A just reward

Since the mini was merely an instrument to switch to a more enlightened computer platform, it now languishes in a corner playing media for me whilst I use it's big sister in the other corner. As such I thought I might reward it for it's services by buying it this a present.

http://www.artmac.info/MacMiniSATAMod.html

Shiny - a double edged sword

Well on this bank holiday weekend, it is gloriously sunny in my part of the world. So instead of hiding my pasty limbs away I decided I'd sit 'dans le jardin ' and take in some rays, raise my vitamin D levels and smell the grass. That is until I found a small problem with my beautiful Mac Book Pro, since it's so shiny, the casing and keyboard quite litterally blinds me during use. I have had to don my Oakleys to work on it, although that then makes it even hard to see the tft screen, anti glare my foot!

On a further worrying note, a "permanant" solution to the whine has been described on the apple discussion forums, I'm not jkeen, it removes the speed step extension to the mac os x kernal. Some people are prophising doom, claiming that the machiens will melt down into the core of the earth without some temperature protections, all false obviously (Temperature and fan controll is located elsewhere) however this "fix" does take a 30% hit on the battery life, which given I've been sat here writing this for about 5 minutes I only have 2:47 minutes remaining, I don't like those odds.

For now I'll stick to using magic, to stop my whining.

The idea of aluminim cases has always been a give and take istuation for me, sure the aluminium is supposed to help dissapate heat, but if I leave my baby in the Sun or sit using it in the sun surly this removal is being impeeded, or at worst being reversed, if I use it on a very hot day, you know high 70s - is the heat exchanger gonna do a180 and push heat onto the board ?


ps sorry for any spelling mistakes, sinceI'm wearing eye protection to save my retinas being scared I'm having some diffisulty seeing the screen.

Robert X.

Robert X. waxes and wanes, this time he could just be waxing lyrical.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060427.html
Could be.

I do like Virgin's

Megastores that is. I had the fortune to be traipsing round the local mall. Parental Units were busy, puffing and panting after the five minute walk, but that is a whole other story. I bussied myself with my version of vurerism, walking round Virgin Megastore. Holding on to far to many CDs, eight at one point, knowing inside that I can't buy these all for two reasons:
1) I'd already spent this weeks music budget at the ITMS
2) It would have been obscene to buy eight CDs at once and really something I would have only ever done with a musically inclined Evans. Someone I used to hang about with who would tell me not to feel guilty for spending more money that most African Families earn in a lifetime on some strange round joy giving pieces of plastic.
Anyway, I decided I'd try to convince myself I didn't want them all by finding something else to listen to. In HMV there are music posts with someone else usually crap music selection set up to force people to buy the latest piece of pop drivel.
I looked for such an offending pillar in Virgin Megastore and couldn't see one instead I found a different kind of monolith. This one had earphones, some CDs in a holder and some basic controls, the clever thing was however the voice that penetrated my mind when I donned the noise cancelling phones.
"Take any CD", he said in a voice not dissimilar to that of a BBC announcer "Scan the barcode on the laser underneath the post" - no way I thought. , the machine responded like a Wallmart check out. Instantly, OK not exactly a step input here, but amazingly fast, I couldn't discern a wait. Music filled my audio receptors at volume that was loud but not unpleasant. I toyed with the rudimentary controls, volume up... up... up... yeah. "Next track" There is my well spoken English mate again. Clear the "Next Track" is to stall you, but the system still responded pretty quick. Instant music. I flipped through several tracks and even more CDs each time the system responding to all intents a purposes instantly.
Whilst I realise a barcode is a nice shiny beacon of a unique key, it's a pretty optimised table that's pumping out, what I must say is pretty low bit rate music, not horrid but no worse than say, an iPod, and no annoying hard disk action every thirty seconds.
So go play, try and catch it out(Pick up a DVD), deafen yourself, buy more than eight CDs but most of all enjoy the music.

Skype came...

...and went. Well for some time last night Skype.com had a universal binary program that was very fast, agile, great interface. Unfortunately it was a bit lacking some of the funcitonality and was soon replaced with a recent, slower - emulated in rosetta dmg file, which didn't crash quite so quickly.

Court Cases Galore

OK was watching my very cool rss screen saver this evening - boring I know. I was led to an article on el reg regarding the current Microsoft versus EU Commision about previous judgement regarding anti trust.
The commissions representative, Mr Whelan, made this great quote;

Whelan said: “We are only talking about the rules of interaction between operating systems, no more than that. Rules of interaction refer to the structure of messages and reactions to such messages….Source code is the implementation of a specification and you can’t create code from specifications.”

I love that last bit..."you can’t create code from specifications.” isn't that great - I wonder if any of our academics in this area are following this ?

Original article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/26/ms_ec_day_three_afternoon/

Coke anyone ?

http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/will-vista-will-be-the-last-operating-system-microsoft-produces/

Nearly as much coke as Dvorak... what is it with them all at the moment ?

Updates for my ancient MP3 Player

I've been considering joining the other 80% of portable music player owners, jumping aboard the good ship iPod and getting a new MP3 player. The reasons I never fawned over the original iPod back in 2001 were several fold: I just didn't need hard disk capacity on an mp3 player, I didn't believe St. Steve about going jogging with them, it was big, I didn't think it was feature rich, I thought it was iTunes only (OK so this was my own ignorance, but hey it's not that open is it), it was expensive and come on no radio ?

Instead I hunted around, living on various mp3 player shoping sights, talking to colleagues - reading reviews. I lusted a little on the iPod for a monkey for a music player was out of the question. After some deliberation whilst factoring in multiple characteristics, I stumped up what I still thought was a lot, £124 springs to mind but don't quote me on that bit. I bought an iBead 150M 256 Mb, mp3, WMA, FM radio, recording device.

It arrived fairly promptly and it did the job, it couldn't hold copious amounts, 5 albums maybe less if I was being a stickler about quality. I could run with it, goto the gym, walk about and if I decided I'd chosen the wrong music to carry around I could always flip to the radio, plus I love my Radio 4 morning news.
Despite the fact a Swedish friend of mine walked in several days later with the same device, double the capacity and having paid half the price with beautiful, really really beautiful Bang and Olufsen headphones, I was pleased with my purchase.

For many years it served me well, when I first tried podcasts two years ago now ? It was able in Windows with media player to sync with Andy Curry, and the five other pod casts that existed back then. I fell out of favour with pod casts because, back then there just rubbish. Well when I got my first Mac some 9 months ago I gave them another bash what with iTunes making it somewhat more simple to keep up to date and find pod casts, boom it just worked. Well here I had to re-evaluate my mp3 player. I looked again at the iPod.

During my years in the music playing minority the iPod had shot to fame as the gadget to have, Apple had stayed enough ahead of the curve knowing what people wanted and not changing a thing. OK They added colours, big drives and video.

Steve had changed his mind about solid state players and launched two.

However the iPod 5th gen wasn't much smaller than it used to be. The capacity had rocketed further, I could actually understand more now the need to carrying my entire collection of music. In the intervening year my music taste has matured my collection grown, swelled whereby I can appreciate having my 250+ CD collection at my beck and call ready for instant playback. My financially parlous, credit card ravaging, use of iTunes despite its previously mentioned short comings has become worryingly frequent. An iPod would allow automatic syncing of all this music and my copious pod casts, apparently it can learn what I like to listen to a lot, does this mean it might just constantly play Jose Gonzales and Dave Bruback ?

The pod cast syncing seems great. Currently I have to drag stuff to my current mp3 player out of iTunes, maybe converting to mp3 on the way, if I am part way through a track I've got to manually find the position again, something which I'm led to believe the iPod will do for me. Add to this all the video stuff that's quite clever at the moment. Download Desperate Housewives / Lost / Invasion and all, this might not actually be in UK yet but surly it must come ?

When the coolade has worn off and I've finished using my lunch break to drool on the nanos or the gargantuan 60 Gig video beauty. I start to consider the situation more clearly, going back to my reasons for not joining the lemmings all that time ago. Even now I can sit here with my miniscule player listening to Mark Lamarr, Radio 2 - being introduced to more new music than the iTunes Music Store's weekly free download can ever hope to bring to my audible receptors.

The nano is smaller. Perfectly formed. I do tend to man handle my kit though, hey chicks dig scares... that applies to mobile phones right ? It still doesn't have a radio unless I want to shell out a further £30 and then have that dangling from my neck screaming, "mug me".
It still only plays, MP3s, wavs aiff aside. I have a stack load of music in WMA, that I've err lost the CDs for, "honest guvner". It's from a time when WMA was indeed more efficient and better quality than MP3 - I could re-encode, but why should I. I can't record memos on an iPod, havn't done this on my mp3 player in a while, again not the point.

See no one has yet managed to make the true iPod killer, Sony, Creative, i-Bead, Packard Bell etc, for some reason throwing features at most people hasn't worked. Does this come down to true simplicity, what Apple do well. People want to carry music around and listen to it. Most people want to open a computer and check their e-mail, or browse the web - not scan for viruses, scan for malware, update their virus scanner, try the new microsoft anti malware product, scan their drives for errors, defragment or install camera drivers or printer drivers etc.

What inspired me to write this was that for a laugh I popped on over to i-bead.kr and look at how they have changed to try and challenge the ubiquitous iPod. Imagine my surprise when I find that this company is still dishing out updates to my archaic device. They had in their last update tothe firmware, updated the USB interface, the menu system and added GAMES, the radio still hisses, but hey it's FM radio what do I expect ? Whilst this maybe a small thing, the fact that five years on they are still paying me attention actually supprised me. I updated and found Russian Roulette, Pairs and several other little distractions on the improved menu interface. Do Apple still issue update for their five year old products ? I am very much if it ain't broke don't fix it! I'll have another think about it when I listen to my pod casts tomorrow during my shopping, on my 5 year old MP3 player, which by the way nearly got me thrown out of my local apple store last week.

China

Given yesterdays rant about the Red Bear, I thought I'd like to Boris' article which I only found in my rss feeds today. http://www.boris-johnson.com/archives/2006/04/china.php Enjoy

"Most of our imports come from foreign countries" -GWB

With the official visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao, being noted for what wasn't said as much as what was said, shouted, hurled and screamed I remember an official visit to of some Chinese dignatories to a city I used to live in. The student body protested, the human rights campaigners rallied, the hoteliers and restauranters did big business.

After the visit I recall an actual official state visit to the UK was , pomp circumstance, dinner with the Queen, the works - it was around the time the Government was losing a vote, on ID cards maybe, John Prescot MP met with Hu after the vote and in one of his laughable dulcet northern toned gaffes proclaimed, "We've lost the vote, the vote we've just lost it" laughable because Hu probably doesn't realise that a government can lose votes, or maybe he doesn't even remember what votes are.

The close collaboration between the two Super Powers is being met by some with dismay, regarding privacy, freedom of expression, freedom to practise religion and censorship. Everyone at the time lambasted Google for acquiescing to China's demands for filtered searching and readership disclosures, despite the fact that Microsoft and Yahoo had been at it for ages. Google didn't help themselves with that "Do no evil" thing they had going on for a while.

It will take a big, morally, company to say "No" to China and take the economic hit, further more it will take people outside China to say "No". Garments made in sweat shops, electronics made in chemically dangerous conditions are purchased by the US, the UK and Europe. Why ? Cost mainly. The trade deficit between the United States and China is massive, $220bn maybe. China devalues its currency, its people, its environment, this is a common trait in the remaining Communist pillars, whilst the opulent few carry that heavy well fed gilt edged burden for the desperate many.

We currently run about like headless, avian flu infected, chickens about Iran's nuclear apitite, what about China's, is this the new country to really fear ? they can after all raise the largest Army on earth if calling on their total population able to fight. Massing troops on Taiwan's borer - their Living room maybe ? It took China several days to admit what happened in a Chemical explosion in one villiage, before they turned the poisoned water supply off, to protect the local populous no doubt, despite not making any other provision. The west has allowed itself to be taken in by the cheap imports from the waking bear. Convincing itself that progress was being made human rights quip in a speech, McDonalds built here and there, some internet access (To non politically sensitive sites obviously), a state visit here, some tourists on the great wall.
I thought of Kafka's (Pretentious me ?), The Great wall of China, he tells the tale of a beggar fleeing from a conflict. "So eager are out people to obliterate the present." when people ignore the beggar.

Whilst Google filtering the entire perspective of the Chinese people based on the whim of the Opulently fed few is no Tianaman Square, an incident that by the way never happened, honest - I think it is still wrong, somehow we have decided it is palatable, "Their way" Woz described it as, are we ignoring the beggar ?

Merlin and QS

Everyone's friend Merlin Mann has done a page on Quicksilver modules "you might not know" - since I'm a bot of a QS fan I thought I'd link to it at http://www.43folders.com/2006/04/13/qs-plugins/ - i don't think they're all worth it but maybe it'll give you the impetus to try it.

I've just installed the universal binary release of Fire Fox and tbh I'm kind underwhelmed, more than four of five tabs and it positivly crawls using about 99% of one of the dual bad boys. Of couse not running in emulation now it can't access any of the flash plugs for the likes of the BBC website etc unless I snap it back to Rosetta, just my two cents.

Firefox Universal is available at www.getfirefox.com, I think for speed I might flirt with Deerpark, Kamino, Safari or Opera (I know I know) I'm a bit of a browser whore.

Apple comp, Apple corp, Jackson, McCartney

Whilst Apple versus Apple isn't set to have a judgement from the, iPod using Mr Justice Mann before Easter, there is a complex web weaved around this case that is outside the British Legal sphere.
During a dinner in 1985, a 26 year old Michael Jackson and 43 year old Beatle is describing a great way to stay rich is to invest in popular music, we're not talking Steps here we're talking really popular music. After this conversation, some say slyly, Jackson outbid his former co-performer McCartney with a bid of $47 million for the publishing rights to the great majority of the Beatles songs, save a tiny number of songs which McCartney later got back. Jackson and sony merged their publishing frameworks. This was during the first set of none court cases against Jackson for inappropriate behaviour he was accused of. It is often said that Jackson sold 50% of his share to Sony totally during the 90s, in fact it was structured as a loan from the music giant. Today rumors are abound with other mounting debts from an extremely costly courtcase to prove his innocence of further allogations of child molestation. The rumors are indicating that despite his earlier protestations he would be looking to actually sell another share of the catalogue to pay off the lawyers, his debts and maybe food for the monkey. Who would he sell them too, the obvisou choice is Sony, handing them the total rights, he might try to keep hold of the most lucrative pieces. Although merely holding publishing rights doesn't give you total rights over the music, and has no effect on the actual recordings previously made you just get a cut when anyone plays them.
Could he sell them to St. Steve finally getting the Beatles in the ITMS, no probably not - that wouldn't be enough to them on ITMS anyway. One of the blockers of this is indeed McCartney himself, who claimed he would never like the songs to purchased one by one, this is, in my opinion purely a greed thing - which I think is pretty grim given the fact this guy could clear the debt of most of sub Saharan Africa by cutting a cheque and still have enough cash to buy his way into the British House of Lords.
Throw into this the words of the Neil Aspinall in court the other day that they are re-mastering the records prior to making them available for download. Could this al be smoke and mirrors using the British justice system as a publicity machine prior to relenting and putting the music on itunes. To be honest I am siding with apple computers not apple corp. For most people Apple is known as a computer company not a music company, the music store isn't known to anyone as the apple music store, it's only ever been referenced as the iTunes music store, precisely to remain within the agreements made previously by Jobs and Apple corp.
All in all, this is merely conjecture on your authors part, we'll have to wait for a court ruling, a Jackson decision but while we're waiting for those, everything might revert to Macca anyway his prophetic words from a couple of years ago
"The interesting thing is, there are actually things in the whole deal that actually revert to me anyway," McCartney claimed. "There are years approaching, there are dates approaching, that we never though would approach, where things revert to me. So really, it's a waiting game rather than a big, proactive buying game."

I don't do fives, but I noticed this...

Books I'm reading...

Illiad ~Homer
Friends, Voters, Countrymen ~Boris Johnson
A Long Way Down ~Nick Hornby
Joel on Software:... ~Joel Spolsky
As Seen on TV ~Sarah Mlynowski

Virtualisation pointers...

Whilst I hope, St. Steve isn't loosing it and considering shipping beautiful macs with Windows. I am sure, please let it be so that Dvorak and now The Reg are on Crack with their crazy time lines about Apple becoming a subsidury of MS. However with the "official support" offered by Bootcamp and many peoples predications / hopes that true virtualistation will be present in Leopard somthing like parallels Virtual machines, using hypervisor giving you click and excute in a window environment for x86 binary applications (.exe). I have noticed an interesting pointer for this in Safari, now I don't think apple have made a windows version of Safari like Firefox is cross platform which always explained it there, but why does Safari warn me when I download an .exe ? I can't run it on Mac OS X, yet, is this a bit of future proofing by apple that means eventually a downloaded .exe could be as dangerous on a mac as it is on a PC ? Could I soon be wanting to buy a virus scanner for my mac because I can't trust files I find on the web anymore ? Hopefully we won't need spyware since all the protection mechanisms are and will remain in place to stop the unauthorised execution of code on the mac ? We'll have to wait and see.

Interbreading

OK all the hooplar surround what has been called, spinning crap from gold. Yes XP on a mac is "interesting" technically quite cool but would you, just to run that single application ? Not on a dual boot - still to inconvient.

Anyway I am about to start planning my next system, and whilst I am not a fan of single sign on or nescesarily identity 2.0 type schemes whereby the creditials are central to the services that require them. I have written systems in the past that (since they were operating in a known domain) could obtain the users login automatically and therefore 'know' who they were. Whilst this works in php on a windows 2003 IIS server. It's somewhat flaky and occasionally pops up a login box. This can be accepted in a new system being rolled out, the minority might get a login box to fill in, and would do it get tothe new system. However we're going to upgrade the intranet with an "intelligent" notices system, just accept, like I have, that my boss doesn't understand quite what inteligence is, from a computing sense obviously.

The point being if I run this in php across 1500 student it's likely that a fair proportion will end up being hit with a login box when trying to access the intranet / internet - some of those might fill it in and then be presented with new notices that their user hasn't seen. However some of the little darlings won't bother to login hit, cancel and then potter off and surver the net with gay abandon having never noticed the n ew notices and not knowing that they're exam has moved location and then then not necessarily notice when they sit down to an Endemiology exam when in fact they were expecting "Gardening 101" - in short they have a bad time.

So I thought harvesting the domain user name is apparently a less turgid affair using asp /.asp.net when running on a server 2003 box with IIS, don't worry I'm getting to my point / open ended question to be discussed... is it sacrilegious to consider developing asp.net on my beloved mac ? Is it even possible, or should i use this as an oportunity to try this whole dual boot to xp thing ?