Audio MIDI Setup is a pretty moldy corner, really. Click to see it in motion:
Even the question and button names at the end are worded in a way that conflicts with generally accepted Mac standards.
Archive for February, 2008
So I’m about five days into my free .Mac trial, and I thought I’d write up some thoughts.
I pay about $60 per year for 500 GB of storage and 5 TB of bandwidth from DreamHost. .Mac costs $100 per year. For that much, it should be really, really special. On a strictly numerical level, DreamHost beats .Mac. Now, it’s true that DreamHost’s reputation for reliability has taken a beating the last year or so, but for $6 per month I can accept a few days per month of down time. And it’s nowhere near that bad; it seems to be less than one evening every month or two.
So that leaves a comparison of features. Now, actually there’s very little overlap between the two. .Mac offers a bare minimum of traditional web hosting features, with low bandwidth and storage, and few of the more dynamic features such as SQL and PHP. DreamHost offers huge bandwidth, huge storage, and lots of dynamic features.
As a traditional webhost, DreamHost wins hands down. But .Mac offers a lot that DreamHost doesn’t.
Apple lists the features of .Mac as Web Gallery, Website Hosting, IMAP email, Back to My Mac, Sync, iDisk, Groups, Backup, and 10 GB storage. There’s also easy publishing with the iApps. The webmail interface shames DreamHost’s webmail, but I download all my email anyway. The most useful-looking features are syncing and Back to My Mac.
Back to My Mac doesn’t work at all for me. There’s no errors, no feedback at all — it just isn’t there where it’s supposed to be. I’ve done a bit of research on this, and I expect it’s because my NAT doesn’t support the features Back to My Mac needs. But this is really just a guess, since there’s no feedback at all.
At first glance, syncing seemed to work for me. But then I ran into an odd problem: The sync created duplicates of a bunch of smart mail boxes. No problem, though: Delete them, reset up to .Mac. It’ll propagate to the other computers, right? Well, it turns out that’s a bad assumption. It worked to a point, but then one of the other computers just adds them again. I’d basically need to delete them from both computers simultaneously in order to get rid of them. No problem, I’ll just use Back to My Mac.
Oh, wait. That’s not going to work.
Well, maybe I’ll check out .Mac in another few years. But for now, I can’t imagine spending $100 on it. I want something that takes the gremlins out of a multi-machine existence, rather than adding bigger, more annoying ones. I feel like I started with a mogwai and .Mac fed it after midnight. Maybe if I was a bigger webmail user or wasn’t comfortable setting up things like WordPress it would be more interesting, but I’m not that guy.
Asus is probably going to have some explaining to do to Apple. The conversation might go like this:
Apple: So, you’re manufacturing our products.
Asus: Yeah.
Apple: And now you’ve produced a rip-off of our Mac mini.
Asus: It’s not a rip-off. We’ve got 802.11N.
Apple: It’s also more expensive, bigger, and slower.
Asus: No! Well… yeah. But it also has this really great pen holder!
Apple: Yeah, uh, we noticed that.
Asus: We’re patenting that idea, so don’t even think of stealing it.
Apple: You don’t have to worry about that.
Asus: Pen goes in, pen comes out! So easy!
(Thanks to Daring Fireball for the link.)
Back in October, I decided to run Google AdSense ads on my site. I wasn’t expecting a lot of money, but I was hoping to see enough for the site to pay for its hosting.
Unfortunately, AdSense isn’t going to do it.
I added AdSense on October 20, 2007. On November 7, 2007 it broke $1. On November 21, 2007 it broke $2. On November 24, 2007 it broke $3. On December 5, 2007 it broke $4 and hit $4.26. It hasn’t moved again since. That’s over two months.
I wondered at first if I’d broken something. I refreshed all the AdSense code, and even expanded the number of ads I was serving. Nothing. Since December 5, 2007 I haven’t seen a penny.
Oh, sure, maybe it will get better, but it isn’t going to get that much better. Maybe I could reasonably expect to see a hundred dollars by the time my boy wants higher education (he’s nine months old now), but I don’t think it’s worth looking at the ads (and their ever-decreasing quality) until then.
And so it comes time to bid AdSense farewell. It was a compromise that simply wasn’t worth it, but I’d like to think I learned something from the experience. Although other than AdSense doesn’t work, I’m not sure what that would be.
In addition to the Time Machine security issue I reported (radar link)1, Apple has also fixed Time Machine being almost unusable on my Core Solo Mac mini due to poor graphical performance (radar link). Prior to 10.5.2, the star field animation was too taxing for the little guy. With 10.5.2 and the Leopard Graphics Update, it zips along at a perfectly respectable rate while leaving my Mac responsive enough that I can select files without needing something to keep me busy between clicks.
Unfortunately, Apple has not fixed the problem where the Leopard’s new (and totally awesome) menu search can point to the wrong problem (radar link). Still, at least the arrow is close enough. I love this feature.
Two out of three is pretty good, especially considering the one left unfixed is relatively minor.
The bugs that were flagged as duplicate also seem to be fixed. Sadly, my biggest Finder pet peeve (radar link) is still present (click the image to see it demonstrated in a QuickTime movie):
I’m pretty sure this one predates Leopard.
I’m one of those who thought that 10.5, even with its bugs, was a better OS choice than 10.4. However, with 10.5.2 I can finally recommend 10.5 without even a hint of reservation.
- You won’t be able to follow this link; it’s in case anyone from Apple stumbles across this post and wants to look up these bugs. See rdar:// urls over at the red shed if you’re interested in this. [↩]
Red Robin made good today for their taunting me with a contest I could probably win but can’t enter, sending me a coupon for free onion rings. That might sound lame, but Red Robin’s onion rings are not exactly cheap and are a wonderful thing. In fact, they’re my favourite thing at Red Robin. If I could, I’d buy that dip in bulk and dip everything in it. Yes, even my morning oatmeal.
I know it’s because someone complained, and they realized that this would cost them nothing and be a nice gesture to offer that to everyone they taunted. But still, it’s funny to imagine them noticing my complaint, going through my bills and figuring out what I’ve ordered the last three times I came in. “Hey, look! We can get away with giving him onion rings, and he’ll order two entrees!”
Yeah.
Anyway, thanks Red Robin. I’ll probably use the coupon next week to take my wife out, so it will pay off for you.
Interesting look at iPhone application development. Although there’s probably a few wrinkles we haven’t heard about yet, it’s reasonable to expect the basics will be the same when the SDK is released. (via Daring Fireball)
I’ve written before on bad update mechanisms, but it’s worth noting that Firefox has the worst.
After several clicks and long waits, I finally made it to this screen:
And things just stopped there.
It’s a good thing I had Safari so I could, like, browse the web.
You can go ahead and blame sqlite manager if you like, since it was probably that website that was down. However, it was Firefox’s development team that made the decision that updates should block, require multiple clicks and application restarts to install, and not have a useful Cancel button. The server being down merely made things slightly worse.
Apple claims to have fixed the issue where applications could run automatically out of a Time Machine backup. Look for CVE-2008-0038 in Apple’s About the security content of Mac OS X 10.5.2 and Security Update 2008-001 .
Thanks to Apple for mentioning me. I certainly would have reported the bug regardless, but it’s a nice bonus.
The only thing I wish had happened differently was an earlier acknowledgement from Apple that they realized what I was describing and agreed it was a security problem. I didn’t find out Apple considered it a problem until January 22nd, when they asked how I’d like to be credited for discovery. Most of that time I wondered if I should file more details in an attempt to convince them it really was a problem.
Note: I’m saying “claims” only because I haven’t installed the update and verified the fix yet. I have no reason to disbelieve Apple. 
About a year ago, I filled out a customer comment card for Red Robin. It gets me some email newsletters, but few enough that it doesn’t really bother me. I saw no real increase in spam, so I don’t think they sold my email adress to anyone.
The card did ask for an address, which I filled out dutifully. And, of course, this was a Canadian restaraunt. I’m a Canadian citizen. My adress is a Canadian address.
So, naturally, Red Robin is now sending me information on a contest available to US citizens only.
Congratulations, Red Robin. That’s how easy it is to lose someone’s good will. Nothing but nothing says you simply couldn’t care less about not abusing your email list than sending out an email like that.