Wake up before Apple just replaces M$?

Apple Climbs Into Third Place In U.S. PC Market

Now that there is an AppStore with applications in iTunes, why wouldn’t Apple move next to distribute all applications through iTunes

A very cogent comment from ionix5891 on /. warning us no to sleep walk into the arms of another monopoly power. As I said before, Steve Jobs can be a very scary guy!

Personally, now that Ubuntu 8.04 (or Spiny Norman as I call it) is so polished I’m not feeling such an urgent need to rush back into the arms of Cupertino. Mr Shuttleworth may have made life a lot less exciting, but now it all ‘just works’. Well, except for some proprietary media formats still.

Having said that, the family is still happy plugging away on the iMac (except when my son wants to run games)

MS Office 2004.5 more like

Alec the Geek

bitten the bullet and upgraded from MS Office 2004 (for the Mac) to Office 2008

Well the much vaunted Office 2008 has turned into a damp squib for me. There have been two improvements:

1. When replying to messages the fonts don’t become so small that you can’t read them
2. I can check colleagues diaries when booking a meeting

And that’s it!
Personally I am pretty disappointed and look forward to ditching Office in the next couple of weeks

The iPhone starts to look intresting

Slashdot | 3G iPhone Going Into Production In May

the rumor mill churning over 3G iPhones coming soon.

Along with the updated software roadmap announced last month (enterprise email, SDK etc etc) the iPhone is starting to look like a worthwhile appliance for serious people instead of a toy for Mac fanboys and girls. My current handset contract expires in 18 months so I’ll look forward to considering it then — provided it’s arrived in Australia of course…

A proper desktop

A proper desktop

Originally uploaded by alecclews

How I wish my desktop looked all the time

Three terminal sessions (one to a remote Debian system) and an xclock

No GUI pollution

Having a second thoughts about Timemachine – It may not be so bad?

Macworld | Is Time Machine all you need?

Is Time Machine all you need

After buying some new notebook journals and starting GSD again it occurs to me that the time based interface to backups may make sense. I will think about this some more…

Upgraded to MS Office 2008

I’ve just bitten the bullet and upgraded from MS Office 2004 (for the Mac) to Office 2008. I actually prefer NeoOffice and Thunderbird, but we use Exchange for our corporate email and I am desperate for better calendar and address book support.

I can now check colleagues availability when making appointments, however I can’t view shared calendars.

At the moment it keeps asking for access to my keychain every 10 mins and the normal fix does not work

So far I can’t access our global address book either.

I wish we used Zimbra!

So little money?

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry

One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.

This quote from Wired magazine really surprised me — I would assume a new device such as the iPhone would cost over US$500 to develop.

Handy Hack: OS/X Screenshot Options

I keep losing this information, so here it is for posterity.

O’Reilly — Mac OS X Screenshot Secrets

Mac OS X Screenshot Secrets

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Handy Hack: How to configure TextWrangler for svn & svk commit messages on OS/X

In a similar fashion to a previous post about gvim you can use TextWrangler as your SVN or SVN log message editor by setting $SVN_EDITOR to the value of "/usr/bin/edit -w" and install the TextWrangler command line tools. I’m guessing that something similar would also work for BBEdit as well.

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OK — I have a severe case of techno lust

Apple – MacBook Air

MacBook Air is nearly as thin as your index finge

Apple announced their new compact laptop that everyone anticipated. However it’s a lot smaller and more fully featured than I expected.

Please can I have one? Who do I have to murder?

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2nd Lifehack for 2008

Now dropping Emacs in favour of TextWrangler in the belief that it’s simpler and easier to use for my limited needs.

So export SVN_EDITOR=/usr/bin/edit if using subversion as well, after installing the TextWrangler command line tools

Time to write a backup script

Does Mac TimeMachine suck?

… I am fast coming to the conclusion that it’s pretty useless and you are better off with a backup script.

I have switched off TimeMachine after I discovered it runs my machine 15C hotter and forces the fans to run faster. Too much stress.

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BOO! Apple does not give education discounts to school children

Apple Store for Education

Student
University TAFE
Other accredited higher education

Apple gives some nice discounts to students and staff, but not to teanagers at high school (or younger). I would have thought the more they can rope in at an early age the better. At my son’s school there is wall to wall Windows (except in the art department). It would be nice to see an alternative; it could also open the door to more Linux as well, once people can have a choice.

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My favourite Leopard improvements

After a couple of weeks with Leopard here are my top reasons to switch

• WiFi management just works! I had to keep choosing my favourite SSID every time my Macbook woke up under Tiger. Worth the price of entry alone
• It’s faster
• Finder is slightly better at displaying information
• I think I like spaces…, but still trying to get used to that
• Stacks is useful
• erhh.. that’s it for me. I don’t use AppleMail,iCal, iChat etc etc.

Handy Hack: Freemind on Mac, Fix ‘Add Child’ shortcut

The excellent FreeMind mind mapping tool started to play up when I tried to use it on Leopard. I couldn’t use the keyboard to insert a new child node, a pretty basic function really. I apologise to anyone at  last nights Perl Mongers meeting distrurbed by me pounding (gently) on my machine trying to make it work during the presentation, as I have taken to using Freemind for note taking.

The fix turns out to be very simple. In Tools/Preferences/Keystrokes (scroll down a little) make TAB the shortcut for ‘Add Child’ as well as ‘Add Child Mac’

Does Mac TimeMachine suck?

Mac OS/X 10.5 (a.k.a Leopard) sports a new backup program called TimeMachine. However I am fast coming to the conclusion that it’s pretty useless and you are better off with a backup script.

The problem seems to be the user interface, visiually attractive but it has no way to easily identify files and changes as the presentation is time base. i.e. it is possible to go back to a certain time, but no look at when a file (or group of files) has changed.

Usually when I want to restore something I want to locate an object and then perhaps look at it’s history. No the other way around.

A big thanks to the Bell Labs team

Dennis Ritchie Home Page

Dennis M. Ritchie

The C programming language and the UNIX operating system both came out of Bell Laps in the 70’s. I and many other owe a big debt to Dennis and the teams that he was part of. I have used UNIX, Linux and OS/X for years; and for a long time earned a living as a C programmer. The influence of the C language is still being felt after more than 30 years.

Dennis’ home page lists a lot of resources for those with a historical interest.

I was lucky enough to meet and chat to Dennis for an extended period when he visited the UKUUG Winter conference in 1997. A very interesting man who never tired of answering my questions.

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Handy Hack: Compare backups with the original

macosxhints.com – Compare directories via diff

Compare directories via diff

A useful shell hack to compare two sets of directories for differences. Should work on Linux as well.
Updated Jan/09: if your diff does not support the -q option then try this

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Alec’s measure of Mac adoption

Apple: “Let me show you my sales figures. My sales figures, let me show you them”

2.164M Macs sold

Whenever I spend time on the business lounge at airports (which is far too often), I now idly look around to see how many Macbooks I can see. For those who have never trod in such hallowed halls, all the suites in the business lounge are iether on their mobile or using their laptop (or often both).

99% of the latops are running Windows, there are ‘never’ any Linux system (although that’a hard to tell) and a small smattering of Mac’s (from 0-3). The zero to three figure has occured on my last 5 visits and the number always gone one way: 0 to 3. Too early to say that’s a trend, but I’ll keep looking…

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Handy Hack: Use the ‘locate’ command on OS/X

The locate database at Mac Singularity

The usage is merely locate filename but you have to have the locate database made first, and this is not done by default. You have to do this: sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

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