ecto 1 point oh!

The best blogging tool on the block has just final: ecto has reached 1.0.

Previous donors have been granted a generous discount on the public price which remains very reasonable. So, if you need a client application to talk to MovableType, TypePad, Blogger or whatever, give it a try, you won't be disappointed.

French localisation available, Window version in the pipe.

Threaded Trash

Who would have guessed that the "Empty Trash..." task was threaded ?

Yes, I ctrl-clicked the Trash while it was emptying .. and don't ask me why. I guess that the number of items was so large, and having issued the command earlier on - like 15" - I forgot until the window pop-up from under another.

Just a Monday curiosity.

 

The Mac turns 20

Happy Birthday Macintosh!

A few links picked up on the net (orig. MacMinute)

• First Macintosh Press Release - MacDailyNews
• Steve Jobs on the Mac's 20th anniversary - Macworld
• Celebrating 20 Years of the Mac - NPR
• The Mac that roared - San Jose Mercury News
• Looking Back on the Mac - Macworld
• We're All Mac Users Now - Wired
• 20 crazy years later, a new direction for Apple - CBS Marketwatch
• Apple's core: The Mac turns 20 - CNN
• The machine that changed the world - San Francisco Chronicle
• The Mac Turns 20 - PC World
• Apple bytes: The Mac at 20 - Silicon.com
• Apple's groundbreaking computer marks 20th anniversary - Seattle Times

iTMS RSS Feed Generator

Apple is offering a cool service to generate your own RSS feed based on their new releases. Select your favourite type of music among the 25 genre proposed. The page generates an URL that can be copy & pasted into your favourite news aggregator (such as NetNewsWire e.g.).
Cool.

Orig. MacDailyNews

1Tb for 5Kg

There we are.

You can actually have 1 terabyte (1000 Gb) on your desktop.

LaCie has just released the Bigger Disk. It offers Firewire 400 (6 or 4 pins a.k.a. iLink), Firewire 800 and USB 1.1/2.0 interface.

 

European ITMS Q2 2004

Jobs announced that iPhoto's print services will be available in Europe sometime in March 2004, but he didn't mentionned anything regarding iTunes Music Store.

According to an article in MacWorld UK,

Music industry insiders expect Apple, Napster and other major digital music services to launch in Europe as soon as the second quarter 2004.

While Apple remains tight-lipped about plans to introduce its service in Europe, Universal Music's eLabs president Larry Kenswil told Macworld: "By the second or third quarter there will be a number of major services in Europe, and I expect one of these will be Apple's iTunes Music Store."

Sounds cool, no ?

Stream video from your Mac to your TV via WiFi

Anyone using one of these? Ultimate Wireless.

Sounds cool. You can stream video and stereo audio from your Mac (or PC) to your TV wirelessly. Just need a CRT port (VGA) and a composite input on your TV.

But the design isn't as cool as my favourite MP3 streamer: Squeezebox of Slim Devices.

USD 179 / user manual / info

What is Mac OS X ?

Amit Singh's kernelthread.com publishes a milestone article on "What is Mac OS X" targeted at those members of the technical community who are not familiar with it, notably the Linux User's Group at his work.

A low level article - quite technical by moments, which complements all the higher level ones you can find on the net. A milestone.

There's a thread on Slashdot on this article.

Your 20 Macs

Wired has a paper on the 20 Macs that mattered most. Time to reflect. One generation melting into the next, you quickly forget the fun and frustrations of one generation over the next.

I've managed to keep the most significant Macs I was lucky to work on (with?), with in mind to reinstall a System 6 (or 5, or 1?) one of these days. What is your Mac ? The one which enlightened you - or infuriated you ? I believe it was the Mac II for me. It felt like a giant leap at the time. I never did had the cash to buy a Mac mid-eighties, buy my lab owned a Mac II, IIx, then a Mac IIfx.

That was the time when I really dived into the Mac, experienced frame grabbing (GENLock remember?), Object Oriented programming, ResEdit and MacBugs. Magical times, when I had the time to explore, discover and experiment - night after day after night.

ecto public beta

The new desktop blogging client ecto was released for public beta testing (expire end of January, 2004).

The current version is very stable, and offers all of Kung-Log's features and more. It is setup in a matter of seconds, and the new user interface is strait-forward for anyone who's used Kung Log or MovableType's post form.

I'm using it with MovableType and TypePad without any problem.

iLife 04 translations

You probably watched yesterday's Keynote, so I won't comment on it or the new products/ services that were announced until I start to use them. Nevertheless, I was amused to discover how badly some product tag lines can be translated into French. The PowerBook 12"/17" «Small is Big..» one was terrible in French - meaningless actually. The iLife 04 is worse: it vehicles the wrong message:

The French translation found on Apple Switzerland's website was removed and replaced by the English text earlier this morning. They must have warned that computer translated texts should be reviewed by a human being..

The translation roughly goes like «As from now on, it's for life between Microsoft Office and you»

14:46 CET Update: here's the new version that has appeared on Apple France.

«The Microsoft Office for your creative .. life»

Will 2004 be like 1984 ?

It's 20 years since the original Mac was first presented to the public (I bet you remember the commercial during the Super Bowl broadcast).

How do you think is MWSF going to celebrate that ?

Check the Apple Computer History Weblog for more information or a previous Macinlog post.

Moreover, the Mac OS epoch hit a 100 years yesterday.. (Slashdot)

Batch upload to TypePad

In my efforts to finalise my move from Movable Type to TypePad, I found an elegant solution to upload batch of files to TypePad.

One of my problems was to keep old links (URLs) alive. TypePad doesn't permit you to use .htaccess configuration files with rewrite rules or insert php scripts to redirect a request elsewhere. The solution I chose was to create alternate individual archives with the refresh meta tag in their header. In that way, the old address would be redirected to the new one automatically. The problem was uploading the files .. Macinblog isn't what I would call a very busy weblog, but there is close to 200 posts, which means 200 individual uploads through TypePad's "upload file" interface. You quickly get tired of clicking-selecting-return-backspace..

While posting an entry with ecto (former Kung-Log), I remembered that the upload file interface allowed to select and upload multiple files by drag & drop, or file open dialog.

• Select files to upload, and drop them on the upload interface,
• set the upload path,
• make sure "Apply to all" is selected,
• uncheck all settings relating to image files (eventhough ecto will ignore them),
• click upload and enjoy

It works like a charm. The Google SiteSearch box now works properly. Most of the search results returned MovableType style URLs. Now, they are all redirected to to the new TypePad ones.

Note: ecto will soon be available as a public preview version. Until then, use Kung-Log.

For those interested, here's my recipe (click images to enlarge):

1. Create a new Archive template

Login to the MovableType admin interface of your weblog, and select the template section in the left hand navigation bar, and create a new template (here named MT2TP)

The content of my template is inspired of David Ely's Redirecting MovableType permalinks to TypePad. Amend the following to reflect the settings of your MT installation.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>
<title>Macinblog redirecting to TypePad</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2; url=http://www.macinblog.com/<$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1" trim_to="15"$>.html" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
</head>
<body>
<p>
Slight address change. New address is: <a href="http://www.macinblog.com/<$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1" trim_to="15"$>.html">http://www.macinblog.com/<$MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1" trim_to="15"$>.html</a></p>
<p>
Redirecting...
</p>
</body>
</html>

2. Configure your archive options

Switch to your weblog configuration, and select the "Archiving" option. Add an entry and select "Individual and the name of your new template (here MT2TP).

Make sure the selected radio button points to your new individual archive.

3. Rebuild your site

4. Download all the newly created individual archive files to your computer

5. Upload all the files to your TypePad weblog

Drop all the selected files on the image placeholder, uncheck all the parameters relative to image upload, make sure the "Apply to all" is checked and click upload. You're seconds away from Nirvana
;)

Important note: on the downside, you don't have any control on the eventual overwriting of a file. If the same file is uploaded twice, the second one is renamed with a trailing '_1' before the extension. Only the TypePad upload interface will let you overwrite a file.

From T to T3

Here are a few tips and hints if you need to migrate from a Palm T (or older) to the brand new Palm T3. Unfortunately this time, I ran into a number of problems I didn't encounter during previous upgrades.

First, my Backup Plus Card didn't function properly. I was unable to restore the data on the card to the handheld. Hm, scary, no? I previously relied on that solution to transfer information and applications from one handheld to another, but this time it sadly failed with fatal alerts. I'd been using the card regularly this last month due to a battery failure of my Palm T which suddenly discharged itself completely, requiring a complete restore of all apps and data. I took the habit of launching a backup 2 to 3 times a day. Then suddenly, my Web Confidential database went corrupt. I would launch the application, enter the password, and my available memory would get saturated with an ever growing web confidential file until the system would halt. Hmm. That's when I started to get the creeps. My last desktop backup dated from more than a month ago. The problems I encountered with Palm Desktop/HotSync Manager and Panther delayed the proper reinstallation of Palm Desktop 4.1 and its related backups. So, I'd already lost data. I was relying only on one single backup source - a common mistake. Don't put all your eggs in the same basket, or your bound to loose them all one day..

Since, I found on the following support article on PalmOne that shed a little light on the Expansion Card problem:

<http://www.palmone.com/us/support/downloads/64mb_backup_other.html>

Palm offers an update to correct the problem on Zire and Tungsten models (Macintosh download). I was more cautious now. The restore function of the card failing, I reverted to the standard HotSync solution. Hotsynched my Palm T, and synched my Palm T3 - sounds simple, no ? The catch here was that most of the data was saved on my Mac, but not the essential, namely the Address, Datebook and To Do list .. No matter how I did it, the synch went well, the logs were clear of errors, but Palm Desktop displayed an empty Address and Datebook. Damn. By that time I was really getting worried.

After tinkering around for 2 or 3 hours, checking iSync, looking for a way to send all my contacts by Bluetooth, etc. I finally examined the HotSync Conduit files. I discovered that the main applications had changed name between Palm OS 5 (T) and 5.2.1 (T3)

• Address Conduit becomes Contacts Conduit
• Datebook Conduit becomes Calendar Conduit
• ToDo Conduit becomes Tasks Conduit
• Memo Conduit becomes Memos Conduit

The picture got suddenly clearer. The conduit weren't working. I was trying to backup a device with the incorrect conduits. Luckily, my desktop Mac at work still had an older version of Palm Desktop 4 installed, and I quickly transfered the old conduit files to my PowerBook at home.

With the proper files installed, the HotSync functioned correctly. Switch the files, and I was ready to sync back the data onto the T3. The only other thing to check is the all the files that have accumulated in the Backup directory.

~/Documents/Palm/Users/your hotsync name/Backups/

Chances are you'll find a large number of files there. Some that will ring a bell, some other that just won't. Be conservative, and remove all unknown. Several apps brought my T3 to a halt when restoring them, including my DateBk5 DB. Once I got all my contacts, tasks and appointments back up, I reinstalled the other applications. Beware to use the same HotSync ID or most of your registered applications won't register anymore.

I thought I'd share this info with you - might come in handy. All this is surely available elsewhere online, but I'm not too accustomed with Palm forums and weblogs. Send me your pointers and comments.