Life is grand

Sadly there is no GTalk client for Mac OS X. So when I swapped to OS X I switched to Adium which worked great with our internal IM (jabber based), with my old MSN Messenger buddies (you dinosaurs!) and supposedly my new GTalk contacts.

Except GTalk didn’t connect at work because of firewall restrictions. The MSN Messenger connection in Adium has a handy “Connect via HTTP” option which works fine. But the GTalk options don’t have that.

Instead I found this little gem which tells you how to use port 443 (HTTPS, normally open on firewalls) and voila! GTalk now works at work.

Ain’t computers grand?

Reading Joel’s long piece on the Windows Vista shutdown menu, which took 48 people a year to implement, had me thinking; the answer is pretty simple. It is three choices. Sleep, Restart and Shutdown. ala Mac OS X.

One benefit Mac users will often tout over Windows users is that of restarting after software updates. I thought his was true but frankly my Mac restarts after software updates about as much as my Windows installation did. Here you can see some basic bits getting updated and I have to restart afterwards. So don’t think there are no more restarts in OS X, there are plenty. However the restarts are a damned sight faster than Windows XP at least.

Also I thought I’d point out that all is solved by OS X, even world conflicts: