iNODE

My 1/100 scale model of George Mason’s Fairfax campus is coming along nicely. Just kidding. A few minutes ago I happened upon a website that shows how you can use Photoshop to create faux miniature models from actual photographs. Detailed (and pretty simple) instructions with illustrations show how it’s done.

To get started on your miniature world, visit Christopher Phin’s site:

http://recedinghairline.co.uk/tutorials/fakemodel/

I use Camino for my browser so the threat to my personal machine is low…but I fired up Safari and went to this test page and saw that Safari is indeed problematic:

http://secunia.com/advisories/18963

The “fix” is to open Safari preferences and uncheck the “Open safe files after download” checkbox. I would suggest using Camino or Firefox as another reasonable workaround. You might also want to make a bookmark of the Secunia site since it monitors many (8,000?) products for security vulnerabilities.

Update: This is “fixed” with the latest security update available from Apple.

A new update for Comic Life appeared the other day and I wasted no time downloading a copy. Dragged it right into my applications folder…hit the icon and got ready…splash screen appeared…then nothing…then a crash report. Tried another download, still wouldn’t run. Went to another machine, got a copy of 1.2.2 and reinstalled it. It worked fine.
Went to the second computer and tried the update sequence…went without a hitch. Hmmm…the two machines were nearly identical (10.4.5, roughly the same amount of memory, etc.). In desperation, I sent a note to Plasq (creators of Comic Life) and included my crash log. Then I noticed they had a forum on the site so I posted a note there as well. Didn’t expect to hear anything but you never know.

Next morning I got a note back from Plasq telling me that they were going to repost 1.2.2 for others having this problem and that they’d continue trying to figure it out (seems they’d seen two messages about it). Of course, the two they’d seen were both mine. I wrote back explaining that I was in fact all of the people reporting the problem–and thus a repost of 1.2.2 wasn’t really necessary.

About two hours later I got another email from Plasq, explaining that they were baffled by my crash dump. To make a long story a bit shorter, it turns out that they have (to quote their message) some “magic they perform with the InterfaceBuilder.framework to help when laying out the user interface” and it works even when it’s run on a machine that’s not a developer system. For reasons they couldn’t explain, my crash dump indicated that my machine thought it was a developer system and yet it crashed.

Well, that made perfect sense…about a month ago I uninstalled Xcode 2.2 on this particular machine (to get a bit more disk space) but my uninstall left bits & pieces lying about which fooled Comic Life. Solution? I reinstalled XCode (which I had been meaning to do anyway now that I have a new book on Cocoa programming) and voila!

Moral? Don’t ever uninstall Developer Tools unless you get it all. And, of course, the developers/support people at Plasq (like their software) are really first rate.

http://plasq.com

I found an interesting report today and thought I’d share a link to it for readers interested in how we might continue to refactor the work of librarianship. I spent the last 18 months or so on a digression into issues surrounding digital archiving and institutional repositories and now I’m beginning to think about another area where the library has a contribution to make and an opportunity to develop new expertise–digital data collections. The report, Long-Lived Digital Data Collections: Enabling Research and Education in the 21st Century, was published in September 2005 by the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation and runs about 85 pages (no comment on the fact that you have to reach page 23 before the word library appears).

I think it can be argued that is easier to convince others that an IR service belongs in the library–after all, it’s just an updated version of what we’ve been doing for years. Inertia might suggest that something like a “digital data collections center” will require an entirely new entity on campus—but I think the “long-lived” in the title certainly gives us an opening.

I wrote the other day about .mac and the iDisk, so I thought I should follow up with a bit about another option for an internet-based disk—Google Mail.

There have been a couple of Windows utilities that enable you to use your GMail account to store files but this is the first I’ve seen for Mac OSX. gDisk is a simple but useful tool. Install the software and then log in with your Gmail account username and password, create a folder, and then upload or download files. On Google Mail, they’re stored as attachments to draft messages (which means you can access them either with your gDisk client or simply the web interface to Google Mail.

Don’t have a Google Mail account? If you need an “invite”, drop me a line and I’ll send you one.  gDisk is “donationware” and XCode-ready source is also available on the sourceforge site.

http://gdisk.sourceforge.net

Recognizing that files placed on a service like .mac or Google Mail are subject to the whims of the host (or NSA or RIAA or whoever), let me also suggest a Mac-based port of an encryption package:

http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/

If you’re running OS X Server and get tired of having to uncheck updates for things like iTunes or QuickTime that you don’t run on the server, you can check “Ignore Update” in the Software Update function and you’ll see no more updates for that particular package. Maybe I should use this entry to launch a new feature–“obvious information for idiots” or something, but I didn’t realize until a couple of days ago that you could do this. In fact, I once installed an iPod update just to keep from having to see it in the list later…

Not only can you ignore the updates, you can get them all back if you later change your mind (as the above screen cap illustrates).

I got a .mac subscription the other day (primarily for other members of my family) but I’ve been playing around with it a bit and have found several uses that I suppose I can point to to justify the $8.25 per month it is costing me ($99 per year). I have found being able to sync my calendar and address book on both my G5 at work and two other machines at home is nice (and may eliminate the need for my Zire 72—which had pretty much come to function as a sync tool between computers). I also posted a quick iWeb one page website and set up a couple of email accounts to give spambots a few more targets. But the most interesting thing thus far has been the iDisk.

With the “basic” plan, Apple provides a 1GB iDisk (a WebDav disk) which shows up on your desktop in cached form and then a “sync” process (either automatic or manual) keeps it current with it’s net-based master. Contents of this “iDisk” are also accessible from any modern webbrowser (Mac or Windows or Linux) that understands the WebDav protocol.

The problem lies in the default desktop interface to iDisk—Finder. It is slow and quirky and offers very little feedback during transfers. Fortunately, a really nice Cocoa application, Transmit (an ftp/sftp/WebDav client from Panic software) also understands .mac and transfers are much faster. How much faster? Well, here are the results of my unofficial test:

Same computer, same network…

I should mention that the test is conducted on a powerbook going over a LinkSys 802.11g wireless router (four rooms away) which is connected via cat5 wire to a wireless broadband network antenna on my roof which in turn is pointed at another antenna on a tower 2 miles away (see RoadStar Internet)…which means I’m not on a really fast connection (it averages around 500-700 Kbps on the Intel broadband speed test page but speed falls off during WebDav transfers).

Test Data: The Dead Kennedys, Viva Las Vegas.mp3 (4.1Mb)

From Powerbook to iDisk (using Transmit): 1 minute, 10 seconds
From Powerbook to iDisk (using Finder): 1 minute, 32 seconds

So clearly, a copy of Transmit speeds things up and if my experience moving a 52Mb Keynote file around between machines via iDisk is typical, it is more reliable as well.

Bottom line: There are much better deals on the net if you are just looking for a hosting site. In fact, if you are planning a “popular” site, .mac will get expensive (Apple’s $99 subscription limits bandwidth to 10GB per month, increasing it to 25GB costs an additional $45 per year, 250GB yet another $45). If your requirements include WebDav (which fortunately isn’t counted against this bandwidth allocation), the list of choices grows smaller and if you also want integration with Apple’s iLife, iCal and Contacts (along with .mac aware applications like Transmit, Quicken, NetNewsWire, Yojimbo and others) then .mac begins to make a bit more sense.