One day, though. Maybe.

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.

We have multiple testing checklists that need to be followed, and items checked off, every build we’re seriously testing. I could go into a whole rant about these lists, but I think everyone who’s seen them (and especially had to use them) would agree with me on it. At the moment it has to be done, and that’s it.

Microsoft Word for Windows handles these with ease. It’s only when they’re brought over to my PowerBook that they start to cause problems.

The spinning wait cursors abound as I try to work with this document. A lot of it is caused by the documents being in Page Layout mode. Switching to Normal mode fixes this, but I hate Normal mode. It confuses me why I’d have to use it, considering how responsive Word for Windows is, even in Page Layout mode. Still, I can put up with this.

More significant, though: I fill this form out by repeating the formatting change that checks an item on the list. Sometimes I apply it to the wrong line, and then it’s time to Undo. Undo has about a 70% chance of crashing Word. Not every use of Undo, but just undoing this particular formatting change.

Seriously.

How did this ship? And how did Microsoft manage to release roughly ten minor updates to Microsoft Word without ever fixing this? Does the Mac team at Microsoft use Word on Windows for all their large documents? Are the Mac team at Microsoft perfect people who never use Undo? That’s a trick question. If they were perfect, Undo wouldn’t crash. (Not that I expect perfection. I can’t attain that myself, after all.)

This seriously, seriously sucks. It’s cost me serious amounts of time. What good is software that crashes all the time? Why do people – including me – keep paying for products like this?

“Programs that crash have been proven to be less useful than those that don’t.” — Apple Technote #117

My wife has recently taped the end of her PowerBook’s power adapter. She also added toothpicks, more tape, and so on. The plug just kept growing. On the weekend, I decided to peel off all the junk to see what she was hiding.

I am not joking: The thing sparks almost continuously. Snap, snap, snap, snap. I unplugged it and hid it away, and went to the local Apple dealer (Simply Computing – highly recommended, even if their website is a bit lame). They’re out of stock on the adapter, and Apple’s apparently back-ordered. But they had a third party adapter, which brings us to the main topic of this post.

Newer’s 65 Watt Power Adapter was about $20 less than Apple’s power adapter at Simply Computing. It lacks a safety ground and a recharge ring light, but has heavier-duty cabling between the adapter and the laptop. And not only does it have sturdier cabling, it has a sturdier PowerBook connector. I don’t think I’m ever going to have to bend the outer ring on the plug back into shape.

I have no serious regrets about this purchase. The only regret I have is that I’ve since found out I can probably get the Apple AC adapter replaced under warranty. But that’s mostly cool with me; it’s good to have spares.

First, I tried the Mac. Connecting the device did nothing. Pushing the button on the device did nothing. A search of Canon’s website revealed a driver, but the installer seems to have been written by rabid monkeys. Eventually, I discovered how to make the installer work (you need to already be running on an admin account, because it doesn’t know how to authenticate) and restarted, to find… still nothing.

So after a few minutes of that, I decided to try to install on my Windows desktop. This worked a little better right from the start, as Windows at least noticed there was something there. I had to download a driver from Canon’s website and use some trickery to install it, but a few minutes later the scan button is launching Picasa2.

Verdict: Canon’s installers suck. Completely on Mac, almost completely on Windows.