Creative Friday

Dennis O’Reilly wonders why so many people use IE, if it’s such a crappy browser:

Part of the reason may be that it’s so tightly integrated with Windows: It takes an effort to download Firefox or another alternative browser, while the little blue “e” icon is omnipresent on the desktop, start menu, quick launch toolbar, and elsewhere in Windows.

Ya think? Maybe if you understood human beings at all, you’d understand that people choose the path of least resistance. When Microsoft decided to embed Explorer into the operating system, they created an anti-competitive environment which is why they’re being watched for another 2 years. And IE is a crappy browser, no one should be using it.

After the upgrade to Leopard, I found my Mac was slow to respond to commands, the Finder was constantly crashing, and I couldn’t restart or shutdown my computer anymore. I ended up doing clean installation of Leopard thinking something went wrong during the update process. No dice. My computer was great for about an hour after getting all caught up on my updates. Then the problems started to occur. I posted this question on the Apple Support forums in hopes someone else had a similar issue. I really didn’t want to send my computer into Apple. After getting a good reply about the possibility of my RAM failing, I purchased memtest and ran it thinking that it had to be a bad RAM module. I was sure it would come back with a bad test for one or both of the modules. Nope. Then I thought one of my WD Firewire hard drives were failing. Or maybe my Firewire controller was bad. So I unplugged everything from my computer, force-restarted my computer, went into single-user mode and deleted all of my cache files from /Library and ~/Library and booted up. Still wouldn’t restart or shutdown and my Finder was as unstable as ever.

It began to occur to me that my MacBook Pro at work was experiencing similar issues. But they weren’t as extreme as the problems I was having on my iMac. I couldn’t restart or shutdown about 50% of the time but I could occasionally restart or shutdown so there weren’t any alarms going off in my head. When I started to think about what these 2 machines had in common, the only thing I could think of was Leopard. In every other way, they were different. I felt like I was running out of options.

I’m not an Apple Certified Technician or anything and I just never think to look at the Console. But for some reason I did (probably because I was really trying to get out of sending my iMac in for repairs). And I noticed this line:

FileSyncAgent[147] LOCK /.FileSync (FAILED)

I didn’t even bother with a Google search for .FileSync. I immediately knew who the culprit was after reading that line. I jumped to my System Preferences, clicked .Mac and stopped my iDisk Syncing. As soon as it was stopped, I went to the Apple Menu and selected Restart. Bingo. That was it. My computer was back to being a bad-ass.

What really irritates me about this whole story is that I didn’t check the console sooner. No, that’s just a shame since I wasted so much time. No, what really irritates me is that this is Apple’s own product. Their product which has some really great uses but is also a big, fat lemon. The .Mac suite has to be one of Apple’s biggest failures over the course of the last few years. The idea behind it is solid but the implementation just sucks. If it weren’t for the amazingly simple way to get photo gallery pages up online for my family, I wouldn’t have any use for .Mac.

I don’t know, after this whole episode I’m pretty soured on .Mac anyway. Maybe it’s time to just give up on it since I don’t think they’re ever really going to fix it.

An absolutely fascinating article about the design of the biohazard symbol

The only parameters that I set down for them to noodle through were, it had to be unique and something that would be striking enough that it would be remembered. We wanted something that was memorable but meaningless, so we could educate people as to what it means.

I certainly would have thought I was in the high 90s.

77%How Addicted to Apple Are You?

I don’t normally post twice in one day but this article on Ars was too damn good to pass up.

At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

It gives me so much satisfaction to hear that. I’m a 30-something, not a teen, but I haven’t bought a physical CD in years. I own too many DRM’d tracks from iTunes but I haven’t bought a regular iTunes track since they went to iTunes Plus. With iTunes Plus and Amazon MP3, I’m on cloud nine.