Getting iPhones turned out to be pretty easy. I got to the Soho Apple store at 4:30pm, the line was about a fifth of a mile, stretching almost all the way around the block, up Greene St, across Houston and back down Mercer St. But Apple was ready, they’d cleared almost the entire line in 45 minutes. Two friends walked into the 5th Avenue store after 8 and walked out with iPhones in less than 15 minutes. The AT&T stores were slower, I walked by the line outside the AT&T store on Broadway at Astor and there were still nearly a hundred people lined up on the sidewalk. Walking home was somewhat nerve-wracking. The special iPhone bag just screamed “mug me.”

What has turned out to be difficult is getting the phone activated. I’m pressing publish on this post nearly six hours after first attempting to activate. Michelle’s iPhone somehow activated right away, and it is truely amazing — totally exceeding my hype-inflated expectations. However, counting six other friends and co-workers who got iPhones tonight, Michelle is the only one who lucked out and got hers to work, all the rest of us are still waiting on activation. One for eight. That’s beyond lousy.

At this point I’m too tired to be angry. I’m really disappointed that AT&T wasn’t more on the ball with this. I’m upset that Apple locks out all functionality prior to activation. I’m not the slightest bit surprised that Verizon probably had something to do with borking this up.

AT&T’s phone support people are somehow remaining chipper and polite despite an inevitable deluge of iPhone support requests. The last person I spoke with finally admitted that the transfer system was overwhelmed and it was going to be a while. Overall they’ve been a pleasure to talk to, even if they haven’t been able to help at all.

The question arises: Would we have been happier had we been unable to buy iPhones, rather than having iPhones which we’re unable to use. I’m leaning towards the first.

Anyone else near 14th St and First Avenue in Manhattan notice their water smelling funny? The smell is very chemical, sort of like chlorine but sharper and more caustic. It’s not an overpowering odor, the water doesn’t taste bad and isn’t discolored. The odor tends to dissipate after the water has been left to settle for a short while. None of this is normal and I can’t recall anything like this happening before.

I first noticed the smell in our building’s water around 7pm, then again around 10pm at the 14th St Y across the street.  The smell was still in our water at 11pm and also when I wrote this at midnight. I went for a walk at about 11:30pm and thought I smelled the same smell in various pockets around the neighborhood.

I called 311 and ended up filing ticket 1656381 with the New York City DEP.

The easiest way to smell the odor is to fill a glass with tap water and quickly smell it. If you’ve got the same odor, you won’t have to  get very close. The smell does fade relatively quickly. Our water filters seem to have completely removed the smell.

If you smelled this too, please leave a comment including your location.

While updating several machines to CS3, one (otherwise identical) machine would not successfully complete the Illustrator 13.0.1 update. I discovered a solution which I posted to Adobe’s forums, where plenty of other people seemed to be running into the same problem. Here’s the text since their support pages are not especially Google-friendly.

After spending way too many hours beating my head against CS3’s lethargic installer, I finally found a fix for the impossible-to-update Illustrator.

I should note that I’ve installed CS3 on a half-dozen machines, five of those installations were flawless (though deathly slow). The remaining one however, on identical hardware, was a disaster. (all were iMac G5s running OSX 10.4.10)

On this one machine, Illustrator would not update to 13.0.1. I’d already given up on Adobe Updater, so I was running the downloaded standalone Illustrator update. It failed every time at “application.sif”. In reading this thread, one line jumped out at me in the Console dump above: “File to add already exists. Need not add.”

Renaming the “application.sif” file inside the Illustrator application allowed the 13.0.1 update to finish. I didn’t delete the file until after the update finished, but I suspect that would work too.

Here’s the path to the file to rename/delete:

/Applications/Adobe Illustrator CS3/Adobe Illustrator.app/Contents/Resources/AMT/application.sif

To find that file, open the Illustrator CS3 application bundle (control-click on Illustrator CS3 and choose Show Package Contents). Open Contents. Open Resources. Open AMT and there it is. Rename or delete it and try running the update again.

Hopefully this works for more than just me.

CS3 is really an exceptionally solid release, but Adobe seems to have completely dropped the ball on the installer. It’s hard to describe exactly how slow it is when things work right, should something fail and need to be re-installed you can kiss your day goodbye. In this case, I ended up losing the night as well.

The care and testing which went into the applications is badly served by a lousy installer, something should be done about this in the next point release. CS3 should not be stuck behind this abomination for the suite’s entire 12-18 month product cycle.

So the problem I mentioned in the previous post was not exclusive to LiquidWeb or Mail.app. All the issues seem to be related to an upgrade to CPanel which addressed a critical security vulnerability.

A few days after the LiquidWeb problems I ran into similar issues with sites hosted on SwiftCo.

Both hosting companies handled this poorly. Customers should have been notified that there would be an upgrade. Both tech support departments appeared to be caught off guard by the mail problems. While it is impossible to anticipate every potential interaction from a system upgrade, some advance warning would allow for these issues to be dealt with more effectively. Letting us know something was coming would also invite feedback which would help identify problems more quickly and help the companies better prepare responses and solutions whatever comes up.

I came very close to firing hosts and moving sites over this, not knowing the cause of our problems had me assuming incompetence.

Some combination of screwy net access and a LiquidWeb mail server upgrade resulted in my Inbox duplicating all of the enclosed messages. Since I’m nowhere near inbox zero the glitch resulted in a few thousand messages to wade through. I figured I wasn’t the first to deal with this, and quickly found two scripts which id’d duplicate messages: Tim Auton’s Select Duplicates and Andreas Amann’s Mail Scripts. I ended up going with Time Auton’s script because of his description and a quick review of his code. The script finished quickly enough (running from Script Editor) and left me with all the duplicated messages selected and ready to review and delete.

The LiquidWeb mail upgrade caused another problem, my IMAP folders were now grouped inside my Inbox. The solution was to add the IMAP prefix “INBOX” to the account settings, as shown here:

And yes, I do really have that many active email accounts. Pity me.

The CalDav project Calendar Server is looking to be very, very good.

It’s an open source server supporting full read-write calendars, availability blocking, delegations, notifications, directory integration and more. I’m going to be setting up a few of these once we start migrating to Leopard.

I’m not loving the new desktop. It’s hard to believe that after all these years of publicly mocking Microsoft and Vista, Apple appears to be aping one of the ugliest and most useless features of Vista: Aero.

The transparent menu bar is a disaster. Michael Tsai agrees, calling it “insane.” Looking around the conference it’s easy to tell which machines are running Leopard, they’re the ones with the horrid acid-pastel menubars. The first corrective solution, Non-Transparent Menu Bar, was posted a few hours after the keynote. Personally, I would have called it a de-uglifier.

The interaction of windows butted up against the menubar is also sub-optimal. In all previous OS X iterations, there has been a faint grey line at the base of the bar. That prevented windows from visually grouping with the menubar. Now that the bar relies on whatever incidental color is leaching through, window title bars appear to clump up with the menubar.

About the Dock’s new glowing blue LED blob: Didn’t we learn our lesson after putting the original iMac’s into Aqua’s menus? Or Brushed Metal? Mimicking physical elements do not necessarily make for good computer interface design. This is looking dated already and it’s only been a day.

The faux-perspective Dock floor implies the bottom edge of a portal into a 3d space. The problem here is that the windows go behind the furthest edge of the Dock’s floor. That means we’re sort of looking into a box and our windows, the most important content, are psychologically far away from us, all the way down at the bottom. Nevermind that the menubar doesn’t exist in that space in any logical way. Having seen Beryl’s true 3D windows, the Finder feels flat and dated. And that oversized drop shadow is so big it’s nearly comical, except that we might have to live with it for a year or two.

Stacks. Like so much else, they demo well. Beyond that they’re really strange, especially regarding usability. I guess it will be nice to see the icon of the last-downloaded item (or newest item in a folder), even if that means I’ll always have a DMG, ZIP or unremarkable text file down there. Most of the time we’ll be hitting the Downloads stack to get to the most recent download, but here Stacks defies logic and moves that icon to the farthest position from the mouse. (this seems to be a Leopard design pattern) It seems to me that the most recent thing should be closest to the mouse. Also, and I don’t know the exact number, but beyond a certain amount of files, stacks revert to a limited grid view which shows a few dozen items. My Downloads folder is a junk collector, currently there are 225 items crufting away in there. Stacks are mostly useless for me.