Microsoft Pays $290m

Remember this one? Well, the supreme court ruled that Microsoft did use some code illegally, and needs to cough up $290 million in favor to i4i.

They (i4i) must be celebrating somewhere in the tropics by now I imagine.... $290m is something I don't carry around in my wallet every day.

The court also decided that the existing Office/Word installments in the world don't need the patented code removed. New purchases from January 11, 2010 will have no illegal code (as does Office/Word 2010).
This basically results into 2 different Office/Word versions. I wonder how long it takes before the first incompatibility bug raises its ugly head.......

Thankfully I won't have to deal with this in my personal life.

Adobe Flash Player Problems

Updated on Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 22:26 by Willem

Since I encountered some problems with flash on certain websites, I decided to check if my Flash player has been updated since 1972. Normally you can check the Flash settings (incl auto-update functions) through a page on the Adobe/Macromedia website. Which is weird, since you would think that this is a local setting (incl. privacy settings and audio functionalities).... But no. Macromedia/Adobe decided that you have to do that through their website.
The reason being that they can check whatever you are doing with your player.......

Click to read more ...

Windows 7 Backup Flaw(s)

During the last couple of weeks I've been using Windows 7 at my work laptop (a Dell E6500). The OS itself ain't that bad (but still no OSX). Among the many improvements there's a new Backup ad Restore Center in the OS (compared to Windows XP, since I skipped Vista). But the application/service has a flaw. A very annoying one.

The interface is pretty intuitive and definitely more user-friendly. There's the option of backing up to a local (CD/DVD) drive, and you can choose to backup to a network share. In the corporate environment I choose the network drive. To do this, you do need ownership (some special permissions) on the drive share. This way the Backup and Restore application can do its thing.

Since Windows 7 is a member of the corporate domain I don't need to enter any credentials when accessing network shares, except with the backup application. Why? Don't ask me. But this is where the flaw kicks in.

Click to read more ...

Long Exposure Calculations

We'll be heading out for some night photography next month. Playing with long exposures is one of the thing you can't get around. Especially since I don't have any f/0.2 lenses in my bag.

Most lenses are sharpest (the so-called sweet-spot) around 2 stops from their biggest aperture (mostly around the apertures of f/8 and f/11) , but the problem is that these apertures kill the available light hitting the sensor of your camera. You could turn up the ISO (to 102400 if you have a Nikon D3s), but that gives you noise, and lots of it with most consumer dSLR's.

The only proper thing to do is adjusting the shutterspeed. Leave the aperture on its sweet-spot (f/9 or f/11), and the ISO at ISO100 or ISO200 (for the lowest amount of noise). But if you do that, chances are that you need exposures much longer than the available maximum on your camera, which is 15 or 30 seconds (depending on your camera). Which leaves you with the bulb setting on your camera. But how do you calculate the time needed for an exposure?

Bulb means that the shutter stays open for as long as you press the shutter release button.

Click to read more ...

Nikon Scan 4 and Snow Leopard

My dad switched to an iMac a couple of weeks ago. He came from a Windows environment with lots of periferals (RF Mouse, Bluetooth dongle, HP flatbed Scanner, Espon printer, Nikon CoolScan V, HP PDA, etc.). So the challenge was to migrate as many periferals as possible.

Thankfully, most of them worked. Even the old Nikon CoolScan V film scanner worked with the supplied Nikon Scan 4 software, until last Sunday. For some reason the application crashes with a message that the preferences file can't be read (Is another instance of Nikon Scan 4 running??).

It seemed that the Nikon app wasn't shut down properly on one occasion and a lock file was left in the preferences. Removing the lock file solved the issue.
The lock file is located at the following location:

~/Library/Preferences/Nikon/Nikon Scan 4 Prefs.lock

Sidenote: Weird that relatively old propriatary software like the Nikon Scan 4 software works fine, but that more recent (Nikon) software needs special updates to keep working under Snow Leopard. Was Nikon Scan 4 written by people who understand what they were doing (OS sub-version independent)? Or is this just luck?

Update on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 21:30 by Willem

Eventhough the Nikon Scan software works in Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6), Nikon abandonned the support for Nikon Scan 4 a while back. Alternatively you could use SilverFast from LaserSoft (commercial software).

iPhone Apps That Rule

Normally, I wouldn't write about every app I try (or buy) in the iPhone App Store, but sometimes there's a good reason. In this case two;

• GeoDefense Swarm
• Appie

GeoDefense Swarm is a highly addictive Desktop Tower Defense game. Very good gameplay, great graphics, and addictive as hell. I heard about this game om MacBreak Weekly, and I curse them every time I start the game (for getting me to buy it and getting addicted).

Appie is a Netherlands-only app. It's an application for Albert Heijn (Supermarkt in the Netherlands). It shows what articles are on sale, what you bought in the last three months (based on your Bonuscard number). It also holds recipes, and a lot more. A definite must-have for everyone who owns an iPhone (or iPod Touch), and who shops @ Albert Heijn.

Squarespace.com iPhone App

Squarespace.com released their iPhone App. This App let's you manage your (Squarespace) website(s);

• create content
• upload images
• manage posts
• view statistics
• et all

I used to do all these things by using Safari on the iPhone, but makes it a whole lot easier. A definite 5 star program.

TrueCrypt Bug, or Hardware Failure

For the last couple of years I've been using an offsite backup method. And today the drive I use for that failed on me. My backup program reported that it could write (or read) data to the drive.

Investigation showed that several directories in the TrueCrypt volume were gone!!!!! Thankfully, the data on my Drobo and server were still pristine condition.

Disk Utility and several other tools reported problems with the drive (or at least the TrueCrypt part/volume). So I erased the drive, and re-initialized it. No reports of trouble while I did that. After that I recreated the TrueCrypt volume and restarted the backup to the drive (which takes forever).

All I can do now is wait for the backup to finish, and pray that the house doesn't catch on fire.....

After that a new case for SpinRite.

Photoshop CS4 and Snow Leopard

Photoshop CS4 was released as an Universal app (system requirements). So both PowerPC (PPC) and Intel support. Since it's an Universal app, you shouldn't need Rosetta on an Intel .
So upgrading to Snow Leopard shouldn't be a problem... Until you're gonna use the droplet functionality of Photoshop CS4. That piece of code still needs Rosetta to function.

So no way that CS4 is Universal. It's just another piece of buggy Adobe software.

What's next? An announcement that this crap won't be supported and that you can upgrade to the >1000USD Adobe CS5 suite next year?

PGP and Snow Leopard

It seems that the current versions of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) are NOT compatible with Snow Leopard. Incompatibilty issues are are something that mostly occurs on mayor OS upgrades. The upgrades that overhauls the entire OS. But Snow Leopard is merely a fancy service/feature pack. So I have no idea why this would cripple PGP.

The blogposting is of August 27th. 1 (ONE) day before the release of Snow Leopard. And according to the post they are still in some sort of beta stage in the Snow Leopard compatibility development. This raises the following question(s);

• Why aren't they further in the development?
• Have they missed the news that Snow Leopard was on its way (announced somewhere last year)?
• Don't they have access to the developer tools (and associated beta's of the OS)?
• Were they asleep the last couple of months?

Instead of patching the 'old' v9.x of PGP they will release a new (commercial) version 10 which will be compatible with Snow Leopard. This shows the 'real' commitment of supporting the current customers. I'll try to make a list of applications which were incompatible with the release of Snow Leopard, but are pathed for FREE. Just to show that real service still exists.

I'll be keeping my eyes in the mean time on the MacGPG pages (the free implementation of the opensource part of PGP).
No more PGP for me. I'll be heading towards S/MIME and Truecrypt for the time being.