Or so iTunes tells me. No, this isn’t a rant about DRM, iTunes, Apple or anything along those lines. Ranting requires energy, and I rather devote it to more productive matters. I prefer, as the saying goes, to “vote with my wallet”.
A couple of months ago I went on a limb and purchased a HD movie from the iTunes Store, mostly as an experiment. After checking out the goods, I decided I probably would not be buying any more movies, given subtitles (which are generally a strong requirement for a multi-lingual household) are not available. But I wasn’t ready for the surprise of not being able to watch said movie with or without subtitles at all. It turns out that now that I have upgraded my desktop system (which has a Mini Display Port), the movie will simply not play. Jemery Horwitz has a write up on why this is the case. This is annoying, especially given the fact that the system is Apple branded end to end.
I said this wasn’t a rant on DRM, and it isn’t. I subscribe to the mantra of use what works for you, and this doesn’t work for me, so my response is that I will not be buying any movies. I will live, and the $15 I spent on the movie will have to do for SD (vs HD) for that one movie. Live and learn.
[...] 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.
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.
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).
