david sidlinger

I’ve migrated my blog to my slice. Have I mentioned that Slicehost kicks ass?

Xerox is looking to change its image. Their efforts include a new logo that apparently a lot of people think is hideous. I think it’s lame and ugly, too, but my sense of design does not qualify me to weigh in on the work of a ridiculously-named company like Interbrand. What I will say is that I find it a little odd that they admired Kyrgyzstan so much that they used a design element from their flag.

In the meantime, please don’t mistake silence for inaction. - Dean Hachamovitch

Consider it done. In the meantime, I also won’t mistake silence for a viable strategy.

I subscribed to Marvel Digital Comics yesterday. It’s nice to have a very extensive library of material without taking up any space. I’m busy catching up on content that I missed during the time I was either broke or thought I was too cool to be buying comics.

The comics are read with a flash “player”. It seems to do a pretty good job with the images. I believe that the comics have been scanned and then vectorized, but I may be wrong. The reader provides you with three ways to view the comic: two page, which makes the text too small to read on my MacBook, single page, and smart panels. The smart panel mode works pretty well, zooming in to a panel or two.

Nothing’s perfect, though. While I think this is a nice move towards an online distribution model, I do have some complaints.

At this point, the issues available online are spotty, and it’s hard to find contiguous runs of a title that are more than a few issues. Inexplicably, limited-length series and story-lines are not complete. For example, Secret Wars was an eight issue limited series. Marvel has made issues 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 8 available. I can only hope that the gaps will be filled in over time.

There isn’t any way to get access to content off-line. I understand Marvel’s concern about “secondary” distribution, but I think a move to watermarked PDFs, like those available on Safari, would be well received. Restricting the comics to an online-only player will not stop the people sharing them through Bitorrent or Usenet, and only lowers the usefulness of the service to paying customers.

The player is a little buggy. The size of the navigation bar at the bottom of the window doesn’t seem to be taken into account when calculating the rendered size of the content. This results in the bottom of the content being clipped in smart panel mode. Usually, I can deal with this, but some letterers seem to like placing dialogue at the bottom of the panel. I’ve provided feedback to Marvel, and, hopefully, they’ll address this soon.

Update: Marvel has responded to my email, and they are working on a fix. In the meantime, resizing the window to have a standard aspect ratio seems to work.

All in all, I’m fairly happy with the service, but I’ll wait for a couple months to see how it progresses before committing to a prepaid, year-long membership.

The 1.1.2 firmware for the iPod touch updates the calendar application to allow adding and editing of events. I can return my touch to its unjailbroken state.

via daring fireball

Today, I ran the jailbreak on my iPod touch. I was perfectly content to leave it locked up and wait for ISVs to get their hands on the SDK in February. The only thing that I wanted was the ability to add and edit events in the calendar application. I give Apple a lot of leeway (and a lot of my money,) but the artificial limitation they placed on the calendar app on the touch was too much. Apparently, it’s the same binary that runs on the iPhone with a configuration property change. What in the world were they thinking?

I recently picked up of the new Apple keyboards, the wired one, to use on both my laptop and with Windows at work. Spending a lot of time on the MacBook made me accustomed to typing on the chiclet keys, and I’m now used to the positions of the control and alt keys on a Mac. My traditional Windows keyboard, a Microsoft Natural Ergo 4000, was slowing me down.

The good news is that the keyboard works fine with Windows. A little bit of work with SharpKeys and I was ready to go. I remapped F13 to Insert (VMware Workstation uses Ctrl-Alt-Ins to send Ctrl-Alt-Del to virtual machines) and the right Command (Windows) to the Application key (context-click).

The only problem I have had so far is “bottoming out” my keystrokes. The travel on the new keyboard is extremely short. Sometimes my fingers forget about that and pretend they are hitting the keys on the old one. It’s a lot like when you think there’s another stair to go and end up slamming your foot down hard. I’m sure that will go away in time.

A couple things prospective buyers might want to know:

• As far as I can tell, the “special” function keys don’t do anything under Windows; so, no media/volume control is available. The keys don’t register at all using SharpKeys’ “Type Key” functionality. The only way to fix this appears to be a driver.
• Mac’s don’t use NumLock. The clear key functions as a NumLock key under Windows, but there is no indicator light for feedback.

Update: Forgot to mention that I love this keyboard. It’s the opposite of what I thought I’d want, but I wouldn’t want to go back now.

I recently started using VMware Fusion instead of Parallels Desktop to run virtual machines on my MacBook. The main reason I switched was support for multi-processor VMs, but I also had a nagging suspicion that Parallels’ kernel extensions might be behind the sleep issues my machine has been having.

I think Fusion is a great product, but I’ve run across something that caused me huge amounts of frustration. Sometimes, it would warn me that it couldn’t write preference information. Once that happened, it was all downhill. Attempting to change the application preferences would cause the whole application to die immediately. Most of the other applications I use would start acting funky.

It turns out you should never ever launch Fusion using Quicksilver.

I don’t know what exactly VMware is doing, but Fusion has earned the dubious distinction of being the only application that I know of that won’t work with the best application in the explored universe. My first guess is something to do with changing the process identity.

I like to imagine that it does feel some shame being the only item that I’ve had to add to my dock since installing Quicksilver.

I’ve got to get one of these. My 360 decided to go belly-up last week.

RRoD t-shirt design @ © SplitReason.com

Quicksilver is the best thing since any kind of bread. I can’t live on a Mac without it, and I even find myself attempting to use it on Windows when I’m at work.

One its tricks that I use all the time is “Go to Directory in Terminal”. This command opens a Terminal window and cd’s to the directory that was the subject of the Quicksilver sentence. Very handy.

Recently, this command got “stuck”. Every time I would open a Terminal window, it would change to a directory I had opened with Quicksilver. Nothing seemed to make Terminal forget the command. Since I didn’t know how Quicksilver caused the command to be run when the window was created, I wasn’t able to do anything about it.

My first guess was a term file that was created by Quicksilver and set as the default. No dice. I wasn’t able to find any term files that I hadn’t created myself.

Next, I thought it might have altered my .profile file. Nope. It was still just like I left it.

Turns out there is a Terminal preference I was unaware of. If a key named ExecutionString exists in the com.apple.Terminal domain, all new Terminal windows will execute it upon creation. My cd command was found there. My best guess is that Quicksilver modifies the key, opens a window, and then returns it to its previous state. It must have somehow lost its mond and forgotten to return ExecutionString to its original state. Quicksilver does crash on me sometimes.

If this happens to you, correcting it is fairly easy:

defaults delete com.apple.Terminal ExecutionString

When I first found this, I tried to think of some other way to put the preference to use, but I think I’ll just use .profile and term files.