Roblog

I've finished my PHP program that parses the picture indexes on my website and re-displays them in a standard format. It was a lot of work to be able to reproduce what the static index files were already doing, but it was my excuse for being able to work with PHP.

But now I realize that this is a great way to get my pictures' data into an on-line, searchable database. Since I can now parse out the picture data based on the files that are published by my photo publishing programs, I can use that to automatically populate the database with the picture information each time I upload a new batch of pictures. Then, I'll have a searchable index of my pictures - all 382 of them (and counting)!

OK. Now that it's after Christmas and we have given away the twins calendars, I can relate my difficulties with getting them printed.

My Dad just sent me an extra printer he had lying around. It's not all that old, but he had a newer one so he didn't need his old HP Photosmart 1215. I eagerly offered to take it off of his hands, since we'll need a printer to go along with our new iMac (that we won't buy for another few months).

He said he dropped the printer (with cables, manuals, and extra ink cartridges) off at a packing store and let them take care of it. The result was quite an impressive display of packing prowess. Opened the box to find a large amount of foam peanuts surrounding a smaller box. I opened the smaller box to find an equal amount of foam peanuts, under which was the printer fully enclosed in bubble wrap. The folder with all the extraneous supplies was in the smaller box, too.

I haven't unwrapped the printer yet. It is so nicely cocooned in bubble wrap that I may not disturb it until we get our new computer, although I really should check it to make sure it survived the journey.

Even if I don't use the printer soon, the package was a hit. The dog got to bark at the UPS delivery man, and the girls loved playing in the foam peanuts.

I have some new twins pictures uploaded! Only 2 weeks late.

The batch of pictures is momentous because I was able to use my new Applescript method I mentioned to get the pictures up on my website. Read on to hear all the technical and gory details.

I'm excited because we've decided to buy a new computer. My 5-year-old Macintosh has been out of date for some time now, but it was hanging on and it was hard to justify buying a new computer when our existing one works.

But we've decided it's time now, and I had already selected the kind I wanted: a 20" iMac. It would be wonderful to have an integrated CD and DVD burner along with the Apple iLife Suite. So I went to the Apple store to price it with the exact setup I wanted.

But what did I find when I when to the Apple Store? This:

This is unprecedented. Apple is selling exactly 0 iMacs for two months until the new ones are ready?!? Usually, Apple is very tight-lipped about upcoming hardware upgrades so that people continue to buy the old ones right up until the day the new ones are announced and available for ordering. This two-month gap speaks to someone not planning something correctly.

I must admit to having mixed feelings about the delay, though. I adore the current (old?) iMacs with their hemispherical shape and the "floating" LCD monitor above it. It would look so cool on my desk at home. But I was also worried about getting a G4 processor, which is on the way out, being replaced by the G5. Although there is no information about what the new iMacs will have, there is a general consensus that they will be G5 iMacs. So in this aspect, a forced two-month delay is a good thing for me. Apple is good at design, so I should trust that the new iMacs will be beautiful, too, although I really do love the current design.

Check back here in two months to see what I finally got to order.

No details yet, but at least I know my next computer will be a G5 iMac. What it looks like and what other attributes it has, one can only guess.

So I will. I think it will look similar to the new displays Apple has recently released (brushed metal), but the screen will still "float" above the CPU enclosure. I think the mid-range iMac will have a 20" LCD screen. The G5 clock speed will start at 1.8 GHz, and it will have both USB 2.0 and Firewire 800 ports. The internal HD will be 80 MB, and it will come with a paltry 128 MB of RAM. Airport and Bluetooth will be add-ons.

When I order mine, I'll likely get as much RAM as I can stand along with the Bluetooth add-on. I'll be tempted to get the wireless keyboard (which uses Bluetooth) and a wireless trackball or mouse. I might get an iSight, too, but only if my Dad gets one. I think he'd be the only one I would use it with (at least at first).

My lack of blog entries belies my eagerness to get our new, as yet unannounced, iMac. The product announcement is expected to be made at the Apple Expo in Paris on August 31, and I've given some serious thought about trying to see the live webcast of the event. It would start at 4:00 AM Houston time, although I have not yet been able to verify that there will be a live webcast available.

I am also steeling myself for the fact that it will be several weeks, if not months, after the new iMac is announced before we will actually take possession of our new computer. There are serious shortages of the new G5 chip that is delaying the new PowerMac models. That does not bode well for the availability of the G5 iMac.

But all I can do is wait. So that's what I'll do.

Well, I waited 4 hours to do it, but I placed my order for one of the new G5 iMacs. Four hours after they were available for ordering, I submitted my order for a 20" LCD, 1.8 GHz G5, DVD-R burner, wireless keyboard iMac.

I've been way too busy at work to wax eloquent about the upcoming arrival of the computer, but I'll have time. It won't be shipped for at least 4 weeks - maybe longer. At least I'm relatively close to the front of the line. I hope.

I have updated my Macintosh page to reflect my pending change in home computing environment. The old Macintosh page is still around, if you want to reminisce.

Have I lost my design touch? It seems like I had a much harder time in laying out the new page than I used to, and I'm still not very happy with it. I think part of it is that I don't have as much time to spend on my web page as I used to, and part of it is my attempt to use CSS to control the layout and style of my page, instead of the old techniques I've known for years.

I at least got what I wanted to up on the page: a comparison between my old (current) Mac and my new (future) iMac, and a cute little countdown image. It'll do for now, even though the countdown image will cease to function 20 days after my new Mac arrives.

My new bundle of joy arrived last week - the new G5 iMac! It only took 5 days to get here from Singapore via FedEx (by way of Manila, Tokyo, Anchorage, and Indianapolis), which I monitored daily.

Ugh and Blech. Today, my beloved iMac G5 crashed. At first, it would appear to go to sleep without being able to be woken up. Then, it would not boot far enough to get to the login screen (although once I got an open firmware prompt). The next step was to run the hardware diagnostics, which all indicated no problems.

So I thought I was OK; I'd just have to reinstall the system software. But when I went to do that, the system installation program would not recognize the internal hard disk. At all. It's hard to install system software without a hard disk to install it onto.

The worst case is that the hard drive is gone. That means all the files on it are gone, too. It being a relatively new hard drive, though, I'd be surprised if it were a total loss. I am hopeful the data on the hard drive is recoverable.

Donna will drop the computer off at the Houston Galleria Apple store tomorrow. We'll be without the computer for a few weeks, but it is still under warranty, so I don't expect to have to pay for the repairs (except for a nominal service fee, perhaps). They can fix the faulty Bluetooth module while the have it, too.

BTW - I'm accessing my blog from my wife's blueberry iBook, connected to the internet via the wireless Airport network and router. It's nice having a backup computer.

Just a few hours at the Apple Store is all it took. By yesterday evening, the same day that we dropped the iMac off at the Apple Store, we had a message on our phone that it was fixed. They had to replace the motherboard, or midplane as they called it. Now, not only does the computer work, but also the Bluetooth module is fully functional again (or so it seems so far).

It was all under warranty, but this experience has made purchasing the extended warranty look pretty attractive. It would extend the 1-year warranty to a 3-year warranty for about $160. We'll likely get that insurance sometime within the next few weeks.

Now that the most recent Macintosh operating system has had its initial post-release patch distributed, I went ahead and ordered it from Amazon. There have been scattered reports of issues with the new OS, but it actually seems to be less severe than the other Mac OS X 10.x releases. I am looking forward to using Spotlight and Automator the most. Dashboard is pretty, but right now I don't really see myself using it that much. Quartz Composer has me intrigued, but I don't know if I'll spend the time on it I'll need to make it really interesting.

At any rate, it should arrive within 2 weeks on a DVD - my first software purchase that is being delivered on a DVD. It will be arriving along with a cookbook my wife ordered and her birthday present. I told her she can't open the box when it arrives.

I neglected to mention earlier that I indeed got Tiger, that is Mac OS X 10.4.1, while Donna and the girls were up in Dallas. It's been a month now, and so I can provide some first impressions:

• The interface is cleaner. If only all of the OS would standardize on one window style, it would be better.
• Spotlight is not as useful as I thought it would be. Mostly because it does not work very well with iPhoto 4.
• I'm using Dashboard a lot more than I thought I would. It's easy to jump there to track a package or check the weather.
• Mail is not as offensively ugly as I thought it would be. It is definitely more useful, so it's minor loss of attractiveness is not as noticeable.
• It seems slightly faster.

Overall, I'm happy with the purchase. Now if I could just figure out how to get my custom Xcode-developed Automator action to work, I'd be psyched.

Our old printer, HP Photosmart 1215, originated from the days of Mac OS X when printer drivers were just slapped together for the "new" operating system. The printer printed but:

• it would not print if more than one person had logged in since it was last rebooted
• it would not work with my new USB hub (which I at first thought was a problem with the hub)
• it was extremely slow
• it used up an inordinate amount of CPU power to print (you could hear the variable-speed CPU fans rev up when it was printing)

So with all these difficulties, I decided to use some of my bonus to buy a new printer. The one I selected, the Epson Stylus Photo RX700, is more than I would normally pay for a printer, but it happened to have my full wishlist of features and was just released in the US this month:

• Mac-compatible color inkjet printer
• built-in scanner
• built-in card reader
• prints directly to CDs/DVDs

This sounds cool. I don't really watc h enough TV or listen to enough music to make a valid argument to get a "home entertainment PC" for myself, but it is intriguing nonetheless. Apple has a history of making stylish end-user systems that "just work" so it would be really neat if they could be the ones to produce a viable system that will be the living room's multimedia hub.

I guess I'll have to wait until January to see if this really comes to pass, and if so, how cool it really is.

I recently got converted to XP (from NT) at work. Included in that was a screenshot program that has a plug-in for use in all of the MS Office applications. So now every time I open a Word, Excel, or Powerpoint document, I get this little dialog box asking if it's OK to install the plug-in. That's a little annoying, but bearable.

But when I open it from Windows Explorer (the analog to the Finder for you Mac people), I get a second dialog box placed on top of the first. Rather than explain it, here is a screenshot:

So then I have to click on the overlapping dialog box that says, essentially, "Hey - there's a dialog box under me!", before I can dispense with the original dialog box.

What gets me is that someone had to put this into the operating system to have it behave this way. Someone thought this would be a good idea. I'm sure there's a good, logical reason why it behaves this way. Probably Excel reported back to Windows that the file didn't finish opening, so Windows wanted to tell me about it. I don't know why I'd need to know that, since I hope I would notice if the file opened or not. Maybe it's in case I forgot I tried to open it.

I have to use Windows XP for my job. I get to use the Mac OS at home. Thank goodness.

I am excited about a completely free program I recently found online called Lilypond, but when I try to explain it to people, somehow no one seems all that enthusiastic. Lilypond is a musical score creation program that takes text-based input. Looking at their website, you can see their focus is creating very precise scores that are not subject to the small annoyances that most computer-generated scores contain.

The main reason why it's got me excited is that it creates a MIDI file along with the score, so I can listent to the notes I've input. As a non-musician, this is very valuable, since it's the only way I can check myself to see if I've entered the notes correctly.

Since I discovered the program about two weeks ago, I've been entering all the songs we've invented throughout the years. These include "Amanda Jean", "Elena Reid", "I'm the Foxy Dog", "The Trash Song", and "Deery in the Cornfield". I'm right now working on trying to convert Richard's (my brother-in-law) composition "Wedding Waltz" that he created for his wedding. It is hand-written (but clear), so it will take me a while to create.

SketchUp is the neatest 3D-drawing application I've seen yet. It was so neat, in fact, that I looked into it about a year ago, but it was far too expensive for me to justify even putting it on my gift list. I instead turned to Blender, which is free and extremely powerful, but has a steep learning curve up which I have just begun to climb.

But recently I found out that Google, who bought SketchUp last year, is releasing a free version. It is available to the PC now and promises a Mac version soon.

I'm so psyched that I downloaded the time-restricted demo version of the full software so I can start playing with it now, instead of waiting for the Mac version. I want to design a 3D layout of my home, just for fun.

We had to take the iMac in for service this weekend. It would suddenly turn off (lose all power) anywhere between 5 seconds and 10 minutes after turning it on. These are the same symptoms it had a little over a year ago.

So what's going on? Did I get a lemon? Is there something in the way we use it or in the environment that causes the same problem to recur? It turns out it may be a design or manufacturing flaw. The Apple service technician found an entry for this issue in a Repair Extension Program at Apple. This indicates that multiple people have had this issue and that there has been some amount of root cause analysis performed.

This means that the repairs should be covered at no cost to me! Yay! But that also means we're without a computer for about a week. Boo! I figured out how to read our email via my ISP's web interface, so at least we won't be totally out of touch. It does mean, though, that I can't extract the 6th birthday photos from my camera just yet (although I can print them out directly from the card from my printer - they'll just be totally unedited).

This event also brings home the fact that our computer is nearing the end of its useful life. The new iMacs, while nicer than the one we have, don't seem so astounding that they make me crave an upgrade. Historically speaking, the iMac is upgraded about once a year, so if the repairs to our current iMac allow it to run well for another year, maybe we'll consider getting its replacement for my birthday in 2008.

Apple announced an upgrade to the iMac line of computers today, without much fanfare. That's typical when the upgrade is generally just a bump up in processor speeds. That's true with this upgrade as well, with no major redesign of the computer.

There have been iMac upgrades in the past that have not caught my attention, but our current iMac is showing its age. It's not too early for us to think about getting a new one. The difficulty, as always, is price. We have a major bathroom remodeling project that is about to sap about $13K $16K from our assets, so any other large purchases will be difficult to fit in.

When I went to the Apple site to check out the prices, one with all my ideal upgrades is $2200. That's the 24" version with the standard processor (2.8 GHz Intel Core Duo) and hard drive (320GB) but with an upgraded graphics card (2.2x increase in graphics performance) and increased memory (doubled to 4GB).

Since I don't do any gaming at home on the iMac, I waffled a little on an upgraded graphics card, but the trend in computers seems to be offloading more and more calculation tasks to the graphics processor. So my thinking is an upgrade to the graphics chip might make a bigger difference in performance in the future than upgrading the CPU.

Even if we decide to get a new iMac, it won't be until after the finances for our bathroom remodeling job are setteld and underway. After that, though, if it looks like we can fit it into our budget, an iMac upgrade is probably in our future.

It really shouldn't be this hard. I wanted to have my daughters describe some photos, which I would overlay as a narration to a slideshow of those photos. I have a Mac, so that should be easy. Indeed, you can add an audio track directly in iMovie, but you can do that only against an existing video track, and I don't know in advance how long the girls will talk about each photo.

What would be great is to have iPhoto (or iMovie) record the audio narration along with the timings of when I advance to each picture, so this information can be used to generate a slideshow that is synched-up with the narration. Alas, despite much Googling, I was not able to find an easy way to do this.

But being stubborn, I did get it to work, although in a rather laborius fashion:

• Collect the photos you want to use in an iPhoto slideshow
• Set the slideshow settings to show the title, manual controls, and transitions between slides to 60 seconds (this sets the maximum amount of narration per slide to 1 minute)
• Open up a sound recording program (e.g. Audacity) and start recording a new file
• Go into iPhoto and start the slideshow
• Record your narration, advancing to the next photo as you wish
• When finished with the slideshow, stop the audio recording
• Edit the audio recording as needed (remove any unecessary silence, technical glicthes, or daughters bickering)
• Create a new iMovie project, importing both the pictures you used (from iPhoto) and the audio file with your narration
• Manually change the duration of each photo in iMovie to match the narration
• Export the iMovie project to iDVD and burn to a DVD

Although this is a lot of steps, it's really only the next-to-last step that annoys me. Since I already used the computer to advance to each slide, it should be able to store and transfer those timings to iMovie.

It's not all bad, though. This long method does allow me to edit the audio to take out the bits I don't want to be there. And having the stream-of-conciousness narration from 2 six-year-olds is pretty neat, regardless of how I had to get there. I especially like the part we recorded before the slideshow starts of them asking me what they're supposed to do (I'll have this playing over a black screen) and the time when we had to stop the slideshow so we could snuggle.

I think it will be one of those things that will be fun to listen to 10 years from now. Assuming old-fashioned DVDs are still playable then.