Glog

A few months ago the aging Early 2009 Mac Mini in the living room was replaced with a 2010 model. The old one was having a hard time keeping up with HD content (mainly in terms of performance but also flat out refusing to display iTunes HD content after the upgrade to Snow Leopard) and the 1080p display over the DVI to HDMI adapter over-scanning issues were rather tiresome. The 2010 model did away with all that: faster CPU, more memory and native HDMI took care of those issues, which left a perfectly functional Macmini3,1 searching for a mission in life, a mission I had found even before I pulled the trigger on the new model.

Thus, the mission is defined: the Mac Mini needs to take over the services that run continuously so the other system can be powered off at will.

The migration is nearly complete: mail is flowing and the software repository is up to date. The wiki bits are still a work in progress, but those are not as critical, primarily because Evernote has largely replaced (and enhanced) the wiki use. None of this would have been possible without the MacPorts Project community, at least not as fast and seamlessly as it has been. So there is happiness in the living room and there is happiness in the office.

Safari 5 Reader it’s the shitznutz! I love it.

From Jean-Louis Gassée‘s The Apple Licensing Myth at Monday Note:

[...] 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.

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.

I had been wanting to take Snow Leopard for a spin for some time, but software availability at home and time constraints in general had prevented me from doing it. I picked up a copy during my last visit to California, so all that was left was finding some cycles to install it and get going with it. Friday just sort of came up from nowhere and enabled the forcing function: disk.dieByClickNoise(). New drive, some minor surgery, and voilá: ready for Snow Leopard.

It has been running pretty well minus a couple of annoyances: it doesn’t seem to get along with my wireless at home all time and iPulse now asks for an admin password upon login (which, admittedly, I don’t do all that often, so it’s not enough to be obnoxious). Everything else so far works rather well. Having been running on the same Leopard image for nearly two years, I felt it was time to start from scratch (i.e., discarding old apps I no longer use, rearranging some things in my home directory, fully switching to Xcode) and, along the way, verify that things work as expected. I’d say I’m about 80% done, but even at that level, I’m fully functional for work (and blogging, but of course).

Given the starting point, I did push MobileMe a bit by having it sync most of the items it supports (mail accounts and rules, the dock, etc). Everything worked as advertised, so a lot of that work was fairly effortless (and contributed to the cleanup). I also went ahead and updated most of the seed files I keep on the server at home (i.e., the bare baseline of apps, configuration and initialization files, and other data that I share across all the systems I use, which, at last count, was too many). Yes, I do eat my own dog food, and at some point I will polish what I have written about said dog food and publish it.

Once the laptop is 100% done and I’m satisfied with it (say, a couple of weeks of heavy use of most of the work/photo/video stuff), the desktop will follow, although I am thinking that the Mac Mini at home will probably happen soonish given its primary purpose in life is to deliver media into my living room. Alas, this is the end of the line for the trusty PowerBook G4, which turns four in a couple of months, although its current user will continue to enjoy everything Leopard has to offer for quite some time (until the system dies of Leopard is no longer updated or usable in it).

Courtesy of bstreiff: Enabling Remote Disc on not-Airs:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true

Context: we have an older MacBook with what appears to be a busted DVD-ROM drive, preventing a clean install of the newly arrived cat. After enabling CD/DVD Sharing on the “server”, nothing would show up on the “client”. After tweaking the above properties and restarting the Finder, it’s all good now. Install in progress.

Snow Leopard is still a rare-to-find species in Spain (at least in Valencia). No luck in four separate (and unrelated) stores this morning.

Yum: Apple to Ship Mac OS X Snow Leopard on August 28.

Luv Macports. Luuuuuuv them.

From Fake Jerry Yang comes an open letter to Joe Nocera, a writer for the New York Times, who wrote his own open letter to Jerry Yang (Re: Shafting Yahoo’s Shareholders), regarding Yahoo’s deal with Google. Mr. Nocera’s premise:

Besides, even if the deal does win federal approval, you’ve chosen to become a pawn of the most dominant company on the Internet. How exactly is that going to lead to a brighter future for Yahoo?

Which brings back memories of events that took place nearly 10 years ago:

Lots of boos at that conference, and yet, Apple hasn’t done too bad for itself. More than the money, it was the ability to not focus on Microsoft for a while (at least, not openly). Google needs Yahoo to stay alive (and separate from Microsoft) as much as Microsoft needed Apple to stay. I am not familiar with Mr. Nocera’s credentials, but I’m happy to watch Fake Jerry Yang hold his turf:

(c) blow me, you turd in a suit. Have you started a company? Have you ever done anything other than sit in New York write articles? Walk a mile in my moccasins, and then let’s talk.