Kodiak's Korner

After more than eight years of wanting a Mac for my office I finally got one last week. And what a nice one it is…a 17″ MacBook Pro laptop with a 2.5Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4Gb of RAM, and a 250Gb hard drive. This thing flies, and the display quality is absolutely amazing.

Apple seems to have thought of everything, too. The keyboard lights and the screen dims to adjust to the ambient lighting around you. The touch pad lets you easily scroll when you touch with two fingers, and rotate and resize images with a pinching action. The only thing that I miss are my Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End keys which are absent from the MacBook keyboard. Command-Arrow does about the same thing, but it is less convenient, especially when I’m used to hitting Home and End all the time as I write code.

Since my job often requires me to make things that are cross-platform or at least to test things on both platforms, having access to a Mac is rather important. Until now, any time I needed to use a Mac I had to go upstairs to our lab and work there. Since working this way is incredibly inconvenient and distracting, I tended to work on the Windows side of things and only test on Mac when I absolutely needed to, which sometimes led me to find problems that could have been fixed much more easily if I had tested on the Mac side a lot sooner. Now I’ll be much better able to develop both platforms in parallel and hopefully improve my quality at the same time.

I was originally going to order the 15.4″ display, but my boss suggested going for the 17″ for the extra screen real estate. I wasn’t about to argue with that, though I worried that a 17″ laptop was bordering on not being portable. Boy was I wrong, though–the thing is so slim and light that it is hardly a chore to take it home with me.

So far I like the Mac. As my buddy Jason says, it’s “usable Unix.” I’ve never particularly cared for the Windows environment but used it because a) it was better than the old pre-X Mac OS versions and b) that’s where the software for developers was. Now most of the software I use is available on both platforms and the OS is a huge improvement. I hesitate to say it, but I could quite possibly become a convert. And since I can can virtualize Windows so easily on the Mac, I can have the best of both worlds on a single laptop.

I haven’t done too much yet with the Mac. I’ve been busy with a few things at work lately and, since I am trying to roll out the new Tay House site by the beginning of the scouting year, I’ve had little free time I home, either. So mostly I’ve been editing the site using our CMS’s browser-based tools and looking for tools to replace my most oft-used web development tools (such as Cyberduck in place of WinSCP). Of course, I’ve played with some of the cool software that comes with the Mac, too, like the DVD player and Front Row (full screen video is awesome on this thing).

I’ve also installed Virtual Box, an open source virtual machine container from Sun, and a virtual install of Windows Vista. While it works, VirtualBox doesn’t always hide the Mac mouse pointer when I’m “locked” into windows, so I end up with with two pointers–in different places–which is extremely confusing. I’m planning to ask for a license of VMWare, so that I can virtualize without confusion, sometime soon.

My only other complaint so far is with Office. Office 2008 is nothing like Office 2007 and things that I can do easily with office on Windows aren’t quite as fluid on the Mac. I guess that’s what you get when you let Microsoft design software for the Mac, though.

Overall, I love the Mac and can’t wait to be able to get more use out of it.

Thanks to the awesome music app Pandora I have discovered a cool new band.

Speechwriters LLC is an acoustic rock band from So Cal. Their sound is a mix of Jack Johnson, Jason Mraz, and Red Hot Chili Peppers with some funky slide guitar riffs thrown in for good measure. The song CHBB (or Crazy Heart-Breaking Bitches as it is named on the MP3) got me interested, but several other tracks, including Clones and The Ballad of Johnny Lo frequently get stuck in my head when they pop up in my iPod’s shuffle.

While some of the band’s feature albums are available on CD or for download through iTunes and Amazon, nearly all of their catalog is available as free downloads on various “mix tapes” in the SWLLC Digital Archive.

Driving through town earlier today I noticed a new box on one of the traffic lights near my house. The box, mounted on above the road, had three antennae coming out of it. As I continued to drive I noticed these boxes on several traffic lights in the city as well as one on a telephone pole near the intersection of South Clinton and Westfall Roads.

After a bit of research I confirmed my suspicions that these boxes are, in fact, WiFi transceivers. Evidently (though the information is difficult to find), Frontier Telephone, in connection with Monroe County and the City of Rochester has rolled out an urban WiFi network. Information is surprisingly spotty, but according to these maps (all PDFs) [Rochester], [Greece], [Pittsford]) found on News 10 NBC’s site, the network covers most of downtown and the “trendy” areas of the city (Park/East/Monroe, South Wedge), a chunk of Greece around Long Pond Road roughly stretching from Elmgrove to Mt. Read and from Ridge Road to Latta Road, and in the Monroe/Clover/French Road section of Pittsford as well as the village.

Free access is available downtown, at Pittsford Plaza, The Mall at Greece Ridge, and Ridgemont Plaza, and in much of the Village of Pittsford according to the maps. In other areas users can purchase prepaid access “cards” online for time in 1 hour, 1 day, 7 day, or 30 day blocks of continuous access time for as little as $1 a day. Existing Frontier High-Speed Internet customers can add the Wireless service to their existing service for about $10/month.

Despite the potential impact this project could have, prior to the research I did to write this post I have seen nothing about it other than speculation and long-term guesstimates. Although the news item on the county’s website fails to include a date, the original announcement appears to have been made on February 12th. At that time Channel 10 reported that the system was already functional in Pittsford and Greece and that the Rochester system should be available “within days.” Frontier apparently sunk $3 million into the project so far, and Maggie hopes to continue working with Frontier and the local municipalities to expand the service to include all Monroe County residents. As of this post the Frontier Citywide Wireless Internet site lists the airport as the only access point in New York state.

I’m curious about the service now. How’s the speed and security? If anyone has used it, let me know.

Several years ago, when Apple first released OS X and with it the Safari browser, I was rather excited. The browser was fast and standards compliant. It worked great, had a nice clean UI, and didn’t come with a lot of bloat. There was just one little thing that prevented me from adopting it: I’m a Windows user.

Yesterday, while reading Eric Meyer’s blog, I discovered that Apple had released a public beta of Safari 3, including a version for Windows. Eric links to other blogs that suggest that Apple is doing this to allow Windows-based developers to test their web apps to prepare them for the iPhone.

I downloaded the beta this morning and installed it. The installation was smooth and uneventful. Once done, I closed out the installer and clicked on the new Safari icon on my desktop. Safari loaded quite fast and presented me with a page on the Apple site. Just one problem, though: no fonts! No menus, no buttons, and no text on the page. A quick Google search revealed that I am not alone and that font support seems to be a major issue for WinSafari right now.

I tried a few of the workarounds that I found, finding one that fixed the font issue on the rendered page, but I still had no fonts on the UI (which, BTW, prevents me from typing a new address into the location bar). I’ll continue to hunt for a fix as I have time, but at the moment I don’t have time.

Three or four years ago having Safari on Windows would have been a godsend. Back then my browser choices were Microsoft Internet Explorer 6–with all of its quirkiness–or the slow and bloated Netscape 7. Mozilla at the time was still too unstable to use as a primary browser platform. Since then Firefox has come into its own as a very stable, mature, browser and has become my primary platform. At the moment I can’t imagine giving up my highly customized (via extensions) Firefox install, even if Safari is a bit faster. Still though, WinSafari does have potential.

OK, its official, I’m addicted to IconBuffet. IconBuffet, if you aren’t aware, is a icon site. It is a commercial site that sells icon sets to software and web developers. That, in itself, isn’t all that exciting, even though their icons are very nice looking and relatively inexpensive. What’s cool about the site is the Free Deliveries and the community behind them.

In a nutshell, Free Deliveries are small sets of themed icons. The developers occasionally send members a random set and the recipients are free to do as their please once they get it. The free icons can be used for personal or commercial projects, modified, whatever. About the only thing you can’t do with them is sell them to others. One thing that members can do however is share their deliveries with other members. Each month every member gets a set of tokens that can be exchanged for icon deliveries from other members. Icon sets are marked as either bronze, silver, gold, or diamond and each level costs a different number of tokens. To send icons you need stamps—sending an icon set costs you one stamp, and for every set you receive you also receive five stamps so that you can share it. The community is very friendly and someone is always willing to fill a request if you ask.

Sound cool? Sign up using this link and I’ll send you whatever sets you’d like (provided I still have the stamps available). Just whisper your requests to me (via “The Box” on my profile page) after you sign up. In case you’re confused, my username on the site is “kodiak.”