pro battery (which had been recalled), and replace my power adapter which had broken. That's $180 is warranty parts! Great for me, not so great for Apple.

I also learned that my iMac hard drive must be replaced due to its "Invalid Node Structure" and "Surface Scan Errors", I need to book another appointment at the Genius bar and bring my iMac with me - bummer.

All in all, it was a great experience and a great value to be able to talk to a support tech face to face. Much better experience than any over-the-phone support person could have provided.

On the other hand, both of my computers are just about 4 months old, it was certainly unexpected to have hardware problems so soon. Not something that I am used to. Hopefully these are one off failures, and not a sign of general quality control issues at Apple.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Apple, genius bar

Mail.app - KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE fixed

A trip to the Apple Genius Store fixed my Mail.app kernel protection failure. My preferences file was corrupt, and even thought I thought I had deleted all mail preference files I missed one of them. Mail.app stores preference list files in at least 3 locations:

• \library\mail
• ~\\library\mail
• ~\library\Preferences

The important one to reset is ~\library\Preferences\com.apple.mail.plist. Once this file was deleted, Mail was able to load again.

In order not to loose all of my email accounts, I moved ~\library\Preferences\com.apple.mail.plist to the desktop. Then I restarted Mail.app which caused it to recreate a default, vanilla, preferences file and re-set Mail's internal settings. I exited mail.app and then moved my original plist file to the correct location. Once I re-started mail.app this time, everything worked - and all of my email accounts were available once again.

Horrible error handling on Apple's part, and annoying behavior to store preference files (plist) all over the place.

Thanks to Tom at the Bellevue Apple Genius Bar for helping me get my system running again.

Cris Pierry

Technorati Tags: Apple, mail.app, Technology

Mail Application Refuses to Load

I am giving up on get Mail.app working tonight - my Mail.app crashes on load every single time - KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE.

Here is what I did to try and fix the problem:

I deleted the Preferences List (.plist file) from cris\library\mail and from \library\mail.

I forced Mail to rebuild its index by deleting the ~\library\mail\Envelope Index file.

I tested my computer's memory by running MemTest from http://www.memtestosx.org/.

I Verified Disk Permissions, I Verified Disk by using Disk Utility.

Everything checks out ok and yet Mail still crashes - bummer.

That's as far as I'm going tonight thought. I will deal with it tomorrow when I am back in Redmond.

Cristiano Pierry

Technorati Tags: Apple, mail.app, Technology

Mail.app: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE, EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)

I have been off the grid all week with no internet access until this evening and now every time I go to run Apple's Mail.app I get a KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE. Arghhh - I have a ton of stuff to do, the last thing I needed was a computer error. Nothing changed on my machine in a while, and everything was working fine before I left on Monday.

Oh well, I am hoping this one is easy to fix, but an initial google search did not return anything useful.

Host Name: MacBook-Pro
Date/Time: 2006-08-30 21:58:14.748 -0700
OS Version: 10.4.7 (Build 8J2135)
Report Version: 4

Command: Mail
Path: /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail
Parent: WindowServer [58]

Version: 2.1 (752)
Build Version: 2
Project Name: MailViewer
Source Version: 7520000

PID: 601
Thread: 0

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x0000000c

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 com.apple.Foundation 0x9272f614 +[NSInvocation newInvocationWithMethodSignature:] + 28
1 com.apple.Foundation 0x9272f226 -[NSObject(NSForwardInvocation) forward::] + 215
2 libobjc.A.dylib 0x90a51ba1 _objc_msgForward + 49
3 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x99365efc +[MailAccount _addAccountToSortedPaths:] + 83
4 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x99365e9a _setupSortedPathsForAccounts + 119
5 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x9936575f +[MailAccount setMailAccounts:] + 1158
6 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x9943291b -[Account updateAccountsFromPlist:acceptedChanges:] + 2583
7 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x99431ed8 -[Account dataWasSyncedVersion:newData:acceptedChanges:] + 176
8 libobjc.A.dylib 0x90a51c56 objc_msgSendv + 54
9 com.apple.Foundation 0x927302a0 -[NSInvocation invoke] + 982
10 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x993893f8 _invokeInvocationRequest + 85
11 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x99389011 -[MainThread handlePortMessage:] + 154
12 com.apple.Foundation 0x9277a75c __NSFireMachPort + 307
13 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90833773 __CFMachPortPerform + 136
14 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90823a14 CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 2904
15 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90822eb5 CFRunLoopRunInMode + 61
16 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x92f02b90 RunCurrentEventLoopInMode + 285
17 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x92f02297 ReceiveNextEventCommon + 385
18 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x92f020ee BlockUntilNextEventMatchingListInMode + 81
19 com.apple.AppKit 0x93383771 _DPSNextEvent + 576
20 com.apple.AppKit 0x9338335e -[NSApplication nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:] + 137
21 com.apple.AppKit 0x9337d0e3 -[NSApplication run] + 512
22 com.apple.AppKit 0x93371037 NSApplicationMain + 573
23 com.apple.mail 0x0009474a 0x1000 + 603978
24 com.apple.mail 0x00094665 0x1000 + 603749

Cristiano Pierry

Technorati Tags: Apple, mail.app, Technology

Mail.app: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE, EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)

I have been off the grid all week with no internet access until this evening and now every time I go to run Apple's Mail.app I get a KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE. Arghhh - I have a ton of stuff to do, the last thing I needed was a computer error. Nothing changed on my machine in a while, and everything was working fine before I left on Monday.

Oh well, I am hoping this one is easy to fix, but an initial google search did not return anything useful.

Host Name: MacBook-Pro
Date/Time: 2006-08-30 21:58:14.748 -0700
OS Version: 10.4.7 (Build 8J2135)
Report Version: 4

Command: Mail
Path: /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail
Parent: WindowServer [58]

Version: 2.1 (752)
Build Version: 2
Project Name: MailViewer
Source Version: 7520000

PID: 601
Thread: 0

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x0000000c

Thread 0 Crashed:
0 com.apple.Foundation 0x9272f614 +[NSInvocation newInvocationWithMethodSignature:] + 28
1 com.apple.Foundation 0x9272f226 -[NSObject(NSForwardInvocation) forward::] + 215
2 libobjc.A.dylib 0x90a51ba1 _objc_msgForward + 49
3 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x99365efc +[MailAccount _addAccountToSortedPaths:] + 83
4 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x99365e9a _setupSortedPathsForAccounts + 119
5 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x9936575f +[MailAccount setMailAccounts:] + 1158
6 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x9943291b -[Account updateAccountsFromPlist:acceptedChanges:] + 2583
7 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x99431ed8 -[Account dataWasSyncedVersion:newData:acceptedChanges:] + 176
8 libobjc.A.dylib 0x90a51c56 objc_msgSendv + 54
9 com.apple.Foundation 0x927302a0 -[NSInvocation invoke] + 982
10 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x993893f8 _invokeInvocationRequest + 85
11 com.apple.MessageFramework 0x99389011 -[MainThread handlePortMessage:] + 154
12 com.apple.Foundation 0x9277a75c __NSFireMachPort + 307
13 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90833773 __CFMachPortPerform + 136
14 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90823a14 CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 2904
15 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x90822eb5 CFRunLoopRunInMode + 61
16 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x92f02b90 RunCurrentEventLoopInMode + 285
17 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x92f02297 ReceiveNextEventCommon + 385
18 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x92f020ee BlockUntilNextEventMatchingListInMode + 81
19 com.apple.AppKit 0x93383771 _DPSNextEvent + 576
20 com.apple.AppKit 0x9338335e -[NSApplication nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:] + 137
21 com.apple.AppKit 0x9337d0e3 -[NSApplication run] + 512
22 com.apple.AppKit 0x93371037 NSApplicationMain + 573
23 com.apple.mail 0x0009474a 0x1000 + 603978
24 com.apple.mail 0x00094665 0x1000 + 603749

Cristiano Pierry

Technorati Tags: Apple, mail.app, Technology

DRM hack has been fixed...

It looks like Microsoft has issued a fix to the DRM hack, it will require new client code for every Windows Media subscription service but it doesn't look like it will require the music services to re-encode their media - which would have been a huge task.

The DRM hack was first published on 8/19/2006 and fixed on 8/28/2006. Interestingly enough, it doesn't look like Microsoft knew of it until Engaged published the article on the 25th... See Microsoft's email to Windows Media Licensees.

Cristiano Pierry

Technorati Tags: DRM, Microsoft, music, Technology, Windows, WMA, Yahoo Music

Music Subscription Services Shutdown!

Microsoft's DRM technology has been hacked, rendering all existing digital music subscription services effectively shut down until a fix is made available.

With the tool mentioned in the article above, one is able to convert their subscription music files to a DRM free WMA file that can be copied, transferred to music players, converted to MP3s, and/or burned to CDs without any restrictions.

I wonder how long it will be until Yahoo, Napster, and others have to shut down their subscription services in response to the DRM hack. I haven't seen any announcements yet, but I bet one will be forthcoming.

More importantly, I wonder how quickly Microsoft will be able to respond to this latest hack.

Cristiano Pierry

Technorati Tags: DRM, Microsoft, Napster, Technology, WMA, Yahoo Music

Yahoo Photos

Yahoo recently launched their Yahoo Photos site with free unlimited photo storage - I couldn't wait to try it. Unfortunately, the upload wizard is not Mac compatible. You can still upload photos via your web browser, but you must select each photo individually with a maximum of 10 photos per transfer -- pretty much rendering it useless if you have a lot of photos to transfer.

Since I am playing around with Windows Vista Build 5536 (Pre-RC 1), I decided to give Yahoo Photos a try and see how well it help up.

Uploading photos is very easy with the Upload Wizard, just drag and drop a bunch of files and off it goes. The UI does not properly handle "spaces" in the file name while uploading, replacing it with an unfriendly %20. Luckily, the file name is stored properly once the upload is complete. The performance is sub-par - taking over 2 hours to upload 106 files (234 MB) (my home network is capable of handling 1.5GBper hour). I am also having problems with failed uploads (reason "unknown".) Out of the 106 files, over 30 of them failed to upload the first time around, the upload wizard automatically retried the failed files at the end, but still over 10 files failed to upload, and no further retries were performed.

Given this initial poor experience, I quickly abandoned any further tests. As it stands, while the unlimited storage is awesome, Yahoo Photos cannot handle my current digital photos needs for an online photo service.

Cristiano Pierry

Technorati Tags: Photography, Technology

CS 101: Signing Up Users

It still amazes me how various companies can mess up the software trial process. Instead of making the process painless and simple, they put up huge barriers before users can actually try the product: lengthy sign up process, two way email authentication, post install product authentication, requiring credit cards for the download, etc... Heck, in some cases companies should be paying users to try out their software. But yet, they forget that users just wants to see if the product is any good, users want to see if the software has value to them past an initial 2 to 4 weeks honeymoon period.

Companies need to remember that first impressions are formed during the sign up, download, and install process - long before the user actually "tries" the product in the first place.

Rick Segal has two great posts on this subject - check it out: ActiveWords - Less Friction for Signing em Up and Another Option on Sign Ups.

I like Rick's two phase approach for "signing up users" the best:

• No credit card/email sign up gets you a five day trial.

• Sign up with just an email address and you get 60 days to kick the tires.

Just about perfect and it shows tremendous confidence in the value of your product.

Cristiano Pierry

Technorati Tags: CS 101, Technology

Windows Vista 5536 - The Big Upgrade Test

Windows Vista, as everyone is reporting, is fast approaching its release candidate. Until now, every Windows Vista build that I installed was done on a clean, reformatted machine - not an upgrade over Windows XP SP2. With the pre-RC1 build, Microsoft is requesting that we test the upgrade scenario.

It should be an interesting test and great indication of how ready Vista is to be released. The system that I have available for testing is a Sony Vaio SZ140P laptop that has a lot of custom hardware that has yet to work on the previous Windows Vista builds. Let's see how this pre-RC1 build holds up to the upgrade test.

Before I can begin, I need to spend a ton of time re-imaging my machine back to Win XP and burning the Windows Vista DVD image - joy.

Cristiano Pierry

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Windows Vista, Technology, Windows

BitTorrent Speed vs. Commercial Systems

Last week I spent some time playing around with various BitTorrent networks. My initial download speed was very poor, ~20 KB/sec. After hand optimizing the various parameters in a BitTorrent client I was able to achieve an average transfer rate in the order of 65 KB/Sec - respectful, but still not great. My various downloads were taking over 10 hours to complete.

Today I am downloading Windows Vista build 5536 (Pre-RC1, 2643 MB) through Microsoft's official download site - my average transfer rate is 650 KB/Sec, a full 10x increase over my best BitTorrent average speed. On iTunes, I am also able to achieve ~650 KB/sec downloading TV shows.

The key difference here, of course, is that a company using BitTorrent to distribute a file is not paying much for the data bandwidth, while both Microsoft and Apple, in the example above, are incurring huge bandwidth costs. You get what you pay for.

Cristiano Pierry

Technorati Tags: BitTorrent, Microsoft, Technology

How to: Create an ad hoc wireless network

Few users are aware that they can use the wireless card on their Macs (or PCs) to create what is a called an ad hoc/computer to computer network - enabling you to extend a single internet connection to various computers/devices without the need for a standalone wireless router - your wireless card acts as a wireless access point.

Ad hoc networks are useful in a hotel room when you may want to extend the single hotel internet connection to your other devices or to a colleague's laptop. Even if you do not have internet access, you can use an ad hoc network to share files between computers.

Setting up a Wi-Fi ad hoc network on OS X

1. Click on the AirPort icon in your menu bar. From the AirPort menu, select Create Network.

2. Click on Show Options and encrypt the connection by entering a password as described in the dialog box.

3. Click on OK.

4. Each user on your ad hoc network should now select the network that appears in the AirPort menu and enter the specified password.

That's it - you can now share a single internet connection across various devices, and you can share files cross all devices on your ad hoc network.

Note: in order to be able to share files across computer, you must make sure that file sharing is turned on - In System Preferences, click on the Sharing icon and then on the Services tab. Turn on Personal File Sharing to share with other macs and/or Windows Sharing to share with windows PCs.

Windows users can also create an ad hoc network, it is only a little more difficult to configure - for windows instructions, see Making the Wireless Home Network Connection in Windows XP Without a Router.

Cristiano Pierry

Technorati Tags: Apple, How To, Technology

Start Me Up

Here is a cool article from Brad Silverberg and Brad Chase on the history behind the Windows 95 "theme song".

The Story behind "Start Me Up" and Windows 95

Start Me Up - Part II

Here is the Win 95 TV ad...

Cristiano Pierry

Technorati Tags: Technology, Windows