Leopard on the flip side...

So despite dyer warnings of "Blue screens of unhappiness" (Which since I'm not using the prime culprit application enhancer - I'm not worrying about), Parallels malfunctioning, and even my own limited bugs from AD connected Leopards. I have decided to ignore at least 3 of the points over at tuaw.com and take the plunge on my own machine.

Whilst a big change, I'm also following a tried and tested method... backup backup backup. Whilst I've done two Upgrade installs and they've been totally fine. With my own data I can never be too careful. I'm not going to do it the way some are suggesting... Clone the disk, clean install on my internal drive then migration assistant from the clone backup. I'm gonna first of all just try a good and honest upgrade... that's what it's there for right.

The only immediate downside for me is that I must give up my badge of honour...

:-(

See you on the flip side.

Firefox tabs run down...

Another run down of my open tabs. A clear vie into despite how anal I am how bad I am at hoarding internet tabs.

http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/the-complete-guide-to-macwindows-interoperability-311618.php - Good coverage of some of the bumps that most home users will find when using both macs and windows together. All pretty solvable in my opinion.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/yager/archives/2007/10/take_me_home_le.html - Wonderful piece on Leopard. All that we hoped it would be. Obviously there is no mention here of the re-written Kerberos mechanism that appears to be causing some slight nausea with regards to Active Directory interactions.

http://www.macrumors.com/2007/10/18/leopard-gm-build-apple-retail-sales-launch-free-t-shirts/ - This nearly encouraged me to go and buy at the retail launch but then I decided that £85 + queue for a "free" tee shirt was a bit much even by my standards. Anyway I was still a bit ill and tired.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/16/poll-os-war-2007/ - An amusing if less that scientific survey of Operating System preference.

http://menu.jeweledplatypus.org/#/ - Further information on the vast array of menu bar tools. I believe my post of Safari tabs yesterday alluded to this fetish of mine.

http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/wordpress-theme-hacks/ - A great article on using Wordpress as a CMS for any site. A theory I might put to practice quite soon with some people I'm trying to encourage to blog. For me the blogs are only supposed to be part of the sites.

http://uk3.php.net/array - I've been all over some cunning array stuff recently, this has been my bible.

http://www.bombich.com/software/lwm.html - An excellent resource from an Apple employee about macs in a lab environment and using open or more importantly active directories.

http://macromates.com/textmate/manual/bundles - I'm still trying to get TextMate singing to my tune past merely using it as a code editor. I'm using some of it's tricks just not many. It doesn't help that this feeds into my argument that PHP ain't real programming and thus it's support in text mate is a bit lack lustre. Although preview tools etc. are solid.

http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2007/webmaster-intel-basics-25-tools-to-compile-an-in-depth-dossier-on-a-competitors-site/ - A bit of gurilar market research on the competition. Never would I condone such skulduggery though it does seem like fun.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7035152.stm - The number of times this guy hacks me off is quite large. I especially enjoyed it when he was forced to eat his words re Job and DRM free music. This piece gives quite a nice coverage of the Spanish FON idea and how BT in the UK is backing it.

http://uk.php.net/autoload - More daliancies in to OO Dev with PHP... real programming see.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_repeat_yourself - I'm trying to use this more and more as a paradigm, it is hard though when a quick edit to solve the problem starts off with cheekily copying that well worn function and changing just the query ;-)

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html - An extreemly interesting piece about a guy that switched back to PHP after wrestling with Ruby and took the lessons he'd learned and applied them to his OO PHP Code

http://ilovetypography.com/2007/09/19/15-excellent-examples-of-web-typography/ - Furthermore in my quest to imitate good design I found, via digg, this discussion on typography. Whilst I don't whole heatedly concur with all the example. I am fond of a list apart and have been for some time, content as well as layout. Sean Inmann's site is lovely also.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7002612.stm - More FUD from Bill about some Monopolistic practices he alleges Apple undertake with their music player. Whilst I'd love to see the iPod more open I realise they've had to strike a balance between conforming with the industry to get services like ITMS running in the first place and making the device easy to use. To be honest I've had a couple of other music players and never felt the urge to tinker with them, they did the job I needed. Indeed by some measures you can run what you like on the iPod we've all seen the hacked iPods running iPod Linux etc. For me I can fill an iPod without once needing to buy music from ITMS hence Apple isn't locking me into any DRM jail since I can simple untick the "Protect" box when I rip my own CDs. I don't see what people's beef is with having to use iTunes to load the music on the iPod - if I had a Sony I'd need to use Sony Sound Stage... it's all the same.

http://blog.irisink.com/?p=8 - More information on Macs in a lab style community and working with mounted file systems on remote hosts.

http://www.macwindows.com/ADinstruct.html - And more active directory material for Mac integration.

http://www.macmax.org/article.php3?id_article=41 - For logging at work we like all internet traffic to be identifiable by user name, despite iDentD being a no brainier to fool / lie to / fabricate it make senior staff happy to see usernames next to yahoo.com when they look at a log file.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301446 - I was using this to attempt to auto start the iDentD server above when it failed on some users in the Active Directory.

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_do_i_read_system_mail_on_my_mac_os_x_system.html - I occasionally get stung with a sticky message in my System Mail account and I needed this handy guide to work out how to read and delete it.

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/09/06/apples-ipod-colors-growing-up/ - A great article about the new versus old Shuffle colours. I don't like the new ones, in fact I went completely out of my way and bugged my local Apple store to death to find me an old Orange one.



http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/11/the_zen_estheti.html - Can't beat Gary's evaluation of Jobs' Gates compare and contrast.

http://www.wikihow.com/Install-Subversion-on-Mac-OS-X - Again another tutorial on Subversion. This time with Fink.

http://macromates.com/wiki/Main/SubversionCheckout - Another text mate guide for use with the subversion server I keep promising to setup.

http://uk2.php.net/function.mssql-connect - Months ago a bunch of systems I wrote stopped working the module error'ing was related to the mssql connection. Our MSSQL database stores most of our records with my systems merely interrogating that database for bits and bobs, eg class lists, when required. The MSSQL server had been upgraded during out summer recess and all of a sudden I found I needed to connect to the SQL server on port 1156. Luckily I had been a good boy and had the connection strings in a separate file. So it was an easy fix once I knew how.

http://www.exforsys.com/tutorials/sql-server-2005/security-features-in-sql-server-2005-for-the-developer.html - The upgrade had also broken my development user account at first to do I had to have a quick lesson in security objects in MSSQL 2005

http://www.out-law.com/page-4106 - A longer post about my annoyance at Dell will follow.

http://www.ed-u.com/kodak.htm - More retail law

http://mashable.com/2007/08/13/facebook-leaker/ - Well this was all a storm in a tea cup. The code appeared on my login at one point. I thought whilst it was interesting to see the magic I didn't see what all the brew ha ha was about. Amusing to know this guy got his 15 minutes of fame though.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6944176.stm - Well this is getting more interesting. The ISPs in the US are bleating constantly about the costs they incur providing the service they charge for.

http://www.ohgizmo.com/2007/08/07/brush-rinse-toothbrush-brilliantly-simple/ - Stupid stupid stupid... this would merely fire water all over the bathroom. Unfortunately not all taps put out a lovely round stream.

http://www.bookrags.com/notes/omam/QUO.htm - A list of decent quotes from of Mice and Men. Tell me about the rabbits George indeed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6939816.stm - Some interesting ideas I expect will come out of this. the difficulty as I see it is as clever as we make technology there are always those want to make a fast buck by circumventing it. Little do they realise that at some point karma must catch up to them and they might find themselves unlocking their own stolen phone. My GPS does a clever thing. It has a pin mechanism that is "unrecoverable" but should you forget it you can take it to a specific location and it will reset.

http://all-streaming-media.com/remove-DRM-protection/FairUse4WM-freeware-DRM-removal-Windows-software-Strip-copy-protection-from-WMV-ASF-WMA-Windows-Media-Player.htm - Very useful this was recently. Legally a gray area, but I needed to move content, videos, (no not those kind of videos) from a machine that was trying to lock them in to another.

http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/08/08/master-your-information-manifesto-21-tips-to-deal-with-info-overload/ - This is the kind of thing work place head doctors love.

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/08/07/download-squad-first-look-and-gallery-apple-iwork-08-in-the-sp/ - Pretty good review of iWork, especially numbers. I love the pre done formulas and the high level parsing of "total tax" style interaction.

Long time no blog...onto Leopard

Well blogger tells me I've got 559 entries and my last entry was October the 3rd. However that was just a picture from my phone. In between Stag Weekends in Poland, Weddings in Henley, local politics, having a social life, this little thing I like to call a job which has recently involved marketing, strategy and application maintenance - and having sinusitis for about two weeks, which pales into insignificance compared to some of my loved ones but nonetheless I've been crazy busy.

So I've been woefully remiss opining on all things technology and specifically mac. What a busy time it's been too with more details about the impending iPhone's UK launch and the latest big cat release from Apple being the two most significant bits of news from Cupertino.

I will post more details about my European adventures, my trip to London for tea and Diggnation, in some retrospective posts. My main reason for this post is after the successful install of Leopard on a couple of machines I don't use it's time to take the plunge myself on a machine I do use. My trusty workhorse the Macbook Pro. I realise that with the greatness that is supposed to be Safari 3 comes the lack of Input managers like Saft. I know the Saft dude is furiously rewriting to make saft work with the latest Safari, for now I only used it for session restore when I had the unfortunate and rare chore of rebooting.

Session restore is now built into Safari, not as well as Saft but well enough, I'm told. Incidentally I was going to watch Job's introduction of Safari whilst I wrote this but weirdly, youtube is broken. Update: During the writing of this, youtube came back.


I've recently sworn off (again) firefox. It was running my mac so hot, such memory usage. I'll admit I was somewhat complicit in this with my ridiculous 51+ open tabs, I had a picture but I've been cleaning the disc up, by burning, so I've got enough space for Leopard. My other main source of space reclamation other than deleting a whole host of unwatched video netcasts was to turn down the amount of space I'd allocated to my iDisk from the 10gig Apple give you. Mac OS X creates an image of this space on your local hard disk... even if 5.6 gigs of the 6 gigs is empty.

The purpose of this post for me was to list all the open tabs I have, because I assume once I upgrade to Leopard they won't open for me on my return. Here goes, I might list an opinion next to link if I can be bothered / can remember what I thought when I kept the tab open - a evil habit I have for things I genuinely intend to read later... honest...

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/10317 - The actual Cisco .dmg is here for download, I assume accidentally, making it far easier than my normal hunt for the latest version. This one is reportedly compatible with Leopard. However our current network manager has finally contacted Cisco themselves to confirm our eligibility to get the new versions in a legit fashion, well done him.

http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=18880 - This was, as you can see, shockingly old but interesting at the time. Source being mac world puts a bit of a spin on it.

http://digg.com/apple/Apple_s_Mac_Sales_Are_Surging - A digg article of the same ilk.

http://daringfireball.net/2007/08/clipboard_and_arrows - Given my own um'ings and arrr'ings about buying an iPhone this was interesting. Actually this evening, Channel 5, http://gadgetshow.five.tv/index.htm offered a Super Phone challenge pitting the N95 and the Jesus phone against each other. The challenge was mainly about features, and like the iPod before it the iPhone is feature lacking but beautiful. I'll post my vitriol about the iPhone in another post... it involves the ASA.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6938796.stm - From my many other posts you can tell I have a deep distrust of the governments ability to rise to any kind of technical challenge, and I know the consultants they employ - who concur with me.
Whilst this article does cite a survey whereby the fear of crime is always higher than the actual probability of crime, analogue or digital - the government is displaying supreme incompetence on e-crime.

http://daringfireball.net/2007/10/un_in_unsupported - Another Gruber special. I disagree, I think with some of his arguments here, although good - I don't think Apple needed to "brick" iPhones an act I believe they did deliberately, no if I break open my washing machine to fit a Rolls Royce turbine I can't then go to Indesit to fix it if I break it. By the same measure I don't expect an indesit engineer to come to my house and cut off the plug because they don't support Rolls Royce engines. No my analogy is also full of holes, but that's the story I'm sticking to.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1665119,00.html?imw=Y - Recently I have been visiting many high schools, one of which was my own Secondary modern. Near the canteen I spotted these new fangled machines. I asked an old pal who now teaches there -
"What's the finger print id for ? Registers ?"
"No - canteen payments"
Sure enough there was a coin receptacle for feeding the machine, the idea being similar to the one in the article I've linked to. I asked if this was to stop bullying, "NO" came the immediate reply as the school grows it is an attempt at crowd control and efficiency in the canteen. No some privacy advocates are screaming blue murder right now... but really I doubt even the policy could wonder in and on a whip pick up this data. 1) It'll be stored in some proprietary database, 2) They'd still need a court order in the UK.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7017660.stm - The original warnings about "bricking" of the iPhones. Boooo

http://paulstamatiou.com/2007/08/10/a-realistic-back-to-school-guide-for-college-students/ - I really enjoyed this article about back to school, but given we're fast approaching November it's a bit moot now. I was going to write a version for older students not studying as undergrads - sure their needs are different but I havn't had time. Have I mentioned I've been crazy busy ?

http://www.phpvideotutorials.com/lesson10/ - Ok this was a resource I found when trying to sell someone the idea of learning to program in PHP. Which given the great new releases and dev seeds is on the verge of making me believes it's real programming. Don't get me wrong I use PHP daily I just always feel like I'm not really programming - unless I'm using objects and pointers I don't feel challenged. Hence with true OO support in PHP5 I'm tempted to re-write a few things just for sport. These video lessons are a great intro and even I picked up the odd tid bit. Also props for the Australian accent.

http://mashable.com/2007/09/26/php-toolbox/ - Somehow another PHP programming resource.

http://anngarner.blogspot.com/ - The blog of a colleague I read every now and again, especially recently what with Ming giving up the old Yellow Zimmer frame. Now to be honest I liked Ming, he could easily have been PM (If he'd have been in a proper party) the age thing was a cruel concoction of the media that was quite unnecessary. Was quite spectacular watching the Limp Dems decapitate, I mean have another leader resign. I quite liked Charlie boy as well though.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/should-we-use-any-notes-in-presentation.html - Being heavily involved in presentation authoring and delivery recently I've rekindled my reading about this amazing skill. I've also incorporated improving this skill into my social life too... more on that in another post. I've been going to Toastmasters for the past two months too.

http://lifehacker.com/software/screenshot-tour/menu-bar-show-and-tell-306871.php - I am a big fan of menu meters so I read with interest what others with a this special fetish have in their menu bar. Also Menu meters Leopard news is here

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_create_a_web_app.php - Some nice writing on how to run your startup with a lot of lessons that could apply to normal project management... just gotta get my boss to read it.

http://css.maxdesign.com.au/floatutorial/? - I'm having to redesign a few sites at the moment, and I refreshing some legacy work with CSS so I found this was a great refresher for my own skills in CSS.

http://www.futureofwebapps.com/index.html - I had this open so I could find my way to the Excel centre in London for Diggnation Live in London, which was completely off the hook.

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=diggnation%20london&w=all&s=int - My search post diggnation filming. Unfortunately because of my schedule me and the goat trader couldn't stay for the after party and had to train it back home arriving only a 0130 and having to be in work a mere 7 hours later.

http://www.johntaber.com/?p=60 - Amusing in it's irony. It already runs bloody unix. Yes I know hose words are not completely interchangeable... don't teach me to suck eggs.

http://www.totaljobs.com/JobSearch/JobDetails.aspx?JobId=33588769&Keywords=&AndOr=0<xt=GU22%2c+Woking&Radius=5&LIds1=CkT,Uk,Uz,VK,VW&LIds6=D5i,K,V,c,EW,Ef&From=%2fJobSearch%2fLocationJobSearch.aspx - Someone suggested I apply for this. See my earlier comments about real manly programming... grrrr.

http://www.nexdot.net/blog/2007/04/20/updating-facebook-status-using-php/ - This is outrageous. I'd had this idea before I found this mechanism. Before I could play facebook had banned it... boooo.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wear/6944026.stm - Well done girl... feed the addiction early and often. No wait that's software updates. Meh.

http://uk.gizmodo.com/2007/09/18/iphone_hits_uk_on_november_9.html#more - More exciting 9th November news.

http://www.bombaydigital.com/arenared/2005/10/27/1 - I will do this someday. Honest, it'd be good for me, it'd be good for work. It is hard to explain why this would be beneficial to my boss who doesn't understand it, and thus struggles to give me some time to set this up.

http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/The-Sharon-System.aspx - I enjoy worsetanfailure every so often, it becomes a guilty pleasure - much like xkcd.com

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/07/06/for-the-record-adobe-kuler-vs-colourlovers/ - More design pages. I am crap at choosing colour schemes. I'm lucky that many of my themes... are already blue. With a bit of scandal about Adobe and Kuler in the mean time.

http://www.andyrutledge.com/quiet-structure.php - An interesting discussion about layout using case studies of CNN and other news sites as compare and contrast exercise.

http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/info/vi_tutorial.shtml - More proper programming stuff, using as an old man is fond of calling... A Proper editor. Maybe one day I'll use Vi, the same day I being my PhD thesis in LaTeX

http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/11/ipod-touch-now-running-mail-and-more/ - Hacking galore, with hacked iPod Touch et al. Apple won't be happy.

http://www.metatitan.com/cssbuilder.php - I've not had a chance to properly try this CSS constructor but it was from Digg.com there were mixed comments on digg.com... What a surprise. First.

http://www.zeldman.com/2007/09/27/something-new-at-apple-store/ - nice post about the new Apple Online store and their embracing of web-standards.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/2907607.stm - this was an old story I looked up in response to the next link...
a mere four years later...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6982499.stm - turns our giving schools more money helps them improve... who knew.

http://notes.thinksecret.com/secretnotes/0709byebyebhifi.shtml - Yeah always was a rubbish idea.. might have sounded beautiful... but man was it expensive.

http://homepage.mac.com/lesposen/blogwavestudio/LH20070403124024/index.html - More presentation stuff and also a tangential link with Psychology for a colleague.

http://michaelhyatt.blogs.com/workingsmart/2005/01/mac_envy.html - An amusing article about mac envy, it's pretty old now.

http://homepage.mac.com/lesposen/blogwavestudio/LH20070403124024/LHA20050131090728/index.html - Yeah i'd agree whilst export to Power Point it pretty good, and pdf views are completely good for a solid set of slides. Sometimes you're suing the animations as part of the showmanship of presenting.

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9760910-1.html - A decent stand off of the main players in Windows on a Mac fodder. As a close close friend said to me the other day when I was extolling the virtues of my agnostic approach on my mac. "It's time you weaned yourself off these silly legacy systems" - he meant windows.

http://www2.netdoctor.co.uk/medicines/showpreparation.asp?id=2479 - Told you I'd been really ill. I had a prescription and pills and everything.

http://www.diggableresources.com/ibm/ - A bit gimmicky but a nice idea. I used an IBM resource to first dip my tow in the AJAX pool.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119326655774870521-_1guKieddydNBOHhvRYV4F1ZCe4_20081024.html - And now onto more and more Leopard links. Uncle Walt in the WSJ - overall the press lapped up the Leopard. Some genuine bit and bobs that need even more polish but overall I was impressed enough to try it myself. Some of the so called marque features arn't turning me on at all and some of the quieter ones are really getting me excited. Data detectors in mail anyone ? Quick look is also a god send and so fast, no launching of Word under Rosetta just to peak at a file... w00t.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/2 - Ars review.

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8300945231/m/898000428831 - Finder is better.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1195757 - Although they've completely broken AD integration and I can confirm this. 2-3 minutes for a logon... don't be ridiculous. Well we're not rolling that out to our suites of macs.

http://hinkle.wordpress.com/2007/10/27/leopard-problems-active-directory-integration/ - More Leopard AD woes. As I recall I blogged about me fears from the re-writing of the AD components some time ago after a developer release, seems your oracle was correct.

So there we have it some 40+ Safari tabs collated for your perusal. I won't list my 51 Firefox tabs, I'm hope they'll all come back post my Leopard install. Why do you ask am I still taking the plunge after the bad AD links just above... well my laptop ain't on the AD so I don't care. The only thing I'm concerned about is SMB Read only a bit weird.

My main fear seemed unfounded, parallels worked like a charm on my father's machine so unfortunately he can still use Quicken from back in 2000. Although 7 years of financial records is quite a feat.

I'm sure once it's on and I've felt my way around there'll be no looking back....

Diggnation London.

At the excel centre. Waiting kevin and alex. We have to leave in an hour so they better start soon.