NSLog();

Scorecard 2.2 is now available for download from Cynical Peak's website for both Mac and Windows! Scorecard 2.2 adds the ability to export your statistics to HTML: the index page will now automatically show a "Stats" tab with your current stats using all rounds played after your master marker date. It fixes a few little bugs as well, including sorting improperly on Windows.

Additionally, the free Scorecard add-on for iPhone and iPod Touch has been updated and approved by Apple. It's available in the App Store now. It contains a number of bug fixes.

And finally, I'm happy to say that the current version of Rivet works with iTunes 9, and a small update with some nice features for PS3 users will be made available soon.

Does anyone have any recommendations on a good office chair?

I'm primarily looking for only two things: cost and comfort. I'd like a chair that's priced in the mid-range and which is comfortable. Clients don't visit my home office, so I'm not concerned with looks at all.

The chair I have now I've had for, heck, eight years. It's a simple mostly plastic chair with a cloth back. It's getting up there in years and I'll only really be motivated to replace it if I can find a nice replacement.

Any suggestions?

Yippee! I just noticed that this bug - a bug that affected sheets and Spaces in Mac OS X - appears to be fixed in Snow Leopard.

The bug would result in your computer switching to any space in which a sheet appeared or disappeared. It most frequently annoyed me when I'd post via MarsEdit, switch to another space, and get sucked back to MarsEdit because the "Posting…" sheet had gone away.

Party on!

Since upgrading to Snow Leopard, my keyboard has been "lost" by my Mac Pro a few times. Suddenly keyboard input will simply cease to work - or at least all of the letter and number keys.

The fix I've found is to hit ctrl-eject (which still works), click "sleep" with the mouse (which continues to work), and then re-awaken the machine. My keyboard works after that.

It may not be a Snow Leopard bug, but rather a TypeIt4Me bug, which also exhibits another bug where expansions take over the clipboard. That's annoying and still isn't fixed in TypeIt4Me 4.2.

Update: Happens under 10.6.1 too. It's so infrequent I can't really disable TI4M to see if that's the problem. It's only happened four times since I installed Snow Leopard.

John Gruber thinks it stinks. Another John says "don't blame the victim."

I think John Gruber goes a bit over-board in dissing WordPress. I don't know why, but he seems to have an axe to grind with WordPress. It came off that way to me just as it came off that way to many others. In fact, I'm surprised anybody could take it differently - the bias and sneering seemed rather evident to me.

In the end, I don't really care what John thinks about my blogging platform of choice. Those who have known me for quite awhile realize I spent quite a lot of time with MovableType. Suffice to say I'm very, very happy with my move to WordPress.

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A few days ago I wrote about a MobileMe Sync issue under Snow Leopard. Ever since trying to troubleshoot that issue - knock on wood - things have been operating smoothly here.

I still have the Preference plist was NOT a dictionary stuff in my Console, but the syncs take far less time and don't kill the CPU and the disk.

What did I do? I manually checked on each of the various sync items. I reset my sync data for my preferences and wrote over the cloud's data with the data from my desktop Mac. Someone else in the comments said that they unregistered and re-registered their computer.

Normal troubleshooting stuff, really. And yet it really seems to have cleared out some of the "gunk" that perhaps had accumulated. Give it a try.

I've switched to minimizing into the application icon, but sometimes I wish the icon would badge itself with the number of minimized windows or in some way indicate that it's "holding" some of my windows. I don't feel as though I've gained much by switching, but it feels different, and sometimes a little change is good for you. It probably takes longer to switch between windows because, with Spaces, I've never been one to minimize a ton of windows anyway. I may switch back at some point…

On a related note, I really like that Exposé now works with minimized windows.

I have the first Mac Pro (September 2006 purchase date) and currently have the memory arranged as such:

A1: 1 GB
A2: 1 GB
B1: 1 GB
B2: 1 GB
A3: 512 MB
A4: 512 MB
B3: Empty
B4: Empty

I'll soon be receiving two 4 GB DIMMs and am trying to figure out how to install them to maximize performance. I know they should be paired, but do you still put the largest RAM first? And if so, does A3 come before B1 or vice versa? Where should I put the RAM in order to maximize potential (and yes, I realize any differences will be small)?

I was surprised to see that my computer was three years old. I think I'll keep this one for about four - doubling up my normal "every two years" schedule for a desktop model. It's still got two dual-core 3.0 GHz processors.

My list:

• Schubert-It's PDF Plugin (Running Safari in 32-bit mode ain't gonna cut it, dude.)
• AppleJack (I rarely use it, but it's nice to have.)
• Cocktail (Again, rarely use it, but nice to have.)

That's really about it. I certainly hope that all of the third-party Preference Panes I use are converted to run in 32-bit mode too, because it's really, really annoying to have to close and re-open the System Preferences every time, too.

P.S. I'm looking forward to the USB Overdrive update as well.

Since upgrading to Snow Leopard, MobileMe syncs take a really, really, really long time.

95% of the time I'd check it would be syncing the preferences. I reset my prefs, having this computer over-write the cloud for just the preferences, and Console tells me this about 10 or 12 times:

9/1/09 2:37:57 pm PreferenceSyncClient[6047] Preference plist was NOT a dictionary.
9/1/09 2:37:57 pm com.apple.syncservices.SyncServer[5781] 2009-09-01 14:37:57.729 PreferenceSyncClient[6047:903] Preference plist was NOT a dictionary.

Then it tells me this:

9/1/09 2:57:28 pm mobilemesyncclient[6046] UNLOCK /Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Schemas/ (FAILED), httpStatusCode:-1, errorType:100 (domain=DMGeneralErrorDomain, code=100), transactionState:5, txnId:6DBBA8BD-xxxx-4CEA-xxxx-94Axxxx0612D, auto-retries=0, manual-retries=0

I have no "SyncServices folder in /Library/App Support/ and I have no "Schemas" folder in ~/Library/App Support/SyncServices/.

As of now, the menu bar sync spinner has stopped spinning but the MobileMe pref pane still says I'm syncing. The spinning gadget is still right there next to "Preferences."

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Even as recently as a few days ago my wife wasn't sure what kind of car she wanted.

That's all over now - we picked up the new car today - a Subaru Forester 2.5x Limited in "Paprika Red Pearl":

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So the wife and I visit a Subaru dealer in Erie… we'll call them "Old Motors" to keep it anonymous. 😉

We wander around the parking lot looking at Foresters for 20 minutes. Finally someone comes to see us. We tell him what we'd like, and we test drive a car.

Several times he tells us "now, I could be fired for telling you this, but…" before telling us things like "you can get a hitch installed cheaper down the road at a mechanic shop instead of here." Or "you don't have to pay that environmental fee we have listed here on the sticker."

We tell him we're probably going to buy a car on Monday, and if he can write down his best price, we'll leave to consider it, and then we'll either be back on Monday or we won't.

While he checks with his sales manager we use our iPhones to look up invoice on the Forester and find the figures. He comes back and gives us a figure that's over $1800 above invoice. He tells us "I was able to take $500 off, and now you're only $400 over invoice. That's our best offer. You might be able to get that $400 off on Monday, but not if we have to locate a vehicle for you and send someone to get it." We tell him what we saw for invoice price and he tells us "oh, that must be for the manual models."

Uh huh.

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For several years I've run psync to clone my drive, each night, to a bootable backup:

/usr/local/bin/psync -d -q / /Volumes/Backup

I ran into some problems compiling psync on Intel Macs initially, but then things went well.

Now I'm having trouble building MacOSX::File on Snow Leopard. The end of the process (whether I just install or force install looks like this:

make[1]: *** [Catalog.o] Error 1
make: *** [subdirs] Error 2
  DANKOGAI/MacOSX-File-0.71.tar.gz
  /usr/bin/make -- NOT OK
Running make test
  Can't test without successful make
Running make install
  Make had returned bad status, install seems impossible
Failed during this command:
 DANKOGAI/MacOSX-File-0.71.tar.gz             : make NO

Any tips? Any ideas? Any suggestions? Perl isn't my thing, to put it politely.

P.S. Downloading and building manually also fails.

Hold down the option key:

Incidentally, this is the first time I noticed that screenshots aren't named "Picture 1" in Snow Leopard.

An update to this post about our car search. Now we're looking at the Subaru Forester.

Any Subaru Forester owners out there with comments?

Specifically, we're looking at a 2010 2.5X Limited for about $26,500. The only incentives right now are 4.9% financing (yawn), and invoice is $24,335 + $695 destination + a few options and location fees.

Second option remains the Jetta SportWagen (either SEL or TDI). It lacks AWD but supposedly it should handle okay in Erie, PA winters according to a quick web search.