Really? This is the reality of living in the world today. While you’re not so likely to be killed by, oh I don’t know, the Bubonic Plague, you could be attacked by a terrorist. If you expect the police to catch every terror plot that some sick mind dreams up, you would live in a police state. You would lose the freedoms you hold dear and the same people clamoring for the police to do more would be the ones screaming that they have too much power. The balance between security and freedom is precarious and swings both ways. I think we (India) do a pretty good job of balancing those two ideals. The cops were there quickly and seem to be far better prepared than we give them credit for. The government has moved swiftly and clearly the lessons of the Taj have not been forgotten. I call that progress.

Any place in the world worth living in is a place worth targeting. The reason these places are worth living in is because they value an individual’s freedoms. Removing those freedoms makes the people sad and hands victory to the terrorists.

The other prevalent sentiment in everything I have read on the TwitBook (or Faceter, if you prefer) is one of helplessness. “Is there anything we can do besides post empty words on social networks?”. Yeah, you could go out and celebrate Valentine’s Day. If you genuinely want to help defeat terror and terrorism the answer is simple. Don’t get terrorized. For a terrorist to succeed, he must deliver terror. If you don’t get scared he is impotent. By being afraid we are all willing contributors to terrorism.

The likelihood of dying (especially in Pune) from a road accident is several orders of magnitude higher than getting blown up by a bomb. One could even argue that a few bus drivers have malicious intent. Yet we don’t call them terrorists, because we don’t get terrorized. The unfortunate truth is that if you’re unlucky enough to be there when this sort of thing happens, you will die. Is your need for safety greater than your need to enjoy your life?

A life you don’t live is still lost.

I have had to run OS X and Windows side by side and shuffle between them before. It is jarring when I switch from one to the other: things are in the wrong place, I keep trying to trigger Expose or get to the desktop by using Active Screen Corners, finding applications in the goddamn Start menu takes an age, I stare blankly at the Control Panel trying to figure out what the hell the icons mean (they renamed Add/Remove Programs for God’s sake), the hideous system tray stretching out to infinity chills my very soul. You get the point.

What I realized during this heavy-duty play is that much of this annoying nonsense that Windows XP humbly began and Windows Vista took to unfathomable depths was magically fixed in Windows 7. In my view the last good operating system out of Redmond, WA was Windows 2000. That is until, they switched back to actual version numbers.

Microsoft, true to form, fixed Vista by flat out copying OS X. Now, contrary to the traditional Mac fanboy’s reaction to this, I am a a firm believer in stealing everything you can get away with. After all, Apple is no stranger to this sort of “borrowing” of ideas. Remember when they ripped the still-beating heart out of Xerox PARC and sold it as Mac OS back in 1984?

So the new Taskbar in Windows 7 looks more like the Mac OS Dock than the old Taskbar. You can even rearrange the icons while the program is running ala OS X. I don’t use the Start menu any more, and even then I’ve taken to using it like I do Spotlight on the Mac. Even the system tray has monochrome icons now, I wonder which other OS uses monochrome icons in the tray? And look! moving your mouse into the bottom right corner shows the desktop just like Active Corners! You don’t quite get Expose but hovering over an application icon in the Taskbar allows you to see the windows that are open in the app. It’s a nice touch (that Snow Leopard promptly copied, by the way).

It is also stable. Sure apps crash and I’ve seen a couple of blue screens, but really I’ve seen about the same number of grey screens on my Mac. Compatibility with older apps hasn’t been much of a problem for me. Games have all worked really well. I can’t remember having downloaded any drivers other than the usual video card stuff. UAC is still a little annoying but it seems to behave itself and doesn’t constantly ask you incredibly stupid questions. In other words, Windows 7 is what Windows Vista should have been in the first place.

It is the first time since Windows 2000 that I have enjoyed using a Microsoft OS. And that boys and girls, is what a good operating system is all about. Making your computer fun to use by being easy, intuitive and responsive. I’m not giving up my Mac any time soon but at least I don’t cringe if I have to work in Windows any more.

In Snow Leopard the plain old QuickTime Player has a Share menu which lets you export any video that QuickTime can read into iTunes formats for iPod/iPhone, Apple TV and “Computer”. The shared videos are added to your media library and can then be synced with whatever device you choose.

Three easy steps:

1. Open the video you downloaded in QuickTime X
2. Click on the Share menu and select iTunes…
   
3. Choose the output format of your choice, keep in mind QuickTime will not scale your movie up, so your choices are limited based on the current resolution of the movie. You’ll find that only True HD movies (1080p+) can be exported to Computer format. Don’t worry about it, just choose the best option it gives you.
   

That’s it! Nice and easy.

For those interested in the actual output resolutions, the answer is it depends on the source resolution. By and large the iPhone/iPod size will try to constrain the width to 640 pixels. Apple TV will attempt to get close to 720p and Computer will attempt to get close to 1080p.

This is a huge piece of the puzzle that is going to allow the creation of web-based 3D games that can take advantage of hardware acceleration. So which pieces are missing? Not too many as it turns out. New implementations of JavaScript in both Firefox and Safari are very fast, making render loops and input capture entirely possible within the browser window. Video and audio have both got standards support in HTML 5. The only thing I can think of that’s missing is server initiated communication and peer to peer networking that would be necessary for real-time multiplayer games. Yeah you can poll a server making it possible to have multiplayer turn-based games or even real-time games where latency isn’t an issue. For 3D shooters and MMOs however, I would wager the networking piece is still mighty important.

Can’t wait to get my hands dirty with this stuff.

openssl pkcs12 -export -out iis.p12 -inkey apache.key -in apache.crt

Replace IIS / Apache with the appropriate filenames and you’re done. The .p12 file can be directly imported into the Certificates MMC Snap-In on Windows for use in IIS. The command works on any system that can run openssl, including Mac OS X.

I recently discovered this when, after carefully testing a site in Internet Explorers 6, 7 and 8, I committed the release to the SVN repo and published it to the staging server. A quick test showed IE8 issues that weren’t there on my local version. Turns out the problem was this default compatibility mode setting. You can turn it off by going to “Tools > Compatibility View Settings” and unchecking the “Display intranet sites in Compatibility View” option. They did this to ensure old intranets are compatible with IE8 out the box, but in the process put every web designer in the awkward position of not knowing their site is broken until they upload.

Internet Explorer 8 isn’t all that bad. It does a pretty good job of fixing the (not so) little things that drove us crazy in previous incarnations, but it’s far from perfect. In the very likely event that you need to code some IE8 specific styles I recommend using conditional comments. In this case I needed one set of modifications for IE6, 7 and compatibility mode 8 (which mostly behaves like IE7) and another for IE8 specifically. To achieve this I used the following code:

<!--[if lte IE 7]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/ie.css" /><![endif]-->
<!--[if IE 8]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/ie8.css" /><![endif]-->

It uses one stylesheet for everything less than 7 and another for IE8 specifically. Works like a charm, hopefully until IE9 comes along.

Technically it has been possible to use any font you choose through several existing techniques (plain old images or Flash/JavaScript/Canvas trickery like sIFR and Cufón). They all have limitations of varying degrees and body font choices are still limited to the usual suspects. So why is it so hard to use fonts on the web?

Copyright

The main issue is one of font copyright. Fonts are expensive. Making a font takes lot of time, dedication and talent. Font designers deserve to be paid for their incredible work. If you send the font over the internet when you visit a website it doesn’t take long to figure out what’s going to happen.

Font Delivery

The copyright issue had stopped the development of viable alternatives to Microsoft’s (ancient and proprietary) EOT format. Finally however, both Webkit and Mozilla (Safari/Chrome and Firefox) support the @font-face CSS attribute. Making it possible to create an all-browser encompassing font delivery mechanism.

Enter Typekit

The clever peeps at Typekit have managed to fix both problems in one fell swoop. By working with the type foundries directly, they have managed to gain licenses to distribute fonts over the web. They’ve also taken great pains to obfuscate the fonts they are distributing. More importantly for us lowly web designers, they’ve made this stuff ridiculously easy. Choose the fonts you want (236 options as of right now), get a snippet of JS and Bob’s your uncle. All the fonts are compatible with Firefox 3.5+, Safari 3.1+ and IE 5+ (!).

I just got my beta invite and am going to be reworking both this site and ActivElement to use my newly acquired library. Can’t wait to get my font on.

Since, we were using Cloud Sites we didn’t have SSH access to our box. Rackspace recommended we use mysqldump on another server and connect to our MySQL instance to grab the data directly over the internet. Two problems with that:

1. Moving 15GB. of data on a single connection sequentially would take forever. (We were getting only ~200Kb/sec)
2. The data would not be compressed, so we’d have to move the full 15GB.

Our solution:

1. Setup a virtual Cloud Server on Rackspace Cloud with enough space for the data.
2. Use mysqldump on this new server to connect to Cloud Sites and grab the data. Since they’re in the same server farm you get much much higher transfer rates.
3. Compress using gzip and place in a web server document directory.
4. On the Amazon server use aget to download the newly compressed gz file. We used 10 parts and got about 1800Kb/sec.
5. Unzip and execute the SQL.

This reduced the amount of time needed to manageable proportions and therefore caused a minimal service outage.

There are several obvious things that will happen here. Google is going to put it’s considerable marketing muscle behind getting Netbooks to use Chrome as the default instead of various other flavors of Linux. Microsoft is going to push these same vendors to use Windows 7 instead. Google is going to price this thing rock bottom, in all likelihood it will be a free download. Couple that with Snow Leopard’s ridiculously low upgrade price and it becomes clear that this OS cycle consumers are going to be the big winners.

I have long maintained that the only thing stopping Linux from becoming a viable desktop OS is that design (UI/UX or otherwise) doesn’t work by committee. But the community is perhaps the single most important part of the open source movement. By putting Google designers in charge of figuring out the windowing system Chrome is probably going to be the first linux flavor to be genuinely polished from a UI perspective (Even though Doug Bowman might disagree).

There is one big problem though. I can’t use it. Not as my primary OS anyway.

Google say the only way developers will build applications for it is through web technologies, taking a page out of Apple’s iPhone 1.0 marketing spiel. Given enough bandwidth you might be able to get away without access to the internals of the PC but as long as there is a need to run compiled code for applications/games like Photoshop or Fallout 3 this is not going to be my OS of choice. It will however be perfect for any number of people that just want a computer that does their email and web stuff. Throw in the occasional flash game for good luck.

Cower in fear Microsoft, this is the moment Balmer has been sweating for years (literally). Maybe Microsoft should sue Google for monopolistic tactics. After all, you can’t install a competing web browser when the OS is the web browser.

At this point I started thinking something was seriously wrong. The first thing I did was verify and repair permissions using Disk Utility. It found errors, and said it fixed them, but when I verified again the errors were still there. Not very helpful. Next I tried the much vaunted DiskWarrior. At $100 it isn’t exactly cheap but it came highly recommended. In order for DiskWarrior to scan your disk it shouldn’t be the boot drive. A bit of a problem since my MacBook Pro’s main drive was the one that failed. Using my other “Mac” (wink wink, nudge nudge) I used the nifty Target Disk mode of the MacBook Pro to mount the drive. DiskWarrior found something and said it was fixed, but I wasn’t convinced.

My paranoia was now in top gear and refused to let me rest after DiskWarrior’s all clear. I decided to buy Drive Genius 2  which offers a low level surface scan (also $100 but offers a competitive upgrade from DiskWarrior for $75). When you buy Drive Genius they give you a link to a bootable DVD image (unlike DiskWarrior that mails you the DVD, seriously Alsoft, get with the times). This DVD allows you to side-step that pesky boot disk problem. Unfortunately my MBP’s SuperDrive was on the blink. Enter my trusty 3rd generation 40 gig iPod. Using Disk Utility I restored the downloaded Drive Genius image onto the iPod and booted up my MBP using it.

Drive Genius started doing its thing and almost immediately discovered bad sectors on my hard drive. It was slow going so I decided to leave it on all night just to see how many errors found. In the morning it was still at only 9% scanned with over 100 bad sectors. Clearly this disk was breathing its last breath.

So, I have a hosed time machine disk because in moving from plugged in to my mac to plugged in to my airport, the old images were wiped off the disk in order to support backup over the air. I have a primary disk that is failing big time and probably not capable of giving me a solid backup.

Luckily for me, this is not quite as bad as it sounds. While time machine is nice and does a decent job most of the time, I don’t trust it too far. I use SuperDuper for real backups and I have had that going fine for a very long time. Push comes to shove, all my data is also backed up on Mozy in case a fire or something happens and everything in the vicinity of my computer dies.

Yesterday my Mac came back from having its drives replaced. I booted it in Target Disk mode and plugged it in to the other Mac. Opened Disk Utility, mounted my SuperDuper incremental backup and hit restore. 3 hours later everything starts up perfectly and I am back where I began. No fuss, no drama.

I love it when things work the way they are supposed to.