Commentary: My crush on Michelle Obama – CNN.com
I think I am developing a crush on America’s first lady. Michelle Obama is more compelling than her husband. He’s good, but she’s utterly fascinating.
Is this a joke?
In case anyone was wondering, that song used in the background of the Choke trailer is “Satan Said Dance – Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah.”
The UI for Netflix’s bonus rentals is a little confusing. When you click on “Use a Bonus Rental,” a confirmation loads on the next page telling you that your next rental will ship soon. However, after this page, there is no further confirmation that such a thing is going to happen anywhere else, and it’s impossible to tell if you actually did things right.
This is in contrast to if you report a disc problem or look at your queue after you return a few disks. In those instances, the “At Home” portion of your queue adds or swaps a few lines to say “[Movie Title]: Shipping Soon.” With a Bonus Rental, no line is added until the next day or so, when they actually ship the disk out.
I called to query Netflix about this and they were gracious enough to send me another disk, but now I have an extra disk on top of my requested bonus disk. I don’t mind, but if any Netflix business-folk come across this, I’m not trying to scam your customer service folks – I just couldn’t figure out your Bonus Rental UI!
I’ve been using Firefox 3 alphas, betas, and RCs off and on for several months now, and I’m looking forward for the final release of Firefox 3. It’s a fantastic release and has really come together in the past several months, and I think anyone who’s ever used Firefox or even thought about using it should download it as soon as it’s released.
Thus, I bring to you a non-comprehensive listing of things I love that are new to Firefox 3, in no particular order.
Things that I love in Firefox 3, but where credit deserves to go somewhere else:
Things that I wish were in Firefox 3, but sadly aren’t:
Try a sneak peek of Firefox 3 right now by downloading a release candidate build. As always with pre-releases, the intent is to figure out what significant but unknown bugs are before general release, so if this idea makes you squeamish you should probably avoid it for now.
This is a really slick device – I don’t have a lot of A/V devices to control with this yet, but once I do, its usefulness is going to increase exponentially with each new A/V remote 
The design seems pretty nice, and it’s got a decent heft in your hand.
Setup process takes about 30 minutes, depending on how many devices you have, and it involves a few reboots of the remote. The breadth of their remote database is rather impressive, and it’s nice to see it seamlessly integrate with my cable box and TV.
Now what would a discussion of a Logitech product be without complaining about Logitech software? Let’s get the positives out of the way first: the software does what it advertises and it does it pretty well, without crashing or anything bizarre like that. It does work, and doesn’t give you too much hassle while doing it. The interface is pretty streamlined and leans very heavily on the Wizard side. It does have drivers available for OS X, and they seem to be updated reasonably frequently. It is a separate package from the keyboard/mouse drivers.
That being said, the software has some negatives. It is pretty pokey and slow – not unbearably slow but noticeably slow. For example, UI elements don’t respond instantly to clicks or interactions, they take about tens of milliseconds to act. Doesn’t sound like much but you feel it as you go along. Most of your interactions seem to take place on a server – not much data is located on your HD but this does add a bit to that sluggish feel. This has the added benefit of being fairly well up to date with remote codes.
Best case for having a universal remote connect to your computer: no more hunting for driver codes and enduring weird keypress procedures in order to program something. Rarely going through that dog and pony show for all the driver codes and discovering that none of them worked.
I can say unequivocally that the Logitech Harmony software uses the Mozilla Gecko engine. How do I know this? Because the software does something really dumb and creates a very Firefox/Gecko-esque profile in the home directory with complete disregard for OS X platform standards. A folder named “browser – Logitech” is created in ~, instead of the much more sensible location of ~/Library/Application Support or ~/Library/Preferences, where it is hidden away from the user. Honestly, how often am I going to be poking around the preferences folder for my Harmony updater?
The software also creates a folder in your home directory (~) simply called “Logitech.” Best as I can tell, this contains further preferences and remote settings data that aren’t part of the browser component. Again, something better off living in ~/Library/Application Support/Logitech Harmony or something like that. In case anyone at Logitech ever reads this: THESE ARE STUPID LOCATIONS FOR YOUR PREFERENCE DIRECTORIES.
What’s more, this directory is created with the privileges 777 for some bizarre reason, and owned by root. In my own home directory! Why?! For those of you who don’t know, 777 means that everyone on your computer has read, write, and execute privileges on this directory. Since it’s in your home directory, it’s not likely to be a problem, but it’s still stupid.
By comparison to this Logitech package, the Logitech Control Center for keyboards and mice seems downright awesome. Don’t even get me started on how useless SetPoint is for Windows.
In the end, I do like the remote. The hardware is well designed and once it’s all set up, the remote works really well. The software fulfills its job just fine, but it’s really poorly designed and effectively shits in your home directory in OS X. I didn’t try it on Windows, but I have a feeling they do the same thing in My Documents. Yet again, Logitech can’t seem to pull off more than a C+ effort when it comes to making Mac drivers.
Final call: I’d still recommend it for someone looking for a really neat universal remote that puts almost all other universal remotes to shame, but with reservations about the drivers.
Logitech Harmony 550 Universal Remote on Amazon.com
Is it just me, or does Lewis Black’s new show, “the Root of All Evil” use a laugh track?
It’s not that funny of a show (contrary to the show name, it’s two comedian guests who do most of the talking) to begin with really. What’s more, if you look at the audience in the background while the comedians are delivering their bits, it doesn’t seem like the audience is really reacting all that much. As in, there’s no where near the amount of hooting, hollering, or even laughing compared to what’s playing back on the audio.
Anyone else notice something like that?
Apple Developer Connection – iPhone Dev Center – iPhone Developer Program Details
Start your development today with the free iPhone SDK and the iPhone Dev Center. Apply to the iPhone Developer Program and gain access to test your code on iPhone and distribute your free and commercial applications on the App Store.
The iPhone Developer Program provides you with the ability to develop directly on iPhone or iPod touch. Build, test, and optimize your application to get the best performance possible, exactly as your customers will experience it.
The wording seems pretty clear to me: software iPhone emulator for free SDK members, hardware testing only after you’ve paid to join the iPhone Developer program.
Store and share documents online with Office Live Workspace
Microsoft just released their new Office Live Workspace web app today. It’s a new type of collaboration tool but meant for the small business and average folk, as opposed to the more enterprise-oriented Sharepoint Server. If that doesn’t make sense to you, think of a Microsoft take on Google Docs. Unfortunately, I’ve had a lot of trouble dealing with it.
Uploading a document is pretty easy. In a workspace (you can have multiple ones) click on the big “Add document” button the toolbar. It’s pretty straightforward – use the file selector to upload some file.
What if you’re editing a file locally and you want to upload a new copy to the server? This is somewhat less than intuitive – this option is buried under a big “Versions” button as “Upload and overwrite file.” A sensible title except for being stuck under Versions: versioning is far more Computer Science-y of a concept than I think most people are used to.
In the end it doesn’t really matter anyway because on Firefox 2.0.0.12 (that’s the latest version, for those keeping count), the “Upload and overwrite” menu option doesn’t even work! That’s right, you can click on it all day and it won’t do a damn thing. The same is true if you use Firefox on either Windows or OS X. Move over to IE7 and it works just fine. It’s bizarre how Firefox is on the supported list of browsers and I can’t do something as basic as upload an updated file copy.
Another pick – on OS X most Office documents come with file extensions (e.g. the .doc, .docx, .xls variety) but some do not. If you upload a file without an extension, Office Live is not smart enough to determine what the file is nor is it smart enough to warn you about the missing extension. This is somewhat important, because if you upload a file without an extension you won’t really be able to do much with it. I couldn’t even upload a new version of the file because they said it didn’t match the same type.
This brings me to a final point. Google Docs lets you edit the file within the browser, which means it works on any OS that runs IE, Firefox, or Safari. Best as I can tell, Office Live doesn’t let you edit any Office document over the web, and instead you must download the file and edit it locally, which still requires a working copy of Office and is less convenient. To their credit, they do have an add-in that lets you open and save the document directly from the webserver.
Long story short – only usable on Windows in Internet Explorer, and even then not all that usable.
Just noticed that “The Crane Wife
For those who don’t know, Crane Wife is an awesome album and I recommend it, as I would recommend any other The Decemberists songs.
As for the Amazon MP3 store, I personally prefer iTunes but I appreciate Amazon’s aggressive pricing strategy. I also really don’t like that labels are giving preferential treatment to Amazon (and inhibiting consumer choice) because they carry a huge grudge against iTunes. I don’t like it when consumers are being used as pawns in this fight.
XM Radio Channel Guide for AOL Radio – AOL Music
XM Radio’s standard AOL Radio lineup is back again. During November and December they took off a bunch of channels for all the holiday-themed ones (e.g. XM Holly, etc.) but now things are back to normal. Notably, XM 47 Ethel’s back
For those of you who don’t know, AOL Radio streams various XM Radio channels for free if you’re on Windows or Mac. It’s pretty nice, and can’t beat the price.
Bad Behavior has blocked 18 access attempts in the last 7 days.
