wincent.org - Making the most out of a busy connection with throttled [via VarChars]

O'Reilly Network: XGrid or the future of computing [Jan. 28, 2004]. Next weekend, I'll give a status report after trying this out on a cluster *cough* of tibook/667, powermac/400, and ibook/700. [via rootprompt]

Remember nntp? If you do you're probably using some variant of the NewsWatcher family (I always liked YA-NewsWatcher/Thoth until I stopped reading newsgroups a while ago). If you don't you're probably a post-web internet user and here's your chance to go old-skool: Panic has just released v1.0 of Unison, a drop-dead gorgeous newsreader with some very sweet looking threading and downloading features.

Discuss

Much like in a relationship, a company rarely gets kudos for doing what it is supposed to do. Apple rolled out the 2004-01-26 Security Update for 10.3.2 client/server, 10.2.8 client/server and 10.1.5 client/server at the same time. Software Update 'em if ya got 'em.

Dear Apple,

Kudos.

Love, Pat

Fun with Mail.app: Mail.appetizer, a cool little Mail pref that pops up a semi-transparent window informing you of any new mail that's arrived in your Inbox.

Three things I'd like to see added to this:
1. Let me resize the window. By default it's too large for my liking.
2. Let me define which properties of the email are displayed. I only need to see the From: and Subject: lines to know if it's worth reading or not.
3. Let me change the colour of th window. That white on black is a bit harsh. Very cyberpunk, but it doesn't fit with the rest of my OS.

Other than those minor quibbles, I like it alot.

Update: I'd like my preferences to be remembered as well.

Discuss

Noah Kravitz at PowerBookCentral.com has posted what looks to be one in a series of pieces on Windows XP vs. MacOS in schools, from his perspective as Mac user and XP admin. Non-polemical cross-platform comparisons are surprisingly rare, so I'm looking forward to hearing more from Noah. The two bullet points from the first installment: "OS X Crashes, but Win XP Crashes More" and "Quirky Mac Innovations are Cool at Home, But Inexcuseable at Work." Link

For those of you wondering about the speed of VirtualPC 6.1, I did a test. I got a copy of VirtualPC 6.1, I put FreeBSD (command-line only) on it, and used "openssl speed" to measure the CPU speed doing a reasonable mix of complex things that don't involve the disk. Virtual PC is almost exactly 20% as fast as the native CPU on my iBook G3 600 MHz. So, VirtualPC is probably reasonable for people who have to have one or two non-CPU-intensive Windows apps running sometimes, but not much more than that. They say there will be speed improvements in VirtualPC 7, but I'll believe that when I see it.

Recently I wanted to set an environment variable so that a standard, double-clickable-from-the-Finder Cocoa app could see it. Apple Technical Q&A #1067 has the lowdown on how one does this, but basically you need to create a ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file (you can use /Developer/Applications/PropertyListEditor.app to create and edit this file).

I quote:

Most Mac OS X users prefer to use GUI tools to make Installations of software. By providing GNU software ported or built for the Apple Installer we are providing a needed service for the OS X community. Our Goal is to produce Tools for the OS X Package Installer/Maker and to port all Free/Open source software to the OS X Installer system as is possible. - THE GNU MAC OS X Public Archive

Maybe it's old gnus but it was gnu to me and came in especially handy when I needed to install useradd (why isn't that part of OS X?).

Lead and they will follow: WinExpose.

I recently came across this page (it's a couple years old) detailing an uncommon but interesting migration, from BeOS to OS X.

Okay, so I indulged in a little Schadenfreude against the holy Mac universe from time to time, pissing off thousands. I'm not proud. But neither am I a bad person. I've just always wanted the most from my computer, and it always seemed like the Mac offered very little of the best, and a whole lot of the worst. But recently I've seen the light, and am here to make amends for my blasphemy. I hereby publicly apologize for my past life as a Mac-hater. Not only that, but thanks to OS X, I'm now a bona fide Mac OS lover.

Link

Charles Arthur at The Indepent weighs in with his predictions for 2004. Notable: the ubiquity of the iPod and a Mac resurgence. Ok, so it's not news and these sorts of predictions are generally meaningless, but it's been slow around here lately ;-)