Recently my youngest daughter and I finished the video game Myst IV: Revelation. One more Myst title remains (End of Ages), and we will have finished the entire Myst cycle. We just began this last title, but have stalled somewhat, and I wonder if we will ever finish our five-volume journey. We both enjoy playing games and especially enjoyed the first three in the Myst series. The fault, I’m afraid, lies with the games themselves, and I worry already that the final one has “jumped the shark”.

In an essay on my main web page some time ago, I ranted about trying to find a text editor whose native format was something I’d still be able to read in twenty years. Turns out it’s been right under my nose: it’s the humble Mac OS X TextEdit application.

Mac OS X’s “Spotlight” feature, present in Tiger, proposes to search your entire hard drive not just for filenames but for words in the content of those files, and to do it with super speed. The demos are impressive, and it works in many cases, but as a user you should understand that it is not exactly a system-level feature. Rather, it requires some kind of cooperation on the part of your content-editing applications. If the application doesn’t write “spotlight-able” files, they won’t show up.

Xcode, for those who don’t know, is the Mac OS X IDE (Integrated Development Environment). It is an application that creates other applications; the toolmaker’s tool. As a software developer myself, I use (and have written) many such toolmaking-tools, although nothing quite as ambitious and comprehensive as Xcode. As a matter of fact, in my professional life, I don’t even use an IDE like Xcode. I use the low-level pieces of which they are made, directly, which makes me increasingly something of a dinosaur.

In a previous entry I described a problem with Apple’s Backup utility that caused it to ignore most Quicken data file updates. I’m pleased to report that the current version of Backup, version 3, backs up Quicken data files correctly.

After the second of two marathon sessions this last weekend, I finished the game Darwinia by Ambrosia Software. This is one of the most unique and addictive games I’ve ever played. I’m not quite sure how to describe it. Think of Tron, Sim City, and Risk, and you still won’t quite have it.

My photo printer got stolen today. No, not physically. It’s still here, but only because of my superhuman self-control. It’s the ability to print photos that is missing. What it performs now is a kind of artistic license, taking my photos and giving them a ridiculous purple tint before printing them. This is not what it did before. There is no reason for it to do it now. I don’t care why it’s doing it. I don’t give a ragged rip. I enjoyed a capability for printing color photos, which, though no negligence or misuse of my own, is missing today. That’s theft.

This entry’s just a quick recommendation for the free VNC client “Chicken of the VNC”. When I was searching VersionTracker for a VNC client, I steered away from it because of its gonzo name, but on my friend E–’s advice, checked it out. It is in fact superior.

It’s been quite interesting to see all the different press and viewpoints about Apple’s recent move to use Intel chips. I’ve saved what I think are the most interesting links to mull over, with some of my own comments on them.

As I said in my post, “Data Violence”, I discovered recently that my backups were distressingly incomplete. One of the things I had not been backing up were my application preferences. It turns out these contained, in at least one case, some rather critical data. You might already be backing up your application preferences and figuring that I got what I deserved. But before you rush to judgment, consider: what do you think a preference is, after all?

My previous entry, “Data Violence”, mentioned that Apple’s Backup utility didn’t work for some files that mattered a lot to me. One of these was my Quicken file. (Familiar with that program?) The worst part is that Backup appears to back the file up, but it’s only backing up the peripheral data, not the all-important register data.

I’m feeling a lot happier these days about Quicken, and the company that publishes it, Intuit. I’m running version 2004 now, rather than 2002, and it’s a much more stable program. Those of you who have followed my rants on this blog about Quicken know that my only serious complaint about Quicken has been its stability. It’s much better now.

It’s only fair, given how much I ripped on Apple’s “Panther” incarnation of Mac OS X this summer, to point out that I haven’t experienced any system crashes since May 11th of this year. That’s over six months of smooth sailing.

Yes, once again, this morning as I woke my Panther-addled iMac from sleep, it presented me with Apple’s version of the Blue Screen of Death. But is it entirely Panther’s fault or is aging hardware to blame?

I’m trying, these days, to stop typing “stupid quotes”, to stop over-hyphenating, and to stop making homemade ellipses. Have I gone crazy? Or has the WORLD GONE CRAZY?!