Thought for the day

Did Lee Majors do his own stunts when he played Colt Seavers in The Fall Guy?

Embedded comment forms

Cool. I just found about embedding comment forms in posts.

Edit your comment settings via http://draft.blogger.com/ and you should see an extra option under Comment Form Placement - 'Embedded Below Post'.  That's all there is to it.  More details here.

If you're using your own hand crafted template, this article  describes how to update it.

Rant: an amount of numbers

This is my rant for the day:

It really irks me when people use the words amount and number in the wrong context.  What just fired me off this time was reading this Macworld article about iPhone orders reaching 13,000 per second. (Anyway, that sounds way too high, surely 13,000 per minute is more realistic.)

But I digress. What got me was the quote from O2 "The amount of devices will vary depending on the store...". This should of course be "The number of devices...".

Amount should be used when you are referring to a portion of a single thing. If you can't pluralise the thing, then you should always use amount.

Number should be used to signify plurality. If it makes sense that you can count the number of objects, then use number.

Some examples might help...

• Correct: I want to buy an amount of sand.
  
• Incorrect: I want to buy a number of sand.
  

However, what would be correct grammar (though hardly appropriate in the real world) is "I want to buy a number of sand particles". Thus, an amount of sand particles is incorrect.

And consider the following:

• Incorrect: I want to record the amount of messages being sent.
  
• Correct: I want to record the number of messages being sent.
  

Thank you for listening. Rant over.

I have checked, but no doubt somebody will flame me for grammatical errors in this post!

WWDC 2008

Well, well. Lots of exciting stuff announced at this year's WWDC 2008 Stevenote.

The new iPhone. Hmmm... a much cheaper price, 3G and GPS makes it a slightly more compelling purchase than the old iPhone. We'll have to wait and see how much the contract will cost from O2.

Snow Leopard. Interesting. One of the goals of Snow Leopard is to reduce the footprint of OS X - I guess everything shrinks in the cold, right...?

MobileMe. An upgrade to .Mac? Your very own mail server! Access mail with your Mac, and iPhone or iPod touch.

6-day recording with Sky+

I was watching a 2 hour programme at the weekend, then all of a sudden my Sky+ box thought I was 6 days into it!

Separated at birth?

What do you think?

Benny from the Vatican...

And Genial Harry Grout, of HM Slade Prison...

?

Things not to do in an airport departure lounge or tube train

1. Play this on your laptop  - http://boortz.com/mp3/archive/countdown.swf

Why you should use Python

From http://docs.python.org/tut/node3.html:

"By the way, the language is named after the BBC show ``Monty Python's Flying Circus'' and has nothing to do with nasty reptiles. Making references to Monty Python skits in documentation is not only allowed, it is encouraged!"

Why? Because she's a fucking princess, that's why!

Spotlight is CPU hog in Leopard

There was a time on Tiger when the Spotlight indexer processes (mdimport) would run nicely in the background and relinquish CPU cycles to anything else; you would hardly know they were there.

On Leopard now,  Spotlight appears to have been completely re-written and certainly does produce search results a lot faster than Tiger, but it does so at the expense of hogging your CPU(s) in an effort to get the indexing done (which are mdworker processes now). mds is a bit of hog too.

It took about 20 minutes to install the Office update, and it started a couple of minutes just before the Time Machine backup kicked off.  Coupled with the Spotlight indexing going on in the background as well (which didn't totally calm down until about half an hour after the install finished), made for a slightly unresponsive machine for a while!

So here's a tip - don't install the Office 2008 update (12.0.1) during a Time Machine backup!  Responsiveness is reduced a tad.

I filed a bug report with Apple.

Thought for the day

Why should I have to pay for free range eggs?

Operator? Get me Bugs Bunny

Ever wanted to play the Looney Tunes theme on your phone?  Dial this number: 901293645555

It works best if you can programme the number and dial it that way. 

(Probably doesn't work on mobile phones.)

I wonder what other tunes can be played?

Leopard? Bored now.

Leopard is old hat. It's been out for a few months now. I'm bored with it. We need to move on.

First, please take part in my poll. What do we think the next version of OS X will be called?

Secondly, does anyone have any ideas (as wacky as you like) as to what the next big features in OS X will be? We've had Fast User Switching, Exposé, Spotlight and Time Machine. What's next? What would you like to see?

Freedom of speech

So who should be able to comment on my posts? How much protection should I put around comments?

From what I can see, I can limit who can post (anonymous, google account holders, blog members only), I can moderate comments, and I can add word verification to prevent autonomous comments.

Now, at the moment, my readership is not *that* big.

I am going to open my arms and allow anonymous posts and turn word verification off. I want as big a readership as possible. If it starts to go sour and I get comments by bots or other unsuitable comments, then I will start to restrict things.

Let's see how it goes...

Rich text, poor text

I feel I have reached an important milestone in my emails: No longer will I make a conscious effort to send plain text emails. It's rich text (well, HTML to be picky) for me from now on.

I use Mac OS X, so I'm not too concerned about reading emails with potentially dangerous virus and trojan-laden payloads. (My spam traps are about 95% effective anyway.) Most of the mailing lists I subscribe to use HTML, and they're always much nicer to read in HTML than plain text

If Apple Mail had an option to always compose new emails in plain text (hint - it doesn't if you 'Mail Link to This Page' from Safari), and an option to prefer viewing plain text content I might have persevered a while longer.

Can anyone convince me as to why I should stick with plain text?

OS X Packages and Version Control

Chris's blog about ClearType fonts in OS X got me thinking about other issues with Microsoft Office and iWork.

One 'good' thing about Office is that the documents it creates are truly single files, as opposed to iWork where it's documents are OS X packages, or bundles, in particular document bundles.

A bundle is simply a folder with sub-folders and files. OS X and the application that created it knows it's to be treated as a single entity.

This is important when considering a version control tool for OS X. Most (if not all?) version control tools work at the file level, they don't know how about bundles. I would love to use iWork for our documentation, but see here how it can go wrong (some comments offer solutions).

It seems to be an issue with version control tools that want to litter your working copy with a hidden file or directory per directory (CVS, Subverison). On the other hand, more modern version control tools like git or Mercurial don't seem to suffer from the same issues and CVS and Subversion.

We deliver documents to our clients as PDF, so it shouldn't matter what tool we use to generate them. On the other hand, clients may well be Microsoft-bound, and may still send us Word documents.

But how do you send a cross-platform spreadsheet, or PowerPoint presentation?

I suspect we may be stuck with Office for a while yet...

Chewbacca at home

You may have seen these before, but they make me laugh.

Is Chewbacca trapped in my nightstand?



My Hoover Sounds Like Chewbacca From Star Wars

Macworld 2008

Here's a few of my thoughts about the recent announcements at the Stevenote:

Time Capsule. Great idea, but I might want to put in my own bigger disk later, especially for my ever expanding collection of exotic photos and videos ;-). I wonder how suitable it would be in an office environment?

MacBook Air. Cool! But, no firewire? Only one USB? I don't think it's intended to be your main machine (no optical drive). SSD is welcome, even though a tad expensive - £639 for 64GB! I'm sure prices will fall eventually, but at £2000 it's not for me.

Movie Rentals. This definitely got my attention. With the new Apple TV box and a nice new LCD HD TV, the idea of renting movies over the internet is now looking quite plausible.

iPod touch apps. Already bought. Now we have Mail and Notes, the move towards it becoming a PDA is much more likely. The Maps app Locate function was quite scary - is this Big Brother in disguise! The wiggling home screen icons is just so twee!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

I'm back - grudgingly - from 2 fabulous weeks in South Africa.

Every time I go everyone says - you must come out to live here. To be honest, part of me says yes, and part of me says no. (The bigger part says yes.) Of course, there are many reasons I'd love to stay out there longer. Seeing friends and family more often than 2 weeks out of every 52, Gilroy's, and being able to go for a quick swim on the 1st January, at 12.01am (that's one way to sober up!) are just a few that spring to mind.