Author: Scott Gruby

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Why do I blog?

Why do I blog? That’s an interesting question. I’ve been blogging for almost 5 months now and sometimes ask myself, why? There are several answers to that question. First off, it gives me an opportunity to get stuff off my chest and synthesize my thoughts. Second, it is a record of what has been going on in my life that I can look back sometime in the future. Third, it is a way for me to write wacky stuff without having to bug my wife with some useless stuff.

Do I expect anyone to read this blog? Not really. It is mainly for me. If others read it, great, but unlike some other blogs I read daily, this is not meant to attract an audience.

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Better than the Sony Reader?

The other day I mentioned the Sony Reader for reading stuff on the go. After a little more research and wading through tons of negative comments about Sony’s offering, I came across The iLiad. Similar concept, but may be better executed. It appears to read PDF, XHTML, TXT, etc. as well as having 802.11g built in. This looks a lot more exciting; hopefully the cost will make it affordable to mere consumers like me.

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Hard Drive Recovery complete

I restored my PowerBook’s hard drive to the state it was on Saturday before it crashed using the most excellent SuperDuper!. If you aren’t doing regular backups (daily), then you are asking for trouble. There are 2 kinds of computer users; those that have lost data and those that will.

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Digital Books and Sony Reader

I have a pile of stuff to read on my computer’s desktop (technical stuff) that I just haven’t gotten around to reading. I don’t want to print it out and I don’t want to read it on my computer. I never considered a dedicated “eBook” reader, but the Sony Reader device announced at CES looks like it could meet my needs.

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Living in hell (must be real hot)

Today on my way to run some errands, I passed by Serra High School and read their fairly new electronic sign. One of the messages on it had the current temperature listed as +266 degrees F. Wow! That is really hot and sure didn’t feel like it. My car’s thermometer indicated it was about 64 degrees F. I suspect that the 2 was just a mistake and that its thermometer wasn’t completely broken.

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Surgery complete!

I managed to replace the hard drive in my PowerBook with a Hitatchi Travelstar 7200 RPM, 80 GB drive. The instructions from www.pbfixit.com were excellent as well as their screw guide which I used to dutifully place and tape all the screws I removed. The drive is now formatted and appears to work. I still have to wait until tomorrow morning to get my backup and restore it. I completely understand the warning “no user serviceable parts inside”. Replacing a hard drive in a laptop takes time and patience.

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Fry’s – The good, the bad, and the ugly

As I had some time to kill today, I decided to go ahead and get a new hard drive for my PowerBook and replace it without waiting until tomorrow. The choices on a Sunday for getting a laptop hard drive are pretty limited, basically only Fry’s Electronics. Fry’s is not my favorite store as their service is not great, return lines are long, and sometimes they try to pass returns off as new (I had bought a monitor from them that turns out had been used and when it broke, it was out of warranty even though it was less than 1 year since I had bought it). However, on the plus side, Fry’s has decent store hours, good selection, OK prices, and carries parts others don’t (where can you find a #6 Torx screwdriver locally?). While I try to avoid shopping at Fry’s, sometimes it is unavoidable.

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Hard drive failure

One of the worst things that could happen to a computer happened today to me. The hard drive on my PowerBook failed. It started making funny noises yesterday and then today it stopped spinning. Given that I’m a bit paranoid about backups, I said to myself, “this isn’t a problem as my backup is 2 hours old.” Then my elated thought turned to disappointment when I realized that my 2 hour old backup is sitting in the bank vault where I had just been a few hours earlier to store my backup. The good news is that my 9 day old backup boots my PowerBook thanks to SuperDuper!. So on Monday morning I’ll drive over to The Chip Merchant, plunk down $150 + tax for a new 80 GB hard drive, then goto the bank which doesn’t open until 9 am. Then I have the fun task of disassembling my PowerBook and putting the new hard drive in.

To add to my backup strategy, I’m going to get additional TrayDocks and have 2 backups at home so that this doesn’t happen again.

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Stuffit Archives and .hqx encoded files

Stuffit products have been on my Macs for years and have done a wonderful job of compressing and decompressing. Stuffit Expander shipped with all versions of the Mac up until OS X Tiger. Now that zip is built into the OS and even has extensions for keeping the Mac resource fork (newer applications don’t use the resource fork anymore), I haven’t been able to come up with a reason to keep Stuffit Expander around except to deal with files I download that are still in .sit and .hqx formats. I find that some companies are still putting files on their websites with these extensions; if the app doesn’t have a resource fork, zip it. If it does or you want to customize the look, use a disc image (.dmg) and let a user download that. I think by now users are used to using disc images. Also, the disc image doesn’t need to be zipped or .bin put on the end; just make sure your web server serves up the .dmg file as application/octet-stream.

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Passing off Windows software as Mac software

It amazes me that companies recompile their code to work on the Mac (either using cross platform GUI libraries or trying to make a Mac interface without basically ever using a Mac) and expect Mac users to not be offended when no real effort is put into making the app look like it belongs on a Mac. In one app I ran today they even used a screenshot of a Windows dialog in the dialog! As a die hard Mac user, I avoid software that is done this way as much as possible as it doesn’t instill confidence in me if they can’t provide a Mac user experience which really wouldn’t take all that much time. This is similar to my complaint about Palm applications in an article I wrote called “Common User Interface Mistakes. Some Real World Examples” published for the PalmSource Developer Conference, May 2003. In that article, I used screenshots to point out errors in user interface according to the Palm OS guidelines. One line that I really like from the article is:

If a developer didn’t care enough to spend an extra hour fixing the user interface and making it adhere to guidelines, did he or she cut corners when developing the application? This isn’t to say that an application with a good user interface operates better than one with a poor user interface or that a good application can’t have a poor user interface, but it may be indicative of the quality of the application.