Burning Pancakes

One of the iBorg – A switch to Mail and Safari

mutex — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 08:18:06 +0000

I can now understand why despite the simple and lousy interface that folks really love Mail in OS X.First let me back up and say that with a degree of sadness I am going to have to grab any important emails from Thunderbird and uninstall it. I require that an email client work with Gmail without problems and Thunderbird hit some kind of message limit and regardless of reinstall will not download any messages past a certain date. I want local copies and Thunderbird’s failure to work even after reinstall has me switching to Mail.I have to admit that Mail appeared too simple to satisfy my needs however it is FAST and it downloaded a huge cache of my past emails from Google’s servers. After installing the Letterbox add-on which presents the interface in three panes the task of sorting through a few thousand historical emails went much faster than I had expected.I can see an iPhone in my future and it just proves that I should experience my Macbook fully with an eye toward user experiences rather than feature experiences. Is it faster? Do things get in the way? Am I more effective?In anticipation of iPhone and with my recent choice to embrace Mail and the very fast Safari browser it looks like I will be taking another look into iCal, Address Book, and a full life using the Apple software integrated approach.

I Use GMail

mutex — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 07:27:50 +0000

Google caches a huge portion of the internet and to me that means email reliability and persistence. The free space for email is very large and I never seem to have a problem with reasonable attachments. A wide release of GMail to everyone is great news!

Newsvine – Google E-Mail Service Ready for All

Distilling Blog Text

mutex — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 21:21:04 +0000

I always love when someone does something cool with Processing. This visualization opens the eyes to what kind of emotional datamining is possible when blogs are distilled.

We Feel Fine / by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar

The Web Will Unite the World

mutex — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 20:26:33 +0000

The presentation technologies that power the modern web browser will eventually catch up and interest will drive development of the correct CSS and other display technologies to unite people even from the far flung edges of the world. Localization + Unicode Generalization = Unification.

Hacklog: Blogamundo » Blog Archive » A Peek at Vertical Text

Mapping Music

mutex — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 19:53:30 +0000

I wonder if this story will make it over to the dataisnature rss feed. It certainly covers two topics I really love: data graphics and music. It’s fascinating work and hard to put aside as trivial given how often small discoveries or new ways of thinking cause yet further exploration and discovery.

Mapping Music - Harvard Magazine (January-February 2007)

ShadowKiller Speeds OSX

mutex — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 11:36:38 +0000

So back in the days when Mac OS X was new and folks were still trying to run it on G3 PowerPC based machines a hack was released that eliminates the useless drop shadows in all aqua windows and speeds up the user experience. Well let me tell you that it is still valid in the days of Tiger on Core 2 Duo Macbooks. I have seen a perceptable increase in the snappy response after installing it as a login item.

ShadowKiller

Sensible National Digital Television

mutex — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 08:32:18 +0000

In America I can believe that the following article which describes the dutch move to digital television would be interpreted as “big brother” stepping in but there are many mutual wins described and in the end… if the people want to move forward then desire for the the right technology policies can be met. I love dutch sensibilities.

Dutch pull plug on analog television, shift to digital | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle

Hosting Space Philanthropy

mutex — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 08:25:51 +0000

Maybe it is just good to give space away for the benefit of technology advancement in a time when we see comprehensive web applications expanding their capability to make life easier for a wider audience. Already I find Wikipedia to be approaching Google like ubiquity in my personal use of the web.

Wikipedia founder to give away Web hosting – LinuxWorld

Google Web Toolkit for Everyone

mutex — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 08:20:26 +0000

This is great news for developers with a java toolset and another example of how there is a sense of benevolent good toward the web community by the elephant we know as Google.

Google Web Toolkit Blog: GWT 1.3 Release Candidate is 100% Open Source

The O.G. OSX ROR Bootstrap

mutex — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 07:07:46 +0000

Not everything from my older Macbook came over in the transfer, specifically lots of dev environment stuff. Well, to keep myself jazzed about an error free compile and install of PostgreSQL 8.2 which was announced last night I forged on and gave the old tried and true Hivelogic – Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger install a runthrough and I am thrilled that this original clear set of instructions still works. I am perfectly ok with it not layering in some other package manager and being a direct install. If I eat my words on this I will post the horror story but for now I have the warm fuzzies.

Hivelogic – The Narrative of Dan Benjamin, Your Internet Pal

I can sync my PPC-6700!

mutex — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 07:07:35 +0000

Finally after fiddling around on various Windows laptops, each with their own special ActiveSync experience ranging from quirky but operational all the way through periods of time where nothing worked. Finally the solution has been to sync against a clean install of Windows XP/Office/ActiveSync running in the excellent virtual environment Parallels Desktop for Macintosh. I really praise Parallels for their effort to keep up with the latest Apple chipset advancements.

Finalscratch 2

mutex — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 06:24:26 +0000

I have been sick and finally got to the point of feeling useless so I decided to rearrange my studio space and give Stanton Finalscratch 2 a good honest try. My housemates have been fiddling with FS2 for awhile now and I haven’t been all that impressed. Scratching a few records and playing a mishmash of styles is not the same as what I do: house, techno, breaks/electro with long drawn out dramatic mixing. Now I know that Hawtin and Aquaviva have been early adopters and their sets are inspiring but I just had to see for myself. The Guitar Center sales guy actually recommended Serato from Rane but I haven’t heard much about looping and MIDI ability out of that software… just that it tends to be more stable and accurate. FS2 is a workable system and I can say this: It takes less effort to adjust to the difference of records vs. FS2 than it does between a technics 1200 series turntable and a Vestax turntable. I’m happy with my purchase and look forward to producing some tracks specifically for playback using Finalscratch 2.

The New Meebo Look!

mutex — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 09:24:05 +0000

First off, I love meebo… it has been my preferred IM client for awhile. The company has a great personality, very people oriented and I feel good when I login and see the blog pop up… sort of like the whole thing comes from the heart. In its latest look and feel change meebo went from functional to straight up elegant. This latest release feels optimized, the windows are snappy. Great work, love it!

http://www.meebo.com/

I Use Qumana

mutex — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 03:19:03 +0000

Recently my best friend got me blogging on a more personal note over at livejournal.com. I like the combination, WordPress for the more admittedly geeky stuff and livejournal.com for personal feelings and day to day reflection. To enable posting to multiple blogs I am using Qumana since switching to a MacBook.

One of Each

mutex — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 16:44:19 +0000

So I finally went out and bought my true portable; a black Macbook that I quickly maxed out with 2GB of RAM. It is my policy now to just max out a laptop with as much as it will take since they always seem to run better. I am one step closer in my ‘one of each’ plan that will eventually put a solid machine of each type in my studio/home office. So why the switch to Mac? Well, I have been primarily a windows developer and now my focus in on web technologies and databases; since OS X is unix based the Macintosh platform is a sensible choice. Though the various linux distros have come a long way and Ubuntu probably would install on my current windows laptop fine… nothing beats the feel of a piece of harware and software that were designed to go together rather than thrown on a machine in generic fashion… the moto “stuff just works” is really true. So to make a long story short… my faith and enjoyment in the platform have returned and I don’t feel so bad about Steve laying me off back in ’97 during the last days of Gil Amelio and the MacOS licensing effort.