Site: what do I want?

The first step is to decide what kind of content that I want to publish and whether it is dynamic or static content. Naturally I continue my previous things as much as possible.


  1. Blog - the first thing is this blog. This is naturally dynamic content, which implies a Weblog Collection in Sandvox;

  2. MicroContent - my blog specific to MicroContent. I do not post much lately, but will likely continue it. This is naturally dynamic content, which implies a Weblog Collection in Sandvox;

  3. Software - where I discuss things related to Software on my platform. This is naturally dynamic content, which implies a Weblog Collection in Sandvox;

  4. Sundials - this is a collection of items related to sundials that I saw. This is not a blog and there are more ways to sort this collection. As the image is an important part, I used the Sandvox Photo Album collection;

  5. Media - is a collection of reviews of books, movies, dvd's, games, etc. I will use the Sandvox weblog collection for this;

  6. Recipes - some recipes that we made;

  7. Walks - a description of some walks. For the moment a weblog collection is Ok. It is however a much more complex type of information;

  8. Français - a started this weblog in french;

  9. Links - a list of bookmarks. I use the static Link List page in Sandvox for this;

  10. About Me - this is a static page. The Sandvox Rich Text page will do here;


So you see there are many collections, which I can turn into 'weblogs' in Expression Engine.


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Sandvox, Espresso and Expression Engine

Time for a redesign of this site. As I am not very good into creating nice sites, nor in CSS, I decided to use an existing design. However as I do want to twiddle around a bit with design, I do need a wysiwyg editor. And I must be able to integrate into my CMS, Expression Engine. So this implies three stages: visual layout selection, site structure design and logic design. In order to do this I will use Sandvox, Espresso and Expression Engine.

I will use this blog to report my experiences doing this.



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Application duds

There are several applications that I bought, but no longer use. Let’s go over them a bit.

Audiofile by Spinfree - this application could be used to create a library for your audio CD’s. It was a MacOS8-9 application. I did use it a bit at first, but with the advance of iTunes I forgot this app. It is no longer supported.

Ultimate Label Printer Pro by Digital RIver Commerce is an application to create labels for CD’s, etc. I think I used it only for a few times. It looks as if the application is taken over by Pay&Play Software. Unfortunately I do not see an upgrade path. And my old registration number no longer works.

Starry Night Backyard by Siennasoft - a very nice application to view the sky. I was a happy user, but with the demise of MacOS 9 I lost this application. It was a bit to expensive to upgrade, maybe later.

Quicktime 3 Pro by Apple. I hardly used this and never did by the new releases.

CDFinder was bought to keep track of the CD’s I burned for backups, etc. I practice however I stopped bothering to do this, it was just to much hassle. So really no need for this application anymore.

OmniOutliner by OmniGroup - an application to create todo-list, etc. Very nice. I used it some time, but nowadays I do not seem to need it anymore. Anyway, the version I have does not run under Leopard.

pmPost an application like MarsEdit to ulpad blog items to a pMachine weblog. This got obsolete with the demise of pMachine.

Enigmo 1 by Pangea - a nice game. I basically finished it.

Reckless Drivin by Jonas Echterhoff - we finished this game.

Snood - stopped playing this.

Transmit by Panic, I used this FTP application a lot. I got now ForkLift through MacHeist, so I stopped upgrading Transmit.

Retrospect - I never got this application really nicely working under MacOS9. A bit to complex for my needs. And now I no longer need it.

CopyPaste Lite by Script Software is no longer used. I moved to iClip.

SiteStudio for creating sites was no longer supported and discontinued. I moved to Sandvox.

SoundConverter - I forgot about this application. It does not seem to work anymore. Have to check it out. Anyway I do not need it very much.



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MacHeist 3 evaluation

Is it worthwhile to buy the MacHeist 3 bundle. This will only be worthwhile if there is at least one application I actually need.



So is this 39 dollar worth for me? It seems there is only one application that I will use: WireTap Studio. There is a chance I might use iSale. I will play World of Goo. Espresso might be interesting. But the rest?


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MacHeist evaluation

The newest iteration of MacHeist is in town. I did participate in the previous two version and probably will in this one. But is it my worthwhile?

So a good moment to look back and check which applications I actually started using and why I do not use the others.



So from MacHeist2, I only use Cha-Ching and AppZapper. That is not much. So I did pay what I would pay for buying this applications directly for the developers.

For the MacHeist 1 bundle, the results are even worse. But I have now a better than when I would buy TextMate directly.


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Searching for a Cha Ching replacement

Today I downloaded the latest beta for Cha Ching. And I had mixed feelings. I did not start on my PowerPC Mac. I did start on an Intel one and I was able to import my old data. However the import did miss some parts. The beta still crashes from time to time or hangs. It seems to have a scaling problem.

The new system misses the possibility to focus easily on a date range

The information within Cha Ching can not be nicely exported. It does support an export function, but that contains to few information.

The most important thing a new application must be able to do, is to import my old data from ChaChing.

CheckbookPro has a bit old fashioned interface, so I did not investigate any further.

EasyMoney is to easy.

Flowing Pennies is much to simple.

Fortera Fresh Finance - forget it. It does not even have a standard Mac interface.

iBank managed to import my csv after some fiddling. However ... crash.

iCash looks to OS9’ish. And has no csv import option.

iCompta can not import my (adapted) csv.

Money looks Ok, but I am not able to import properly. It seems that withdrawals and deposits must be in separate columns. I do not feel like changing the csv-file. I guess I could if I knew regular expressions.

Moneydance forget it. It is from the MacOS8 age.

MoneyWell looks interesting. I was able to import my data after changing the number formats in the System Preferences. I played a bit with it, but its workings were not obvious to me.

Squirrel can not handle my csv-file. However after fiddling with my csv, it did handle it well. I find the application a bit to limited for my needs though.

This list does not make me very happy, so I will stay with ChaChing for a while. I do like this app much better.



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GrandTotal thoughts

I have been using GrandTotal for a few days and reached my conclusions: it is not for me. Let me explain.

My main gripe is around the interface, it reconfigures itself to much. The meaning of each pane switches very often. There are seven views: overview, clients, invoices, catalog, estimates, layouts and help/buy.

The overview has a pane on the left, which shows Invoices (and Reminders) in various categories. What happens in the right pane however depends on the category. Thus Recent (invoices) shows images of invoices.

The Invoices category shows a right hand side that is split into three parts: a table view with all the invoices (the table columns can be changed, deleted and moved), a view with an image of the invoice and a ‘totals’ view with bars and pie chart. I do like the totals view, but why here?

The Reminders category allows the user to send reminders for invoices. The right part consists a table view with contracts and an empty view (shouldn’t here be an image of the Reminder PDF).

The Reporting category allows me to see information (not just invoices) for multiple months. Thus one can see the payments, item groups, clients and a summary. I miss the totals here. And this would eb a great place to the bars and pie charts.

The Smartlists category can be used to select invoices based on certain criteria. It has three parts: a table view with invoices, an image of the invoice and a totals section with bars and pie chart. I do like this possibility.

The Client View shows a pane on the left with clients, number of invoices and estimate, outstanding balance. The right part shows either the Client Information or two panes with either invoices or drafts/estimates for a selected client. Each pane has its own columns.

The Invoices View shows three panes. The left pane shows the invoices, the other panes depend on the tab one selects: info shows the info of the invoice and and the right pane a client selector; the Items pane allows to build the invoice with the portfolio catalog on the right; the Preview tab shows an image of the PDF and a related thumbnail on the right; The documents tab shows related documents (Reminders).

Finally the Catalog View allows the user to edit and define his portfolio. It has two panes:L the left pane shows a list with portfolio items and has the possibility to search and filter the items. The right pane shows the content of a selected item.

All in all the interface is just weird and confuses me often. I get the feeling that this application is some port. It does not have the right feel. The menu is strange, the buttons are nothing more than view switchers, it is just not right.

If you finalise an Invoice or a Reminder you have to print or email it. Why? I do not want to do that. For me that is a separate process. So now I do a Preview of the Print and stop there.

I miss the possibility to create projects for clients. One can define a project related to an invoice. We however can have multiple projects for a single client and multiple invoices for a single project. There is no way to manage this well in GrandTotal.

I like the approach to the portfolio items and groups. This application is not geared around a time-based services portfolio. A big change from many other applications.

Another main gripe is around the speed of the application. Often it hangs a bit, because it has ‘to render PDF’s’. I never have seen an application where one has to ‘render’. There is just to much rendering at many places.

I did not discuss the possibility to layout your own templates. This works pretty good, but is not great. It did work for my invoices.



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Searching an Invoicing Application

Our business is getting more complicated, so I am in need of an application to create invoices, to keep track of the items bought and the payments received.

Luckily there is a suite of applications to chose from: GrandTotal, Billings, iBiz, Invoice3, Billable, Invoicer, Involer. And probably I am missing some. So there is a good selection, but which to chose?

Involer is just to simple for me.

iBiz seems an application mainly for time-based projects. And I only have quantity based items. The offered templates do not seem very advanced. I seem to get this application working for. I however get a MacOS 9 feeling, so I moved on.

Invoice3 is mainly geared towards the sale of products with large catalogs, etc. I did not find the interface very intuitive. I had a difficult time imagining that this app could work for me.

Invoicer is a doubtful application. I did not find their website serious enough. And I do need an application that I can rely on. A very simple application. Unfortunately I was not able to get it going for me and I got stuck quickly.

Billable is a bit to simple. I especially miss the possibility to create a catalog of possible services. And I do not see an easy way to adapt the invoices.

GrandTotal seems a great application to do what I want. It has a large range of templates to chose from and you can adapt them easily. It has been adapted to other languages as well, which is important for me. I have to dive into this application a bit more to see whether I can adapt it to my workflow. And I have to work on the templates to see if I can make something nice.

Billings is at the moment my favorite application. There is a large selection of possible templates and you adapt them to suit you. I have been working to create my own invoice, which works out. It is an extremely complex system with many possibilities. The documentation is very lacking here.



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Harddisk replaced

So finally my harddisk really died. The clicking sound was indicative of this. So I bought a new harddisk (twice as large) at MacWay, which came two days later.

Replacing the harddisk in my iBook was one of the most difficult things I ever did on a computer. It turns out that there are many different designs of this iBoo. So I started with a manual, but then got stuck, because things turned out to be different.

But all in all two hours later, I could start restoring things. Again TimeMachine came to my rescue. By now the backup is a week old, but I did very few things in-between.

There are still troubles with TimeMachine, as not everything gets restored nicely:

(2)No such file or directory: httpd: could not open error log file /private/var/log/apache2/error_log.
implies that I have to create the directory apache2 by hand.

(org.postfix.master): Failed to count the number of files in "/var/spool/postfix/maildrop": No such file or directory
created directory postfix and maildrop.


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TimeMachine stupidity

After my restore from TimeMachine, I am naturally

eager to start backup again. However this turns out to be not so easy. There is a problem with TimeMachine’s algorithm.


I the console log one sees: 
20-01-09 09:26:08 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[9542] Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: harddisk 
20-01-09 09:26:08 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[9542] Node requires deep traversal:/ reason:kFSEDBEventFlagMustScanSubDirs| 
20-01-09 10:04:08 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[9542] Starting pre-backup thinning: 66.23 GB requested (including padding), 55.41 GB available

It tries to backup some 66.23 GB, where there is only 55.41 GB space. So it has to delete the oldest backup. So far so good. However when it has deleted the oldest backup and there still is no space, the whole process has to restart. And this takes a lot of time. I am now well into my second day of pruning and trying.

I guess there is room for improvement here. And why does this have to happen anyway? If things are well restored, the copy on my computer is the same as the last backup. So where do all the changes come from?


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Hard-disk troubles

A few days back my hard-disk started to make strange clicking sounds, And at the same time the computer was slowing down. So I started the Disk Utility application and verified the hard-disk. It turned out there was a problem in the Catalogue file (the error message eludes me).

I looked around internet for an easy solution. I started in single user mode and did a fsck on the hard-disk, but that did not help. So no other solution than a reinstall. Thank god I have TimeMachine.

So I started from the Leopard Install disk and did a restore from TimeMachine. Unfortunately this did not work. Should I have done a format disk before reinstalling? I do not know.

So I first installed Leopard. I guess this was not a clean install either. And then I tried to use the Migration Assistent. Unfortunately this application did not see the right backup. I backup over WiFi to a hard-disk connected to another computer. So I started Leopard again from the DVD and did a restore. This time it did see the right backup-file.

And after several hours thing are working again. Thank god for TimeMachine.


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Google’s Mac Apps

It seems I am never happy with the Mac Apps released by Google. Now Picasa is only available for Intel. That doesn’t sound like a true Cocoa app. So I am glad it did not work.



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Antivirus Software For Macs

On the support knowledge base an article appeared that advised apple users to install anti-virus software. This was picked up by many news agencies, which wanted to prove that Apple does have viruses, nah-nah-nah. I did not notice. But why did this article suddenly appear? Are there indeed viruses that one has to be afraid of? Or is this just a legal precaution?


Gizmodo tracked this bullshit news down.


Makes you wonder about journalism. They should put in some more effort in researching than stories that the average blogger like me, otherwise they do not add any value.


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MarsEdit regresssion

Update: I am not sure what the problem is, but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

Today I upgraded MarsEdit from version 2.2 to 2.2.2. When I posted a new post, I noticed that the content-field ended up empty: I lost my (long) post. As I work hard on the post my first problem was to use TimeMachine. Luckily I saved the draft from time to time. And I found a partial draft in one of the backups. It would be nice if MarsEdit supported TimeMachine. Now I had to dig in the Application Support files. But anyway I got the post partially back.

I played a bit more with MarsEdit. My only conclusion was that a regression had occurred in one of the latest updates. Reverting to an older version (thanks TimeMachine), resolved the issue.

I did use the web-interface of my weblog to set the content of the empty post. It then turned up MarsEdit, so there is no retrieving problem. It seems to be a post problem.

Next time I must be more careful with my updates. However with TimeMachine it is not a very big issue.


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TimeMachine problem

This morning I had a problem with TimeMachine. I backup my iBook over wireless to a harddisk connected to an iMac. I am doing this since I started using Leopard, about six months ago. I am now on MacOSX 10.5.3.

This morning I got the error ‘unable to get status of backup volume’. I am not the only one with this error message. Unfortunately I did not find a solution right away. I did a repair with Disk Utility on the iMac, but no errors were found.

When I connected the harddisk right away to the iBook, I did not got the error and performed a backup as usual. I did get however another error (unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume) while finishing the backup. Still investigating. I might have found the solution. And indeed it resolved the issue. I just had a backup attempt that went wrong. That is the danger when doing a backup over the network to a harddisk connected to another computer, which is not always under my control.



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