Now that is creative

While browsing nerdizmo I grocked a link to some new USB offerings from Belkin. I definitely want one of the in desk hubs.

A Greener Apple

An intersting use of word imagery for the title of this letter from CEO Steve Jobs. Imagine that, a company run by Steve Jobs is a leader in environmental issues.

Hmm... Coda. Dont think so.

New app from Panic that certainly looks shiny, but I don't think it will be shiny enough to tear me away from my first love TextMate. Most of the user interface stuff looks hot, but I am not sure how much it actually will add to the user experience. I have downloaded it though and I am going to give it a try. Check out Coda.

Ginormous SSD Drives

Both ginormous in price, as well as storage. I would love to have a 256 gig SSD to play with. Anyone want to give me one? I will write a nice review! Engadget has the details.

Recovering your resolution

So, I wrote about my fledgling media center set up before, and I ranted about the AppleTV saying I would just get a Mac Mini and call it a day.

Well that day has been called. I picked up a low end mini this week, and set it up last night. When I fired up the mini, things went bad. Real bad. It seems that the mini wanted my LCD HDTV to run at an altogether silly resolution, interlaced no less, and my TV said.. "uh, no".

The Problem

So I was stuck with a TV that said "Invalid Mode" and no second monitor to hook to the mini to reset the resolution to something more manageable. What to do? Well the first thing was obviously to break out the powerbook and ask the great oracle of goog what to do. There were many answers offered up by the all seeing goog, but none worked for me. It was time for a less conventional approach.

The Solution

It occurred to me that navigating around the Mac-OS was pretty easy with the wealth of keyboard commands at my disposal. If I could just settle upon the correct sequence I could reset the resolution on the mini, without actually seeing anything. I had my handy lappy right there, so why not give it a shot. What I came up with is a fool proof way to reset the resolution without having to reboot the machine, or actually see the UI. Here's what I did:

1. Do yourself a favor and hit enter. Depending on the circumstances, there might be a dialog that says your resolution is out of range of the attached monitor.
2. Next hit apple + spacebar. This will call up Spotlight and give focus to the search area.
3. Type in displays, wait 5 seconds and then hit the down arrow key once. This will highlight the search result you want. Hit enter.
4. Wait about 5 seconds, and then hit tab. When the displays pref pane loads the search box will have focus, hitting tab will move focus to the resolutions list.
5. Now hit the up arrow and wait for around 5 seconds. Keep doing this until you hit a resolution that your monitor/tv can handle.

That's all there is to it. Within 5 minutes I had a working resolution, and I was setting up the mini as my media-center. I hope this will help other people who might run into a similar problem.

Come to ApacheCon

The call for papers is now open for ApacheCon US 2007.

Anger, seething anger

That is what I feel after having read this 'statement' from Apple Inc.'s website:

We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones. [Apr 12, 2007]

No, it is not an acceptable tradeoff to delay the release of a much anticipated major OS release so that you can make FCC deadlines for the iPhone. Has the Executive team at Apple suffered a collective blow to the head at some point this year?

The iPhone, while cool, is not more important than a major OS release. The iPod, while cool is not more important than a major OS release.

This is troubling to say the least. I thought the name change from Apple Computers to Apple Incorporated would be a good thing, reflecting the broadening of the scope of the companies endeavours. This smacks of a narrowing, the opposite of what should be happeining right now.. unless of course that narrowing is to the core of their technology offerings.

We need iCal with caldav capabilities. We need Time Machine. Artists and creative professionals need the Core Image, Core Audio and Core Video upgrades that will come with Leopard. We do not need a freaking touch screen phone.

* Walks off in disgust *

Warning: Crazy Egg is cracked

This is a hard thing for me to say, since I just love the service, when it works.

We have been using Crazy Egg at Asbury for the past few months, and it has been nothing but frustration. We are a fairly well trafficked site, not a google or c|net mind you, but we average in the millions of hits a year, so not too shabby.

I routinely experince time outs when trying to load the results of a given test, even lower trafficed areas that I track, as well as get application errors and timeouts when trying to start or restart tests.

My recommendation to you if you are looking at a service like Crazy Egg for analytics is if you recieve more than 200,000 visits a month, stear clear. They just can't handle the volume of data you will be throwing at it.

AppleTV, some random thoughts

The Apple TV is now shipping, and some lucky blokes like Walt Mossberg were given demo units to play with early.  I don't have much to say, other than as it stands now I will not be purchasing one, and here are some reasons why.

I want my DIVX!

Seriously Apple, come on.  H.264 is actually a beautiful codec; I have no complaints with the quality that you can get out of it.  What I will complain about is the footprint.  I can get the same, or better quality, from a DIVX encoded file that is sometimes half the size.  Period.

Read the rest »

Back from Austin

And man am I tired.

This ApacheCon was probably the busiest for me.  Between hacking on the secret project, and attending talks I barely had anytime to hang out with the extremely cool people that were there.  Austin was an extremely cool place.

I will write a proper entry on this once I have recovered, but for now I leave you with this very important question:

Why in the world did the water in Austin taste like moldy dirt?

Pictures and more witty banter to come.