Saturday, March 31. 2007
Actual Release Date for Apple iPhone?
| If rumors are to be believed, the release date for the much talked about Apple iPhone would be June 11th (coinciding nicely with the beginning of the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference). And for yet another rumor, according to The Register, apparently Google and Apple will be teaming up together for the iPhone, or idPhone as it now seems to be called. |  |
Friday, March 30. 2007
Google Notebook: Redesigned
| It looks like Google Notebook has a nice new redesign that makes use of Ajax for the UI. |  |
Thursday, March 29. 2007
(Firefox 3) Gran Paradiso Alpha 3 Released
| This past Monday, the third Alpha revision of Firefox's next generation browser, Gran Paradiso, was released. When I first got my Mac, I did play around with this version, and it did seem to be noticeably faster in rendering pages (of course, my favorite extensions were not available yet, which forced me back to Firefox version 2). Here are the release notes. (PC Magazine also has an article on it). |  |
Wednesday, March 28. 2007
LG BH100: First Reviews...
| The early reviews are in for the (long awaited) LG BH100 Dual-Format DVD Player and, unfortunately, they are not too good if one is a fan of the HD-DVD format. The general consensus seems to be that the BH100 does a good job on Blu-Ray, but doesn't support the full capabilities of HD-DVD. The BH100 player only plays the HD-DVD disc - there is no access to the menus or special features (one of the big points of the HD-DVD format). Below are some of the reviews from various sites: Also, here is the official LG press release. |  |
Friday, March 23. 2007
Running KDE on Mac OSX
Since the steps for getting the KDE desktop running on the Mac OSX platform are somewhat scattered all over (this wiki page was pretty helpful), I thought I would document the steps that I executed in order to get KDE running on Mac OSX:
I ended up installing the kdebase3 package(s) along with some needed extras (instead of the kde-bundle, because some of the software mirrors ended up being down). About the only serious snag that I ran into was a problem waking the Mac OSX out of sleep mode if the X11 screensaver was active. |  |
Wednesday, March 21. 2007
John Backus, Creator of Fortran, Dies at 82
Firefox 2.0.0.3 Released
| Firefox 2.0.0.3 has been released. It looks like this release is mainly to plug a security hole with FTP PASV scanning. Here are the release notes for the interested. (Note: It looks like this new version might have fixed some of the page rendering issues that I was seeing earlier as well -- *fingers crossed*). |  |
Tuesday, March 20. 2007
Adobe Apollo Finally Launched
Monday, March 19. 2007
Newboys Concert
| I took in The Newboys concert at Target Center Sunday evening. Overall, I would give the concert positive marks (my ears are still ringing!). The good:  (OK, I guess I have to admit that was a pretty geeky observation, but....  )The bad: I must have been sleeping under a rock for the past couple of months, because the news that he had left the band in Dec 2006 totally escaped me.  |  |
Sunday, March 18. 2007
Life with Mac (1st week).... ;-)
| It has been exactly one week since I have crossed the burning sands to Mac-land ;-), and I am quite happy to say that I have 95% of the things that I need configured done. Parallels Desktop is running w/ Office 2007 (needed for the some Windows-centric apps my work has), KDE is also running (that was a little bit more tricky) and my main environment is pretty well configured the way that I want it. I am pretty pleased to be able to do this after only a week on a totally foreign platform. Once nice nod to Apple is that any question I had (with the exception of configuring KDE), I never seemed to be more than 5 minutes away from the answer to any of my questions. Either it was intuitive enough that I figured out on my own or it was answered in the Apple help documentation, or answered in one of the many Mac Forums scattered around the internet (I have only had to pick my Mac co-workers' head only a couple of times ). In general, things seemed to just work right out of the box. I'll be running more intensive performance tests on my new toy in the coming week, but things look promising so far - the only time I have been able to even start pushing my dual-core CPU was the source building of X11 and KDE. I have had the machine up for a couple of days with about 12 applications running (including X11 with several Eterm windows open and my usual Firefox session with my 15 tabs open) and things still seem to be humming along. Some of the key differences that I found changing over from the Windows platform to the Mac platform were (Note: not criticisms, just observations): (Update {6/20/07}: It looks like you can use the combination of the "open apple-mouse-click" to do the insert function under X11). Having been unhappy with Safari (from being forced to use it on my sister's Mac), one of my first actions on my Mac was to get Firefox 2.0.0.2 installed. I noticed that it seemed to be just a little bit slower rendering some pages, so I tried the Firefox alpha 2 GrandParadiso (FF ver 3.0), which is much speedier, but crashes occasionally and doesn't support my favorite extension (del.icio.us bookmarks) yet (all part trying to live life on the bleeding edge). In my Mac journey, here are some of the cool (mac-centric) sites that I have come across: All in all, a surprisingly good week. It was very nice to be able to pick up a totally foreign OS and be able to have it configured exactly the way you want it (even with doing odd stuff, i.e. running KDE window manager in parallel with the Mac OSX Aqua one) within a week - certainly not what I expected. (I am sure the members of my new Mac family will be waiting in line to tell me "I told you so!"). | |
Friday, March 16. 2007
Windows Vista: How To Run for a Year w/o Activation
| Evidently, Brian Livingston uncovered an "undocumented feature" that allows you to run Windows Vista for a year without having to do the activation. Microsoft's response is to call this a "hack". |  |
Thursday, March 15. 2007
Life with Mac (Part 1).... ;-)
| Have been playing/configuring my new MacBook Pro for a couple of days now and I am trying to do the SysAdmin thing of learning all of nuances of the new system. By far, the hardest thing to get used to is the different mapping of the control/modifier keys (especially since I used Windows keyboard shortcuts a lot). I hope to have an in-depth review posted by the end of the weekend. So far, the early impressions have been very good (almost makes me ask the question of why I waited so long to get one in the first place ). | |
Sunday, March 11. 2007
Interesting Weekend...
| To put it mildly, the later part of the previous week, work-wise has been extremely grueling. In between on-call work and getting ready for DST (in which Sun Java so kindly dropped the ball by announcing on Friday that they had screwed up their Java DST patch release), it has pretty much been a non-stop work (with catnaps in between) from Thursday to Sunday. Thankfully, the DST changeover seemed to go pretty smooth in the end (which was nice to see, given all of the hard work that was put in getting machines and applications patched ).So, to make up for the horrendous past couple of days, I decided that I needed something to lift my spirits. After making many trips to the Apple store and returning home empty-handed, thanks partially to my niece who was with me ("What are you waiting for? You deserve it!") and tireless prompting of a few co-workers :-), I finally decided to take the plunge and plop down for a 17" MacBook Pro. I am still in the process of trying to get it configured the way that I want, as well as get all of my needed applications loaded (had to work again, so not much time to spend with the new toy), especially to run the KDE environment side-by-side with the Mac OSX environment (it looks like Fink will do most of what I want). Of course, in the process of trying X11 configured to work the way that I want, I came across some nice tweaks for the regular Terminal application as well: namely to have the focus follow the mouse (just for the Terminal application): just type the following string in a Terminal window (note: this only works in Tiger - 10.4.x): defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES. Note: For the curious (or the disinterested), I have just completed my first work maintenance window on my Mac (using just the Terminal window, which was bearable w/ the additional tweak of letting the focus follow the mouse). | |
Thursday, March 8. 2007
Google Desktop: Version 5 Released
| Google Desktop 5 has been released It sounds like the search to supposed to be improved (i.e. allowing you to preview files from search results in a browser for one) and it sounds like there was some security improvements as well. Here is the full list. |  |
Wednesday, March 7. 2007
Virtual Machine on a USB?
| VMware is introducing beta software called VMware Pocket Ace, that would let you distribute Virtual Machines on a USB drive. |  |
