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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.

Link Updates

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Joseph Lowery’s Dreamweaver 2 Bible is now shipping.

With summer approaching, it might be a good time for a visit to the Waterguns museum .

There seems to be no shortage of articles on Apple’s comeback these days. Today’s NY Times has a piece , and there have been several others over the last couple of weeks. I have to say that while I am optimistic about their business from a financial standpoint(how can you not be?), there are some serious things on the horizon that will determine their long term viability.

If they can deliver their next generation OS in the right time frame, and it is a high quality product, then I will be a lot more comfortable. As it is, they haven’t seeded it to developers yet, and I wonder when they are going to start including this group in their development process(WWDC is a good bet, there are plenty of sessions listed that apply to Mac OS X.)

Pathfinder is closing From where I stand, this is all about the existing media companies not getting the Web. Not spending their money wisely and using business models imported from their print roots have hurt these types of enterprises quite a bit.

I somehow missed the Austin Powers Icons at Iconfactory

There are some Planet of the Apes icons at the Icon Planet site. I really liked those movies, they remind me of Sunday television when I was a kid.

Mac OS Server event

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Reminder from yesterday, Bump is now live on the My Netscape Network channel system . To add my page to your My Netscape , follow this link

For those of you who don’t want to go there to see what it looks like, here’s a screenshot of the Bump Channel.

Macintouch has good unbiased coverage of the Mac OS X Server release event yesterday.

StepWise , a site maintained by a well respected long time OpenSTEP developer, has some notes on Mac OS X Server too. He had access to it in the limited beta release cycle, so he’s pretty well tuned in.

I am encouraged by the pricing, and by the iniative of the open sourcing. I want to see more though. Open Source the whole thing. I worry that this is more of a media event thing than an actual committment, but we’ll find out about that down the road.

Work will be crazy for me over the next ten days, we have our largest trade event coming up next weekend. You may see a small lack of consistency with regards to updates. Well, it does say sporadic in our statement of purpose above.

I’ve been playing with AvantGo on my Palm V over the last day and a half. I think it would be useful if I only wanted to read the sites, but I like to follow links, so it frustrates me. For me to cache all of the material I would want, I would have to have a Palm with 16 Mb of RAM.

PC WEEK has an article that reviews what the original Palm creators are doing called Catching up with the creators of the Palm They are moving towards a more consumer oriented device based on the Palm OS. based on what a good friend told me of his recent trip to Germany, they use the Palm in some very different ways there now. It all makes a lot of sense to me.

I picked up a copy of Fireworks 2.0 using their upgrade discount yesterday. I used it a little last night, and it seems to be much improved over the previous version, which wasn’t bad at all. I think they have unified the UI in a better way. Builder.com has a review that I more or less agree with that was posted this morning.

Microsoft is attempting to move into the distributable digital audio market. There is a Wired News story on the subject this morning. Seems they have some pretty stiff competition from some companies, including Sony, which are already in this space. This has the potential to become a real mess if one standard isn’t agreed upon. I like MP3 just fine, but I understand that there are piracy concerns.