Today while I was working on my computer, I received a notice that my calendars were not able to sync. I have been using the web interface at work a lot to update my calendars and stuff. So my iCal is no longer the authoritative source of calendar information. So, I tooled around in my System Preferences: MobileMe Settings and found the place to override my iCal data.

Choose: System Preferences: MobileMe: Sync (Tab): Advanced… (Button)

Select your computer, click the Reset Sync Data… button, and you will see this:

I completed the process, and received another complaint that it was unable to complete my request.

So far I have looked around the web for a fix, to no avail. I am interested to hear it. But I am not holding my breath at this point.

We have already been compensated with 90 days of free service because of some of the shortcomings of MobileMe. So I don’t think I have room to complain, but beware of updating your information through the cloud at this point. They have not yet found the silver lining.

I thank God that things ended the way they did, and early:

In late 2003, when I went to work for the National Guard at the Kansas Headquarters (STARC/JFHQ), I was asked to build a web for them. That job whetted my appetite for web design and introduced me to standards. I had two bosses while working there: one on the traditional/M-Day side and another on the full-time side. When my M-Day boss retired to enter the private sector, he was hired to work for a group of women’s health practitioners. Since I had been building the two sites for his organization and the state medical site, he asked me to put together a site for the practice he served.

Of course, being the entrepreneur that I am [laughter here], I accepted. I did not get far into it before I realized that I might be helping to advertise abortion services. So I asked if they did. No, they are not like that was his response. Which I am inclined to believe. So, I got back to work. Then it occurred to me that I had learned some time ago that there are normal birth controls pills that cause conceived eggs to be unable to implant on the wall of the uterus, they are referred to in some cases as abortifacients. I did not bother to ask, because there is debate on that. I politely declined to continue to provide them services. He was agreeable.

This should have been a sign to me that this kind of work (under normal circumstances) is wrong for me. But I went on. Government web craft seems to be fine. It has served me well so far. They generally stay out of junk like that, well, maybe not. But certainly private enterprise has no scruples as a rule. So many places are willing to do too much for a dollar. They are willing to remain open on the Lord’s Day (nearly all businesses). They are willing to lie and do what they can get away with (Walmart). They are willing to sell idols (so many grocery stores). They sell pornography (gas stations) or leverage as much flesh as they can to sell their “intimates” (J.C.Penney). They kill innocents (certain obstetricians).

It is hard to get away from all of that. And web design is not like so many businesses, in that we don’t provide the kind of necessities that plumbers and grocers provide. We often provide marketing or advertising support. As a result, we help companies to promote their grievous sins for gain.

As time goes on, we see more and more of that even in the public sector. And I don’t know what to do about it. However, I do know this: I cannot continue to work in the private sector with my current understanding of the nature of promotion. I would love to hear your comments on the subject.

I don’t know if this is the place to open those thoughts, but further consideration would help. So, for now, I will open them up a little here, knowing that if we forget these things, we are in danger of being hearers only and not doers of the word of God. Likewise, tThe word of God is excellent, sweet as honey, pure, tried, perfect, true, living, and (with the aid of God’s Spirit) quickening. If it is that excellent, why wouldn’t we savor it? Moreover, it says in the Bible to think on things that are pure and true and praiseworthy and excellent, etc (Phil 4.8). That sounds like promotion of the Scriptures. David spent the longest psalm (which is even the longest chapter in the whole Bible) on the subject of God’s word and his love of it.

If we don’t think on these things—continually—we are in danger of forgetting them. Considering the Bible’s value, being better than life, and of greater importance than food, can we afford not to consider it carefully and above all things?

I have strangely been able to get through college with very little reading of my textbooks. I am not boasting about it. I think it is sad. But the Bible is not a college book. It is not full of men’s ideas about stuff. It is not contemporary and slanted by modern scientific notions. It is not the work of men who love the praise of men, or who have a personal agenda, but men who feared and loved God, and who spake as the Spirit led them.

Let us then consider carefully the words of life that are ours (Dt. 29.29).

A friend invited us over recently for a barbecue, some company and a fireworks display. While enjoying it, I snapped photos with my handy-dandy but slightly shabby iPhone camera. (I say shabby, because, while it is very handy, and the resolution is high, the photos it produces tend to be grainy and it lacks a flash. I know, it’s just a camera phone. I am expecting too much. But it is an Apple, and being an admitted “fanboy” I have been trained to expect a lot. If I was doing my fanboy duty, I would make some excuse for the shortcoming and think longingly on its being bettered in the next iteration. Wow! I digress and shamefully!)

I took over 500 shots that night. A couple of days later, I noticed that the shots were all giving my white thumbnails and it was acting flakily. (You get the point.) I looked around and found quite a few “fixes” for it, but they sometimes went too far, were a little laborious (though insightful), sometimes snooty, incorrect or short of an answer (but that last one from Jeffrey Zeldman was particularly funny, and especially true). Apparently, when you get to 1024 images, the camera poops out. The following instructions I hope will help you to reset the phone’s camera.

In most cases, Acham’s Razor says assume it is the simplest thing possible. In line with that, if you have not already done it, restart your phone. If that does not work, power cycle your phone (hold the home button down and while depressing the sleep/wake button, until it reboots itself, after the slider displays). If that doesn’t work, try these steps. (I cannot warrant them, you already have bigger problems if Apple cannot warrant that your digital camera will not run out of film.)

I finally found a concise, effective fix on iPhoneGuru.org. The link on the home page returned a 404 error, but the whole story (minus comments) was on the homepage at posting.

(Update: I found that the site may have changed to a different style of permalinks since initially posting the story. You should be able to find the story here.)

I hope those instructions help you like they helped me. Their instructions were simple, straightforward and quite helpful.

I have been very impressed for a long time with Safari, all the more when Safari 3 came out. The new DOM inspector in the Debug menu was very nice, and in a later release, it only got substantially better (DOM Inspector|Network Pane). And really, KHTML/Webkit is a very nice document-rendering engine.

That was then, this is now. It (in a small way) pains me to say that Firefox 3 knocks Safari’s socks off. This is problematic for me, because it proves that I am the fanboy that I never wanted to be. I should be happy to simply say, yeah it is vastly superior and move on, but I am pained by it. The truth is out. ACK!

Since Firefox 3 came out, I have been impressed three more times by Firefox:

• The font-rendering and over all appearance has been solidly improved.
• The awesome bar is…well…awesome.
• It no longer looks like a ported Windows application, it is solidly Mac, which is a nice

Those are certainly not the only things, but they strike me as the most important new features. It’s extensibility is also a very important feature, namely the plug-ins that I find myself (or forget that I am) using constantly or at least frequently:

• Firebug is an excellent, nimble, powerful HTML/JS/CSS debugger, and it does it all on-the-fly. It can bog page loads a bit at times, but the app itself is quite speedy.
• NoScript is an extension allows you to turn off JS for a site by default. It is also interesting to see how well implemented a site’s JS is and what features are reliant on it. It can, however, be as annoying as useful.
• Adblock Plus is another great application that blocks a lot of unsightly (or unseemly) advertisements, e.g. those depicting scantily-clad women, etc. It comes with a free subscription service that allows you to use the recommendations of others that have stumbled upon noxious content.
• Others include the Web Developer toolbar, 1Password for Mac, IETab and IE View Lite for Windows
• Another feature that is not new, though often overlooked, is the find-as-you-type text search. If you enable it in Tools>Options…>Advanced Tab>General Sub-tab>Accessibility box>“Search for text when I start typing” it will allow you to find text as you type it. Furthermore, using the apostrophe (single quote or “’”) first will look only in link text. That has been such a great productivity booster! It is not impressive to consider how useful it is until you consider the IE6/7 Crtl+F search, or a similar search.
• Greater use of non-modal dialogs that appear at top and bottom in banners or ribbons, like the password saving that you can approve after you have seen that it is was correct. NoScript also uses a banner at the bottom to notify that scripts remain unexecuted.

The only thing that I really miss of the features I expected is the lack of support for Mac’s Keychain Application. Firefox stores them in its own space.

I think one thing that Safari has always done well is a simple and inviting user interface which keeps their products from becoming bloated. Firefox has the poor distinction of often seeming bloated because we (yes, me included) often load on too many add-ons and become disgusted by how slow it becomes. That is not Firefox, it is my overburdening of it.

Safari’s lack of those features has made it increasingly unable to be the heavy-lifting browser I need in my daily work as a web developer, designer and administrator. (Of course that does not free me from my duty to test in IE 6&7, Firefox and Safari.)