yamahito

No, I’m not selling the iMac. No, not vista. Not XP, either. Windows CE

Yes, it’s new phone time, new contract time, and it looks like I’ll be able to have pretty much whatever I want. My friends are all going for the N95 8GB Nokia (we couldn’t afford the iPhone, even if it was offered on business tariff), but I’m just not getting on with the interface. Don’t get me wrong, the feature set is fantastic, and the camera with Carl Zeiss optics among the best I’ve seen on a phone. iSync integration with the macs is good. But I just don’t enjoy using it.

So I’m thinking of one of those HTC smart phones. In particular either the Tytn II (also known, I think, as the Vodaphone 1615 or the o2 XDA Stellar) or something similar without the largely pointless keyboard, assuming I can find one on tariff which isn’t processor crippled in comparison.

So, windows CE… does anyone know much about it? How difficult will it be to sync to the macs? How do people find the interface? Any comments welcome as always.

Sometimes the bredth and scope of the stupidity of the oversights of intelligent people can be staggering. I’m sure many of my friends will agree.

Today is the turn of Apple Software Update (ASU), a windows program that runs once a week to check for updates for quicktime, iTunes, Safari and the like.

As some of you will know, we suffer from an ongoing network issue here at work: every now and then we suffer a small amount of packet corruption. It doesn’t affect browsing the web, or email, or instant messenging much. But it frequently breaks large downloads over http: .iso images and large zipped or compressed files (such as update executables) tend to get corrupted and unopenable.

It’s a lucky thing, then, that ASU has a built-in checker to make sure that the files it downloads are the same files that they meant to download, right?

Wrong. ASU finds corrupted files fine, but then proceeds to deal with them in the worst possible way: after telling you that the file is corrupt (or more accurately, that it has an ‘invalid signature’), it gives you a chance to install the updates again. What it doesn’t do is re-download the update files; someone thought it would be a good idea to cache those. Admirable in other circumstances, all it means is that ASU continually fails verification tests on these files, and the updates are never installed. At least until newer versions are released or the downloaded files are flushed/deleted (not found out where they are yet).

Let me rephrase that: If something goes wrong when it’s downloading files, My update programs inhibits me installing updates.

Particularly for those of us running parallels across multiple monitors, here is a method of creating a floating Windows SystemTray using Geoshell:

For those of you not running parallels across multiple monitors and who are wondering what the problem is, parallels doesn’t reallly ‘do’ multiple monitors properly. It just resized the windows desktop across all monitors. I’m using parallels 2.5ish, but they still haven’t implemented proper multi-monitor support in 3.0 - it does make me wonder how well they’ll cope with Spaces when 10.5 is finally released. Anyway, it means that the Task bar is spread across both monitors which is a) ugly as sin and b) a right pain, hiding the system tray if, like me, your monitors are on different horizontal baselines.

I’m assuming you can edit the registry. If you don’t know how to do that, I wouldn’t recommend any of this. I am not responsible for you screwing up your computer.
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No, I’m not talking about going linux or BSD. I’m talking about the latest version of Parallels.

Yes, I know everyone is getting sick of me talking about my imminent move over to Mac OS X. But I think people may not realise how blurry the lines between my two primary OS have become. Check out this video; the last sentence is why I’m ‘making the change’:

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I’m not saying I entirely agree with it, but Robert Scoble wrote an interesting post this weekend about what’s wrong with Microsoft.

I’ve been talking for about nine months about moving to apple as my main desktop OS. It’s also the main direction my career seems to be moving towards. A lot of people tend to think this means that I’m pro-apple and anti-microsoft. Funny, because most of my mac-cy friends have always thought I was pro-microsoft and anti-apple.

The truth is, both companies are doing things wrong. Scoble’s post talks about microsoft’s oversights, but apple surely has some, too. They’re wrong about their attitude to security updates, as SilentBob will tell you. I also think that in the past they’ve been less than adequately open with prospective developers - that almost put them under in the past, and it looks like they’re doing the same thing with the iPhone.

At the end of the day I’m choosing mac because it offers me the most flexibility. I can open a bash terminal on a mac. Applescript, to be frank, has been a revelation to me. These days, I can even change hard drives or add OEM memory/graphics cards. But the deal clincher? Parallels. I can run windows on a mac, but not vice versa.

I’ll be ordering my mac pro in the next two weeks.

less than a month after Microsoft announced Silverlight, an open source linux variant, Moonlight has been announced.

Miguel de Icaza, part of the team who wrote Mono (the linux framework equivalent of .net) announced it earlier on his blog.

I think this is a good thing for Microsoft. Not only will it give market penetration, it will force them to keep a good pace with features and implementation. Whether they see it the same way, I don’t know

SB just pointed me to a great tool for troubleshooting drop-outs in streaming media;

I’m not having problems at the moment, but if I ever do, I’m sure this will come in handy. It probably also is of use for a number of other driver issues, particularly with sound cards, wireless adapters and modems:

DPC Latency Checker
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Just to prove Microsoft can still do some things better.

Does anyone know if there’s any reason why font rendering would be different on different platforms?

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Codinghorror seems to be slashdotted or otherwise down. Here’s a graphic from the original post which shows what we’re talking about: the top line is safari, the bottom line is IE with ClearType.

I’m sure it wasn’t long ago that a ‘mash-up’ was a seamless mix of two existing songs, but these days it seems to be taking on a different meaning in web design.

The name of the game, it seems, is taking elements from all those wonderful web-sites we belong to now, and mixing them together in some sort of portal/web-application.

Hmm… my latest flickr pictures and blog entries together with facebook information on a home page I’ve been meaning to write… Could be good, if it’s done right.

Honestly, I don’t know if it’s a useless fad or the next stage of web evolution. But Microsoft has jumped onto the bandwagon with Popfly.

Lots of people see me as some sort of ‘Mac geek’ (despite the fact that 95% of all my computing happens on a windows PC (for the moment)). Others are struck by my linux advocacy for servers. The truth is I don’t feel I’m particularly anti-Microsoft or pro-apple/linux. All of the current OS options out there grind my gears at some point or another, and all I want is to get the best of all possible worlds. But I do have some ‘automatic reservations’ about products from any software house based on previous experience, so I’m going to list a couple of MS-centric ones:

Microsoft have traditionally followed very closed-source development philosophies. When I say that, I’m not talking about the fact that their software is closed source, or that they charge too much for it: I really don’t think that they’re doing anything there that isn’t their right to do. The problem is that it extends to proprietary file formats and communication protocols and the like. And MS aren’t alone in this: real player, AOL Instant messanger, the list goes on.

One of the reasons I like how apple and google have changed in the last decade is that they will embrace open standards, even though their software is closed source. It means it’s easier to move data around different platforms, different clients… and rather than losing business, it seems to increase their market share. I think that this attitude will prove to be more successful in the long run.

So I’m a little cautious about popfly from MS - and also a little surprised, in a good way. I’m hoping that it will be a little gleam of Microsoft’s past glories - not a big invention, but a piece of useful innovation.

Ballmer must go?

I have my doubts about any article which starts with a joke likening Microsoft to a country yokel and then proceeds, in the next paragraph, to deny that it’s ‘Microsoft knocking copy’

However, I have more serious doubts about a man who loses control of his emotions to the point where he throws chairs around. I’ve done that, but I was eight at the time.

Maybe they have a point?