Almost! A blog commenter’s story
I posted a comment to Freakonomics today, and I almost made it on the first page of comments. Sadly, mine is #27 and is unlikely to be read by anyone but those of you who clicked it from here. Or maybe, if I get really lucky, someone else procrastinating bigger things will post a "re: #27" comment later.
The Freakonomics post was about a website where potential employers could post mini projects for students and other job seekers to complete. The idea is that then job seekers can demonstrate their skills before being interviewed or hired. Sadly, I think such a site would get plenty of traffic. I sympathize with all the students who would feel compelled to do those extra projects during what little remains of their sleeping hours. And no, I don't think it would help them get jobs.
Oh, I also commented on Question: Where to Study Information Visualization or Infographics at Information Aesthetics today. Yes, I gave the School of Information a shout out. I would love to have more infoaesthetics types around.
On the employer side, I doubt that such a site would actually help find appropriate employees. If my work at Microsoft taught me nothing else, it showed that domain proficiency does not indicate success in employment. Great engineers have mad social skills. All engineers spend more time in meetings than any student could ever imagine. A site for mini projects might get work done for free, but it won't help people weed through CS graduates to find the ones that can work in teams and on large-scale projects. Now if only there were some way to figure out whether a potential employee could work well with others...
iPhone apps: Syphone
Updated 6/23/2010
As a commenter points out, Syphone doesn't work with current or recent iPhone OS. Don't waste your time.
Updated 2/21/2009
Syphone is a Mac freeware application that allows you to archive your iPhone SMS messages to your Mac hard drive. Here's a screenshot from my messages with Google Local:
Syphone screenshot
If you're using iPhone firmware 2.1+, you may get "No iPhones found!" in the drop down next to "iPhone" there near the top left. If so, go into Syphone's Preferences and uncheck the box marked "Run helper app in the background." Restart Syphone, and your iPhone and its messages should appear. You can change the colors, sort order, and export your messages to XML, PDF, or TXT.
Originally, I'd posted that I was unable to get the XML export to work. Ben commented that he was successful using XML export for one contact at a a time. This morning I tried again making sure I had one and only one contact selected. Success! Here's a screen shot of the XML output:
Syphone XML output
Now I'm definitely tempted to study text messaging. Any workgroups out there who all use iPhones and want to be in a study of text messaging at work?
Syphone stores its database in /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup.
Windows 7, or, Seeking Solace When Apple Makes Me Cry
Regular readers know I've had a rough time with Apple hardware lately. In fact, I forgot that I also had to have my 4th generation iPod replaced because the middle button stopped working. So, that means that only my iPod Shuffle has functioned as promised and not required service. Anyway, I'm intrigued by Windows 7 and took the plunge today. Well, as much plunge as one takes when making a virtual machine.
To get your own virtual Windows 7 machine, visit TuxDistro for a torrent. Yes, the virtual machine will work in Fusion on a Mac. Downloading the zip file through Vuze took me about 7 hours today.
First impressions? My goodness, Win7 boots fast. After I updated VMWare tools and clicked "restart," I switched back to Flock to Tweet about my new virtual machine. By the time I had logged in and read the first couple tweets my friends had posted, my Win7 machine was waiting for me to login. That was insanely fast. Certainly beat the pants off the Vista virtual machine I use every day. The new taskbar is a nice touch; it uses icons for running programs so it's easy to tell on which one you should click. I had no problems installing and running OpenOffice or Netflix Watch Instantly. I'll post again when I've given Win7 a true test. Also, some time this weekend I'll put a Win7 virtual machine on the Linux box downstairs and see how that goes. I got VMWare Player, a free program for running virtual machines, installed this morning, but then I had work to do. Stay tuned.
iPhone’s glass is broken. What to do?
UPDATE: I got my iPhone fixed by Mission: Repair and am very happy. See my review post.
Yes, I dropped my iPhone today. Yes, that drop, from less than 3 feet, cracked the glass. Yes, I wanted to cry.
Now what do I do? I went to the Genuis Bar at the Briarwood Apple Store right away, and they told me, as I expected, that they could get me a replacement iPhone for $299. You read that right. They didn't offer to repair my phone; they offered to replace it, maybe with a refurbished one, for the same price I originally paid. I asked if there were repair options, and they said not with them. Paying $299 would also get me a new warranty that lasts until August. As is, my warranty is void since the break was accidental. So,
Option 1: Pay Apple $299 and hope they give me a new one instead of a refurb.
I looked around online for other options. Since my warranty's void anyway, I'm not that concerned about a warranty-saving repair. This guy's site - http://3gcrackedglass.com - is pretty much right on about repair options and prices. The two sites I see mentioned most often when I search for repair info are iResQ and Mission:Repair. iResQ is supposedly an Apple Authorized repair provider, but they have some service and PR issues. Apparently that particular problem was resolved. So,
Option 2: Pay iResQ $129 or Mission:Repair $137 to fix it and ship it back overnight
Of course, I could always just live with the cracked screen, making
Option 3: Put the iPhone back in its case, and live with a cracked screen.
I had an InCase skin on my iPhone for awhile. I took it off because it made it really hard to get the phone in and out of my pocket. It also made it bulky. Oh, and, I was a little irked at having to pay $30 for an accessory to make the iPhone marginally more durable. The other $300 cell phones I've owned didn't need cases to be durable. If I'd had my case on today, my screen may not have cracked. I take responsibility for dropping my phone. I still think it's ludicrous to offer only replacement and not repair. I get that Apple makes a load more money doing it that way, but the process is infuriating and wasteful.
Mini rant about Apple
In the last 2.5 years, I've spent about $4100 on Apple hardware - 2 laptops and an iPhone. My MacBook required two new logic boards, three new keyboards, and a new hard drive. My MacBook Pro requires new fans and probably a new logic board. None of those 8 repairs were my fault. My laptops have spent about 2 weeks at Apple service facilities and require another 5-7 day stay to fix the fans. My iPhone has worked fine since I bought it in August, but the fact that it cannot withstand a rather routine and expected fall made me furious today. I've been patient with my other Apple hardware. I've sent my computer in for repair and tried to work on my dissertation using backup data and backup computers. I've been through the ringer with their hardware, and I'm exasperated. I don't want to be a whiner, and I don't want to minimize my role in breaking my iPhone. But, I don't think I can recommend Apple products anymore. They either come broken like my MacBook, break almost immediately like my MacBook Pro, or require unreasonable gentleness like my iPhone. At twice the price of comparable laptops and cell phones from competitors, I expected more. Sigh. I'm no longer convinced that the software advantages Apple platforms provide make them worth the hassle or cost. I'm left thinking maybe I should have stuck with my Dell and my BlackBerry.
Oh, and the total cost of ownership for Apple products are even higher. Every laptop needs $30 adapters to work with external monitors, and apparently every iPhone needs a $30 case to protect it. Yes, needs. So add 1.4% to your laptop bill for each adapter you need, and add 15-20% for a case for each iPhone. And those are just the beginning.
Poster Printing
Grad students print a lot of posters. Every time this grad student tries, something goes horribly wrong. So, finally, I've documented a successful poster printing process, and now I'll share it with you.
Background Info:
Before you even begin to design your poster, make sure you know
- The dimensions your poster is allowed to be
- How wide the poster printer's paper is
- What file format the poster printer likes best
- Whether you will be allowed to install fonts on the computer from which you send your poster to the printer
Standard posters for conferences are often 36" x 48" or something close to it. Some poster sessions require portrait orientation, some landscape. Most poster printers on my campus (and at FedEx Kinkos) print on paper 42" wide. Poster printing is usually charged by linear foot. Most poster print shops use Windows PCs and Windows-based software to manage poster print jobs. Using a file format such as PDF with embedded fonts should ensure that your poster looks the same on a Mac and on Windows.
Now, you're ready to design your poster. Many people use PowerPoint. I am not one of those people. If you'd like help designing and printing a large poster in PowerPoint, go here instead. I use Inkscape, an open source alternative to Adobe Illustrator. Inkscape produces .SVG files and allows you to save in a variety of formats including .EPS, .PDF, and .AI. Inkscape is available for Mac, PC, and Linux. I'm a Mac user, so I use the Mac version.
The instructions below assume you have already finalized your design. I recommend designing a poster with edges no longer than 42" because that's the size of the poster printer's paper. By designing a poster that's 36" x 42" instead of 36" x 48", you'll save yourself a linear foot of printing cost and the hassle of trimming the extra paper off your poster. If you use another tool such as PowerPoint or Illustrator to design your poster, you can still use the instructions but start at #12.
I perfected these instructions using the poster printers, Macs, and PCs, available at the Tech Deck and Angell Hall computing sites at the University of Michigan. Both poster printing shops use HP printers. Both places also offer user support, and all the staff I worked with rocked! See special notes below about each of these poster printing sites.
The Instructions:
- Open your SVG file in Inkscape
- Go to
File -> Save As... - Choose EPS from the drop down at the bottom right
- Choose a location, probably a jump drive, to save your poster as a EPS
- Take your jump drive to a computer at the poster print shop that has Illustrator (I'd stick with a Mac at this point if you can)
- Open Illustrator
- Choose
New Print Documentand set the dimensions to the size of your poster - Choose
File -> Placeand select your EPS file - Quadruple check all the parts of your poster to make sure it looks right (See Note 1 for tips perfecting your poster in Illustrator)
- When it's perfect, save your poster as PDF. DO NOT print to PDF. SAVE AS PDF.
- Take your PDF on your jump drive over to a PC that can print to the poster printer
- Open the PDF
- Quadruple check your poster in Acrobat on the PC
- Send your poster to the poster printer (See Note 2 for details about appropriate settings in the print dialog box)
- Cross your fingers, and hope for the best
- Enjoy your perfect poster!
Note 1: Illustrator and File Formats
Where ever you print your poster probably uses Illustrator. Illustrator will be happy to make a nice PDF of your poster, and you may be able to go straight from placing your EPS file to saving as a PDF. If you use transparent fonts or have placed images from PowerPoint, you will have to make some adjustments. Changing the fonts should be easy enough - you can simply select the text and change its opacity. If you've placed an image from PowerPoint, and it looks wrong, go to PowerPoint, save as a PNG, and place the PNG using File -> Place in Illustrator.
Note 2: Setting Properties in the Print Dialog
You're using Windows because the print dialog box will let you adjust the settings appropriately. The Mac print dialog box will probably not work. Remember, these instructions are for HP poster printers (e.g. HP DesignJet 5500) So, in the print dialog box
- Select the poster printer from the drop down list of available printers.
- Click on the Properties button.
- In the Properties window, select the "Advanced" tab.
- Expand the Paper/Output selection and select "PostScript Custom Page Size" from the Paper Size: drop down menu.
- In the PostScipt Custom Page Size Definition window enter your document's height and width.
- If the longest edge of your poster is the width of the printer (in my case 42") or shorter, from the Paper Feed Direction: drop down menu select "Long Edge First."
- In the print window, verify that your document size is correct.
- Click the Print button to send your document to the printer.
Tech Deck Notes:
The Tech Deck uses some software on a PC directly attached to the printer. You can print directly from Illustrator on the Mac to the poster printer, and then you'll do your last quadruple checking over on the PC attached to the printer. Tech Deck staff will help you through all of this. You will pay for your poster at the Shapiro Undergraduate Library's Circulation desk.
Angell Hall Notes:
The Sites personnel may or may not be able to help you. The instructions above will work if you design your poster in Inkscape on a Mac, use a Sites Mac to make a PDF, and then use a Sites PC to print to the poster printer. After you click "OK" to print your poster, you must visit http://mprint.umich.edu/poster and release your job to the printer. Your student account will be billed for the cost of printing your poster.
New (to me) and Useful: Visual Search
Many of you know that online searching frustrates me. That frustration results, in large part, from the ugliness of search results and their inability to let me describe what kind of thing I'm looking for. Pattern matching, result sorting, pish posh. I want internet finding. Enter visual search. Thanks, machine learning and digital image processing!
I've been hunting for new black shoes that I can wear with both jeans and suits for years. Years! Molly, my incredibly helpful librarian friend, introduced me to Like.com. Information Aesthetics, a fantastic blog, introduced me to Modista.
Like and Modista allow you to search for shoes, watches, sunglasses, handbags, etc. visually. On Like, you enter some search terms like "black boots" and then get to click on ones you like and see many more that are visually similar. You can filter by color, style, brand, site, all kinds of useful categories. Modista starts with a kind of item, such as "eyewear" and then shows you a variety of styles. Clicking on examples refines the search. Modista uses fancy sliders for limits on price and other continuous variables.
I found black boots at Zappos that I'm keeping; I almost love them. I'll use visual search again the next time I need shoes or accessories, and I look forward to the improvements coming to Like's apparel searches. Searching by sight is so much more fun than plowing through those boring text lists!
Why not Time Machine?
A couple of commenters asked why I use the ChronoSync + SuperDuper! combination instead of just Time Machine. The main reason? Time Machine uses too many resources. It's also slow. For awhile I avoided it because I wasn't sure how to make a bootable backup, but Mac OS X hints has instructions.
I don't always have my external hard drives plugged in since I'm rocking a laptop and am pretty mobile. Time Machine complained every hour, on the hour, that it couldn't find the drive it wanted for long enough to annoy me. Eventually it stops complaining about not being able to find the drive it wants.
Even if you leave the drive plugged in while working at your base location, for me it's my home office, Time Machine sucks up resources to do those intermittent backups. Even when I'm working on my dissertation, my data is not so mission-critical that it needs to be backed up every hour. Mac OS X Hints has a solution for changing the backup interval too.
ChronoSync can do in 39 minutes what it takes Time Machine over an hour to do. SuperDuper! beats the initial setup by about 20 minutes. So, the ChronoSync + SuperDuper! setup saves me resources, time, and headache.
One more thing - I have an Airport Extreme router, and I hang a hard drive off it via USB also. That drive is open to anyone on our home network. Apple's not kidding when they say Time Machine does not support network backups except to Time Capsule. When I tried using Time Machine to backup to that USB drive off the Airport Extreme, it would run my CPU up to about 80% and break many of my network connections. You may have better luck there. I didn't troubleshoot or try to fix it; I just gave up.
I ordered a rocstor ROCRAID from mwave last week, and that should be here on Tuesday. I'll try out RAID storage for my stuff and see how that goes. It has FireWire connections too, and I'm interested to see how much faster that can really be. I really don't want to have to give my laptop to Apple for a week. They won't let me keep the hard drive and send it in with a different one, and they won't give me a loaner. So I paid $2500 to have a laptop 98% of the time. Would I get it 100% of the time if I'd spent $3000? Sorry for the minirant, but having to get my MacBook Pro's fan fixed is what prompted this latest round of backup chatter.
Tweeteorology.com
tweeteorology.com just launched. It's the first project from my new company - Magical Pork. Tweeteorology shows tweets (posts to Twitter) about the weather. You can limit the search by location. I am actively developing Tweeteorology and welcome your suggestions.
Thanks, Molly, for the tweeteorology idea!
Backing up My Mac
My posts about cloning at Boot Camp drive and swapping hard drives in a MacBook are the most popular, according to Google Analytics. Today's special treat, therefore, is a quick overview of an easy, successful, inexpensive backup routine for all your Mac owners.
Our goals:
- Create a bootable backup of a Mac,
- Update that backup occasionally, updating only the stuff that's changed rather than copying the whole drive again, and
- Not spending much money.
What you'll need (besides a working Mac):
- SuperDuper! - the free version
- ChronoSync - latest version; $30 until v4.0 comes out, then price goes up to $40. v4.0 is already late, so the price could change any day.
- An external hard drive
* - something bigger than your internal drive. I use a 3:1 ratio of external:internal storage
Steps to make bootable and differential backups:
- Make a bootable backup using the free version of SuperDuper! (see the SuperDuper! user's guide for compete instructions; it comes with your download)
- Schedule syncing with ChronoSync; tell ChronoSync you're syncing two Macs (see the ChronoSync help menu for complete instructions)
You'll see that "cannot locate target" message in the ChronoSynce window if you forget to plug in the external drive. - Remember to leave your computer running when your backups are scheduled. I set a reminder in Google Calendar. It reminds me every week to leave my laptop running overnight so it'll backup.
Making the bootable backup with SuperDuper! took just over 3 hours on my MacBook Pro with 192GB of files. ChronoSync usually takes about 2 hours to sync - only about 45 minutes if I exclude my VMWare virtual machine from the backup. My virtual machine is over 40GB now, and since it always appears as "changed" in ChronoSync's analysis, it gets backed up every time my sync task runs.
I'm experimenting with backing up over a network using rsync and scp. When I get that worked out, I'll post the instructions here. I'm obsessed with backup now that my dissertation is coming along. I don't want anything to happen to those files (or my pictures), so I have them (both) in quadruplicate and on 2 continents. I suggest you set up something similar for the files that are really important to you.
*Notes on shopping for hard drives
Prices on external hard drives are dropping pretty fast, and you should be able to get a good deal. You can build your own external drive by buying an enclosure and an internal drive, or you can buy a ready-made external drive. Sometimes internal drives go on such a huge sale that building your own is cheaper, but ready-made externals are now competitively priced. Building your own has advantages like making the drive swappable and maybe helping you get a FireWire port for less money, and it's not hard. If you find a great deal on an enclosure and internal drive, go for it!
Where are these deals? I recommend checking the forums at Fat Wallet first to see if any site is having a big sale. I often buy drives from NewEgg because they have great prices, really fast shipping, and reasonable return policies. I use only Western Digital and Seagate drives. PC Mag has a good review site for hard drives.