Planes, Pains and Automobiles

In 3 hours, we start heading to O’Hare to get me back on a plane. This is the third time I’ve left Evanston/Chicago for Atlanta, and each time I less want to even go back. Hopefully, Northwest can get me back there on the same day as was originally scheduled, but I’m not holding my breath on that one. We did go exploring a little yesterday after a monster day of unpacking, and went out to Lincolnshire to eat at the Red Robin. We really developed a taste for these joints back in Portland, and we were delighted to be able to eat at one again. It’s kind of a haul out in to really suburban suburbs – it makes Evanston look positively urban – but it was worth it. There’s also a Trader Joe’s on the way, something else we have missed from our Portland days.

Mac Talk show in Spanish

I’ve seen this posted on a few Macintosh sites now. There is an MP3 “talk radio” show about the Macintosh in Spanish. It seems to originate from Argentina as best I can tell. This is perfect for me with my desire to learn Spanish. In fact, the poster (who is anonymous on all the sites I see) says the same thing:

Is intended for mac audience who speaks in spanish and can’t listen to other mac shows on the net do to language barriers, and is great for people who loves mac and is learning spanish, because is a great way to practice listening while hearing great news from that thing that we love… Apple Macintosh!

I don’t like how they have the object tag in their HTML which automatically loads up an embedded MP3 player (and immediately starts downloading it.) I’d rather have another link for that myself. As it is, I downloaded the actual MP3 file with wget and will listen to it offline anyway.

Mac does it again

Writing a post in Blapp, which uses the default Mac OS X text editor window as far as I can tell, I stumbled across some hidden knowledge. This thing uses Emacs keys! Holy crap, how cool! By accident, I forgot what editor I was in and hit Ctrl-a to go the the beginning of a line. By gum, it did it! For a second nothing seemed unusual, until I realized I wasn’t using Emacs. So I hit Ctrl-e, voila, I’m at the end of a line. Damn! I went back to the beginning, and hit Ctrl-k, and the line disappeared, and Ctrl-y put it back. I love it! Am I the last to know this, or is this common knowledge?

MacCVS Client

I’ve just downloaded today and played around with MacCVSClient. It is a semi-graphical frontend to the venerable CVS client. From their promotional docs on the webpage:

A free multithreaded CVS client with Mac OS look and feel. It shows your sandbox in an intuitive hierarchical list view so that you are aware of every file’s status anytime. File logs are shown in hierarchical log views with quick access to file content diffs. Enhanced file annotations show related commit log messages. File differences and change conflicts are shown in special colour coded views. The add/import preview helps to avoid file corruption when adding new items to a repository.

I downloaded one of the repositories I work with, and all seems well. This might be a keeper.

I love OS X

I was fooling around with the launchbar on my Mac OS X box, and I wanted some of the things gone and I wanted Mozilla and a few other things in the launch bar. I brought up the preferences and couldn’t see a way to specify what I wanted, the way one does for the Start menu on Windows. On a wild hair, I just dragged the Mozilla icon over the bar and let go. Blip, a little animated graphic zips in there and now it is there forever. Hmm, says I, I wonder if I can do the same to get rid of them? I grabbed the IE icon, pulled it away and out into the main part of the desktop, where it moved, and then vanished in a literal puff of smoke. I thought that was so spiffy that I deleted a bunch of stuff just to watch it. I’m developing faith in this OS that there is always an easy way to do things. Most of the time when I find there isn’t, I’m just overthinking. Years of Windows and having to constantly fight it to get ones work done ingrains bad habits. OS X enables better ones. Long live OS X!

Palm Buys Handspring

Today it was announced that Palm will acquire Handspring. I’m a Handspring user who was happy with my B&W Visor Platinum, and replaced that with a color Visor Prism after I busted the first one. Frankly, I’ve been planning on going elsewhere after I wear this one out. The Springboard module is why I went with this line and when they dropped support for that in the Treo line, I was done. I’m still haunting closeout sales looking for cool discontinued modules. I’d be happy to get a GPS or an Audible Advisor if I could get them for $20. If I wasn’t already planning on moving away from Hanspring, this would matter more to me. I see in the article that they only have 2.9% of handheld market share. Didn’t that used to be more like 20%? I think the Treo fiasco did them in, a clear case of misunderstanding the value they brought to the table.

John Gruber in Waferbaby Interview

There’s an interview with John Gruber at Waferbaby. I started reading Daring Fireball because it was a default in NetNewsWire. Here’s an excerpt from the interview on PCs vs Macintosh:

now how could this be, that your typical graphic designer can perceive and appreciate the mac’s advantages, but most pc industry experts can’t? it’s because these guys are a bunch of jerk-offs. if they covered restaurants the way they cover technology, instead of evaluating how the food tastes, or the quality of the ambiance, they’d base their analyses on the chemical composition of the food.

no one claims you’re in a “cult” if you prefer hamburgers from friday’s over those from mcdonald’s, even though there are a lot more mcdonald’s restaurants and their food is cheaper.

[Daring Fireball]

OS X and Java

No more arguments, here is an entry about fun stuff. First, I saw a reference to something interesting, BlogPluck an RSS aggregator that converts blogs to Plucker format for handheld reading. It is also packaged as a Java webstart application, which I have never used. It needs a Java 1.4.1 install. Because I want my new old Mac to become my main syncing box, I wanted to upgrade Java on there. As I sat down at the computer, there was a window open from “System Updater” telling me which of my programs have updates available. Java is one, as it tells me 1.4.1 is what it wants to upgrade to. That’s why I was walking to the computer! I like it. I’ve only been using OS X for 4 days now, but I am thrilled with it. What is there to say but “Right on!”

Floating in a Mail Flood

I have been working with the Apple Mail app. I imported all my mailboxes from the old Mac and started over. I was working on getting my inbox under control and beaten down from 1200 mails. After the import the new inbox had the 300 mails that have come in in the last week. I’ve now gotten that down under 100. I’m going to get that cleaned down to nothing by tomorrow. The inbox will then be just that. If it is in there, it means that I haven’t read it or replied to it. After I’ve read it, I either file it or delete it. If I need to reply to it, I’ll leave it in there until I do, after which I file it or delete it. No longer will I leave mails in there for months or years, getting lost as new shit pushes the old shit upwards.

New Mac Setup

It is dismal and rainy in Atlanta today, but at least it is keeping the pollen at bay. I’m beginning to get serious with the G3 Mac. I’m importing the mail from Eudora on the old box to the Mail.app, I set up the Palm/iSync/iCal conduit business, got MT-Newswatcher all set up. The last was a surprise how easy it was. I ftp’d my Newswatcher files over, opened them on the new box and it went straight to setting up the news server and connecting. Only on the ones where I needed username and password did it require anything more from me. Even better, I was able to migrate my filters as well. That’s a little bit of the downer from moving away from Eudora. I’ve got a fair amount of effort investing in those filters. Someone needs to come up with an abstract way of representing mail filters, say in XML, that all mail programs read from and write to. That way you could easily export your filters to your friends, regardless what mail client they use. Good idea, huh?

New Old Mac

More fun with the new old Mac. I need to install make and some development tools. I went to install some Perl modules so I can use the Mac as my main box to download the archive MP3s of WREK shows and burn them to CD. I couldn’t install them since I was lacking make and a few other development tools. Once I get them on, I’ll really be rocking. I can then move all my stuff from being the Windows scheduler calling the perl scripts to a crontab entry on the Mac. Just the fact that my Mac has a built in cron (I used to have a fake-o cron-like extension on the System 8.6 box) makes me happy.

My New Old Macinstosh

As if reinstalling and getting a brand new image of a new Linux distro wasn’t enough for one month, I now have a new old Macintosh, a Blue and White G3 running OS X. I’m really digging it. I spent a full 6 years using my Performa 6400, about which I feel pretty good. I guess I’ll be moving the important stuff over and then carrying forward. My current Eudora mailbox has e-mails I migrated over from my original Mac, an LC II, so the saga continues on a third box. I’m doing pretty good about not thrashing, this only being my third Mac in the last 11 years. The box is sitting on my desk (I bought it from a coworker) and it is very hard to actually do my nominal work, when I’d much rather
be playing with the Mac.

No Title

I e-mailed about the new/old Mac today. We’ll see if the guy still has
it. $300 for a 300 MHz Blue and White G3, with an OS 9 and OS 10.1.5
on it. The cool thing is that it has Firewire. Last XMas my wife got
me a CD burner that has both USB and Firewire interfaces. It’s 24X,
but the USB only does 8X. I’m getting a little excited at the thought
of being able to run OS X. I had resigned myself to an indefinite
future of OS 8.6, which means that things like my newsreader of choice
MT-Newswatcher were no longer being developed on that platform. All
the action is happening on OS X. As late as yesterday, the guy was
posting about it on Usenet, so I hope it is still available.

No Title

I’m considering buying a new old Macintosh. There is a guy in North
Atlanta that I’ve bought a printer and a monitor from in the
past. He’s selling several Black and White G3s in the $300 range. I’ve
decided that I may never buy another new computer or new car
again. I’d rather buy them a year or three old, after the steep part
of the depreciation curve is over. I’m still using my Performa 6400
that I bought in 1997 when it was on clearance. This is 50% faster on
clock speed, but with the G3 chip, faster bus, and video RAM I think
it will feel significantly faster. Since the Performa can’t run OS X
the 8.6 I currently run is the end of the line for it. I’d like to
play with it, particularly since I’m comfortable fooling with the Unix
guts underneath it.

No Title

Last night we had dinner at The Stinking Rose in North
Beach. I’d heard of the joint but never been there. It was quite
something. The food was pretty good, but the schtick was a lot of the
appeal. Garlic everything, and our server was basically nuts. He also
took a shine to me immediately in that way that gets kind of
embarrassing. It did mean that anything I asked for we got very
quickly, so by the end of the meal all 6 other people were laundering
requests for service through me.

Today I’m going to barely – if at all – go to the Moscone
Center. Darlene will head there this morning and I’ll get ready, head
to the the Cartoon Art Museum
to get there right when it opens, and then take the train to the
Mission District after I’m done there. There are like 5 bookstores or
comic shops within a few blocks of the train stop, so this should be fun.