In a bizarre political move from the guys at CodeWeavers, they are giving away copies of their CrossOver products for today only.  Head to their website for all the details, and to register for your serial number.

 

Watch it tonight at 8/7 c on ABC.

Evernight by Claudia Gray was provided to me as part of the Amazon Vine program.

Evernight is a teen drama about a girl named Bianca.  Her parent's are teachers, and have landed jobs at an exclusive boarding school named Evernight Academy.  Most of the kids there are perfect: smart, attractive, world travelers, and very clique-ish.  Bianca doesn't fit in, until she meets Lucas.  Lucas has issues, but Bianca loves him, even over another boy he seems better in every way.

The first half of this book seems like your typical teen novel.  Trouble fitting in.  Back stabbing kids.  The works.  And then it takes a serious turn.  I liked the book after the turn, but I was a little frustrated in the secrets which were kept.  The second half of the book is full of action and intrigue, and a few smaller twists along the way.

You definitely want to think of this as a modern fantasy book.  I will watching for Stargazer (the sequel) when it comes out next year.

I read the hardcover edition.  The dust jacket was pretty normal (if you like red) but the cover itself had a wonderfully embossed Evernight title.

As mentioned before, I'm now running on my Mac as a Standard User.  Everything seems to work really well.  When you run an installer, it gives you the option to authenticate (the same dialog an admin user gets, except that the username box is blank.)  When you try to install an application using the drag and drop on /Applications method

gives you the option of authenticating.  Each time I have tried this, I have used my alternate Administrator credentials, and assumed that my Administrator user owned the app.

WRONG!

This morning Firefox wanted to update, and I let it restart.  Little to my surprise, it actually worked.  A quick look in terminal showed something very disturbing:

drwxr-xr-x   3 rlobrecht  admin   102 Sep 22 09:43 DVDSpanner.app
drwxr-xr-x   7 root       admin   238 Mar  4  2008 Darwine
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Feb  6  2008 Dashboard.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Jun  8 09:41 Dictionary.app
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       admin   102 Nov 30  2007 Drag-N-Scale.app
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       admin   102 Aug 14 15:21 Evernote.app
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       admin   102 Dec  8  2007 ExifRenamer.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Jul 10 08:30 Expose.app
drwxr-xr-x@  3 rlobrecht  admin   102 Jul 28 15:26 Firefox.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Feb  6  2008 Font Book.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Feb  6  2008 Front Row.app
drwxr-xr-x   5 root       admin   170 Mar  3  2008 Gallery Remote.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Mar  3  2008 GarageBand.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Nov 14  2007 Google Earth.app
drwxr-xr-x   3 rlobrecht  admin   102 Aug 16 15:07 HandBrake.app
drwxrwxr-x   3 root       admin   102 Feb  6  2008 Image Capture.app
drwxr-xr-x   3 root       admin   102 Apr 27 10:53 JetPhoto Studio.app
drwxr-xr-x   3 rlobrecht  admin   102 Aug 17 13:52 Librarian Pro.app

Every application I've installed using the drag and drop method is still owned by me.  This isn't better than Windows, it's just that the brokenness is a little less obvious.  Time to chown again...

This is a review of an Advance Reading Copy of Ted Bell's Tsar provided to me as part of the Amazon Vine program.

The tagline for the novel is "A Triller."  At its core, its a spy novel, with a little bit of future tech thrown in for good measure.  This book isn't deep or involved like a Clancy novel, or even as fast paced as a Vince Flynn novel.  I liked the story, and I liked the main character Alex Hawke.  The hero wins, and the bad guy gets it in the end.  That said, the end is quite disappointing, although probably necessary if Bell is to use Hawke in future novel.

My biggest complaint with this book is the detail.  There are certain sections which are well written and detailed, but other parts were barely glossed over, as though the author needed it for the story, but had no interest in writing them.

Overall this is a book which was ok to spend time with, but easily let me put it down, and I really had little desire to finish.

Things are starting to resemble normalcy for us.  Email and blog are back up.  If you sent us important emails, we may not have gotten them, so please resend.

Like all good geeks, I installed Google Chrome the other day.  I like the idea of Chrome (i.e. another major browser to encourage innovation) and I also like some of the major features they have announced.  Having one tab which crashes not take down the browser is a good thing.

Even though the UI is sleek, I find the color scheme to look bizarre with my dark theme.  Maybe we'll be able to modify it with some javascript or css.

I created an application shortcut for Google Reader, just to see what it would do.  It's very interesting.  Basically, it gets its own window, without a tab bar, location bar, or menu bar.  The menu is completely embedded in the control box (the little icon at the top left of the window.)  In this mode, that icon, and the icon in the windows task bar are both the Google Reader icon.  Nice touches.  It does have interesting behavior when clicking links.  These launch a new browser window, but as Carl points out, those tabs live inside the same process as Google Reader.  Any links followed from that tab (in a new tab, window, or incognito window) all live in the same process.  Even if you manually navigate in those tabs, by typing in a URL, they still live in the same process.  This is definitely not what I was expecting.

One other thing I found to be very bizarre is the install location.  Just like Live Mesh, Chrome installed inside my user profile.  I installed it on my work dev machine where I have local Admin privs. so its not a huge deal, but I find the choice to be very strange.

I will continue to play with it, but there are a few things obviously missing which will keep it from being my default browser: Delicious, Ad Block Plus, spell checker, etc.

Even though it has been out for a while, I just attempted to use the Amazon Universal Wish List feature.  This is really cool.  It found the product image, and grabbed the Web Page title.  I was given the opportunity to change the item title, price, and add a comment.  When viewing my wishlist, it sits right along side everything else, with only slight differences.  Great job Amazon.

Trey's in heaven today, Cartoon Network is running a Pokemon marathon.  During just about every commercial break, they are pimping their Clone Wars series starting October 3rd.  They've got a site up, but all it has right now is a flash game.

I figured out that if I import the iPhoto library on the CD into my own iPhoto library, I can then drag the images into the filesystem.  This isn't exactly perfect, but does seem to solve the problem I was having.

My step-son gave me a bunch of pictures on CD, which had been burned by iPhoto.  This created actual iPhoto Libraries, but not being an iPhoto user, I couldn't figure out how to get the photos out of iPhoto, and into my filesystem.  That's fine, the iPhoto library is actually in the file system, and all the files were right there, I should just be able to copy them.  The format is a bit interesting:

--Data (contains the thumbnails as jpgs)
--Modified (contain some of the images, which had been altered)
--Originals (contain all the images)

Under Modified and Originals, there was a 2008 subfolder, and then Roll x folder's under that.  I decided the easiest thing to do would be to copy the contents of the Originals folder, and then lay the Modified folder over that.  Should work fine.  I first copied the three Roll x folders from the Originals folder (and waited a few minutes, since CDs still aren't that fast.)  I then copied the two Roll x folders from the Modified folder and got this question:

I blindly clicked Replace, and went on.  A few more steps into my photo workflow, and I realized I didn't have nearly as many pictures as I expected.  After taking a more detailed look, I realized I only had the contents of the Modified folder.  After re-reading the question, I realize that it did exactly what I told it to, it replaced the entire folder with the second copy of the folder I was pasting.  The only way I could figure out how to get what I was looking for was to copy the contents of each folder individually.  A complete pain.

Anyone know a better way?