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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kate, my girlfriend has been home this week(she normally travels on business during the week). It's been a pleasant change to have her around.(Maybe she'll read this and I'll get brownie points)
Day four of my diet. Getting easier.
I reserved a Clio because my intense technolust got the better of me. Thing looks cool. I hear good things about the evolution of Windows CE. Course I should wait for Apple's unreleased Palm Computer(assuming such a thing exists). Another sign that I have become platform agnostic.
Mac OS Is Better Than Ever is a well written article in the New York Times about the new Mac OS 8.5 upgrade. It continues to be solid on my home machine. At work, I hope I am over the bumps(no pun) that I ran into. I didn't bother to completely isolate the issue, but it seemed to be related to the combination of the new Microsft Outlook for Exchange client and Office 98.
I continue to wait for my Gateway Notebook. Plans for this weekend include updating my aging Powerbook 1400 to Mac OS 8.5.
I diagnosed a problem I was having with Mailsmith and a server at work with Stairways Software's OTSessionWatcher . It was invaluable in figuring out the problem.
I'm working from the Bump Clubhouse today. I love doing it, and wish I could do it two days a week. It gives me a chance to get things done without the distractions of my office environment. I've already done as much as I usually get done in a day and it's not even 1 pm.
I really like Proteron's GoMac . It is a utility that gives my Macintosh the standard Windows Start menu and application switcher bar. I'm surprised how much I like this feature of Windows. They released version 1.6 today which adds Mac OS 8.5 compatibility. It has a great pop up calendar feature that I use all the time.
On the subject of Windows, I got to play with a Fire Ant prototype at a trade show this week. It seemed really fast. I especially look forward to being able to watch DVD movies on it. I am working on my level of knowledge of Windows 98 to ready myself for its arrival. I really wish that Windows NT had USB and DVD support, because I would much rather have had it on the laptop.
Mac OS 8.5 has been rock solid here at home. I still am having some nagging issues at work, but I'm sure I will figure them out in the coming days. Claris Emailer seems to work fine, and that was my biggest concern. The Sherlock search engine is an invaluable tool. Sherlock Internet Search Archives is a great collection of plug ins.
Word on the street(and in a MacWEEK article ) has Palm Computing releasing their revised MacPac software as a public beta. I can't wait for this added flexibility. I am now using the Palm device all the time.
SETI's SETI@Home program , scheduled to start in April 1999, will allow home users to commit their extra processing cycles towards the search for extra terrestrial life. Cool. There is a Salon Magazine article on the topic here .
What a great vacation. I want to write up everything that we did, where we stayed, ate, and played. I will attempt to get to this project as soon as possible.
I really enjoyed every one of the four cities we visited(Portland Oregon, Seattle Washington, Vancouver B.C., and Victoria B.C.) Each has its own charm.
The best thing I took away from this vacation was perspective. The eleven days I went without touching any computer equipment realy paid off. It is a really positive thing to get away from the central things in your life for a while. I appreciate things more now than I ever have. I enjoy my job, the people in my life, and I realize how lucky I have been every day of my life.
I am now starting to settle back in. There's work to be done.(A lot) Also laundry, car repairs and cleaning. I will be up against it this whole week.
Mark McGuire ends up with 70 home runs. Incredible.
My very smart cousin Jim Occhialini is getting married in two weeks. I am traveling to the wedding in Hershey Pennsylvania in two weeks. It will be the first time in years that I will see many of my more distant family members.
I'm a big Yankees fan and enjoying the game currently. Baseball has returned as a part of my life. I didn't leave as a fan because of the strike or anything, just other interests took the time I devoted to it.
Well I will probably be doing a lot of updating this week so check back often. I hope that I didn't lose too many of you because of my absence.
Netscape's Web client has very quietly become very stable in 1998. I know that, one year ago, I complained about stability all the time. I have been using their Preview Release 2 for a few weeks without any major issues.
I have been using Apple's new MacOS 8.5. I have to say that, if the beta's are any indication, they continue to take steps in the right direction. It is faster by far, easier to use, incorporates Internet terchnology, and the new implementation of AppleScipt is a screamer. It also looks like Mac User's will finally have a decent Java implementation to work with.
My playing with Macromedia Fireworks continues. I have a really strong grip on using it now. I think I will move onto another piece of software soon. I am way behind my informal schedule of technologies that I wanted to master in 1998. I can't believe that it's already almost October.
Dreamweaver now has its own Frontier suite as a hook into Frontier authoring. This is getting more exciting by the day.
Iconfactory has some limited edition Batman icons that will only be up for a couple of days.
Mark McGuire needs three home runs in 23 games.
A news item on today's Macintouch talks about the fact that Emailer, my email client of choice, is dead. It goes on to say that Emailer is not fully compatible with the soon to be released Mac OS 8.5 . I'm really pissed about this. I have 3 years worth of email in Emailer.
On a similar note, Bare Bones released the 1.1 patch for Mailsmith , another email client. It makes it faster, and adds some great features, but I still like the previously mentioned Emailer better.
This type of behavior is too typical of software companies these days. I live in a constant state of concern that I am investing time and money in software products that are doomed.
After burning the midnight oil arguing interface philosophy with my cat, I am on the coffee horse and typing like a crazed fanatic.
QuickTime 3.0 beta(This link is to Apple's Preview Page) is pretty interesting. For a long time I've felt that the best minds at Apple were on QuickTime development, and they continue to prove me correct. I will definitely be doing my first software review for this site on it, so check back.
I also meant to mention GUI Junky, an interface hacking site that looks like it might pick up where MacOver faded...
I will begin porting all of my pages at work over to a new server this weekend. If anyone has any suggestions on moving from UNIX to Windows NT(Netscape Enterprise 3) feel free to drop me a line. I will post any experiences I have to share.
I am an interface addict. That is to say that I can spend hours of precious productivity deciding how I want my desktop to look. I hoard Kaleidoscopeschemes on zip cartridges desperately seeking desktop nirvana.
Designer's Studio 1.1 is the first step towards giving the power to the people. No arcane resource editing by candlelight here. Check it out.
Once again I stay awake bleary eyed and ready to collapse. As if working a ten hour day is not enough.
