Movable Type releases new version of content management system, can’t manage content

Irony alert: Movable Type today released a beta of the fourth version of their “publishing platform”. Unfortunately, the warning they give users that they

should expect to encounter bugs and issues, and you shouldn’t use Movable Type 4 in a production environment or context

Was taken to heart: links to pages meant to describe the new version were mysteriously broken when I visted today about 11:15 PDT, and remain so 15 minutes later.

Here are screen shots of the broken pages:

http://www.movabletype.org/mt4/:
Picture 6

http://www.movabletype.org/mt4/mt4_answers.html
Picture 7

Update: Looks like they put some MT4 info on their movabletype.org domain but the pages above are on their movabletype.com one. If you go to the .com address, the pages show up now. Oops!

http://www.movabletype.com/mt4/
http://www.movabletype.com/mt4/mt4_answers.html

Technorati Tags:

Targeting the AAPL millionaries

Apple’s stock has been on a major run-up the last few months (heck, the last few years). They been hitting new highs just about every day it seems, and I check about as often. Last night I plugged AAPL into Google, and nearly rolled out my bed laughing.

As you no doubt know, Google sticks ads into your search results, and this particular search returned a link to a Sotheby’s real estate agent selling multi-million dollar houses.

200706042307

How about a 5 bedroom, 4 bath Mediterranean-style multi-level homestead with pool for only $3.5 million?

Picture 1

Or how about a more modest-looking single-story ranch-style home with 5 bedrooms and 5 baths? No price listed, but if you have to ask, your options haven’t vested.

Picture 2

I’ve heard of targeted advertising, but this is a whole new level. There must be a yacht-load of newly minted millionaires meandering through the Apple Campus in Cupertino. I wonder if they’ve started wearing ascots and muttering “What ho my good man?” to each other?

I should note that this isn’t exclusive to AAPL; the real estate agent also targeted Google (GOOG)

Picture 3-1

But not Microsoft (MSFT) or Dell (DELL).

Technorati Tags: , ,

A (more) reasonable grill

I found a grill which is more reasonably priced than the last one I drooled over. It’s a 42,000 BTU Weber grill with over 500 square inches of grill space. Available in sleek black or electric blue for about $550 (or, for some unfathomable reason, for $700 in forest green; note, I didn’t say it was cheap), the Genesis E-310 Propane Gas Grill may eventually burn its way into my backyard.

This is made slightly more likely thanks to a gift certificate balance I have at Amazon; I got it by cashing in my coins at my local Coinstar machine. You’d be surprised how much money in coins you might have laying around! I read somewhere, many many years ago, that saving your change is a great way to generate “free” money. I never actually tried cashing those coins in until I was doing a house cleaning a few months ago and had nowhere to put the boxes of coins I’d gathered over the years (and moved from apartment to apartment). When I took the coins to my Coinstar machine the first time, I ended up with over $500.

The second time I ended up with over $300.

I now keep a jar at the door, and when it fills to the top, I cash it in. Normally, to get cash out of Coinstar, you have to pay a 9% fee of the total amount deposited. But if you get an Amazon gift certificate, that fee is waived. Ditto for iTunes gift certificates, Starbucks, AMC Theatres, and nearly a dozen other merchants. It’s a great way to recover your coins in one fell swoop.

And if a gift card to your favorite retailer isn’t available, you can always get a prepaid MasterCard. Alas, that will cost you $10 just to get the card, and another $5 every time you renew it.

Nope, I’m sticking to Amazon gift certificates. Hello summer grilling season….

Grammatical Error of the Week

I love reading John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. Witty, insightful, technical, it’s one of the better Mac-oriented websites around. John comes across as a rather brilliant guy, but even the brilliant get it wrong on occasion.

This occasion was the title of a recent entry on his site. In lamenting the lack of a way to write programs for the Apple iPhone, John writes “iPhone SDK, iPhone SDK! Wherefore Art Thou iPhone SDK?” and makes a mistake almost everyone makes: thinking that wherefore art is “Old English” for where are. After all, in one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines, Juliet cries out:

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo

But she’s not asking “where are you, Romeo?” (despite the amateur productions you’ve seen of Juliet casting about from her garden window in search of a hidden Romeo), she’s asking “why are you Romeo?”.

You know the story: Juliet Capulet falls for Romeo Montague, but their families are sworn enemies. She can’t be with him simply because of his name (awww). The lines that follow are

Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

What Juliet is asking is why must Romeo be Romeo (and, unspoken, a Montague). She begs him to give up his family and his name, or if he’s unwilling to do that, that they get married, and she’ll take on his last name, and therefore give up hers.

I don’t recall learning the meaning of wherefore in school; I learned its meaning sometime in the late 80s, while studying Shakespeare in my acting company (New York Parks’ Shakespeare Company). (Although Romeo and Juliet wasn’t one that I performed in, we studied famous scenes and plays as a way of better understanding Shakespeare in general.)

Wherefore as where is such a common misconception that it wouldn’t surprise me if a poll of English teachers got it wrong; I know that most ordinary people you’d stop on the street would. The unfortunate thing is, in an incorrect use like “Wherefore Art Thou iPhone SDK,” most ordinary people would get what you’re trying to ask, which means this mistake will continue on, and, even worse, might gain currency as correct.

What a shame.

The Ow! Factor

A few weeks ago, when we first saw the apartment Y moved into this weekend, she commented unfavorably on the lack of an elevator in this third-story walk-up. I retorted “you only have to worry about it twice: once when moving in, and again when moving out.”

Man do I regret that. After helping Y move into that third-story walk-up, my body has rebelled. It claims I’ve pushed it too far this time. After the 7.5 mile walk last week, the last thing it needed, it insists, was another strenuous weekend. And yet I compelled it to lift dozens of heavy boxes, beds and bags up and down several flights of stairs for six hours on Saturday, including one particularly cumbersome Ikea sideboard.

In particular, my body is taking its anger out on my lower back, which feels like someone has placed me on a medieval rack and turned the wheel the wrong way, compressing my spine. After rising from a sitting or reclined position, I’m forced to walk in a half-crouch until my body relinquishes its grip around my midsection.

I’m also feeling it in my forearms, which feel like a hot poker was shoved into my wrists. I’m reminded of the exercises I used to do for my stage combat training: I’d take two fencing swords, extend my arms straight out to my sides, to my full wingspan, and describe ever-smaller circles with the tips of the swords. It only took a few minutes to feel the burning sensation. (Don’t believe me? Give it a try with a couple of pens in each arm.)

I’m surprised my legs have been let off the hook. I was expecting my calf muscles have me in throes of agony, but I only feel a mild twinge, and usually only when I’m climbing the stairs. Indeed, I found walking up and down the stairs of the new apartment (as well as the hills of Y’s SF neighborhood) almost refreshing.

Almost.

I’ve already decided: my next move, I’m hiring professionals.

Grillin’ an’ Chillin’

During the damp, dreary darkness of California winter, I looked at buying a new grill. I enjoy grilling, and for most of the year, California has great grilling weather. Buying a grill during the winter is akin to buying a convertible during a rainstorm: salespeople are thrilled to see you and will give you a great deal.

Of course, I never bought that grill.

Now, with Memorial Day and the unofficial start of summer leaping upon us, I find myself again eyeing a new grill. Unfortunately, the one I’m eyeing costs $12,000.

OK, so I’m not really eyeing it so much as ogling it. Only in my wildest dreams (and exorbitant stock prices) could I even consider it. But, oh, it’s so cool.

Bread Breaker® Two Dual-Fuel Gourmet Stainless Steel Hybrid Grill

It’s called the Bread Breaker® Two Dual-Fuel Gourmet Stainless Steel Gas, Charcoal and Wood Combination Grill (just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?).

This mofo is huge: a 36″ x 24″ grilling area, 100,00 BTUs on the main burner, a Rotisserie, a side-burner with 22,000 BTUs, ready for wok cooking, a thermometer that goes up to 1,000 degrees, and, as you may have guessed by virtue of its highly descriptive name, it chars your meat with either charcoal or gas (or, oh! both at the same time!). Replace charcoal with chunks of hardwood and you’ve got yourself a mouthwatering smoked barbecue.

Excuse me while I find a mop for my drool.

Criminal minded / Color-blinded / Looking for the red and green / You can’t find it

A few months back at my irregular vision checkup, I learned something that every woman I’ve met has known: I’m color-blind. Not severely, mind you, but enough that I’m unable to distinguish the number in the image to the side.

I believe I’m afflicted by “anomalous trichromacy”, probably “Deuteranomaly”, which, according to Wikipedia, means greens are weak and reds are stronger to my eyes, and affects 6% of men, . While it doesn’t affect me in my everyday life, I found my “deficiency” interesting enough to try operating without the benefit of any color cues.

The easiest way for me to do this was on my computer, where it’s dead-simple to turn off color. I launched System Preferences and opened Universal Access, a preference pane designed to make Mac OS X easier for disabled people to use. You can have your Mac speak the textual interface to you, make the entire screen bigger and reverse colors to white on black.

You can also turn everything grayscale, eliminating all color completely.

Universalprefpane

I lived without color for weeks (and consistently freaked out people who came into my office), and what I learned is most people have no idea how important color is in communications. Here’s a typical iChat window, but in greyscale.

Ichat-Status-Grey

Can you tell who’s available (green), who’s idle (yellow) and who is away (red)? That’s how many color-blind people see things. Here’s that window again, in color:

Ichat-Status-Color

Much clearer, isn’t it? (Note, even in color I can’t easily distinguish between green and yellow, and often have to give it a second glance.)

Fortunately, Apple tends to care about the issues of the disabled, and have thoughtfully put options into iChat to use shapes to distinguish state: circles for available, triangles for idle and squares for unavailable.

Ichat-Status-Shapes

Not everyone is so considerate. Even Apple’s Server Admin tool uses red and green icons to indicate status. In greyscale, it’s nearly impossible to tell them apart, especially with no legend saying “this is what red looks like”.

Serveradmin-Grey

You’ll find many transgressors in help manuals, where they’ll ask you to, for example, “click the red button to stop recording”.

(I’ve been keeping an eye open for poorly designed applications that use color as a primary interface, and I’m surprised to say I haven’t encountered too many.)

I suggest living in greyscale for a few weeks to see how the other, uh, 6% lives. For the first few days, it’ll feel weird, and you’ll realize how important color is. After a while, switching back to color will either be a huge relief, or you’ll find the color to be garish and bright. (The latter is what happened to me, and I had to get used to color all over again.)

You might also try software that simulates various color-blindness, such as Sim Daltonism or Color Oracle. It can be an eye-opener.

Improving Your Mac OS X FTP Experience

There are many ways of getting a file from your computer to someone else’s computer: you can send it via email, from a web page, or upload it to .Mac’s iDisk. But more basic than any of these is the aptly named File Transfer Protocol, or FTP. FTP is as integral to the internet as the web and for a long time was the primary way files were sent between computers.

Mac OS X provides for downloading from an FTP site (from Finder, choose Go > Connect to Server… and enter the address, e.g. ftp://ftp.apple.com), but surprisingly doesn’t provide for a way of sending files (i.e. writing) to an FTP site. (And the download functionality is awfully slow anyway.) Why, I’ll never understand. “Third-party opportunity,” as they say.

Fortunately, there are many third-party developers filling this opportunity (a search on VersionTracker for “ftp client” returns some 40 applications). My favorite is Panic’s Transmit ($18), though Fetch ($25) continues to be highly regarded, and Captain FTP ($25) has a strong following. If you’d rather not pay that much for an FTP client, CyberDuck is donation-ware (and donate you should).

The problem is if you click a link in your browser, instead of your FTP application of choice launching, Finder tries connecting to the FTP site. This often leads to great pain as Finder chugs through the connection and download, and too bad if you need to upload a file.

No, what you need is for your FTP application of choice (let’s just call it Transmit) to be the default application for all FTP activity.

Here’s how you do that.

First, download and install an FTP application. I use Transmit because it’s fast, well-designed, and I like the company. Installing Transmit is a breeze. Download and open the disk image, and drag the icon to your Applications folder. That’s it. Double-click the application to launch and register it with the system.

Then, you need to be able to change how your system treats FTP links. That means changing your system’s default behavior, and unfortunately, there’s no built-in way to do this. Why, I’ll never understand. “Third party opportunity”. Right.

In this case, that third-party is RCDefaultApp. And its most elementary level, it lets you decide which application opens when you click on, say, a web link, an email link, or, in our case, an FTP link. So download RCDefaultApp, open the downloaded disk image, and install it by double-clicking RCDefaultApp.prefPane

Rcdefaultapp-Finder

Since it’s a preference pane, System Preferences will launch and ask if you want to install it for this or all users. Choose “Install for this user only” and select “Install“.

Rcdefaults-Install

Aside: You may get another message saying “The preference pane you are installing is already installed. Do you want to replace the existing preference pane?” Fight your urge to say “OK”, and instead choose “Cancel“. There’s a bug that prevents the preference pane from being installed if you say “OK”. I’ve reported it to the developer.

Once installed, the prefpane shows up as “Default Apps” (look under “Other” if you’re organized by category). Click Default Apps and note the options under “Internet”.

Rcdefaults-Main

Select FTP, then click the popup under “Default Application” and select your chosen FTP application (in this example, Transmit).

rcdefaults-ftpoptions.png

Quit System Preferences, and the next time you click an FTP link, your FTP application should open automatically. Go ahead, try it: ftp://ftp.apple.com.

RDefaultApp isn’t just for FTP applications. It can also be used to enhance security by preventing certain internet URLs, file extensions and file types from opening an application. We’ll talk about that in a future article.

Birthdays and Bay to Breakers

This Friday was Y’s big 3-0, and we celebrated throughout the weekend. On Friday, a small group of friends had dinner in a new Chinese restaurant, followed by Shrek The Third at a new movie theatre. What better way to enter a new decade than with new experiences?

Saturday was the full celebration, with 16 of Y’s friends enjoying dinner at a local Italian restaurant. There was a lot of food, and a lot of leftovers. It was fun pulling together different groups of her friends and watching them enjoy each others’ company. We also enjoyed a few good bottles of wine. I’ll have to get the names.

The weekend culminated in our participation in an annual San Francisco tradition, Bay to Breakers, a 12 kilometer (7.46 miles) footrace that’s been going strong for 96 years. About nine of us took a leisurely stroll through the streets of San Francisco, including a hill with an 11.15% incline, before wandering through Golden Gate Park and ending up in front of the Pacific Ocean. Many of us wore “Over the (Hayes Street) Hill, 2007” tee-shirts I had printed up for the occasion.

At the top of Hayes Street Hill, we sang Happy Birthday to Y, much to her surprise and chagrin.

The weekend ended much as it had begun, with us eating a late lunch together, this time at a Thai restaurant, before we made our ways home.

The legs of this particular “over the hill” walker are now in some pain, as you might expect of legs which don’t see much physical action anymore. I took a brief hot bath soak in my jetted tub to relieve the tension, and will definitely be applying some Ben Gay or something shortly.

If you’ve never experienced Bay to Breakers, I strongly recommend you do. It’s a one-of-a kind event, with both serious runners and leisurely walkers, and everything in between. There are outrageous costumes and stark nakedness, freely flowing alcohol and staid Jesus-Loves-You/Hates-Gays follies. It’s a genuine microcosm of Life In San Francisco.

On final note, this year Bay to Breakers had a timing chip that gave your start-to-finish time, to the second. Our walking time was 3:21:18. Whoo.