Since then I have moved on to Chrome as my primary browser, but I still use Firefox for the Something Awful forums extension, various HTML developer extensions, and my Ümloud! logins (preventing acidental personal posts). I also started using 1Password (a future post!) for better security across all my browsers. The key component to my Firefox use are the extensions (also known as Add-ons).

When Firefox first rolled out extensions, the API asked developers to limit what version the extension would work for. An extension for Firefox 3 wouldn’t work on 4. This forced developers to test the new browser and for users to update when needed. That way extensions wouldn’t soft-fail on users, causing them to think the browser is broken when the fault was the extension. This process was fine when major Firefox releases were around a year or more.

Recently Firefox started going on a version number release schedule similar to Chrome: Release early and very often. Major version number updates occur in a span of months or weeks. This is fine, but flies against extensions. An extension that got updated for the shipping version won’t work on a beta. The updating messages aren’t removable; just “ask later”. Now I have to pick between seeing update messages every time I launch, or break extension support.

So we need two things to happen here:

• Make a third “wait till it’s released, not beta” option.
• Extensions move away from version numbers and more to capability testing.

While the “not beta” option should be there in any case, we’re starting to see a change that the old versioning system isn’t paired with the change of development schedule. Without knowing too much about the extension system, I can’t help but think of the disastrous history of using User Agent strings to assume capabilities. The better approach is using something like Modernizr¹ which tests what a browser can do, rather than the name/version of a browser. That way when a browser with a different name, but capable of the require actions, can still work. Past, present, and future.

Sadly, I can’t wait for these things to happen. Which sadly means on my Mac, I’ll be using Safari as my Ümloud! browser and only venturing into Firefox when I absolutely need to use an extension, assuming it still works…

¹ Shout out to Faruk Ateş!

For the past few weeks, I’ve noticed my trackpad was super sensitive to clicks. I haven’t notied it that much, but the bulk of my laptop use in the past three months is via Synergy and not using the trackpad. Now that Puzzle Agent 2 shipped, I’m back to working at my coffee shops. Today the clicking got so horrible I couldn’t do anything and had to shut down the computer.

Flipping it over to the back, the hood was bent out of shape a bit. I noticed this before, but I thought it was just use. Popping the hood, I remove the battery and see what’s under it. Didn’t see anything out of place, so I thought I’d see if there’s something wrong with the lid. Putting the lid back but without the battery, the lid clicked in place normally.

Looking at the battery, the “bottom” side which should be flat was bowing out:

Keeping the battery out, I started my computer up again and things were working fine. Who knows what would have happened if I didn’t look at that sooner…

No more battery power, but I can click again! The Internet says it’s covered by Apple Care, which I have till Nov. Figuring out when I can make an Apple Store appointment.

My music collection is roughly 22GB of music I’ve purchased in the past 15+ years; Moving to digital when it was easy to buy digital. I wasn’t much of a file sharing person in the days since I just didn’t have the time. Course with that large of a library, I’ve had to make some choices between all the devices I use for music play. While it’s changed over the years due to technology, my current layout works for me.

Central storage of music is important for me as it helps to keep things consistent between the devices, unless the device can’t store that amount. I also concerned about backups of this music data. While I still own physical CDs, the digital purchases can’t be re-download (except new Amazon.com purchases). So here’s my system I’ve established for myself. I’ll explain it in a typical workflow.

Obtaining Music

The only time I buy physical CDs is when they are signed by the artist or some preorder bonus is included. The rest is all digital. I do this for a number of reasons. Physical items are expensive to everyone in comparison to the delivery of bits. For me, physical media that doesn’t have a more meaning for me is largely wasteful. (I’m proud of buying MC Frontalot CDs from the man himself.) There are exceptions for when an artist is selling directly on their own service. Otherwise I prefer Amazon, followed by iTunes. I will admit that the Amazon cloud service makes that buy more attractive, but I’ll get to that later.

Where ever the source, the first place music goes is my MacBook Pro’s iTunes. This makes my laptop the most up to date storage of music. It’s my primary listening device by far, but I still have other places to play my music.

Home Storage

When I get home, I’ll do one manual copy from my MacBook Pro to my Windows 7 iTunes. While this is a manual step I haven’t been able to automate completely, I have added some things into that step that add a lot more bang for my buck.

My Windows 7 Music folder (which is essentially my iTunes music folder) is actually a network disk provided by my Network Area Storage (NAS) device, a Synology Disk Station 207+. This step alone enables the music to do the following:

• Interface music though iTunes GUI.
• Broadcast my music via the NAS’ iTunes Server (without my Win7 box turned on).
• Broadcast my music via DLNA.
• Stream music to my iPhone via DS Audio.
• Stream music to a web browser player.

While I admit I don’t use most of the other functions as much, there are times when I use the PS3 to play music and keep my computers closed down. It’s also great for guests staying at my place and have the music available to them. I confess I don’t use the DS Audio app much, but the places I want to listen to music with a solid 3G or WAN connection are times when I have my laptop.

Playing Music

My portable Mac is the main place of music, followed by my iPhone. I work a lot with my laptop and there’s no need to stream when I have my devices with me.

On my iPhone, I don’t do the streaming as much. The times I’m without my laptop and play music are usually the dead zones of cell service. Which means I’m listening to podcasts, of which iTunes is still the best solution for. There are times where I’ll plug in my iPhone directly to my AV receiver to listen to podcasts and don’t want to turn on my Windows box.

At home, I mainly use my Windows box for music listening, which is connected to my receiver. I have the flexibility to move to either my PS3 or Xbox360 and access the same music. Usually it’s the PS3 as the interface is better than the Xbox.

My car however is in the past. It’s a Ford Focus 2007 I got when I moved to the bay area. My father and I knew that in six months the Focus would include the Ford Sync system. This allows my iPhone to play though the car. Sadly I couldn’t wait that long for a car and settled for the 6CD changer. Thankfully it will read MP3 CDs so I can store more music than a Red Book CD. Slowly I’m moving to MP3 CDs of music I’d like in the car. I tried the FM transmitter thing, but it’s not the best with a phone physically connected. Once it’s available, I do plan on getting the BlueTrip DualConnect which should solve my iPhone as music player issues.

Long-Term Backups

While this adds a level of backup to my media files, it’s not the Final Solution™ for backups. For this I use another feature on the Synology and backup to an Amazon S3 Bucket; All automated on a weekly process.

S3 is a network storage service that’s more advanced than a service like Dropbox and much cheaper depending on your volume. You’re charged for the storage you keep and the bandwidth you use. The rates can very depending on what location you want the data stored, but for anyone in North America, US East (Virgina) is fine. My bill for last month was $1 to store the 22GB. Once my music is on my NAS, everything else falls into place.

Enter the new thing: Amazon Cloud Drive & Player. This service does what my NAS already does – A steaming music player and cloud storage of music. For me it’s reduced features to what I’m used to with my NAS. Not to mention extra manual steps to make it all work. The only benefit is redundancy from failures of my local devices. But that’s what my S3 bucket is for. My current plan is also much cheaper than Cloud Drive. I’d have to pay $4.25/month to upload my existing music manually at the 50GB tier.

Cloud Drive does allow you to redownload Amazon music purchases without counting against drive quota. Makes sense as Amazon simply links to the existing music download server and storage and fully recommend people do this. You can always download your music off the drive at a later date. The alterative is a one-time download so you’d be silly not to use Cloud Drive. The big bummer is I can’t re-associate my music I payed for on Amazon to the drive without Quota. They still have purchase history and could in theory. I suspect it’s a licence issue, but who knows.

But is this for you?

My system setup is this way as I know what I’m doing and don’t want to worry about it as much. While I’m not trying to sound like a product placement for the Synology, it’s a system that does a lot of things that are helpful and just plain work. I also use the device for a bunch of other things like Time Capsule and other features. The device is pricy in comparison to other NAS systems (current model at $300 without disks). Unless you’re doing security camera stuff, there’s no other costs besides the drives. All the iOS apps are free. I’d recomend a Dynamic DNS name service like DynDNS so you can always phone home, which is free. You’ll also need to poke holes for ports on your router.

With services like Cloud Drive and what ever rumored and future services from Apple, Google, and et all, there’s a simplicity that doesn’t require a hardware purchase like a NAS. We’ll see what these services offer, but I feel my current setup will end up being cheaper as I’m rolling my own services. So long as I don’t make the downloading of my library public, I don’t need to strike licensing deals to do it either.

Synergy is a software KVM switch (Keyboard-Video-Mouse) but without the video. Instead, it allows you to work on one computer, move the mouse to one side of the screen, and start working on the computer next to it. All of which connected by the local network to control mouse and keyboard.

It doesn’t matter what OS the computers are using. Once they’re set up with Synergy, you use one keyboard and mouse to run as many computers as you wish. Have one computer with more than one screen? Synergy adjusts flawlessly. Even more amazing is that text-only copy and paste works across the computers!

The bugger is getting the system set up. Right now the project is recovering from a bit of neglect as well as a lack of user-centered focus on design. As you’ll read on, we’re now at a point where the setbacks are worked on. I invite you to use Synergy now as it’s stable. Just a bit curious to set up with Windows as the “server” (the computer with the physical keyboard & mouse).

As wonderful this software is, the development story was questionable in the late 2000′s. The maintainer for the original project at Synergy.sf.net went AWOL. New operating systems, namely Windows Vista & 7, required maintenance on the software. There were a few groups trying to make the software work, but a project named Synergy++ came out on top as the successor to the project providing a good chunk of maintenance to the Synergy code. Eventually the project moved to it’s new home, Synergy-FOSS. In the past few days they released the first release under FOSS, brining Synergy back to awesome status.

They’re far from done however. The biggest problem Synergy has for usability is a huge interface problem. As it stands, Synergy’s configuration of screens depends on either hand-editing a text file, or a GUI interface that didn’t take human beings into account.

“0 to 100% of the ‘left’ of ‘Screen A’ goes to 0 to 100% of ‘Screen B’” is the language you needed to figure out for arranging screens. Meaning you have to set up the reverse of what you intended to configure. When I set up a server on a Windows box, I have to draw out the screens on a sheet of paper to get it working. It’s a nightmare as someone who’s done it before and almost impossible for someone who hasn’t.

A while ago someone developed a Mac GUI to Synergy called SynergyKM. It uses the Synergy binaries but wrapped in a GUI and other tie-ins to make it work as a native Mac application. This includes a menu bar allowing you to switch profiles and turn it on and off. This is a boon to me when I have a home and office configuration. Most importantly, the server configuration is easy once you know the machine names of your computers.

Put the computer screen where you want it to be and hit “Apply Now”. Done. While the screens are all iMacs, it’s just cosmetic as one’s a Windows box.

The bad news is that SynergyKM as a project isn’t developed anymore. The good thing is that there’s a workaround to update SynergyKM with newer Synergy binaries. I use this with the new 1.3.6 Synergy-FOSS binaries.

Synergy-FOSS is planning on a Mac GUI for 1.4.1. I can’t find screenshots or early copies of this, so I can’t comment on how that’s going. But I’m hoping they took some pages from the SynergyKM playbook, using it for the PC as well. Still, using 1.3.6 is great with a few minor but recoverable hangups.

Once the 1.4 Synergy comes out of beta, Synergy will hopefully realize a level of usability for more people to use!

The point of this post:

Windows 7 must include a fully patched DirectX installation.

Users of Windows 7 will still need to run programs in DX10 and DX9. There’s no reason why the OS should be updated to the latest of DirectX; Especially when the updates are over four years old.

Windows Update needs to include DirectX as apart of updatable software.

Of all the ‘optional’ and ‘critical’ software that Windows Update includes, updating a core API as DirectX is to Windows should be one of them. Updating DirectX is crucial for any graphics intensive program, especially Games for Windows. Why not include it, even as an ‘optional’ update?

DirectX needs real version identification

Did you know there are at least 17 versions of DirectX 9.0c and 8 versions of DirectX 10? All of which report with only on version number?

Did you also know that Vista still needs updates to DirectX9, but wasn’t included when Vista was released?

This makes it very hard to do technical support when no one can decree a realistic version number.

The Context:

For anyone who’s played games on Windows, you may be familiar with Microsoft® DirectX. DirectX is an API and acts as a bridge between software with advanced sound and visual needs and the array of devices and drivers on your computer. There are others¹ for other and operating systems and platforms, but these problems are for DirectX specifically.

Without these APIs, each software would need to program for every possible graphics and audio card in existence individually. With an API, software needs only to work with the API and drivers of devices needs only to work on the API. From there, new software or new hardware can be released and still work without massive overhaul.

For Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, the engineering team developed what I nicknamed a “Flash” shader in order to achieve the similar look of the Flash animation into 3D graphics. The graphics would work on Windows so long as the user’s Windows computer had at least DirectX 9.0c – Aug 2007 installed.

I have to include the date with this version number as Microsoft stopped incrementing version numbers, even though releases were made after 9.0c on a bi-monthly and now quarterly bases. Yet any callable version number are all listed under “9.0c” or “4.09.00.0904″, which is the primary version for Windows XP SP2, released in August 2004. Even when you update DirectX, the same version number is reported.

The problem: We needed users to have August 2007′s release or later. Upon research, I found a form of version numbering with DirectX. If you look in “C:\Windows\System32\”, you’ll see a series of files named “d2dx9_**.dll”, the ** being a range of numbers starting at 24. The ’27′ being the August 2007 DX9.

Windows XP (RTM / SP0) included DirectX 8.1. Windows XP SP2 included DirectX 9.0c. Only after SP2 did the “_**” updates start. To add more insult to injury, Windows Update doesn’t check or update DirectX. Ever. While they’ll include optional software and Office updates, DirectX gets the shaft.

My saving grace is the DirectX updaters will update all versions on all platforms of Windows in one installer. There are two flavors, one large installer for off-line updating, and one small and web-based. The web installer downloading the components needed at the time of install. I included this with the Strong Bad episodes. It’s worked out, but it adds a step in the install process by asking to do an install one doesn’t expect.

By now you may be thinking: “But Vista is on DirectX 10 and Windows 7 on DirectX 11. Certainly there isn’t an issue because it’s later version!” Oh how I wish this was true. Normally when one thinks of software version numbers, the higher number replaces the lower numbers. In the land of DirectX, the version numbers are modes that run independently of each other. While you have Vista, you still run DirectX 9 unless the software specifically requests DirectX 10. Since DirectX 10 doesn’t run in Windows XP, very few games run in 10. If they do, there’s a DX9 version along side it. Even with DX10, there’s quarterly updates. Still, this isn’t updated via Windows Update. Meanwhile, users still need to update DX9 and DX10.

Try explaining all of the above to users with Vista. “But I have DirectX10 which is more up to date than 9!” Yes you have DX10, but you don’t have the latest DX9 which you still use. The DirectX installers I mentioned above work on all platforms, which is something. However, it’s still left trying to instruct users to run the installer, which goes upstream from conventional thinking.

So in light of all of this, I tried the Windows 7 beta (using VirtualBox on my MBP). You would expect the latest released updates of DX9 and DX10 right? Wrong. What ships is the DX9.0c before the updates, and DX10 from the original Vista RTM release. Since DX11 is still in beta so there are no quarterly updates to speak of. I honestly can’t fathom why they wouldn’t roll the updates in at this point. It’s inexcusable.

¹ Other APIs like OpenGL, OpenAL, etc exist and do a great job, but require a full client-side install on Windows.