I just received a newsletter from Barnes & Noble trying to drum up pre-orders for their new eBook reader, the Nook. As you can guess by the graphic above, the first thing I noticed was the fucked up line spacing in their promo shot.

The shot on the left was from the newsletter I received. It’s a pretty good shot, and makes the device look attractive, but it sadly falls flat on its face if you actually look at the most important part: the screen. The featured book is Pride and Prejudice (which seems to be a defacto advertising standard for ebook readers…go public domain), and you can clearly see that the line spacing is messed up as the first five paragraphs are all bunched up.

Now, if you look at the screen on the right, you will notice that the line spacing has been corrected. So, I find myself wondering, how will these books actually perform on the device? Is Pride and Prejudice really screwed up, or did somebody notice and fixed it in photoshop? Or, was it just an early prototype that was not rendering correctly?

Based on my experiences trying convert some books to mobi reader format for my kindle, getting the paragraph spacing correct is a bit of a nightmare. I think that ebooks are basically just a compressed markup format, and the styles that get applied are related to the markup used. For example, the equivalent of the <br/> tag always seems to equate to a single line break, rather than a paragraph break regardless of how many you have.

I first came across this when I was converting some essays that were in PDF format. Occasionally my importer would split some paragraphs with two <br/> tags instead of using <p> tags. When this happened, the paragraphs ended up jumbled like the left promo shot. I assume this blunder has put the developers on their toes, and I would expect this to be right before launch.

Generally speaking, I am pretty excited about launch. I love book stores, and haven’t really been in one since I picked up my kindle. And, I really like the idea of having the in store perks for Nook owners. The Nook also has a couple of other interesting features, it looks sexier than the kindle, it supports wifi, has over one million books available, and it supports a replaceable battery. But, it isn’t all rosy.

I am concerned about the lack of qwerty keyboard. Granted, I don’t use it often on my kindle, but when I do, I cannot imagine functioning without. I am wondering if they have some kind of input system using the color touch screen in the bottom. Speaking of which, am I the only one thinking that would be pretty distracting while you’re reading? Hopefully it turns itself off when not active.

The Nook is expected to launch in late November, and should be available in a B&N near you for a test drive. I plan on giving it a once over in person, and with low price of $259 (same as the kindle), it deserves some level of consideration.

Early this month, Apple announced that owners of Leopard will be able to purchase Snow Leopard at a discounted rate of $29.99. That sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Today, Microsoft announced that owners of Vista will be able to purchase Vista 7 for a full blown $219.99. What a deal. To put this in perspective, the full version of Snow Leopard will be $129.99. Microsoft => FAIL.

My question is, how many people actually read my site on a mobile device other than an iPhone/iPod Touch?

If there are a lot of users viewing the site on shitty browsers I can switch out WPTouch for MobilePress.

Apparently, for 9.04 they decided to do a rewrite of wubi from the ground up. Normally these refactoring excercises result in a better program. Unfortunately there appears to be a rather nasty bug in this version. Whenever I tried to run the installed I would get “Windows – No Disk” error, with a really nasty message in the dialog. I tried everything short of reformating the machine to get it to work. But, today I finally found the answer.

It appears that the new wubi installer gets confused if you have a bunch of drives. Many people who had more than one cd-rom drive had to burn two copies and have the disk in both drives for it to work. In my case, it was the built in card reader that was the problem. After stopping it, and ejecting the drives I was finally able to get the installer going. Hurray.

Unfortunately, after clearing out some system caches and various other troubleshooting techniques I noticed that some of my applications started crashing for no apparent reason. This annoyance forced my hand, so I went out and picked up a new drive today, since I am planning on putting a fresh install on it.

I picked up a Seagate Momentus 320gb drive to replace my fujitsu 160gb drive. This was the first time I have ever taken this computer apart. But, I have taken apart Apple laptops before so I knew the entire process was going to be a nightmare. Boy was I right.

I started taking the thing apart with microscopic screw drivers, and it did not take too long before I hit a road block. Apparently, they slipped in a couple of “T6 Torx” screws, just to fuck with you. My Torx screw driver set only went down to T7, so I had to make a trip to the hardware store to pick up another one. The guy there didn’t even know they make Torx screw drivers that small. So, I was left on my own to canvas the “hand tools” isle. Eventually I found what I needed, and of course it cost $6.99.

When I got back at it with the correct tools, things went fine for the most part. I did not the fancy plastic tool for remove the tape and what not, but I found a new play card worked just as well. Eventually, I got the old drive out and the new drive in, then went through the painful task of putting everything back together. And, it only took 4 hours, 28 minutes, and 32 seconds (compare that to the 9 minutes, and 12 seconds it took my to replace the hard drive in my dell laptop a year ago).

Once everything was back in place, I put in my Leopard install disk, and attempted to install the os. No dice, need to “repartition” the disk as “GUID” so I pulled up disk utility and did so, no problem. After that, the installer seemed to go on its merry way. I came back several minutes later to find the install finishing up. Then, just as it was getting ready to reboot this huge error log pops up, accompanied by an alert box stating something to the effect of “OS X unable to complete installation.” Fuck.

After that I went ahead and rebooted the machine, and the cursed setup wizard popped up, so in theory it may have worked. I wade through that piece of shit and get to the desktop so that I can reboot and attempt to install again. This time I flashed the PRAM and NVRAM (just incase some nasties were trapped in there from the previous drive). And now, I am in the process of zeroing out the drive to make sure it is properly writable. When that finishes I’ll attempt the installer again. I’ll post an update after my next round with the vile machine.

UPDATE: It took a little over an hour to zero out the drive, but I assume that helped since I started the installer again, and when I returned my laptop was sitting on the welcome screen. So, it must have installed, and rebooted on its own. And, I assume the errors would have have blocked that.

I went through and installed updates, and most of my apps without an issue. Unfortunately, the Adobe CS4 installed errorred out. I am pretty sure this was just some kind of permissions conflict when I copied over some of the application support files from my previous drive. After running the CS4 cleaner to dump the conflicted files the installed finished successfully. 

I didn’t install everything I had on there before, as I don’t really need everything that was on there. So, I’ll try running “lite” and see how it goes for a while.

By default, firmware upgrades are forced pushed, so you shouldn’t have to do anything, just make sure the following conditions are true:

• You have wireless turned on (and are somewhere where you can connect to whispernet)
• Your Kindle is in sleep mode

And, for those of you like me who are not will to wait for magic fairies to upgrade your Kindle, just head to the following url to get instructions to do it manually.

Kindle Manual Updates

After getting all the versions of ie installed, I took the new ie8 final out for a test drive. And, low and behold it still sucks, not surprise there though. I love how they don’t care about standards, and just keep introducing more fucking bugs for web developers to deal with. I can’t wait until the next site that I have to add yet another ie version specific stylesheet to. I mean seriously, I have one file for every other browser on the planet, but I expect to have to have three stylessheets just for ie.

I am seriously considering instituting a $1,000 surcharge to make sites ie6 compliant, but it seems absurd to me to devote such a huge portion of project development to debugging issues for a single, very obsolete, browser. Am I wrong? In the not too distant future I plan on modifying this site so that ie6 users are sent to a static page with download links to modern browsers, they will not longer be able to get to the actual blog and send me annoying messages about rendering quirks.

If you are viewing this post in internet explorer: what the fuck? Get with the program, and drop that piece of shit.

I could site here and rant about how awful internet explorer is, and how it takes years off my life, but it is getting late and I really should be sleeping, not venting. But, I won’t let that stop you from venting.

Anyone reading this is more than welcome to post a comment expressing their hatred for internet explorer. Any version is fair game, as they all suck.

• Appears to be more stable than vista
• Has a more consistent look than vista
• Loosy goosy interface isn’t as good as windows 2000.
• Seems to be a bit faster than vista
• IE8 renders this site correctly
• IE8 is very unstable (tabs crashed and reloaded about ever 15 seconds and it kept “not responding”)

But, symfony 1.1 began to introduce many great new feature, such as their object oriented form system that makes building forms much easier. Several other internal changes made it reasonable for me to start looking into. Unfortunately, nothing is perfect, and there were some annoyances in 1.1 that prevented me from using it as much as I would like. Fortunately, symfony 1.2 took care of many of those issues.

One of the nicer things is the new admin generator that uses the new form system. I hated dealing with the old system in the admin generator in 1.1. And, another nice thing was the inclusion of task configurations, so I no longer need to reference an application when I am executing a task (it was very counter intuitive).

The only gotcha that I experience was with the plugin system. Since they revamped the plugin manager, you are now required to define what plugins you want loaded in the project config file. In the past everything in the plugin directory was automatically loaded. Once I figured that out I was off the races.