Archive for July, 2006
You think your intel Mac is hot?
July 31, 2006
My next phone?
July 31, 2006
With the hundreds of iPhone mock-ups available on the internet, this one claims that it is from an Apple employee. Anyway, if this turns out to be true and announced and released at WWDC, then I am definitely getting one… if it has WiFi, BT and 3G and a decent battery life, of course. Hey, should be GSM, right? 
technorati tags:apple, iphone, ipod
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Upgrade finished!
July 30, 2006Well, I messed up my back-up copy of the blog (thanks to Transmit’s caching!) but it is a good thing that the database is intact as well as the config file. I re-installed the entire WordPress software and just replaced the config file and did an update – good thing that it went well. 
Next, I reconfigured the theme to reflect the changes I made (adding AdSense, Statistics monitoring, etc.) and luckily, all seems to look the same before the update.
I have added some admin tools to make it easier for me to manage the site and a simple math-based anti-spam facility for the Comments.
If you find some bugs, please do let me know asap! Thanks.
Edit: Apparently, the math-based spam prevention tool has a bug. Will replace it with another one.
Latest: Well, the other math-based spam prevention did not work as well – I guess both are not compatible with my theme. 
Anyway, am back to the WordPress Akismet plug-in.
Upgrade in progress
July 30, 2006I am upgrading WordPress to 2.0.4 and also upgrading the plug-ins, themes and widgets to the latest versions. Apologies if the site looks a bit confusing. 
Ships when ready
July 30, 2006GTalk enhanced but only for Windows client
July 28, 2006
There’s lots of instant messaging news today. Google isn’t letting the fact that it has less than 1% market share and only 44,000 people used its Google Talk client last month get it down. Tonight they’ve released three significant new features to the product – file transfers, voicemail and music status. Information on all of these features is here.
File Transfers
Files and folders can be sent to Google Talk friends by clicking the “send file” button. There are no limits on file sizes or type, and the recipient will see a preview of the image within the chat session. Both users must be using the actual Google Talk client, however, for this feature to work. See left image below.
Voicemail
Voicemails can now be left for friends who do not answer calls through Google Talk. Unlike File Transfers above, this feature does not require that the friend use the Google Talk client. In that case, they’ll receive an email with the message attached as an audio file. Voicemails can be up to 10 minutes long, and messages can be left for people online without calling them directly by clicking the down arrrow from any profile card or chat window. Voicemail will also automatically kick in after 4 rings. See middle image below.
Music Status
If you are listening to music while logged in to Google Talk, you can show your contacts what you are listening to by selecting “show current music track” from your status drop down menu. This is only for “supported music players” but they do not say what players are supported. See far right image below.
Well, Google never really released a client for the Mac. However, GTalk is compatible with iChatAV via Jabber. I wonder if it can now ‘talk’ to us.
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Don’t deprive them…
July 26, 2006As a follow-up to my Manila Bulletin TechNews article today, I am urging educators to veer away from “technology-centric learning”, for lack of a better term. I know for a fact that majority of colleges and universities offering Computer Science and other IT-related degree courses use Microsoft-only technologies. Whilst this is not entirely a bad thing but if that is the only thing that you teach your students, e.g. Visual Basic, .Net or worse, Microsoft Office, then I assure you that you are contributing to what IT companies often clamour about — having thousands of under-qualified IT graduates!
Our Java Education & Development Initiative (JEDI) helps by exposing students to OS-independent development platform – hopefully increasing their marketability, should they take on the entire JEDI suite, of course. Unfortunately, the number of qualified teachers to handle the higher level JEDI courses are only a handful. As part of the JEDI proponent, I am actually thinking of what can be done to increase the number of teachers who can teach the courses. However, we (JEDI) are guilty for pushing for Java technology only – but hey, the curriculum is intact, we just give examples and exercises using Java.
POSITIVE is also doing its share by providing a suite of alternative courseware based on Open Source technologies. Although Java is not exactly Open Source (yet), it is not against Open Source either so both can co-exist within a college or university curriculum. Since I am not using POSITIVE’s courseware, I am not sure as to the extent of their ‘reach’ in as far as CS/IT education is concerned.
I know that Microsoft has a similar project hoping to combat JEDI and POSITIVE in the Philippines. However, the bottom-line here is, you need to be, at least, a paying MSDN Academic Alliance member to take advantage of their courseware. Otherwise, there is no point in getting their materials if you do not have the platform to develop, test and run it on, right?
Where does Apple come in? Apple supports Java. Apple runs Open Source applications such as OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice, PHP, mySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, Tomcat, etc. Apple’s ICBMs run Windows XP (and Vista) for .Net application development, too. Did I say that Apple also does C, C++ and Objective C? Ruby on Rails, too! Although I have not googled it but I bet there is Fortran, Cobol, LISP for Apple as well.
With Apple’s benefits brought by its new ICBM line, students have access to practically all major technologies available today! The question is – would you deprive them of these advantages because you were deprived access to them when you were students?
Apple abandons OSS?
July 26, 2006OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a development environment for building and developing Mac OS X sources as well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative. OpenDarwin was meant to be a development community and a proving ground for fixes and features for Mac OS X and Darwin, which could be picked up by Apple for inclusion in the canonical sources. OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down.
Over the past few years, OpenDarwin has become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects. The original notions of developing the Mac OS X and Darwin sources has not panned out. Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this. Administering a system to host other people’s projects is not what the remaining OpenDarwin contributors had signed up for and have been doing this thankless task far longer than they expected. It is time for OpenDarwin to go dark.
With what is written above, it seems like the project became a SourceForge-like community rather than a Linux-like community. I am not part of the OpenDarwin community so I do not know how many people are actually contributing time and code to make Mac OS X better. How much participation did Apple engineers give? This is crucial to an open source community that spawns from a commercial entity. Take a look at how OpenOffice.org started, Sun still has engineers working on improving it.
Anyway, I am hoping that this signals a change in the kernel – to perhaps something like Linux (full Linux binary compatibility) or Solaris 10 (GNU Solaris perhaps?). Come to think of it, if Apple uses the Linux kernel, then I predict more Linux developers joining the OpenMacOSX fork. On the other hand, if they use the Solaris kernel, then they get the support of Sun, too! Win-win situation for both communities. [aside: Solaris 10 is already binary compatible with Linux].
If I remember correctly, KDE announced before that it is working on a Dashboard-compatible Widget engine. Wouldn’t it be easier if it runs on a Linux kernel? Hmmm… imagine, Mac OS X UI on Linux kernel – I think it will, hopefully, unify both KDE and Gnome into a single desktop environment but that is asking for the sun and the moon.
Well, if it is indeed a kernel change – how cool is it for Steve Jobs to call on Jonathan Schwartz and/or Linus Torvalds (or Mark Shuttleworth of the Ubuntu fame) at this year’s WWDC keynote? Wickedly awesome!
Technorati Tags: Mac OS X, OpenDarwin
NVidia cards on next MacBook Pros?
July 25, 2006Now that AMD is getting ATI, I am sure that Intel will advise Apple to drop ATI Radeons in favor of NVidia on the next MacBook Pros. I am speculating that the next Merom-based MacBook Pros will have 256MB and 512MB NVidia GPUs along with a Blu-Ray-compatible drive and running on Leopard.
I am slightly in favor of NVidia only because of its Linux support. NVidia provides binary-only graphics drivers that work perfectly on my Ubuntu Dapper Drake PC. Although it is not entirely open source but it really does not have to be as long as it is free and it works.
