September 02, 2004
I LOVE APPLE
I've been writing a long entry on last weekend's trip, but since it is not finish yet, I could not wait to post these amazing news. Last September I bought a beautiful Apple 20" Cinema Display (of the old design of course). As great as this display is, it has the small blemish of a broken power button, which will activate at completely random times. When the power button (which is electronic and touch sensitive) goes off for longer than...
Posted on September 2, 2004 05:48 AM
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August 25, 2004
Rethinking the iMac
I want to give a bit of an apology for my last post on the new iMac. While I still think that having a consumer computer without an optical drive (except for some subnotebooks) is a terrible idea, this is apparently not what this iMac model is meant for. The targetted market is computer clusters, where having an optical drive is often seen as a security risk, because system administrators often forget to change the boot order, so that the...
Posted on August 25, 2004 02:41 AM
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August 22, 2004
A Terrible Mistake
Apple is widely believed to release a new G5 powered iMac at its upcoming Paris Expo, to be held on August 31. As with many Apple products, rumoured specifications of the upcoming iMac have been all over the web for a while. When it comes to rumours there are few websites that tend to be as accurate as ThinkSecret. But according to this ThinkSecret article, the new iMac's Education priced model will not come with an optical drive:Experts Think Secret...
Posted on August 22, 2004 06:27 AM
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July 06, 2004
Konfabulatory
I just tried out Konfabulator which has gotten a lot of attention because Apple just announced a virtually identically product by the name of Dashboard. This should not be confused with Nat Friedman's program of the same name, which is not at all related. Konfabulator allows the downloading and displaying of so called widgets, some of which come with the program, while others can be downloaded here. Popular widgets includes iTunes Remotes, Battery Charge Displays, Event Listings, Stock Tickers, etc....
Posted on July 6, 2004 08:47 AM
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May 30, 2004
Safari & Undo
Safari really needs undo capabilities for text fields, especially when used to edit weblog entries, such as this one....
Posted on May 30, 2004 05:33 PM
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April 28, 2004
iTunes Crash
My laptop deadlocks. I restart. I start iTunes: "The iTunes Music Library file cannot be read because it does not appear to be a valid library file." I am currently working on restoring my playlist and am VERY annoyed. VERY annoyed. I tried the way described on many weblogs (looks like this is not that uncommon), but only got a very old version of my playlist back. I am now reimporting all my songs (just the library description, not the...
Posted on April 28, 2004 06:13 PM
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February 11, 2004
iChatless in Stanford
I installed iChat AV 1.2 beta a few days ago and today it stopped working. Tristan is having similar issues so it's not just me. I am extremely annoyed and hope that it will work again soon. In better news, I got some awesome Thomas D songs today....
Posted on February 11, 2004 12:41 AM
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November 10, 2003
Camino Out, Enter Safari
I will give Camino 2 weeks, as of today, to release a new version, otherwise I will switch my main browser to Safari....
Posted on November 10, 2003 06:14 PM
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October 29, 2003
Ideas for the Post Panther Mac
Adam Angst raised some great points at his TenCon Keynote . In the future Apple needs to provide standard ways for programs to interact with each other. iPhoto, iTunes and the like are all great programs, but if they are to be integrated effectively, Apple needs to give independent programmers better ways of adding featuers to them. Architectures, not Applications. iPhoto is just an application. iPhoto should be an image database that Apple provides at the system level for anyone...
Posted on October 29, 2003 10:20 AM
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October 29, 2003
More Dual Display Issues
Sometimes I attach my monitor to my laptop before opening the screen and thereby waking it up. What happens is that my laptop then assumes that my external display should be the main monitor. This is not a big problem of course. But after plugging out the display, the background image on my laptop display vanishes, and I have to go back and reset it. My background images are random chosen from one folder. If anyone knows what might be...
Posted on October 29, 2003 12:46 AM
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October 28, 2003
Screensaver Issue
When watching DVDs in Full Screen mode on my Dual Display setup the Screen Saver comes on after a few minutes. This happens on both Displays, but does not happen when I unplug my 20" monitor, and just use the internal display. This will probably be fixed by 10.3.1....
Posted on October 28, 2003 06:56 PM
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October 28, 2003
Terminal Issues When Running Emacs on Sweet Hall Machines
Panther creates an issue when trying to log onto the Sweet Hall machines over ssh from Terminal.app and running full screen applications like Emacs. I will go over how to fix the problem and then explain it for those of you who are interested in why it doesn't work. Log into a sweet hall machine and type setenv TERM vt100 Then type emacs .cshrc. Go to the last line of the file and type setenv TERM vt100. Then save the...
Posted on October 28, 2003 01:39 PM
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October 27, 2003
OSNews.com & More about Exposê
My Panther review was posted on OSNews.com this morning. I hope to write more for them in the future. I have been using Exposê more and more in the last few days, and I am starting to realize how great a feature it is. What I particularily like to do is push F9 and then look at all my windows at the same time, so I can read several IM conversations at the same time. Unfortunately, when I want to...
Posted on October 27, 2003 02:16 PM
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October 20, 2003
More on the iTunes Store
From a The Register article: Why a song costs just as much when delivered via the Internet sans packaging instead of by a complex global shipping system is a question that needs answering. We also wonder why users are paying the same price for music but can't do what ever they like with their property. Although the Register is known for complaining about even the smallest of issues, and I generally like the iTunes store, the article does raise some...
Posted on October 20, 2003 01:51 PM
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October 16, 2003
Sooooooo Cold!
Hell just froze over. Except that I don't believe in Hell, and that everyone knew that Apple was going to announce iTunes for Windows today. But the significance of this should not be understated or even worse, ignored. In recent months Apple has become increasingly good at making world changing announcements, coming up with new innovations that might change the lives of many computer users. The iPod, the Music Store, the G5, Panther, the Music Store for Windows,......, are all...
Posted on October 16, 2003 05:03 PM
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October 09, 2003
Panther - October 24th
The release date for Panther is finally set: October 24th 8pm. I for one will be buying it on the same day from the Stanford book store or get it from the Palo Alto score, if they offer student pricing. I think that the price is acceptable for the new features and improvments in Panther, especially since it is only 69$ for students. Because of my excitment about this I am going to start doing research into Darwin again, since...
Posted on October 9, 2003 12:03 PM
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October 09, 2003
Predicted, Released and Unreleased
A while ago I predicted that Apple's strategy for the iPod would make it into a mobile home directory, as well as a music player. This would allow users to work on any computer, by attaching their iPod, and then synchronize all the changes with their home computer. Apple announced this feature with Panther (see below), but then removed it from it's website. The following excerpt is not on the Apple website any more. We can only hope that it...
Posted on October 9, 2003 11:38 AM
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October 01, 2003
Apple Everywhere!
My friend Greg who works at Microsoft is now an Apple convert and would love to get a Power Mac, if only there were a C# implementation for it, that he needs for work. I am sitting in class right now, and behind me my former TA and Microsoft Campus Representative is sitting, typing away on his PowerBook. Also, there are more and more Apple laptops showing up in Stanford CS classes....
Posted on October 1, 2003 01:38 PM
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August 01, 2003
Hydra 1.1.1 Featuring HTML Preview
This is mainly for you HTML monkeys out there. TheCodingMonkeys recently released a new version of Hydra that includes a new feature called Web Preview. Web Preview uses the Safari rendering engine to render an HTML file you are editing, and updates the changes automatically, or upon saving - you choose. This means that it is no possible to see every change made to an HTML document without using a cumbersome WYSISYG HTML editor like Frontpage. I will definitely use...
Posted on August 1, 2003 04:32 AM
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July 05, 2003
Apple's Plan for the iPod
I have a little revelation that I'd liked to share with you. It came to me yesterday. Why is the iPod so important to Apple? The iPod is a large hard-drive that you take with you as much as possible. Nobody would every carry around a large storage device with them all the time, but the iPod gives people an incentive to: it just happens to be an MP3 player. While the MP3 capability is still the main selling point...
Posted on July 5, 2003 02:58 AM
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June 26, 2003
Musings on the WWDC - Good Times Ahead
First of all iChat 2 is great news, because video conferencing was the only feature I was missing from my Mac. I do, however, hope that it will be compatible with some Windows application, so that I can communicate with windows users. After some deliberation on future acquisitions, I stand by my decision to buy a 20" display next year. I just hope that the Euro gets stronger again, and that prices on displays drop slightly before next September/October. Now...
Posted on June 26, 2003 02:32 PM
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June 23, 2003
Take That gxx_personality_v0 - Now It's Preview.app
Thanks to Tristán I realized why I was getting the weird linker error. It turns out that writing systems code from Hydra is not the best thing to do, because the linker doesn't handle some part of the resulting files correctly (probably the line endings). This means that I have to write stuff in emacs, and that I should consider using the Apple XWindow client instead of Terminal.app. Hm..... In other news Preview.app has stopped working for no reason. Tristan...
Posted on June 23, 2003 03:24 AM
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May 27, 2003
iTunes 4.0.1: No more internet sharing
By now others have commented on the release of iTunes 4.0.1, but this morning I was probably one of the first users to download it. This also meant that I was unable to listen to shared stations anymore, because most users had, and have still, not updated to this version. While this removal of features is definitely not good news, I understand Apple's decision. I still think it is wrong, to kill particular features, only because they could be potentially...
Posted on May 27, 2003 06:15 PM
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May 05, 2003
Learning Cocoa and Writing BattleFungus
My progress in learning Cocoa has been acceptable. I have been programming in it for about a day now, but there are lots of things I do not yet know. Many things are very interesting, some I like a lot, some will take a bit of time to get used to. Right now I'm having a problem with the debugger. I cannot debug properly when the window of the app displays itself. I'm not exactly sure, what the reason for...
Posted on May 5, 2003 09:38 PM
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April 28, 2003
I'm Writing a Game AI!
Tristan was intrigued by the idea of me writing the AI for the computer player of his game, and I will probably start this weekend. Dylan, who took CS 221 (AI for AI people), gave us some good suggestions on how to do it, and I will talk to John McCarthy about it too. We will have to play the game a LOT to learn good winning strategies, and know what the computer should consider in his move evaluations. Once...
Posted on April 28, 2003 11:09 PM
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April 28, 2003
iTunes 4, Music Service, iPods
Apple released lots of cool new music stuff today, and I'll cover all of it. Let's start with the iPod. Good to have 30GB models now, 20 was too little for me to consider buying one. The same goes for upgrading to a 15GB and 10GB model. The design is very elegant and the docking station is great. Now the iPod can really be something that you connect to your computer easily and then just take with you, without any...
Posted on April 28, 2003 06:04 PM
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