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Politicians should be examples

As I was driving home from the airport, I was stopped at the light to turn on Pacific Highway when I see a minivan making a right turn. I looked at the license plate and saw that it was K6JVM; license plates like these are the call letters for an amateur radio license. While I know my own call sign, I don’t know too many other people’s call signs (I know Phil Karn’s, KA9Q as I worked with some of his code years ago and he got me interested in Linux), I happen to know that this call sign belongs to the city council member representing our district, Jim Madaffer. He was yapping on his cell phone making the turn with one hand while his other hand was on the phone.

I know that the hands free law doesn’t go into effect this summer for cell phones and that it is a state law, not one that he had anything to do with, but I think it would set a good example for our elected politicians to do the safe and responsible thing when it comes to driving while talking…use a handsfree device, if you MUST talk.

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I pulled an OJ

No, I didn’t commit any crime, I ran through the airport like in the old Hertz commercial. I left for the airport quite early for my 12:10 pm flight back home to San Diego just to be on the safe side. I figured I could work at the airport as I’d be there quite early. I got to the airport and went to print my boarding pass (it’s hard to print my boarding pass ahead of time when I don’t have a printer and it said my flight was cancelled. While waiting in line, I checked my iPhone and saw that there was a 10 am flight and an 11:10 am flight; this was at about 9:45 am. There was no way that I could make the 10 am flight, but the person at the counter put me on it and said to go through the employee security entrance. So I did, took my cell phones out of my pockets, pulled out my laptop, took off my jacket, sweatshirt, and shoes, shoved everything in the X-Ray machine and proceeded. I forgot that I had a water bottle that had to be confiscated. I quickly put on my shoes and grabbed all my stuff than darted off to the gate. I made it on the plane with about 7 minutes to spare!

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Macworld 2008 Summary

Now that I’m done with Macworld 2008, here are my reactions.

  • Apple’s announcements were pretty much snoreville.
    • The MacBook Air is an interesting device for some, but for me, it is lacking. I need a machine that is faster than my current 2.16 GHz MacBook Pro (Core Duo) and has a significantly larger hard drive (I have a 7200 RPM 100 GB drive). I only have one main machine, so I’m looking at a 2.8 GHz MacBook Pro with a 200 GB 7200 RPM drive. I’m going to wait as my machine is quite adequate for now (it does have a nice dent in the corner when I dropped it a few months ago when trying to put luggage on a cart; it works fine, but has a dent in the corner near the power connector).
    • The AppleTV announcement was pretty much a given based on the rumors. I’m excited to have the free software update, but will have to wait until someone hacks it so I can install the SlimServer software back on it.
    • The iPhone/iPod Touch updates aren’t of much use to me, as far as I can tell. I did try out the GPS-like stuff in Google maps and it worked adequately.
    • Time Capsule – not a whole lot of use to me as I use a local Time Machine backup and use SuperDuper! to backup daily
  • There was still a lot of iPod/iPhone stuff on the floor, but less than previous years. I could do without this. How many iPod/iPhone cases can you use?
  • Nothing really new in the hardware front. A few new scanners, more junk from Canon, HP, and EPSON.
  • No new software that I didn’t already know about. I think that BusySync is an interesting competitor to Spanning Sync (I’ve know the folks behind BusySync for years as they used to do Palm software.)
  • On the positive side, I’m excited about ReceiptWallet as I got some real good ideas for enhancements. However, I don’t have enough time to implement them!
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Lazy Expo Goers

The Expo that is going on at the same time as Macworld is the United Motorcoach Association Expo. I saw the sign in front of Moscone North that detailed their hotel shuttle schedule. It listed the hotels it goes to and one of them was the Marriott. You have to be real lazy to not walk from the Marriott to Moscone. It is a 3 minute walk and just over a block. You’d spend more time getting onto and off the bus than walking.

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Doh, fixed a blog issue!

This week I’ve written a lot of posts and noticed that the “Previous” link didn’t show up at the bottom causing people to potentially miss some of my excellent work! I finally took a look and discovered that one of my WordPress plugins (Adhesive) caused the issue. I installed this plugin right after I ran my first marathon 1.5 years ago! Oh well, now people can see the older posts.

BTW, I’m playing around the theme for my blog and will keep searching for one that I like. Please don’t mind my mess.

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The bird had the right idea!

I installed the software for the IRIScan Express and was not surprised to see that it isn’t TWAIN compliant. However, the ReadIRIS software that comes with it DOES use TWAIN compliant scanners if they exist. In poking around, I see that the software opens up a bundle specifically for the scanner. (I used a tool called opensnoop to see what the app was opening.)

 501   1867 Readiris       6 /Library/Application Support/IRISScan/IRISScan 1.6.bundle 
  501   1867 Readiris       6 /Library/Application Support/IRISScan/IRISScan 1.6.bundle/Contents 
  501   1867 Readiris       6 /dev/autofs_nowait   
  501   1867 Readiris       7 /Library/Application Support/IRISScan/IRISScan 1.6.bundle/Contents/Info.plist

TWAIN drivers live in /Library/Image Capture/TWAIN Data Sources. It doesn’t look like the IRIScan folks did the right thing and create a TWAIN driver. Instead they created their own system for talking to the scanner. The scanner is a Plustek scanner (according to USB Prober). I haven’t found Plustek drivers, yet, but will keep searching.

So, the IRIScan scanners won’t work with ReceiptWallet. Piece of crap scanner. I’ve sent email to them asked where the TWAIN drivers are as the sales guy told me it was TWAIN compliant and how can I return the scanner. I’m sure I’ll get a great response to my message.

I should have heeded the advice of the bird and returned the scanner while I still had the chance and before I left the show. Anyone have a need for a paperweight? Their software is so awful that I wouldn’t even think of using it.

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A sign from the heavens?

I went ahead and purchased the IRIScan Express 2 scanner today to give it a whirl. When I handed the guy my credit card, he started to write down my name on an order form and was about to write down my credit card info when I asked if he’d take cash. He said, “Yes”, so I handed him $100. I wasn’t about to have a company write down my credit card number and have it potentially lost who knows where. In this case, I trust electronic transfers of my information rather than paper as the commotion of a tradeshow could easily cause them to lose the piece of paper.

Anyway, I was walking between the show halls and luckily zigged as a bird that came out of nowhere decided to poop. The poop landed within about 3 feet of the bag I was carrying the IRIScan. If the poop landed on the scanner, it definitely would have been a sign about the scanner. I’m still reserving judgement until I get a chance to crack open the box and see if it has a TWAIN driver.

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Zig-Zagging Through San Francisco

One of my problems with traveling is that I eat out all the time and become a bump on a log. This negatively affects me and I hate it. This morning, I decided to take a stroll through San Francisco to get my heart going. One of my former co-workers said that the way to walk in San Francisco is to zig zag so that you don’t have to wait at the lights. This is great if you have no place to be, like me this morning.

get.do.jpeg
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Sending the “big guns” to Macworld

Sprint had a booth at Macworld showing their modems and how fast their EVDO network is. I love EVDO and thought it was cool that they care about the Mac market. Well, I was a bit wrong. I asked one of the guys there if the modems support LBS. He didn’t know what LBS was; LBS, Location Based Services, came up as the second link in my Google search, so it isn’t too obscure. When I said what the acronym stood for, he said yes and showed me the Novatel modem which had it. I looked at the guy’s name tag and it said “Retail Sales Consultant”. So it looks like Sprint sent people from the local store to man the booth. Are Mac users not good enough to get people from Sprint corporate? While I’m ranting about Sprint, I saw their new connection manager software. It is worse than the “Delicious Generation” type UI. It is a UI that is completely un-Mac-like and is in your face, not just a little menu bar thingy.

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Document based vs One Main Window

After looking at NEAT Receipts yesterday and a few other programs, I’m beginning to think that my decision to make ReceiptWallet a one main window application may not have been the best one. A huge advantage to multiple windows is that people can have data files for each year or one for work and one for home. Unfortunately, changing from the main window to a document based model is not easy. Unfortunately NSPersistentDocument doesn’t support packages, but a few developers have figured out how to get around this. What does this mean? This would mean that all the data is stored in one package and it would appear as one file, but would actually be separated inside. This is exactly what I’d want with the database file separate from the actual PDFs.

Hmmmm…