Greg In The Desert

One Project Closer is giving away $100 Home Depot gift certificate. To enter you can use one of the following methods:

• 1 entries: Leave a comment.
• 10 entries: Subscribe via e-mail.
• 50 Entries: Blog about the Giveaway.

Please, go over and leave a comment to get your one entry, but please to not create a blog post. I would like to keep my 50 entry advantage.

Actually One Project Closer is a great site. Their radiant floor heating installation was a great resource for my own master bathroom radiant floor installation.

Check out this picture of the President’s land line phone from the White House’s blog entry “A Call With Senator Specter“. That’s a lot of buttons. I can barely operate the land line phone I have at work, I wonder if this is any easier.

The Fish Bowl blog has a entry about David Watanabe’s production activation issue with the Newsfire RSS reader. After reinstalling MacOS X on his MacBook, product activation said his email address was no longer valid and Watanabe suggested it was used for piracy.

Sounds familiar. In Febuary I reinstalled MacOS and tried to reactivate Acquisition (also made by Dave Watanabe), and I got the same kind of message. I could not activate the product with my email. I emailed Dave and he asked for my paypal trasaction ID. He then came back with this response.

Your license has been pretty clearly used by software pirates. David.

It’s Not clear to me! I purchased Acquisition in 2003, only ever used it on two computers and I never shared my email with anyone. I replied and said this isn’t possible and must be a mistake, but I didn’t get any more responses from Dave. A little research (various comments at MacUpdate) indicates that I’m not the only one that has had the activation problem with Acquisition.

Clearly, legitimate users are getting lost in the noise of piracy. Dave’s product activation scheme is flawed. People interested in pirating his software only need a email address to activate a item. It doesn’t take nearly as much effort to target users who have said they use his software, or just guess vs. issuing a serial number. Instead Dave chooses to insult his customers by calling them pirates.

Update 18 April 2007: Look at Dave Watanabe has a blog entry yesterday and attempts to justify his activation scheme.

simple cooperation and open dialog are usually enough to fix those situations… Are anti-piracy mechanisms bad for the user? Of course not. The honest user should never have an issue and the dishonest users are kept from ruining a project.

Bullhockey on both of those points. I am a honest user and Dave wasn’t willing to talk to me.

Here’s a handy little application that has popped up called Agitprop. If your using iBlog and are ready to move to some more advanced blogging software or just tired of iBlog’s limitations, now there’s an easy way to convert your entries.

Agitprop is a Mac OS X application for liberating your blog entries from Lifli Software?s iBlog application. iBlog (1.4.x and earlier) does not readily provide any form of export functionality that preserves all of your blog entry information, such as category, posting date, etc. Agitprop was written for the express purpose of migrating all of your blog entry information to the MovableType import file format so it can then be imported into MovableType, Wordpress, etc. Additionally, Agitprop supports the Growl global notification system for Mac OS X, should you have it installed.

I’m not ready convert myself, just yet. It’s impressive that Agitprop perseveres all the entry details like posting date, categories, etc (something iBlog itself seems to have problems with). You will need to have your server URL set up with an idea of the URL for all your graphics since it will extract them and regenerate URLs to them.

I exported my 500+ entries in less than a minute. It’s good to have options.

Update: Agitprop is no longer available on the authors website. I did not make a copy for myself but if anyone comes across one please include a link in the comments.