Mike Cohen

Dell "quality"

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Engadget tells of someone receiving a Dell XPS M1330 laptop without an OS, no system BIOS and several other defects.

The $2k+ laptop looked fine at first glance, but when Pradeep popped it open and hit the power button, it immediately booted to a blank, white, flickering screen. After 10 minutes, nothing had changed, no Dell logo, Vista boot screen or anything — not only had Dell forgotten an OS, they didn’t even manage to squeeze in a system BIOS before they shipped this one. That wasn’t all that Dell screwed up on this M1330, the power button is defective, the Microsoft seal underneath the machine is partially ripped and burned, there’s a problem with a grill cover protruding, and the WiFi radio switch is so loose it almost falls off when pushed back and forth.

Lesson of the day

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When writing Objective C code, never forget to have your init method return self or bad things will happen, but maybe not in a debug build. I wasted over an hour on that today when my debug build worked perfectly but a release build crashed in awakeFromNib where it was initializing a series of items for a TabView. One of them had an init method that looked like this:

- (id)init
{
	if (self = [super init]) {
		[self loadStateNames];
	}
	// oops - I forgot something here
}


For some mysterious reason it didn’t fail in a debug build, and I couldn’t place a breakpoint to debug a release build, so I had to resort to “ghetto debugging” using CFShow. Instead of a panel object, I was seeing an array of state names! Adding return self; cured it.

Educational Benefits of Social Networking

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Via Laptop Security Blog:

Education Week has published an article which indicates that Social Networking can have educational benefits. According to a survey commissioned by the National School Boards Association (NSBA), 50% of teens say they talk to their peers about schoolwork online (IM, blog or social networking sites) or via text message. A larger proportion (60%) indicate that they discuss education-related topics such as college and career planning. According to the survey, 96% of students with access to the Internet build social networks. That more than 50% of these students discuss education is promising for educators. NSBA says that Social Networking technologies should be adapted for use in the classroom.

‘When it’s another generation’s technology, it’s easy to be uncomfortable with it and say we don’t need it,’ said Ann Flynn, the NSBA’s director of educational technology. ‘We want to say to people, explore these things. Figure out what kinds of tools they are. By no means are we saying people shouldn’t be safe. But we also don’t want to see policies that are so restrictive that the unintended consequence is to keep the technology out of the hands of educators.’

The NSBA suggests setting up chat rooms or blogs where students can talk about, and collaborate on, schoolwork. They also suggest altering policies that ban or restrict the use of these sites while at school. The survey found that the reports of cyberbullying or online bullying could be out of proportion to the fear induced by it. Their report indicated that 7% of students surveyed said they were victims of cyberbullying – this is much less than the 32% indicated in a survey by PEW conducted earlier this summer. The NSBA survey also included a separate study on how districts use technology. 96% of the district leaders interviewed say that teachers assign homework via the Internet, and nearly half of the schools go online for collaborative projects with other schools. Currently, 80% of schools ban chat software, and more than 50% ban the use of social networking sites. This policy may be too restrictive. Social networking can be embraced for its ‘social’ modes of learning, and with education on Internet safety, can be a valuable educational tool.

Read the full article here.

Twitter vs. Pownce

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Several people have switched from Twitter to Pownce, but I seem to be the only one who prefers Twitter.

Pownce has several features that Twitter lacks, such as sending files & links, and it doesn’t limit messages to 140 characters. Unfortunately Pownce is crippled by the lack of a public API and their desktop client just plain sucks.

I really hate Adobe AIR applications. I’d rather have a lightweight client like Twitterific that doesn’t require any runtime software. The only other option for Pownce is using the website, and keeping the page open all the time is less convenient than using a desktop client. Pownce’s desktop client has lots of annoyances aside from being written in AIR. It doesn’t log in automatically and there’s no way to keep it from displaying error messages which blur the window contents until you dismiss them. You also can’t reply directly from the client – it switches to the web browser for replies.

With Twitter, I can post updates via SMS or IM, and even automatically tweet when I post a blog item. Pownce offers no such options. I can also receive my twitter updates via SMS or IM, and twitter even has a mobile page that looks nice on an iPhone.

If anyone still needs a Pownce invite, I have 9 left.

iLife 08 Upgrade

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My new MacBook Pro included iLife 08, which I had an opportunity to use extensively today.

Last night we had a big birthday party (including a stripper) for someone who turned 80. I took lots of pictures and video of her reaction to the stripper. I had already used iPhoto 08, which works more or less the same as iPhoto 06 other than events. The only thing I miss is pressing CTRL after enhancing a photo to see the original. Unless they added a different keystroke, I don’t see any way to compare the enhanced & unenhanced photo other than undoing.

iMovie 08, on the other hand, I found to be a big step backwards from iMovie HD. I was able to import DV video easily from my Canon ZR600, but assembling a movie from the clippings without a time line was less convenient than using iMovie HD’s editing mode. Before I could use the movie anywhere else I had to share to media browser. It would only allow me to share to medium or smaller sizes, not large size.

The first time I launched iDVD 08 it quit immediately with no crash reporter log. After I removed the preferences, it would quit only after I chose an option from the splash screen. Finally, I removed the old themes from ~/Library/Application Support/iDVD which cured the problem. Magic DVD was very easy. After sharing the movie from iDVD, I was able to drop it into Magic DVD, choose a theme, and add a slideshow from iPhoto. The event feature of iPhoto 08 made this even easier. When I view events, I simply dropped the single event rather than selecting all of the photos in that roll or event. Finally, I was able to add music by simply dragging a track from the media browser to the slide show.

I haven’t had a chance to try iWeb (and I probably won’t, since I don’t use .Mac web hosting). I briefly played with GarageBand’s “Magic GarageBand” feature. It’s a lot of fun, but doesn’t really seem useful. I didn’t connect my USB MIDI keyboard, so I couldn’t do too much with it.

My2unz.com Improvements

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I’ve made a few improvements to my2unz.com over the weekend. I set up several color variations of the theme, and enabled theme switching. I also did some work on the iTunes module and changed the database tables slightly to add a few new features.

One of the problems with the previous version is that I considered the track title, artist name and album title to identify identical tracks. However, if two members owned the same track but on different albums (for example “Stairway to Heaven” from IV in one member’s playlist and from “Best of Led Zeppelin” in another one), they won’t be recognized as the same track and won’t count in number of fans for that track. I dropped the album info from the track table and moved it to the playlist info table, so it’s still listed in a member’s playlist.

You can now click on a track to see more info and rate that track. In the track lists and track info screens you can click on the artist name to see a list of all tracks by that artist.

There are also new items in member profiles to list all playlists and all tracks owned by that member.

Finally, I’ve added the Content Recommendation module, which will recommend artists, tracks, and playlists based on ratings.

My2unz.com is still in private beta, but anyone who wants an invite can contact me or another member. When it goes public I will enable Drupal distributed authentication and possibly OpenID.

Dead Battery or Toyota's Revenge

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This is yet another chapter in my ongoing problems with the 12v Starter battery in my Prius.

To recap, the battery died for the first time last December while I was using a 12v compressor to adjust the tire pressure. The second time I found a dead battery was when I returned from MacWorld Expo in January. At this point I bought a portable jump starter. I had to use it for the first time in March, after leaving the door unlocked for about 3 days without using the car.

I took it to the dealer and was told that I didn’t drive it enough to keep the battery charged. Since I work from my home office, I often don’t drive for several days during the week. I followed their recommendation and got a solar trickle charger after my friend installed Coastal Tech’s power outlet mod so it can be used with the accessory outlet.

I had no further problems until June, when I was away for over two weeks to Vancouver and San Francisco, which I sort of expected. When I got back from 6 days in Vancouver last month and found that it started, I thought the problems were behind me.

Until today. I didn’t use my car for only two days and found it dead this morning. I got my trusty jump starter, but this time it wouldn’t start. It came alive in Accessory mode with all of the warning lights on and an error message on the screen saying there’s a problem with the parking interlock (even though I had the parking brake fully engaged). Attempting to switch in and out of park and releasing and depressing the parking brake had no effect. Repeated attempts had the same result and I was never able to get it to Ready. I’m now making sure the jump charger is fully charged, since I didn’t use it for several months, on the off chance that it didn’t have enough of a charge to start the car.

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