Curse Update

Now that I am back from a great visit to friends and family in New York City and Connecticut, I finally had time to make some progress in diagnosing the TiVo. I called back to discuss my trouble ticket last night, and to report that things had degraded significantly, to the point where I could not watch or record anything. No programs had been recorded since Monday, November 24.

The friendly TiVo tech walked me through various troubleshooting steps, leading up to a “Kickstart 54” which performed hard drive diagnostics once we got it to launch successfully. Even doing that required letting the external drive power off for a while first.

It turned out that, as I suspected, the external drive was garbage. It had started to fail days after its warranty timer ran out, and was now unable to pass any of the tests other than the “initial state” which seems to just say “are you there?”

The silver lining is that the internal drive, which would be much more of a pain to replace, is just fine. So I ended up biting the bullet and severing the TiVo’s connection to the external drive. Of course that meant irrevocably losing almost a terabyte worth of the TV programs and movies I had saved, many of which I hoped to watch or burn to DVD. One advantage of the seasonally-imposed delays in getting to this point is that I had already mentally prepared myself for this outcome.

Now my TiVo is working fine again, with a quarter of the space it had before. It snagged an episode of The Venture Brothers last night, and let me watch some spooled Good Morning America while I got ready for work this morning.

I’ve ordered a replacement drive from WeaKnees. I am giving up on the “TiVo Certified” route, since they still only officially support Western Digital drives, and my experience with the last one lived down to my expectations. Happily my Series 3 will let me use an unsupported drive, and WeaKnees has a nice Seagate mechanism that is designed for DVR use, in a quiet enclosure. And I already know how to run the hard drive diagnostics if it ever comes to this again in the future, so good-bye to supported but low-quality hardware.

On the other major front, I am having less luck. It turns out that The MacXprts were not out of business, they were just having problems with their phone line (and still are). They can get calls from some places, but not my office in Fitchburg. If I call on my cell phone I can at least reach their voice mail. When I stopped in (without time to do so, really) on Wednesday, they told me that the original person who took my Mac had misspoken when he quoted two business days for me to hear a diagnosis and repair plan; the real figure was a much less satisfactory five business days.

Well, even that has more than elapsed now, and I have received no communication from them whatsoever. I left a message expressing concern and dissatisfaction yesterday, and they have not called me back. So, I have to report that their customer service, speed, and general business is leaving me highly unimpressed. I should not have tried to support a local business, it seems. At least not this one.

Now that it is clear I will be without my Mac for several weeks, I am being forced to find ways to cope without it. Last night I dealt with the most pressing issue, migrating Quicken, my data files, and the Treo syncing software over to my laptop. I needed to do this in order to record the past few weeks of transactions, adjust balances, and pay some bills that were very nearly coming due.

At some point I may well conclude I can limp along without the desktop machine until Apple’s new line next year. But there are some things I won’t have space to migrate over to the laptop, and some that will be hard to deal with. So I hope it doesn’t come to that.

If I don’t start hearing from the folks at The MacXperts soon, I am going to go and demand my hardware back and dispute their charge on my credit card. Very disappointing.

The Tech Curse gets even worse

It used to be Joe who suffered from incredible tech failures. I fear he has bequeathed that curse to me.

First my Treo’s antenna fell off somewhere during a workday. Luckily, I had his as a spare, and it did not take too long to migrate my software, data, and Bluetooth trust relationships to it. Then our TiVo started rebooting with increasing frequency. I have started jumping through their support hoops but won’t have time to get to the bottom of it until after this weekend. And the best-case scenario is that my external drive (barely out of warranty) is defective, and I will lose almost all my recordings in replacing it. I really didn’t like the fact that the only TiVo-approved drive was a Western Digital, and it has lived down to my expectations.

My car had a low tire last week, and the compressor I keep in my trunk for such situations is dead.

This kind of thing did not previously happen to me with such frequency. And there have been other minor annoyances… But the pièce de résistance is this: My dual G5 Power Mac, which has been out of extended warranty for a year and a half, which I want to replace early next year when the new powerhouse Intel chips make it into the Mac Pro line, died on Thursday. I hoped it was just an NVRAM battery or memory, but no such luck.

So I took it in for repair Saturday. The MacXprts had moved to a new location very conveniently close to my home, so I decided to support a local business rather than dealing with the zoo at the official Apple store. They seemed friendly, there was stuff on the shelves, they asked good questions and wrote up a repair order. I expected to hear back Monday or yesterday. But nothing yet, so I just called them back.

Their number “has been temporarily disconnected.”

At this point I don’t know if they are a victim of the credit crunch, just flaky and forgot to pay their phone bill, or running a scam. And I do not have time to deal with this. I have questions racing through my head like “will the police help me bust in and look for my Mac?” “Will my homeowner’s insurance cover this?” I know that’s premature, but this is very unsettling. I need to use some of the software on that machine soon, and won’t have time to even really pursue this until Monday. Augh!

Thank heavens that I at least had the foresight to remove the hard drives before dropping it off.

Fun in Milwaukee

Last night I joined Judy for the first performance in our season subscription to the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Many of the people I hope to see on these excursions were still traveling as summer draws to a close, but I can already tell it will be a wonderful way to stay connected with friends I met through Joe. And, of course, it was a great night of theater. The play was State of the Union, and as much as I worried about being burned out on the concept of presidential elections, it was interesting being reminded that politics were just as dirty in the 1940s, and the story’s human side was engaging and moving, especially given the quality of the production and acting.

This morning I joined Oliver at the Milwaukee Art Museum to see Sensory Overload, and I definitely recommend a trip to check it out before it closes in October if you can make it. I’ve always been interested in op art, and the restored “walk-in infinity chamber” was a truly breathtaking effect to experience, and it was nicely complemented by the new “Matrix XV” walk-through experience. There were some other fun interactive pieces, and of course the op art that I expected.

When we were getting our tickets (unexpectedly free, thanks to some guest passes generously shared with us by a friend at the Rep), we were told not to miss the photography exhibit on the mezzanine level just above Sensory Overload, and we were both very glad of that advice. The photos were surprisingly interesting and moving, contrasting some of the earliest daguerrotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes with very recent photographs made with similar techniques, and which look like they come from another time. Although Madison comes off seeming more eccentric and less classy than I like to think of it in the couple of pictures taken here, I now have much more interest in Manitowoc than before seeing this exhibit. These photographers developed the kinds of personal connections with their subjects that enable amazing portraiture, the kind that is completely impossible for me. It closes on November 30, and is definitely worth checking out too, if you can make the trip.

Another interesting find upstairs in the museum was “sphere #5” sculpted by Arnaldo Pomodoro, with intricate “machinery” showing through cracks. The effect is very steampunk, and reminded me strongly of some columns I had enjoyed very much at the new Amaliehaven park in Copenhagen when Joe and I were there last summer. Sure enough, they are by the same artist.

I felt a very strong connection with Joe while walking and driving around the city, and could not help feeling a bit wistful about the fact that, but for his cancer, we would probably be living there together today. I definitely want to spend more time hanging out there and even just enjoying walking and sitting in the lakefront parks.

Blu-Ray misadventures part 2: MCE’s missing Support

I wrote email to MCE’s technical support last Wednesday, with details about the problems their drive was causing my system. I heard nothing back, so I wrote to their customer service address on Friday. I have still not heard back from either. So I can’t recommend purchasing from these people, after spending over $500 on a drive (which was back ordered for weeks). Which is a pity, because the specs on the drive are very nice.

I needed to be able to use my G5 tower this weekend, so I took out the new Blu-Ray drive and put the factory DVD burner back in. This yielded an instant and total restoration of system stability.

Out of curiosity, I pulled off the jury-rigged SATA to ATAPI adapter they shipped the Blu-Ray drive with, and tried hooking it up externally using my NewerTech USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter (a veritable “swiss army knife” of drive attachment which I have found very useful on occasion—they are selling a newer version with more blinky lights and a slightly higher price today.)

In this configuration, I still had the exact same error trying to burn a BD-video disk using Toast 9, but the drive otherwise worked perfectly. I was able to burn and read all different kinds of media with no issues, and my system remained completely stable. So it looks like the drive itself works fine, but the card they taped to the back to connect it to my older Mac is garbage.

I expect them to do something about this, because I would really much rather have it work internally. And even if I can’t get to that state until I upgrade my Mac, I can’t have it sitting naked on the floor with lab wiring running to my computer every time I want to work with Blu-Ray media. So if they can’t get me a stable internal adapter, I want a working Firewire or USB enclosure. And I want a response from their support teams, and an apology for the delay and silence so far.

I’ll also need to open a ticket with Roxio support to sort out the Toast issues burning BD-video when I get back from my trip.

MCE Blu-Ray Burner: So Far, So-So

Almost four weeks ago I took the plunge and ordered a Blu-ray burner from MCE Technologies to install into my Power Mac G5 tower. It was on back order for quite a while, as was the media I ordered from Meritline (which I expect to finally show up this week). The drive itself arrived at the end of last week, and they were kind enough to ship a re-recordable Blu-ray disc with it, so I was able to play with it some over the weekend.

The results so far have not been encouraging.

Read more »

Where has Jim been?

You might think my hopes to start a habit of blogging failed miserably. Well, that’s not actually true; I did get into the practice, but all my activity over the past several months has been on a private blog for my family and close friends, as I dealt with the end stages of terminal cancer in my partner of almost seventeen years.

I’m through that now, and ready to move back to more public thoughts. But I will be busy or away much of the next month, between catching up at work and going on a cruise from London to Barcelona with a friend. So I apologize for the hiatus, and hope it can be understood.

I’ve set up a memorial page to commemorate Joe, and will be adding links and resources to it as they are shared with me (and as I have time).

Effective Java™ Second Edition: Worth the wait?

Yes, I have been horribly impatient for Joshua Bloch to update his fantastic “Effective Java™” for the last few years. There is so much potential for new effective idioms in Java 5, and I couldn’t wait to see Bloch’s recommendations and insights.

Well, the new edition’s been out for a few weeks, and I am happily making my way through it. The wait was painful, but a worthy update has been the result. So far the best major new content has been the chapter on Generics. I really wish I’d had this two years ago, it would have saved me hours of pain trying to figure out some of the subtleties for myself, from scattered sources and cryptic compiler errors.

So, definitely, pick up a copy of the new edition and read it all again, making up for lost time.

A Happy Reader

Ryan noticed a very nice review of Harnessing Hibernate on Amazon this Friday. I don’t think we could have hired someone to do as nice a job of reacting to the approach we took to the book—even the Stripes section which had made Ryan a little nervous during tech review, because it is a bit of a stretch beyond the core topics in the first half of the book. But we’re evidently not the only people who enjoy that lightweight web framework after even a brief exposure.

We Have Book

Woo hoo! When I heard that I had a FedEx package from O’Reilly today, I just knew it had to be my new book. Sure enough, I now have a real printed copy. Even though you’d think I’d know everything about it after the effort of getting it ready for publication, there’s still something magical about holding the physical object in my hands, to hold and flip through.

It looks great! My only disappointment was that I received just one copy. I know things have been scaling back since the Swing book (when all three revision authors got ten copies each). Upon finishing the Developer’s Notebook I got five. But one copy? I want one for reference, of course, and I’d always like to be able to send one to my parents. Well, maybe more are on the way later, or I’ll just have to buy a copy out of the vast royalty stream I can always dream of…

But really, I’m thrilled to have the book, and hope many people will find it interesting and useful. It was definitely fun working with Tim and Ryan to put it together.

Typing Pretty on your Mac

Recently I helped out a friend of mine by editing his restaurant review to include the proper accented characters, as well as real typographer’s quotes and apostrophes. He asked me how I’d done that, and I wrote up an over-elaborate reply, which I might as well share with the world, since my quick Google searches haven’t shown anything better out there that I could easily find. So in the interest of an online guide to more attractive text, here it is.

If you’re not reading this on a Mac, it’s not going to be that useful to you (unless you’ve got one somewhere) and I won’t be offended if you go read something else. If you do stick with me, be warned that Internet Explorer doesn’t yet know how to display the symbol for the Mac’s “option” key, which is used a bunch. Firefox handles it fine, though, even on Windows.

OK, how do I do it?

It’s always been pretty easy on the Mac, and the key commands have been fairly stable over the decades of the Mac’s existence, although the graphical tools I’ll introduce later have evolved and expanded. When the Mac first came out, few computers could deal with any characters other than the standard US ASCII alphabet (which is barely richer than your average manual typewriter), and even lowercase was relatively new.

The key to typing most of these special characters is the “option” key, represented by the symbol ⌥. (Note that this discussion assumes you’re using a US keyboard, since that’s what I have available to me. I am sure there are important differences when using keyboards for languages that commonly use these characters.)

Accented letters

Accents are implemented using what are called “dead keys” where you type a symbol first, then type the character you want to apply it to. To get an “ì” you type ⌥-` (hold down ⌥ and type the key to the left of “1” then let go of both). You will see a grave accent (“ ` ”) on a yellowish background—that means the system knows you want to combine that accent with another letter. Then you type “i” and you get the combined result, an “ì” with a grave accent.

Other accents are not quite as obvious, alas. I think they were trying to avoid requiring multiple modifier keys for the accent key prefix, so you don’t type ⌥-⇧-` (option, shift, and the key left of “1”) to get a combining tilde (~) even though that would be visually intuitive since ⇧-` is how you normally get a tilde. Instead, you have to know that the tilde is most commonly used create an eñe (the “nyuh” sounding letter in Spanish), so you produce it using ⌥-n. So to get “ñ” you type ⌥-n followed by “n”. But you can get other funky letters like “õ” by ⌥-n followed by “o”.

Similarly to get an acute accent, like you see on the “e” in “¡Olé!” you type ⌥-e followed by the letter you want to accent. And how did I get that upside down exclamation mark? ⌥-! will do that. It’s not a combining symbol, so it’s not a dead-key combination; as soon as you hit that set of keys, the symbol is added to your text. ¿Y la pregunta? To get an upside-down question mark you do need to add the shift key; that’s ⌥-⇧-/ (option, shift and the key on which the question mark appears).

Other choice symbols

There are a bunch of other useful symbols you get via the ⌥ key. I will mention a few of the most important, then show you how to explore on your own. First, let’s look at real quotation marks. Most of the people, most of the time, use foot ( ’ ) and inch ( ” ) marks instead of quotation marks ( “ ” ) and apostrophes ( ’ ), because that is all that old typewriters and early computers could produce. But in real typesetting, like in handwriting, there is a difference between opening and closing quotation marks, and apostrophes have a directionality to them as well. You use the “[” and “]” keys to produce them. Alas, I think Apple got this a bit backwards. I would think the “[” key would produce opening marks and the “]” key would produce closing marks, and you’d use ⇧ to pick between single and double, but no. ⌥-[ gives you an opening double-quote, ⌥-⇧-[ gives you a closing double-quote, ⌥-] gives you an opening single-quote, and ⌥-⇧-] gives you a closing single-quote, also known as an apostrophe.

Some people call these “smart quotes” but that is inaccurate, and comes from a feature in some word-processing programs which automatically converts straight quotes when you type them to curly quotes, guessing which version is needed by looking at the context in which you’re typing. That can seem handy, but often screws up, so once you learn the keyboard combinations for typing them yourself, you are better off seizing control and doing it yourself, turning off this feature in the software.

Last—but by no means least—I typed those lovely long dashes (called em-dashes in the typography world because they are as long as a capital “M”) by typing ⌥-⇧ and the minus key (to the right of “0”). The slightly shorter en-dash (-) is just ⌥ plus the minus key, but there’s not as much visual difference between that and a normal minus/hyphen, and less call to use it. Where you might find yourself tempted to use a double hyphen, use an em-dash instead. Pretty much everyone’s email client can handle Unicode these days. And certainly everyone’s web browser can.

Finding obscure stuff

OK, now the tips on how to learn more. The key is to get easy access to a couple of palettes, which you do in an unexpected way. Open the International section of your System Preferences:

Switch to the “Input Menu” tab and make sure the “Character Palette” and “Keyboard Viewer” items are checked, and that “Show input menu in menu bar” at the bottom is checked also:

If you are interested in practicing typing in other languages, you can check them as options too (switching to their input methods using this menu will also change the system spell checker to work with that language), but be sure at least your most common language is checked (I think it will be already checked for you).

Once you do this, a new menu will appear:

In this menu you can switch languages, and also open the two palettes that will help you type special characters. The Keyboard Viewer is a nice way of teaching yourself what symbols you can get with the ⌥ key. It shows a picture of your keyboard, and as you hold down modifier keys, updates to show what symbols you get by pressing that key. Here I am showing it with the ⌥ key held down:

The “dead keys” which produce combining symbols (e.g. the accents for letters I started this discussion with) are shown in orange. Note how you can get an ümlaut and circumflex (“î”) which I did not discuss above. Now you can figure those out, and remind yourself of them, whenever you need to.

Beyond the keyboard

The Character Palette is for when you need even less common symbols. Unicode has tens of thousands of characters in it, and not all of them fit on the keyboard, even with modifiers like ⌥, so sometimes you need another way to get them. This window lets you explore the whole Unicode space, find interesting symbols (like the keyboard modifiers I have been using in this email), and then insert them into your document by double-clicking them, or using the “Insert” button at the bottom:

If you find, as I have, that there are some symbols you use often, you can make them “favorites” using the little gear menu at the bottom left, and then access them easily using the Favorites tab. You can also search for symbols by their description or code using the search bar. This has become a very powerful tool, but seems intimidating at first because of the vast number of symbols available. I’d encourage you to just play with it for a while, learn about the different views and organizations of the symbol space it offers, and how to use it effectively.

OK, that was probably more than you wanted to know, but hopefully you will find it useful! Go forth and type beautifully.