Eaten by a Lion

Sunday, July 3rd, 2011

This weekend I had to say goodbye to some very old friends who have been my best buddies for many years. It wasn’t my fault really, it’s just that, for me, Lion went GM.

It’s now 3rd of July, I’ve been MacOSX Lioned-up since around about March or maybe earlier but having slashed open an artery to sign in blood I wasn’t able to say anything about Lion. Even now I have to mention MacOS 10.7 in only the vaguest terms in case the Infinity Loop Patrol notice, clicker-click their sawn-offs to blast me to smithereens in a dark alleyway.

All I’m prepared to say is that when my Mac rebooted in the trusty, old MacOS Snow Leopard 10.6 partition, to convert it to the new OS, I ran back to Lion with relief. I hated Lion at first, bought a trackpad, found alternatives to applications and now think it’s the best OS since… err… the change between System 9 and MacOS X. Yes, It’s that good.

However, we have lost a load of friends in this last switch. With a bit of brilliant forward thinking I have a sparse image of my entire start-up Snow Leopard disk, complete with applications and Users Folder. Belt and braces just in case, eh?

I managed to get an Iomega external 2TB hard drive which had been designed to sit under a Mac Mini server until Apple redesigned the Mini’s case. As a hint, it means there are some superb FW800/400/USB2 drives waiting for someone to find them on the Web. I love the way the drive spins up with an ooooh-wup sound and it sits neatly on top of a Mac Pro, matching aluminium casing and looking exactly unlike any other desktop drive I have ever seen. Mac top would be a better description.

The loss of old friends is a heavy burden. Gone are Freehand, Adobe Suites, CS 2 and 3, Switch, Visual Hub, Turbo 264, Call of Duty UO MP (ooooooooohhh)…. In fact so many I can’t bear the loss without shedding a tear or two. We have many work arounds: such as using Apple’s free Image Capture to get scans into Photoshop and Pages or Sun Office have replaced Word, Handbrake steps up for VisualHup or Turbo264.

It could be time to investigate virtual OS-es to run the old PPC applications but how far back does one go? After all, Steam does exactly the same with their MacOS games. We miss Vette and good old StarTrek, AfterDark, Streamline and Talking Moose but those are things the kids nowadays think are films on DVD rather than CRT or LCD.

One thing is for sure, my partner (still PPC based) and I are heartily sick of the interface Adobe slaps on their apps. We have been using them for over 20 years and still think they are the dog’s vomit. If MacOS Lion forces us to find new vector graphic and pixel editors it’s no bad thing. As she (my partner) said, ‘Adobe’s interfaces rival the worst Microsoft has designed’, which means the absolutely daft Ribbon of their latest Office. Why break a paradigm without offering something better?

Which was my first though about Lion until I let it get its teeth into me.

Désolé monsieur

Sunday, June 26th, 2011

The biggest tossers in Europe

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

That’s us Brits. We throw away more than any other EC country and much of it still usable. The bulk of our ‘stuff’ ends up in giant landfill sites even if we recycle it, all because the market is flooded with dead plastic, paper and CRT TVs.

We had to make a decision whether to give up something perfectly adequate. Our home and studio is in an area where we are offered a broadband choice from the best of the UK’s leading suppliers. Speeds available vary between pathetic to incredible but at what point does all the speed become a waste of money?

The best our telephone line could manage was a miserly 5Mbps download and 0.8 upload.  Thos was after numerous modem upgrades, changing wholesalers and switching between various flavours of ADSL, We could also guarantee that at half past five, ADSL would go down. Exactly the same time we wanted to upload files of the day’s work to servers around the world. Obviously people were getting home from work and hitting their connections. But we paid a premium price for business lines and contention ratios meant to make sure we had priority access.

The move to cable was inevitable and immediately our upload speed was better than the best download speed ADSL ever supplied. It is more than adequate for our needs and even faster than we are supposed to be paying for. Then Virgin told us we can have double that and shortly double that again. All for an additional £22 per month.

What will all that bandwidth get us?

At the moment our 50Mb cable link means we can do everything we need, rapidly and without the disconnects which plague ADSL. Up and downloads of gigabytes of data are a matter of minutes. The server we are connecting with is the limiting factor rather than our cable connection. BBC aside that is, which has been consistently the best in our experience.

We are a household where at times, we have four or more smart phones, one iPad, two Samsung Tabs, seven laptops and two or three desktop computers running ftp servers and the like. Plus our own little Cloud upstairs serving videos to whoever we give the password to. In addition, we might be streaming to an AppleTV or the iPad from Crackle. Perhaps one or two of us are having a video chat to girl/boyfriend left behind in London/Chicago.

If we fancy a movie download, usually about 1.5GB from the iTunes Store, between clicking on the link and sitting to watch is about the same time it takes to get the foil and wire off a bottle of Prosecco With enough time left over to pop the cork through the open French doors into the garden to see if we can beat the current distance record. An achievement I lost recently when my partner uncorked a particularly fizzy specimen. The cork shot up three metres, sailed past the greenhouse by a gnat’s crotchet to land in the garden pond some 15 metres away. Personally I think the wind was behind it.

Should we move to 100Mb link and then to 200mb?

Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame would undoubtedly declaim of course we should, speed is essential. It didn’t do The Stig much good when he won the court case to reveal his identity. He lost his job, had a brief appearance in BTCC racing and seems to have sunk into history.

But he did give driving lessons to Cameron Diaz. And Tom Cruise if you are into short, Scientologist actors.

Wednesday, June 15th, 2011

It is an interesting coincidence that I was enthusing about doing it for free
random-hacks-of-kindness/
as IT Pro is pulling this blog. Do I carry on elsewhere or do I give up? The coincidence is that I am paid by IT Pro, if I set up my own blog site obviously I’ll be doing for free.

Whilst I’m enthusing about volunteering I’m not sure about just blogging for the sake of it – it smacks too much of vanity publishing. How will I know if it’s read or even if it’s worth reading? If someone pays me I know someone values what I’m doing, if not…

Anyway this is pretty much the end here for me as the mystery blogger. So I’ll say farewell and finally reveal my true identity…

I am not an IT bod at all – in fact I am a Gay Girl in Damascus
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13744980

or am I?

How much stuff can I fit into my bulging man bag?

Monday, June 13th, 2011

The average travelling office worker carries around a lot of technology nowadays – more ardent IT enthusiasts will carry around even more. Comfort and space are therefore important things to consider when buying laptop bags – if it looks inconspicuous and as unlike a black attaché case as possible that would be even better.

I’ve been using an old Kensington AstroPack backpack which is lightweight and looks completely unlike a black attaché bag. Unfortunately it only has room for a laptop, the battery charger, a small notepad and a pen, a handful of cables, a phone and, at a stretch, a compact camera and a small camcorder. It’s comfortable though, with the weight evenly distributed.

My desire for more space has led me to the new Samsonite Pro-DLX3 backpack. It has a rather staid, plain black appearance but it feels very well made with substantially more padding in the laptop compartment than the AstroPack, but is also a bit heavier.

It’s also far roomier as I was able to squeeze in a laptop, the battery charger, a notepad and several pens, some cables, a phone, a DSLR-sized camera, a full-sized camcorder, their corresponding chargers and a magazine. Despite all that stuff, the weight is well-distributed and the bag is still just about comfortable enough to carry. The straps are quite taut though so the bag sits quite close to your back. This is apparently ergonomically advantageous, but it can also bunch up a close-up fitting jacket or coat.

I haven’t abandoned the trusty AstroPack, keeping it for shorter trips where I don’t need as much kit, but the Pro-DLX3 is now my preferred laptop bag for longer trips. It’s a bit pricy at £135, but it’s well worth it for serious travellers. I only wish it looked a little more inconspicuous.

Small scale email marketing works a treat

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

A long time ago, in a place far from here, on a dark and stormy night, I sent out my first mailshot to 100 names plucked from Thomson’s Directory. It read ‘Mark and Mac for hire’. The response was amazing, creating a customer base which lasted for a decade and more. My wife and I were some of the first designers in Brighton with Mac set-ups, including a PostScript laser printer and a full range of design software. It all cost a gazillion to buy, the typefaces alone were worth thousands of pounds.

Over the years, clients moved on, to be replaced with others. As new facilities became affordable we bought them: ISDN, ADSL, high-res scanning, image manipulation, large format colour prints and web page design.

Gradually I specialised into book production, with clients in London, France and America, while my wife worked for a national charity. But the bankers screwed the world, people stopped buying books, publishing moved to ebooks and for the first time in 25 years I had to get a proper job. Ironically back to my old career where there is a huge lack of staff and I’m working less for the same money I earned from design. But I still keep a toehold in the creative world, hoping for the return of the good old days.

Zany, attractive and to the point

Which is how one email caught my eye and instead of marking it as junk, I read each new one with interest. They were zany, attractive and to the point, obviously from someone who knew what they were doing, or at least appeared to do so. The email was from Keith Scott, another jobbing freelancer who was trying to create a new client base via email.

Pre-recession Keith had been the man behind British Airport Authority’s annual report. As any designer will tell you, a glossy annual report pays the mortgage for a year. When BAA were taken over, Keith found he didn’t have enough work after a career in typesetting and design for print, dating from the days of hot metal.

Keith explained: “Once BAA’s 2006 annual report had gone to print I was back in the normal run of things with no financial umbrella and wondering what to do about the monetary vacuum. I had been sending postcards then followed up with a phone call but it became too expensive and time-consuming. I decided to try email.

“I had built up a small database of about 120 contacts whom I telephoned to get an email address before starting a monthly mail-out. It was a slow, manual process but it did keep the work coming in. Eventually I set FileMaker Pro to send the emails for me.

“At the start of 2009 I had 300 friendly contacts and about 1200 who had never replied. Each month I carried on emailing both and slowly increased the friendly list, which kept the work coming in. Unfortunately, as the recession hit, work started drying up, I had to put my time to good use.

“With the help of Yell.com, Yellow Pages on line, I searched for graphic design companies in London and the southern home counties. I telephoned them and said I was an artworker. I gave them my details and asked for the email address of the creative director or studio manager. The vast majority of people were very obliging.

Life threatening

“One day, searching Yell, an odd message appeared in a new browser window. It said that I was deemed to be using their site for the purpose of making a database which was strictly illegal and if I did not desist I would be prosecuted. It frightened the life out of me.

“Now I buy low cost lists from other companies. Not all of them have been particularly useful and one even instigated a contact from another database company threatening to prosecute me for using their data without permission. A list I had bought was clearly not legal and I had used a hidden trojan.

“I now have 570 friendly contacts and over 3000 who have never replied. The irony is that I have less work than ever, although it does seem to be improving slightly. Producing an html email for a client gave me the knowledge to create my own. I tried Dreamweaver which wasn’t very successful before I settled on TextWrangler which is free and very good. I use MacMassMailer to send my html emails.”

As with all jobbing designers, Keith has had to learn new skills and software to keep up with the industry. He is keen to learn from others’ experience. In the last couple of years, MacUser articles have made him re-evaluate his approach and present himself more forcefully. For example: a recent article showed that skilled freelancers should present themselves as specialists rather than just run-of-the-mill artworkers.

Like Keith, MacUser’s Steve Caplin convinced me to switch to a graphics tablet and adopt a different method to do ‘hairy cut-outs.’ This was immediately before I created a book for the Imperial War Museum called The Animals’ War. Page after page had cut-outs of hirsute animals which even the best Photoshop filters were a major head-ache. Steve’s advice was to paint quick masks, convert them to cut-outs before generating ‘hairiness‘ with brushes and fitters. This helped when I went on to do The Children’s War.

Keith Scott concludes: “The obvious thing for me was to promote my traditional typesetting and artworking background. This is why I try hard to distinguish the fact that design and artwork are two very different disciplines.

“But I feel that I’m barking up the wrong tree much of the time – some might say I’m simply barking.”

Far be it for me to contradict him.

It’ll be worse before it’s better…

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

I used to have this verdant, green lawn. However, if you looked closely much of the green was moss. So, a couple of weeks back I fed it “weed and feed” which killed most of the moss and I have spent much of this weekend raking it out. The trouble is I now have a lot of brown earth and not much grass. The idea is now the moss has gone the grass will (eventually) grow over the bare patches the way it couldn’t over the moss.

So what has this to do with IT? The whole process reminded me of bug fixing a project that has gone bad. Once a system is well out of hand fixing the bugs gets tricky because they interact with other bugs and you end up with temporary fixes and work arounds until the other bugs are fixed which in turn create their own problems… The “best” approach (for development) is to clear them all out and start afresh. The problem is you end up with system much like my lawn – a bit bare.

This doesn’t go down well with users, however they will sometimes live without features for a while IF they believe they will be replaced with fully working ones.

Marketing usually really hate the idea – they’d rather have a healthy looking a system even if the healthy look is only from a distance. Still, I have often said the you could display everything about most marketing departments’ enthusiasm for openness on one screen of a smart phone … in a very large font.

New Vistas on Lion

Monday, May 16th, 2011

Terry Seabrook emailed me today, about his new CD and concert dates. Don’t know who he is (I hear you say)? Terry is just a cool Brighton-based jazz man, his new website is here: http://www.milestonesjazz.co.uk/ . I’m not usually a fan of jazz but Terry’s last band, Cubana Bop and his new latest, Sketches of Miles, give you a Jazz which is very light and listenable.

As I looked through Terry’s back catalogue I tried to remember which were the CD cover’s I designed, from an era when my studio was in Brighton and I traded design of their poster/cover/whatever in exchange for a copy of their latest music as CD and MP3s. Brighton is the birth place of so many bands and musicians, I made sure my music library grew exponentially by working for as many as possible. Most of the CDs remain sealed in their wrappers in case in years to come, I can take them to the Antiques Roadshow.

The chances of running the software I used to produce Terry’s covers, diminish as rapidly as Apple switches allegiance in it’s choice of CPU suppliers. The switch from System 8 to MacOSX was expensive in some ways as scanners and some printers were left for dust but software still ran. Apple introduced their Classic emulator which I found ran old software quicker and more reliably than under native System 8.

I still have some of those old packages and welcome anyone creating a new Classic emulator so I can get to my old barcoders, Streamline and various graphics apps. Then Apple switched from IBM to Intel as their CPU supplier. That change was again, helped by Rosetta, the PPC emulation software which has kept all my older MacOSX apps running.

It is the switch to Lion which is going to hurt the most because this time there will be no emulator to keep PPC apps alive. They will wither away to nothing as soon as I switch and will include some of the heavyweight software I cannot find alternatives for. This includes every Adobe application I own, Microsoft Office suite as well as old faithfuls such as VisualHub, SilverFast scanning software and others.

Losing Microsoft Office will be the least painful, I never wanted to upgrade from Word 5 and definitely not the latest Word with the dreadful ribbon. For the rest of broken apps, I just hope they get updates pretty darned quick. Some, such as Epson’s drivers, are all PPC. Others, such as SilverFast, will probably be a paid for upgrade.

This next MacOSX is the first where I shall really examine whether it is worth the hassle to use. For me to say that, I think Apple might be on the verge of making the same mistake as Microsoft did with Vista.

How to blog sulking

Friday, May 13th, 2011

Blogging is a weird business. I have no idea how many people read this. One approach is to make up a target person and write just to them; but assuming I’m writing to the great British public I have to say that I’m not speaking to you. Not “not addressing all of you” or “failing to reach”, actually sulking. My lack of blog wasn’t laziness, it was me deliberately snubbing you. The trouble is I don’t think any one noticed.

I did rather pin my colours to the mast over the referendum and as far as I’m concerned a no vote to AV put the “dumb” in “referendum”. The only people I’ve spoken to who were against it didn’t understand it – of course it could be plenty of people were against it but didn’t want to have a boring argument with me so pretended they were. Considering the majority of people didn’t vote for the ruling party (parties if you assume the lib dem’s have any rule) why wouldn’t people vote for a system that lets them have a say in their second choice…

Anyway, there are two ways we can play this. Either I get 68% of a 42% turnout* – say 17 million – comments apologising or we just forget the whole thing and pretend it never happened.

What never happened? Rather than crash the site I forgotten it already. Friends again?

(* results from
http://ukreferendumresults.aboutmyvote.co.uk/en/default.aspx turnout was amazingly hard to find for a site dedicated to informing us of the results!)

The Lion Wores

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

What is it with TV presenters? Why have we got so many all of a sudden who have speech affectations? Should such people be on TV in the first place?

I listened to some last night and their expressions included: Sir Anthony Beaumwant.… The Gweatest Wevolution… Cweated the kitchen wange…  Incwedible… pweliferwation…the scullery mwaid…middle cwases.

These aren’t the words of someone with a speech impediment caused by some physical or psychological disability. If they were I wouldn’t dream of mentioning them. Instead, they are from the voices of those who have been to the best schools, usually now being something like the curator of the Queens handkerchiefs, or should that be Cwuwater? Then there is Jonathan Woss…

After extensive minutes of research it appears I am not the only one questioning this affectation which they also notes as a pwoduct of the wealthy. The Queen in her 1950s voice sounded pretty stupid to us today. As if she had something stuck in her royal passage. Thankfully her accent has tamed and Britain is represented by a softly spoken lady with a wealthy London accent. Unlike the Estuary speech that Nigel Kennedy, wealthy iconic violinist, has adopted. In Jamie Oliver it is natural, in others it is forced.

Here, one American asks the same qwestion:. While here the questioner notes it is not an affectation seen in other English speaking countries. Even the Beeb has some notes about it: BBC – Voices – Your Voice.

Macs have long had voices, which I find useful to grab my attention to something going on. For many years Alex has summoned me to click on a dialogue box or warned that Armageddon would occur if I didn’t choose between two options. Usually Erase Hard Drive Yes or No.

For me, the other voices just didn’t hack it. Victoria was nearly my dream girl but sounded just a bit too CanadianAmericanDigital. The others might appeal to some but I have never wanted to be summoned by Bubbles or his compatriots.

However, with Lion it looks as though this will change. A whole new range of voices may be included, according to those with Developer copies. The voices spoken be real people or nearly real people, from the countries the Mac is present around the world. This includes the various versions of English, such as Australian, South African and so on. Even such third world countries as Scotland are included.

But you can’t mix and match to have Jacques in Montreal speak English with his sexy French Canadian accent. He’s strictly French speaking, just like Brunhilda will always speak in German and Agnetha in Swedish, unfortunately.

Apparently the Speech control panel with have previews of the new voices which are then downloaded if you make a selection. The downside being they will be pretty big files to take in all the nuances of each voice. Personally I’d give a gigabyte to have Agnetha summons me but I can’t be bothered to learn Swedish.