The Author – Bart Busschots
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Jan
26
This has to be one of the coolest and most original web sites I’ve seen in a long time. Literally hours of fun if you get bored/pissed off at work: www.netdisaster.com
Jan
21
Something which has annoyed me for quite some time about OS X is how little control you get over SMB sharing (unless you run OS X server). I am generally a fan of Apple’s "keep it simple" approach but in this case they’ve gone too far and made it so simple as to deny ordinary users access to many features the underlying OS has. Well, the problem is now solved by some nice DonationWare utils form HownWare (www.hornware.com).
OS X contains a complete Samba Server and a complete Samba server and client but
unless you have OS X Server you only get very limited GUI access to these features. You can fully share your entire home dir to your username
and password and you can have a fully public folder called "Public" in
your home directory that everyone can see and that’s it. IMO that is
not good enough! If you are not afraid of the command line you can of
course set up your own shares manually, as I have done on some of my
Macs, but that is beyond the realms of the Ordinary user.
This is where HornWare come in with a nice set of utils. The best one IMO is SharePoints which gives you both a standalone app for managing all your SMB shares as well as a pane you can add to the system preferences app (OS X’s version of Windows’ Control Panel). This gives you all the control you could hope for and at first glance seems a nice app. Another very useful app is SharePoints Auto Mounter which allows you to set up finder to automatically connect to remote shares when you log in, ideal in a work situation where you want access to files on departmental shares etc..
Screenshot of SharePoints System Preferences Pane:
Jan
20
SimCity4 for Mac – UNPLAYABLE
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After much hassle (see here) I finally got SimCity4 installed on my Mac today and I am unbelievably disappointed. The game is so buggy and unstable that I’ve seen pre-alpha releases of software perform better. Both my Macs are dramatically above the minimum spec but the game does not work on either. On my Mac Mini it crashes each time you try to load any city and on my better half’s G5 iMac it just freezes every few minutes and forces you to do a hard reset of the machine. The only way I can describe this game is un-playable. If you’re tempted to buy it, don’t! It is so bad I’ve just emailed to the shop that sold me the game asking for a re-fund because the product they sold me is sub-standard. TBH I am tempted to take them to small-claims if they don’t comply because I genuinely feel defrauded here.
Jan
18
Well, it’s taken them long enough but Google Earth for the Mac is now available all be it in Beta form. Had a bit of a play with it and so far I’m impressed, seems stable and looks bloody shinny with all that Mac graphics goodness at it’s disposal!
Jan
16
Apparently Dell will be pre-installing FireFox in the UK
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There have been rumors around about this for a few weeks now and try as I might the closest to an authoritative source I can get is a post on Blake Ross’ blog (he is a FireFox co-creator). Should this turn out to be true it could have quite an impact on the browser usage on the web, particularly for UK sites. I can only see it as a good thing. I also enjoyed some of the rumors I’ve seen about the reasons for this on the web, the best being that it’s a ploy by Dell to reduce the amount of support they have to give because it will cut down on spy-ware infections and the invasion of those annoying porn pop-ups!
Jan
12
Musings on Macworld 2006
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So yet another Macworld has come and gone so it’s inevitable that Mac-heads reflect on such things. Personally, my predictions were about 50% right and 50% wrong on the big stuff. The Intel iMacs were a complete shock to me, the Intel Notebooks, totally expected.
Well, we may as well start with the BIG stuff, and lets face it, the move to Intel CPUs is the biggest thing to happen to the Mac since OS X. I fully expected that there would be Intel based Macs unveiled this January. I really didn’t expect Apple to let a whole year pass between their announcement of Intel Macs and those macs being unleashed. Why was I so sure? Simple, sales would have started to plummet as we got nearer and nearer to the summer as more and more people started putting off getting a new Mac until the new ones were out.
Personally, I had expexted the iMac to be the last Mac to get the Intel treatment. Why? Because they were the most recently re-vamped and were not particularly unders-peced or anything like that. Since Intel PowerMacs have been available to developers since last summer I was quite sure that an Intel PowerMac would be the first Intel Mac to be released, WRONG! After that I had expected Intel Notebooks to be the next because lets face it, the G4 iBooks and PowerBooks were just not good enough to compete anymore. Another machine that I expected to get the Intel treatment very early on was the MacMini, again it’s a G4 and again it is rather under-powered compared to what’s out there in the PC market. I also expected to see it released with Front Row and a to be a full TiVo complete with TV Tuner. This could still come to pass in the next few months but nothing at Macworld about it. Basically, I’m shocked to see a G5 machine replaced with an Intel chip before all the remaining G4s are all replaced. What makes it worse is that I accepted delivery of a 20" G5 iMac yesterday!
There was nothing really major with regards to the iPod in Steve’s key note. We got the usual sales figures with the standard blurb about how great iTunes is doing but nothing really new or revolutionary on that front was revealed to us.
The other major part of the Keynote was apple software. Aperture looked very impressive as did the new and improved iPhoto with its PhotoCasts. I was also impressed by the themes in iMovie and the PodCast Studio in Garrage Band also looked good. However, what really intrigued me was the release of iWeb. There can be no doubt that the pages it produces look very flashy on the surface and that the interface seemed very good, however, I am reserving judgment on it till I see the source code that it generates. Perhaps Apple will have achieved a miracle and invented WYSIWYG web software that doesn’t suck but I’m not convinced yet!
Finally, going back to the Intel thing for a moment, I have to say I like their new adds about Apple "liberating" the Intel chip form the dull little boxes they used to be confined to. The slogan on their web page is also great IMO; "What’s an Intel chip doing in a Mac? …. A whole lot more than it’s ever done in a PC".
Jan
11
In general I really like the Dock and prefer it to the Windows Start Menu. It’s great for the apps you use a lot but not so great for getting at apps you don’t use often. Well, with Himmel Bar that problem goes away!
[tags]OS X, Himmel Bar[/tags]
Jan
4
Having just had a very negative experience with a Ryanair flight I think I should provide a warning to people – some of the airports Ryanair fly to are not actually properly equipped to offer a reliable international service. The case in point is "Brussels South" but this also applies to others such as Eindhooven.
Dec
19
How do Apple inspire such mad obsession – the mind boggles
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Rumors are doing the rounds that the Intel based macs will have a different Boot Chime to the current G4/5 macs out there. One wonders why something this trivial and inconsequential would even warrant reporting but in the mac circles this is big news (if you don’t believe me google for it) and people seem to be genuinely emotive about the issue. This might lead you to believe that the mac startup chime is something special like Beethoven’s 5th or some such – nope, it just makes a load bong that scares the crap out of you if your volumes is up on the high side! Unless they make it do something genuinely annoying like play that stupid ‘Intel Inside’ jingle from the Intel adds I genuinely don’t give a shit what they do! People have said that Apple inspire fanaticism more than any other OS and when you read some of the comments on blogs and boards about something as trivial as the noise your mac makes about once a month when you need to reboot it you are left in no doubt about the existence of this fanaticism! What I’d like to know is HOW they inspire this crazy passion and loyalty, figure that out and you’re made for life!
Dec
17
Why closed standards are a bad idea – a personal experience
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I’ve rather made a name for myself as and anti-closed standards person on some boards I’m on and have perhaps pissed a few people off by implementing policies on file uploads etc. However, I recently got stung because I had saved important information (both my undergraduate theses) in a closed format a few years back. When I went to get at that information again a few weeks ago I realised I was in for a battle because the format I had saved the data in was no longer supported and since it is a closed standard no one else could make a viewer or a converter for it.
No prizes for guessing which company swallowed both my theses, it was of course MicroSoft. When I was in 4th year I had discovered an obscure but really cool tool that came with MS Office 97 called "Binder". This allowed you to build up a document out of lots of sub-documents of any MS Office type. In other words you could have a separate Word Document for each chapter making it much easier to edit and also include Excel spreadsheets etc. All these sub-documents could then be printed as one document and Binder would make sure all the pages were numbered correctly for you. Binder saved all your sub-documents in one file in its own format (.obd file).
When I went to convert my thesses to PDF for publication on my website I was horrified to find that neither Office 2000 nor Office XP had a clue how to open an Office Binder file. Some googling on the matter revealed that MS had abandoned Binder from Office 2000 on and had not bothered to even bundel a converter/extractor or anything like that. If you had used Binder your documents were gone. MS obviously don’t give a damd about their customers if they dare use any of the more obscure tools they charge you an arm and a leg for. I was majorly not impressed.
In the end I had to find a machine that still had Office 97 and then install a PDF printer driver to get my theses back out. It took me weeks and a lot of hassle and even now my CS thesis is missing two appendices because I had done those in MS Project and that too disappeared into the ether and I haven’t been able to find a machine with that installed anywhere yet.
Bottom line, if you value your data save it in an open format so that people other than the company that wrote the software you use can write readers/converters so you can always get at your data. Proprietary data formats are dangerous so don’t trust your data to the whims of people like MicroSoft!