Miscellaneous Ramblings....

VMWare Fusion has released version 1.1.1, which is mainly a maintenance release containing miscellaneous bug fixes.

Amid rumors of the MacBook Air already shipping, here are several more reviews of the MacBook Air (here and here), where the basic consensus seems to be that while extremely functional, the MacBook Air isn't for everyone (read: power users). The main gripe seems to be one of two things: 1.) battery only replaceable by Apple and 2.) lack of conventional ports (i.e. firewire, ethernet, etc). On the plus side, Mossberg of the WSJ did say that remote installs seem to work reasonably well (after the Windows PC firewall was disabled).

For you Windows XP users, here is a handy guide of keyboard shortcuts for the Control Panel (something I had stumbled across while working on the nephew's computer this evening).

For you movie buffs out there, AMC Theaters is offering a special in 30 cities, where you can view all 5 Best Picture Oscar Nominees back to back for $30 (which includes popcorn and free refills) on Saturday February 23rd. (Thanks Slick Deals).

Now that DRM (within the music industry at least) seems to be on the wane, there is speculation that paid music downloads might be following as well. Fueling the speculation is the launch of Qtrax (which has all four major labels (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group) signed). The front page of their website boasts availability of over 25 million songs, but a big initial drawback (IMHO) is that the downloaded songs are not compatible with iPods and have to be played via a proprietary player. Another drawback is that the service is Windows-only (at least for right now) . A P2P music tangent, is a nice TechCrunch article on the some of the music download search engines available. Update (1/29/08): Well, it seems like QTrax really messed up it's initial launch. For other prospective small businesses, it is usually wise to do the launch after getting signed contracts with your partners (especially if they are key to your success). Evidently, QTrax pulled the grand move of launching before getting signed agreements from 3 of the 4 records labels (the unsigned three say only that "talks are in progress").

I have finally bit the bullet (or given into peer pressure, whichever way you want to look at it ), motivated chiefly by the ever so helpful comments that I would receive on my very outdated-80's looking home web page ) and changed my home web page so that it points to my blog (which has pretty much become my home web page anyway).
(Fear not; for you retro-loving folk, you can still access the outdated-page via the old home page link at the top of my blog).

During the process of discovering that I was woefully behind in my picture developing, I found out that Adobe had released Lightroom 1.3.1. Changes include updated Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard support, problems from the 1.3 release fixed as well as additional camera support for the Canon 1Ds Mark III, Nikon D3, Nikon D300, and the Olympus E-3 as well as other new camera models. Note: For those putting picture galleries on the web, JAlbum has also been updated to 7.4.1.

As everyone in MacLand probably knows by now, the upcoming MacBook Air was one of the highlights of the MacWorld 2008 (btw, for those who haven't viewed it yet, here is Steve Jobs' Keynote speech in HD). Here is one (no doubt, many more will be forthcoming ) of the in-depth reviews on the new addition to the Apple lineup. (and no, I haven't pre-ordered my own yet ).

I recently upgraded to the final version of Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 and I am happy to report that the various stability issues (crashing upon copying text, etc) that I experienced with the beta version seem to be fixed. I have been using it for about a week and have experienced no crashes (the primary ones that I experienced before seemed to be mainly with Word). I have configured Entourage, but have not put through the paces yet - hopefully I'll have sometime to do that this weekend (in the meantime, here is an in-depth AppleInsider article comparing Entourage_2008 and Mac Mail). Stay tuned....

Just heard that the fourth (and final *sob*) season of The 4400 has been announced on DVD on May 6th, 2008. Needless to say that I will miss this series greatly. Update (5/28/08): I must be terribly lax on the home consumer front, because it took me close to a month to finally pick this up, but better late than never.

There have been some reports of the Airport Express causing kernel panics under Leopard. It looks like this primarily happens when a user is trying to use BitTorrent client to download fairly big files. It seems like the temporary workaround is to use a Ethernet cable for sizable downloads.

I have been using MenuMeters for awhile now - a very low overhead performance monitoring application for Mac OSX that sits in the menubar. Recently though, I have been introduced to the iStat Menus application, which I have been trying out for the past week. Both applications are stable and have low overhead (a must for any performance monitoring application) and both will allow you to monitor CPU utilization network utilization, hard drive usage, etc, but so far iStat Menus has been winning out for display purposes. I like the representation of the CPU utilization as well as the memory and hard drive. All of the icons have drop downs as well which look similar to the screens that you would see in the very popular iStatPro dashboard widget (no surprise, since both applications are developed by the same company).

Over at TUAW, there have been some additional reports of miscellaneous problems with the latest 1.1.3 firmware update. Some of the user reported issues: • Loss of sound from the speakers • Less stable than the 1.1.2 update • Bluetooth devices that worked with 1.1.2 no longer work For some of the issues, users have found work-arounds (i.e. for the loss of sound, simply plugging and unplugging headphones into the iPhone seems to do the trick. Update (01/19/08): According to iLounge, there have been several user reports of the 1.1.3 firmware update actually fixing phones that were bricked by previous firmware updates. Update (02/01/08): It looks like there is an (updated) jailbreakme.com to jail break the 1.1.3 firmware version. Yeah!

Miro 1.1 has been released. This version has much better BitTorrent support and has added a combined search, that enables end users to search for video across all 5 of the built-in search engines.

For those suffering with the Parallels dreaded cut-n-paste bug, at last, a Parallels update is available for this issue (build# 5584). Several users have reported back on the forum thread that this appears to take care of the very annoying cut-n-paste problem. I have installed the update and am pleased to say that I have my cut-n-paste back between Parallels and Mac OSX apps. Yes!