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By coscooper
iPad and iPhone (and a MBP) are part of my everyday technical life, so you would think I’m some “fan-boy” or something, sorry, “fan(person)”, a term I hate BTW, but I’m not. I just like good solid technology to get things done, not worry about either being “hacked” or things falling apart in my hands, (okay, my iPad is just WiFi on purpose and I did have to put a new glass face on my iPhone). I’m also not enamored by the inflated number of applications “available” on those “other” smart-phones who “they” claim a huge number of programs, which according to my limited research, are mostly half baked, low quality and riddled with security issues, hacks and other such reminiscent “windoze ilk”. Android aside, I digress. While the latest iPhone isn’t in my possession, I do have one that is about a year old. With the new release of iOS4, I anticipated taking advantage of a few new features, knowing full well that most wouldn’t be supported, but some would. My anticipation was met with disappointment.
After several hours of waiting for the upgrade to process, I also didn’t see that one coming, I finally got to dinking around with the new system after dinner last night. Armed with the feature list, I poked through the various settings looking for the new features. It all acted, behaved and frankly looked no different than the previous version. I found nothing compelling that made me think, “Boy am I glad I upgraded!” Instead, I yawned pushed a couple of apps together into folders, about the only thing worth the upgrade and moved onto the next few features. Photo zooming, didn’t happen; home background, still black; tap to focus video, I have a 3G only phone, so that was a bust. Finally, I fired up the iPod application to make a new Playlist, underwhelmed and continued down the list. Gift apps, whoopity doo; spell check, —yawn; Bluetooth keyboard, don’t have one, man, this upgrade was a waste of time all around.
Basically, I did my “dinking” for about thirty minutes, placed it on it’s charger and haven’t picked it up since. Instead, as usual, I opted for my morning reading with the iPad, not thinking twice about what I can do with my old, reliable, beater iPhone. I’ll make a call later, I guess, as long as AT&T doesn’t drop me. Then again, I rarely use the calling feature on my iPhone, so I suppose I’ll stick the earbuds in and take the dog for a walk, I am “underemployed” after all.
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By coscooper
I just started the IOS 4 upgrade on my one-year-old 3G phone. I am not in the market to upgrade to the latest & greatest iPhone at the moment, but I figured I’d at least go through with the upgrade and see what new features I am able to take advantage.
Installation & Upgrade: easy to get started, simply plugged it in for a sync, was presented with the obligatory, “You’re not running the latest version, blah, blah, blah…” and I didn’t go for it at first. I was doing some house cleaning and trying to get some new music uploaded first. Then, I decided to go for it after about thirty minutes of futzing with the apps, syncing some music and an iCal appointment. I also realized that if the install screwed it up, all this would be in vain and I’d have to re-sync anyway. But, alas, that didn’t happen. What did happen… time ticked by, that’s what happened.
After selecting yes on the first screen, I was presented with a “this could take a while, do not interrupt it or everything will be wiped into obliteration” screen. Okay, it didn’t say that literally, but alluded to that being a possibility. As a side note, the wording stated that it could take up to an hour, or perhaps longer. Seriously, it stated this without an estimate or any more specifics, just a nebulous, an hour or more. So, deciding to just press on, I hit the button of no return at exactly 2:55pm this afternoon.
So far, iTunes presented a dialog window that said it was “backing up” my iPhone, the blue bar was about an 1/8th of the distance across the window, then it stopped. To not get frustrated or blow my iPhone into oblivion, I turned to my, (groan) DELL Inspiron with the 23” screen and started working there glancing back at the MBP every few minutes to see if the bar had moved. It had not.
Finally, after loosing track and getting absorbed into my “research” on the XP box (using Safari), I stole a peek and saw that the window had changed to “installing”. The iPhone flipped to some activation screen and iTunes started activating. That sat seemingly froze the progress for at least another hour.
Now, it’s exactly 5:18pm and it’s been “Restoring” on iTunes and/or “Sync in Progress” on my iPhone for some time now, I’m loosing track of exactly what happened when, still hours have creeped by. Two hours and twenty two minutes later, the entire progress is still going. iTunes has moved onto restoring my music, but it’s still going. Dialogs are moving, but very slowly.
So, I’m going to post this blog entry anyway and will follow up later with the exact length it took to do a full upgrade. Needless to say, set aside a lot of time if you’re upgrading. My intent was to include initial “Newness” experience, but I’ll save that for another day.
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By coscooper
Does anyone keep all of their old installer CD’s and DVD’s like me? I’ve been combing through stacks and stacks of CD’s with software I used back more than 5 years ago. I’m compelled to throw it out, but as soon as I do, something will come up that will require what I threw in the trash. Of course this is the original case as I’m looking for something I need that I can’t locate.
I have nearly every version of OSX operating system CD’s, EXCEPT the one I really, really need, Tiger. Somehow, I must have either skipped that purchase or just lost the disks. Problem is, I don’t know which is the case.
I guess that makes me a hoarder of software CD’s and old software.
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By coscooper
Chrome Download
I’ve recently upgraded my MacBook Pro to a newer model. Previously, I had purchased the first generation MBP back just months after Apple released the new model back in 2006. It’s served me well, had the mother board replaced, twice, has been dropped several times, jostled around in a back-pack, travelled as much as I did, helped me make a lot of money and then, it finally kept over-heating. It still runs, but if you run YouTube or anything that pushes the graphics, it just shuts-down.
I digress… so, with the new shiny model having sat on my desk for 3 weeks now, I’ve been much more inclined to get back to having fun with my computer. With 8gb of RAM and a hugemongous hard-drive, I’m back to trying all kinds of applications.
Just a few days ago, I’m logging into my GMail account and get presented with the announcement that Chrome is now available on the Mac OSX platform, about time! So, instinctively, I hit the download button and fire it up. I’m met with the fastest launch of any browser installed on my system. Now, it could be the blazing fast new machine, but, I tested a browser launch war. Chrome won hands-down.
So, what makes it so special? Basically, it’s super light-weight, whicked fast, simple and has a few cool features.
- Google Search (Well, any search as you can specify your favorite) is integrated right into the URL field at the top.
- Did I mention it’s blistering fast?
- Rock solid. Supposedly it’s in “Beta” for MacOSX, but it seems more stable than FireFox, my other favorite browser.
- Download Manager – With security checks.
- Popup blockers that are smart. Meaning, if a site has a Java popup or something related to the site, it seems to be smart enough to differentiate. Haven’t tested this fully.
- Kind of goes without saying, all of the Google apps rock in Chrome. They’re fast, responsive and have no issues. IE… GMail, Picasa etc…
- Great looking theme system and the start page with cached history of recent sites is actually useful.
Downside:
- Certain plugins I use on other browsers aren’t supported. IE… XMarks my book-mark sync tool. I’m a little lost without it in Chrome.
- No cool add-ons just yet. I’ll be patient.
- Can’t come up with anything else negative to say.
There you go. If you’re into Macs and want to run the fastest browser out there, give Chrome a spin. I’ve used FireFox for years and it’s still pretty much my GOTO browser.
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By coscooper
Well, after several weeks of interviews and submitting resumes, I just accepted a position as a “Sales Engineer” for a software company that provides solutions for enterprise server systems. They are extremely unique in the Unix world in offering a management tool for managing data access.
My new company, is based in New York and their sales teams are “virtually” spread across the country. So, I’ll be working frommy home office and supporting the local sales opportunities here in the Denver area along with several other near by major metropolitan areas. Additionally, I’ll be responsible for facilitating the installations and implementation process for new customers and their projects.
I don’t officially start until Monday April the 7th. However, in the mean time, I’ve been slowly getting setup to hit the ground running and gaining access to all of the important company systems. I’m basically in that “getting all of the paperwork together” stage. So far, I’ve found the company to be VERY communicative, responsive and forthright. Looks like a great bunch of people to be working with.
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By coscooper
I’m sure there are a ton of great sites out there. However, if you have time to just surf and don’t really want to “think”, then the best tool out there is StumbleUpon. You may or may not have heard about this really cool technology. If you haven’t go get it, NOW.
What does it do? If you’ve not heard about StumbleUpon, then here’s what it does. Once you’ve setup a profile and selected general categories of things you like or are interested your set. Next, install the Firefox extension, where it’ll add a set of tools in the bar above the tabs area. I believe they also have an IE installer for those still using that browser.
Once everything is installed, it’s as simple as clicking a button. It’ll automatically jump to a given site that fits the interest level from your profile.
Why is it cool? Well, simply speaking, it’s a great way to find new sites to check out. If you happen upon a site you really like, there’s a “I like it” button as well. This triggers a flag on your profile and others who like similar categories will find the site next time they’ve “stumbled” through their list. So, you help others and they help you. It’s really a cool win-win.
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By coscooper
I’ve been feverishly working on several web site concepts and am finding the process of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) a bit complex. Not that I don’t understand it, but that while attempting to sort out all of the articles, density and keywords, search engines seem to take for ever to crawl the sites. I’ve read tons of information about “Content Is King”. Well, that’s fine except that it’s kind of hard to write content specifically targeting keywords and trying to keep “density” in mind.
I’ve also noticed that on some sites, namely my own personal blog, here, that it moves all over the place on Google. One day, it’s top 5, then a few days later, I can’t find it to save my life. I’ve found that if I slack off and don’t post anything for a few days, it drops like a stone in water. Go figure. But, then there’s a few “Shane” sites that haven’t been updated in months and it stays on top. It’s kind of hard to figure out frankly.
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By coscooper
This is freakin cool. After reading a blog by a tech guy, Phil I think, over at Conversant, I stumbled on this blog posting tool he suggested trying out. It has built-in spell checking and is a lot like an email client.
One feature is that you can write posts and save them as a draft. This is my first post with this tool. Way cool for offline editing
I’ve also found it helpful for quickly editing posted blogs as well.
Get a demo at: MarsEditor
The only issue is, it’s Mac only.
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By coscooper
SUSE 10.0: yes, I know the dinosaur Novell purchased it, but I took another look. Several years ago I had purchased SUSE 8.x and played with 9.x on a local workstation, but just didn’t feel compelled enough to use it on a daily basis. So, I stuck to the MacOS 10 and Windows XP flavors of OS’s for daily chores.
So, then a colleague of mine, Tad, catches me in the hallway and says, man Shane, have you seen the new SUSE 10.0 distro? Well, of course I hadn’t and beings that he is a hard-core Win user, but slowly converting to the Mac or at least using them both interchangeably, I figured I’d take another look.
Install download ISO disks are huge, but worth the wait. I did them over night one night as I tend to get more bandwidth at night (around 3mb or greater w/Mesa). The ISO’s make either several CD installers or one large DVD installer. I burned the DVD installer and gave it a go on my DELL 4700 workstation with a 150gb drive and WinXP Pro already installed.
The installation took about 45 minutes, but the coolest thing is that it has a built-in reformatting tool that took a chunk of the NTFS volume allocated to WinXP and shrunk it to make room for the Linux install. Way cool and didn’t even have to think about dual boot, which I installed first etc… Linux for dummies. Each step of the installation was very similar to Apples installer asking all of the basic questions. Will you connect to the internet, what user name/password and preset the ‘root’ password, etc… Once installed, it jumped right into the desktop and ran the YaST application, which basically ran out to their live update server and updated several patches and security fixes that had come out since the ISO burns.
Voila’ I’m now running a modern Linux desktop with the Gnome UI. You can choose between KDE and GNOME during install. Previously I’d used the KDE UI and found it a bit klunky. So, I decided to give GNOME a go. So far, so good.
Next, I popped open FireFox, pre-installed, and updated the theme and a few extensions I like to use. Jumped over to my blog site, gmail account and several web haunts to see if it looks and/or worked any different. Nope, all the same. Last, I downloaded the current PDF reader. The one thing I noticed was, the Acrobat installer was very Wind/Mac like. Double click an installer application and it was done. No package to install, no command line to run, no shell script etc… All things I’m familiar with, but my goal was to imitate the average Joe.
Now, I’m attempting to use it along with the WinXP and MacOS I’m familiar with and attempt to become as virtual as possible. No more OS dependencies! Maybe.
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