Ugo Cei’s Weblog
Mary Jo Foley: “If you’re Microsoft — especially a member of the Vista team — there’s no way you can help but gloat. Very few Softies or their loyal followers are gloating publicly. But there’s no way they aren’t enjoying this turning of the tables.”
I’m a fully satisfied user of NetNewsWire (the full, not-lite version), but there is one thing that this fine piece of software cannot do, apparently. I want to subscribe to some feeds that are served by an HTTP server which requires authentication and only accepts client certificates as a means of authentication. So I can subscribe to the feeds using Firefox LiveBookmarks, since I have imported my client identity certificate in Firefox, but I’d really prefer to be able to read those feeds in NNW. Alas, NetNewsWire doesn’t seem to offer any option to import a client certificate, like Firefox does.
A search on Google and on Newsgator’s website did not turn up anything useful, so I’m resorting to the lazy web, in the hope that some kind soul had the same problem and solved it.
Technorati Tags: netnewswire, ranchero, newsgator, syndication, firefox, osx, rss, certificate, https, identity, authentication, client.
A few days ago I started noticing that my MacBook Pro was running hotter than usual, even when not doing any particularly intensive task. Turns out that apparently one of the fans got stuck.
Couple this with a failing magsafe connector, a battery that needed replacement and a hard disk with some kind of defect, and I’m really starting to think this machine needs to be seriously serviced, if not entirely replaced.
I’m adding my voice to the chorus of people asking Apple to please not discontinue the Mac Mini.
OK, it’s underpowered and it’s not very expandable, but it’s the best home computer around, especially for children, and it works great as a media center, and it’s cheap to boot.
What I want is a Mac Mini with a 2GHz+ CPU, at least 1GB of RAM and a largish HD (make it 250GB at least)! If it cost around €600, it would be just perfect.
Technorati Tags: mac mini, discontinue.
Today His Steveness finally unveiled the long awaited iPhone and once more left the world gasping in awe and wondering how can a company be so consistently innovative and miles above and beyond the competition.
Excuse me if I let myself be totally swept away into Job’s Reality Distortion Field, but this iPhone is such a thing of beauty that is leaving me completely helpless. It’s not just that it’s probably the smart phone with the best user interface around (we still need to verify how good the multi-touch, but I don’t think Apple can blow it). It’s also not just that it’s a wide-screen video iPod too.
What really blows my socks off about it is the fact that it’s running OS X! Can you imagine it? Not some brain-damaged or crippled OS like Symbian or WinCE, but OS X. And it’s got Safari, of course. A real browser, not a joke like the Symbian browser or Opera Mini, and with that screen resolution, you can really browse almost any website. If you ever tried browsing the web with a typical smartphone, you know that most sites are actually off-limits. And it’s got Wi-Fi too!
Does the fact that it is running OS X mean that most Mac applications will run on it unchanged? This is not clear, but I see no reason why this shouldn’t be the case. What follows from this is that thousands of desktop-class applications will immediately be available on the iPhone. Can you say “great mobile platform”? I knew you could.
No wonder that shares of RIMM and PALM are plummeting through the floor today. Would you buy a Blackberry or a Treo if the iPhone were available today?
And would you buy a Zune? If there’s one thing that the iPhone is not is…brown ;).
To be honest, the only thing that the iPhone lacks is more memory. 8GB is not that much if you want to carry around lots of music, videos and a great deal of applications and associated data. Let’s just hope that by the time it actually becomes available, advances in Flash memory density bring us a 16GB model, at least.
Finally, I cannot close this post without a mention of the other product that was announced today. The Apple TV is a great product, but its importance risks being overshadowed by the much sexier iPhone. It would be much sexier if my friends at The Venice Project could port the Venice client to it ;).
Update: Looks like it won’t be as open a platform as I had hoped, which is a pity, and tends to cool my enthusiasm a little bit. It’s still probably the best iPod ever (minus the tiny memory size) and a cool gadget for mobile Web and email access, but not such a revolution. However, this is just the first version, so I guess it’s better to wait and see.
Technorati Tags: iPhone, macworld, stevejobs, keynote, osx, appletv, convergence, rimm, blackberry, palm, treo, symbian, theveniceproject.
You know what happens when you get a new boss who’s been working for 11 years at Sun? He starts sending out OpenOffice documents, that’s what ;).
I think I should be happy that he’s not sending MS Office documents, and cannot really in good conscience recommend the exclusive use of Apple products like iWork, in preference to a true Open Source solution, no matter how much I love Keynote. Moreover, we still need to get him a Mac.
The only problem I had, to be honest, was that I didn’t have Open Office installed on my MacBook Pro, and didn’t want to install and run X11 just to open a few documents. So I thought of using NeoOffice. After all, I’ve seen Simon Phipps use it on his Mac when he did his presentation at OSBA, so if it’s good for Simon it must be good for me.
Problem is, the main download site for NeoOffice appears to be down. Looking for an alternative location, I came upon a torrent for NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua Beta 3 for Intel Macs which led to a speedy download and now I can open ODF files without having to suffer X11.
To make this post a little less self-serving, I’m linking to the torrent here, for the benefit of those that might be searching for it. Personally, though, I think I will continue to use Keynote for doing my own presentations.
Technorati Tags:
openoffice, neooffice
I don’t know who this David Keppelmeyer is. The name is probably fake, but he got me completely—hook, line and sink—before I realized this was just an elaborate prank:
In the last few years Apple has been the darling of the gadget press. Profits and sales are reported to be sailing higher than ever, and at a glance, the company’s success would seem to be assured. Under the surface however, there is little to be happy about for followers of the Macintosh, Apple’s aged platform, and the iPod. While the iPod is a solid if limited music player, it’s an offering without the backing of Microsoft, and missing several killer features of the Redmond giant’s new Zune music player.
Taken by itself, every single point he makes sounds outrageous, but not something you haven’t heard yet from the ever-present Apple-bashers and Microsoft-lovers. It’s only when you consider them all together that it becomes clear that it’s just satire.
Or was I simply too credulous? Judging from the comments, it seems like I’m in good company. Even TUAW seems to have taken the piece seriously. In any case, read it all, it’s fun.
Image courtesy of goopymart.
Technorati Tags: david keppelmeyer, danaquarium.
My friend and colleague Gianugo says this happened to him also, and it seems to be quite frequently. To make it short, the power cable of my MacBook Pro started malfunctioning this afternoon: the led wouldn’t light up and no power was flowing. Apparently the soldering between the thin cable and the MagSafe connector cannot stand the repetitive strain that you apply on it by continuously winding and unwinding it around the power brick.
So I called up the store and they told me I will need to bring it in for checking tomorrow morning and they might have one spare power adapter to lend me. Luckily, after some prodding, pushing and pulling I was able to make the cable work again this evening (see picture), but I am afraid it’s going to fail again as soon as I try to move it. Anyway, I have two fully charged batteries now and they should be enough to allow me to use the laptop tonight (and post this entry) and tomorrow morning until after 10AM, when the store opens.
… mature artists steal, as someone said. How would you classify this page then?
I’m sure you’ve already seen the original:
Apple Support: “Apple has initiated a worldwide battery exchange program for certain rechargeable batteries that were sold for use with 15-inch MacBook Pro computer systems from February 2006 through May 2006.”
If your 15-inc MacBook Pro battery has model number A1175 and a 12-digit serial number that ends with U7SA, U7SB or U7SC, then it is eligible for replacement. Mine is, so I ordered the replacement. Nice to know I’ll soon have a brand new battery, those suckers never seem to last too much before starting to lose performance.
Just installed the latest Skype (beta) version for the Mac, which they say features video calling. But I couldn’t find anything in the preferences regarding video, nor any “start video call” button in the UI. I guess it’s maybe not detecting the built-in iSight camera in my MacBook Pro, who knows?
Update: Oh, I got it now: The version with video is actually a separate download!
Great advice from cavemonkey50.com on how to make your Firefox more Mac-like:
Who doesn’t love Firefox? I’ll tell you who, Mac users. While Firefox has always been great on Windows and Linux, it seems that the Mac version of the browser has always lagged behind in terms of performance and visual appeal. Since version 1.5, the Firefox development team has been paying more attention to the Mac version of the browser, slowly increasing its speed. The upcoming Firefox 2.0 continues those tweaks, finally making Firefox fast enough to be considered usable. That leaves just one problem with Firefox for Mac, the appearance. Luckily thanks to some third-party developers, Firefox can easily be tweaked to fit in with the operating system.
Apart from the theme, which is a matter of taste after all—but using less vertical pixels is better as a matter of fact—having close buttons on the tabs themselves is a must, especially considering that it will be the default on Firefox 2. And using the location box as a progress bar is useful when you have lots of extensions taking up space in the status bar, like me. Pictured below: Google PageRank Status, Firebug, AdSense Notifier, Blogger Web Comments, GreaseMonkey.
Technorati Tags: firefox, extensions, look & feel.
This is for a bunch of people I know that routinely use Eclipse on their Intel Macs:
EclipseZone - Eclipse and Intel Macs - apply …: “It’s quite likely that this is a driver issue with Mac OS X on Intel that was causing some of these problems, and Apple’s released QuickTime 7.1.1 that claims to fix some issues with startup items for Intel macs. In any case, bug 142892 has been tracking it, and it looks like applying this fix solves whatever the graphics card issue is, and Eclipse is running again. “
I didn’t have this particular problem (UI is freezed, even though mouse pointer moves, and you cannot even login from remote) when running Eclipse, but rather with other applications, like Opera for example. However, the symptoms were the same, so I dutifully upgraded Quicktime to 7.1.1, hoping they won’t surface again.
I just learned (via TUAW) that there’s a new Skype version (1.4.0.49) out for the Mac which is a Universal Binary and I immediately installed it. One less PowerPC application to go.
While I was looking around to see what other PowerPC applications I had running, I noticed I hadn’t updated Quicksilver in a while. Lo and Behold! There’s a new beta out (β48) which is universal too. So, at this very moment, I’m not running a single PowerPC application on my MacBook anymore. Woot!
Technorati Tags: macbook, intel mac, skype, quicksilver.
My new MacBook Pro is acting more and more strangely. First it was random lockups, maybe once every few days, where the whole UI would freeze, even though the mouse pointer would still move. Now it’s frequent appearances of the spinning beach ball, locking up a single application and going away in a couple of seconds.
What’s more worrysome, I started noticing these kind of messages in the system.log:
May 3 15:56:19 MaBi kernel[0]: disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED). May 3 15:57:07 MaBi kernel[0]: disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED). May 3 15:57:54 MaBi kernel[0]: disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED). May 3 15:58:42 MaBi kernel[0]: disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
And finally, if I try to verify the disk using Disk Utility, the system will lock up in the manner described above. S.M.A.R.T. status is “Verified”, though.
I couldn’t find anything on Google regarding that error code, but I’m scared that my disk might be on the verge of abandoning me. I need to do a backup as soon as I get back home.
I just upgraded to the latest beta of NetNewsWire 2.1 from 2.0 since it’s a universal binary and was thinking it would be much faster on my MacBook Pro, but I had an unpleasant surprise when running it for the first time, as a pop-up box appeared telling me that “A NewsGator account is required to activate your product.”.
Huh, excuse me? I bought NetNewsWire and MarsEdit when Ranchero was still an independent company and I would gladly pay for them again in case my license doesn’t cover the upgrade from 2.0 to 2.1, but giving my full name and address to another company without even an explanation of what that’s for and, what’s more, accepting their terms of service? You got to be kidding!
OK, I will probably comply, since I basically trust Brent and will probably find the syncing feature useful, but other people might not be so trustful. How about adding an explanation before the final release?
And wouldn’t it really be possible to opt-out?
Technorati Tags: macbook, intel mac, netnewswire, ranchero, newsgator.
Apple Introduces Boot Camp: “CUPERTINO, California—April 5, 2006—Apple® today introduced Boot Camp, public beta software that enables Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP. Available as a download beginning today, Boot Camp allows users with a Microsoft Windows XP installation disc to install Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac®, and once installation is complete, users can restart their computer to run either Mac OS® X or Windows XP. Boot Camp will be a feature in “Leopard,” Apple’s next major release of Mac OS X, that will be previewed at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in August.”
Way cool! My plan to buy an Intel MacMini for my little girl just got so much more feasible.
Technorati Tags: windows xp, intel mac, booting, boot camp, leopard.
The title is not a reference to Don Siegel’s classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where duplicates of the people of a small village were grown inside giant pods. Rather, it refers to Apple’s newest marketing strategy: building a giant iPod-like structure that would be visible from high above, if not exactly from outer space. At least, it’s visible in Google Maps.
Take care: While this might seem like an April Fool’s joke, the news broke out at least one week ago on boakes.org, so it’s probably genuine.
By the way, happy 30th birthday, Apple!
(Via Davide).
Technorati Tags: iPod, space, satellite, google maps.
Find the best deals on new mp3 players. Get customer ratings and professional price comparison on new ipods. Get the latest in mp3 music legal debates and who really pays the price for free music. Also find great deals on new laptop computers to go along with your new music player. Check out this great comprehensive laptop buying tips computers.
From my namesake Ugo Landini, I learned that: “Reliable sources informed MacosXrumors that Apple is developing virtualisation software that could be added to Apple’s next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard. The technology will allow users to create and run virtual machines with Mac OS X, Linux or Windows on any Intel-based Mac.”
If this turns out to be true, my plans to get an Intel Mac Mini on which to run Windows might be closer to fulfillment.
Mac Rumors: Windows XP Booting on Mac Contest Over: “According to this post the final solution will work on the 17′ iMac, 20′ iMac, Mac mini and MacBook Pro. The full solution should be posted shortly and appears it will include downloadable bootloader.”
How cool is this? I might resolve myself to buy the third Mac in my house: a Mac Mini for the daughter to add to the iMac I use for doing serious work at the home office and the MacBook Pro (substituting the aging PowerBook) for traveling (which I’m doing more and more often, incidentally).
This will allow me to throw the old Celeron she has and that is not even fast enough to play most games, out of the window. We already have mouse, keyboard and display and would get WiFi so I won’t need to run cables through the house to enable her to use the Internet.
The only doubt I have is: will the Intel Mac Mini running Windows XP be able to run some decent games? Nothing requiring extreme 3D performances, mind you, just some simple, fun, educational games.
Technorati Tags: contests, microsoft, macbook, windows xp, intel mac, booting.
