One of the relatives I saw over Thanksgiving is an attorney. He was telling me all the ways I could leverage the internet to promote the church I serve. Most of it was what you’d expect (“start a blog”, “post your sermons as podcasts”) but the surprising one was this pitch he gave me for a Fujitsu ScanSnap. He basically shuffles paper for a living and the ScanSnap is one reason he can rack up so many billable hours.

The ScanSnap (Mac people like me would want the -M version, e.g., the S510M) is designed for unloading all the papers that clutter your life. It scans two sides at a time, 18 pages a minute, producing PDFs of the result. It includes a full version of Adobe Acrobat (though I’m not sure why; surely Fujitsu could have licensed Ghostscript if all they needed was software to pack up a JPEG into a PDF) and Optical-Character Recognition software from ABBYY. The only downside (check the positive reviews on Amazon) is the price. But still…

I’d heard this before from the usual sources, but now I’ve heard it from a flesh-and-blood paper-pusher. Huh!

I’ve moved from one hosting service to another. [Basically, the reason was that we were moving hosts at church (a month or two back) and I didn’t want to have to cope with two wildly different administrative interfaces. So…] I’ve been migrating all my stuff from host A to host B. What a pain. I don’t look forward ever to doing that again. But the blog was the hard part, and it’s apparently migrated successfully now. (This post is the acid test.) After that I have to migrate a mailing list and then bob’s your uncle.

I’ve decided I hate Omni-Outliner. It’s a shame, since it’s the best outliner for the Mac that I’ve yet found. But they give me no choice. I just can’t stand it any more. Here are some things I dislike about it:

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If Amazon didn’t make it so hard to recommend buying a book from them, I’d post a link to Practical Ruby for System Administration. I purchased a copy a couple of weeks ago, and just finished reading it. You can find a sample chapter at the publisher’s site.
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The Mac fanboys have been chuckling about the icon Leopard uses to represent a “generic PC.” (I missed this in June; I first saw it on D?F a couple of days ago, but John Siracusa also found room to mention it in his comprehensive review (scroll down).) This is roughly what it looks like:

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In response to reports that some Mac users are apparently getting “blue screens” in the course of upgrading to Leopard, John Gruber leaps to Apple’s defense:

The most common route is Logitech Control Center, the mouse “driver” software from Logitech. “Driver” in quotes because it’s utterly absurd and completely irresponsible for Logitech to base their mouse software on a completely and utterly unsupported-by-Apple system software modification.

Well, he’s right, of course.

But on the other hand, for a hardware company to buy and use off-the-shelf software, instead of writing their own, borders on genius. Hardware companies — if I may paint with a broad brush — tend to think of drivers and related software as an afterthought. When the electrical engineers are done sorting out the voltages and resistances with the mechanical engineers, they’re assigned the task of putting together some application-level software for end-users. The result is utterly predictable. Consider for a moment how crappy the software is that comes with a digital camera or printer. (Or — especially — a scanner.)

So the surprising thing to me isn’t that Logitech’s software does something that makes the system unstable or even brings it to a halt. To me, the surprising thing is that they got 3rd-party software developers to do that for them, instead of having some EE’s code it up in-house.