[...] like spinach being good for you because it held the iron your red cells needed. After decades of the disgusting veggie inflicted upon young kids – I remember, a scientist went back to the bench and found out there was no digestible iron whatsoever in spinach. You don’t get calcium by ingesting chalk, you need a calcium compound that’ll get through the sophisticated filters in the digestive system. Eating spinach gives you as much digestible iron as sucking nails.
It’s the little things that make it all worthwhile. Seriously now, the article is a really good read as a whole.
Although I am not a full-time developer, I do deal with a fair amount of information that benefits from the joys of versioning (including software I write). A lot of that work today happens in an IDE (Xcode), but a lot of it happens in other contexts, so having a pretty (and above all, useful) tool to navigate a repository is quite useful. I have been using Versions for the Mac since it was beta, and it has proven to be a worthy helper. Recently, I ran into Cornerstone, and I decided to try it out of curiosity. Both are solid apps, and either one will service your SVN needs nicely. Hopefully Git will get one in the near future.
The optimist thinks the glass is half full. The pessimist thinks the glass is half empty. The engineer knows the real truth: that the glass is twice as large as it should be for optimum utilization of resources.
Exchange support in Snow Leopard has so far worked really well, including iPhone syncing with MobileMe. Good-bye Outlook running under VMware. Really, good-bye to about the only reason I ran some flavor of Windows anymore.
The fine folks at Gizmodo are running story titled The Best Alternatives to Every Apple Product. Curiosity killed the cat. And they nearly killed mine (the curiosity, not the cat). The comparisons are, in general, somewhat bland, but they leave the best for last: the “Mac Pro ($2,500) -> Hackintosh (far less $$$)”.
While the pictures accompanying each item are clearly not intended to be accurately representative (I suppose), the one for the MacPro item is somewhat misleading (or incorrect, depending on your take).
The MacPro on the left is placed opposite to a futuristic-looking system, which does look sassy. The case turns out to be Thermaltake’s Level 10 case. I almost want one. Newegg, always ready to provide some pricing guidance, breaks the news: the case itself sells for $849 (free shipping), but it’s only available as part of a DIY PC Combo. Ah, yes: $4,663.99. I haven’t compared CPU/memory/etc specs: that’s not the point.
Pictures (like, apparently, Gizmodo’s post) are filler, and no one is likely going to argue that they buy Apple products because they’re price sensitive, but pictures also offer context and visual clues (and are supposed to not be, at a minimum, fallacious).
When I nuked and paved the laptop, I cleaned up the virtual machine stable I had been hauling around for some time.
About two years ago I switched from Parallels (which had been working relatively well for me and was, for a while, the only option for the Mac) and went back to VMware (so that I could run VMs elsewhere if I needed to). Parallels 5 came out recently, and they had sent out an offer for a cheap update, so I decided to give them a try. I used their Virtual Machine Transporter to convert a Win7 beta VMware virtual machine, but Parallels ended up choking on it (it went into this loop where it wants to log the user in and out for the changes to the Shared Profile to take effect). I’m on the road, so I gave up quickly: I dislike getting beachballed into oblivion and having my laptop rendered into a hot molten pile of silicon (solid 100% CPU utilization). I uninstalled Parallels, wiped the virtual machine, installed VMware back and started the old VMware-based machine. For whatever reason, now VMware chokes on it too: the endless beachballing, CPU slaughtering… the works.
That’s almost five minutes humanity won’t be able to get back. No Logo comes to mind. I love the bit when they all mumble (chant?) “Microsoft!” (about 1:50 into the video). I once had dinner at a crab restaurant (I think it was Joe’s Crab Shack) in Colorado Springs where the servers did a similar thing. I actually enjoyed it, primarily because I had a beer and some really good food in front of me, and it fit the moment. Not so much at the Microsoft store. Really. Unless they have a beer dispenser somewhere. And it event then…
Today I installed CNET’s TechTracker and while I do love the concept, it’s likely to get uninstalled. Primarily, it’s not actually tracking the bulk of the software I would like to track because it seems to only pay attention to /Applications. In the fine tradition of sysadmin file system organization (or simply my own personal mental organization) I try to keep most of the apps away from the system’s /Applications directory, so I have a /Local hierarchy where I keep, well, local stuff (so there is such a thing as /Local/Applications where most of the apps I use live; there are exceptions for those that insist on living in /Applications, such as CS4 or Fusion). Looking into the preferences pane, there doesn’t seem to be an option to add other locations.
I realize most people install applications in the system location, which is fine. It simply means TechTracker isn’t of much use to me at this point in time.
