sotto.org

Our friend Jenni is in town this weekend, so we made our way to downtown Palo Alto to eat at the Peninsula Diner, which is a favorite place of ours not only because of the food and the service, but also because it is the least pretentious of the restaurants in that general vicinity.

After gorging [...]

The more I read about Exposé, the new window management feature in Panther, the more convinced I am that the Usability people from Apple have hit a home run and completely removed the need for tabs in any application. It’s fucking brilliant.
Before the Safari tab debacle, I had been racking my brain trying to [...]

Much hullaballo about whether Apple’s claims of G5 performance are at all genuine. While I would reserve judgement until the new Powermacs are released in the wild along with some realworld benchmarks, the article misses the point entirely with regard to what this mean for Apple.
The G5 makes Mac competitive again in the greater [...]

Holy Macaroni. Apple does it again with the G5 Powermac. In a single introduction at their Worldwide Developers Conference at the Moscone center, they have erased almost 4 years of subpar performance against the x86 platform, and surpassed it with a big bang. They are a company with their fingers firmly planted onto the trigger [...]

Apple’s numbers on the popularity of their ITunes music store may be misleading.

Apple says that “more than half” of this song total was sold in album format, rather than as singles. Assuming a conservative 12 songs per album, and one album per person, we can calculate that 500,000 songs would satisfy 42,000 customers. Assuming a [...]

Remember what I said about the ipod changing the relationship you have with music? To wit.

I’ve browsed the online Apple music store and I have a few thoughts about it. Again, somehow, Apple innovates the paradigm, this time in the entertainment and media realm. It’s a well-designed webservice, and integrates intuitively and beautifully into Itunes. However, I personally would never buy anything from the store because I think it is [...]

I bought one of these iCurves to help the ache in my neck when looking down at my Powerbook. It also works great with the ThinkPad I use for my daily bread. Yet I can’t help but feel ripped because in the end, it’s still a $40 piece of plastic.

Hyatt has begun writing Webcore documentation on how KHTML and KWQ (quack) works. This is just in time since I’ve been learning Objective-C and its oddball Smalltalkish syntax in bits and pieces since I got my Powerbook.
After reading up a bit on the subject, it looks more and more like Carbon, which I believe was [...]

Note to self: If you intend to type: sudo fink install bundle-kde, be prepared to wait a very, very long time.

The interesting thing about switching back and forth between XP and OS X is that you realize that despite the low level differences between the two (which in most cases means very little to the average user), the metaphors for working within them are basically the same. Window dressing, while the most noticable, is also [...]

When a helicopter crashed into San Francisco Bay, it made local news here a few weeks ago. Luckily its mandated safety pontoons meant that it simply floated on the water while the Coast Guard came to the rescue.
It turns out that the passengers in the helicopter were Macworld-San Francisco attendees, which was happening at [...]

Have I mentioned recently how OS X on an Apple Powerbook is the shiznat? OS X on an Apple Powerbook is the shiznat.

A developer on the KDE-DEV list is trying to port Safari (rather the updated KHTML libs) to WIN32 in baby steps: first trying to get KHTML to compile using MS VC++ and then to do the same for CoreFoundation and KWQ (Quack) layer. Apples uses KWQ I believe to emulate the Qt libraries needed by [...]

Thoughts on the Apple’s Safari browser: I’m extremely positive about Safari for Apple. Their choice in using KHTML instead of Gecko as the rendering engine seems to me a particularly sound technical decision. I was going to say that it was also a non-political decision, but every technology decision is political, even a couched non-political [...]

Bittersweet Obsolescence. Everyone is talking about the updates to Apple’s laptops, including the 17″ fiber-optic lighted Aluminum Powerbook whom I shall dub Gigantor. This was a huge surprise to everyone in the mac community who were presented with a load of new offerings: Safari, Apple’s own browser based partly on KHTML (which runs KDE’s Konqeror), [...]

One of the nice things that re-switching affords is that an alternate parallel universe opens up as you slowly re-discover publications, people, paradigms and subcultures devoted to the cult of Apple. It’s been a re-education of sorts since I followed much of that subculture when I first started using computers years ago. Let me [...]

Apple released their iPod MP3 player today. As I was telling my friend Dave today, I was underwhelmed with it initially, but on second thought from a Mac user’s point of view, the product is actually very spiffy: 5 gigs of space the size of a deck of cards, firewire enabled and autosynchronization with your [...]