It's been an evening of updates on the computers - some OS X patches, and then two wacking great Microsoft Office updates. These are 11.5.0 for Office 2004 (which I still have on the machine for speed for Powerpoint, and for VBA compatibility on Excel) and 12.1.1 for Office 2008. Although the latter was only flagged in passing as having some minor performance gains, it has made a really significant difference to the speed of PowerPoint 2008 on the G4 processor, moving it to the point of being usable, which was quite a shock. Word seems to have got nippier too, although that is more subjective, as it could always update faster than I could type.

Thank you Microsoft, this moves in the right direction. Now, restore the access to VBA macros in Excel and I'll be very very happy! Of course, Scrivener still meets my writing needs!



Currently feeling: Surprised
Currently listening to: Nothing.
Currently reading: Lost in Transmission (Wil McCarthy).

Gadgets are one of my weaknesses, but also one of those things that Jill says that to get me one every now and again keeps me quiet. However, with a young Nathan around, it doesn't always make sense to be chasing the newest and best (hence my computers are still G4 PPCs and so on).

Anyway, I was a reasonably early adopter of the iPod (with a 30Gb 3rd Gen model) thanks to my gorgeous wife buying me one back in 2003 when I became a chartered engineer, and despite having travelled several times around the world, it's still going strong. About the only thing that disappoints is the 6-8 hour battery life, which seems low against the 14+ hours that Jill's 5.5G 80Gb iPod manages. If you're on a long flight, or train journey, with no scope to recharge then it's a pain. We did have a Belkin external battery pack, but haven't seen it since we came back from Australia in 2005 (!).

Anyway, I idly googled iPod batteries and now have a significantly higher powered one from iPodjuice.com, which I fitted and charged last night. It cost a very reasonable $36, or around £18 at the time I ordered, so slipped under the import tax limits. The fitting was a challenge, but the kit that came with it was spot on, as were the instructions. The internals of the iPod are something to behold with lots crammed in. Anyway, in theory I've about 80% more power, so I'm hoping for a battery life much closer to Jill's unit.

The only other thing that could do with improving is the HDD space, but I'm managing that by being selective as to what I sync from iTunes.

Happy

I've been pondering something over the last few days; why do I prefer writing stuff on the PowerBook, when I have a gorgeous 20" screen on the iMac G4 coupled with a very nice keyboard? I don't know what it is, but nothing has come close to the tactical feel and focus I get tapping away on either of my PowerBooks over the last decade. The iBook didn't quite match either of them for the same urge to type away.

I've also realise how much little tweaks to your user interface can significantly improve your workflow. I was helping my Dad out with his iMac G5 to try and resolve an email related issue, and although he's on the exactly the same version of the OS as me, I kept on getting frustrated. The big differences were little things – I have Exposé set to my top screen corners to either clear the screen, or drop to all windows available, and the mouse I have (a gorgeous Micro$oft Intellimouse 5) has different set ups with the extra buttons. It's amazing how much difference it makes. Anyway, we fixed the issue, and started the process that will allow him to break free from his current ISP if he needs to.

Pretty annoyed, as I've just found out that some bugger has hacked one of the websites that I maintain, and put in a link to a trojan etc. Not seen it myself, as the Mac tends to be blasé about PC viruses and as I've not been asked to do any updates I've had very little reason to visit the site. I do have anti-virus installed, but if the attack doesn't break the firewall, or affect a Mac it doesn't alarm by default. Anyway, I've replaced the corrupted files, and also gone and hardened the site password significantly (not that it was that weak in the first place), but it's still annoying!

As an aside, Rapidweaver has been upgraded to v3.6.7, which is the last non-bugfix version for Tiger. It's improved the export times somewhat, especially with the bigger sites I have. I'm still mulling over whether it's worth switching to OS X 10.5 Leopard or staying with Tiger (OS X 10.4). I never rush to new versions of the OS (because it often takes 2 or 3 patches to get everything to a stable enough level), but there are a couple of big questions I need to answer:

1) Is there a significant speed hit with a G4 processor (1.25GHz+ and 1GB RAM+)?
2) Does Creative Suite CS2 work with Leopard (or it's a £500 premium to upgrade to CS3!)?

Pretty much everything else is clear. Most of my other apps are all Leopard compatible, and those that aren't won't be a big loss. It'd have been nice if the various Mac publications actually covered these kind of questions!

We had a great day today – Nathan was on form, and we took him to the local fish and chip restaurant in Wetherby where he had fish (no batter) and some chips, and stole bread and butter. He really likes the fish! After that, he entertained the shop assistants for 30 mins in one shop (opening every cupboard he could find and generally being cuite) before we went to Harrogate and had more fun in Mothercare.

Currently feeling: Annoyed.
Currently listening to: Suits (Fish)
Currently reading: Yvgenie (CJ Cherryh) (resisting Asher's Hilldiggers!).

ATV picture by NASA from the BBC news website.

The Jules Verne ATV has successfully docked with the International Space Station. It's a kind of fitting tribute to Sir Arthur C. Clarke's passing - a fully automatic orbital docking of a new spacecraft that adds a significant capability to Europe's space programme.

Currently feeling: Relaxed.
Currently listening to: Our Earthly Pleasures (Maximo Park)
Currently reading: Yvgenie (CJ Cherryh).

Had to do a lot of disk to disk copies the last two days. Firewire 400 gets me 18 MB/s, USB2 gets 2 MB/s, same drive.

'nuff said. I know which I'm using if I get a choice!

I'm pretty excited about the imminent launch of the Jules Verne ATV, the European Space Agencies contribution to the International Space Station. Admittedly, it owes more to the technology of Apollo and the disposable space craft concept than the re-useable Space Shuttle, but this is just a first step.


ATV diagram from the BBC news website - click through to see the original.

Of course, the media talks up the fact that this could be adapted for passenger transfer, and even to become recoverable rather than burning up sacrificially, but I still think that it's a big step forward for Europe, moving us to catch up with the premier space power, Russia. I mean that with all seriousness. NASA dominates in remote technologies against Russia, but the Russians dominate manned flight.

The ISS keeps the dream alive, that there is somewhere to go and explore, a voyage of discovery.

Currently feeling: Happy.
Currently listening to: BBC News 24 in the background.
Currently reading: The Execution Channel (Ken MacLeod).

Since I posted on Office 2008 at the weekend, I've had a chance to use PowerPoint 2008 seriously. The upshot of this usage is, if you have a G4, don't bother, it's a laggard. On either of the G4's (1.5GHz and 1.25GHz with 1.25Gb and 1Gb RAM respectively, both running Tiger) it's significantly slower than PowerPoint 2004, and it gets worse the more graphics you have in the presentation. Interface-wise, it is a lot better and much more Mac-like. I guess the newer Intel based Macs will be more than happy with it, performance wise.

Of course, I'd prefer to be using Keynote, but PowerPoint is what I need to talk work.

Feeling pretty tired now, as I'm doing a lot of juggling at work (no, I'm not really employed as a clown, it just feels like it sometimes), and I'm looking forward to a few days off that I've booked this week! Need to confirm I can make TravCon 08, and sort out some stuff around the house. I guess it's time to end this now!

I've recently upgraded my copy of Microsoft Office from v.X through Office 2004 to Office 2008, and I've been pretty surprised at the steps forward that have been made, especially in the last step.

Here's Office 2004, as exemplified by Word 2004. This was the second version of Office written for Mac OS X, and cleaned up a lot of the glitches in v.X (things like long file name support, and slightly improved stability). The application was a Carbon one, which means that it was built with tools developed for compatibility with OS 9 originally.


Click Through for Larger Image.

Now, I like this version, as it pretty much mirrors the Windows XP version of Office 2003 (which I have at work), but is still slightly easier to use.

And here's Office 2008, as exemplified by Word 2008.


Click Through for Larger Image.

Under the hood, there are a lot of changes here. The application is a universal binary (supporting Intel and PPC chips) and it has been recoded in Cocoa, which is the native OS X way to build apps. However, the bit that has really surprised me is the fact that the interface has been cleaned up so much. All of a sudden, it feels like a Mac application, rather than something that was cloned from the PC version. The clutter has gone, and it feels a lot more enjoyable to use. Ok, so you can't quantify this easily, but I'm really impressed. It looks like the twin pressures of OpenOffice/NeoOffice(*) and iWork 08 have forced an evolution on Microsoft.

Wow! And they dropped the home user price below £100 for 3 licenses! For once I'm impressed with Microsoft!

*Okay, I know that many of my techy-friends would prefer to see me with Ubuntu Linux and OpenOffice, but my only defence is I love the Mac interface, and if the commenting tools were better on OpenOffice, I'd use it happily. But they didn't cut the mustard when I tried them a month or two back.

After a request from one of my friends, Tom, I have enabled the RSS feeds on the site. You should find a link at the bottom of the page on the right hand side so you can link up via your favourite feed aggregator!

I've been musing what to do following the messing around with the connection to Pipex (which still isn't perfect) and I think that my next route will be to look at getting my own domain name and moving the email addresses and accounts over to it over the next six to nine months (the period I need to stay with Pipex to avoid any extra charges). After that, things become more portable and I can move at will, depending upon service. But what domain name do I go for? Do I go for a variation on cybergoths, which is an old nickname from University and has ties back to my past (thanks Jon!), or do I go for something completely different? I think I need to think about this before rushing in!

I'm also musing with switching this blog to Livejournal for the main blog here. That would mean that I would have been able to update this blog even if I couldn't connect at home. Decisions, decisions, but none that need to be rushed.

The phone call to Pipex at least established that I'd been looking at the right things but left me with the recommendation that I borrow another router and try it before we got BT involved (as they'd charge me £150 if the issue was with my hardware).

Sorry the troubleshooting continued. I took the existing hardware downstairs and plugged it into the original phone socket that I had been using. It still dropped out, but noticeably less over the next few days. Of course, this could just be Pipex fixing its issues. I decided to get a new router (another Netgear, the DG834G) and upgrade the wireless base-station to 54Mbs at the same time. This arrived today, and I've installed it and it is working like a dream!

Interesting points which I haven't resolved:

1. The service has got more reliable as the week progressed, which could be at Pipex's end.
2. I installed the 3rd and final DSL filter replacement this afternoon, a nightmare job as I needed to take the fitted furnishings in our bedroom apart to get to the telephone socket.
3. The new router wouldn't talk to the internet from the socket which is in the study. It was fine downstairs.

I'm thinking I probably have an issue on the new study telephone extension combined with a glitch at the ISP end. However, I'll never really know.

No news for a bit because of Pipex. At the moment I can't keep a sustained internet connection up at home, as the server connection at Pipex's end keeps on dropping out. I'm buying 3 new DSL filters tomorrow in a final attempt to make sure it isn't my line that's the issue. This is heading towards the last straw with Pipex - certainly, I'm getting tempted to get my own server set up to handle my email and webspace, and after that's in play then I may well look at a new ISP.



Otherwise, life is pretty good.

UPDATE (Sunday): The new DSL filters haven't changed a thing. I can see the BT side of the connection is holding up, as I've been monitoring the PPPoA. I was going to call Pipex today to chase this up, but I've just discovered that their former '24/7' support line is now 6 days a week, for less than 24 hours. At least it's only a local rate call. I'll have to try on Monday.

I use Pipex as my ISP (indeed, this site is hosted by them) and generally have found them pretty good, except that they seem to have a somewhat surreal idea of customer service. We've been without an internet connection for two days because of their latest farce.

Apparently, they ran maintenance on their servers which resulted in the PPPoE connection being changed to a PPPoA connection (or at least the settings significantly changing from what there was before). Of course, they didn't communicate this before it happened and it took two days for me to find out what the issue was (I'd pretty quickly diagnosed it to either BT or Pipex, with Pipex looking more likely). Anyway, phoned up and got told how to log back in, and it works, but I think that the load over Christmas as the kids are home is a bit of an issue. My line speed is now down around 2Mbs rather than 4Mbs, and larger downloads are dropping out (which is a pain when you're trying to install system updates).

I just wish they'd sent an email out before they killed my access so I could know what to do. It's identical to the lack of communication over the changes to the FTP servers 18 months ago, which I described here. Basic, poor customer service.

Hrumph!

I'm going through one of those phases at the moment where I'm getting slightly obsessive about organising things. It's something that has happened over the last few years, mainly as I get busier and have ended up spinning more plates. A number of different things have caught my eye - a combination of articles, software and solutions. I really enjoyed one of the articles on 43folders on managing a paperless office, which resonated with me because I'd previously (about 10 years ago) tried something similar with the then new and trendy Visioneer Paperport scanner. That failed, mainly as the scanner was pretty limited in what and how it handled, and the OCR capabilities around at the time were pretty bad. However, I'm wondering if it may be the time to revisit this, as the filing cabinet is getting far to full.


If your desktop looks like this, then have a look at the article on Kinkless.com linked below.

I also really liked the article on Kinkless.com on ways to avoid a massively cluttered desktop. I just wish that there was a way that I could establish this easily on the work PC (but I guess that I should just be grateful that it's finally working normally again), but the tools beyond the basics are all for OS X. However, i went some way towards this over the weekend with a general clean up of the iMac HDD.

One of my friends refers to this kind of stuff as 'productivity pr0n', as you need to be very careful that you don't just get obsessed with fiddling with new systems. I agree with this up to a point, but I do think you need to try out the various options to see what works for you. I'll probably post some more links and software notes over the next few weeks.

Exit to Nowhere is a great place to get your Geek-Chic T-Shirts from. They specialise in one off prints of logos and pictures to tie in with famous cult and horror movies. Personally, it's the sci-fi ones that float my boat, but if you fancy a T Shirt promoting Amity Island (Jaws), Summerisle (The Wicker Man), Tyrell Corporation (Blade Runner) or even the ED-209 Law Enforcement Droid (Robocop) then click on through. I went for the Weyland-Yutani Corp from the Alien films, which was kind of fun. Got stopped when I was out in town wearing it and asked where I got it from as well!

The Corolla won.


A slightly older model Corolla than the one we bought.

In the end, the Corolla won because we could get one with 40,000 miles and 3 years less than the Lexus IS200. It's also more practical. So, I am now a car owner again for the first time in nearly 3 years, with a lovely 54 reg T-Spirit in the silver shown in the picture above. It fits the car seat as it has iso-fix, and is nicely built. It's also less hungry for fuel than the Lexus would have been. But my heart still misses the idea of the IS200. Some other time, perhaps.

At the moment, we're starting to look at getting a second car again as life is somewhat more complex with Nathan around. It's going to get more so when Jill returns to work in November. We've been narrowing down what we're after based on past experience and what we both like.

VS

We've got to a position where there is a choice from the heart (a Lexus IS200 March 2004 latest because after that the sunroof becomes mandatory and I can't fit in it!) and a choice for the head (a Toyota Corolla, based on the experience of Jill's previous Corolla's and our Avensis, and it's made in the UK). Which will win? More on that later!

I stopped using Apple's Safari Web-browser some time ago, not because it performed poorly but because, after a particular security update, it refused to hold the log in details for one of the BBSes that I visit regularly (The Tavern, FWIW). I switched to Camino, which is the Mac-ified version of Firefox that I've mentioned previously. Camino is great, but can be a little sluggish compared to Safari. Anyway, when Apple rolled out Safari 3's beta, I decided to try it again (if only because Jill uses it regularly as well). The package itself is great, but the new version of Webkit knackers a lot of things. If you have any programs that call on web-kit (ie those that have pseudo browser behaviours) avoid this beta. It makes programs hang for no apparent reason. But I guess that's why it's a beta, and why it's confirmed my using Camino as my browser of choice.

I'm having fun with optical media. Well, maybe fun isn't the best way to describe it. I'm rediscovering the joys of optical media. It's been too long since I experienced the pain of just how finicky optical media can be when you're burning it.

I've always tended to buy decent CD-ROMs, on the basis that the cheap and nasty ones tend to become coasters (Yes, Tesco, that's you I'm talking about with a 100% failure rate). As a result, I've tended to use Memorex (which have always worked well) and Verbatim in more recent times. Now, I'm discovering the same issues with DVDs. Memorex and TDK work fine, but I've just tried 3 DVD-R Verbatim disks and they all give error messages. Slot a TDK, the same spec, and the problem returns. I've no idea why, but it's really frustrating, especially when you've got 8 copies of a presentation made and video-ed at work to get done for tomorrow and it takes 9 min per disk to burn...

I've been watching the iPhone bru-ha-hah with interest. Yes, it looks excellent, but it seems to be somewhat limited for my needs. Firstly, all the reports I've seen say it needs iTunes to sync (and I can't have that at work), and secondly, it seems to have some interface quirks that need to be ironed out before it could give any true advantage over my Palm Treo. Silly things like no one-touch dialing, and no full-stop on the basic keyboard page for email and SMS. The touch screen is the way to go (and is why I've rejected getting something sexier to replace my Treo 650), but the whole package matters. I'm guessing I can hang on until 2008 and see what Apple and Palm deliver (as the new Linux based Palm OS is due in 2008). And at that point I'm guessing justifying a £300 phone may be a challenge anyway!

I've just updated Camino, my browser of choice on the Mac, to version 1.5. It's Mozilla Firefox done with an Apple style GUI. Fast, stable and simple, it's long since displaced Safari as my favourite browser on the Mac. However, if you're on a Windows or Linux machine you'll need to stick with Firefox (same rendering engine, more clunk on the interface, but still excellent).

It certainly feels a lot faster, and adds the ability to add RSS feeds directly to my preferred RSS Reader, Newsfire, which is very useful.

Well, Realmac Software have just released RapidWeaver 3.6, which sees a significant number of upgrades. I've upgraded one license to play with it first on my own blog before trying the BITS and Birkenhead History Society ones. The upgrade isn't too painful at £19, and as it's the first one that I've had to pay for in two years it's not bad at all!

I've tried a new theme here just for an experiment! No glitches so far!

I had a bit of a surprise today, as the copy of CS2 Standard that I ordered earlier in the week was at home when I got in today. It wasn't meant to arrive until 6th April at the vendors, let alone be on my doorstep. Naturally, I installed it this evening. The initial installation took about 25 mins, with a further hour nearly to download and install all the updaters. It's times like this when I whistfully consider whether I should upgrade my DSL connection beyond 1M/sec. 160 Mb data still takes a while. Considering the installation is all run from within an update program, it was a disappointment that I had to enter the admin authorisation for every updater, but I guess that's the price of security and it should only be a single hit.

The initial impression I have of the software – Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2, InDesign CS2 plus the Bridge and Version Cue systems – is that although it takes longer (maybe two or three times as long?) to load, it seems pretty fast once you're in it. However, this should be taken with a pinch of salt as I haven't done any serious manipulation here. If the impression is correct, then I've made the right call and a fast G4 with a bucket of RAM is a fine machine for the package. However, only time will tell.

InDesign will take some learning; I think I may go and see if there are any night school classes in Harrogate again like the ones I did for Photoshop and Illustrator some time ago. However, It's probably a lot better for BITS and other writings than iCalamus is (as it's pretty much one of the two industry standards and integrates so well). I seem to be getting all the materials together for a workflow to restart writing - Scrivener for the text smithing, Word/InDesign for layout, and Photoshop/Illustrator/OmniGraffle for illustrations.

I guess the ending point to this is a tip. If you have an old version of Photoshop, be sure to check out the Jigsaw website. They appear to be offering an upgrade to CS3 Design Premium for £616 inc VAT. As the list price is £1385 inc VAT that's a great deal. Wish I'd seen it first (although, I'm guessing that I'd have resisted because it's somewhat more than I paid for CS2)!

I've long used the various Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustration, GoLive and Acrobat) but resisted buying the Creative Suite once that became available because of cost. Anyway, I've reached the end of the line for my current versions (Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10) so had to make a call to upgrade to avoid falling off the upgrade ladder (Adobe keep the number of back versions you can upgrade fron a lot tighter than they used to).

I'm feeling a bit gouged by it because you can upgrade from Photoshop (or an equivalent product) or from the earlier versions of the Creative Suite. You don't (in any way) have a way to get other versions of the software considered (so I can only take 1 product into consideration when I upgrade).

Anyway, I decided that the £700+ that was wanted for a full upgrade to the soon to be released Creative Suite 3, and bought an upgrade to CS2 in clearance for substantially less!

I got really fed up of using my work laptop with an ethernet cable in the back on Thursday, as it means that I have to sit on the sofa with the laptop on my lap. I don't really find this very conducive to working at home (but then again, having a 9 week old in the house is probably far more of a challenge). Anyhow, I'd previously had the home network set up so that I could see the internet with the work Dell, but I couldn't connect to the servers at work via VPN.

I believe (according to a more techy friend) that this is a side effect of the way that I had the network configured so it had a double NAT set up. Now, this was really an accident, so I spent a little time with the network admin utility to fix the problem. Now I can sit at my desk upstairs if I need to do any work from home. OK..... when I need to do some work from home. Beats the sofa any day. Just need to find the desk surface!

I guess it ended up being a lot easier than I expected once I'd worked out exactly how I'd configured the network (and also once I'd saved the configuration file).

When I went for DSL and dropped my 56k connection, I was pretty careful about who I selected. I wanted reliability and decent customer service, something that my previous ISP had provided for most of the eight or more years that I used them. Pipex have a lot of the backbone in the UK, and a good reputation. I've only really had two issues with them since I signed up, but both are pretty annoying.

Firstly, they changed the FTP servers they used from UNIX boxes to some kind of Windows box (it says NT on the connection) that demanded active FTP rather than passive FTP. No big thing, as the apps I generally FTP (to upload the website) – Cyberduck, Rapidweaver's Publisher module and Fetch – can all handle this if necessary. However, the first pain of this is that I have to compromise the security of my system or reorganise my network to upload. I've gone for the simpler security compromise route, based on the fact I'm running OS X with anti-virus software. However, the need to do this annoys me a lot. The second pain from this change is the fact that they have yet to update their technical documentation to reflect this over a year later. The third pain was the fact their tech support couldn't explain what the changes were, and didn't bother noting the entry on their customer database or the info in email that I sent (describing the problem) that confirmed I was using OS X and sent me an XP solution.

Frustrating.

On an ongoing basis, I've worked around this, but the FTP side is getting increasingly flaky. I'm regularly loosing the connection to the server, which I know isn't an issue at this end because the two commercial servers which I use don't suffer the same problem. At some point I'm going to get a separate server package, or change ISP, or both.

The second big issue is the fact that every now and again I loose the service completely. It's just happened tonight, which has scuppered some work that I was planning to do tonight. I've checked the connection via the router, and it's the login to Pipex which is failing.

Doubly frustrating.

Overall, I like Pipex, but their customer service is starting to slide. It's getting tempting to jump ship.

As an aside, I'm enjoying typing this on the PowerBook now that it has 1.25 Gb RAM. It certainly makes are real speed difference. Hurrah! The old RAM will go on eBay in a week or two when the rest of my 'for eBay' pile comes home from storage at my parents.

As you may have guessed from the fact this is posted, normal service has been restored!

I bought a gigabyte of RAM off Crucial for the PowerBook, mainly driven by the slowdown in RapidWeaver now that I've been throwing the bigger photo files into the blog. You don't see these when the site is uploaded, as RW scales them to something far more reasonable, but the master files are held in the binding file which means that RW is handling them. As the recent photos I've been taking with the Lumix FZ-50 are around 4-5 Mb, that rapidly adds up.

Anyway, the real world has won, as I'm still stuck with 512 Mb rather than 1.25 Gb until tomorrow, because I've been defeated by the memory bay door as the screws are a size 00 Philips fitting that I don't have. It's a trip to the hardware store tomorrow to get a driver to solve this slight mechanical problem. Defeated by the real world! It'll be interesting to compare the speed of the laptop with the desktop (iMac). It'll have 256Mb more RAM and 250 MHz more speed on the processor, so how will the architectures play out.

As an aside, I actually got 6 hours sleep last night, as Nathan is seeming to be recovered from his cold. Amazing how much better I feel for it. Jill only got four hours sleep (but got several blocks of this!), as he woke, but he seems to be getting more regular in his sleep patterns so perhaps there is hope!

Look above if you want the latest baby update - this entry addresses my inner geek! In spite of the recent spate of sleepless nights (the joy of Nathan's cold!) I've been playing with some computery related things. The first is the complete rebuild of the Power Projection website. In reality, it was done before Christmas, but the domain name registrar took far too long to redirect to the new server.

I'm pretty pleased with the site. Ever since I created the Power Projection site way back, it's never been quite what I wanted. I was surfing BlueBall Design's website and saw their MaxLight theme for Rapidweaver. The moment I saw it, I knew I wanted it for PowerProjection.net, because it was so, well, Star Trek like. Something just made me think of space. Anyway, I bought it, and started to build the site while we were waiting for Nathan's arrival. It needed a little bit of hacking to get exactly what I wanted (some tweaks to the theme) but I got there. I should also mention Charlie Lockhart from BlueBall, who was incredibly helpful when there were some code issues. Anyway, I'm pleased with the site, and happy that it is finally off the Pipex webspace which this blog is on, because it is a real pain to update.

The other big IT related find is Scrivener. Writing Power Projection on the Mac taught me the limitations of Word for creative writing projects, in much the same way that writing Delta 3 is Down taught me the limitations of Windows (NT 4 in this case) as a stable OS you can rely on. The problem is, Word really stops you seeing the wood for the trees, and you end up spending a lot of time thinking about the programme rather than the words.

I tried a number of solutions to address this issue with the workflow before layout, but none of them have been entirely satisfactory. My first attempt was a program called Copywrite, which promised a lot but seemed to be unstable as hell on my G3 iBook and G4 iMac. (It may be better now, but I have no burning desire to check it out again!) I eventually gave up on it and went back to Word. My most recent solution was to use Circus Ponies' Notebook to capture notes on projects, and then drive the projects themselves through the excellent OmniOutliner using an outline with embedded documents and files. This worked reasonably well, but didn't quite click. Then I happened upon a reference and review of Scrivener on 43folders.com, which instantly peaked my interest.


Scrivener takes what I was using Word and OmniOutliner for and merges them with some really intuitive tools. The full screen editing and structuring tools are excellent and it is very 'Mac'. It hangs together beautifully and after a few days playing convinced me it was a must have. I've registered a copy, and will be using it for my next two writing projects; Power Projection: Reinforcements, and a Traveller scenario called This Fear of Gods. I recommend you take it for a test drive and have a look. You can use it for 30 days before it locks down.

My first real introduction to modern computing was with an Atari ST, which I was given by my parents as a birthday present when I was 18. The first ST I had was a 1Mb STFM hooked to a 12" portable TV, which I eventually replaced with a 4Mb STE with twin floppy drives and a 'high res' (600x400) mono monitor. This served me all the way through University, but fell by the wayside after Atari went under and I changed to Apple to get a similar look and feel.

Anyway, I used to do some DTP for a number of newsletters and such using a powerful little package called 'Calamus'. Even in its initial iteration (v1.09n) it was a match for the likes of Pagemaker (which was admittedly in the process of being trounced by Quark at that time). It was one of the packages I was sad to loose, and I've never really been able to justify purchasing a copy of InDesign or Pagemaker to replace it.

This position stands even more at the moment because neither Adobe's Creative Suite or Microsoft's Office Suite are Universal Binaries. I'm not going to buy any software that will need to run under Rosetta emulation on a future Mac because the code hasn't been prepared for the Intel Processors. Why buy obsolescence deliberately?

Anyway, in MacWorld's last issue, there was a reference to iCalamus on the cover disk. I followed this up, and found a website with a new iteration of Calamus, built in Cocoa (one of the programming frameworks that Apple provides). I downloaded the demo, and instantly fell in love with it, as it was a new shiny version of what I loved on the Atari. Needless to say, I've licensed it and now have a tool that means perhaps I can do some of the layout stuff that I've been meaning to for a long time. Child permitting, of course....

Ever since I first got a Mac back in 1996, there have been a number of PC programs I've really wanted to get hold of to try and match the stuff I use at work. The key ones I wanted to replace were CAD, Visio and MS Project.

OmniGraffle has solved the Visio demand - in the latest 'Professional' edition it can export and import Visio XML. The only area it gets let down with is the way Vision handles drop shadows. i did some work for work the other week, and I need to modify it to remove the shadows as they are pretty ugly in XP.

OmniGroup also seem to be closing the gap with the forthcoming OmniPlan. i was involved in the initial beta testing of this, and it is a superb package. It may not have quite all the features of MS Project, but it has all the important ones and is slick and stable, even in beta. If I was still doing Engineering I would be rushing to buy this!

The final part of the gap was closed last week when I got hold of TurboCAD Mac V2. This will import and export to AutoCAD, but has a look and feel very much like Bentley Microstation SE, the package that I spent much of the time that I spent doing CAD on. I'd previously tried to get by through a number of methods. The first was the addition of a plug-in for illustrator (Hot Door CAD Tools 2) but I found it really unstable, and the price to upgrade was somewhat extortionate. I decided not to because there was no guarantee that it would be any better. Next up was using the scale function on OmniGraffle 4. This was excellent, and has been really useful in preparing crude room layouts for the nursery and study, but it was far less intuitive than a CAD package. So TurboCAD looks like it is going to be really useful, especially as I can enter a CAD mindset really easily!

All of a sudden, all the burning advantages that PCs have over Macs for my work have gone!

I've just dug out my PowerBook 190cs (from 1996) because I'm passing it on to someone via Freecycle. As it hadn't been switched on since 2004 (!) the battery needed to be recharged, so I've had it plugged in all day. As I was writing the last blog entry, I had my current PowerBook G4 next to it, so I grabbed a photo.



Both these machines were the bottom end units of the their times. Interestingly, they both take about the same time to boot up, and feel similarly snappy in performance!

So PB190 vs PB G4 12"
Processor: 68LC040 66MHz vs PPC G4 1.5 GHz
Memory: 20Mb (Maxed) vs 512 Mb (can go to 1.5 Gb)
HDD: 500 Mb vs 60 Gb
OS: 7.5.2 vs 10.4.7
Screen : Passive 9" vs Active 12"
Networking: serial port vs Bluetooth / Airport Extreme / Ethernet / Modem

The old PB keyboard is better than the current PB, but both are better than the iBook and the new MacBook keyboards. The new machine is lighter, thinner and slightly narrower.

I have a great nostalgia for the old machine because I wrote my first few books for BITS on it. It was also my first Mac, and the machine I bought when I graduated and started working. It was my work horse for a long time, and I built my first websites with it, initially with pure HTML and later with Adobe Pagemill (which I upgraded to GoLive 4.0 when Adobe bought the application from Cyberstudio). The 20Mb of RAM never gave a problem, nor did the processor. It's amazing how much operating systems have bloated since that time. A clean boot of OS X takes around 180 Mb of RAM initially vs 4Mb for system 7.5. Those were the days! But I wouldn't go back.

I like the new version of Rapidweaver. It shows significant progress from the previous one, and is even more powerful, plus it still allows you to use the old themes, which means that the Birkenhead History Society pages didn't need any significant update. The BITS website did need some more work, but that related to the complexity of the site and the theme. I had to change to the new version and manually change some of the default layouts. However, migrating all the sites took less than an hour tops.

What I do especially like is the increased flexibility built into some of the themes. For example, some of them support variable widths now. I did try that originally for this blog, but I think I will revert to the fixed width from now on, as it looks more aesthetically pleasing. I've also landed a more autumnal flavour to the site looks for a while!

Next thing (website wise) will be to develop the theme for the Power Projection website. It needs an update (especially with the new book) and it needs to move servers from the same one as this blog! Assuming I can sort out the sub-domain and parked domain stuff, I'll land it on the BITS servers as well.

Once this has been done I will have completely walked away from GoLive! How times change...

Well, RapidWeaver 3.5 is finally out of beta so I decided to give it a try. I'll change the BITS and BHS websites later, as the themes need some work first! So far, so smooth!

I'm pretty fed up with Pipex, my ISP, at the moment as they've changed something with their FTP servers (running on an NT box from the look of the responses in the command line) which has messed up my FTP access. I'm certain it's at their end because:

1) I've not changed anything (okay, this week, four weeks in, I did run the OS X security update).
2) I can access the other ISPs I use for BITS etc with the same packages (Cyberduck and Rapidweaver - I even dragged GoLive and Fetch back out)!
3) They had FTP system problems immediately at the point that the problem manifested, which one of the support emails hinted still existed.

I've done all the usual - toggling Active/Passive etc and switching the FTP module that Rapidweaver uses. The only way I can upload at the moment is by leaving the computer's security wide open while I do so. I'm hoping that the email exchange with support will resolve this soon enough...

I suppose it is worth saying that I do think, aside from this, that Pipex is doing a fine job otherwise!

It's a new year, so I decided to try and see how easy it was to change the site look. This took 7 clicks...

1) Open the theme menu.
2) Select the theme.
3) Open the site inspector.
4) Select the theme settings to apply to the whole site.
5) Select brushed metal.
6) Select light grey outer skin.
7) Publish the site with the publish button.

I do love RapidWeaver. Having just looked on RealMac Software's website (RapidWeaver's Publisher), I've noticed a preview of version 3.5 has been announced for MacWorld next week. Can't wait to see what they've added...