Kedar's Log, Stardate 2010

Having said what I said about my breakup with Ms Windows and a new relationship with Ms Mac, let me just say now, in all fairness, that I do appreciate some things about Ms Windows now that were more right than wrong.. that doesn’t mean I am not going steady with my new soulmate, no, on the contrary I have totally committed myself to ‘her’ now. This is same as my iPhone rant.. you gotta love it but sure, it is not perfect – kinda’ thing. So don’t think I am trying to get out of this!.. not yet There are more things here that I like or am interested in than I hate..

1. Windows Explorer rocks (the views especially). The Finder views in Mac are plain useless. No hierarchical view, not sure whose idea was the column view ‘coz it sucks so bad. The thumbnail view is stupid and unusable. Here is the thing, you can’t go into thumbnail view and select a few files to copy!

2. Windows Alt+Tab is much better than Mac (sure they have Spaces and all that fancy stuff but the basic Command+Tab is really not done right). The Mac Command+Tab does not show all ‘instances’ of an application, say you have 10 Firefox windows open, you will see only one icon for Firefox. So if you want to switch, you either have to search in the task bar or use Spaces.

3. Mac OSX releases a JDK version with its own release so you can’t just pick a JRE/JDK from java.com and use it on your Mac. How stupid is that.. apparently Mac mucks around with the JDK before it let’s it live on its OS.

4. No central program registry: While the Windows DLL hell is horrible, it still makes sense to me to have a central Program registry like Windows has, after having spent quite a few wild night-outs in the Linux and lately the Mac land. So I do like the convenience of getting rid of everything by just deleting the app instead of going through an Uninstaller that does not install everything (!) as on Windows. However, not having everything in one place is kinda’ not that great. Sure Mac has the Applications folder. But sometimes, you download something, install, and the app is sitting right there in your Downloads folder. Then you gotta move it to Applications… that’s a bit lame.

5. Resizing Windows:

This is really a bad usability thing. Again, I thought Mac OS X is known for setting standards in Usability and UI design. This is honestly a mistake to have the resize hotspot in the lower right corner. I use an external monitor sometimes and if I resize a window there, and return back to the laptop monitor, this corner is out of screen and there is no way to resize sometimes because you can’t move a window above the menu on top and off screen.

Let me state here categorically, whatever Mac loyalists might say, but using any window edge (like MS Windows) to resize is absolutely awesome. Even if a window is off screen in windows, you can switch to it, press <Alt>, <Dn Arrow> (this opens the main window menu), press ‘M’ which selects the ‘Move’ option in the menu and then just use the arrow keys to bring it back to the viewable screen.

6. Application Support: Some of the simple things in Windows life are fairly difficult.. now look, I have dealt with Unixes before, so I am not completely that “stupid-windows-user”! But if you don’t use Mac for a real hardcore *developery* stuff then you won’t realize these hardships. But then, you couldn’t get too adventurous with Windows on the other hand – you had to follow the stupid way or hit the highway which I finally did

1. VMWare Fusion : Had to use Windows VMWare Workstation for creating a VM with 2 network interfaces. There was no easy way (even the difficult is just hearsay) to create 2 interfaces for a VM in Fusion..
2. Apache – mod_security : The amount of time I have spent so far without success just to get mod_security installed on my Mac is crazy! I found out about MacPort (package management system for Mac OS X) that potentially has a port for mod_security – http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/browser/trunk/dports/www/mod_security – which allegedly has a variant for apache2 but everytime you do a “port install mod_security +apache2″ looks for and installs apache 1.3.7 and then the checksum for mod_security tar fails…. now how frustrating is that??
3. Enabling php5 for apache2, with mysql and pear support was just a port command such as – “port install php5 @5.2.5_3+apache2+macosx+mysql5+pear”

…there will be more as I get acquainted more…

When you talk about lifetime changes, you tend to think about getting married, having a kid, buying a house, getting divorced.. well, you know what I mean I went for a change in my life recently with the same bit of seriousness, as I would for any of the above, and it makes sense that I call it a “Lifetime change” too… Please read on, it is not a technical discussion.

The change was simply that I finally dumped my Windows machine, for a Mac, after about 16 years! For the non-savvy and non-technical, this may sound trivial. But having spent almost every day of my life, for the last 16 years, in front of different types of computers, I think they too, deserve to claim a piece of my life.

You know, I have ‘dated’ a lot of ‘damsels err, I mean computers.. a weird one called ZX Spectrum back in 1988 that ‘claimed to be a computer’ with a Cassette tape (!), the oldies – PC XTs, the ATs, Honeywell Unix terminals and many other Unix terminals whose names I have forgotten, the IBM mainframe terminals, PC 286s, 386s, 486s, Pentiums xxx, Dual cores… bla bla bla.

And I have seen the Operating Systems that control their behaviors, mood swings, tantrums – there was Unix System V, MS DOS 4, 5, 6, AT&T Unix, SCO Unix, IBM Mainframe OSs, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98, NT, ME, XP Pro, XP Home, 2000 flavors of Linux’s (!), Windows -2000, -2003, Mac OS-X, Mac Leopard..

So many of them, but I managed to stay loyal to one family throughout this 16 yr journey – the Microsoft family! I have dated many from that family, keeping the family loyalty intact for all these years! I have enjoyed the closeness, their popularity, their riches, and at the same time, have suffered at their hands, defended them out in the world, got embarrassed because of them, but still, at the end of the day, I came back to them – in their palace, to their kingdom, back to my in-laws…. And now this.. call it disloyalty or my mid-life crisis, but I finally realized that it needed to end.. I wanted out!

On that fateful day in the last week of February of 2008, I finally embraced a bright, slim MacBook Pro and flew away on my vacation to India. That’s when my love affair with the Mac started after so many stale years living with the Microsoft family. I had a few flings with the Mac family before but it was always too clumsy, since there was no commitment from my side. And I used to always complain as to why someone did not ‘click right’ or ‘close their windows right’… I guess I never looked at their heart, which is made of pure gold – the Unix heart – one that holds steady..

And all those complaints, I realize now, were just because I was so brainwashed by the Microsoft family members! I didn’t have a voice of my own, nor was I allowed to think outside the Window! I was comfortable, because it was all too familiar to me – someone blowing their fuse whenever they want, not having anybody to depend on, always living in fear of losing everything you have.. I thought that’s how it is in a love affair – you know, being ready to sacrifice, giving, forgiving, undemanding.. And I didn’t realize when those love affairs morphed into hate affairs.. I continued on as if I was married to the family and there were no divorce courts! It was as if, I had to go from one cousin to another…!

And then this day in February, I said to myself – hey! you are not so old yet.. don’t give up. You will find a soulmate if you are committed to making this change. Linux was too complicated and couldn’t have been someone to go steady with. The only other option I had been eying all these days was the stylish Mac, the one I had complained about in the past like a fool. I poured my heart out in front of her and she was magnanimous in accepting me.

From that day, I began living my new life, accepting things that were minor inconveniences, adapting to the new way of life, new moods, new responses, all the while admiring the beauty of my new girlfriend. And I told myself, nobody is perfect.

I still live my life, there is still programming, surfing, storing, retrieving, shutting down, starting up, but it is just done in a different way.

After all, life is a way of living rather than the living itself! Everybody has one..

Read the 2nd part of this post here

My iPod FM Transmitter finally worked with iPhone after I bought the 3.5mm adapter for it. However, it is still not very nice and clean. So from time to time, there is some disturbance you can hear along with your music – this is because of the phone interfering with the FM transmission. It is not completely unusable but it does irritate you from time to time. They say the *official* FM transmitter for iPhone that Apple sells does not have this issue – hmm, well it costs about $40/- which I am not quite prepared to spend yet !

There is some light at the end of the tunnel -

1. Apple has announced it will open up the iPhone for 3rd party apps in Feb 2008. Hope they stick to it.

2. Hackers! So many of them..

i. http://www.hacktheiphone.com

ii. …<will add more as I find out>…

Don’t get me wrong.. I love my iPhone! But when a device is showcased as something close to being the coolest thing to have ever happened, I think it should – at the very least – be able to do all the cool things that other devices in the market can do. And somehow I had thought iPhone has the ability to satisfy this basic expectation. But AT&T and Apple have completely failed at that – in my opinion. It is one thing to stop people from getting around things, but it is another matter altogether to purposely block them from doing things that are legitimate.

I am sure I will know that some of these can be done in some hackish way.. but this is no way to generate interest in your product IMHO (I don’t claim to be a geeky type – although I’d like to think of myself as such – but being in this industry for the last 15 years, I think I am not stupid either – I can figure things out fairly quickly). So here is the list of my annoyances (there are already bigger lists – check this http://www.appleiphonereview.com/iphone-features/25-things-wrong-with-the-iphone/ )

1. You can’t easily use DUN or PAN using your iPhone? Now what kind of ridiculous geekiness is there in that?

2. The bluetooth on this doesn’t offer any services – can’t transfer a file etc? This is so 20th century!

3. Doesn’t support Java or third party apps? Stupidity unlimited! You have to something like ‘Jailbreakfree’ your iPhone for that? This is like you have open up your DVD player and solder in a replacement for a register in order to just play a DVD!!

4. Standard FM trasmitter or for that matter even a standard 3.5mm plug doesn’t work. I have heard that the phone scrambles FM transmission – what?? – would love to know who is this *genius* at Apple that had this *wonderful* idea!

5. No copy/paste or selecting a chunk of text.. that totally sucks!

6. No voice dialing.. grrrr

7. The camera doesn’t have a zoom or there is no video recorder? How basic is that?

YouTube videos are .flv files when saved. But how do you save them in the first place?

If you use Firefox, you are lucky, just install the DownloadHelper plugin (my version is 2.5.1). Now go to the YouTube URL with your favorite video. Let it load completely. Now click on Tools in Firefox, select DownloadHelper and you should see the file there. Click on it and download.

Or, there are online tools – try http://converttube.com

Now you are not there yet. iTunes will not work with .flv. So you need to convert it to some mpeg or avi. I convert it to MP4 using StreamClip (http://www.squared5.com/) StreamClip is especially good when you want to convert VOB files to MP4 and the VOB file audio is muxed. It seems it can also download/convert YouTube videos directly. So no need for the Firefox plugin if you are an IE fan!

Now that you have .MP4, just go to iTunes and Import this video into the library and sync with your iPhone/iPod.

Doing more with iPhone..

• Just found out that the iPod Headset jack is shallower and more standardized than that of the iPhone. Most plugs have a body that is too large to fit in the jack inset of iPhone – and that’s very mean of Apple to do that to make the iPhone unfriendly to most but the Apple headphone plugs! So I can’t use my FM transmitter with iPhone till I get a standard 3.5mm Adapter.

• My experiment with being able to use iPhone as iPod Touch+ is ongoing. First test was successful. So I pulled out the SIM from iPhone and shoved it in my old phone which then worked with that SIM. The iPhone worked as iPod touch without the SIM.

• Next step to this is to see how long it will work without the SIM. So what happens after your AT&T contract expires? This experiment started on 11/29/2007. So far nothing bad to report. Both, my old phone and iPhone (as iPod touch) are working as expected. I am guessing I cannot use the data plan I signed up for iPhone on my Treo ‘coz it specifically says ‘iPhone data plan’ and I am not sure if it is the same as ‘Media Net’ or not.

Conclusion: My iPhone worked fine as a iPod Touch for more than 4 days. Next target is to test it away from its SIM for a week or two.

I simply never disappoint myself when it comes to being stupid sometimes! So I have been feeling angry, cheated and disillusioned about technology in general for the past 3 hours and look what I find on the Phillipine Mac Users Forum – someone just suggests removing the plastic over the iPhone (which covers the earpiece as well) to fix the low volume issue. And Voila! There I have it, an iPhone that actually has some volume!! It really made a big difference..

Now what do you say to that? A human, not smart enough for the technology!

You know, you can’t trust anyone in the technology field. You think Microsoft is bad (OS-X is the best), you think PCs are evil (Mac’s are perfect), Internet Explorer sucks (Firefox is stable), Blockbuster is bad (Netflix is the way to go)… think again!

Got myself an iPhone, and expected the major part of the name to work properly – which is guess what, the PHONE! The volume SUCKS like huge! I am going to take it to the Apple store to get it replaced. Will keep posting my iPhone adventures here..

Well, it just so happened that iTunes refused to read my iPod one day and said, “go reset your settings”. I did not notice the Reset button IN ITUNES.. but went ahead and chose the “Reset to factory settings” on the iPod menu. Guess what, that just deletes EVERYTHING on your iPod WITHOUT warning you about that.

So there goes my thriving 240 song collection! A frantic search on the internet for iPod recovery softwares later, I found “Recover My iPod”. I wasn’t too optimistic about it since the “undelete/recover/resurrect…” softwares always produce too much of strangely named junk – in my opinion – that needs hours and hours of investigative work.

But this one wasn’t that bad. Only thing is, it pulled some of the songs that were supposed to be left in their graves. So anyway, I had to take care of them separately and push them back in their graves on my iPod. But overall, I did recover all my songs but not my Playlists..

So, I now have a single all inclusive Playlist sorted alphabetically.. better than nothing I say! Another lesson learned – backup your iPod more often! Is there a backup software that can backup your Playlists too?