Life is grand

You might be sick of Apple news but it is going to get increasingly hard to ignore. Die hard PC fans often critical of Apple computers need to take heed of today’s Apple quarter 4 report:

• 2,164,000 Macs sold. 400,000 more in Q4 than in any previous quarter.
• iPhone sales at 1.4 million.
• 10,200,000 iPod sales. Not canabalised by the iPhone but, incredibly, up by 17%.

And the fun thing is the heavily pushed “new” operating system upgrade, Leopard, is only about to be released. More sales. Also consider that the iPhone and iTouch run a stripped down but still obvious OS X. I don’t remember Windows Mobile doing very well. Or Vista for that matter.

All in all a small percentage of total computer sales but it is on the rise. I am so sick of PC users making fun of Apple and the Mac. I used to but I got converted and for the better.

Give it a few more years and we’ll see how funny Apple seems to the PC industry.

The Canon IXUS 860 IS looks like a decent pocket digital camera. I have a good DSLR for the more serious photography but would love something I can carry around at all times. I had a look at other pocket digital cameras such as the Canon PowerShot series with their manual controls, some of the Nikons and so on but the simple Canon IXUS seems best. It doesn’t have manual controls but frankly I don’t want them on something like this, I just want the moment of shooting without aperture, shutter and other controls. I’ll just fiddle about if I were given the option.

Especially nice in this IXUS 860 IS (SD870 IS in the States) is the 28mm “wide” angle lens. A good deal better than the usual 36mm which really bugs me when using most pocket digital cameras.

DPReview has a decent review of it. Flickr has some photos taken with the 860 IS.

More and more of us are using Apple Macs. The MacBook Pro is proving a popular laptop here and the new iMac is appearing on a few desks. The rest of the building is Dell of course and they have been good machines though lacking in a bit of style.

Typically you think Dell cheap, Apple expensive. And up till a year or to ago you would be dead right. A year ago I wouldn’t bother doing a comparison and didn’t dream of defending Apple. 2007 is different though.

So I did a comparison between our companies official Dell approved Precision 390 desktop and the Apple iMac. The specs of both are roughly:

• Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz CPU
• 300GB hard-drive (320GB for the iMac)
• 2GB RAM
• 256MB graphics card
• 19″ monitor (20″ for the iMac)

The iMac comes in at €1589 inclusive of VAT and shipping while the Dell comes in at €1756 exclusive of VAT and shipping. With 21% VAT and shipping the Dell would cost €2184.

Luckily Dell often gives us up to a 30% discount which makes the Dell cost €1548. It took a whole 30% discount to beat the iMac. And that ignores the fact that we order all our desktop Dells with a second monitor costing €409 while we are happy with just one monitor for the iMacs. That 20″ iMac screen is a beauty, the 24″ is a monster.

For home users who don’t get 30% discounts and aren’t going to buy the el cheapo Dells, the iMac offers a whole lot more value. You can get Windows XP on it if you really want. If you don’t mind a cheap Dell then you can save a few hundred over an iMac. I just wouldn’t recommend a cheap Dell.

There are many benefits in working for a college. Good holidays, knowledge sharing, the range of people you meet, the facilities and a whopping big pipe to the internet.

One of the less beneficial features though is the Websense powered web filter. Because we “staff” are on the same network as the “students” we get the same filters. Much of the time the filtering doesn’t bother me as there are innumerable ways of getting around it when work requires I read up on a new hack to beef up our security etc.

But today I visited a sex education website and was blocked. Why on earth is a college blocking sex education sites? Shouldn’t we be encouraging our students to learn all they can about safe sex?

For many a South African there is no greater game than Rugby. Soccer is played by many more in South Africa but as a nation we have rallied around Rugby. It bonded our new nation, just a year out of apartheid, in 1995 when we won our first Rugby World Cup. And tonight, in France, in front of the world we won again, beating England by just 15 to 6.

On the game, a lot of credit must be given to England for not playing their usual style. They swung it wide, they penetrated and they really stepped up to a cup final game. But South Africa, the Springboks, die Amabokkebokke, the Rainbown Nation, the Bokke, they did what they have been doing and played one step above whatever team faced them. They absorbed everything and even with the very close thing that was Tait’s try, a closer try that wasn’t you won’t see again in your lifte-time, they stuck to it. It wasn’t pretty for not a try was to be seen in the game but Percy and Steyn beat Wilkinson. England conceded more opportune penalties, simple as that.

I am a relieved and proud South Africa. 4 years as world champions with a young team who can only get better. Well done Smit. Well done Jake White. You survived the quick-sand that is South African Rugby politics and delivered the Web Ellis cup for 2007.

Viva la South Africa!

The result is a school with no academic departments or tenure, and one that emphasizes entrepreneurship and humanities as well as technical education. Its method of instruction has more in common with a liberal arts college, where the focus is on learning how to learn, than with a standard engineering curriculum. “How can you possibly provide everything they need in their knapsack of education to sustain them in their 40-year career?” [president Richard K.] Miller asked. “I think those days are over. Learning the skill of how to learn is more important than trying to fill every possible cup of knowledge in every possible discipline.”

I have never been to varsity or college but I found this post by Jon Udell fascinating.

I am a nervous wreck.

On Saturday we take on England in the Rugby World Cup 2007 finals. We have a good chance of winning but I dare not even imagine it, never mind predict a score. Many Irish co-workers have asked me about the game on Saturday and I have no easy answer. Obviously I want us to win and deep down I feel we are the better team. But I am not arrogant or over confident and I do not want to appear that way. In the past we South Africans have over-cooked “easy” games. The saying goes “The game is ours to loose” and we do that when we are arrogant and too confident. England got to the finals on a tougher route than us and they are not the same team we beat 36-0.

A Nando’s advert is doing the rounds which ends with “Moer hulle” which makes me gag. “Moer hulle” is Afrikaans for “Kill them” and is exactly the image I don’t want to project as a South African. I want a good game of Rugby with the best team emerging as the victors. If that means England then so be it. It is all down to the day of the game though.

I will support my team with verve, vigour and pride, but not arrogance. Go Bokke!

There is also an appeal circulating via email to wear green and gold tomorrow, Friday the 19th of October, to show our support. I’ll be wearing my Springbok Rugby jersey to work.

Apple are releasing an update of Mac OS X code-named Leopard on the 26th of October.

Of the 300 or so improvements here are the ones that caught my eye:
Watch Me Do in Automator.
Command Line Utility for Automator.
BootCamp, Copy Files between Mac OS X and Windows.
Convenient Boot Camp Task Bar shortcut.
Dock folder/file Stacks.
Wikipedia content in the Dictionary app.
New Sidebar in Finder with more logical groupings.
Instant Screen Sharing from the Finder.
Path Bar in Finder, better late than never.
Folder Sharing.
Inline Editing in iCal.
Auto Pick in iCal.
Create Instruments with DTrace.
Data Detectors in Mail.app
Video Recording in PhotoBooth.
Photo Booth with Burst Mode.
Export Movies in PhotoBooth.
Location Aware Printing.
Quick Look.
Multi-select in Quick Look.
Enhanced Find in Safari.
Resizable Text Fields in Safari.
Full History Search in Safari.
Spaces.
Search Shared Macs with Spotlight.
Calculations in Spotlight.
Spotlight Application Launching.
Web History Search from Spotlight.
Live Partition Resizing in Disk Utility.
Scroll Non-Active Windows.
Empty Trash Button.
Merge All Windows into Tabs in Terminal.
Profiles in Terminal.
Adjusting Window Settings in Terminal.
Workspaces in Terminal.
Time Machine.
UNIX Certification.
Cocoa Bridges for Ruby.
Multi-Core Optimized.
Scripting Bridge for Ruby.
Ruby on Rails, Capistrano and Mongrels included.
And while I don’t use or like .Mac it is making more sense as more of the Mac OS X experience is now syncable, even the Dock itself.

All in all nothing too amazing. Time Machine seems nice though sadly for Time Machine, most of my files are not stored locally anymore. Spaces is very welcome but hardly a new concept. Stacks seems a good idea but I’ll have to see how it works in practice.

At €129 I’m not sure it is worth it. It is nice to have but…

One thing that may swing it strangely enough are the Terminal updates. I use Terminal everyday all day, often half a dozen windows open at once running various command-line tools and servers. Everytime I reboot or do something else and come back to development I have to open them all again, set them all to their locations, run commands etc. etc. Profiles and Workspaces in Terminal might solve this. Also Tabs will make it easier to manage sets of similar windows, stopping me from getting confused and running the wrong command in the wrong MySQL command-line.

Still. €129 for Terminal updates? We’ll see.

I was given one of the O2 Broadband USB modems today. Hopefully over the next few weeks I’ll get to test it out and see if it is a viable.

From initial tests I have the following comments:

1. Neat packaging with two lengths of USB cabling, one short and the other longer with a dual/repeater USB head. Nice touch.
2. SIM cradle is very iffy, when I opened it again the SIM card stayed inside the main device. Had to put it on one end to jiggle it out.
3. It doesn’t work out of the box for Mac OS X users. It gives me an “Unreadable disk” error and there is no information to help in the documentation. So I phoned O2 support where a very helpful Danielle stepped me through a bunch of “Is your computer on?” questions before getting deep into a “You need this extra download.” So Mac OS X users, head on over to the O2 Online site and download the DMG. Thanks Danielle, good support.
4. You have to have the O2 Connect app. running whenever you want to be connected. Not major but not ideal.
5. First it has to detect the device and this fails the first time almost every time. Clicking it again takes about 20 seconds.
6. You can then click Connect which, depending on your coverage, takes another 15 to 20 seconds.
7. Our building has very poor O2 mobile coverage but my iPhone picks up GPRS from my desk while this O2 Broadband modem doesn’t. So I tried it upstairs and it managed to connect to GPRS. No 3G coverage out here or at home, I’ll test that when I get into an urban center.
8. With a GPRS connection I get 5kbps downloads from a NEO Office server. Usable for critical information sites, like the Rugby World Cup site. It seems to be about as fast as using GPRS from the iPhone.

So it works but only just and was a bit complicated to get going on Mac OS X. I’ll give it a fair test though over the next week or two and hopefully find some 3G coverage to try the 3.6mb claims.

I’ve been trying to make sense of the Google Gadget Ads. Some described it as AdSense for Google Gadgets which sounded like AdSense adverts inside Google Gadgets. Others described it as your adverts posing as Google Gadgets on iGoogle.

The Inside Adsense blog though makes it all clear; it is a way to distribute your Google Gadget as an ad through the AdSense network. It is an excellent idea. You can distribute a smidgeon of your companies functionality through AdSense now. Not just a static banner ad, text ad or even a Flash ad but an all singing, all dancing “gadget” or widget as the rest of us call them.