Lee Packham

This video is just a nice cartoon of Darth Vader calling up Apple about the problems with his new iPhone. It’s rather comical.

Apple have opened up a new section on their website devoted to HTML5 demos stating that:

Standards aren’t add-ons to the web. They are the web. And you can start using them today.

Only, their idea of ‘They are the web’ is a little off:

As Google Chrome is based on WebKit and Safari is really just an older (maybe more stable version of WebKit) there is absolutely no reason to do this!

Turns out that new employees at Google are no longer given an option to run Windows according to FT.com.

New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system. “Linux is open source and we feel good about it,” said one employee. “Microsoft we don’t feel so good about.”

Wow. Makes sense though. More and more, Windows doesn’t fit into the desktop world and the only companies left on it are those stuck on it due to legacy issues.

FT.com / Technology – Google ditches Windows on security concerns.

Today I flipped over the x64 kernel on my MacBook Pro. So far, noticing the memory allocation/deallocation performs a lot better. Very very nice. Might actually alter the nvram settings to make it permanent.

I did however suffer a stability issue that forced me to hard reboot. I was brew (homebrew rocks – but that’s another post!) building in one tab of terminal and then a ‘svn co’ in another tab. I hit CTRL-C on svn and it hung. Tried to kill -9 things it really wasn’t having anything of it. Not sure what caused it. Logs don’t show much either. I’m sure i’ll get to bottom of it at some point.

Update: Just after I posted this, the author of Colloquy posted on Twitter that the’s got a new Nightly that solves this problem in a “proper” way. Proves the power of Twitter works!

I just upgraded to Snow Leopard and loaded up my IRC client, which happens to be Colloquy, and noticed that Growl stopped working! Checked Growl, Adium was managing to use it just fine.

Turns out that you need to load Colloquy in 32-bit mode as there is no 64-bit Growl API at present.

To do this:

1. Go to Applications in Finder
2. Find Colloquy
3. Highlight it with a single left click
4. Hit CMD-I or go to File -> Get Info
5. Tick the ‘Open in 32-bit mode’ box
6. Close the window
7. Load up Colloquy

Can’t see why Colloquy needs 64-bits anyway. I’d rather it was limited to 4GB of RAM – the amount of memory leaks it tends to have!

MacRumors is reporting that the new Unibody MacBook Pros announced last week have an interesting issue:

Apple seems to have quietly downgraded the SATA Interface from 3.0Gbit to 1.5Gbit speeds in some of the new MacBook Pros introduced last week

As correctly highlighted in the posting, most drives can’t saturate it. Apart from, unfortunately, SSD drives. Although these little beggars are still beyond most people’s level of feasibility, they are useful for more rugged conditions. I’m hoping this is a bug in OSX rather than a purposeful hardware change. Or, maybe it’s to make the battery last a log longer?

13″ and 15″ MacBook Pros Have a Slower SATA Interface – Mac Rumors

If you have any bluetooth device that constantly wants to talk to your new Macbook Pro (like a headset/keyboard) – it will wake it from sleep constantly and thus drain your battery. Fun eh?

I enjoy gaming. I don’t enjoy having to use a full PC rig to play them. I prefer playing on my Macbook Pro. I recently got myself the new Unibody one and wanted to play Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3 under Vista x64 (it has 4GB of RAM, x86 makes little sense).

After a painful install, I wanted to get my Apple Bluetooth keyboard to work. When I am at home, my MBP sits up on a Griffin stand and I use the Bluetooth keyboard. However, for love nor money, I could not make the thing work under Vista. It would just keep flashing it’s little green light for no apparent reason – until I finally figured it out!

At the step where you have to ‘enter’ the passkey. Enter it, then press ENTER repeatedly. Silly? Yes! The only thing that got it working for me? Yes! It seems that you have to keep persuading the keyboard to actually stop being discoverable and be useful. This appears, to me at least, the only way to achieve it.

The new iTunes 8 came out yesterday! Excellent. Loving the new features – especially the Genius playlist thingie. Apart from… It’s not ACTUALLY that good. Sorry. If you’re listening to a popular artist (Say Coldplay, Michael Jackson or similar), it’s great. If you’re listening to one of the reams of Christian music albums, forget it.

Genius just pops up a message saying “Tough” (see the image for the proper text) when I click the little Genius button while Tim Hughes is playing. Tim Hughes is one of the most popular worship leaders in the UK (and a top guy to boot). I was hoping it would find other inspirational songs when I hit the button. Alas, just the error.

The iTunes store had no trouble finding other Christian tracks for me to buy in the Genius sidebar! Figures. Pandora (although that’s no longer available) and last.fm don’t ever have this trouble. So why does iTunes. I put to you that Genius is truly not Genius.

EDIT: It can’t even handle the Mark Ronson – Version album. That’s far less obscure than some big religion thing!

This morning I updated to 2.0.2 of the iPhone firmware (I have an original iPhone). My phone is unlocked to Vodafone using Pwnage – I won’t provide links to all that stuff here. Problem was, I put the phone into recovery mode, restored my new custom 2.0.2 firmware and iTunes went "Do you want to restore xyz backup?" Yes! This is what I usually do and it works every time.

Anyhow, it restored as normal and rebooted the phone. Only iTunes still saw it as a new phone! That’s not right at all! Anyway a quick Google dug up this thread with details on how to fix it. Appears it’s a common 2.0.2 problem then.

1. Click set up as new iPhone and hit Continue
2. As soon as it starts – CANCEL IT on the iPhone. Then cancel it on iTunes as well
3. Unplug phone
4. Turn off by holding the top button down then ‘Slide to turn off’
5. Turn on the phone by pressing the top button again
6. Once fully booted, plug in phone

And then it all shall work well again.