OpenOffice Calc and Base suck

I recog­nise this post is highly ironic in light of yesterday’s remarks about my not being able to use a spread­sheet in par­ody of Apple’s Mac/PC ads, but, please, let it slide.

So all I want is an enum field. Or a mul­ti­ple choice box, easy to get in Excel.

Nei­ther of these are avail­able at time of writ­ing. The term “enum” has only been men­tioned on any OO.o mail­ing lists per­tain­ing to Base nine times, ever. And it sup­pos­edly con­nects to a MySQL server. Yeah, right.

I guess it’s back to rapid pro­to­typ­ing of a web inter­face to deal with data entry, or using Excel/Access… sigh. This was meant to be the quick and easy (and open source) solution.

# by Josh on December 7th, 2006 Tags: ,
| 2 Comments »

MacPro

It’s kinda nice and all, but seri­ously, so expen­sive. I’m sure the parts are all really high qual­ity, but that I can source pretty much all upgrade options offered for half the price or less — for exam­ple, adding a mea­gre two 512MB sticks costs an obscene $AU499, whilst even the most ridicu­lous gamer-marketed RAM (you know the stuff, it’s sup­pos­edly ‘tuned’ in pairs, etc.) can be had for $135 for two 512MB sticks (OCZ brand) — is rather telling about their hor­rific markup.

And yeah, I’m sure it’s all great qual­ity and mag­i­cally never crashes and all the rest of that mar­ket­ing crap. Good for you guys. I’m gonna wan­der back over the other side of the room here and install Win­dows on my equally-powerful sys­tem for, oh, about 40% of the cost. And don’t get me started on the absurd cost of your mon­i­tors. I can pick up an equiv­a­lent Dell 30″ for $600 less than your offer­ing… and if I’m con­tent with a mea­gre 23″ then I can get a 24″ Dell for $400 less! Even the 20″ screens are $500 apart. Seri­ously, it’s com­pletely unjus­ti­fi­able and no-one in their right mind should be pre­pared to spend that much more for a brand.

Sigh.

I need to open a buy-a-new-computer account and start putting money into it. Well not really… I just need a new hard­drive and var­i­ous soft­ware licenses I guess. I think I’d miss Ubuntu too much (maybe)… I don’t even know why, nearly every­thing I can do here I can do in Win­dows (haha — does any­one else notice the beau­ti­ful inver­sion of that argu­ment? I actu­ally think I’ve been run­ning Linux for too many years now to have posted about it in any currently-stored online blog entries! Crazy) except any­thing requir­ing a ter­mi­nal. That’s almost def­i­nitely my great­est frus­tra­tion, but no mat­ter. I need soft­ware that doesn’t run in Linux and is too inten­sive to work well in vir­tu­al­ized con­di­tions. Best option for me would be to get a whole sep­a­rate com­puter, but then… well, this thing can feel flaky after being on for two weeks. Win­dows I’d prob­a­bly get that every two days or so, but at least I’d think to reboot. Here, I just kill processes and at worst logout. Ker­nel patches are the only thing tak­ing this down, basically.

Moral of the story… some­thing like don’t waste your money on a shiny new Mac.

# by Josh on August 8th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| 9 Comments »

I need a Mac

There’s some­thing won­der­ful about a plat­form where every­thing seems moron­i­cally sim­ple and there are no codecs to worry about, files that can’t be read, and processes that might-just-not-complete and eat your entire day. This isn’t more ram­pant con­sumerism… I’d trade in a rather-well-specced XP MCE box for a decent Mac soooo quickly right now. *launches some­thing heavy at com­put­ers which will cause fail­ure of exams*

# by Josh on June 3rd, 2006 Tags:
| 2 Comments »

St George Internet banking sucks

It requires Java. I can live with that, it’s a web application.

I had to call up to find out what browsers they offi­cially sup­ported, only to be told that sup­port was lim­ited to Inter­net Explorer on Win­dows, Mac (!!) and Netscape 7+ on both plat­forms. Fire­fox “hasn’t been tested”, Safari hasn’t been looked at. I’m not par­tic­u­larly keen on this, but hey, they’re a bank… we all expect them to be a bit backwards.

The appli­ca­tion sniffs for a Java Vir­tual Machine and refuses to load with­out even pro­vid­ing an error mes­sage if one isn’t detected. This wouldn’t be so bad but for the fact that it checks explic­itly and exclu­sively for the Sun vir­tual machine… so any­one who doesn’t use that plat­form for what­ever rea­son (licens­ing, eth­i­cal, platform) — even if they have another fully com­pat­i­ble vir­tual machine — can’t get access.

My solu­tion? Dis­able Java (not JavaScript) alto­gether using the Web Developer’s tool­bar, then sign in (it doesn’t choke!), wait til you get to the main applet pane, re-enable Java, and press F5. Magic, it works.

There is absolutely no rea­son or excuse for this behav­iour. If this fits into some per­verted notion of secu­rity, I’m not com­fort­able hav­ing my money there. If it’s the prod­uct of an incom­pe­tent web team… well… they’re an incom­pe­tent web team. Grr.

I called up and asked why it wasn’t work­ing, then explic­itly asked for a report to be for­warded to the web team. Please lots of peo­ple do this (heh, you don’t even need to be with St George… they didn’t ask me for a name or account num­ber dur­ing the phone call!)… this ser­vice is unnec­ces­sar­ily stu­pid at present!

On a plus side, their phone ser­vice is good fun. I couldn’t find a sup­port num­ber quickly, so I called the drag­ondi­rect num­ber pro­vided on a let­ter (1300 30 10 20) and when none of the options matched “sup­port”, I just ham­mered “9” repeat­edly. Works on a lot of PBX sys­tems, and it worked there… I got through to a human within 30 sec­onds, who then put me straight into the queue for web sup­port. Good stuff.

# by Josh on February 15th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 5 Comments »

eBay piracy

I’m vaguely hunt­ing for a lap­top. Well, okay, a lit­tle more than vaguely – but as they’re reput­edly one of the more-commonly-fraudulent items listed on eBay, use of that ser­vice as a pur­chas­ing vehi­cle is less than certain.

Soft­ware piracy also fea­tures… but, of course, there seems to be lit­tle that can be done to actu­ally report this (if eBay have a “Report vio­la­tion” link, it’s ade­quately hid­den from me). Observe this ques­tion from ear­lier today on an iBook with OS 10.4.4 and Pho­to­shop, Illus­tra­tor and Inde­sign, and MS Office for Mac included:

Me: Does this come with orig­i­nal CDs + licenses for OS 10.4, MS Office for Mac and Adobe soft­ware?
Seller: No.

(Yeah, that was full­text of the ques­tion + answer!)

And on another list­ing (I didn’t ask the ques­tion on this one!) adver­tised as includ­ing iLife 06, MS Office 2004 and Adobe CS2:

Q: Are you sell­ing the soft­ware disks too?
A: No. I’ve installed the soft­ware, and all the apps work, but I’m only going to be send­ing the lap­top and its power cable. Thanks.

Sigh.

(p.s. though it may appear this way from this post, I’m not con­vinced I want a Mac lap­top any­more. In fact, I’d prob­a­bly pre­fer a PC because they’re lighter + cheaper than their Apple counterparts)

# by Josh on February 10th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| 4 Comments »

IE7 Beta 2

For:

  • Font ren­der­ing. This is how ClearType should have worked years ago.
  • Improved stan­dards com­pli­ance. The Sun­rise Fam­ily site (live) now works with IE7 near-perfectly (i.e. no more or less bro­ken than most other browsers. On par with Fire­fox, worse than Opera and Safari.) Happy happy happy!
  • Zoom. Note this is SEPARATE to font siz­ing. But it’s still a lit­tle broken.
  • Home­page tab group isn’t an exten­sion or extra soft­ware that needs to be added. When­ever you add a home­page, IE prompts you if you want to make this your ACTUAL home­page or add it to the open­ing group of tabs. Play­ing catch-up, sure, but a good fea­ture nonetheless

Against:

  • Font ren­der­ing. It’d be great if it could intel­li­gently antialias only san-serif fonts, and not process fixed-width or ser­ifed fonts, which it invari­ably makes “fuzzy” rather than clearer. Also, font ren­der­ing seems to be smaller by default, which is both a good thing — it’ll force design­ers to make their base font sizes big­ger — and a bad thing — in that, obvi­ously, those design­ers that don’t con­form will be sub­ject­ing users to painfully small text :-(
  • Inter­face. Kudos for think­ing out­side the square, or what­ever, but I reckon peo­ple are going to strug­gle get­ting used to this. I know I will, but that’s prob­a­bly because I switch between at least five dif­fer­ent browsers daily and expect them to all behave about the same. I get con­fused when going between Mac and PC, mostly, because the key­board short­cut bind­ings change from Apple/Start — I’m using a KVM — and con­trol + [key] change, so Inter­net Explorer mov­ing any­thing around is bad for me, unless every­one else fol­lows suit.
  • Bro­ken zoom resizes images + ele­ments in HTML fine, but on one of my sites strug­gles resiz­ing the back­ground on the body (or maybe html?) ele­ment. Also, it doesn’t keep (all) cen­tered sites cen­tered once you zoom. This will obvi­ously have to be fixed for the final release, too. I searched their news­group and couldn’t find any­thing so I posted some­thing about it quickly. Vote for it, please :-)
# by Josh on February 1st, 2006 Tags: , , , ,
| 1 Comment »

Predictable inadequacy

The won­der­ful thing about IE/Win is you always know where you stand. Its foibles are com­pre­hen­si­bly doc­u­mented, and fixes for many issues are avail­able to those who seek them. Fire­fox 1.0.x Mac, how­ever, is any­thing but thor­oughly doc­u­mented. My lat­est gripe? Floats, of all things. You’d think we’d have them sorted and worked out prop­erly by now, but appar­ently not. Opera, IE, Safari and Fire­fox Win (and Fire­fox Mac/1.5.x) all behave per­fectly, but Fire­fox Mac decides it’s not inter­ested. Unless, of course, I mod­ify the prop­er­ties using the DOM and then set back to what­ever it had been… in which case it dis­plays as expected. Clearly, it’s a ren­der bug rather than an out­right mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the specs, but annoy­ing nonethe­less. Not in the least because there is very lit­tle infor­ma­tion about it avail­able. Grr.

# by Josh on January 25th, 2006 Tags: ,
| 1 Comment »
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