Blogger and Firefox for Mac are friends again.

For about a week, Blogger wasn't working on my Mac using my browser of choice Firefox. I found a workaround of using Safari instead, but many are the ways that Safari sucks.

I thought it might have been a problem on my end, possibly downloading some virus that screwed something up, but no diagnostic I could do solved the problem. Yesterday, everything was back to the way it was and I have no need (or desire) to use Safari again.

Blogger as a package has been ultra reliable for over four years for me, whether I was using Mac or PC, but over the past few months it has had some serious glitches lasting days on end, which I can only hope are finally solved.

I chatted with fellow blogger sfmike, who also has some experience with software development, about what the problem could be. He conjectured that it might be the quality of programming at Google is deteriorating, a loss of institutional memory involved. My guess is that some of the Internet big boys are screwing with each other, possibly intentionally and possibly not.

No one has come forward to give the exact reason for the screw ups yet, but having a huge piece of software being used by thousands of users (and millions of visitors) that is being updated regularly and has to interact with an uncounted number of interfacing browsers on various computer platforms is not possibly unstable. It is very nearly a mathematical certainty that it's unstable. It's a miracle that it has worked this well for this long.

A metaphor for the modern world, Matty Boy?

Yes, Hypothetical Question Asker, something like that.

Good news and bad about Excel for the Mac

It was back in August that I told people not to buy a Mac if they were looking for a new computer. I said this as someone who bought a Mac in 1984 when it was obviously the best personal computer in the world.

The biggest complaint I had (and still have) is the lack of functionality in a lot of software. I have since found that one of my complaints about Excel for Mac is untrue.

Sort of.

The chart above was made on a Mac. Making a scatterplot on the Mac is easy (as it should be), but I did not see how to add the line of regression, also known as the predictor line or the trendline, and to get the correlation coefficient R², which are very easy to get on the PC version of the software. I want to thank my student from Mills, Lara Barhoum, for finding out how to do this.

The thing is, it's ridiculously hard to do, and of course software designers and account managers at Microsoft are to blame for the difficulty. On the PC, once you've chosen scatterplot, there are several choices for the output and one of them gives you the picture above immediately. On the Mac, you have to control-click on a single dot in the picture and then select the Add Trendline... option and choose the two formulas.

Notice: Control-click one of the dots inside the picture, not control-click anywhere inside the picture.

It's been nearly fifteen years since I wrote software for money, so I readily admit I'm a dinosaur. Regardless of my antique status, I can still smell bad software design a mile off and this flat out sucks and there are grown-ups at Microsoft acting like spoiled children who made this suck.

I hate being a consumer and getting a sub-optimal products specifically because some huge corporations are having a pissing contest. If you are paying attention, you know this happens a lot.

A disappointing setback.

When I was a lad, we had the album pictured on the left Songs From A Village Garret, folk songs sung and played by Raphael Boguslav, recorded about the time I was born. I loved the music and listened to it often, even after I discovered rock and roll. Boguslav stayed in the music business through the 1960s, but he never was a huge success and spent the rest of his life as one of the best known calligraphers in the United States.

So anyway, fast forward several decades. Songs from this ancient album would still get stuck in my head, so I searched for it online and bought a copy on eBay. (Thanks, Meg! I'm still not voting for you and I hope the millions you spent on this disastrous campaign will taste like ashes in your mouth until the day you die. Love and Kisses!) A friend had the tech to turn a record into .mpg files, so I now have the album on my computer and can listen to it at my convenience.

So far, so good.

If you go on The You Tubes, you can find a video about Boguslav's calligraphy, but none of his music. After I bought the album, I had a short e-mail correspondence with the artist, who was a very gracious person. He died earlier this year, and I thought that there should be some record of his music in the most important music library of today, The You Tubes.

I wanted to make an iMovie of his version of the traditional American folk song Buffalo Skinners, but iMovie doesn't like .mpg files, it only wants .mp4 files. This means I was able to make videos of Burl Ives and my own music, but trying to share Ray Boguslav's music with the world is so far no go.

If anybody knows an easy workaround, I'd be glad to entertain any suggestions.