Tag: Mac

For the terminally curious, Apple has a knowledgebase article: What’s the difference between a “disc” and a “disk”?

Short story: Discs are optical, disks are magnetic. But you knew that already, right? And:

Although both discs and disks are circular, disks are usually sealed inside a metal or plastic casing (often, a disk and its enclosing mechanism are collectively known as a “hard drive”).

Absent from the article is any mention of how it came to pass that Apple gets to speak so authoritatively on the subject. Granted, this seems to be standard tech lore, but it’s weird to see the KB regarding itself as if a dictionary.

My friend Guy D2 just released a really nice Dashboard Widget for web developers — SeeSS gives you instant access to “all CSS1 & CSS2 (and some CSS3) properties with their values, examples, descriptions and other valuable info.”

After the initial “Wow!” factor of Dashboard wears off, you quickly start to separate the wheat from the chaff and pare down the collection. This is the kind of thing Dashboard was made for – useful info at your fingertips. I liked the distinction made between Dashboard and Spotlight made back at WWDC:

Spotlight – Find Stuff
Dashboard – Find Out Stuff

Though truth be known, 99% of my Dashboard use can be boiled down to punching F12 as I get out of the shower to see whether I can wear shorts to work.

How hard can it be to slide a few servers into a cabinet? Took pretty much the entire day to rack up a UPS, X-Raid, and three X-Serves into an XRackPro2. From top to bottom, the J-School’s existing web server, fairly new streaming media server, brand new directory server/RAID controller, and 1.4 TB RAID-4 student/faculty storage system. Haven’t yet configured the RAID or directory server — will be working on that in the coming weeks. Huge leap forward – this half-height cabinet replaces a wall full of mostly x86/Windows servers.

As if Apple had read my mind (or read this post), iTunes 4.9 and the accompanying iPod updater released today addresses every single one of my sync frustrations. No more using an external RSS aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, transmit them into iTunes, and then into the iPod. No more manually removing casts I’ve already heard*. Suddenly it’s all tightly integrated, totally elegant, just works. How Apple of them. The new podcast directory built into the iTunes Music Store is pretty cool too, but has some growing to do.

* Actually this remains to be tested – there’s a preference that lets you tell iTunes to keep copies of all casts you haven’t yet heard. How “haven’t yet heard” is defined remains to be seen. I’m assuming that the 29MB iPod updater I just installed includes a mechanism for determining whether I’ve listened to a cast all the way through; on the next sync it should remove that cast from my hard disk as well.

Playing around with the new iTunes Artwork screensaver in Tiger — generates an array of all albums in your collection for which you have cover art, randomizes, throws them up in a grid, flips/replaces covers at random. Sounds a bit silly, but in reality feels like a sort of reclamation — the vanishing romance of thumbing through piles of LPs, cover art scattered over the rug. Feels good.

Of course you quickly realize how little of your MP3 collection even has cover art. Clutter solves that, but grows your database by about 1MB per album (art is added to metadata of each track) and it would take weeks to add cover art to an entire collection.

You need to use the CLI screencapture utility in OS X to shoot screensavers. Be sure to silence it with the -x flag — without that it hoarks forth an ungodly loud noise when it snaps.

sleep 25; screencapture -x cap6.png

Interesting that Apple has switched from PDF to PNG as the screen capture file format with Tiger. Would be nice if they offered a preference for that.

Show notes: Steve Jobs’ introduction of OS X on Intel processors, Mac growth, etc. Took forever to get a WiFi connection. 3800 attendees, 3700 of whom have PowerBooks, so not much bandwidth to go around. This will be old news by the time this goes up, but FWIW…
Continue reading “WWDC 2005 Keynote Notes”

That thin blue line running vertically down the left side of my iMac screen mentioned a few weeks ago? It went away on its own. I don’t like symptoms that appear and disappear without reason or cause. Few things more mystifying than intermittent computer problems. Things should either work or not.

Two days ago I walked into the office to have nostrils greeted by a truly acrid chemical smell emanating from the top vents. The kind of smell that you just know causes cancer without even having to look it up. Shut it down, opened it up, everything looked absolutely hunky. Must be pooting forth from somewhere hidden — inside the power supply or something. Fortunately, the Apple Genius was able to duplicate the smell immediately (“I love the smell of burning resin in the morning,” he said, quoting Duvall). A capacitor frying, probably. Or something worse. Maybe I’ll get a new motherboard out of the deal. [Update: Yep, an industry-wide problem with bad caps.]

So now I’m working on a borrowed PowerBook — divorced from all my data — for the next two weeks. Which actually coincides nicely with WWDC, and is giving me a chance to check out the new Mail.app in Tiger, which has come a long way, baby. Loving it. The fact that it integrates with Spotlight while Entourage doesn’t is giving me one more reason to consider moving on from Entourage (even though I do think it’s one of the cleanest apps MS has ever produced, it’s got an IMAP bug that drives me crazy, so I’ve been using Thunderbird for IMAP for the past few weeks).

Also having a great time playing with Dashboard Widgets, and will learn how to create them myself next week. Friend Guy D2 created a Widget port of Brian Eno’s classic Oblique Strategies. My strategy for today:

Make what’s perfect more human.

Will strive to do that. Got a favorite Widget? Let me know.

We watched Apple move from 68k to PowerPC. They survived, and were better off for it. We watched as Be moved from the Hobbit processor to PowerPC, and then to x86. The x86 transition worked so well for Be that we heard Jean-Louis saying things like “Our only regret is that we waited so long to do it.” Now it seems that Apple is not getting the speed bumps they need from IBM, and are going to start shipping Macs with Intel processors. With all of the recompiling (and porting of advanced instruction sets) that a move like that entails. With the inevitable impact on current sales. With the shock and awe of “professional pundits and analysts,” who need to take a deep breath and loosen their jaw muscles a bit, methinks.

The story could be a red herring or false leak, but news.com is pretty credible and doesn’t do rumors. The armchair critics at MacSlash and SlashDot are having a field day with this. Of course it almost certainly doesn’t mean OS X running on any old beige box — chances are great that the system will depend on custom ROMs only available on Apple hardware (remember that most of Apple’s profit is in hardware — the OS is luxury bait to sell the hardware, a mystical glue that welds consumers to the real cash cow). But the door does get opened, and it’s not inconceivable that we could see OS X on generic boxes in the future. With Darwin already x86-compatible, a huge amount of underlying work is already done. I have no love for CPU architectures – I’m here for the OS (just installed Tiger today, having a gas). The cheaper and more ubiquitous the box, the better.

I’ll be at WWDC most of next week – will be interesting to see the announcement and watch the fallout.