Category Archives: Tech

Tech

When Microsoft’s Position is Threatened

I’ve been reading Neal Stephenson’s “In the beginning was the command line”, which was written nearly ten years ago. In it is a paragraph that is nothing short of prophetic:

Likewise, when Microsoft’s position in the OS world is threatened, their corporate instincts will tell them to pile more new features into their operating systems, and then re-jigger their software applications to exploit those special features. But this will only have the effect of making their applications dependent on an OS with declining market share, and make it worse for them in the end.

Hmm, like Vista and the latest Office?

What are the best utilities in Mac OS X?

There are whole websites dedicated to answering these kinds of questions. However, for the kind of work I do as a computational scientist, I have found some favorites over the last seven years of using Mac OS X. From now on, my current favorites with brief rationale for each one will be posted on the tools page of this blog. That page has also been added to the navigation bar at the top.

Please let me know if your favorites differ from mine and why — there might be a better program out there that I’m missing out on!

Leopard 10.5.2 Is Out

Apple has finally released the much-anticipated 10.5.2 update. Unfortunately, Mail.app still says I have 4.3 billion email messages. Sadly, I’m not that popular unless you maybe count spam.

Hopefully they’ll get that one in 10.5.3.

I’ve updated my lab machine, a 2x dual-core Xeon machine, and it seems to be working alright so far. The big test will be whether it fixes the stupid airport network non-listing problem on my MacBook.

How Many iPods Do You Own?

There’s an interesting iPod ownership survey over on MacOSXHints.com — a site I often find answers on when doing Google searches for Mac issues. I have three, though one of them was an old Shuffle found lost on the street in our neighborhood, so I’ve only ever purchased two.

How many do you own? Take the poll here.

So far “1” is winning with “2” and “3” close behind.