Dead Ink Vinyl

I was given a Microsoft Access database (MDB file) containing an old mailing list. I didn’t want to fire up my long-dormant PC just to open this file, so I looked for alternatives available on OSX. A quick Google search popped up Actual Technologies, who—as luck would have it—just released a read-only Access ODBC driver for OSX. I grabbed the trial version and it worked slick as could be.

The installation was painless, but requires administrative rights. After the ODBC driver was installed, I used the ODBC Manager to configure an ODBC connection to the Access file I received. This opened the Actual Technologies configuration wizard which made the setup a snap. Once the ODBC instance was defined, I was able to open Excel 2004 and pull in the records without any difficulty. The trial edition limits the result set to three rows, but it was obvious that the product did exactly what I needed.

Here’s an interesting detour for you, though. I actually took the time to scan the license agreement and was surprised to see that the license included the copyright for an open source project to read MDB files. Well, who needs a commercial product when you can have the open source product on which it was built?! Too bad that it didn’t compile under OSX. Well, it might have compiled with enough work. The ./configure script wanted GTK libraries. I thought about it for a few minutes… How far was I will to go to avoid spending $30 bucks? But then the reason I use OSX instead of Linux is that I decided long ago that I’m willing to trade money for mortality (time); I’m willing to pay to not have to futz around making things work. I love OSX for many reasons, but the biggest is that it just works.

So Actual Technologies got my money and I got a license key to unlock the driver to return more than three rows. The product works exactly as advertised and I highly recommend it. And Actual Technologies is local to Chicagoland, so I’m helping the area technology industry. Go me!

I cautiously upgraded to MacOSX 10.4.4 the day after Steve’s keynote address at MacWorld. I can’t say that it’s much different than OSX 10.4.3 for me. No stability issues or other problems to report. Still no support for Pentax‘s RAW camera format and the linear-ized Adobe DNG format, though. For those interested, iScroll seems to work fine with 10.4.4.

I upgraded to Quicktime 7.0.4 as well. That hasn’t given me problems, but apparently it doesn’t like Flip4Mac — the Quicktime plug-in to play Windows Media formats that has just been bless by Microsoft.

I also ordered family packs of iWork and iLife to upgrade the two Mac laptops in the house. When those arrived at the end of last week, I eagerly installed them.

iPhoto ’06 seems to resolve the constant iPhoto instability I suffered. The firwst time I launched it, it upgraded my 3,000+ image photo library to its new format without incident. iPhoto ’06 is much more responsive and has not yet crashed on me. Thanks, Apple — although I don’t think I should have to pay for such a critical a bug fix. One of the new iPhoto’s much-touted features is actually turning into a curse — iPhoto scrolls too quickly now — it is very difficult to stop in the general vicinity of the photos I desired using the touch pad two-finger scrolling. Finally, photocasts — despite being poorly named — are just as easy as Steve made them look on stage. I haven’t trying opening one on a non-Mac yet, but the couple I tested with my wife were sucked right into her iPhoto like magic. I can see this being an excellent way to share photos of the kids, family vacations, etc. once the entire family is Mac-enabled.

iWeb is a very nice personal Web site generator. It is easy and fun to use — in fact, it may inspire my wife to create her own little corner of the Internet. I’m playing with it now to determine if I want to migrate my aviation blog over to iWeb. It would certainly be prettier in iWeb.

I don’t use Keynote much, so I can’t really espouse the value of Keynote 3′s upgrades in iWork. However, I’ve just taken over work on a newsletter for one of my organizations and appreciate the new Pages themes. The embedded image manipulation is nice, but otherwise Pages is pretty much the same — a simple page layout engine for the rest of us.

That’s all for now.

My wife received a new 12″ iBook for work a couple of months ago. It is a very nice computer and she simply loves it. Since I lug around a 17″ PowerBook with the same processor speed (1.33GHz), I didn’t vie for her shiny new machine too heavily.

However, I noticed that she was vertically scrolling her applications “the old fashioned way”, like have to on my PowerBook: by moving the mouse cursor to manipulate the scroll bar. I showed her how to scroll by using two fingers and she was ecstatic. A few days later that I observed that she had entirely converted to two-fingered-scrolling and that it was really working out for her.

Every once in a while, she would hand me the iBook to look at something on the screen, such as a Web site, and I would get to use the two-fingered scrolling. I started envying her that feature. It works so smoothly, so intuitively, I would find myself trying to use it when I returned to my PowerBook.

I tried gaining similar functionality using SideTrack but scrolling along the right side of the pad never clicked with me. I recalled seeing a couple of drivers for earlier iBooks and PowerBooks that mimicked the two-fingered scrolling. Performing a Google search I found iScroll2.

I’ve been using iScroll2 now for three weeks. It’s a good product and hasn’t demonstrated any undesirable side-effects on my PowerBook, which is running 10.4.3. It isn’t quite as smooth or slick as the native support in my wife’s iBook — in particular, it doesn’t alway’s “catch” when I’m using two fingers and it’s scrolling is a little jumpy when it does — but it is an adequate solution for me.