I have an iPod and it’s worth every penny, no doubt.. BUT I have a huge complaint, the sheathing on my remote unit has receded and has exposed the delicate and tender wires underneath. I was wondering if any of my readers or if anyone that finds this comment in the Google Cache has an insight on how to fix. I have pictures here.

It has developed a blotchy white screen-condition. Apparently the 15" AluBooks have a known (if not popular) defect where certain uneven spots of screen will start to go dramatically lighter than the rest of the screen. I hadn’t noticed it until I opened up a white document and noticed these splotches. Fortunately Apple has fessed up to this unfortunate state of affairs and has sent me a box wherewith to ship back. I must admit, I’m a bit angsty about being PowerBook-less for a few days. Heh, maybe this will be the chance to catch up on my reading instead of working to learn Cocoa.

This sucks. I had forgotten what a crappy experience using an IBM Thinkpad with Windows 2000 was. The trackpad is totally insensitive and the cursor slowly slides to the upper right-hand corner. Windows is godawful slow. I mean, it’s slow. Geez it’s slow. The box is ugly. The display is lower quality. The keys chatter too much because they are made of cheap crappy plastic Trying to get Win2K to get the idea that it should not use IE as the default browser is an exercise in pain. O! Powerbook of joy, how darest thou get sick!

Thank the lord. This PC business is for the birds. Something particularly irritating about PCs is that the window manager aspect of Windows fails to provide a utility to tab through multiple windows of the same application conveniently. Example, you have 3 “windows” of your browser open (I suggest you grab Thundebird from Mozilla.org) and you want to cycle through them without using a mouse or navigating to the taskbar. Can’t do it. In the Mac universe the command + ~ key will cycle through them. Add a shift to that and it will cycle backwards. This is very handy for those who want to keep their hands on the keyboard (fast) versus having to lift a hand and move to a mouse (or trackpad, or keyboard nipple).

You know you want it - another control key where the caps lock button is. Barry Lustig’s haxie take care of that problem. Here is the OSX site with the info: Here

Rumour is that Jim has a Mac. I have encouraged him to blog an entry about his new finer computing apparatus. As a former iMac owner I remember the thrill of bringing the big box home, the smell, the hypermatte covering, viva Apple.

The iPod’s random play feature is certainly my favorite. While there are times when I am annoyedat it for choosing to play “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” in the middle of my cardio exercise, sometimes it helps meld interesting mental connections. See, I consume music by the boatload, only thing that will even be close in competition is books. The Social Bobcat could tell you of the traditional order of teenage boredom in the suburbs of Houston along FM1960 included a general triangular attack of “Book Stop” (later Barnes and Noble), some mexican food place, and the CD Warehouse. As a result of 4 binders full of discs, I have tons of MP3 on my computer and my iPod that I don’t think of often.

A new line of signature iPods after the success of the U2 iPod.

This image has been very popular in the blogosphere and on del.icio.us.

I love my Apple, pretty much all the time. When I was a sophomore in college I made my first own computer purchase: Apple PowerBook 190cs. It had this rich color screen that was bright and it was only moderately back-breakingly heavy. It kept a charge about a good two hours and ran all the basic MS productivity apps. What wasn’t to like? It was on this system that I dialed into the University of Texas VAXen and Unices. I wrote history papers and fancied writing a novel or two (didn’t really pan out). I took that computer with me overseas and taught it to suckle at the teat of 240volt - it never complained.

When Lauren and I were looking at new laptops for her, when we went to brick-and-mortar shops we were consistently chagrined by the presence of “shiny” or “glossy” screened laptops. I looked at these laptops and could only snort in derision, knowing the obvious superiority of my matte finished Powerbook or my work Thinkpad. But with the new release of the MacBook, Apple has shoved a shiny, glossy knife between my scapulae.

Dear Apple, I have now saved sufficient money such that if you were to release a new Mac Book Pro with a dual-core Merom processor, I would buy it lickety-split. Please hurry,

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I took the opportunity to read the autobiography of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, iWoz. Steve believes in “extreme ethics”: always tell the truth completely Steve was incredibly precocious in terms of becoming an engineer Steve seems to be one of the ’new atheism’ camp: Science, proof, reason, plus nothing else. So I never got any exposure to religion. Church, mass, communion. What is that? Seriously I couldn’t tell you. As for religion, if I asked, my dad would say, no, no, he was scientific. Science was the religion. We had discussions about science and truth and honesty, the first discussions of many that formed my values.

The example and exercise scripts during the RoR class center around receiving requirements for a company that produces widgets. Never content to simply accept the assignment, I have pushed my, uh, unusual sense of humour onto the project.

Yesterday’s post looks a little incoherent with a day of rest between it and I. Based on the entreaty of Mr. Graitcer in the comments, I thought that perhaps I could try to characterize what it is to be fatigued in this way. First, let’s just say that it’s not the expectation of the teacher or the class curriculum that you work yourself into fatigue of this type. It’s not necessary or required. Yet in both of the BNR classes I’ve taken, the students worked late into the night on their own projects, or improving the assignments. Therefore, the motivation to work to this level of fatigue is not extrinsic, it is clearly intrinsic.

In case things look screwy, I’m trying to update my site to look good in Safari. Firefox kept having issues with memory when I was doing Rails development so I’ve been using Safari for a bit. I think that I’m going to convert, it works better for the Mac and it scrolls so-very smoothly.

I’m currently running an old PB G4 ( 2004 vintage ) and I would really like to get a new one. With buying apple hardware there’s always a waiting game and a cult of “but the next rev will have XXX that will really be worth waiting for.” In the end, I just usually get fed up and say, “Eff it”, plunk down a charge card and am happy. But I’ve made so many friends in the world these-a-days, perhaps some of them could help me. Is it time to upgrade? Should I go for the 15" ( love the LED, form factor, right size, better weight ) or the 17" model (screen real estate and HD are nice ) Is there some other factor that would make you hold out on this rev until some point in the future, and if so, what’s that thing you have to see before you buy another dose of mac kool-aid.

I’m not just a fanboy because my most excellent friend P-dizzle earns his daily bread on the hills of Page Mill Road, but because the virtualization software totally mega absolutely freaking rocks. I bought their latest product, Fusion, yesterday. It’s the virtual machine platform for new Intel Macs. So on this one can run a virtual machine of Windows, and I’m currently typing this in a virtual machine of Ubuntu Linux “Feisty Fawn”. Real reason is that I needed to figure out some magic associated with mod_rewrite and mod_proxy. For VMWare this is a snap. I created an ubuntu image, installed the necessary apache components and am now figuring out the magic.

Must display unicode properly Must let me use command ( AKA the apple key ) as META on the command line ( i.e. meta+b goes back one word ) Option is not an acceptable substitute for META ( lookin’ at you, iTerm )

Just a quick shout, I’m doing a lot of work during this off-site ( and enjoying the local lager ). Last night I bailed on post-work activities to do homework and to prepare a presentation that I gave today. It went well. Something that I’ve seen today is that 3rd party apps are now coming to the iPhone.

When I write my Latin homework in LaTeX, the source winds up looking like this: \item[13.] Am\={\i}c\={o}s tr\={\i}st\={e}s exc\={e}pit, ad m\={e}nsam inv\={\i}t\={a}vit, et e\={\i}s perfugium ac s\={o}l\={a}cium h\={\i}c dedit. Aside: You might be thinking that entering \={\i} just to get a single character would be a drag, but thanks to Textmate I have created snippets such that Control + letter does all that typing for me } Now if I want to post this to the web, I need to convert those characters from say \={\i} to \&\#x12b;. I would like it to go through the sentence and change each of those LaTeX-macron characters to HTML entities.

Back in 2005 Apple released the iPod shuffle. Realizing that they had just unearthed the biggest technological personal computing boom since Dell conquered East Anglia and realms beyond with Stephen, our hempen “Dude, you’re getting a dell” guy, they had a challenge: how can we get everyone to buy another one? Dude, you should liquidate AAPL and return value to shareholders! – Michael Dell circa 1997 Do not question the wisdom of Stephen Paul Jobs’ secret emotion reader of populations (Asimov anyone?). In this time, Apple brought us The iPod Shuffle. Yes, a USB stick with a button. And yes, I bought one.

It took a while to find this, but here’s my solution Add this file: /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postgres.launchd.plist <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd";> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <!-- Following the launchd man page enumeration of keys --> <key>Label</key> <string>org.postgres.launchd</string> <key>Disabled</key> <false/> <key>UserName</key> <string>_pgsql</string> <key>GroupName</key> <string>_pgsql</string> <key>Program</key> <string>/usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster</string> <key>EnvironmentVariables</key> <dict> <key>PGDATA</key> <string>/usr/local/pgsql/data/</string> </dict> <key>RunAtLoad</key> <true/> </dict> </plist> You can then load it and unload it by issuing: $ sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postgres.launchd.plist $ sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postgres.launchd.plist Now get to making some great Rails stuff!

Or, “Dont’ make me use your ‘rich editor’” At work we’re using a wiki engine whose power user syntax has been disabled. While it’s been disabled for good reasons, it still bothers me much. What one is left with is the rich text box which works great for dumping in cut-from-Word documents or which people who don’t want to type quickly and don’t mind mousing to turn on bold etc. As a person who wants to type fast and format as he thinks it, not being able to write markup as I write in wiki data is sad, sad sad.

I was particularly interested in one of the last pictures I saw from Engaget’s liveblog of the Apple iPad2 announcement. It was a picture of two crossed street signs (black letters on white field, just like the city of San Francisco) between “Liberal Arts” and “Technology.” Topolsky blogged the following, quoting or paraphrasing Steve: “It’s tech married with the liberal arts and the humanities. Nowhere is that more true than in the post-PC products. Our competitors are looking at this like it’s the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are pos[sic]-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, more intuitive.

Story 1: I was riding on the corporate shuttle to work yesterday and there were several open laptops at the table near me. We hit a bump in Route 237 and every Lenovo lid jostled and lay back down flat, facing the sky. The PC users jostled to recover proper angle. My lid just wiggled a bit. While the general gripe was “Chinese manufacturing,” my Apple, designed in California made in China, didn’t have this issue. It just wobbled a little bit. Story 2: And while I’m on the topic of laptops, every now and again I see these big pizza boxes on the Caltrain or at a coffeeshop with the word DELL on the lid.

I have decided to move away from a stylish Timbuk 2 computer bag. Fully encumbered and with my walk from the train station / around town it seems to be contributing to weakness and irritation in my right outer oblique muscles. Therefore I have moved back to a backpack. If it’s good enough for Dora née Explorer, it should be good enough for me. Looking at the choices I was struck by how unbelievably dorky they all looked. I tried to buy the most stylish of the available choices and wound up with the Brenthaven Slimline. Judge for yourself:

Update 2022: Once upon a time there was a product called the iPod: a music player with gigantic storage. It was superseded by it’s descendant the iPhone. It looked like this the following. The cable that plugged into the iPod had sheathing whose rubberized plastic receded. This was a design flaw.