HyperionReactor The Middle Child of History

Apple recently purchased CUPS ( Common UNIX Printing System). This is kinda scary since Apple has always used FLOSS software to better their operating system but has never given back. Remember the kHTML and Webkit shit show?

I only hope the same doesn't happen to CUPS. Here is the author's announcement.

Apple released iTunes 7 a few hours back. I just connected my iPod to charge it.

This screen just blew me away

*The threadmill*

PC and Mac on a treadmill. Mac starts sweating like crazy. PC is just a little winded. Mac starts pouring out sweat, then collapses and turns gray.

*Hey its iPod!*

PC sees Mac listening to an iPod. Pc tries to say something to Mac. PC starts yelling, Mac ignores him. So PC snatches the iPod from Mac "disconnecting" him without warning. Mac goes crazy and has an seizure on the floor. Tag line, "Macs don't like it when you disconnect their iPods."

*The little girl*

PC and Mac are standing there. Mac is going on about how user friendly and progressive it is. Just then a little kid runs in and tells PC, "Hey mister! I heard that guy is going to come out with an even better computer in one month.".

!http://static.flickr.com/26/96156446_3275d6a6a7.jpg!

I was lucky enough to get my hands on the Apple's latest and possibly the greatest product to hit the market, two days after it was launched. No doubt it was way faster than my PowerBook 17" with a gig of ram. But is it really a good idea to move to the MacBook? I am not a fan of first generation products, but on the other hand Apple has never release a product that wasn't production worthy.

The first thing I that amazed me was how bright and clear the new display was. It was way brighter than the powerbooks that was launched a while back. I generally do not use my laptop with maximum brightness but the clarity was just amazing.

One thing that I would like to see is more battery life, my PowerBook gives me about 4 hours of battery life, with some tweaks a bit more. While the guy was showing me how the new MagSafe works I turned to check how much battery life the MacBookPro had, amazingly it was 4 hours. With all the mambo jambo on how the new processors are much more efficient on power, I expected it to be a lot more. Then again these are pre-production models.

I love the way the added the iSight into the new laptop and how crisp the images were. I did a quick test of the cam and a quic conference on the local network. I think this is a real good feature if your into video conferencing, since you don't have to carry around another piece of hardware.

The downers of this new system is that you will have to wait a while before you get a native binaries for software, I guess its going to take till March or April till most of the major ones have been ported to the new Intel platform. I did not find much of a performance hit running Photoshop CS2 on it though. Actually it did load up faster than it normally does on my PowerBook.

The new laptop is heavier than its ancestors, from 5.6 pounds to 6 pounds. Its actually heavier than my current one. The DVD drive is also a lot slower and not as powerful as the ones currently shipped with the PowerBooks.

Also with the addition of FrontRow to the new MacBook Pro, you can use it as a entertainment center. But then again how many of us use our laptops for this. It would make much more sense for Apple to ship the next generation of Mac Mini's with FrontRow since thats where ever one wants it. A good addition none the less, and another piece of plastic to bother about.

I am also not a huge fan of Apples new iWeb Application. Yes, it looks really cool and no doubt its easy to use and publish data. But then again the source code the application generates is not all the great. I wonder if it even passes any standards, also the new PhotoCast that they have come up with is not really standard, when Apple could have used MRSS they seem to have hacked up something of their own.

The latest iWorks is definitely some thing I am planning on buying. I have never used any presentation application or word processor that just works!

Conclusions... I guess I am going to wait a while till I get my self one. This is not due to the current shortcomings, but I would just like to have a 17" MacBook Pro. But for now I think Ill be buying a copy of iWorks

Technorati Tags: Apple, MacBookPro

I finally got bored of using NetNewsWire, and moved to Vienna, I am pretty happy with the features, and the nifty NetNewsWire2Vienna port script.

!(alignleft)http://static.flickr.com/42/87755337_fa67cb7490_m.jpg!:http://flickr.com/photos/wnorrix/87755337/

h3. Quick feature roundup

* Clean simple and uncluttered UI
* RSS and Atom support
* Builtin browser thats easy to use
* Smart folders (just like Mail.app)
* Folder Groups (organize stuff)
* Import and Export to OPML
* Scheduled Refresh
* Flag articles that you like
* Customizable reading panes
* A good number of styles (create your own with basic HTML and CSS knowledge)

When in 1986 Apple Computer bought a Cray X-MP and 
announced that they would use it to design the next Apple Macintosh, 
Seymour Cray replied, "This is very interesting because I 
am using an Apple Macintosh to design the Cray-2 supercomputer."

"Jon":http://www.jonbruck.com/ convinced me a while back to move all my email to Gmail, since its easier to archive and search ( Gmail rocks at this ). I had to format my laptop a while back because I removed some libs that made the entire system unstable.

Another reason for moving all my mail to Gmail was to reduce SPAM. On a good day I get about 200 SPAM mails. Mail.app did a pretty good job of reducing this to about 50. This number reduced to 2-5 once I started piping it through Gmail.

Now because I had moved all my mail to Gmail, I did not have to bother backing up all my emails, because Gmail already had them archived for me. I have one gmail account which I use for my free software and consulting address. I spent a good number of hours trying to figure out how to get Mail.app to use multiple addresses with a single Mail.app account.

At first I thought I could check out Thunderbird since its opensource, I could just hack the source code and integrate it with the MacOSX's Addressbook.app. But then I would also have to hack it to support multiple email addresses per account. Once I weighed all the pros and cons, It seemed to be smarter to hack Mail.app through Apple Script or write a Proxy for my outgoing mail in Ruby.

Finally I figured it out. What if i just entered a bunch of email addresses seperated by commas (like you normally do when you want to send it to multiple people) in the Email setup? Would it work? Yes! It did work!

Here is a small tute on backing up your mail at Gmail and using it with Mail.app. If you have already setup Gmail to support multiple email addresses you can just skip to the second section.