No...I haven't picked up a copy yet, but I am planning on ordering one soon. I just thought it would be wise to wait and let things settle down a little. As a substitute and while I wait, I'll be keeping my eyes on TigerWiki.

Welcome to TigerWiki. This site has been made for you guys. TigerWiki is here to track all of the great changes found in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. TigerWiki isn't exactly a "tips & hints" site, as much as it is a way to find and track all of the cool new features of Tiger. And unlike sites like Mac OS X Hints, TigerWiki is owned by its users. Whenever you find something new or improved in Tiger, post it! Let it be indexed and available to everyone else!

Let's see if it takes off or not. I for one hope so.

And really, there's no need to $#!^ on MacOSXHints. There's some valuable stuff to be found there. See Comments

TigerWiki isn't the only Mac-based Wiki out there. They're popping up everywhere.

Shadow Family is a mystery novel by Miyuki Miyabe, who is celebrated in Japan as a great mystery writer. So far only two of her books have been translated into English, Shadow Family being the second of these.

It's not the most gripping of stories, and I worked out who the killer was way too early, but it was somehow still enjoyable to read. I think this is because I have an interest in most aspects of Japanese culture, and this book was just another source to get my fix from.

I read this book in about 3 sittings [I usually read for a couple of hours before I go to sleep at night] so it would be perfect for a long train/plane trip. Basically a good time killer.

Can't say much for the name, but Findory promises to personalize your news reading.

Findory brings you news articles from thousands of worldwide sources. We custom-build a personalized newspaper for each reader.

The more articles you click on, the more personalized Findory will look. Our patent-pending Personalization Technology adapts the website to show you interesting and relevant news based on your reading habits. There is too much news out there for anybody to keep up. We're here to help.

Sound complicated? It isn't. Findory is really easy to use: just click on the articles which interest you. We'll do the rest. No signup, no complicated "configuration". It just works.

So what if I click on something by accident? Or several articles that look promising but end up being trash. I'm not sure I'm keen enough to even try. And just when people are getting the hang of aggregators.

But it might be worth a looksee. Although if I find one more alliteration on their site, I'm blacklisting it. They can be as passionate about personalization as they want, but if they stick to cheap linguistic stunts like TV News Advertainments, I'm outta 'ere.

xen ix has posted a article on Why DHL Sucks. I have a bit of a beef with them myself after something my sister sent me from the US just disappeared in transit. But I understand that it can be a little difficult with Japanese addresses - which tend to be some for of secret code revealed subliminally to Japanese children while they sleep, so that when they grow up and can find locations themselves, but are unable to explain how they do it to anyone else.

More info from John Battette as hes describes how Google;

• seems to be about to implement something called TrustRank. Bit of an oxymoron there.
• is already starting to implement image adverts.
• will soon be offering adverts for RSS feeds.

Crikey

That's a bummer. /. seems to have started posting adverts in it's RSS feed. What is the world coming to?

John Battelle has some information about Google's new advertising plans. According to Google's press release on the enhancements of AdWords:

Our advertisers have asked for the option to target specific sites in our content network, and to reach prospects with compelling ad formats at different points in the purchasing cycle. Users have told us they are tired of seeing the same banner ads everytime they visit their favorite sites. We listened—and now we would like to give you a sneak peek at the new features we will be releasing for the AdWords platform.

And John's rightly points out:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is Google as DoubleClick, Web 2.0 style (ie with an auction and with massive scale). Any pretense this has to do with search should be put to rest. This is an advertising play, pure and simple.

Even if Google has always had plans of being an advertising agency, credit has to be given that they went the right way about it. Most advertisers just go straight for the throat, displaying annoying pop-up, gaudy banners and unflashy flash-verts. Google created the best search engine in the world, built up a dedicated following of millions of users, then slowly introduced the idea to all those millions of users that they could be advertisers themselves. The future's looking interesting.

This is only a prototype, but I think it'd be pretty popular if/when it becomes a reality. There's no specs on the thing yet, but you can see from the photo that you'd have at least the basic functionality of pitch control, cueing and pad-scratching.

Although having two iPods seems the obvious and easy solution, I would've loaded the mixer with enough RAM to cue tracks on both sides of the mixer, and therefore required only 1 iPod. Even a 10GB iPod will carry enough tracks for a long party. And you'd only need about 1GB of RAM to be safe. But in any case I'd still think about it if I was still DJing. Carrying around that rig would be easy. No decks, no records. It would all fit nicely in a small flight-case.

A few juicy bits of Apple.

Cocoalicious is a Cocoa del.icio.us client for OS X packed with heaps of features. It's a nice little app and worth using if you're into del.icio.us.

sidenote is:

...a MacOS X application that tries to catch the “Stickies” spirit but in the form of a multi-document drawer that will hide in the corner of your screen (left or right). You can use it to take all your daily notes, include images and easily modify text color and font.

There's a new version of SubEthaEdit [release notes]. If you're not up on what this program is, then:

SubEthaEdit is a powerful and lean text editor. And it's the only collaborative one you can actually use. By combining the ease of Bonjour with the world's best text collaboration engine, it makes working together not only possible but even fun…

I climbed Mt Yotei yet again yesterday. I went with three friends and all up we spent just over 8 hours on the mountain. That was about 7 hours climbing and 1 hour snowboarding/skiing down. Needless to say it was a long, long day. And I got badly sunburnt. After recently getting a haircut [my standard hair cut for at least the last 10 years has been a crop with a number 1 comb], my whole head looks like an over-ripe tomato. And it hurts like hell. I think a full nights sleep for the next few nights is out of the question as I keep waking up everytime I move. Ouch!!!

Note to self: Don't forget the sunscreen!

Just finished Iain M. Banks' lastest novel The Algebraist and, as expected, it was an amazing read. He's such a great novelist. After 11 fiction and 10 science fiction novels, his work just keeps getting better and better.

Although most people hope for another Culture novel, The Algebraist doesn't isn't one, but you won't be disappointed at all. In fact the book only goes to show how Banks' imagination is so vast. If you've read any of his books, you'll love The Algebraist. If you haven't, get one and read it. You won't be sorry.

Also, I can't help thinking how relevant The Algebraist is in this day and age - with everyones privacy rights flying out the door while no one is watching [or at least while no one listens to those that are watching].

Here's the teaser from the back of the book.

It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year.

The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilisation. In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadents living in a state of highly developed barbarism, hoarding data without order, hunting their own young and fighting pointless formal wars.

Seconded to a military-religious order he’s barely heard of – part of the baroque hierarchy of the Mercatoria, the latest galactic hegemony – Fassin Taak has to travel again amongst the Dwellers. He is in search of a secret hidden for half a billion years. But with each day that passes a war draws closer – a war that threatens to overwhelm everything and everyone he’s ever known.

As complex, turbulent, flamboyant and spectacular as the gas giant on which it is set, the new science fiction novel from Iain M. Banks is space opera on a truly epic scale.

If you want to know more about Iain M. Banks [which is his science fiction writing name...he writes normal fiction as Iain Banks], Wikipedia has a really good bio on him. He's a great modern day left-wind advocate and creates great examples [especially in his Culture novels] of how utopian societies can and should work.

And there's also his homepage, The Banksoniain [a fanzine] and The Culture Data Repository.

"Those crazy Americans!" is a saying that often comes to my mind when watching/reading news these days. Granted, the whole world is going crazy, but the Yanks just seem to top it off everytime. You gotta love it =)

For example, over the last few years there's been a uproar in the American software industry over out-sourcing work to countries with a cheaper, larger, and [let's face it] often more dedicated workforce. It's a dollors and cents thing right to the bone - it's mainly American companies taking jobs away from Americans - althought, in the press, it's usually made to look like a cultural/business attack on America by the countries receiving the work.

There's a lot of obvious solutions to this problem, but what do the entrepreneurs come up with. SeaCode.

SeaCode presents an innovative service which offers the reduced costs of a distant-shore software development operation while providing the operational benefits and accessibility of a U.S. based onshore location.

Another SeaCode benefit is that 90% of revenue comes back to the U.S. instead of flowing out of the U.S. to distant-shore outsourcing locations.

Notice the new term - distant-shore.

Unsurpassed physical and virtual security, including the protection of U.S. Intellectual Property laws and only minutes from Los Angeles International Airport.

Why compromise? SeaCode delivers the benefits of on-shore engineering services at distant-shore prices.

Am I not understanding something? They seem to place the importance on 'near-shore' services on being able to get access to the facility when you need to, and that more revenue will be returned to the US. But do you need physical access to a coding farm? And aren't the US companies saving money by out-sourcing already.

3.1 Miles off the Coast of Los Angeles - 600 world-class software engineers deliver software to the highest standards.

Surely the 3.1 miles has something to do with visas right? And more probably something to do with tax. And so the 600 world-class software engineers are probably not Americans, and there's probably not that many benefits in regards to revenue returning to the US anyways. This opperation doesn't seem to be solving anything, just giving an alternative. And that's probably where it's going to work, because customers love options.

It's a great, but crazy, idea. It'll be interesting to see if anything comes of it. And it wouldn't be half bad working on a old cruise liner either, so long as they kept some of the pleasure facilities around.

Just a interesting link I saw on /. that might be the answer to my why question about the Adobe purchase of Macromedia. John C. Dvorak seems to think is out of paranoia after Microsoft basically back-stabbed Adobe at a recent Seybold Desktop Publishing Conference in San Francisco. Ouch!

Another great extension for your Thunderbird client - WebMail.

The Web-Mail extension creates a platform which other extensions use to integrate web based email accounts into Mozilla Thunderbird. POP is the only protocol supported, this means Thunderbird can only download emails. To send emails use your ISP’s SMTP server, Thunderbird will set the “Return-Path” and “From” email headers using the web account email address, too the recipient the email will appear to have come from the web base account.

Supported WebMail sites so far include Hotmail, Yahoo! & Lycos, which is a real plus for those dummy email accounts one needs to survive spam-free [well, spam-limited] on the Internet these days. And the fewer number of times you have to login to one of these adverts accounts the better.

Also, it doesn't support Gmail, but my Gmail account is about the only WebMail I enjoy using because of the funky XML over HTTP UI, whereas the others are slow, boring and often annoying.

No doubt a smart move by one of the world's biggest [if not the biggest] graphics/desktop publishing companies.

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion.

My only question - What took them so long? I would have thought it an obvious move and good investment years ago when Macromedia was first starting out. Maybe Adobe didn't have the money to spare until now. Far be it for a lone freelance hacker living in the back-waters of Japan to know what goes on in the depths of such companies. But it's interesting news and I'll be on the watch to see how the purchase changes anything.

You can read the full press release here.

There's a couple of good articles [Part I & Part II] over at the IBM Developer Works site by Peter Seebach. He provides some good arguments on why the MacMini would make such a fine platform for the embedded space. High performance hardware, lots of ports, very quite & a large set of development tools.

Of course, some people have already realised all this...for example - CenterStage.

MJ Simpson, who is a long fan and study of all things Douglas Adams, has posted a review on the Hitchhiker's movie that doesn't really paint a very good picture of it. There's a long version is spoilers, a short version with no spoliers and a list of Things That Aren't In The Hitchhiker's Guide Movie. I've linked to the MirrorDot pages as MJ Simpson's site has reached it's bandwidth limit after a good old /.ing.

After a small introduction as to how he saw a pre-release version of the movie, MJ gets right into it.

Really bad. You just won't believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular - but that's just peanuts to the Hitchhiker's movie. Listen.

The key gripe MJ has is;

Throughout the movie, wherever there are recognisable scenes, they have been severely shortened. This not only doesn't work, it also shows an amazing lack of understanding of what made Hitchhiker's so good in the first place. Here’s a clue: it's not the story. Douglas Adams had no real idea of how to string a long-form narrative together - that's why the plot is so fluid. It's the ideas and - let's be quite clear about this - the use of language which make Hitchhiker’s so enjoyable and so perennially popular. Douglas was a comedy sketch writer. His forte was brilliant dialogue in intricately constructed little three-minute bursts and all the best bits of the story, like Mr Prosser’s scene, are self-contained sketches. Douglas worked and worked at each line of dialogue (or monologue, as the case may be) until it was absolutely perfect; this can be clearly seen in radio producer Geoffrey Perkins’ anecdote about how Douglas would turn up with half an episode, work on it all day, and go home with only a third of an episode.

That's why there are so many wonderfully quotable lines in Hitchhiker's Guide, most of which are notable by their absence from the film. There are, astoundingly, individual phrases and even words that have been removed. For example, in the Vogon poetry scene which, like Prosser's confrontation, is now so short as to be utterly pointless, Arthur’s line "counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor", a brilliantly crafted piece of faux literary critique, has become "counterpoint the underlying metaphor." How is that justified? Did someone try to keep the film under two hours by crossing out some of the long words?

Damn...I was really looking forward to a good movie. Now it's looking like a wait-for-the-dvd kind of thing.

Leave it to the EFF people and the world would be a better place.

Now they've release a guide to safe blogging, including tips on how to blog anonymously and how to blog without getting fired. They'll be some use for it as more and more people flock to blogging as a way of expressing themselves.

A while ago I posted about Invisiblog.com and it's good to see they're still alive and kicking - and noted by the EFF.

Invisiblog.com is a service that offers anonymous blog hosting for free. You may create a blog there with no real names attached. Even the people who run the service will not have access to your name.

If you've blogged for a while, you probably know everything that's in the guide, but it's a good read anyways. Thanks EFF.

The people over at Desktop Anime have released a series of Manga-based iPod advertisement desktops. I can't imagine they'd be the best desktops around, as the iPod ad colours are annoying enough as billboards, posters and TV shorts, but it's one for the interesting basket. My favourite is Motoko from Ghost In The Shell fame. Yours?

Warning: The following post is blatantly biased due to it containing family.

My sister, dispite having a high pressure IT job [it runs in the family] in New York, has managed to squeeze out 3 of the cutiest kids I've seen in a long time...and all with the same partner =) - who is also a really special guy. They recently took a vacation to Saint Thomas [Virgin Islands] where I'm assuming this picture was taken. Bit of a classic.

Nice one 'sis.

EpiaCenter has some updates on the new mini-itx dual processor motherboard. Seems it's going to have 3 NIC ports. Hopefully one of them will be capable of gigabit transfer rates.

Also, there will be 2 models, one with 2x800Mhz processors and one with 2x1GHz processors. Nice.

The other interesting release is the new VIA EPIA SP13000, which is currently the best board going for a small workstation or media center. EpiaCenter has done a decent review on the new SP13000 board, so have a looksee there for more details.

Well...those comments spammers, that have been only moderately annoying until yesterday, must have written a script to automate the spamming of my blog software, because this morning there was over 30 comment records added. Actually I don't think it's the same crew as before - up until yesterday is was all poker and pills...now it's porn of every imaginable flavour.

I've been putting off doing anything because of the limited amount of spam being posted, but times have changed. In the next few days I'll be devising some blocking tactics, then coding and implementing them. There's a few different methods I've researched so far, but as the saying goes, practice outweighs theory. I'll let you know how I go.

Fans of comics, and particularly fans of Frank Miller's work, will all be waiting anxiously to see Sin City - the movie based on the Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name.

If you've read the Sin City graphic novel, I'm sure you'll agree it's on of Miller's best. Also, that it would be a shame to see a poorly made film version of it. Happily, from priliminary reports, it seems we won't be disappointed. Philly.com is reporting so, in a review boldly titled - "Sin City" true to its graphic original.

The black-and-white and blood-red adaptation of Frank Miller's ultra-hardboiled graphic novels is a word-for-word distillation of three books in the series, featuring the chiseled thugs, femmes fatales and dubious denizens of an urban hellhole called Basin City.

Even more hopeful are words from the man himself;

"A comic book has never been adapted the way this has been adapted," Miller says. "Sin City very often is shot panel-for-panel exactly like the comic book. The dialogue is my dialogue from start to finish. I'm thrilled with the results."

And I'm thrilled that he's thrilled with the result. What more could you ask for than the original writer saying something like that? I just hope it's not too long before it's released in Japan. And if it's that good, chalk another one up for the DVD collection.