I do most of my presentation slides in pure XML, but I also do a few more high-level/less-code talks in PowerPoint. Sometimes I need to give the same presentation to different audiences or at different lengths. In XML it’s easy to “comment out” individual slides or whole sections to reduce a presentation to size. Is there any plausible way to do this in PowerPoint?
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My search for a reliable, fast, correct, usable program to synchronize my G5 with my TiBook over Ethernet continues. It had been almost a year since I last evaluated and rejected Decimus Synk, but it had been through several minor versions since then. I figured it was time to give it another try, and see if Decimus had fixed the bug syncing large (> 2.1 GB) files that had led me to reject it last year.
I synced up the TiBook before I left for Norway and all went well, after I finally excluded enough data to allow the desktop content to fit on the laptop. However when I came home and ran the sync in the other direction, Synk hung on my Thunderbird Inbox. Seems I hadn’t cleaned it out enough in Norway and it had grown from just about 2.0GB to 2.4GB in the week I was away. Apparently that was enough to break Synk.
When are programmers going to learn that a signed four-byte int (or even an unsigned four-byte int) just isn’t big enough to hold a file size any more? It hasn’t been large enough for years. Heck, I’m not sure even a long would be large enough for some applications. It’s not just e-mail Inboxes that are big but any sort of data recorded from the outside world: sound, video, scientific imagery, DVD images, backup sets and more. Large files are proliferating. We’ve got to stop ignoring them.
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Last night at the beginning of class, my TiBook couldn’t wake the screen up from sleep, though strangely the cursor was visible, and responded to the trackpad. However nothing else would. I had to force reboot with the power button.
When the computer came back up, all my preferences had reverted to their defaults. There was also a mysterious “Safe Preferences” folder in my ~/Library folder. However it only held a couple of Apple preferences. Deleting it did not restore my original prefs, and near as I can tell they weren’t saved anywhere when the TiBook reverted to defaults. Naturally this happened immediately before I’m leaving for a three-day trip when I still haven’t packed.
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I was reading Digital Photography: The Missing Manual this morning, and it kept talking about all these cool photo retouching features I’d never noticed. I opened up Phtooshop Elements to try them out, and they weren’t there! Then it occurred to me that perhaps it was time to upgrade my ten year old copy of Photoshop Elements 2 for Mac OS 9.
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Since JavaOne, I’ve been thinking its time to upgrade my roughly 5-year old TiBook. The wireless is having trouble connecting, and it’s really a little slow for some of the things I’m doing now. It can’t even play my Doctor Who AVIs without skipping a lot of frames. Apple had just released some new MacBooks, and I’ll need a laptop at Architecture and Design at the end of the month, so I was thinking this was a good time to buy.
Then I read this:
Back on June 20, I reported that there’d be new, slimmer MacBooks coming in October that along with being made from new materials would also feature some “speeds and feeds†updates to the internal components. Today, another “trusted source†told us this was correct and added that the iPhone’s multi-touch technology is theoretically supposed to roll out with all the new laptops, including those coming out in October. The feature will be built into the touchpads, allowing you to navigate through your notebook’s files, applications, etc. the same way you can on the iPhone. (Yes, I know you can already scroll with them, that’s nothing new. I’m talking about all the other finger gestures that can be done on the iPhone’s screen.)
Since size is really everything to me in a notebook, I think it makes sense to wait until October before upgrading. I’d hate to buy a MacBook now, and miss out on a smaller, sexier model just a few months later.
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Run , don’t walk, to http://perian.org/ and install Perian, a simple, Mac-friendly collection of open source video codecs that finally lets QuickTime play and encode many popular video formats that Apple has ignored including Divx, XviD, FLV, AVI, MS-MPEG4 v1, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v3, DivX 3.11 alpha, 3ivX, Sorenson H.263, Flash Screen Video, MKV, Truemotion VP6, and AVI.
Yes, I know there are other products out there like VLC that can play some of this stuff some of the time. This is the first one that actually works.
Definitely worth a donation.
