Mac from Windows?

The issue of the hardware or operating system one uses is almost a religious one in today's technology polarised world. I have heard people discuss the merits of their particular machines with a fervour that almost ended in fisticuffs between seemingly civilised people over the placement of a menu item or the fact that the boss of the company was widely considered to be the real-life model for Damien Thorne.

The marketing approach of "Switch" and later "Get a Mac" that depicted Mac users as cool and trendy while the Windows user was a sad pocket-protector type had underlined that sentiment and served to widen the gap.

What has my overall experience been? Well, I will qualify my explanation with an anecdote. I bought my son a netbook for Christmas. An Acer Aspire One. My immediate reaction was to say that I would install Windows on it, upgrade the memory and fit it in with our internal IT system, I have a highly computer-dependent family. Well, on Christmas day, Robyn wanted, quite rightly, to play with his toy so he fired it up and ran the Linux that was pre-installed on the machine. 500 megs of memory and an 8 gig hard drive goes a long way on such a system and he discovered that it did absolutely everything he desired from a computer. If it floats your boat then that's what's cool.

My own out-of-the-box experience with the Mac was great. In ninteen minutes I had a machine that was ready to go and was usable for e-mail and browsing, it has a cool look and feel, its seriously quiet and if all I wanted to do was install some shop-bought software I would be quite happy. I discussed with Chrissy, my wife, that a simple little Mac would be all she needs and she agreed.

However, I don't need to run overpriced software or limit myself to mail and browsing. I tried the development environment and I don't need to go back to the days of Borland Turbo C++ thanks, I have still not managed to decipher the mysteries of the provisioning profile and I can say with all honesty and after having cracked that whip for a week or more that my experience so far of doing real computing work on a Mac sucks!

Would I "Switch"? ha ha, not on your nellie but wait, I am typing this out on a slim white keyboard with a "cmd" button ;-)

Last Will

When I die I want a gravestone with a progress bar on it.

It should read something like "Estimated time to end of infinity" and have a number like 6x10 ^ -75 % complete.

Then I can be dead in the same way as I live my life.

Looking at a progress bar that doesn't move!!!

The Vogons are coming (AKA Apple iPhone provisioning profile)

As you may know from this blog, I am a new Apple iPhone developer.
I have been trying for a couple of days to put my new application on my iPhone to test it in the wild and I am finding the process of creating a provisioning profile, the fourteen certificates and the approval steps more than a little tiresome and I live in France so I should be used to gratuitously superfluous bureaucracy.
The docs read a bit like a Douglas Adams novel and I am currently in the process of making some compost out of one of the certificates to hide under my chair for a week. Unfortunately my grandmother is dead otherwise I could have simply fed her to the ravenous bugblatter beast of Traal which would, by all accounts, have simplified the process somewhat.
Ho-hum…

Damnit they're at it again!

Yet another 20 meter wide or Tunguska class asteroid, 2009 FH will pass close to the earth tonight. Once again I find myself incredulous that when the boffins at NASA can find a spec of paint 0.3 centimetres across in orbit that they can't find a chunk of nickel steel weighing about thirty thousand tons!

Well, third time might be the charm. Maybe we should turn those radars outwards a bit more and buy new rolls of tinfoil to make hats with.

Its just a computer...

As you may know, if you've read these pages in the past, I have an iPhone which I think is now my most used piece of hardware.

I have a project in mind which may be totally spurious but, if I'm lucky, might prove to be a commercial success despite my Portugese pal's misgivings.

Whatever the situation I find myself owning not only an iPhone but also a Mac Mini upon which I have just installed the iPhone developer kit.

When I suggested this to some of my friends, the sharp intakes of breath were heard more than once and some suggested I had been enticed to the Dark Side while others suggested that I had instead gone to the Light Side. Well, my philosophy is that it's just a computer. It is a processer, a bit of memory and despite all outward appearance is practically identical to what I am used to using since many years.

My only misgiving is that the whole project is a bit of a distraction for me because I am also well aware of the fact that I am behind the curve on the WPF and Silverlight front; two technologies that my graphical leanings have made dear to my heart, and that as suggested by Conan Doyle via the proxy of Sherlock Holmes, I think that brain capacity is a finite resource with which we must be organised and not fill up with unecessary information.

My current attitude to the whole Mac side of things, remembering that the original Macintosh inspired me to become a professional freelance programmer and hardware designer in the first place, and remembering that I have also owned an IMac in the past, is one of pragmatism. I need one with which to fulfil a specific need, ergo I have one. It's no more nor no less than another sink in which to pour my intellectual resources, such as they are, and I have long been agnostic about far more philosophically important things than a few logic gates in a pretty box.

I can report that the out of the box experience has been excellent. Nineteen minutes from unsealing the machine to having it live on my network and configured for my e-mail. I also like the fact that it is small and very very quiet; which is not a huge bonus considering that this room has five other PC systems humming away in it.

Looking at the Objective C++ development system I can see I have a lot of head scratching to do. I will just keep in mind that the Program Counter is advancing over the machine code in much the same way as I would expect it to.

We are truly SCREWED!

"There's no danger of a collision, but newly-discovered asteroid 2009 DD45 will come close enough today when it flies by our planet 72,000 km (0.00048 AU) away"

Well thank heavens for that!

This thing has the potential to totally destroy New York or London or Paris and has only just been discovered. Never mind the war on terror or piddling about with paltry concenes down here. Hows about spending a couple of billion on finding and deflecting these things?

You see, there's no excuse anymore for the idiot story that it's too expensive or not high enough priority. For an idiotic reason of a few fat-cat bankers lining their pockets, governments have the ability to discover a way to authorise trillions of Dollars or Pounds or Euros of -YOUR- money so that the bankers can continue to jilk you out of interest and charge you for spending your own money.

It won't be long before a rock half a mile wide lands in the sea just off Greenland.