Today I discovered CocoThumbX, a neat little tool for generating document icons. You can drop most any image or document file onto CocoThumbX, and the program will generate an icon for the document based on its contents. For PDFs, for example, you get the first page as the icon. The preferences pane allows you tweak the icons a bit and make some selections about what you want represented. It’s freeware, stable, and easy to use—and it even has a Services plug-in so that you can create icons with a keystroke.

I really like the Rhapsody music service by Real Networks, and I am a big fan of their software partly because one of their programmers has been a dear friend. But I am so peeved by a recent response to a support inquiry that I just had to share it here, if only to blow off steam.

My e-mail read as follows (note the details I’ve emphasized in bold):

I’m having trouble playing certain selections. They will “open” in my Rhapsody Online player, but then the music never starts. The status indicator never changes from “Opened” to “Playing.” Most music plays fine. I have had this trouble with:

John Williams > Star Wars Episode 2
John WIlliams > E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial Soundtrack
Danny Elfman > Planet of the Apes soundtrack
John Williams > Hook soundtrack

I am accessing Rhapsody from the browser built into RealPlayer 10 for Mac OS X.

This was the entirely irrelevant reply I received from Rhapsody support:

Thank you for contacting RealNetworks Customer Support.

I understand that you are unable to play certain tracks through Rhapsody online. I apologize for the inconvenience this issue has caused you.

Your Web browser may be blocking Real’s communication with the Internet. To fix it, you’ll need to reset Internet Explorer (IE). This involves clearing out old temporary Internet files and resetting privacy and security settings.

Now, let’s think about this for a minute. Is it really conceivable that a client-side problem would be so selective in which albums it blocks and which ones it doesn’t? Have I got a gremlin in my computer that loves Hans Zimmer but despites John Williams? Of course not. What’s more, it’s absolutely, totally, one hundred percent impossible that Internet Explorer’s cache could be causing my problems, since—as clearly stated in my original support inquiry—I’m using RealPlayer not IE, to access Rhapsody! Get real, Real—don’t blame Microsoft when I’m using your software! I don’t even have Internet Explorer installed on my computer!

I still love the Rhapsody service, and Real Networks products and services generally, but it really frustrates me to submit a support request and get a canned reply that was probably not even composed by the signatory (”Bharathi”) but just cut-and-pated from a list of stock replies—and the stock reply selected is not even remotely relevant to my problem, much less the solution. It reminds me of the experience I have repeatedly at the Taco Bell drive-through. It never fails. I order a cheese quesadilla with no sauce, a “Mexican pizza” with no sauce, and a Burrito Supreme with “no sauce.” When I get to the window, the attendant sticks his or her head out and the first words I hear are, of course: “Any sauce?”

Just in case you haven’t seen it yet …

I know I must sound like a cheerleader, but the Nisus Writer Pro public beta has been a real boon to my work these last couple of days. Tonight I tried something and was amazed by the results. I had a set of MS Word documents that I wanted to convert to PDF. It took less time to open the documents in NWP and save them out as PDFs (using NWP’s “Save as PDF” command, which seems to work lightning-fast but renders pages perfectly [so far]) than to open the same documents in Word and launch the Print dialog box … never mind actually rendering the PDF through the Apple or Adobe drivers. I’ve found one more reason to think that NWP just may be the Word-killer for which I’ve been looking.

I haven’t tested footnotes yet, and I haven’t tested exporting to Microsoft Word. This is important, because some journals to which I would like to submit papers require MS Word as the submission format. Oh, for the day that standards like RTF or XML would be the required formats, rather than proprietary file structures like .doc! Anyway, I’ll report back once I give those features a whirl.

I also haven’t worked at all with NWP’s macro language, though I used to rely heavily on several VBA macros when working with Word.

One thing I haven’t been able to figure out how to do in NWP (but I haven’t read the manual; maybe it’s in there) is to create a floating (fixed to page) text box. Pages and Word have this capability, but NWP seems only to allow floating graphics (or the method for creating floating text boxes is non-intuitive to me). I would also like a way to numerically resize graphics, but haven’t found out how to do that yet in NWP or if it’s even a feature.

I’m feeling pretty good about this product!

I have just finished writing an exam for my Hebrew readings students (both of them), and after a rough start in Pages I switched over to try the public beta of Nisus Writer Pro. Danny will wonder why I didn’t use Mellel, but the reason is because I needed floating graphics in my header, and Mellel just doesn’t do that.

In any event, I was very pleased with my first experience putting together a serious multilingual document in Nisus Writer Pro. Remember, this is a public beta, so there’s a ways to go before it’s completely ready for prime time. Of course, since I hadn’t used the program before, there was a bit of a learning curve. But the learning curve wasn’t as steep as Mellel’s, and the results look good to me.

Nisus Writer Pro’s language support is very comparable to Mellel’s, if not stronger, and in every other category I think it outshines Mellel. You can set up a menu of languages and define a separate font, if you wish, for each one. This is useful because, for some reason, Nisus Writer Pro (just like Pages, so it may be something in the core OS X architecture) makes a mess of the SBL Hebrew (Unicode) font, but for Hebrew it really handles New Peninim MT beautifully. You can also customize just about any keystroke to match any command, so I can type command-control-H to switch to New Peninim and the Hebrew keyboard layout, all at the same time, and then I can type command-control-E to go back to English and the default font for the current paragraph style. I’ve also set up a command-control-G for Greek, though I don’t use that as often. Once I got the hang of it, I found it very easy to use.

Mellel does have one advantage: it handles backspacing through composite characters rather better than NWP. For example, if you type a ב with a daghesh in it and a shewa under it, then press backspace: in Mellel, you erase the shewa, but in NWP, you erase the whole glyph (including the ב itself).

Oh, and it has a nice “Save as PDF” feature.

Based on this one document, this one experience, I’m increasingly curious about NWP. I’m going to use it on a few more projects to see if it might become my word processor of choice.

The tragic shootings at Virginia Tech last week still loom large in our media-saturated collective consciousness. I wish peace and comfort for those who lost family members, friends, or loved ones to the shooter’s rampage. “Mourning with those who mourn” does seem the most appropriate response at this moment. And yet I feel the need to comment on some of the religious talk that has sprung up around this tragedy.

On the afternoon of the shooting, I heard a brief snippet of one of those “human interest” interviews with a parent whose son had stayed home from his Virginia Tech classes that day because he was ill. His mother made a comment very close to (though I cannot quote it exactly), “God was protecting him today.” Obviously this is a pious sentiment, and I am undoubtedly a rank fiend for subjecting this woman’s on-camera remark to critical theological scrutiny, yet I cannot let this statement lie without comment. I object to this mother’s sentiment because it clearly implies that God was not protecting the victims of the shooting—which in turn implies that, for some reason, God cared more about this woman’s son than about the other women’s sons and daughters who were gunned down. I cannot disprove this conclusion, but I find it horrifying to think that God selectively protected this one individual and failed or declined to do so for the others involved.

Of course, whenever a sudden, unexpected tragedy grips our attention, religious folk are troubled by the question of God’s apparent “hands-off” approach to such tragedies. Though on a smaller numerical scale, the congregation I now attend was rocked by just such a tragedy on the weekend we joined the church. A vanload of teenagers from our church was involved in a devastating auto accident, resulting in one death, many physical scars and ongoing medical problems, and much, much emotional pain. Our congregation turned to lament in that time of need, and I heard some of the most honest and gut-wrenching public prayers I’ve ever experienced on that same day.

I have no answers for those who mourn the victims of last week’s shootings, or the traffic accident four years ago, or any other tragedy. To me, the “problem of evil” is deep and perplexing, and has been for a long time. The intractability of this problem does not incline me toward atheism; it does not make me doubt God’s existence, but it does cast some very long shadows over God’s character. I may write more about that later, from a theological-philosophical point of view; for now, I’ll just say that struggles with this issue go back a long, long time (see the book of Job and a number of the biblical psalms).

However, I categorically reject the insane rantings of the Westboro “Baptist” “Church”, whose spokespersons claim that God sent the shooter to kill his victims. The “church” has pulled its plans to picket the funerals of those killed in the massacre, in exchange for national exposure on Mike Gallagher’s radio show. Shirley Phelps-Roper, daughter of the “church’s” founder, tireless hatemonger Fred Phelps, told CBS that “The evidence is they were not Christians. God does not do that to his servants. … You don’t need to look any further for evidence those people are in hell.” Phelps-Roper sounds like she’s channeling Job’s friend Eliphaz, who was just sure that Job must have been guilty of horrible sins if God had inflicted such punishment upon him. One of the main theological lessons of the book of Job, and to a lesser extent of the book of Ecclesiastes, is that such reasoning is incorrect. According to the authors of these books, you simply cannot reason backwards from suffering to divine displeasure. The alternatives do not necessarily redound to God’s credit, depending on your value judgments of the pictures those books paint, but certainly these books show that Phelps-Roper’s vitriol does not reflect the full range of the biblical witness.

I am also quite put off by Dinesh D’Souza’s feeble attempt to use the VA Tech aftermath as an excuse to take a broad swipe at atheists (as is mapantsula [I don’t know his or her real name], an atheist and a professor at VA Tech). I think atheists draw an incorrect conclusion about God’s existence, and I think that a number of potential problems might flow from that, but insensitivity to human grief is not a corollary of rationalism or atheism. D’Souza claims that “if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil,” but D’Souza is just plain wrong about that. In fact, atheists and theists can explain the Virginia Tech tragedy in exactly the same way: a deranged kid went off the rails and shot up a bunch of his fellow students, professors, and bystanders. For an atheist, there is no “problem of evil,” except for the problem of how to get people to stop doing it. The “problem of evil” in philosophical theology is how to reconcile the occurrence of evil in our world with the professed goodness of God. If there is no God, there is no problem of evil. As a theist myself, I almost envy atheists for the fact that the “problem of evil” is a non-issue for them. The only issue is how to prevent lunatics from getting a hold of guns.

In response to my gripe about Microsoft Word’s slowness on my new Intel Mac, two readers suggested Apple’s Pages word processor, part of iWork ‘06. I use Keynote as my presentation software, so I was open to the suggestion.

The interface is clean and smooth, and I was able to open an old backup copy of a previous iteration of my final exam, make appropriate changes and so forth, and lay out the answer sheet so that everything was visually identical—on screen—to my Word documents. As a matter of fact, I found that working in Pages “feels better” than working in Word, once you get used to the Inspector. I was particularly pleased with the way Pages handles objects outside the main body of the text.

When it came time to print, however, I had a terrible experience. Pages shrunk my, well, pages so that they came out about 70% of the normal size. Pages did this on two different printers, and Word did not do it at all, so I know that it’s a Pages issue. To be more specific, it’s an issue with the way Pages treats imported Word files; I’m not sure why this should be the case, but I was able to print a “native” Pages file just fine.

In any event, after several hours of work yesterday, I found myself scrambling with an hour and a half to go before the final to go back into MS Word, clean up the old copy (redoing all my work that I did in Pages), and get it printed out before the 10:30 AM exam slot. I may give Pages another shot, but not with anything mission-critical unless I build it from the ground up within Pages.

Also, Pages is lousy at right-to-left Unicode, something I desperately need for my word processor to be good at. On the other hand, Word is even worse than Pages at RTL Unicode support, so the things I do now in Word, I might be able to do just as well or better in Pages. But Pages also does not do hidden text, which I use extensively in my Word documents.

Perhaps the next version of Word will be a universal binary and will add Unicode RTL support. I can only hope, and look out for alternatives. I do use Mellel when I need to type a lot in Hebrew, but I find it somewhat difficult to use. It’s powerful, but not nearly as intuitive as Pages or even Word, and its graphics and page layout capabilities are lousy. I’m also anticipating Nisus Writer Pro and I’m going to check out Papyrus as well.

Regular readers know that I suffered a hard disk crash recently and I’ve been trying to reconstruct the data. Today I’ve been working on reconstructing the final exam for my Religion 101 class. My new computer is a zippy MacBook Pro, but editing the final in Microsoft Word still feels like slogging through mud-caked seaweeds. Ridiculous.

Or, at least, my little part of the world is. The process of re-installing software on my new hard drive has been slow, tedious, and a bit frustrating, but every vendor (one exception) to whom I have turned for help recovering a lost serial number or license key has been enormously helpful in getting me back up and running. Kudos to all of them.

As Job said, “I had heard of [it] by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees [it].” Yesterday my hard drive “died.” Apparently it has some bad sectors or something. The file system became hopelessly corrupted, the machine would not boot up from the drive (though the machine boots fine from the installation CD and other CDs with an operating system), and all my attempts at data rescue have been unsuccessful. My backup CDs/DVDs are woefully out of date, and so I am in the process of reinstalling all my software—including trying to track down old serial numbers—and so on. Vanity, thy name is “slow read near sector 23456.”

I should add that my division chair and technology liaison were incredibly responsive and fantastically helpful in getting me a replacement computer. A few hours ago, thanks to their efforts and the positive responses from higher up the org chart, I walked out of my local Apple Store with a fully functional MacBook Pro, from which I am posting this item. Pepperdine once again proves to be the greatest university in the world.