We're now officially an all-Mac household, as many of you know. Bubbles has been gleefully playing with hew new MacBook Pro, I'm typing this entry on mine, and we've still got an old G5 sitting under my desk upstairs.

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Hey, Mac users? Learn from my mistakes:

Office for Mac 2008 is very cool. I highly recommend the upgrade. Except:

If you use a program like EndNote or Adobe Acrobat that includes a plug-in, that plug-in will break entirely when you upgrade. The plug-in relies on a tech called VBA that Office 2008 no longer supports.

The vendors are working on Office 2008-compatible solutions, but it's going to be awhile. In the meantime, leave a copy of your old Office on your machine for occasional use.

Otherwise, you will be working one Saturday and discover that you have two choices:

1. Retype and reformat over 90 references for a paper you're working on, and for all the subsequent papers you may write in the future.

-or-

2. Uninstall Office 2008, reinstall Word 2004, reinstall 5 separate patches, reinstall the add-ins, reinstall Office 2008 over top of it all. Takes about an hour per machine on a DSL connection.

Not that I'm annoyed or anything.

I'm sick and tired of having to look this up every time. You probably don't care; this is about 90% for my own use.

Firefox by default doesn't allow keyboard access to form fields and text fields, which I find annoying as hell. Workaround:

1. In the address bar, type "about:config" (without the quotes)
2. Right-click anywhere on the page (or Ctrl+Click on OSX), select New, and then select Integer.
3. Call the new preference "accessibility.tabfocus" (without the quotes)
4. Set the preference to 3.

This will put text and form fields into the tab order in a Firefox window, so you'll be able to get to them using the keyboard only.

Thank you, drive through.

- If you're using Firefox 2.0.0.5 or earlier, you should upgrade. One of the security gurus finally talked them into fixing a major security hole they've had lying around for awhile.

- It's Patch Tuesday over at Microsoft. Hopefully you've got automatic updates turned on, so you'll get everything you need anyway. If not, get busy and start downloading. Particular products of note this time around are Windows Vista, every flavor of Excel, and Mac Office.

- I've been using Macs for a couple years now, and I love them, but I've always griped about their lack of keyboard access. I don't want to use a mouse if I don't have to, especially on a laptop.

Enter Quicksilver. I have no idea how I lived without it this long. Quicksilver is a launching program that allows to very quickly and easily launch programs, documents, web sites, macros, and system functions using just a fast keyboard shortcut. Trust me: if you're at all a power keyboard user, once you've been using this for awhile, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

- Of the Mac-compatible web browsers, Safari loads web pages faster and is arguably simpler to use. What keeps me on Firefox is the add-ins, especially NoScript, which is one of the few tools that lets you browse the web relatively safely.

The third-party developers are trying. I spent part of today playing around with a tool called SafariStand that uses a not-very-documented way to hack Safari into providing a more customized and safer web experience. Good stuff, but it's a hack, and it has all the bugs you'd expect. Hopefully Safari 3 will be better.

All opinions worth exactly what you're paying me for them. Thank you, drive through.

Ever wonder how the guys who develop the first games for a new game console get their work done? After all, there's a chicken-and-egg problem here. Consider the XBox 360 in oh, say, 2004, a year before it shipped to customers. Microsoft can't release the console until there are some games available, but it's hard to write games when you don't have the hardware.

Answer: Microsoft took some then-top-of-the-line PowerMac G5s, installed an early version of the XBox operating system, and sent them to the game developers. Here's a picture. They were called Xenon Development Kits, after the XBox 360's code name.

Why Mac G5s and not Windows boxes? The developers needed the hardware, especially the core CPU, to match the new XBox 360 plans as closely as possible. The core CPU of an XBox 360 is a PowerPC processor, not an Intel like most Windows machines.

G5s, like all older Macs, use a PowerPC processor. Microsoft simply dropped its own operating system on it and voilâ: you had a sort-of-hardware platform that the game developers could use. (This wouldn't work now. The modern Mac Pro uses an Intel chipset, like a Windows machine.)

This worked as a stopgap until the game developers had a few XBox 360 units to test. At that point, the G5s were useless. The developers, of course, wanted to work with and test on the real console.

Imagine, then, that you're a Microsoft games admin, trying to figure out what to do with all of these G5s. You can't reuse them at work, because for the most part Microsoft doesn't use Macs. (And the one group that does has an office about 800 miles away.) Now what do you do with all of that hardware?

Easy: you reinstall Mac OS X on the G5 and sell it at cost to somebody at work. If they don't want it, they can always resell it.

That's how I acquired a used G5 earlier this year for $300. The Xenon Development Kit stickers were still intact when I bought it.

Of course, when you buy used hardware, there's no warranty. And if you buy used hardware that's been thoroughly beaten up by game developers trying their best to max out the limits of what the hardware can achieve, and the hardware is at least three years old, you're definitely asking for trouble.

About $1300 later, that G5 has a new motherboard, a new CPU, new memory, and a new cooling fan. Hopefully it'll keep working this time. *knocks wood*

Was it worth it? Hell yes. A new Mac Pro would cost me $2500. That's a little steep for a box designated mainly for use as a desktop Internet machine and music server.

Hey, LJ is back. It says something about my afternoon that I didn't notice it was down.

Meanwhile, for those interested in even more ways to connect up with people and waste some time, I can now be found on Twitter and Pownce:

http://www.twitter.com/waysofseeing/

http://pownce.com/waysofseeing/

I don't guarantee that I'm going to stay on Pownce terribly long, but I like Twitter. Hello, microblogging! The trick, I've found, is to stay away from that terribly seductive and utterly time-wasting Public Timeline and stick with the folks you know.

I'm evolving a theory that part of the reason all of my computers have a habit of randomly hanging with no notice is that Firefox (or one of the extensions I'm running) has a lovely little memory leak.

So I'm swapping to Safari for a while to test this theory. Any undocumented features or potential quirks I should know about?

ETA: Or, maybe the chips are just getting too damned warm.

Y'know, I used to really like the Hewlett-Packard all-in-one fax/printer/copier/scanners, but at this point I'm not sure I'd buy another one. The one we've got (a Photosmart 2610, if you're interested) has been a pain in the keister since the day we bought it.

For one thing, it installs several hundred megabytes of badly designed shovelware onto your system. For another, the drivers are extremely buggy, both on the Mac and the PC. For a third, the print quality isn't that great and it eats printer ink like a Hummer eats gasoline.

The latest, which I just wasted an hour and a half investigating, is that if you try to upgrade OS X 10.3.9 to 10.4.10 with the Photosmart drivers installed, after the upgrade is complete you'll crash every time you try to print anything from any program to any printer. The workaround is to remove or rename hpImaging.framework from /Library/Printers/hp/Frameworks, which allows OS X's print dialog to work just fine but kills your ability to print to or work with the Photosmart.

I'm going to try cleaning off and reinstalling the Photosmart drivers and software later, but I don't have high hopes.

Technology: useful, but frequently annoying.

I've been griping lately a bit about my old Motorola Razr. It's a lovely phone, but it's a few years old now, and it was starting to develop what my mother charmingly refers to as "character." Random crashes and hangs, dropped calls, you name it.

So my wife, being a very nice person, bought me a new phone, a Razr v3xx. More or less the same phone as before, with a newer OS and a slightly better camera. I got a headset out of the deal as well.

I use my phone for five things, more or less:

- Phone calls, naturally.
- Text messages.
- Reading (and occasionally sending) e-mail.
- Games.
- Keeping track of my calendar.

The phone and text messages work fine. Not sure about the games yet. I'm getting the ever-useful error message "A general error occurred" when I attempt to download them. E-mail works, sort of: the phone OS is Microsoft-Vista-like in the number of times it pops up and asks if you want to allow a data connection to GMail. That's partly a "security" fix and mostly Cingular's attempt to cripple the ability for people to use their phone to connect to services Cingular doesn't like, such as Google and Skype.

The calendar function isn't working for me at all. That's because Mac OSX doesn't support synching with this model of phone. There's a hack available online to allow synching of address book contacts, but it doesn't work with the calendar.

The only known way around the problem is a ferociously complex hack involving synching your calendar from your Mac to Google and then from Google to your phone via another third-party piece of software.

*growl*

I'm debating whether to return the phone and start over or hang onto it and hope that Apple will release a fix for the synching issue with their upcoming Leopard OS.

I have two Macs, a PowerBook laptop and an old G5 tower workstation that I bought used off of some friends last spring. Normally the laptop is my day-to-day machine, while the G5 is my music server and writing workstation.

I'm going to be doing a lot of work in my home office this summer and was counting on having the G5 up and running.

Unfortunately, after all those weeks where my laptop was in the shop, the G5 apparently decided that it hadn't gotten enough attention lately. It's now in the shop while the techs try to figure out why it now hangs almost immediately after boot. (I'd thought it was a memory problem, but replacing the DIMMs didn't solve the issue.)

*sigh*

Hopefully it'll be a quick repair.

Since I have been a completely whiny bastard all week, I would like to make it known that I am composing this LiveJournal post on my own Thalassa, my PowerBook, which is back up and running with all its data intact.

"Thanks very much, and we hope never to see you again," said the woman in the service department.

By next week I have every hope that I will have returned to my normal state of sanity.

Laptop update:

The "drive" failure was, apparently, a failure in what the guy at the store called a "flex cable": the cable that connects the hard disk to the motherboard. They're going to recheck, but they don't think there was any physical damage to the hard drive itself at all.

The shop says they have most, if not all, of my data backed up. They're waiting on a new flex cable. In theory I may be able to get my laptop back tomorrow afternoon.

::angels singing::

HA-lelleujah
HA-lelleujah
Hallelujah, hallelujah
HA-le-eh-lu-JAH

::angels disappear::

Lessons learned:

1. Backups are cheap. Replacing software and music is not.

2. NEVER let the Apple Store replace a hard drive. They might have noticed that the problem was the flex cable when they opened up the machine--or not. If they hadn't I would have a brand new hard drive and a shit sandwich.

3. When the materials for the class you teach are technology-based, make sure you have a backup in case the technology dies.

The guy behind the Apple store genius bar pronounced a set of words you never want to hear: "Um, I can't even find the hard drive."

I think--I hope--that the wail immediately following that pronouncement was only in my head.

The Apple store guy offered to have it replaced, but explained that by corporate policy they don't attempt to retrieve data and won't give me the old hard drive back. So I walked up the hill to the Mac Store and handed over my laptop and a big fat chunk of my last paycheck. They promised to get me a working laptop, hopefully with at least some of the old hard drive data.

I gave the poor thing a little pat on my way out the door. It was all I could do.

Yeah, I've got a backup of the vital stuff, the research and the teaching materials and the creative writing. If I have to rebuild from scratch, I can. But my music, my software, my bookmarks, and a whole bunch of other things I'd rather not rebuild were all on that laptop too. I'd really like it back.

Thank God for free library web access.

The next time some Mac snob wants to laugh and chortle about the infamous (and long removed) Windows blue screen of death, I will now have ample ammunition to tell said snob to stick it. For lo, I have now experienced:

The Macintosh OSX Grey Screen of Death.

Ph34r teh 6r3y D34+h, n00b.

Fortunately, my poor laptop (Thalassa to her friends) started having issues last night: hanging software, forced reboots. So I quickly grabbed a latest-and-greatest copy of all of my documents, including the research work for UW and the couple of book projects I'm working on. That was wise, since when I woke up this morning I couldn't get Thalassa to boot at all.

Damn.

I think it's a crapped out volume index on the hard drive, which should be rebuildable with the right tools. We'll see what the guys at the Apple Store Genius Bar have to say this afternoon.

The shortest SF story in the world, by some long-anonymous writer Frederic Brown, goes like this:

The last man in the world sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door.

The second shortest SF story in the world has now been produced by skzbrust, and I love him for it:

The last computer in the world sat alone in a room. The spam blocker activated.

On that note, I'm going for a walk.

(Thanks for the writing credit, morganminstrel)

While cleaning out one of my computers at work, I found a cobweb-infested, slightly moldy set of files that had been hanging around since the late 90s. They include, but are not limited to:

• an ad for an "important home video" explaining how the failure of all computers worldwide on Dec. 31, 1999 would herald the End Times and Christ's second coming


• an infamous home video shot by a motorcycle rider dodging through Paris traffic at speeds up to 150 MPH for almost ten minutes


• a South Park parody of the Star Wars Episode I trailer


• a sound file of someone saying, "Silence, you ninny"


• enough random Babylon 5 stuff to fill an Earthforce cruiser

...plus a pile of other incredibly random crap.

To keep or not to keep, that is the question.

Science is fun, especially when you can work the phrases "killer kangaroos" and "demon ducks of doom" into a serious report on paleontology. Only in Oz.

In other news:

I've frequently been accused of paranoia, usually by my wife.

Well, yeah. It's what I'm paid for.

But in the spirit of "it's not paranoia if they're really out to get you," here are some everyday things you're not worried enough about.

I can read your e-mail. So can everybody else. I don't need to take over your computer or your account to do it, either.

There's a type of program called a 'packet sniffer' that lets me look at Internet traffic going by for things that interest me. Your e-mail qualifies. There are people out there who are collecting every e-mail that goes by looking for things that interest them, and they don't necessarily work for three letter agencies.

Your keyless entry remote will be mine. The latest new realm for hackers is a set of frequencies collectively called RF, which is used for things like garage door openers, keyless entry, alarm fobs, etc.

There are hackers working right now on copying and mimicking specific RF signals. That means that once they've captured the signal for, say, the alarm for your car, the hacker can unlock your car just by pushing a button.

Incidentally, RF is the core technology for another tech called RFID, which is a tiny RF broadcaster that sends out a unique ID number. RFID tags can be added to a passport, sewn into clothing or implanted into pets or humans.

RFID is a new way to uniquely identify a person or an object from a short distance away. Remember that bit in Minority Report where the stores called out personalized ads to Tom Cruise? RFID tags can let stores do that. The future is almost now.

Of course, if I can copy your shirt's unique ID, I can be your shirt. (Why I'd want to be your shirt, I'm not sure.) More to the point, if I copy your passport's RFID, I can be you.

Internet-based phones are completely insecure. Seriously. I saw a demonstration recently by a guy who had captured every word of every Internet phone call made from the entire University of Michigan campus over a short period of time on his laptop hard drive. The only exception I know of is a new technology called Zfone.

So, what can you do about it?

• Don't use e-mail for anything that must be protected. Credit card numbers, passwords, etc. should never be sent over e-mail. Use an HTTPS connection, or the phone. If you're sending a private document over e-mail, add password protection, or put it in a password-protected ZIP file.


• Don't rely on key fobs and remote controls as protection. Don't leave valuables in your car. If you've got a house alarm, consider ditching the remotes. For your garage, leave your car locked, and don't leave anything irreplaceable in the garage.


• Watch what you say on Internet phones. They're cheap, and they're useful, but use the same rules you'd apply if you were talking to someone in a crowd of people.

Don't you just love my chosen profession?

Remember this cool picture?

For a lark, I tried using this as a desktop background on my work computer.

That worked well until I accidentally left the workstation locked and the monitor turned on overnight. When I came in this morning, the screen had permanent fuzz-lines corresponding to the sharp colors in the image.

Well, crap. I didn't even know you could burn in an LCD screen.

Hang on a second, I thought. You can't. LCDs aren't CRTs. There aren't any electrons being shot continuously at a phosphor screen.

So I consulted teh Intraweb. It turns out LCDs suffer from something called "image persistence," essentially their version of screen burn-in. Unlike CRTs, unless it's an extreme case, it can be cured. Steps:

1. Turn the brightness down.
2. Set the screen to all white for awhile.
3. Turn the monitor off for awhile.

Worked like a charm. Now I just need to find a decent screen-saver for this monitor.

LiveJournal, along with most of the major bloggers, allows you to specify whether you want to allow your posts to be indexed by search engines. Several bloggers are starting to point out that Google's new blog search beta doesn't respect that preference. All of your LJ posts are up there whether you wanted them to be indexed or not.

That's a bad behavior. Google should fix it. They likely won't; they're more concerned with complete search results than privacy, and they'd have to rebuild their entire index from scratch.

The lesson here, though, is that you can't stop your blog from being indexed. You can express a preference not to be indexed, but search engines can and do ignore it. Even if Google changes their behavior, somebody else won't.

So: if you don't want your ex to know where you live or what you're up to, or you're hiding from your creditors, or you just don't want to be searchable: be careful what you write in public entries.

This has been a PSA from your local privacy geek. Resume whatever it was you were doing.

EDIT: Well, huh. I lied. Google also indexed one of my private (i.e. friends-locked or you-locked) posts on LJ.
Admittedly, LJ's security is trivial, but I wonder how they're getting around it anyway.

EDIT #2: LiveJournal says they're fixing it. My point still obtains. Google may end up playing nice, but not every search engine will.

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.

It was one of the oddest features of an odd house. In the daylight basement, between the half bath and the furnace room, there was a 'blank spot,' an area that should have been part of a room, but wasn't. It was as if a piece of the floor plan had mysteriously vanished.

One day I tapped on the wall in the bathroom. I heard an echo. The space behind the wall was completely hollow.

Hm.

Eventually I got fed up and took a Sawzall to the hollow wall, carving a hole about four inches square at eye height. Feeling a bit like Indiana Jones of the Suburbs, I took a flashlight, blew away some leftover particleboard dust, and peered in.

I was looking at what had once been a shower stall. The shower lining had been completely removed, exposing the wooden walls. Part of the plumbing was still visible, though the taps had long since vanished. The tile floor of the shower was mostly intact, and looked like it dated from the very early 60s.

So far, no surprises. But then my flashlight found a large rectangular object, sitting on what had once been the floor of the shower stall.

It was a Compaq server, an old one, one of the first dual-procs. It wasn't plugged in and wasn't hooked up to anything. It couldn't have been hooked up to anything; there was no access to wiring. There was no monitor, no keyboard, no peripherals at all. Just the server, walled up in a shower stall not on any floor plan. The cask of Compaq.

Reconstruction: the previous owners of the house had planned to rebuild the shower, but never gotten around to it. When they sold the house, they took the cheap and easy approach, and simply threw up a wall to close off the unfinished shower.

Around the same time, they realized they had a server they couldn't use, couldn't sell, and didn't want to move. So, they dropped the server in the shower just before they walled it up. No harm, no foul.

I hired someone to pull the wall down and get the shower working again. When they did, they pulled out the server and gave it to me. It stayed down in the basement. We had running bets with friends over the data that was stored on that server - drug records? Mob accounting? Brothel bookkeeping? - but I never got around to hooking up a monitor and finding out.

Finally H got fed up. Get this damn thing out of the house, she said.

So I did. It got dropped off at the PC Recycle place with a pile of other hardware.

I felt a twinge as I dropped it off at the recycle area. Now I'll never know what was on that server.

Having thought it over, I think I prefer it that way.

I like to imagine that the last hard drive in the stack contained the location of Jimmy Hoffa's grave, a definitive digital photo of Sasquatch, and a detailed blueprint of how to build a quantum gravity drive for interstellar travel. It's more fun that way.