Microwave
What is the point in a microwave meal that takes 14 minutes to cook? Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose? It’s like chip shops that say you’ll need to wait for chips.
Archive for July, 2003
Panther
I took advantage of my Apple developer account and downloaded and installed the latest build of Panther yesterday, I’m under NDA so can’t really say much, but I’ll just say that Mail is much faster than the Jaguar version and that Expose is just fantastic. Shame you can’t map it to a mouse button in this build though.
Sunday, July 27th 2003 at 12:16 pm / Apple / Permalink / Post Comment »
More Time Travel
I got another one of those time travel emails this morning, still not quite sure what it is they’re trying to sell me.
Sunday, July 27th 2003 at 12:11 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
Comedy Spam
What the hell is this all about…
Hello,
I’m a time traveler stuck here in 2003. Since nobody here seems to be able to get me what I need (safely here to me), I will have to build a simple time travel circut to get where I need myself. I am going to need an easy to follow picture diagram for a simple time travel circut, which can be built out of (readily available) parts here in 2003. Please email me any schematics you have. I will pay good money for anything you send me I can use Or if you have the rechargeable AMD dimensional warp generator wrist watch unit available, and are 100% certain you have a (secure) means of delivering it to me please also reply. Send a separate email to me at: info@federalfundingprogram.com.
Do not reply back directly to this email as it will only be bounced back to you.
Weirdest spam ever.
Wednesday, July 23rd 2003 at 11:37 am / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
First Blood
(IMDB) This is one of those films that apparently everybody has seen apart from me (and the same goes for the two sequels) so I’m quite pleased that the BBC seem to be showing them all over the next couple of weekends.
It’s an interesting film because it doesn’t appear to have any true good guys and bad guys. Initally Stallone’s character does pretty much nothing at all to get himself arrested, but when he then beats up a few cops and escapes you can understand why they have to catch him. But despite all the damage he causes, he does essentially get away with it in the end. Plus, with all the “I did it because of the war” stuff, I guess as an audience we’re just supposed to accept that what he did (and the fact that he didn’t actually kill anybody, cop falling out of the helicopter accepted) was ok. And it is geared for us to root for him.
Ach, screw it, let’s not bother analyzing it. Things blow up good, and I like that.
Sunday, July 20th 2003 at 7:05 pm / Films / Permalink / Post Comment »
Hackers
(IMDB) I was under the impression I hadn’t seen this film when I started to watch it last night, but it all seemed oddly familiar. Especially one scene about 45 minutes in. As it got nearer the end however, I didn’t recognise much at all, so maybe I’d started to watch it once before but hadn’t made it all the way through (for whatever reason).
It’s reasonably watchable, if you ignore all the completely laughable attempts at trying to use proper computer and hacking terms (I’m pretty sure they’d call themselves crackers for one) and try and completely block Matthew Lillard’s character out of your mind.
Sunday, July 20th 2003 at 6:58 pm / Films / Permalink / Post Comment »
But now…
…it’s booting. After some reset voodoo. Phew.
Sunday, July 20th 2003 at 6:44 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
My Powerbook…
…refuses to start. Which isn’t particulary nice.
Sunday, July 20th 2003 at 6:36 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
Blogbear Updates
If things continue at their current rate, I don’t imagine it’ll be long before I’ll be moving this blog and all it’s content over to Blogbear. I got some good work done on it this week, and while I didn’t manage anything over the weekend (too busy playing with other things, like browser-based Bearkey Alerts) I think in a few days we’ll have something I’ll be happy to move over too. And since it supports comments (and lots of other things) it’ll be a nice little upgrade from what I’m running here at the moment.
Sunday, July 20th 2003 at 6:35 pm / Tech / Permalink / Post Comment »
Perl Editors
Why are there no decent Perl editors available on OS X? BBEdit is fast, but it lacks any of the features necessary to be a true contendor. It has limited syntax colouring, no automatic brace indenting, a badly designed FTP browser, opens a new window for each file, and is certainly still stuck in OS 9 land, with a toolbar and Preferences panel which aren’t very OS X like. Somehow, despite all this, it’s still the de-facto standard text editor on the Mac, despite costing an absolutely ridiculous $179.
Other options include Jedit, which is free (bonus points) with lots of customisation options and a sensible editing window, but since it’s written in Java and uses Swing to provide the interface, it’s very clunky and certainly not like a good OS X application. There’s Pepper, which was looking more and more promising until the author turned into an idiot, dropped OS X support (thinking that somehow he would make more money with a Windows version where the competition is larger and better) and sold it to the company who have it now, who have yet to do anything meaningful with it. Shame. Finally, there’s skEdit which is certainly looking like it could be good. It’s reasonably priced and has a fairly good feature set, with lots of customisation available (although not as extensive as Jedit). Unfortunately it’s full of bugs (regular crashes, incorrect line numbering, useless FTP), has less than stellar performance and has some "interesting" preference UI decisions. It is however being actively developed by a single person who does seem more than keen to create the best application he can, unlike BBEdit’s developers, who seem more interested in making as much money as they can. Personally I’d like to see this one go open source (I’ve already registered my version, so it wouldn’t make much difference to me now) so that more developers can jump on the bandwagon and start improving it further.
Of course in a perfect world there would just be a port of EditPlus for OS X, for that is the standard everybody should be aspiring to.
Saturday, July 5th 2003 at 10:09 pm / Apple / Permalink / Post Comment »
Purchases
I decided that buying a Power Mac G5 was no good. Too expensive and it didn’t fit my reasons for wanting a desktop Mac, which was that I wanted an always-on, very nice, UNIX machine. And don’t say Linux, I’ve been there, it still sucks for anything other than a server. So I started looking below G5, in particular, the recently lowered in price G4’s. And from a price to performance point of view, the dual 1.25Ghz is an incredible bargain right now. But yet, it still wasn’t the machine for me. First, for an always on machine, noise level is obviously a concern. My last experience of Power Mac G4’s made it clear to me that they did not fit the description of a quiet machine. They did however fit the description of “machine to drown out the noise of jets landing.” Secondly, their size and requirement for another display would have taken up space I did not have and removed my ability to run monitors side by side, requiring me instead to use some sort of monitor switching solution.
So with all this taken into account the answer was clear. I bought an iMac. a 17″ display, 1Ghz processor, 256Mb RAM and an 80Gb HD. Walked into John Lewis, slapped the old Visa card down on the table and walked out the door with it. The price/performance is pretty terrible (coming in at basically the same price as the dual 1.25Ghz), but the LCD screen and legendary low noise level was the clincher. And it’s a beauty too, the screen is magnificent, being able to move it wherever is necessary saves me twisting and turning as I am used to and despite only having 1Ghz and 256Mb (something I had originally planned to upgrade to at least 512Mb right away), it runs really well too. All this means that I don’t at all regret the decision to go for the lower spec (but ultimately sexier) hardware.
I’ll put up some photos later this week.
Tuesday, July 1st 2003 at 10:24 pm / General / Permalink / Post Comment »
Recent Purchases
