My wife uses Camino as her browser of choice. She likes to use the sidebar and the way Camino’s works is pleasing to her.
Last night she tried to visit the Thomas Kinkade web site (http://www.thomaskinkade.com) and her browser crashed as a result. This was the first browser crash I had seen with Camino, and I was pleased to see they have a talkback feature that collects information about the crash and sends it off to the developers so they can identify and address the issue.
I suggested that she click through the process and send them a note. I didn’t know that she had already seen this feature and ignored it in the past by clicking cancel. I should have listened to her.
The talkback process worked fine, but after it ran we were unable to relaunch Camino. The splash screen would appear and then the process would freeze. We tried downloading a new copy of version 0.7 and installing it only to get the same freeze.
After reading the Camino web site I discovered that there is a known problem with talkback preventing Camino from launching. D’oh! The error reporting software itself has errors, and they are major enough to basically destroy your application.
Sigh.
We did download the latest nightly build as the site indicated the talkback error had been addressed since the 0.7 release was made. And yes, the nightly build ran, but every so slowly. Far too slowly to be of any use as a daily use browser.
And, they’ve taken away the sidebar and made it a page overlay much like Safari. She wasn’t happy with the speed or the lack of sidebar. We did use the nightly build to export her bookmarks.
So we loaded Mozilla Firebird for her to use. Once the bookmarks were imported she was all set again.
All of this took about 90 minutes to accomplish. All she wanted to do was visit the Kinkade site to see information about 3 of his prints we have framed and hanging in the living room. Because that site is very poorly coded her browser crashed, the error reporting software then trashed the application itself, and she is now forced to use a completely different browser. It just shouldn’t be this hard.
Life has been going rather smoothly on the surface lately. We’ve been enjoying the pool, and cooking at home. Michele said the other day that we’ve finally gotten over the last move and are starting to feel really at home here. I agree with her. Even though it will be three years this October since we moved, I think we are just now starting to hit our own pace here.
Of course the Universe takes delight in challenging you when you start to get too comfortable. Now that we are hitting our own pace we may have to pack up and move again. I’ve largely given up trying to guess what the State will do about my contract. Currently I have about 280 billable hours left on my contract extension. Rumor has it the agency will extend some contractual people through next June. The most likely candidates for this are people associated with critical projects. Depending on who you ask, my project is critical.
I did run off the reservation a bit worrying about re-financing the house, sell a car, and trying to lower our monthly out go as much as possible. While these are all good ideas, I tried to do it all at once. The result was predictable, especially for someone moderately ADD. I couldn’t focus on anything long enough to make a difference, and, as a consequence, everything started to suffer. Thanks to a series of conversations with Michele I was finally able to break down and express the emotions that I had been ignoring in my vain attempt to solve everything simultaneously.
Together we were able to see that I had too much on my plate. We set aside the mortgage re-finance for now, and I have stopped worrying about reducing our monthly expenditures. When the time comes, if necessary, we’ll cross that bridge. I feel much better as a result. I can keep several balls in the air at once and be okay emotionally in the process. But when I take on too many tasks I stop taking care of my emotional self and trouble always follows.
My Powerbook, affectionately known as Eeyore developed a nasty problem with its CD-RW/DVD drive late last week. On Thursday I was burning a series of CD-RWs, transferring a Red Hat distribution I had downloaded to disk. The first 4 burns when perfectly. The fifth stopped about a third of the way into the burn with an error. At the time I thought it was just a bad CD-RW.
Over the weekend I tried several times to complete the task with no luck. In fact I discovered that I was unable to read any CD, much less burn a new one. Oddly enough, DVD reading still worked. I did some searching via Sherlock and found a couple of knowledge base entries about reseting the PRAM and NVRAM. I attempted the PRAM reset with no effect on the CD-RW portion of the drive.
On Tuesday I called Apple Care. My 90 day phone coverage had expired in April so I had to agree to pay $50 if the problem was software related. If the problem turned out to be hardware I wouldn’t be charged as it would be covered under the warranty.
Following their instructions over the phone I again reset the PRAM and this time used the Option-Apple-O-F keystroke boot option to boot into the open firmware page. Reseting the NVRAM and then rebooting didn’t help the drive at all. Next we tried booting into OS 9. Still no CD-RW. Apple arranged to send me a box to ship the unit to them for repairs. They also put me in touch with the local certified repair shop.
Calling them I was able to schedule an appointment to diagnose the machine and order the necessary part(s). They said the parts would be available Wednesday afternoon. I took Eeyore back about 2:30 in the afternoon and it was ready for me when I returned at 4:30.
Everything works perfectly now. Eeyore has a new tail.
Even though I was disappointed to have the drive fail after only 7 months of ownership, I was pleased at the speed Apple moved to fix my problem. I have had CD drives fail in the past, so I know hardware isn’t forever. All in all not a bad experience.
The bill, before the warranty kicked in, $504. Maybe I’ll spring for the extended Apple Care option and buy 2 1/2 more years of peace of mind.
On my site I use a PHP/MySQL tool to track incoming referers. The tool, called Refer 2.01 is very slick and it gives me a sense of where you all are coming from to get to my humble little web site.
Recently I have noticed a trend, well a phenomenon actually. Back in June I posted a story about the new Apple products from the WWDC held in San Francisco. This posting included the word “panther” oddly enough. Panther is the code name for the next release of Mac OS X, release 10.3. Since that posting I have seen a surge in refer hits from google in the form of a search string for “torrent” coupled with the string “panther”. 40 in the last week, similar numbers in the weeks prior to last.
Bit Torrent is a new peer-to-peer file sharing and download program. Obviously, people are searching for copies of the Panther beta to download and use, and they want to use Bit Torrent to accomplish this download. Somehow my referer log page has enough hits on it from google with the words “torrent” and “panther” that it is now the number 1 link from google for those search arguments.
While a part of me likes that my site is garnering all these hits, I realize that the people aren’t coming to see my content. They are just trying to find a copy of Apple’s latest OS to play with, and through the power of the Internet, they are getting my refer logs instead.
I’m either going to have to turn the refer logs off for a while, or figure out how to hide those pages from google (and other search engines as well) so that searchers find what they are looking for. Or hope that some percentage of visitors to my refer log will follow the link up top to my main page and actually see my content.
Of course in writing this posting I have used the magic words, torrent and panther, several times. Maybe now the search engines will point to this posting instead of my log page.
In a trend that oddly mirrors the recent flap over buy.com’s new music service, my sharebuilder account was inaccessible to me this afternoon.
It seems that the powers that be at Sharebuilder think I should be using a browser newer than Microsoft or Netscape 4.0. Hmm, I thought Safari, Camino, and Mozilla Firebird were all newer than 4.0.
Lucky for me, Safari can mask itself as other user agents. A quick trip to the Debug menu and I was able to login again.
My life situation continues to be filled with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It seems that no matter where I look these days there is unrest and uncertainty about the future.
The United States feels more out of control than ever before. Terrorism from abroad and terror tactics from within have made living here uncomfortable in a way that I have never experienced before. I used to view our national government as inept, but largely harmless. Now I wonder if it is safe to live in this country and hold the views I hold. I feel like our government has been handed over to the right-wing Christian hard-liners. I fear for the freedoms we as Americans have taken for granted for so many years.
Personally my employment situation continues to be unsettled. I am finding some opportunities, but none that we have wanted to uproot our lives for yet. We have been trying to reevaluate our personal life goals so that when (if) we move it is to a place that better takes care of us. This would be hard enough to accomplish without adding fear of our countries direction to the mix. We have started talking about going abroad for a time. Or maybe to someplace small and out of the way in this country.
Financially, choices and bad decisions I have made in the past few years are coming home to roost. Leaving here and selling the house is a way to clear away all our debts, which is good. But it leaves us starting over again, which is a bitter pill to swallow.
The only thing in my life today that doesn’t fill me with fear, uncertainty, or doubt is my relationship with my beautiful wife, Michele. Without her love, understanding, support, and friendship, I would never be able to survive this current set of rapids in the river of my life.
Many years ago when I was first developing this site I stumbled across a book called “Creating Killer Web Sites.” Despite the hyperbole in the title it sparked an interest in web design that lasts to this day.
Today I am reading a new book, “Designing with Web Standards” by Jeffery Zeldman. It is fantastic. I haven’t even finished it and already I am looking at my site and starting to make changes.
Get it. Read it. Attain Oneness with the One True Way in a Blinding Flash of Enlightenment.
I posted a picture of me taken in the door to our shipboard cabin to the Mirror Project over the weekend.
This is just too funny for words. Bomb Iraq.
Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
George Orwell, 1984
[as seen here first: dive into mark]