I must humbly confess that I do not remember who wrote such wise words but these are among the first I saw when first playing around with Netscape Navigator on Mac OS 9, a long, very long time ago — that was about the same time my eyes went teary with joy at the thought I had successfully sent a mail with an oh-so-unpatched version of Outlook.

It is however one of the few guiding principles that I tried to always keep in mind. Indeed, even though there are nowadays encryption software that guarantees almost perfect secrecy and loads of sharing communities — from del.icio.us to flickr — that each provides us with tight control over what we upload, information keeps leaking, from all over.

Why is that? Because people make mistakes. Even the best of sysops can, on Thursday morning at 3, enter addresses in the “CC” and not the “BCC” field, even the best of system administrators cannot spend his time riveted to his keyboard, waiting for some user to mail his password to a friendly stranger on the other side of whatever ocean happens to be in the vicinity. Humans fail, computers fail and information spreads, one way or the other.

In that light, why on earth do we keep putting things on line that should never be? Most of us upload our family photos on .Mac or on Flickr, our calendars on some syncing platform and our archives on a GMail account. If someone steals a picture of you in a Speedo, that won’t be the end of the world — and, if you play your cards well, it may even contribute to your success. That’s all fine… But why do some companies keep uploading user credentials, social security numbers and confidential documents on the Internet? Most of these files are never used and, when they are, it is usually within a very restricted group of people — even if your definition of “very restricted” means a couple thousand for the largest of corporations. Why make them potentially available to all the inhabitants of planet earth?

Sure, there are immediate reasons to do so. The call center in Dubai needs to access the same data than the guys in Sacramento. The marketing folks in Malmö want to know what the engineers in Madrid are up to… But in the vast majority of cases, these people just need one file, one record, not the whole SQL database… Couldn’t we imagine a system that sends information when it is of vital importance, piece-by-piece, step-by-step?

We live in a world where networks go faster than people. Information travels round the clock while we, mere mortals, still need between 5 and 10 hours of sleep every day to function properly. Getting overnight deliveries is great but aren’t we willing to sacrifice just about any form of control for the convenience of receiving pet medication to our doorstep in less than 48 hours? The old system of “Ask-Wait-Receive” might be a lot more cumbersome than what we are used to nowadays but it went hand in hand with “Acknowledge-Control-Send”, that holy grail of privacy and security we are now striving to find back — although this time with shell scripts and IPv6 networking.

B.R. emailed me a question on an all-too-common topic:
Getting a Bluetooth enabled phone working with a Bluetooth enabled Pocket PC.

B.R. writes:

I guess I don’t know much about bluetooth file transfer. Can you refer me to a step-by-step somewhere on sending my T610 pics to an IPAQ?
I can link them via bluetooth, and pair them, but I can’t find anything to use to send the pictures from one to the other.

B.R. My opinion is that the various Bluetooth stacks out there are not all equal.
And, that can get we gadget geeks into all kinds of configuration contortions.
However, as you can see in the photo from my review article about the Sony Ericsson T610
it is possible to get the T610 syncing with a HP iPAQ 2215 (I have not tried it with other iPAQ models, however).
Fortunately, you have two things in your favor:

1. IMHO, the Sony Ericsson T610 has a good Bluetooth stack
   
2. There are people who know a lot more about Bluetooth than you and me and they are are willing to share their knowledge with us.
   

Here’s the first place I go when I get stuck trying to get phones and PDAs working together with Bluetooth.

The Geekzone Bluetooth Guides

Take a look at the step-by-step tutorials there.
If your exact iPAQ model is not listed, try a tutorial focusing on a Pocket PC with the same release version (e.g., Pocket PC 2002, Windows Mobile 2003, etc.).

Have a favorite Bluetooth resource/reference site? Let us know about it here.

The problem

Since Mac OS X first saw the light of the day, some Mac users have had a love-hate relationship with the Finder. On the one hand, it’s the application without which nothing would be possible — icons wouldn’t be displayed, windows could be forgotten and we would be back to a weird combo between Windows 3.1 and a UNIX command line. On the other, it has some idiosyncrasies that, at times, make it harder to hug and love.

Does this mean that the Finder is a poorly written application that should be discarded and replaced? No, certainly not. Given the sheer complexity of the tasks the Finder has to perform, it actually performs very well. There are however some basic procedures and precautions that should allow you to avoid most glitches.

What is often at play

Mac OS X is, as many of you know, a UNIX system with a wonderful interface. This means that the Finder constantly needs to draw a link between what the UNIX reality of things is and what you see. For example, let’s assume you perform a “rm” operation in some folder — i.e. you delete something through the command line: Finder needs to immediately realize that and get rid of the icon that corresponded to the file.

While that sounds simple enough, there can be times where it isn’t. For example, a recursive “rm” command can get rid of thousands of files in a matter of seconds… The Finder obviously will have to play catch up. Also, open windows can sometimes be cached to speed up the display and, unless it is brought to the Finder’s attention that something happened there behind its back, it may not immediately refresh the window.

Of course, such glitches are relatively uncommon and cosmetic. Tiger users will have without doubt noticed that the Finder is now kept informed of what’s going on in a much more robust fashion and that the “cached window is out of sync” problem is almost entirely a thing of the past. Never the less, in some circumstances, it can still happen.

The solution

The solution in most cases is to force the Finder to redraw the contents of the window. A quick trick is to click on the icon or icons you think should be updated — this usually takes care of refreshing the dimensions of an image, number of elements, family or visibility status. Should an entire window be behaving strangely, try creating an empty folder in it and deleting it — Command-Shift-N-Apple-Tab will do that in one swell swoop. By forcing the Finder to rearrange icons in the window, it causes it to think about its contents, so to speak, and correct any issues.

Also surprising but entirely harmless are the ghost drives that can remain on the desktop after a CD-R is burnt. Burn your CD-R, eject it and, voilà!, a CD icon stays on the desktop. Dragging it to the trash will cause the Finder to ask you whether you want to burn or eject that non-existing disc… Simply click on “Eject” to dismiss the dialog and you’re done — your optical drive shouldn’t even bother to open, as it is well aware that there is nothing in it.

Finally, in one rare case, you might notice that unpacking .sit archives leads to a fully empty folder. While it is not yet clear whether that is an Expander or a Finder issue, it has been making some noise in the Mac world as some applications are still packaged in .sit format. Don’t worry, the folder trick will serve you well and cause your unpacked files to magically appear, in perfect shape.

All in all, these glitches are uncommon — you really have to spend your day organizing and sorting files on your Mac to encounter them — and harmless. Nevertheless, as they can sometimes be surprising, it can be good to know a couple quick workarounds.

None of what follows is fact. Most of it is wild speculation, some of it pure fiction. But I enjoyed musing on it.

Take the following facts:

• The iPod shuffle is a tiny, stripped-down music player
• The Mac mini is a tiny, stripped-down personal computer
• Both were launched at unexpectedly low retail prices, heralding renewed interest in Apple products from people who had not previously been Apple customers
• iTunes has helped Apple to conquer the digital music business; iTunes now supports video download and playback

And add the following, um, non-facts:

• The video thing in iTunes suggests that Apple might like to conquer the digital video (TV/movie) business too. Well, they’d be dumb not to try, right?
• Some say we should watch Airport Express; what else could it do? Wireless video distribution around your local network sounds like a reasonable sort of thing it could do. Anything else?
• What if there were tiny, stripped-down portable computer that people could use to benefit from these mythical new capabilities?

Mix it all up. Add the Nokia 770 handheld internet device, just announced. It’s a tiny, stripped-down browsing device with WiFi and Opera running on a Debian variant.

If Apple is working on a tablet computer, I wonder if it might follow the shuffle/mini line of thinking. Make it tiny, strip it down (no hard disk, no optical drive, no keyboard, etc) and make use of all the cool stuff that’s already floating around - video iTunes (vTunes?), Airport Express, HD everywhere. What have you got? Something perhaps a little bit like the Nokia 770; but also, as with the iPod shuffle and the Mac mini, entirely unlike anything any of us were expecting.

OK, enough crazed imagining. Normal, fact-based reporting will resume shortly.

What do you want from an Apple tablet? Do you want one at all?

The
Nokia 770 Internet Tablet
is a Linux based handheld device (stylus input).
At 230 grams, it is lighter than the 280 gram Sony Playstation Portable.
Its LCD screen is a bit smaller at 4.13 inches vs the PSP’s 4.3 inches.
It supports Bluetooth and both 802.11b/802.11g giving it a leg up on WiFi enabled PDAs that are 802.11b (at least the one’s I know about).

The embedded application list looks good: Web browser, playback support for most of the popular formats (AVI, MPEG1/4, MP3 3GP, WAV, Real, etc.), note & sketch pad, etc.

The only question is when (if) it will hit the shores I live on (vs. only being available in Europe and Asia as so many of the cool devices are) and how much it will cost.
If it comes in under $600 ($499 would be the sweet spot, I think), it is something I definitely would consider buying.

Got more info on the Nokia 770? Let us know.

A few years ago, using a Mac was an act of faith: every newspaper and magazine was claiming Linux would take over the market in a matter of months, that Windows mobile would simply make it impossible to use a telephone without relying on Microsoft software and that the low-end MP3/USB drives combo would make anything else outdated.

Somehow, though, people kept using their Macs, they kept using Open BSD on handhelds, some even switched to these platforms or embarked in even more esoteric choices. The iPod was at the time at the beginning of its career and started to be followed by an enthusiastic crowd… Why?

Despite my many attempts at finding a rational explanation, I must admit I still haven’t found one that satisfies me entirely. After all, these arguments about Mac OS X having a small market share, Open BSD not having an interface and the iPod lacking an FM tuner were all valid and it was sometimes hard to justify a choice.

Things fell into place when I sat up an IBM laptop for someone last week — a someone who has since switched to the Mac, a mere 3 days later — and realized that, despite the high-end designation of that machine, I still didn’t want to use it. It somehow, felt wrong, felt cheap. The plastics were nice indeed, the thing was not too poorly designed overall and I couldn’t really find anything wrong with it but it just didn’t click. The OS? Well, seeing an IBM boot screen followed by an Intel Inside one, then a DOS prompt and finally a Windows logo didn’t give a feeling of high consistency either — kinda like when you buy a jacket and realize that all the pieces are sewn together in different ways that won’t last past cocktail hour.

We have accepted there is such a thing as a luxury brand in cosmetics, leather goods, fashion. And we have even accepted that sometimes, investing in a luxury good is less expensive in the long run than purchasing junk in bulk — ask many men how much they invest in their shavers / blades / … and the reasoning behind it. So, how come we cannot accept this for computers and, generally speaking, electronics? Why do we need to dissect every device or every piece of software feature by feature, reducing them to a spec sheet that does not take into account the overall idea, the attention to detail that, in the end, make more difference than anything else?

Of course, I am not equating expensive with quality here. I would without doubt call some very expensive applications “cheap” and some open source projects “luxurious”, as it is the attention to detail and the quality of the craftsmanship that is of interest here, not the price tag. Regardless of price, there seems to be a very clear gap in the computing market today: There are the cheap brands that knock you over with tempting specifications but somehow keep producing products that won’t go anywhere and another group that cares about what it does and wants to use their tools for the best. Thanks to the work of many, we have made the internet a financially very democratic space (which I can only applaud) but it would be hasty to think we have put the divides of the past behind us.

Related link: https://www.irobot.com/consumer/scooba_sneak_preview.cfm

I’ve written before about my indispensable robotic floor vacuum, the Roomba Discovery. Now the folks at iRobot have a new product that is sure to get top billing in my letter to Santa this Christmas. It’s the Scooba — a robotic floor washer.

The timing of this announcement couldn’t have been better for me. My new place in Chicago is a loft-style condo, and it has plenty of wood floors that need cleaning. Our current Roomba does a good job of sweeping, but nothing beats a good scrubbing, and it looks like Scooba does that nicely. The demonstration movie at the Scooba website is woefully short, but the animation of how it works is convincing enough for me. I love that it cuts a clean, and dry, swath across the floor as it goes.

One-pass robotic mopping, now we’re talking 21st Century Living!

Can Rosie the Robot be that far behind?

The My Yahoo! personal portal has a couple of features in beta testing that you, like me, may have decided to try.
The two features I tried are: (1) Subscribing to RSS feeds on the personal page; (2) Creating a second page for My Yahoo.
I placed all the RSS feed lists on that second page.
This worked fine on my desktop.
However, when I tried to see this page of RSS feeds on my Yahoo Mobile personal portal on my phone or PDA, I was thrown to this URL and saw the screen below:

https://wap.oa.yahoo.com/raw?dp=myrssnws&act=lst&pt=0

This URL probably works ok if you have a single My Yahoo personal page.
However, if you created a second page like I did,
you need to change the pt value from 0 to 2 to see the page on your mobile device.

https://wap.oa.yahoo.com/raw?dp=myrssnws&act=lst&pt=2

If this works for you, bookmark this modified web address in your mobile browser so you can quickly see it after logging in to Yahoo on your mobile device.

Found any other Yahoo Mobile quirks?

There is something so irritating and pathetic about these «advertising sites» big hosts now put in the place of placeholder pages for domains that have been bought but somehow never used…

Last week, I was browsing the web looking for information on a band called «The Isotoners», which someone had introduced me to — my work requires me to gather as much information on as many topics I humanely can, so here I went Googling to my heart’s content. Somewhere on a site, I clicked on a link that had been misspelt and ended up on one of these advertising sites.

Note how sneaky these have become? The title page of that domain had automatically become “Everything about the Isotoners” and a quick lookup of the source code confirmed that, indeed, the page was customized depending on what words were to be found in the link I had followed to arrive there.

I was about to go back and shoot a friendly mail to the site’s webmaster when my attention was drawn to a very unusual promotional offer to purchase… Minolta supplies. What had Minolta to do with an independent New York-based band? And most of all, why was there, right below that offer to purchase bulk photocopier supplies an offer to rejuvenate my skin with some Paraben-infused lotion?

Oooo… Toner! But of course! Incapable of finding anything relevant for the word “Isotoner”, the site thought I wanted to buy “toner”. Then, incapable to decide which kind of toner, it proceeded to present me with offers related to both kind of toners… I appreciate the thought, of course, but given that these two are about as incompatible as one can get, I’m not convinced it was the best way to lure me into clicking onto a link…

Now, of course, there is an upside: I thought the mishap was so sad and funny at the same time I spent 10 minutes contemplating my very mixed feelings and completely forgot about being mad at the advertisers… ;^)

What about your advertising mishaps?

Related link: https://www.google.com/ig

Google seems to work pretty hard to make their web products mobile device friendly.
I noticed that GMail, for example, started working with my PDA’s and Smartphone’s browser a few weeks ago.
So, I decided to try the new Google personal homepage beta
on some mobile devices released in 2003 and 2004.
Here’s what I found…

• Dell Axim X50i Pocket PC running Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition.
  The page looks pretty good in the One Column reformatted mode. Thumbs up!
• Motorola MPx220 Smartphone running Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition.
  The browser errored out completely claiming the web page could not be found. Thumbs down.
• HP iPAQ 2215 Pocket PC running Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003.
  Windows Mobile 2003 does not have the One Column web page formatting option available in 2003 Second Edition.
  And, its Best Fit mode never really fit anything properly to the 240×320 screen.
  So, I had to perform a lot of horizontal scrolling in addition to vertical scrolling to see the page’s contents.
  Thumbs sidewards…
  

How does the Google personal home page look on your PDA or phone? If you test it on a Treo 650, LifeDrive, Nokia Series 60, Sony Ericsson, or any other mobile device, let us know how it works for you.

I’ve previously written about Insteon, a new home automation technology from the folks at Smarthome, Inc. As I said nearly a year ago, it holds a lot of promise because it’s the first technology that aims to supplant X10 by working with it, instead of replacing it. Personally, I think this is a good strategy since it allows established home automators to keep their investment in X10 going, while gently switching over to a more robust solution.

What makes Insteon appealing is that it’s wireless. While X10 technology cleverly piggy-backs its signals on your AC electrical lines, doing that has always been problematic because certain devices are known to “pollute” the power line with electrical noise. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Mr. ThinkPad Power Supply.) By moving the control signals over-the-air, devices should be more responsive and less prone to error.

The Insteon Starter Kit sells for $99 and includes a remote control, two lamp modules, and two repeaters that bridge your power line signals, which will improve the reliability of your old X10 devices too. What’s not included is a computer-to-Insteon interface, so at this point you’re really just making it more convenient to control the lights and not really automating them, but the Insteon SDK and interface was also recently released, so things in the software world should improve soon.

Perhaps at the Smart Homes session at WWDC we’ll have some more Insteon news to discuss. If you’re already an Insteon user, come by the session and share your experiences. I should also have an update about how I’m making out with another wireless automation contender, Z-Wave.

Does Insteon have what it takes?

The US$499 PalmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager with its 4GB integrated microdrive is stirring a lot of interest in the PDA world.
It doesn’t appear to be available for purchase quite yet, but there are a bunch of preview reviews available:

• bargainPDA: PalmOne LifeDrive Review


• Brighthand: palmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager Debuts


• First Look: PalmOne’s Lively LifeDrive

And, of course, you can also visit the
PalmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager product page.

Even a Microsoft Windows Mobile fan like me has to be at least a little interested in this new PalmOne offering.
Its integrated WiFi (802.11b) and Bluetooth (1.1) adds to its attraction to mobile multimedia geeks.
I’m a little surprised that it does not have an integrated digital camera given its marketing skew as a photo and video viewing device.

I wonder if its $499 price tag will have potential device consumers (like me) wondering whether something like an Apple iPod color with a 30GB (vs. 4GB) hard drive for $349 might be a better buy for listening to music and viewing photos (but not videos).
Or, if you want to watch video with millions of colors instead of the 65K colors available on the LifeDrive (or Pocket PCs for that matter), perhaps the Sony Playstation Portable is a better choice.

Nintendo’s announcement of its
Gameboy Micro
and the increasing popularity of micro-sized phones, MP3 players, and even digital cameras (see my
Canon Powershot SD200 review)
makes me wonder if anything larger than a mobile phone has mass appeal these days.

Buying a PalmOne LifeDrive? Let us know what PDA you use know and how the LifeDrive will change your daily PDA habits.

I’ve been working with Mac OS X Tiger since its release — at first on my developer machine, and now on my everyday production PowerBook. (You know, it just gets to a point where I don’t want to work in Panther anymore…)

There were a few gotchas in the first release of Mac OS X 10.4. A curious one was that my Tiger didn’t want to roam. I have two APs in my studio — an AirPort Extreme and an AirPort Express — and if I moved out of range of one and into range of another, Tiger would get lost. Fortunately, the Connection Doctor works very well and would get me reconnected quickly. BTW: I haven’t read much out there about the Connection Doctor, but it’s a very cool feature that deserves some praise.

Also, I had a cell phone version of a buffer overflow with iSync. When I synced my SE T637, iSync would try to upload every ToDo I had every written resulting in a full memory message. That was a bit frustrating.

Last night I downloaded Mac OS X 10.4.1 via Software Update, and have been using my Mac gleefully ever since. So far, the update has addressed the issues above, and everything else seems fine too. iSync works really well now, and it’s quite fast.

If you’ve been waiting for the first wave of bug fixes before upgrading to Tiger, it appears that the coast is clear. And I think you’re really going to like this release of Mac OS X.

(Side note for those already using Tiger: have you noticed that you can tell who has Tiger and who doesn’t by looking at their phone icons in iChat? Those with Tiger have layered phone icons representing the ability to group chat. Panther users still have the single layered icon.)

Oh, one other thing. This evening on Mac DevCenter we’re publishing a cool article on the new Migration Assistant. This tool will really help you make the jump to Tiger, whether as a single user or as a sysadmin for a group of Macheads.

The problem

Mail, also called “Mail viewer” (by developers) and Mail.app (by uh… many people including myself) is a wonderful little application on which many of us rely for our daily workflow. Mail 2.0, included in Tiger, is a big step forward from the previous versions and its many new features have been acclaimed by heavy users — including its new found love for search capabilities.

For some users, however, the upgrade hasn’t gone as smoothly as they hoped: seemingly lost mails, crashes and the inability to send or retrieve messages have lead them to think that Mail was no longer to be trusted. Luckily, the solution is usually one little step away.

The solution

In issues like these, there are often as many solutions as there are causes — pretty precise, uh? Generally speaking, though, the best way to start is to ask yourself what could potentially interfere with Mail, which includes haxies, bundles, services and enhancers of any kind. Should you have any applications of this kind running, you might want to follow these steps:

1. Quit or force-quit Mail, keeping in mind that force quitting it might cause some settings to be lost and could leave your mailbox indexes in a somewhat unstable state — Mail sometimes takes a long time to quit if you interrupt it in the middle of a server-related process, in which case patiently waiting is the best policy. Then, immediately backup your “Mail” folder, located in your “Library” folder.
2. Perform your
   
   regular maintenance
   
   steps, in order to ensure that no minor disk issue or permissions problem could interfere with your work. Sure, permissions issues have almost no chance to be, by themselves, the cause of a Mail problem but, as we are dealing with third-party installers here, it is better to be on the safe side.
3. Navigate to your various “Library/Mail” folders and remove any folders called “Bundles”. “Bundles” are commonly used third-party “hacks” that add functionality to Mail and, since the application first appeared, enjoy some kind of love-hate relationship with it — everybody knows they exist and work but nobody really says so officially.
4. Navigate to your various “Library/Services” folders and temporarily remove any third-party components you might see here. As services are constantly available from within your applications, a misbehaving service can cause unexpected trouble.
5. If all this remains ineffective, you can delete (at a later time) your various “Library/Caches/Mail” folders.
6. Update your Mac in order to ensure that you are using the latest available version of Mac OS X. Mac OS X v. 10.4.1, for example, improves Mail’s handling of misbehaving add-ons and plug-ins.

Once this is done, simply relaunch Mail and select your mailboxes one by one in the left hand side. For each one, use the “Rebuild” command of the “Mailbox” menu, which will force Mail to purge and re-create the indexes it keeps for the mailbox. Damaged indexes can lead to strange symptoms like “ghost” messages, messages that do not appear or general sluggishness — and while you are at it, try to delete as many attachments as you can (mail servers hate attachments) and ensure that you have purged any deleted messages from any POP server you might have.

Keep in mind that some of your accounts (such as Hotmail accounts) that are not natively managed by Mail and require third-party plug-ins might no longer work since the corresponding files have been removed. In that case, simply ask the developers whether an updated version is available and install it with caution. The best policy, of course, is to avoid these accounts or set them to “forward” any mail to an account you can check through officially supported standard methods but one does not always have the choice.

Should you have had issues with importing messages from your old installation, you can use the “Import Mailboxes…” menu item of the “File” menu in order to force the re-import of any potentially misbehaving mailboxes.

As you can see, these steps are pretty straightforward and basic. They should however help you work around most Mail-related issues and allow you to enjoy that great little application!

Have you found other troubleshooting techniques for Mail?

Related link: https://www.apple.com/macosx/features/automator/

A week has passed since my upgrade to Tiger, and I think I’ve found a new friend — Automator.

Hardly a day goes by without me thinking: “Hang on! Perhaps I could use Automator to whip up a simpler way of doing this!”

I’ve been really enjoying toying around with workflows, trying to find new ways of doing things. Or in some cases, new things to do. Nothing terribly complex or world-changing; in fact, usually very simple and basic. But useful.

“Examples, give us examples!” you cry. OK, here’s some:

Simpler weblogging

I try to post regularly on my weather weblog, Rising Slowly but find the process of grabbing images then resizing them to a specific width tedious and overly time-consuming. (In other words, I know it only takes a few seconds, but every time I have to do it I feel like it’s just that little bit like too much hard work. Hurrumph.)

So I created two workflows, one for turning an image dragged out of my browser into a 100×100 thumbnail, and another for resizing images dragged in the same way to 394 pixels wide.

As yet there are no actions for MarsEdit, the editor I use to maintain that particular site; but as soon as any appear, I can see both these workflows being further amended to make life even simpler.

Use Markdown in TextEdit

You may well have heard of Markdown, a chunk of Perl that does an excellent job of converting suitably-marked-up text into valid XHTML. I use it all the time in BBEdit (in fact, I’m writing this very post in this manner).

Using three very simple Actions, you can now make use of Markdown in a TextEdit document too: Get Contents of TextEdit Document -> Run Shell Script (point this to markdown.pl) -> Set Contents of TextEdit Document. Save in your Applescripts folder for easy access, any time.

One thing that has bothered me during all this noodling around in Automator, is that there’s no pre-installed Action along the lines of ‘Get contents of clipboard’. I keep wanting to use this in many of the workflows I play with, and if it existed then my Markdown example above could be used in all sorts of other text editors and word manglers.

With a bit more time, I might be able to sit down and make such an Action myself, but no doubt someone else has already created it, or will do so much sooner than I can.

What simple little workflows have you been cooking up? Or, what’s the craziest, longest, most complex workflow you’ve created?

Related link: https://www.believermag.com/issues/200505/article_newitz.php

For a few weeks now, I’ve been noodling around the idea of some kind of Eats, Shoots & Leaves meets Chicago Manual of Style cum writing style guide and technical publishing primer, all wrapped up into a collection of tips and tools under the banner of the Hacks series. I even mocked up my dream cover for the book I’d tentatively titled Syntax Hacks: Tips & Tools for Better Writing and Editing.

Though such a book ended up striking me as overly ambitious and more than a little bit daunting, and thus remained in the purgatorial state of an idea that exists in name only (I really liked the title, though I found myself forcing content into it that would really better suited by the more boring but more accurate title of Writing Hacks), it took a walk by my local comic book store to realize exactly how small time my idea actually was.

The cover of the May issue of The Believer (a magazine I’ve raved about elsewhere) caught my eye with a story on “DIY Semantics” by Annalee Newitz. The story inside, actually titled “The Conlangers’ Art” (excerpt available here) is given this description in the magazine’s TOC: “Over eight hundred Klingons and other inventors of language are overhauling the DNA of consciousness.” Now this is the description of a Syntax Hacks worth getting excited about (or humbled by, if you’ve been trying to fit more banal, pedantic content under the same rubric).

Why would you want to create your own language? Perhaps your goal is political and humanitarian, to allow people of different languages to form alliances and understand each other through an auxiliary language such as Esperanto. Perhaps you want to create an imaginary fantasy world to populate with a unique native tough, such as Elvish or Klingon. Whether they’re creating a computer scripting language, such as Perl; a langauge of which they’re the only speaker and chronicler, such as Doug Ball’s Skerre; or a perfectly logical language that removes all ambiguity, such as Lojban, Newitz argues that inventers of language share one crucial trait: they’re idealists.

So, for whatever reason (and, as I’ve briefly summarized, there are many), you’ve decided to create your own language. Exactly how do you go about doing so? In as droolworthy a centerfold as I’ve ever seen in an issue of The Believer (this is a magazine primarily devoted to book reviews, after all), Newitz outlines the steps necessary for creating your own language (she expands on each step with rich description in an eye-catching and nicely laid-out chart):

1. Pick a Syntax

2. Generate Phonological Features
3. Create a Lexicon
4. Make Your Own Writing System
5. Develop a Speaking Community
6. Determine How Your Conlang Will Handle Ambiguity
7. Contemplate Adding Emotional Markers to Your Language
8. Pick One: Artlang or Auxlang
9. Determine Whether Your Conlang Has a Political Purpose
10. Determine Whether Your Conlang Presupposes 2000 Years of Historical Development.
11. Pick a Name for Your Language and Post it Online.

Make each of these steps a chapter title and fill each chapter with hacks, and you’ve got yourself a more compelling Sytax Hacks than the one I’ve been noodling, though with an admittedly much smaller audience. If these steps, or the article I’ve inevitably done an injustice by summarizing too briefly, interest you, do check out the May issue of The Believer before it’s replaced on news stands by the June Music Issue.

Got a hack?

I feel moved to publicly declare my thanks to Brent Simmons for releasing NetNewsWire 2.0. Not only is it packed with plenty of well-designed features, it also makes one very important difference: it’s fast.

Since upgrading to Tiger, I’d noticed how slow and slumpy my older copy had got, but version 2.0 is extremely zippy.

And zippy in more ways than one. NNW now includes a built-in browser element (in common with many other RSS reader applications), which turns out to be impressively fast. There’s nothing quite like tearing through a long list of subscriptions, using NNW’s second-nature keyboard shortcuts to read, move on, and open for browsing.

Everything else is faster too; downloading feeds, and moving about between elements of the GUI. Great work.

I particularly like the use of the lower portion of the window for a handful of control widgets and info panels. This is where you can see the number of remaining unread items, or quickly change the stylesheet without opening up the prefs panel.

The selection of built-in stylesheets for displaying feeds is another impressive bit of work. Most of them are just plain functional, but the BeOS style made me laugh out loud, just for the sheer delight of seeing those quirky yellow window widgets all over again.

The NNW + MarsEdit software bundle is good value for anyone spending a lot of time reading and writing on the web. The only thing I’m waiting for now is an update for the latter, which still runs pretty slowly on my iBook. If MarsEdit’s future releases make it as fast as the new NNW, I shall be a very happy bunny indeed.

Your thoughts on NNW, or any other RSS reader

The security hole in Dashboard is a little wider, following some further investigation of the issues by Aaron Harnly and Rixstep.

Things start to go wrong if a user leaves Safari’s “Automatically open safe files” option checked.

If checked, it allows Safari to automatically download, unzip, and install a Dashboard widget on your computer.

But: widgets installed in this manner are put in your user widget directory, ~/Library/Widgets. The default widgets supplied by Apple are in the system widget directory, /Library/Widgets.

And: when Dashboard starts, it first loads up widgets in the system directory, then loads the ones in the user directory. There’s nothing to prevent one of the user widgets having the same bundle identifier as one of the default ones.

The upshot is that if someone were to ‘embed’ a malicious widget in a web page, it could be designed to call itself Stickies - over-riding the Apple-supplied Stickies widget with something else.

Simply by looking at the Dashboard widget bar, a user would have no way of telling the difference.

A series of screenshots on Aaron’s web page explains this very simply. It’s surprisingly easy for a potentially harmful widget to get into your computer, and for you to execute it regardless.

The Rixstep analysis goes one step further.

Imagine a mail message arrives from a friend, with an attached file. “I found this great Dashboard widget!” it says, “Try it out!”

User double-clicks. A widget is installed.

But: this widget has a plug-in. Which copies itself everywhere. Which delves into the Mail Delivery API and sends copies of itself to people in your Address Book.

Dashboard is supposed to ask the user if it’s OK to run a new widget for the first time. But that doesn’t always happen. Aaron puts it simply:

However — incredibly, amazingly, stupidly — Dashboard does not present a prompt before running a privileged widget that is one of the Library/Widgets folders, including our auto-installed widgets. So now your auto-installed replacement look-alike widget has complete access to your system, and could do nasty things like delete your home folder.

As I said a few days ago, I’ve been smugly telling every Windows user I know how much safer and secure my Mac is. Maybe I should just shut up.

Have Aaron and Rixstep found something we need to worry about? Or is this a storm in a teacup?

I frequently receive email asking questions regarding my favorite mobile platform: Microsoft Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Smartphone.
I usually answer these questions in a Q&A blog on my personal website. But, since the blogging modules on the web host I use have broken my blogs after a recent upgrade and since the information might be of interest to readers here, I thought it would be ok to respond to the question here.

Susan V. asks:

I am creating Excel Checklists using the form toolbar. The lists include a checkbox. I want to convert these files (such as saving as .csv files) so that the checkboxes still work on the PDA. Any ideas?

My Response:
Susan: I don’t know what kind of PDA you are referring to.
But, I will assume it is a Microsoft Windows Mobile based Pocket PC since most people associate me with that platform.
If this is the case, you will not be able to perform that kind of function using Pocket Excel.
Pocket Excel and Pocket Word are very small subsets of the full Microsoft Office applications you use on the PC.
Many functions are missing in the Pocket versions.
There are some third party spreadsheets for the Pocket PC that you can look at to learn if they provide the functionality you want.
You can find a list of these third party spreadsheets a Pocket Excel QuickFAQs page I maintain at:

MobileViews QuickFAQs: Excel

I also maintain a page of QuickFAQs that covers common desktop applications and their Pocket PC analogs (when available) at:

MobileViews: Where Is It for the Pocket PC QuickFAQs?

Is a spreadsheet the appropriate application?
I once heard a Microsoft Excel product manager joke that
Excel is the most widely used database in the world.
Excel is so powerful and widely available that many many people use it as a flat-file database when, perhaps, an actual database application may be more appropriate.
Looking at the brief description of your problem,
I wonder if this might be the case here too?
If so, you might want to refer to a blog I wrote here a while ago titled:

Pocket PC Access Database Alternatives (Missing Apps Part II)

• 
  DDH Software HanDBase.
  HanDBase is a simple database application I use nearly everyday on my Pocket PC.
  I wrote some how-to articles about HanDBase years ago.
  They still have information value today.
  You can find these articles listed at:
  
  Pocket PC How-To Articles
  
• 
  Ilium Software ListPro.
  ListPro has been part of my mobile toolkit since the old Handheld PC era.
  It does one thing and does it extremely well: Maintain lists.
  

Have some favorite productivity apps for the Microsoft Windows Mobile Pocket PC or Smartphone? Let us know here.

Related link: https://www.shapeofdays.com/2005/05/more_h264_demon.html

While we’ve all seen Chris Adamson’s work on QuickTime 7, Jeff Harrell has also done some amazing demonstrations of the H.264 codec. His explanation of the differences in encoding are some of the best I’ve read, and include side by side comparisons of Star Wars footage, as well as Saving Private Ryan and West Wing ripped at varying bitrate levels. It’s amazing how well this codec scales.

Better still:

When you increase the resolution by a factor of three, it’s common practice to increase the bit rate of the encoded file by a factor of three. So rather than this being a one-megabit-per-second clip, it’s gotta be a three-megabit-per-second clip, right?

Wrong. This clip, this one you see right here at broadcast resolution, is encoded at 768 kilobits per second. With audio — which you’ll notice sounds substantially better since I used the MPEG-4 AAC audio encoder — it comes to exactly 980 kilobits per second, or just hair over nine megabytes total. Yeah, I know. This file is bigger and smaller than the other clip. More pixels, fewer bits used to describe them.

Oh, I just can’t wait to see the Bit Torrent crowd get down with H.264. Just in time for Battlestar Galactica’s summer run, too…

What do you make of all this codec wonderousness?

Related link: https://www.cellphedia.com/

Cellphedia is an interesting graduate school project by Limor Garcia at Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU (where Clay Shirky teaches).
Limor describes her project this way:

I have created Cellphedia for the curious mobile phone community (which is almost all of us). It is an application that enables its users to send and receive up-to-date encyclopedia-type information amongst each other, on the go, through SMS. I call it: ‘The first ubiquitous social encyclopedia’.

I haven’t tried it myself, but it looks like an interesting project with practical considerations such as allowing participants to limit the number of SMS messages per day or not allowing messages for a specified time period.

What’s next for the mobile social networking world? Let us know.

Three days after installing Tiger, I’m starting to feel quite comfortable in the new environment. I’m glad I made the decision to upgrade, and I think on the whole things are slightly better and faster than they were in Panther. Here are some random notes and thoughts.

• Tiger runs pretty well on my 600MHz G3 iBook, with 640MB RAM. I’m surprised, but very pleased, that hardware this old can cope so well with a brand new OS. Anyone got Tiger running on any lower-spec machines?
• I took a long look around what Dashboard has to offer, and decided that most of the time, I simply won’t need it. There’s only a few widgets that I imagine I might use often, such as the world clock and the converter. But the information they provide is easier and faster to find with my web browser, which is always open and doesn’t require me to switch to a virtual desktop environment. It bothers me that widgets have to be viewed separately from everything else. And the security concerns have yet to be addressed.
• Spotlight has not ousted Quicksilver as my main file and application launcher. That said, I’ve been using both for different purposes, and think they work just fine together. I’ve found myself using Spotlight to find stuff I’ve created in the last few hours, things that Quicksilver hasn’t had a chance to index yet. Spotlight’s instant update is very nice.
• Automator is by far my favorite new feature. I’ve spent hours fiddling around, trying out ideas for new workflows. I’m really excited by the possibilities, especially once more third-party developers get round to releases their own Automator Actions.
• Camino seems to have slowed to a crawl, even though I’ve downloaded the latest stable release, 0.8.4. I’m back with Firefox again for the time being, it seems to be behaving itself.
• The Finder is working faster than in Panther, and Get Info panels are nice and swift (about time too!). As with Automator, I think Smart Folders are going to be really useful for me; so far, I’ve not spent enough time exploring them. I created one to find about a hundred photos scattered across my drive that had the wrong date (the camera had come back in time from the year 2016, just to take photos of that party!). That made it really easy to hunt down all the offending files and deal with them swiftly.
• I’ve not seen any system crashes, although a few apps have frozen unexpectedly. Nothing terribly troublesome, though.
• The Spinning Pizza of Doom is appearing more often than of late; I suspect this is something that will be dealt with in coming Tiger updates. Again, this has been occasional and not too annoying.

I consider my installation a ‘no frills’ one; I can’t get rid of Dashboard, so I just choose to ignore it for the time being. On this G3 machine, the eyecandy isn’t even very eye-catching, so I don’t need to bother with it. I’m happy with Tiger and look forward to watching it develop and grow over the coming year.

Happy with Tiger?

Last week, in the Washington Post’s Fast Forward column, reporter Rob Pegoraro took some pot-shots at Mac OS X Tiger in his column, “Mac’s Tiger Gives Panther Owners Little Reason to Pounce”. What you’ll find below is Rob’s original article, which I’ve annotated with my comments. With some things, Rob was accurate, and with others, he didn’t quite hit the mark. Read on…

Washington Post
FAST FORWARD

Mac’s Tiger Gives Panther Owners Little Reason to Pounce

By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, May 1, 2005; F06

Since the debut of Mac OS X in March 2001, Apple has been cranking out new versions of its operating system as if they were movie sequels. Its new OS X 10.4 release — which Apple also calls Tiger — took longer than any other OS X update and still showed up barely 18 months after its predecessor, Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.

This pace of updates can’t have been good for the sleep cycles of Apple’s developers, and it certainly has taken a financial toll on users who have kept up with them all. With a purchase of Tiger, $129 ($9.95 if you bought a Mac after April 12), the total bill for OS X updates tops $500.

Each of those earlier releases justified its price with added features and functions. Tiger should as well. But Panther is already very good on its own, while this release exhibits a few rough patches — meaning Tiger doesn’t quite have an immediate, must-buy-now appeal.

For one thing, it can’t be loaded on many computers that could run 10.3 — Tiger requires a Mac with a built-in FireWire port and 256 megabytes of memory. Given how halting and sluggish Tiger ran on a 256 MB Mac Mini, doubling the memory seems wise.

For another, while Tiger features some remarkably powerful capabilities, they’re not all provided in the most effective manner.

Tiger’s highlight is Spotlight. This search tool provides most of the capabilities of such add-on Windows programs as Google Desktop — except that Spotlight’s integration into the operating system lets it index your files as they change, not minutes or hours later.

It also makes Spotlight searches easier to start; click the blue magnifying glass <…snip…>

…icon in the top right corner of the screen or use the search form included in every Finder window and file dialogue box. It even pops up in the System Preferences window; instead of wondering which control panel affects what setting, just type what you want to do and Spotlight will find the right one.

Out of the box, Spotlight already indexes the contents of nearly every file on a Mac — e-mail messages, Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, PDF files, address-book entries, calendar appointments, digital music, and even comments embedded in digital photos. (Spotlight’s vocabulary can be expanded with downloadable plug-ins.)

But Spotlight is missing one of the most useful options of other desktop search utilities: the ability to index the contents of Web pages you’ve visited.

While Spotlight is Tiger’s most sweeping change, Dashboard is its flashiest addition. This array of small “widget” programs for such quick tasks as address and weather look-ups whooshes into view at the tap of a key, then whisks itself out of sight when you’re done. Tiger includes 14 widgets, with more offered online by Apple and others.

Apple’s three core Internet programs — Mail, the Safari Web browser and the iChat instant messenger — gain new roles in Tiger.

Mail now runs much faster, incorporates Spotlight searching and lets you create “smart mailboxes” that function like iTunes’ Smart Playlists, grouping messages by matching preset search terms. But the criteria available to build a smart mailbox are oddly limited; for example, you can’t have Mail show only unanswered messages. (You can create similar automatic-search folders in the Finder and in the Address Book program.)

Mail works outstandingly well with IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) accounts, but remains clumsy at managing more widely used POP (Post Office Protocol) inboxes. It also lacks the screening for fake “phishing” messages now offered by the Eudora and, soon, Thunderbird mail programs. Finally, the space-wasting, pointlessly quirky toolbar slapped onto Mail’s windows needs to go.

Safari’s major addition is support for the “news feeds” many Web sites publish; it usually finds them automatically, allowing you to subscribe to one with two clicks then easily sort through its headlines. A “Private Browsing” option ensures Safari will store no records of your use, handy if you’re borrowing a stranger’s computer.

But other parts of Safari now look a bit creaky. Although this browser will block pop-up ad windows, that option is turned off by default. Its notification of the secure encryption used at real financial sites (but not at the fakes set up by phishers) is way too subtle, compared with the obvious cues offered by Firefox and Opera.

Apple’s iChat instant messenger now allows group video conferencing, but you’ll need a high-end Power Mac desktop to host one.

A more consumer-relevant feature, support for the MSN and Yahoo IM networks, goes missing.

Tiger expands Panther’s limited parental-use controls with options to restrict a child’s online use to designated Web sites, e-mail addresses and IM chatters.

One of Tiger’s most promising components is easy to overlook. Its Automator program makes it drag-and-drop simple to instruct your programs to perform repetitive tasks. Not having to master programming syntax makes this a huge advance, although many programs can’t yet be orchestrated by Automator.

Tiger is prey to as many viruses and spyware attacks as Panther — none. But Apple missed a chance to augment OS X’s already strong defenses: When a program’s installer asks for an administrator’s password, Tiger still provides no details about what will happen next, leaving users to hope for the best.