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Space Age Madness
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Matrix Spoof

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There’s a hilarious net based matrix spoof going on at this site . He adds panels every day.

I found Apple’s Internet strategy announcement’s today a little disappointing. The new services they are providing are far from remarkable or unusual. The only thing they did that I think is neat was to integrate the free drive space on their servers directly with the Mac OS Desktop. Since I’ve got mac OS 9 going on here, I signed up for the free services tonight. The Kidsafe service takes a better approach to keeping things safe for kids than other similar packages have, and the free Web page doesn’t seem to be available right now.

MacWorld Incoming

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Here’s the screenshot from yesterday’s Amazon flub.

It’s that special time of year again for Mac users. MacCentral has pictures from setup day at MacWorld SF. One of them makes me think we may see Internet Explorer 5.0 for the mac tommorrow.

Jane and Ted, the closest thing Atlanta has to a royal family, are separating .

Macintouch is reporting that SuSe will be demonstrating a version of their Linux distribution for the Power Macintosh at this week’s MacWorld conference. It’s interesting to me, because it won my recent five distribution face off as the easiest to install(on my hardware) for Intel. I’m running it on my fast Intel machine at home right now. It would also mark the first major Linux distribution to have a Power PC version.

Update: SuSE has this press release up on their site now.

As a huge fan of taking naps, I was quite pleased with this article in today’s New York Times.(Registration required.)

Platforms

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This rant was inspired by the October 3rd post on Hear Ye! . I’m not singling this person out for my ridicule, but I was pushed a bit and inspired by this single quote out of context with the witty comentary damning my platform choice. Yes, I bought an iBook which had a mechanical failure, but I have had a lot of computer equipment fail on me over the years. It was replaced in a quick manner, and I received the service I expected from Apple. I have received similar service from PC vendors(like Gateway) in the past. I currently have/use machines running the following operating systems on a daily basis: Windows NT, Windows 98, Mac OS 8.6, LinuxPPC, Red Hat Linux, Slackware Linux, BeOS for Intel, and BeOS for PPC. if you pay attention to the bottom of this page, you’ll see that I use almost all of these platforms to update this site at one time or another.

Okay folks, I’ve finally had enough. Every day I’m exposed to people who are evangelistic about their computer platform choice, and that certainly isn’t a bad thing. If people weren’t making comparisons, what would drive innovation? What does bother me are people who take it a bit further than just recommending what they think is the best choice or making open minded and informed comparisons. These people look down their noses at people who aren’t Mac OS/Windows/Linux users. Why am I fed up? Well, I use all three, and I see each as a tool that can be used in a different way(for me.) The problem occurs when I say on these pages anything about a specific platform, people jump to these wild assumptions. “He’s one of (insert computer platform and derogatory term here.) Wake up and smell the coffee here people. Computers are tools, just tools. They are rapidly becoming the central tool in our civilization. It’s a rampant waste of time to have these platform wars/attitudes.

Each platform has it’s own distinct advantages and disadvantages which I won’t belabor by discussing them here. All hardware platforms have a certain amount of problem equipment and a fair amount of junky equipment. No single computer platform is well developed and robust enough at this point that I would be proud to defend it with the emotional vigor that I see on the net every day.

With some folks, it seems that they make the assumption that a person can only know one platform, use one platform, and appreciate one platform. This whole issue shouldn’t be thought of with binary logic folks. These things are complex systems. It’s more logical to view each with an open mind and see it for what it is and what it does well. They all come with their own hangups and are all designed from different perspectives and with different goals. Otherwise, aren’t you limiting yourself? How do you know you are using the right tool for the job? What about the alternate platforms? The BeOSes and Amiga’s of the world? I want the best tool for any specific job, and that isn’t limited to computers. I wouldn’t use a hammer to remove a screw, and I won’t make computer platform decisions without being well informed.

Comments? Email me.

This is what I want for Christmas . I also want better input devices that bypass this infernal keyboard and mouse setup.

Bad iBook

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It’s been a hectic week of change for me. I accepted a new position with a growing Web services firm here in Atlanta, and resigned from my existing position. It was a terribly difficult decision for me to make, but I think I made the right decision.

I’ve spent much of the time at my current position fighting against a print-centric culture. It’s very difficult to make a culture shift in a company happen when it doesn’t live or die by the change. I think that, in the long run, print companies will be forced to make serious commitments to the Web, but some aren’t ready yet.

Tougher still, was leaving the people. I work with a group of people that I really like and respect. Some of them have contributed to my professional growth more than they will ever know.

Moving forward, the new company is young, hungry and growing. It’s all about where I want to be.

My iBook arrived yesterday, but the video fizzled out after about an hour. Apple is shipping me a new one. I like it. It has a great tactile feel, seemed plenty fast while I was using it. It’s definitely a consumer machine.

There are pictures of the next generation iMac posted here.

According to today’s Saturn, Jack and Michal had lunch without me.

Mac OS X Server Arrives

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My copy of Mac OS X Server arrived yesterday. Needless to say, I didn’t do anything else last night. Here’s an overview of my impressions:

There is very limited documentation that comes with the OS on CD, most of it had to do with installation and configuration. I installed it on my 9600/350 at home. Since this is an unsupported configuration, I had to bypass this part of the installer to get it to install. It, however, installed without issue.(I installed it on an external SCSI drive) After the lengthy install process(the machine reboots three times during the install), it booted without issue. It is very NeXtish, and those of you who have experience with that interface will find this one very easy to pick up. For the Mac User looking to learn it, it might be a bit intimidating at first. There are some of the Mac OS interface elements, but things don’t work like a Mac OS machine.

The OS is very repsonsive. I played with it for quite a while on it’s own. Getting Apache configured was very simple, and I had it serving Web pages for me within minutes. The OS doesn’t currently support serial ports, so in order to get access to the Internet via a modem you have set another machine up as a router. The Mac OS app that is included comes with a basic 8.5.1 install, and seemed very stable and compatible. It felt as fast as running the Mac OS directly on the machine. I ran several applications(Frontier, Fireworks 2, BBEdit, and Netscape) and everything worked the way I expected it to.

The command line interface was exactly what you would expect from any UNIX operating system. I didn’t go too crazy, but everything seemed to be where I expected it to be and to work the way I expected it to work.

Tonight, I will be setting it up as a file server and installing Samba so I can get my PC’s to share with it. I also want to figure out how to telnet into it as the root account.

Here are some resources I referred to in my experimentation.

Stepwise has the highest quality information and current news that I found. I’ve been referring to this site since they first announced Rhapsody.

Apple’s support site has good documentation and discussion boards that held the answers to many of my unanswered questions.

The MacOS Xclave has some news and current events stuff.

Mac OS X Tips and Tricks has solid information on the workings of the OS. I found the answers to two of my questions here.