So, it was time to check out the book stores. But due to the monopolistic juggernaut that is Chapters / Indigo, having swallowed up most of the smaller independent book stores over the last decade or so, selecting from book stores is really the same as selecting which Chapters / Indigo location you prefer.

(Yes, there are some quality independent stores left, such as A Different Drummer Books in Burlington, or Bakka Phoenix Books in Toronto, but alas they are few and far between these days.)

So, without much hope, I headed off for my local Chapters (which I had to take the family to anyway, for unrelated reasons). When I had a chance I tried browsing through the Computers section which, although nicely sectioned by category, in reality was a disorganized mess. So I tried the kiosk, which always reminds me of a touchscreen iMac. Searching for “AppleScript” gave me a whopping 24 entries! The first one, simply called AppleScript, was available in the store (1 copy!). Then it listed 23 other manuals which were not in stock at my then-current location. Oh yeah, and they were not available for ordering online.

What the $%&^$ is the point in listing books that are not available in-store or online via the one retailer which has an almost exclusive lock on the retail book business in Canada??? It’s great that the only retailer I have to choose from knows about the books I’d like (or at least want to consider) but either won’t or can’t sell them to me!

Just for comparison purposes, I went to Indigo’s web site and found more than 24 listed… but again many of these were simply unavailable. Amazon’s Canadian site had many as well, but often were down to single copies or were selling the books through third parties. Amazon’s main US site had dozens and dozens of AppleScript-related books (although to be fair some of these were Kindle ebooks, not physical ones), with many (including the ones I was looking for) in stock.

So, to recap: our limited brick-and-mortar stores don’t carry this sort of thing, and their online equivalents don’t either. The Canadian Amazon is a bit better in some cases, but lacks the selection and inventory of the main US site.

It’s a good thing I just wanted this book out of personal interest, rather than actually needing it for a job or something. If that was the case I’d have to be prepared to pay shipment + customs brokerage fees… and probably extra delivery charges of some sort when FedEx / UPS show up at my door.

Where do you get the books that you need these days?… because if my experience is any indication you can’t get them around here!

Let me explain.

Years ago I used WordPress to do my blogging. It seemed relatively straightforward to install on my web server, allowed for easy creation of posts both through its built-in Dashboard and via third party applications (like MarsEdit… which at the time had limited WordPress support). But the look and feel of the end site left a lot to be desired. So I turned to the tool that the rest of my sites are created with, RapidWeaver.

RapidWeaver is great for generating nice looking sites, and a large number of high quality themes and plug-ins available through assorted vendors (I would recommend seyDoggy for themes, as well as YourHead for great plug-ins like Stacks). But its built-in Blog page had some limitations, notably the requirements to create / edit blog posts within RapidWeaver, and the awkward arrangements for enabling commenting on the resulting blogs. They’ve been working on the latter, but none of the options they provide really worked for me: I think that they force the end user to jump through hoops in a jarring way… which doesn’t exactly encourage people to post comments.

Enter RapidBlog. This inexpensive RapidWeaver plug-in allows blogs to be simultaneously published both on your site and within a Blogger blog. The synchronization is bidirectional so you may create / edit posts either in RapidWeaver + RapidBlog or in Blogger directly. The catch is that commenting is only enabled directly through Blogger, so if a visitor accesses your “native” blog site and tries to comment on a post then a Blogger pop-up appears to allow for comment entry. Not the end of the world, but a bit intrusive. Still, the “duality” of this RapidWeaver + Blogger approach bothered me: which site would search engines prefer? Which site would users be sent to, the nice looking RapidWeaver one or the fairly garish Blogger one? A visitor going to the wrong one might think twice about staying due to the relatively unprofessional look of the Blogger site. As well, using RapidBlog entails some compromises over regular RapidWeaver pages: certain page plug-ins do not work (or misbehave), adding content and features to areas like the sidebar involve less drag-and-dtop and more coding… and for the life of me my Sleeker theme from seyDoggy just doesn’t render the RapidBlog pages as nicely… although that may be purely my imagination.

Then I realized I had another option: there is a RapidWeaver plug-in called WP-Blog which allows RapidWeaver to have “pages” for WordPress-based blogs, allowing navigation to them and providing the same type of themes as any other RapidWeaver page. As it was only $12.95 USD I figured I’d take a chance… and wasn’t impressed. Or I was, but not in the way that was intended. After installing WordPress (again!) on my web server, and creating a suitable WordPress blog, I installed and configured WP-Blog and inserted a WP-Blog page into my RapidWeaver site. And, after going through the very terse configuration instructions, it did work… and left me with a WordPress-based blog which had a RapidWeaver theme applied. Which I decided didn’t look all that great (no fault of seyDoggy… their theme looks great on other pages, and I’ve long been impressed by their products). The reason it didn’t look so great is that I first looked at my blog in WordPress, before theming it with WP-Blog. I had many options available like on-screen widgets, calendars, etc. that promptly disappeared when WP-Blog was applied to it.

It looks like WordPress has caught up in the looks and flexibility department… and did I mention that it’s free too?

So I finally decided to do the only sane thing: ditch WP-Blog (and RapidWeaver) for my blogs (but I still use RapidWeaver for everything else). So what if my blog doesn’t have the same seamless appearance as my landing site? Now the challenge was getting it back to a regular WordPress blog. Unfortunately it wasn’t just a matter of changing the WordPress theme… WP-Blog did something to my blog, but I have no idea what files it mucked with (.htaccess? index.php?) A quick search online told me that when a WordPress installation gets borked usually the best thing to do is to reinstall it. Fortunately, I had copied all of my posts from Blogger into MarsEdit, so I wouldn’t lose any content. A quick deletion and installation of WordPress later (“quick” provided you have access to cPanel and Fantastico tools on your provider’s server) and it was up and running.

Now I have total control: I can choose the themes, plug-ins and widgets that I want. Commenting is straightforward for users. I can create and edit posts through the WordPress Dashboard web client, via MarsEdit, or iPhone / iPad apps such as BlogPress). And WordPress is much richer than I remember, both in terms of base functionality and third party support. Some themes offer capabilities that are reminiscent of full-fledged RapidWeaver plug-ins (one company in particular, Elegant Themes, is tempting me… if only they offered outright theme purchases rather than a one-fee-gets-everything-supported-for-a-year approach).

But of course, nothing is perfect. My cPanel / Fantastico scripts had installed WordPress 3.0. Guess what? The WordPress Dashboard informed me that 3.0.1 was available, and that I could upgrade automatically by pressing a single button. After a quick FTP backup (Transmit is handy for this sort of thing) I pressed that button… and waited. And waited. After an hour I gave up any hope that the upgrade would succeed. The options I had at this point were: start going through the troubleshooting tutorial, editing various PHP, HTML, CSS and other configuration files along the way, or restoring to 3.0.

If I wanted to create / modify code, I’d be back with RapidWeaver and RapidBlog. But no, I’ll live with 3.0 for now, and let someone else do the heavy lifting re upgrading and tweaking for 3.0.1.

Or I could always play with Movable Type…

As someone who is fairly typical of users these days — sometimes at home, sometimes at work, sometimes using transit, or just bored somewhere waiting for something / someone — I like to check up on Twitter when time permits. Since there is almost always either a Mac or an iDevice nearby (washroom trips anyone?) getting access to it should be no problem.

Unless of course you don’t like re-reading the same stuff… which is a distinct possibility if you are following a lot of people and / or lists. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a consistent, reliable solution to keeping the tweets straight between devices.

Add to this the problem of finding just the right Twitter clients for my needs. Twitter on iPhone? Nice. Twitter on iPad? Ick. Osfoora on iPhone? Nice. Osfoora on iPad? Almost nice… except for that annoying split screen thing that it enables anytime I tap into a tweet (and doesn’t seem to let me disable this “feature”). And these apps don’t sync read / unread tweets between each other.

Enter Echofon. With Mac, iPhone and iPad apps and an advertised synchronization capability, this would seem to be the ideal to my Twitter-following woes. Unfortunately:

• The iPhone app is okay… but not as slick and polished as, say, Twitter or Osfoora (why no dark vs. light themed-background?).
• The iPad app is useful enough in landscape mode… but as I prefer to use portrait mode for most things, the lack of unread counts, etc. is annoying. And same comment as for the iPhone version.
• The Mac desktop app is functional and full-featured… but has some minor annoyances (example: badge icon has an unread count which includes both your home timeline and currently-selected list timeline… separate counts would be nice).
• Sync works sometimes… but not always.

That last one is the deal-breaker for me, as one of the reasons I put up with Echofon is for the sync capabilities. But just this morning I read over 150 tweets on the desktop Echfon, waited 5 minutes, then proceeded to read the same 150+ tweets on the iPhone. Not my idea of sync. (BTW: I have set up sync correctly on all devices and verified the configurations… and it was all working yesterday. Just not today. Sigh.)

This shouldn’t be this hard. Ideally I’d like someone to crib up something akin to the sort of MobileMe or Dropbox synchronization built into many other apps (OmniFocus anyone?)… should be easier to implement and operate than Echofon’s solution (which involves some server-based magic on their side of things). This would let the likes of Osfoora allow users across platforms synchronize their tweets without any server-side investment. The same would work for developers of desktop clients (both Mac and PC).

Or maybe Twitter.com will be the provider with the best solution. After all, they do have the “official” Twitter app for iPhone / iPad (even though I dislike the iPad UI — like many others! — I’m sure things will be addressed in time). They have hinted in the past that they will be offering synchronization with a desktop application; speculation is that it will be based on the Tweetie for Mac codebase (which has languished since Tweetie’s creator Loren Brichter joined Twitter.com as an employee). Hopefully if they do this they will allow synchronization across all devices: desktop and otherwise.

Maybe their rumoured announcement today will shed some light on this… here’s hoping!

Update: a final rant. Why is it such a pain in the tuckus to get to Favourites in these Twitter apps (both desktop and iPhone / iPad)? Some have a nice Favourites icon (usually a star) on their toolbar / status bar, but most force you to go through contortions via your profile, account or timeline options to get to your Favourites list. Why? Am I the only user of this feature (although as I use Instapaper more and more I can see the need for Favourites decreasing over time)?

My 2006 20″ iMac was finally starting to show its age. One day it dawned on me that I had the slowest computer in the house, with my wife and older son both enjoying relatively new MacBooks and my younger son still playing on a one-year old PC (heresy, I know). But the machine I was trying to do all of my work on just crawled along, getting stuff done but never quickly enough.

This has been going on for a while, mind you… and typically when things start to fill up or slow down we tend to employ band-aids to help things last a little longer. Running slowly? Add some more RAM… to the maximum. Out of storage? Add an external USB drive. Or two. Or three.

Then Starcraft 2 was announced. My son insisted that I line up with him at midnight so he could grab his copy as soon as possible. On a whim I picked one up for me too. I thought it might be cool to play this when I get a bit of free time. Until I tried installing it and running it, that is.

Nothing like a game to remind you of the cold reality that your computer is too old.

So, I resolved that This Was The Time and I needed a new iMac. So I went to the online Apple Store and browsed. Then I started to get RSS feeds letting me know that new iMacs were rumoured to be coming. So I waited a bit… and only for a week as it turned out. A little more confident that the computer I was about to buy wouldn’t be made obsolete literally next week by Apple I browsed again. Decided Ineeded an i7 quad machine. With 8GB of RAM. The 27″ screen was simply a nice side-effect, and didn’t influence my purchase decision. Much.

After about 10 days the beast arrived. And it was frigging heavy (about 50 pounds!). And when you factor in the bigger screen size and all you need to make sure that the cute computer desk / alcove you’ve been using for years can accommodate such a monster. And mine did. Barely.

Since I have the 20″ machine on an adjacent table… and I’ll probably be giving it to someone special soon, I figured I’d try out the Migration Assistant to transfer over my settings, files and applications to the new machine. Since this was an option when booting up the 27″ for the first time I thought I’d give it a go. And it worked… for a while. It got somewhere around 70% complete before it crapped out complaining of a network connection error. At this point I wasn’t really worried — all my stuff was still on the 20″ iMac — but I wondered what was special about my setup. I had both machines connected via Ethernet to a Time Capsule (which I’ve had no problems with to date, btw) — could the go-between be the culprit? At this point I had to go out for an errand or two and I stopped at a Best Buy with an inspiration: buy a patch cable! No dice. I guess they’ve fallen out of fashion… or they were just the sort of item that “mainstream” stores like Best Buy and Future Shop don’t bother to carry.

With my errands mostly done, I returned home, killed the stalled Migration Assistant and let the new machine’s setup continue; once done I diligently installed anything that Software Update could fine: might as well start out the new machine right! Then, just for fun, I tried the Migration Assistant again. This time it worked! I’m guessing that letting the machine complete its setup and updates “fixed” my networking problem.

The Migration Assistant did a decent job, overall. Only one migrated program gave me some grief: Mac The Ripper 4.0. MTR is a DVD-ripping program that you can only get if you donate a certain amount of Swiss Francs to a particular bank account, then follow an arcane email trail to actually get the software and the licence key. I did that some time ago… but after migration it seems to have forgotten that I’ve registered it. And naturally there’s some equally arcane method to follow to get the $%$% software to work again… but I’ll tackle that some other time.

As for quad-core…. it’s very nice! Converting / resizing video with Visual Hub, Handbrake or DVD Remaster Pro takes a fraction of the time it used to before, and the machine doesn’t stall to a near halt while conversions are underway. (Curiously, I’ve noticed that Adobe Flash is still a CPU hog, regardless of the size of the CPU in question… maybe Apple is on the right track with avoiding Flash where possible?).

Now to install that copy of Windows 7 in Parallels + Boot Camp… for research purposes of course…

The installation itself took around 45 minutes, including times for iTunes to perform backups and for the install image to be downloaded and verified. There was also a carrier update (in my case from Rogers); this was a quick download (by comparison to iOS 4) and installation was equally brief. Then, after the updates were done it was smooth sailing.

Almost.

First, let me say that iOS 4 is nice. Very nice. It seems a bit snappier on my 3GS, although that may be my imagination. I have heard, however, that if you are using a 3G that you will experience some slowdowns after the install. You know all about the new features of the OS, as they’ve been plastered just about everywhere (Switched,Engadget, Ars Technica, etc.) on the web. For me there were a few things I needed to immediately do:

• Grab iBooks
• Change Home Screen Wallpaper
• Organize the Home Screen using folders

So, I go to iTunes and start looking for iBooks. No dice. I go to the AppStore app on the iPhone and start looking for iBooks. Nada.

Onwards to wallpaper. This went off without a hitch, and I am now in love with the water bubble wallpaper that shipped with iOS 4. There are many wallpaper sites out there if you are looking for alternatives (I personally love InterfaceLift for both Mac desktop and iPhone wallpapers, but that’s just me). The key thing to remember is that you don’t want to pick something that is too busy… that will make the icons / labels / status bar look just as busy and confused.

My next thing to try was Folders. They are intuitive to set up and to use (especially if you’ve seen demo videos online before!). Simply dragging the icon from one app over that of another will create a folder. It will use some intelligence to name the folder (likely based on the App Store category for the apps) but you can override this. I’m not sure yet if you can ever rename a folder once it’s created or not… something I’ll have to try the next time I’m in iTunes (update: I just did… and folders can be fully renamed and manipulated… nice!), I guess. After fiddling with folders for about a half hour I’ve gone from eight screens of icons to only two. Yes, it’ll take me an extra tap to get to apps within folders… but it was taking me several swipes simply to find the icons previously, so I guess this is a win. One bug that cropped up now and then when I was setting up my folders was that is I was dragging an icon from a different screen onto a folder, sometimes the iOS Springboard got a little confused, and instead of inserting the icon within the folder it tried reshuffling the icons on the screen (folder and otherwise) to make room for the icon I was trying to drop. After a few confused attempts I would let it drop onto the screen, then I would drag the icon from its new location and into the folder with no problems. A minor bug that I’m sure Apple will get around to fixing in the inevitable iOS 4.01…

By this time I decided to look for iBooks again. Couldn’t find it using iTunes… but the AppStore app did find it. It just wouldn’t install… for about a half hour. In hindsight, it is clear that Apple rolled-out the iBooks app after iOS 4, and that these things take a while to propagate. Since I’ve been using iBooks for a while on my iPad, I already had a number of books ready to be copied to the iPhone while it was busy installing. This went off without a hitch and once the app was installed I opened the book I’m currently reading on my iPad. A little smaller (obviously) but still very nice. The new bookmarking feature was cool, so naturally I tried that out right away. And since I was in a multitasking kind of mood, I had the iPad also looking for app updates in the App Store. Lo and behold, there was a new version of iBooks ready for it as well (not thinking that it was the same universal app, duh). That installation went smoothly and I tried it out.

Oops.

This version of iBooks has the cool feature that it will synchronize bookmarks between devices (although I’m not sure what it bases this on… Apple ID? MobileMe ID?). So, let’s see, I’ve been reading one book for quite some time on my iPad, then I open it in iBooks on the iPhone, open it to a page near the beginning, then drop a bookmark. So, when I subsequently opened the same book on my iPad my current reading position was… set to wherever it was on the iPhone… several hundred pages back from where I’d been reading it. Oy. Should have been prepared for that, since anytime synchronization is involved weird (or just unexpected) things can happen.

Which reminds me… after letting the iPhone sync again I got a pop up from MobileMe Sync (okay, technically iSync) telling me that 250 of my bookmarks would be deleted from this computer if I agreed to sync, and would I like to go ahead? Having just been burnt (burned? sometimes English is a bit too fussy) by iBooks, I decided to take out some insurance… so I made a copy of my Bookmarks.plist file and told iSync to go ahead. Naturally it deleted my bookmarks. Restoring the file brought them back and forcing a re-sync restored them as far as MobileMe was concerned.

Or so I thought.

It turns out that there isn’t an easy way to see Bookmarks on MobileMe itself (the web site, I mean). So I was taking it on faith that it had my bookmarks and was doing nice things with them… the iPhone seemed to have them intact so all looked good. Except that the iPad now had no bookmarks whatsoever! Double oy. Looking around the Internet gave me a few ideas on how to force a re-sync on the iPad (most involved turning off MobileMe sync on the iPad, letting it remove any remaining bookmarks, rebooting the device and re-enabling sync. Tried it…. and it didn’t work. Well, it did work but it took one and a half days to finally clue in that the bookmarks weren’t there and copied them over.

I wonder what my next set of iOS4 side-effects will be…. I know I’ll regret pondering that…

Quick update: I just ordered one of these…

Guess this just means I have to buy an iPad now…

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

With the top down...

And from the front...

I figured it’s kind of a pre-mid-life-crisis car (okay, I’m technically post-mid-life, but still pre-crisis; consider this a pre-emptive strike). If I can avert the need to a $80,000 sports car convertible by going with this tiny fuel-efficient car, I figure I’m ahead of the game.

Speaking of fuel, this thing takes premium unleaded only (unfortunately); earlier models ran on diesel but that was also limiting their entry into the U.S. market. Supposedly once the engine has finished breaking-in (1,500 km) it will get between 40 and 50 mpg (or whatever that is in L/km).

With the roof up...

And since this is the GTA it’ll have to deal with winter. I’ll order my snow tires in the fall (the dealer told me that all four of them can fit inside the vehicle sans passenger, making transporting of tires a little easier)… and I guess I’ll be leaving the roof up for over half the year. Sigh…