ideoverse home to the ramblings, experiments, resume, and portfolio of Adam Dunford

After four months of working fine, the iBook’s LCD went out again on Tuesday, this time with no warning at all.

It’s not just the pain of going to the Dell to work that has me down, it’s the anguish in admitting that Apple is fallible. I’m a big fan of the underdog (particularly one as good-looking as this one), but I hope I don’t end up all battered wife on this one, constantly coming up with excuses why things aren’t working out and blaming myself for problems–”Maybe I do use it too much or close the clamshell too tightly or leave it on too long…”

Actually, that last bit, about leaving it on too long, reminds me how incredibly stable OS X has been. In the year I’ve had the machine, it has never locked up and I’ve never had to force a shutdown/reboot. When an application has frozen (which is very rare), force quitting that app has never caused any instability in other apps or across the machine. In contrast, in the two days I’ve been back on XP full-time, I’ve had Dreamweaver, Excel, IE, and Firebird all quit on me unexpectedly, leading to problems with the Explorer and causing me to reboot the machine twice just to clear out any residual side effects.

So while Microsoft, which is ostensibly a software company, has issues with application stability, Apple, which is mainly a hardware company, has problems with the nuts and bolts of their products. What to do?

If I could do it all over again, I would have gone to MIT and worked in the Media Lab. Curse you Negroponte!

An example: Eigenradio.

Quoting from the site:

Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy. If you took a bunch of music and asked it, “Music, what are you, really?” you’d hear Eigenradio singing back at you. When you’re tuned in to Eigenradio, you always know that you’re hearing the latest, rawest, most statistically separable thing you can possibly put in your ear. Tune in and hear the future of music

While I listened for a few minutes, I caught some hip hop, Norah Jones, a classical piece, a polka klezmer ditty, and much glitchy randomness. It’s strangely relaxing, sort of like the warm crackle of an AM radio tuner at night, when you can catch signals from around the world.

Only difference is, Eigenradio is possessed.

Got Kung-Tunes up and running on the site over the weekend. Don’t know why I think it is so freakin’ cool to have people know what I’m listening to, particularly when it’s a guilty pleasure like this one…

In honor of cool technology that may or may not change the world, check out http://www.napsterbits.com/. This is a promo site for Napster 2.0, which should be debuting sometime this fall. Don’t know if I’ll care for the actual product but the site has some pretty sweet flash animations of the Napster kitty busting out of music purgatory, getting shot, and then coming back to life. More episodes are forthcoming. I can dig it.

Okay, so Goliath has moved from “apps I’m playing with” to “apps I can’t live without” status in record time.

Because we have WebDAV set up for me to upload files at work, I’ve been using Dreamweaver MX to move files. There haven’t been any issues with checking files in and out until a few weeks back when I had to send my work computer in for repairs (the iBook’s LCD was freaking out). While it was getting fixed, I was using my other computer (a Dell 8100) to work.

No problem there; I had Dreamweaver 4.0 on the PC and simply overrode the checkout permissions for all the files checked out (locked) when my iBook died. The problem arose after I got the iBook back. When I set up 4.0 to DAV into the work machine, I made my profile (email) the same as in MX and when I returned to MX, it still registered the old checkouts and didn’t allow me to check any files in. Oddly, 4.0 still allowed me to check files in and out (I think it has to do with the version control that MX has in it, not because of some problem with DAV). So I had to resort to using the Dell as I figured out a way to override the locking problem.

I knew that OS X had DAV support built in but I had never messed around with it until this situation. Found out that I didn’t need to use the terminal to use DAV; I could GUI in using “Connect to Server” (Cmd+K). I soon grew tired of that; I couldn’t see locked/unlocked status in the Finder, changing the status necessitated a “Get Info” move, and the whole connection, which dragged at times, caused the entire Finder to hang anytime I was connected (even worse when attempting to save a file locally from an application).

So I downloaded a few different DAV clients and tried Goliath. In a few clicks I was able to override all the locked files and reset their states so I could interface with the files in MX with ease. No need to return to the PC, I’m back to doing it all on the iBook again.

Thank you Goliath!