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.

There’s a new (2.3.1) version of WordPress out. It is my first WordPress update since I moved to the eMac about a month ago. I was wondering what FTP client to use: ftp, lftp, or ncftp. These are all command line apps. The first (ftp) ships with the Mac. The others, available as Macports, overcome some of its limitations.

But I decided, purely as a lark, to try out Cyberduck. And there, hidden in its File menu, is the magic word Synchronize. So instead of having to copy about 2.5 MB up to my web host, I only have to copy a few 10’s of KB. I’m not sure which few, because Cyberduck figured that out and I didn’t have to worry about it.

Excellent. It’s the next best thing to having rsync. And that’s a very good thing indeed.

My Palm Tungsten E2 died. Man. That bums me out. I don’t know what I’ll replace it with. Possibly paper and pencil.

I bought it in September 2005 because my CLIÉ died.

When I bought the E2, I needed something to put my Hebrew vocab flash-cards on. The best Biblical language flash card program is Mini-Flash. (A great company with an excellent product, outstanding support, and reduced prices! Beat that! The only downside is that the spreadsheet-to-flash-card deck converter is windows-only. But the library of downloadable flash-card decks is excellent, and just keeps getting better.)

I also needed something to keep my schedule and address book on, and never did find one. (See here.)

A big part of the problem was Apple’s, since they provided sync services that didn’t work for me. But Mark/Space’s Missing Sync partially solved that problem. (It isn’t my favorite application — very modal, you’d think it originated on Windows — but it was a workmanlike effort, and their tech support is pretty good. I never did get it to sync events and contacts correctly — not bidirectionally, at least — but it did a fine job of overwriting the data on the palm. Since I mostly entered contacts and events on the mac, that was good enough.)

But mostly the problem was Palm‘s. They let Mac buyers know what they thought of them right away, by providing the Palm Desktop for Mac, which stunk. The windows version wasn’t half bad, and Windows didn’t offer anything half as good as iCal and AddressBook. The standard for the Mac was higher, because of the better apps and both the desktop support and the sync experience was worse. But the real tip-off is this: Notice that I bought the E2 in 2005, more than 2 years ago. It’s still shipping. Can you think of any other technical gadget where that would be true? Compare to, for example, the iPod. Also the price hasn’t gone down appreciably in that time.

Normally you can expect a blog update on Thursday or Friday, when I’m procrastinating on my sermon. But I didn’t get to it this last week, because I was busy setting up our new 20″ iMac (specs here). It is a thing of beauty.

But the best part is that I inherit the old family eMac for my main machine. The Linux machine has been retired.

It isn’t that I loved Linux less, but that I loved Mail.app and Accordance and iTunes more. And I’m willing to learn to love iPhoto and the rest of iLife 08, but we’ll have to see about that. Also MarsEdit, which already I can’t hardly blog without. (Not that I blog much with, either.)

A couple of months I posted this picture to my Flickr account:

It’s a fine photo, and I did a great job of masking off the background so you only see the floppy drive unit.

It’s also my most-frequently viewed picture there now.

Why? Do people who only used 3.5″ floppies, and for the last four years only USB drives, really not know how lousy these things were?

Well, I’m throwing in the towel on managing my own bookmarks. I tried del.icio.us awhile back and it just wasn’t happening for me. But the hassle of trying to sync multiple PCs of bookmarks finally convinced me to go back to it. I just spent 45+ minutes migrating bookmark to del.icio.us from my bookmarks on different machines and there’s a few hundred left. But the ones I’ve done so far will take care of most of my needs.