Bill Napier Design

Both of the machines I work on are still PowerPCs. The newest being a G5, 2.3 GHZ which I got last year.

However, like everything else, I will need to upgrade. To what? Possibly a MacBook Pro. At least that is where I’m leaning most.

But a nagging question to me has been, “Will an Intel machine run Mac OS Classic?” After all, I really don’t want to give up my Classic apps.

Why? Because I can basically do all the stuff I do now with Adobe Photoshop 6, Quark 4.1, Illustrator 8, Adobe Dimensions 2, Flash 5, Dreamweaver UltraDev 4, Fireworks, etc.

Why haven’t I moved on? I have. Most of the apps I just listed I have upgraded to the latest version.

But my point is, that those old pieces of software took less Ram and still got the job done. That’s all that anyone really needs after all.

So when I get the MacBook Pro I can’t fire up Classic, eh?

Well, think again. Enter SheepShaver SheepShaver runs PowerPC emulation software with Mac OS 7.5.2 - 9.0.4 on Linux, Mac OS X (Universal Binary) and Windows NT.

Haven’t tried it yet but its nice to know its a possibility.

Last week, I purchased an additional Seagate ATA hard drive. I had a hard drive scare back in August which forced me to get an external Western Digital drive. Until last week, the Western Digital drive had served as a backup to my one internal drive.

But I knew I only had a matter of time before that drive failed.

When I purchased the drive I realized what I was up against. I needed not only to make sure everything was backed up to the external drive but was also copied, as is, onto the new internal drive.

During a Google search I stumbled across Carbon Copy Cloner by Mike Bombich. Carbon Copy Cloner is an excellent little piece of software which is capable of cloning Mac OS 10.1 - 10.4 systems.

It works great. Simply download the software. Select a source and a target drive after running Disk Utility to clear up any boot errors. Then, let Carbon Copy Cloner run (you must have be connected to a Fire Wire or ATA/internal drive.) Depending on the number of files you clone, it could take a while to process. However, once its complete, you have a totally bootable drive with all your applications and files ready to go. You don’t have to spend hours reinstalling Applications and resetting Preferences.

Not only should everyone with a Mac use this software, you should also make a contribution to Mike Bombich for its use. (A drop down menu indicates he’ll take as little as $5. That’s a bargin!)

Google released its patented search formula March 2005. Read about the patent here.

Today, I was reading Lorelle VanFossen’s WordPress blog specifically her article title ‘Secret Out - How Google Ranks Websites.’

It has always been known that links to and from your site increase its ranking. But one other thing that the patent revealed was that the age of those links was also important. As links grow older, they are given less importance.

The age of the domain name also matters. If you have owned, ‘www.suchandsuch.com’ for 10 years and have consistently updated your pages and links, then your ranking is higher. Much higher in fact than a domain which is only a month or so old and has thousands and thousands of links associated with it.

Another tip Lorelle offers is that blogrolls could be considered by Google to be link spam. If Google recognizes that your blog and others are simply exchanging lists of urls, then they are considered spam.

Click through rate also increases your ranking. If your content is fresh and more people have recently clicked their way through your site your rating goes up. Makes sense, huh?

Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, said that the company had seen an “unprecedented demand” for its Mac line in the fourth quarter, selling 1.61 million Macs; the most ever in a single quarter. Apple will hold about 3% of the worldwide PC market in the fourth quarter of 2006, and that number could rise to 4% by the end of 2007

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I’m posting this in the interest of helping someone else with the same problem. If you experience a problem with your Special Characters palette (where it blinks repeatedly with each window … opened or closed), you may want to try Rich’s suggestion.

I appreciate their support. My own frustration stemmed mainly from the fact that I couldn’t get it to go away immediately and that the only way it went away was resetting my Preferences back to what they were August 1.

Bare Bones Software response:

Hi Bill,

Thanks for writing in.

>By mistake I have selected, Special Characters under the Edit menu in TextWrangler, version 2.1.3.
>
>I am not registered but I’m running it a Mac OS 10.4.8, Dual 2.3 GHZ, PowerPC G5. Now, the darn thing won’t go away.
>
>Actually, I never was able to see it. It just blinks now. Regardless, of application launched. I’ve quit TextWrangler and re-started my machine and it still pops up.

I must admit to being rather confused. If I understand correctly, you chose the “Special Characters…” command from TextWrangler’s “Edit” menu, and the palette has remained on the screen since?

If that is so, I’m mystified. The Special Characters palette is a system facility; the command in TextWrangler simply asks the system to open it. Once it’s open, though, you should be able to click its close box which will make the window go away (and this has been my experience, regardless of what application is used to open it).

If the Special Characters palette itself is malfunctioning, that would not be something that’s under the control TextWrangler (or any other application, for that matter).

>I’ve tried deleting the com.barebones.textwrangler.plist under user/library/preferences. And I’ve tried deleting a similar file under the com.barebones.textwrangler.PreferenceData folder.

I would not expect that to have accomplished anything except to reset TextWrangler’s preferences to their factory defaults. It looks like the system preferences for the Special Characters palette can be found in the file “com.apple.CharPaletteServer.plist” in your own Preferences folder; so you might want to see if deleting that file makes any difference.

Rich Siegel
Bare Bones Software, Inc.

While using Bare Bones TextWrangler app, I ran into a real problem yesterday.

By mistake I selected, Special Characters under the Edit menu in TextWrangler, version 2.1.3.

I am not registered but I’m running it a Mac OS 10.4.8, Dual 2.3 GHZ, PowerPC G5. Now, the darn thing wouldn’t go away.

Actually, I never was able to see the Character Palette window. It just flashed, regardless, of application launched. I quit TextWrangler and re-started my machine and it still popped up.

I’ve tried deleting the com.barebones.textwrangler.plist under user/library/preferences. And I’ve tried deleting a similar file under the com.barebones.textwrangler.PreferenceData folder.

I sent 2 emails to Bare Bones support email address with no reply.

So, I went to my external hard drive and replaced my Preferences with a folder from August 1 and shut down for the evening. When I re-booted this morning, no more blinking Character Palette window. Cool.

But now I had a Network problem. My preferences didn’t contain the correct IP Address, Router or DNS Servers. So, then I scrambled. Without having that info handy (or being able to talk to a network administrator right away.) I did some research. I located the IP address of the other Macs in the office and determined my address. Then got connected back to the printers.

Bottom line to this story? Save your Preferences on your back up often. Also, save your Network connection as screen captures and/or prints.

Always be able to restore everything.

This morning I decided to go ahead and move from Blogger to a self hosted Word Press blog.

Why?

1) More flexibility and control over (everything.) Blogger didn’t allow me to customize my url. (Technically, I know I could customize my blog by placing it from Blogger hosting to my web host … but I could never get it to sync up. So, forget it.)

2) My site needed fresh content. Of course, everyone knows that Word Press allows you to do this easily.

3) SEO (Search Engine Optimization) A term that everyone has used Extremely often over the last couple of years. But its true, its what everyone longs for. Everyone wants their site picked up by search engines. Where do I rank? Where does my competition rank? How can I increase my ranking? etc., etc.

4) PHP and MySQL hosting is cool. My default hosting plan was Windows ASP and I didn’t touch it. Now, PHP and MySQL have become dominant forces in web development. I want this site to use ‘em.

5) Everyone else was doing it. Ok, maybe not the best reason. But I liked what I saw out there. MXNA, Adobe’s Feed Syndication Service, features hundreds (probably thousands or tens of thousands) of blogs which utilize the Word Press PHP set up. Most of the subscribers are very cool. Another goal of mine is to have my RSS feeds subscribed to MXNA.

6) The billnapierdesign.com domain allows me to post more portfolio content. Another goal of mine is to start pushing more content I have produced from my hard drive to my web host. I want to show Flash files, CSS layouts, Photoshop templates, etc. This blog will tie easily to those posts.

There are many other reasons that I won’t go into now. It is sufficient that Word Press is up, it looks cool (by default) and I can now go out there and grab some different site themes (or, of course, create my own