vicchi.org

Leopard Unboxing

vicchi — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 09:54:18 +0000

It’s becoming an instinctive reaction these days; something new and shiny from Apple arrives, so grab the digital camera and upload to Flickr. The arrival of my pre-ordered copy of Mac OS X Leopard is no exception.The full set of unboxing madness is on my Flickr photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vicchi/sets/72157602734496350/

Upgrading To Leopard

vicchi — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 09:50:44 +0000

Friday October 26th was Mac OS X Leopard release day and I’d had a pre-order with Apple since the date was announced earlier in the month. Time to say good-bye to Tiger …… and one and a half hours later, hello to Leopard.My iBook G4’s never looked so good. More photos on my Flickr photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/vicchi/sets/72157602727528663/

Getting Ready For Leopard

vicchi — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 19:54:31 +0000

So Leopard is on pre-order and my much loved iBook G4 is getting dusted down, spruced up and generally ready for impending Leopard-ness.Before …

… and after …

Spot the difference.

Good Customer Service? Surely Some Mistake

vicchi — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:51:54 +0000

I freely admit that this is a sweeping generalisation but customer service in the US is generally quite good whereas customer service in the UK is really quite crap; it doesn’t seem to give any form of service to the customer - which we seem to accept in the UK. Even for US companies which open operations in the UK the whole customer service ethic seems to be somewhat less that that offered by their US parent.So I was sitting at my dining room table last weekend with my, work issued, MacBook Pro surfing the CBeebies site for In The Night Garden. This is for the benefit of my two year old son I hasten to add. He’s particularly fond of this site as it’s able to access the built-in iSight web cam that MacBooks and MacBook Pros have so he can see himself in the game for one of his favourite TV shows.I wasn’t really concentrating on what was going on and was mildly annoyed when a small piece of plastic zipped across the table missing my nose by about half an inch. I started concentrating surprisingly fast when I heard my junior surfer issuing those key words which means something’s gone wrong; “Uh Oh“. (more…)

What’s In Your Dock?

vicchi — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 09:58:33 +0000

It’s not original and it’s been done so many times before but … what’s in your dock and where is it? Mine’s at the bottom of the screen, hiding off, magnification off.

On the left hand side there’s the the Finder, Dashboard, Mail, Firefox, Safari, Adium, Vienna, Address Book, iTunes and iCal.

In the middle there’s Terminal, SSH Tunnel Manager, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, OmniGraffle Professional, OmniOutliner, FastTrack Schedule, Xcode and System Preferences.

Finally, on the right hand side, there’s Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection, Cisco VPN Client, iSync, smcFanControl, Think and VMWare Fusion.

So there.

Expose Challenge

vicchi — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 11:01:21 +0000

The Unofficial Apple Weblog ran an article today (http://tinyurl.com/2jxuhc) pointing to this Flickr image (http://tinyurl.com/2w9jnr) made by someone with with far too many windows open on his Mac.

So what the hell … let’s join in; for those remotely interested here’s my MacBook Pro running …

Mail.app (One main windows and 2 smart folders), Firefox, SSH Tunnel Manager, SSH Keychain, Growl, GMail Notifier, Adium, iSync, Terminal, OmniGraffle Pro, iCal.app, iTunes, Mac Word and smcFanControl

My Desk, Part 3

vicchi — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 07:55:56 +0000

New job, new desk, therefore new hardware. When my day job took place at FormScape my desk was somewhat cluttered; a case of more is more.

Since then I’ve moved on and my working hours are now occupied by a division of Yahoo! and we’re definitely in the less is more category where desks are concerned..

I’d never found any issues with speed or overall responsiveness when using my trusty G4 iBook but compared to the MacBook Pro my iBook definately feels sluggish. With 1 GB of SDRAM and a 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo this machine is as fast and responsive as it’s visually gorgeous. So far I’ve had none of the fan or heat issues that other MacBook Pro owners have been afflicted with. According to Coconut Identity Card, the machine is a very recent build so let’s hope that the MacBook Pro’s teething issues are as an end.

Hmm … New Shoes

vicchi — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 13:02:51 +0000

I got some new shoes recently to coincide with starting a new job. Ben also got some new shoes; his first proper pair. There’s a slight difference in size …

(Mostly) UNIX Quotes

vicchi — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 12:53:21 +0000

Various quotes, mostly UNIX related, which I’ve accrued over the years from various sources.

Well my terminal’s locked up and I ain’t got any Mail
And I can’t recall the last time that my program didn’t fail
I’ve got stacks in my structs, I’ve got arrays in my queues
I’ve got those: Segmentation violation — Core dumped blues.

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.

– Grace Murray Hopper

Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the other numerous lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes a mistake, a giant “?” lights up in the corner of the dashboard. “The experienced driver”, says Thompson, “will usually know what’s wrong”.

– Anonymous

The problem with sendmail is that the sendmail configuration file is a rule based expert system, but the world of email is not logical and sendmail configuration editors are not experts.

– David Waitzman, BBN

(more…)

Running Shell Scripts With AppleScript

vicchi — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 10:01:10 +0000

While I was playing with AppleScript earlier this week I wanted to run a shell script I’d written from within Finder rather than from a shell prompt in Terminal.app.

On Windows I tend to write scripts to run under Cygwin and then write a wrapper batch file to run the script under the control of Cygwin’s bash executable.

Turns out the AppleScript solution is identical in principal and is as simple as

do shell script "/full/path/to/shell/script"

You may need to adjust the path to the script dependent upon whether the directory where your script resides is in your $PATH or not.