I’ve moved the site over to the latest version of Wordpress, and I’m really enjoying the new user interface. As a result, keep an eye out for new content appearing in this space shortly.
The Vancouver Apple store in the Pacific Centre Mall opened for business this past weekend. I was in Toronto, attending the MESH conference (thanks to commandN) and couldn’t make the opening day, but I was there Sunday morning.
Interesting thing about Vancouver: it’s a very sleepy town. They get started pretty late in the morning here, at least compared to Toronto and Ottawa. So when I showed up at 11 AM on Sunday morning I was a little disappointed to see how few people were in the store. All the better for me though, because I got to browse without having to push my way through a crowd.
Drooled over a MacBook Air, even though it’s completely impractical for my needs. Besides, I already have a completely serviceable MacBook Pro. I also eyed the new version of X-Plane for the Mac, but decided I was probably better off with one less thing on the credit card this month.
We went for lunch, and when we returned at 1 PM the store was packed full of people. I’m sure the other retailers on the upper level of the Pacific Centre love the new store - there normally isn’t a lot of foot traffic up there, but the Apple store (and the nearby H & M) really draws a crowd.
It’s nice to see so many people interested in Apple today. I say that not because I’m an Apple fan, but because Windows has been synonymous with computers for so long, that it’s great to see people realizing that there are alternatives out there. Whether it’s Mac, Linux or something else, the greater the diversity of the computer world, the more innovation, interoperability and open standards we’ll see, and that’s a good thing.
Personally, I’m happy that the store is there because it’s about 3 blocks from where I live, and I need to get a battery replaced under warranty soon. The downside is that there are all kinds of shiny new toys to purchase, all within walking distance!
Soulver is a funky little calculator application (Mac only) that allows you to type in plain-english statements, and Soulver will figure out the necessary equations and calculate them.
An example from the Soulver website:
book = $12
If I sell 100 copies of my book, how much will I make?
$1200
Personally, I think that everyone needs basic math skills. But I can see a market for this sort of application.
Thanks to the guys at MacResearch for this one.
I was browsing Craigslist today and came across this post. It indicates that Apple is hiring staff for their new Apple Store in the Pacific Centre mall, downtown Vancouver. Woohoo! It’s about time (assuming it’s not a fake post) I live only 3 blocks away, which is both a good and a bad thing (mostly bad for my wallet).
Update: I confirmed it on the Apple Jobs site. Choose Mac Genius and then work your way through to Vancouver BC and you’ll see the Pacific Centre posting.
One of the things that struck Natasha and I after moving to Vancouver is how little we actually drive these days. Living downtown, we can walk or take public transportation to most of our destinations. We only drive on weekends, and even then, only occasionally. Our car insurance payments have actually decreased from what we used to pay in Kamloops, and we only fill up the car once a month or so. Even better, walking is healthy and good for the environment.
If those aren’t good reasons to think about public transportation and walking, then consider what Simon at the Green Blog posted today regarding the space required to transport a group of people by car, bus and bicycle. Apparently these are old photos, but I somehow missed them. Photo credit: Press Office, City of Münster, Germany.
Merlin Mann of 43Folders is a smart guy when it comes to managing all the facets of your "digital life". Here is a presentation he gave recently at the IDEO offices. The 43Folders name comes from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, so if you’re a following of that way of thinking, then you’ll be right at home with Merlin. But even if you’re not, Merlin is still worth paying attention to.
A friend of mine asked me if I could take a look at his Drupal installation - apparently whenever he enabled a particular module his entire site would crash. "Sure, no problem. I’ll take a look this weekend and we’ll get it sorted out for you" was my response. But something came up that weekend and I put it off. I figured that it wouldn’t take me long to figure out, so I could do it Monday. Of course, when Monday came around, something else took precedence and I put my friend’s problem on the backburner.
That was three weeks ago. Each time I pushed the task back it seemed to grow in size. Suddenly it wasn’t a small favour I was doing my friend, it was some giant task that was bordering on a project … at least, that’s how I viewed it.
Last night I found myself with a free evening, so I sent him a quick note saying I would take a look and that it would probably take me a day or so to figure out. I logged in, and within 5 minutes I found and fixed the problem. So simple! My friend was ecstatic that I had solved the problem which had plagued him for weeks… while I felt more than a little guilty for dragging things out as long as I had.
One of the golden rules in the Getting Things Done system is to do a small task immediately, rather than postponing it. It’s a good rule to live by and I guess I needed a reminder.
I use a MacBook Pro as my primary workstation, and it’s usually connected to the internet via an ethernet cable, although we do have wireless in our house for those “work from the couch” days.
Last night, I needed to borrow the ethernet cable from the MacBook Pro - so I switched the Mac over to the wireless network. No big deal, right? Only, I was running VMware Fusion on the Mac at the time, with bridged networking enabled. Now, bridged networking simply makes any virtual computer inside VMware appear to be an entirely separate computer on the LAN. It’s recommended that it is used with Ethernet only. That’s because it needs to do some network trickery in order to make it look like the virtual computer is separate from the real one.
After switching to wireless I walked away to get a drink, and when I returned, OS X was displaying a dialog box that read something to the effect of “It appears as though your wireless network may have been compromised. OS X will disable wireless for approximately one minute” - and sure enough, I was offline.
I didn’t think to grab a screenshot at the time, but it looks as though OS X didn’t like what VMware was trying to do to make itself visible on the wireless network. It misinterpreted it as an attack on the wifi and shut the wireless down. Unexpected, and quite cool!
I’m going to try and replicate it this afternoon to see if I can’t get a screenshot or two.
For all those web developers who rushed out to upgrade to OS X Leopard - if you’re like me and you used the Sites folder in your home directory for testing your websites, you may have noticed that you can no longer access http://localhost/~username/ after your upgrade to Leopard. It took me a minute or two to figure out, but here’s the problem and a solution (if you are command-line friendly):
Leopard features the Apache v2 webserver, as opposed to the older Apache v1 in Tiger. In the old Tiger OS, the Apache configuration files were stored in /private/etc/httpd/. That’s changed in Leopard. The new path is /private/etc/apache2/.
When a user is created on your system, a small Apache configuration file is created that enables Apache to serve content from their ~/Sites/ directory. Under Tiger, these files were stored in /private/etc/httpd/users/. From what I can tell, if you’ve done an upgrade from Tiger to Leopard, those files do not get migrated over to the new /private/etc/apache2/users/ folder.
So, in order to make your sites work again, make sure to copy your Apache per-user configuration files from /private/etc/httpd/users to /private/etc/apache2/users. For example, I had to do this:
$ sudo cp /private/etc/httpd/users/michealk.conf /private/etc/apache2/users/
$ sudo apachectl restart
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you have to admit that Apple knows what it’s doing when it comes to product design. I stumbled across a great article over at Basement.org: 10 Things We Can Learn From Apple. Think about it: here is a company that turned itself around and went from being a minority player to a major trendsetter in technology. How did they do it, and can the lessons we learn from Apple be applied to other businesses and industries?
Some of my favourite points:
For me, points 3 and 4 really resonate. Just about everything Apple builds looks good enough to touch/lick/taste. They pay attention to the overall design, both hardware and software.
I have an HP notebook on which I run Ubuntu Linux and occasionally Vista. While the HP is a solid little performer, it looks clunky as hell and feels cheap. I don’t get the same tactile pleasure using it as I do when I use my MacBook.