The New MacBook Air

Maybe one day I’ll be able to afford one of these babies.

A Tech Witchhunt??

First, Norway went after Apple for not allowing songs downloaded from iTunes, to be playable on the iPod only. Now, Belgium has decided that Goolge’s caching of information (that incidently is free) on the web is a violation of Belgian copyright. This is beginning to sound like a straightforward European governmental witch-hunt because they just can’t seem to make an alternative service. I used to think that the continuing European monopoly action against Microsoft was because Microsoft was guilty of monopolisitic practices, but now I suspect it was just because some beauracrat decided that lame legalism will constrain the competition.

Digg|OS X vs. Vista – a GUI development and concept analysis

Great article on interface design concepts and developement process on both operating systems. Different company philosophies for different results on user interfaces.
read more | digg story

An interesting article in the design process of Windows Vista and Mac OS X. One of the comments had a link to a video superimposing a presentation about Windows Vista’s upcoming features with all the features that Mac OS X has right now.

Mac OS X Blues Part V

So here I am at the Carousel Center Apple Store. I had about fifteen minutes on my hands so I thought why not write a quick post.
I have to say this, these Apple guys do have a certain following!

In the 10 minutes, I’ve been here, I’ve seen them sell two computers.

While I love the end-to-end experience that a Mac provides, I think their manufacturing quality leaves much to be desired. This is the second time, that an Apple product has crapped out on me . Six months ago, it was my 15 GB iPod. Now its the hard disk. While I’ve heard about hard disks crashing, this was much too soon!! My HP hdd, is still alive at 3 years, even if its LCD is dead.

Anyway, I had a long discussion with him, and he gave me a couple of tips. He told me that most probably the hard disk is shot and the only thing left to do is to replace it.

The way to replace it would be open the base of the mac and replace the IDE drive. And he also told me that the price of having it done at the Apple Store would be expensive enough to justify getting a new Mac. I’m just not prepared to do that right now. I want a new Mac, but not until the new Intel-based macs mature.

The next suggestion that he said would be go to ATS (off carrier circle). They had a lot more leeway about using more generic parts because they dont work under the Apple logo, as opposed to the Apple Store which has to buy overpriced Apple authorized parts.

Replacing the hard drive while possible, seemed to be a significant task, which I’m not prepared to do right now.

One last suggestion that Mac Genius suggested was to use my newly acquired external hard drive. This hard drive has a firewire interface. That was a good decision. So according to his suggestion I installed Mac OS X 10.2, and now I’m upgrading to Panther. My first priority is to transfer my music file so that its safe and the new files are authorized. Once that happens, I’m going to try to format the original hard drive again and see if I can recover the original hard drive again.

Mac OS X’s ability to boot from a firewire drive is really a god-send right now. Some of the design choices that Apple has done for its OS are really good, and the way the guy at the Apple Store described, their hardware is really well designed too.

Mac OS X Blues Part II

So I went out and bought a copy of Alsoft’s Disk Warriors.

I bought it the Apple Store at the Carousel Mall in Syracuse. Talking to the technician I found out that the main cause of the I/O errors usually occur because of hardware failures, and I would be much better off just by getting an external hard-drive and backing up my data. So i though I would risk a an investment of $107 and see if that Disk warrior is going to work or not.

Right now its displaying a dialog box saying that its Rebuilding director, and below two progress bars in brackets showing me that the (Speed is inhibited by disk malfunction). Seems to me that the technician was right. The hard disk is physically damaged.

The causes of damage could be anything, it could be a bad cable, a faulty logic board, or that the hard drive has gon bad. I guess the only thing I can do is just wait…. I’ve taken photographs, which I will be posting as I go along.

Disk warrior starting up.

Disk warrior’s attempt to graph the hard disk.

And this is where its stuck at.

and I’m right here waiting for it to finish.

The Graphing Calculator Story

The Graphing Calculator Story is one hell of a story. This is the kind of work I want to be doing at my place of work.