Good service for Apple

Getting my iBook was difficult. Stock problems, delays, you know, the usual at Casa de Mac.
Then there was the ultimate challenge of getting my Portuguese keyboard and the airport card. That took a really long time.
But then that is old news, and not just in this corner of the world.

So when the time came to get my iBook serviced because of a hardware problem I got really, really scared.

Alas I was in for a big surprise and a good one at that!

See, the iBook has a nice round battery lock near the battery itself in the back of the laptop. This little lock with the coin-slot is surrounded by a nice round little plastic piece which is nested in the case itself.
And it was the nice round little plastic part that broke and had to be replaced.
“No problem, they can probably replace just that little part”, though I in my innocence.
Well, it turns out I was wrong, the whole lower case had to be replaced so I really had to bring it in and get it done by a certified servicing agent.
OK, I’ll just scoop up the purchase bill and let it be replaced under the warranty. If I can find the bill, that is…
Sure enough I found it, exactly one year and five days after the purchase. Five days… Oh well, I braced myself and prepared for the pocket drainage that was sure to ensue.

Surprise number one: as of April 2003 Apple’s warranty against manufacture defects lasts for two years, not one, they just forgot to update the documentation in time. So my iBook was covered. Great!

Then there was the timing factor. How much time was I going to be without my Mac? Actually it took three days to get the replacement part and another day to replace it in the laptop for a grand total of four days. Which is not really all that bad in itself but it is gets even better.

Surprise number two: I didn’t actually have to leave the iBook there for the three days it took to get the part, they called me when they got it and only then did I take the iBook to them.
Better yet, I took it to them one day in the afternoon and went round to collect it again the next day in the morning so I ended up without my laptop only for a night.

How’s that for good service?
I’m so used to bad service that this was indeed a refreshing change and I think it deserves mentioning.
Full marks go to Interlog for all this and Apple should know what great service their partner in Portugal provides to their users.

Good job, guys!

Sidestepping the issue… Sort of…

That’s it, I’ve decided to stop trying to make it work correctly in Internet Exploder. It’s just not worth it, I’d have to put design elements in the HTML instead of leaving it all to CSS and I’m totally against that.

So I’ve decided instead to warn IE users and try to help them out of their (probably unknown) state of darkness.

So from today on visitors using IE will get this nice warning on the context-menu bar to the right:

[This image was lost to the ages. It was a cool one, though. :-)]

This will let them know of their plight and, at the same time, offer them a helping hand out of their misery.

Actually this screenshot illustrates some of the problems with IE, for example note how the border around the content part is totally opaque instead of the nice transparent graded shadow. Note also the ugly fat orange bar just below the menu item (About).

If these complaints strike you as surprising then you must be an Internet Exploder user who has probably thought that I must have been crazy to switch my design to this ugly mess.

Well, now you know better, go get firefox or any other standards-compliant browser and open yourself to a whole new world where web pages look the way they are supposed to.

On the road (yet again)

There is talk already of the next big trip.

The prospects of next year seeing us back to the american continent are looking quite good - 2005 may be the year of the Canadian cross-country, coast-to-coast road trip.

I’m already amassing information for this trip on the wiki. When it (finally) comes into public service I’ll link to the relevant page.

I guess Ireland will have to wait a bit longer, but it will be for a good cause! :-)

The photolog sections…

… are in dire need of revision; Not only are the existing ones totally inadequate, they are also too few.

The problem is that it is much more fun to browse around in the huge backlog of pictures, revisit the ones that look more promising and choose some of them to put on-line than it is to get lost in administrative details like these.

Come to think of it playing around with old (and not so old) pictures and, generally speaking, creating content is much more fun than kicking the site into some kind of shape… I still have to address not only the sections of the photolog (that’s easy!) but I also have to hammer the wiki into shape so that I can finally integrate it into the main site, deal with the exploder problems with the site’s CSS and coax the photo album software into the same design as the rest.

It will take me quite a bit of time and this is not a pleasurable prospect, but it must be done or else I won’t have a decent place to show off the content that I like so much to create.

Night photography with high ISO values

One of the advantages of digital photography is that you can use a different ISO setting for each shot without having to change rolls.

Until now I had never even touched the ISO setting but last week I decided to try my EOS 10D with a high ISO value just to see how it handled, so I took a few shots at night at Paço de Arcos beach (a regular evening strolling spot) and the results aren’t half bad.
Some of them can be seen here in the photolog.

[Or could be seen there in the photolog, as it no longer exists and I’ve lost the photographs in the mean time.]

Of course there is quite a bit of color noise, but that is to be expected and, in some cases, it ads to the picture.
Overall the quality is very interesting and I find the 10D handles itself very well in low light conditions. Better than in extremely bright ones. Funny that.

Now I must start thinking about a tripod for night photos. I’ve had my sights on a number of pictures I’d like to try one of these days, but all of them would need low ISO settings and high exposure times so a tripod is a must. The problem is that I just know I’m too lazy to drag a tripod with me on other, more casual occasions and buying a tripod just for a couple of pictures now and then is a bummer…

CSS - Cascading Stylesheets

A great way of solving the web design problem (the one that comes with it being impossible to be done right with HTML).

External resources

These are the resources I’ve found on the web while looking for… well, for them actually!

Examples

• CSS Zen Garden - Probably the largest (and arguably the best) showcase of CSS’ power;
• CSS Edge - Some beautiful examples.
• Tantek Çelik’s examples - Examples and filters (CSS Hacks)
• A quick and dirty CSS hack: PNG backgrounds

Code and tutorials

• Slants - Hard to use it in real life but neat all the same…
• Sliding doors - Cool things to do with tabs;
• Fast rollovers;
• Lists - and lists, and lists and …
• Rounded corners - Yes, it uses images, that’s life;
• Mini tabs - Very useful. Be sure to follow the link to the article explaining about this technique;
• W3schools CSS tutorial;
• Strategies for Long-Term CSS Hack Management;
• Alternate stylesheets;
• Site In An Hour - Making Simple Work of Complex CSS Layouts.

Tools

• CSS Outline - Three amazingly useful bookmarklets to help debug CSS code. It’s a real must-have for anyone writing CSS. Really!
• Css Hack - Wiki page on all things related to CSS Hacks.

Better days will come

Hopefully I’ll soon get the time to start working on nunonunes.org again.

The design needs to be adjusted because of the usual browser discrepancies (I don’t expect it to be a major problem, though) and then I need to finally set-up the photo galleries section and, most importantly, the Wiki behind the rest of the site.

Gallery is looking really good right now simply because of the very useful plugin for iPhoto. Hey, these things count, you know?

The Wiki will probably start up as a Tikiwiki because: a) I’ve already have some information on it, from my tests and everyday general note taking on it and b) it is just simpler to start with because it has everything you could think of and then some.

Both of these options will be up for revision in the (probably not-so-near) future when I re-evaluate my needs and think about making something more specific to address them, but until then I want to have something to get me by.

Oh and I got a real favicon.ico in place so my RSS feed reader (as well the the browsers) now see them.

The much-talked about already Stairway to Heaven

I do try to avoid the link-blog syndrome, but some things are really worth mentioning.
Like “The Stairway Suite” page which describes itself as “Stairway to Heaven, as Schubert wrote it”.
And it’s not only Schubert at that, you have an impressive array of potential composers for this work such as Holst, Bizet or Beethoven, just to cherry-pick a few.

So what’s this all about? Well, I’ll just transcribe the site’s own words here as they tell it all really:

The Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven” is a rock classic for some critics. Whether or not you agree, its notoriety is assured by the thousands of would-be guitarists who can play the first dozen bars badly: it is to the guitar what “Chopsticks” is to the piano. But what if Jimmy Page & Robert Plant hadn’t written it? What if it had been written for orchestra in the 19th or 20th centuries? For a publicity stunt, “The Stairway Suite” was commissioned by the University of New South Wales Orchestra and written by Joe Wolfe.

Anyone who has ever spent any time at all in a guitar shop (and belongs to a certain generation) knows exactly what they mean when they refer to the plague of the would-be guitar players who decided to try out a guitar and would invariably torture those first bars of Stairway to Heaven out of the instrument and into the innocent ears of everyone around them.
It got so bad that it even led to that scene in Wayne’s World when Wayne (or was it Garth? Gees, it was a long time ago) is working on a music instrument store and has to enforce a sign that forbids playing this song when trying out guitars.
But I digress…

The point of this post is to tell you to go to the site and listen to the MP3 samples available there. They are really very good, all of them.
I especially like the Glenn Miller version and grand finale, but that’s just personal preference.

Enjoy.

A psicologia das estações

Hoje de manhã fui até Lisboa, levar a Tuxa ao emprego. Como é natural numa manhã de Agosto havia pouca gente na estrada, maravilha.
Ao contrário do que é normal as praias não estavam cheias. Mas para isto há uma boa razão: o mau tempo que temos tido, supostamente devido ao tal furacão que chegou cá já desfeito.

Agora, aquilo que me chamou a atenção foi o facto de haver alguém na praia. E não era assim tão pouca gente.

Sendo este um país de clima ameno, as pessoas consideram (normalmente) dias como os de hoje como sendo dias de “mau tempo”.
Mas ainda assim, estando nós hoje longe do calor que é habitual haver no verão, as pessoas foram para a praia (em menor número, sim, mas foram).
O que me leva a pensar que realmente a questão da adequação das condições climatéricas a certas actividades é muito mais subjectiva do que se quer perceber.

Ou seja, quando em Abril ou, por vezes, até em Março eu (e sobretudo a Tuxa) fazemos praia é vulgar haver as maiores reacções de espanto (“O quê praia? Já?” ou “Bem, deviam estar mortinhos pela praia para fazer uma coisa dessas…” ou até “Mas vocês estão doidos?!”) quando na realidade o que nós fizemos foi aproveitar aqueles dias maravilhosos que por vezes ocorrem nessa altura. Ao contrário, por exemplo, das pessoas que foram hoje para a praia, num dia bem fresco, totalmente nublado e chuvoso.

Qual é a diferença então? Simples: é que hoje é dia 11 de Agosto, pleno verão. E no verão faz-se praia. E Março/Abril é inverno e no inverno veste-se roupa quente e vai-se ao centro comercial ou fica-se em casa, mas peloamordedeus não se faz praia! Não é adequado…

É engraçada a psicologia das estações… :-)

We live, we get older, we get wiser. Or: Mac OS X 10.3.5 is out

Yes, Mac OS X’s latest Update (10.3.5) is out since yesterday.

No, I haven’t updated yet.

This is probably the first time I’m not one of the early-adopters of an OS upgrade. Like I said, we get older and wiser. And we learn that if the upgrade is good enough it will still be available in a couple of days. If it has serious flaws they will be corrected inside that time-frame and another update will be issued. If it has critical flaws it will be pulled from the update site and I’ll be a happier man not having installed it.

Yep, all things considered I think I can survive with my geek’s self-esteem quite intact without been a guinea-pig for Apple yet again. I’ve been lucky so far, even with the updates that got pulled out, but luck runs out sooner or latter and If I wanted the hassle I’d have stayed in the Linux world.

Things are looking good, though.

Now to immerse myself in other things to avoid thinking too much about it and falling into temptation. I’ve been a geek for too long you see… :-)

Coding aids

Quite a few hours of PHP coding done today.
And today’s (particularly prolific) session is sponsored by Elvis Costello’s North and Morrissey’s You Are The Quarry.
Both excellent, but North is particularly wonderful. You may ask the neighbors, they heard it all, I’m sure, both Elvis and me singing. I guess I just got carried away… ;-)

After all this years music is still the hands down number one helper when I’m coding. Quite amusing that, given that I’m usually also singing along which might indicate that I was not all that concentrated on the coding. Quite the opposite happens though.

And who would have thought that VoodooPad would also be this handy as a coding helper?

Now I’m going out into the world for a while. Be back later for some more.

Intervenções de madrugada

Ah, as intervenções de madrugada quando a única coisa que me calha a mim é ficar a olhar para os logs à espera que algo aconteça apenas para prevenir o caso em que possam surgir problemas…

Alguém tem uns palitos que empreste, para os olhos?

Being connected - communicating and organizing my life on the Internet

There are two somewhat old posts on Pedro’s weblog which got me thinking about some stuff that affect my daily life but to which I never gave that much thought. At least not structured thought.

The posts are about IM usage (Yahoo!’s in particular) and Orkut (and how it could ever be made useful).

So these are just some loosely coupled thoughts that I’ve had on those and other related subjects, and I present them separately, although on a broader view they are connected. Anyway, enough of the philosophical mumbo-jumbo and on with what’s on my mind…

First up: Instant Messaging

This part is quite dear to me. I use it every day both for work and for my personal relations and I don’t think I could go back to living without it anymore.
Sometimes you just can’t beat it for being in touch with a group of people scattered across the world. You might be doing business with them, asking for their advice, doing some debugging with them. Or you may be coordinating development with people who are far away. Or you may just use to for getting a quick question answered. Or for getting asked a quick question.
In fact it also helps me to be in touch with people who are real close to me (geographically speaking) too. Of course Email is invaluable for many things but sometimes (many times actually) a quick chat can save a ton of Email and hassle. And IRC is just too crowded and not private enough.
And it sure beats the phone when it comes to staying in touch with people. I just don’t call my friends all that much, never have. But it is just oh so easy to drop them a line on IM…
Oh yeah, and companies with an Internet connection can save a bundle in telephone bills if they just give their employees permission to use IM for their communications, but that’s something that is just too hard to get across…

Now, when people think of IM many think of Yahoo! Messenger. Most of my contacts use Yahoo! and people just love it.
I am not particularly favorable to it but in order to be accessible to everyone I have my Yahoo! account. And my AOL account. And my ICQ account. And my Hotmail account. Each one of these I use for IM only.
The point is that I have to talk to these people no matter what mechanism they use so I just use a multi-protocol client and get it over with.

Or try to get it over with, because some people are just plain unreasonable…
An so yes, I agree that Yahoo!’s common practice of changing the protocol in order to lock out other people’s software (despite their claim that it is done because of security concerns nobody really believes them) is ludicrous and in the long run bad for the company itself. People who take the time to think about it know this so maybe it is a matter of time before something changes in there. Or, more to the point, stops changing… ;-)

Still on the IM subject, I must admit that I am a big fan of Jabber because it is open, very modular, well designed, etc, and with the IETF giving it a big thumbs-up I see it sticking around for a long time but I don’t expect everyone to start using it tomorrow, so I have my jabber accounts alongside all my other IM accounts and if and when the day comes when I have no contacts on any of the other protocols I’ll just switch them off and be happy with it.

Second part: Contact management

The second part concerns managing my contacts.
It is no secret by now that I am a recent convert of the Mac clan. Also, I have been using some kind or other of PalmOS powered device for years to manage… well, my life, really.
With the advent of bluetooth-enabled mobile phones (and with a little help from iSync or some other mechanism) I now have all my contacts managed on and shared between all these devices.
But this is still not enough. Because when I think about contact management I think about managing all the information I have about each contact, and it involves the traditional address, phone number and email address, but also the IM IDs (probably multiple per person), birthdays, web pages and hosts of other bits and pieces of information.

Now I’ve never really groked social network software in general and Orkut in particular, but Pedro’s post got me thinking that maybe if, in fact, Orkut (or any other software of the kind) opened up access to it’s data via some kind of API it could then be put to good use.
It could be the base of contact management and it’s information could be integrated with whichever relevant applications you could think of. Pedro suggests exporting the birthdays into iCalendar and the IM addresses into your IM client and I think this is a good example, but it could be much more. Why not have Address Book (or a similar application) knowing about your Orkut (or similar service) account and getting information from it and letting you manage the information on it from it’s own interface? These are, of course, just some examples, I’m sure it could go much, much deeper than that.

Obviously there are more people looking at ways of making Orkut and the like useful and while some ideas are a bit far-fetched for me, like letting your friends edit your weblog some others are really cool and useful like using you Orkut (or some-such) friend list in order to white-list your Email. This last one has a particular appeal to me because this is exactly the kind of thing that I find logical. If they are your friends they should be able to get their mail to you. Of course there are some problems to be solved, address spoofing coming to mind instantaneously, but we’ll deal with them eventually.

Conclusion? What conclusion?

So how can all of this be made to work together to further our quality of living? Tall order, huh? ;-)
I’m not entirely sure and that is why this post is just a collection of loosely coupled thoughts (as I said in the begging, remember? Well, if you got this far you probably do…), but I do feel that there is a lot of potential for evolution along the lines of:

• Integration between reputation or friends networks and contact management (my address book knows who is my friend and to what degree);
• Integration between the said networks and automatic assignment of importance to communications between me and each contact (if I’ve never met him his messages are surely less important —to me— than those of my close friends);
• Mechanisms that use that importance factor in order to filter, sort and present those communications to me when and where it is most appropriate (if he is just a loose acquaintance and I’m on “really don’t disturb” mode don’t let him bug me now, keep it until later, but always let my wife through, no matter what);
• Integration of the communication channels and methods (I know the person has several Email accounts, several IM accounts, a mobile phone number, etc, keep that in mind);
• Mechanisms that automatically decide (or help to decide) which particular channel or method is more appropriate in order to reach a given contact at a given moment (remember all those accounts and communication methods I know about the person? Use whichever you want, just get the message through, I couldn’t care less if you use SMS, IM, Email or whatever).

Ah, it’s good to dream, isn’t it? And the best part is that all of this is technically quite easy to achieve. The worst part, however, is that the political and economical obstacles could prove very strong so we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

Recent upgrades and other stuff

Well, things have been happening and pilling up so here’s a quick catcher-up:

• After so many years away I’m back to PHP. I got involved in helping out in a project for a site which requires PHP and mysql. The mysql part is almost trivial, but the site is a bit complex and it is very important that there are no security holes in it so it is going to take some attention. Funny how it turns out really, I started out my web programming languages (ugh!) romance with a brief encounter with perl, switched to PHP and stuck with it for a while and after that got back into perl for a good number of years, and that is where I am now. To go back to PHP at this point is rather funny. Still it feels good not to let the knowledge just whither away;

• After my (not-so-recent) car upgrade I have finally installed a hands-free kit on the new one. And the great thing about it is that it is a blue-tooth solution so in theory (it pays to be careful with this kind of statements!) :-) I am now able to switch mobile phones to my heart’s content and, as long as all my phones support the hands-free or head-set blue-tooth profile I’ll never have to switch the car hands-free kit. Very good use of technology indeed. Oh and I am using the Sony-Ericsson HCB-30 kit, if you’re interested in knowing and so far (3 days usage) it is doing quite nicely, thank you very much.

• Almost forgot about this one but speaking of mobile phones, the Sony-Ericsson t68i was put aside to use as a backup when my company got me a new t630. I’m not sure whether I’ve mentioned this before and I can’t be bothered to look for it now, but I do like this phone. The camera positively sucks but I’ve never been one to like camera-phones anyway (just search my weblog, you’ll see what I mean) but other than that I’ve yet to crash the phone and the blue-tooth behaves much, much better than that of the t68i. I loved the t68i but I do acknowledge that the t630 is quite an improvement. Not only in reliability, but also in usability, responsiveness and the all-around handling of it.

That’s it for now, more geekly news as they appear.