Benjamin Hourigan

In the absence of genuine content updates, the long-overdue announcement that this site no longer uses WordPress 2.5 or K2, but is now on WordPress 2.6 and a new theme.

I spent several weeks looking for a new base theme for my Wordpress sites, and I finally settled on Freshy. Paired with the aptly named Customize plugin, it’s highly and easily customizable. I’ve had a lot of favorable comments from friends on how professional the theme looks. Kudos to designer Julien De Luca.

19 August 2008. A new version of Customize is out that restores widget reordering and fixes other admin interface bugs. There is also a new version of Freshy out (2.0.8), but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet. I’m almost ready to say Freshy users are okay to try upgrading to WP 2.6 (or even 2.6.1, the current version, which I’m now running), but will test the new version of the theme first.

18 August 2008. There are problems with the interaction between Customize (current version, 1.0.2) and WordPress 2.6 that can break some features of your admin interface, particularly the ability to reorder widgets by dragging. Freshy users should hold off upgrading to WordPress 2.6.

Today, Apple released iTunes 6. This is the most gratuitous major version bump I’ve ever seen.

Sure, new iPods came out today that play video. It’s about time. And the iTunes music store also carries short films and TV shows now. But little has changed in iTunes itself. iTunes has played video for ages, and the store’s been selling music videos for some time.

And let’s not forget that iTunes got a major version bump from 4 to 5 just a week or two ago. To go to six, now, with so few changes in between, is just ridiculous.

Today Microsoft released a new software suite for students. It’s aimed at secondary-school students, and offers them resources to help them complete assignments in standard subject areas like maths, science and so on. Students would probably be best advised to get an Apple computer if they want to be productive, which would stop them running the aptly named Microsoft Student suite. Even so, it looks like a decent product. Just like the Xbox 360 looks like a decent product, and probably will be.

Microsoft’s been criticised recently, though, for not knowing how to do publicity properly. The latest edition of Edge, #151, compares Sony’s savvy launch for PS3 with Microsoft’s try-hard MTV special launching XBox 360. And with Microsoft Student, we see a trend emerging.

Microsoft’s flash-based product tour for Student is terrifyingly condescending. It features a hip dude, probably about 25, who goes on about how well Student helps him prepare reports and do things with “numberage,” in a voice that sounds like a simultaneous parody of both Pauly Shore and Keanu Reeves. (Keanu doesn’t need a link, since he still has a career going.) This relic from the 1990s has, for a side-kick, a girl with visible braces and an awful haircut who looks like a poster-child for unpopularity. Here’s a hint, people: the cool kidz down in the ‘hood are using Macs!

Come on, Microsoft! I’m sure today’s kids don’t need advice from Pauly Shore or Little Miss Dork. The best thing about the product tour is that people might get a few giggles out of it at Microsoft’s expense. Check it out, if you could use a few laughs.

And Microsoft… Someone, in fact probably several people, on your publicity team, need a swift and powerful kick in the ass that sends them flying out your front door and into the crisp Redmond morning. Like, jaa…

Today I did a survey that MIT is carrying out. The questions focus on what your blogging practice is like, and on what kinds of people you know personally. If you read this and keep a blog, give it a go. Hell, there sure are stupider internet surveys you could do. Thanks to dogpossum for the link.

In today’s WWDC keynote, Steve Jobs officially announced that Apple is beginning to switch its CPU-based products from the PowerPC architecture to x86. Online responses have been varied, commenting on what effect the move will have on Apple’s sales, Linux, and Microsoft. I haven’t seen any writing that’s been especially enthusiastic about it from a user’s perspective, but I think that’s because a few effects of the transition have so far been missed.

The only thing I’m unhappy about is that come 2006, I’m going to want to replace the 1.5GHz Powerbook I bought last November with one of the new Intel-based Apple laptops we can expect to see soon. On the plus side, that new machine is likely to be considerably faster, cooler, lighter, and less power-hungry than what I currently have.

Better yet, it’s going to have the same processor architecture that Windows and most Linux distros are compiled for. So while I’ll be mostly running OS 10.whatever, I’ll be able to dual-boot with an x86 Linux distro, and probably Windows, too.

This will make my life as a gamer much easier. I just gave away my x86 PC, since the beast of a machine was too heavy and too big to think about taking with me to Japan. So I’ll probably never finish Knights of the Old Republic, Planescape: Torment, and Legacy of Kain: Defiance, which I had on the go. It’s a shame.

But with a new x86 Powerbook, I will be able to play those games again, and not just on Windows, either. With OS X on x86, the way is open for a port of Cedega, which currently lets users play DirectX games on Linux, provided they’ve got an x86. Even Transgaming don’t port Cedega to OS X, I’ll still be able to run it under Ubuntu Linux. Of course, having x86 processors in Apple machines is also going to make it easier for developers to write OS X native ports of Windows games, provided they can wean themselves off their dependence on DirectX. Emulators written for x86 probably won’t suffer the performance hits they currently do on PPC, Virtual PC and so on for OS X will run Windows at close to native speed, and we’ll probably see an OS X port of VMware.

So if Apple keeps putting A-grade GPUs in their Powerbooks, they’ll soon be great work machines that double as gaming platforms. That will make me very happy, and it’s likely to make the Mac a viable choice for gamers for the first time ever. Smart move, Apple.

now playing: No Dancing from the album “My Aim Is True” by Elvis Costello

The MSN Spaces service recently passed out of its beta phase. On visiting the service’s home page, regular readers of OSNews will likely recognise a shocking degree of similarity between the Spaces logo and that of distro-of-the-moment Ubuntu Linux. The similarity is obvious when switching between the Spaces and Ubuntu pages in separate browser tabs. In the sites’ favicons, the three circles representing human heads are in the exact same positions in both logos. There is also a blog within MSN Spaces that has been set up to show Ubuntu’s logo side by side with Microsoft’s ripped-off version. Have a look before Microsoft hears from Canonical’s lawyers.

Macworld UK - Oz Mac sales double – IDC

Apparently sales of Apple computers are really taking off in Australia.

Macworld UK quotes IT analyst Michael Sager saying “Apple seems to be finally benefiting from the iPod halo effect.”

I get really tired of people talking about how the popularity of the iPod is going to make people buy Apple computers. Especially since iTunes is on Windows now (where, as on Mac, it’s the best music player there is), iPod owners can get on just fine without Apple computers. And, incidentally, Mac owners can get on without iPods. I have an 80GB hard drive in my Powerbook, holding, among other things, my entire 3728-song music collection, which I play through speakers connected to my Airport Express wireless base-station. iPods and Macs don’t need to be paired up.

Despite this, Apple are selling loads more computers lately. Why could it be? Here are some of the things I think might be contributing:

• Windows XP is ridiculously antiquated, much the way the old Apple OS 9 was. On top of that, it suffers drawing glitches, constant and often unexplained slowdowns (usually from too many applications having installed useless memory-resident utilities), myriad viruses, and spyware. Every useful feature is buried under a mountain of wizards, menus, and dialog boxes. It is also just plain broken. Every time I plug in my firewire drives under Windows, the system reboots. Genius.
• After years of having an operating system that geeks laughed at, Apple now has OS X, the best operating system there is. Both geeks and people who don’t know what RAM is manage to love it simultaneously. That’s a fine achievement on the developers’ part.
• Their lead industrial designer, Jonathan Ive, is a god. My white iBook G3 and its successor, an Alumnium Powerbook, are the only computers I’ve ever owned that I’d describe as “beautiful,” and the build quality is superb.

These are the reasons why I tell everyone I know who uses a PC that they should be using a Mac instead. Notice none of them had anything to do with an iPod.

Are you using a Mac, reader? If not, do yourself a favour. Go get one. For the budget-conscious, I recommend a Mac Mini, or an iBook G4.

It’s the Mac that radiates a halo, not the iPod.

Incidentally, about half an hour ago, Apple unveiled its newest revisions of the iPod line. Check them out, if you must.

If there’s anyone who wasn’t quite sure if I’m a computer geek, this is the post to prove it…

Ever since I went to the Digital Arts and Culture conference at RMIT in 2003, where I presented this paper, (many of the political arguments of which I now thoroughly disagree with), and where every second attendee was toting some kind of Apple notebook, I’ve been “a Mac person,” as some people I know would put it. I’ve also managed to bring my entire family to the Apple fold; even Mum and Dad are about to buy a new G4 iBook.

Now, OS X 10.3 came with my Powerbook G4, and it’s a great operating system, the best I’ve ever used, in fact. But I also really love the idea of Linux, and also some of the software that is unique to the free-*nix world, like GNOME. I have, however, struggled in vain to make it my sole operating system on both my Powerbook and my x86 PC. I’m currently removing it from my Powerbook, where it’s sat, unused, eating 10 gigs of my hard drive, and it may well vanish from my PC, as well.

I came to this conclusion last night after having a go at installing the latest preview release of Ubuntu Linux, dubbed the “Hoary Hedgehog.” Ubuntu is my favourite distro to date, despite being relatively new. It uses Debian’s APT for package management, so installing new software from online repositories is a snap, and it always comes with the latest version of GNOME. The last release had been sitting on my harddrive unused because it neither supported Airport Expresss (Broadcom’s fault), nor had a working PPPOE utility, and without internet access, a computer isn’t very useful to me.

Hoary’s networking worked fine. Still no wireless, but PPPOE was easy, so I could get online to download some codecs to, in theory, watch some Rurouni Kenshin (in .ogm). But when I finally got them working in gxine, the sound was way too quiet (even with everything at full volume), and trying to use Totem to play the files made my mouse-pointer freeze (needing not just an X-server restart, but a complete reboot to fix). Mounting my HFS+ drive in Ubuntu, I later discovered with Disk Utility.app in OS X, also created some minor, fixable errors.

On top of that, there’s no Exposé, no hardware acceleration for the GUI (and once Tiger comes out, I’ll be saying: “no integrated widget system, no system-wide instant search,” and so on). When compared to Windows, the GNOME GUI is brilliant: multiple desktops, fast drawing of image thumbnails, great usability; but when compared to OS X, GNOME seems like ancient history. KDE is awful, I don’t use it at all.

There’s also very few commercial games for Linux, and sorry, open-source developers, but the only real AAA titles are commercial. Even OS X doesn’t do so poorly in this area, in comparison. Things like Nethack and interactive fiction are great, but they aren’t pushing any technical boundaries.

Other than commercial games, I use free software almost exclusively on my Mac: LyX, OpenOffice, AbiWord, Firefox, Adium, Instiki, MPlayerOSX, VLC, FFView, and more. The list is similar on my PC, where I’m running all this stuff under Windows. All this stuff was born of the same, free software movement that created Linux, and which desperately wants Linux to be the world’s operating system of choice. But I’m sorry to say that despite these applications having delivered technically advanced ways to do my work and to share it across my computers and with others using open file formats, Linux just isn’t the OS to run them on. It isn’t the best. It still won’t “just work,” “out of the box,” or off the bootable CD if you will.

I want the best OS I can have, and I’ll even pay money for it. I paid nearly $150 for Panther the year before last, and I consider it one of the most worthwhile purchases I’ve ever made. When Linux is the best there is, maybe I’ll come back to the fold. But for now, I’m looking forward to having an extra 10 gigs free on my hard drive.