Bonjour, Bonjour!
Apple’s Rendezvous technology, largely an implementation of the Zeroconf standards, has been renamed to ‘Bonjour’ for trademark reasons.
Au revoir, Rendezvous…
May 2nd, 2005
What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?
May 2nd, 2005
Following yesterday’s not-entirely-smooth upgrade process, I now have my main machine running Tiger, and, apart from a few wrinkles, it’s great. (Here’s a very minor wrinkle for UK users: if you install the weather widget in Dashboard, it’ll cleverly select London as the location for the forecasts. Unfortunately, I think it’s selecting London, Ontario, or one of the other Londons; the forecast certainly isn’t right for us. Specify “London, United Kingdom” and it’s fine) Two and a half years ago, after installing Jaguar, I wrote that one of the good things about Apple software updates is that they generally make your machine faster, where Microsoft ones (in my now rather distant experience) tended to do the opposite. Well, the trend continues, and though there are some things that take more time in Tiger, in general the system seems noticeably snappier.
It was the worst of times, it was the best of times
May 1st, 2005
The following is an account of my experiences upgrading my Powerbook to the new “Tiger” version of Mac OS X – a long spiel which is probably of very little interest to anybody not likely to be doing the same thing… and probably not of much interest to them!
This turned out to be a very long post and only suitable for those with great stamina, so I’ve moved it into the Comments. Summary for the rest of you: Buy an external firewire drive if you don’t have one, do a complete bootable backup onto it before starting. Then reboot with a system CD and use Disk Utility to verify/repair your disk. Then do the install. Then reboot with the Tiger DVD and ‘Repair permissions’. That’s my recommendation, anyway, and you can read the rest if you want to know the reasoning.
Who Should You Vote For?
May 1st, 2005
Who Should You Vote For? is a site that I think all UK voters should at least try. It asks for your views on various key subjects and tells you how they match up with the views of the various parties. I was certainly surprised by the results it came up with for me, but I could see the logic behind them.
It has two major problems, from my point of view.
- It doesn’t ask you to rate your view of the competency/reliability/desirability of the individuals involved in any given party. I think this is important.
- It should be called ‘For whom should you vote?’ 🙂
Ndiyo goes live
April 30th, 2005
A friend recently joked that there was a discernible patten in my life: Any organisations I was involved in starting, I would leave just before the web site said anything meaningful!
Well, this was true of Ndiyo, but now, thanks to sterling efforts by John & Seb, the new site is live. More information will no doubt follow soon!
We’ve been almost ready to launch for a long time, but things like being mentioned on Slashdot tend to concentrate the mind.
Tipping the Tiger
April 30th, 2005
Now that Tiger, Apple new version of Mac OS, has been released, those of us with developer licences can talk about the cool new stuff, and there are more new articles and websites to read this weekend than ever before.
Anyone with an interest in the underlying techie details as well as the visible might enjoy John Siracusa’s 21-page review at Ars Technica.
A very significant new feature for me is not much talked about – the ability, at last, to rotate external displays and use them in portrait mode. This is a godsend for anyone who spends a lot of time reading or writing pages of text. I’m not sure whether it’s supported on all Macs or just those with certain graphics chips, but it works on my PowerBook.
Buzztracker
April 29th, 2005
Buzztracker is rather a nice idea.
Thanks to David Orange for the link
Ndiyo and Newnham
April 29th, 2005
There’s a good article on the BBC web site about the Ndiyo project and the hardware we’re using from Newnham Research.
What the tube map should really look like…
April 24th, 2005
The London Underground lines overlaid on a satellite image. (Click image for bigger version).
AirScooter
April 23rd, 2005
Ooh. Now, I really want one of these.
I have a lot to do in my gadget competition with John since he bought his Prius, but I think this might just allow me to overtake!
The PowerBook Sudden Motion Sensor
April 22nd, 2005
The very latest (2005) PowerBooks have a motion sensor built in to them. It will park your hard disk heads if you drop or bump the machine. But that’s not all it can be used for….
More on Adobe & Macromedia
April 22nd, 2005
I mentioned the Adobe/Macromedia merge a few days ago. There’s a nicely sarcastic translation by John Gruber of the FAQ that Adobe issued about the merger.
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