I dunno, maybe it’s worth the sofa surfing porn raid… you still have one hand free to pull yer keks up when the missus walks in, and there is no more squinting at a tiny screen, so it’s probably good for perving without the cloud of macular degeneration and the cost of surgery.

Phanbouy nirvana??? hmm… I think even the hardcore among us will be a little sad inside. I think that really it’s just a Newton version 2.

http://www.wired.com/news/images/full/newton_f.jpg

Maybe the third version will be better – you know, like the iPhone was.

Enter Mechdrew.

I am not attempting to bypass Mechdrew’s excellent set of tools or his process and chances are my post is now out of date I did have to alter the process a little bit so I thought I would clarify what I did for prosperity. BTW, I didn’t want dual boot, and so don’t ask me anything about it.

The mini 9 does not come with a CD ROM drive, but I had an external one, and this process seemed the easiest. There are processes for doing it all via meory stick, but again, my choice was the CD method. The Retail edition of Snow Leopard is Dual Layered… 7.5GB… make sure your CD can read it.

You will need a retail edition of OS X (I used 10.6 – Snow Leopard anything else and go find another process). This will also nearly fill the 8GB internal drive, I’d recommend an upgrade with a Runcore SSD – they are cheap and immensely fast. While you’re at it, buy more memory… You can never have too much memory.

From mechrdrews download site, download the following components.

• NetbookCD 0.8.3 RC4 ISO (and burn it to a blank CD)
• NetbookInstaller 0.8.2 Final (and put on a memory stick)
• NetbookInstaller 0.8.3 RC4 (and put on a memory stick)
• About this Mac (and put on a memory stick)

Yes, get both the NetbookInstallers – this is important! 0.8.4 may fix the bug that means you need to do this this, but for now… get them both. If you do not, you will not be able to reset your BIOS to disable legacy USB support which in tern will mean you will not get sleep to work properly at the end of the process.

So, boot off the NetbookCD. When you get to the chameleon boot loader eject the disk and slip in the Snow leopard DVD. wait a few seconds then press F5 (fn + G) when the list of items change, select the “Mac OS X Install DVD”. And you’re off.

• Select your language and press Continue.
• Press Continue on the Welcome screen.
• Press Agree.
• Go to Menu Bar>Utilities>Disk Utility….
• Select your internal drive and delete anything on it.
• Create a new volume formated as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
• Press Apply.
• When finished, closed Disk Utility.
• Select your newly-formatted drive, press Continue.
• The process then continues.
• Installation will probably get to the end and report that it has failed. Again, this is normal, just press Restart.

I had to then boot back off the NetbookCD but I eventually got to the Mac Desktop (after following the steps to install a user and connect up to my local wireless)

Plug in your memory stick with the tools above on them. Open the zip file with NetbookInstaller 0.8.2, then one that has unpacked, run it. Do the same with 0.8.3. Then finally run the About this mac package. This is the moment of truth. Shut down your system.

Disconnect your CD drive and power on… it should get to the mac desktop.

Right, now you need to ensure you have disabled “Legacy USB support” in your BIOS, so reboot and go into the setup, then let the machine reboot again. Everything (bar the mic and the SD slot in my case) should now work. You may need to BIOS tweak to get my issues fixed, and I’ll keep you posted.

For interest, I used a retail copy of Snow Leopard 10.6.0. Mechdrew says to not use software updater however that worked for me.

An enlightened language, for example PHP, will treat a null in the same way as zero, false, and an empty string during general operational mode. If you want to go into EXCEPTION based logic, you can detect null with an equivalence check. Why is this good? well, for a start, the whole point about EXCPETIONs is the fact they are an EXCEPTION to the standard business logic, which means you have to understand what you’re trying to do at any particular point.

Take an address for example, just because it does not have a postcode does not make it invalid – well unless you live in Ohio. A postcode not being present in a UK system could be an indicator of several things

• an overseas country.
• someone who has forgotten their postcode.
• someone who just moved house and doesn’t know their postcode.
• someone talking on behalf of someone else and not knowing their postcode.

If you wrote a letter and didn’t put the postcode on it, would the Post Office put the letter in the bin? No… well, they may do where I live, but generally NO!

Now, what if your system were tracking usage by postcode… well, this is a different kettle of digits. If you’re tracking usage of something by postcode then you would generally expect there to be one. In the event a postcode is missing you have 2 options. Either log the fault and move on (i.e. it’s important to log whatever you are doing, but add a bin for “Unknowns”), or it’s not important in which you can stop what you’re doing and do the next one (an exception can be used here).

An exception (in my not so humble opinion) is a glorified GOTO command that basically gets you round some error checking and nested IF’s… would you use a GOTO in your code? no. (Well hopefully not anyhow).

Exceptions are not a lazy alternative to proper error checking.

While technically he has a point, let’s put a little context in here. Hands up if you’re using Microsoft Internet Explorer…. what about Firefox? If they have a critical vulnerability and you happen to find somewhere that can exploit it I think you are screwed. Not the same thing Mr McRee? well, what about the dozens of holes in Microsoft IIS? servers using that need to be patched quite regularly. what about people who use blogger, WordPress, MediaWiki etc!!!

I used to be a member of the “Poo poo the new” gang, (and to be fair I still am from time to time) but cloud bashing is not the answer. This is not a dark lining of the cloud Mr clever clogs Dan Goodwin (author of the article) it is a practical and natual effect of software these days – since microsoft invented throw away computing and sold the “Crap software that crashes every 10 minutes is perfectly acceptable” message to the world.

If the intent is to “raise awareness” then good on you. However that still falls into the realms of “stating the bleedin’ obvious”. Do professional companies really deploy software to production without a risk analysis? Do they deploy code without a security review? Do they not ensure their backup strategy is sound? If the answer to any of these is ‘yes‘, then they deserve everything they get.

Mind you, if this is the best ’security flaw’ you could find, and decided to make it note worthy, then I’m an even bigger convert to the cloud.

BACK OFF THE CLOUD BUDDY!!!!

Warning… if you are in any way sensitive about swear words, what follows will make you blush – a lot.

Fuck you all you ignorant twats!

If Java wasn’t bad enough with all it’s pretentious twatty followers and how “Java runs on every platform without recompilation”, and my personal favourite “the fastest PHP interpreter in the world is written in Java” we now have the up-coming .NET lovers

Oh, before I unload on .NET, the comment about the fastest PHP interpreter – this is called Resin, and with a prevailing wind and a muppet doing the testing, it can be faster on the same hardware. However the Doctor Devaint Corollary is “if writing decent code is too difficult, upgrade to the next Amazon instance type”

Right, .NET is shite – I was just updating an XP install and noticed .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 at a gut wrenching 248MB. The reason for the real annoyance is really “HAVE YOU NOT HEARD OF BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY YOU FUCKING MORONS!”

I wouldn’t be overly offended if I only had to install one .NET framework and that would handle all my poncy needs, but NO! I have to install version 1, version 1.1, version 2, version 3 and now version 3.5 – service pack 1! – according to my install history a whopping 612MB 428MB after install… I have been reliably informed that this is not accurate and educated accordingly (thanks Captain Hruk) however someone is lying:

Back when I was a developer you built a set of tools that supported your organisations development needs. tools that worked without question, that worked according to the requirements spec and documented interface. Then the bubble burst and we off-shored it all. Now we have shit code written by muppets using buggy interpretations of a whole army of needs making things more complicated and generally providing a product that fails a lot and is acceptable by the masses. This has to be the biggest wind up job creation scheme know to man!

Personally I think that if we see an “Unhandled exception” we should be able to sack the developer for gross ignorance, then hang draw and quarter them for theft of the exorbitant rates we have to pay them. If it is so fucking easy to create “quality” software, nothing should be “Unhandled” as this indicates the moron who put the thing together missed something, and in this new, shiny, “easy to use” world this should be impossible.

But, at least you can drag and drop a text box onto a web page… I think that may be a plus.

PHP may be slow at times, however it does not suffer from cascade failure. It can suffer from moron developers, but only slightly more than most other languages, and anyway, if you have shite quality control, then you deserve everything you get. And unlike .NET and Java it is also very tricky to completly hose an operating system in PHP (you can do it, but you have to really try).

Oh, and if I had the right 248MB C++ ‘framework’ installed on every operating system, I could also run my standard C++ executables on any platform without recompiling them, so go to hell framework boy.

One final thing… Java install 148MB, dot net intall: 428MB… all the same stuff in PHP: 6MB

The doctor has spoken.

It’s twatter, err, sorry, twitter gone nuts… and for free, oh, and the promise not to sell your personal data… but seeing as its opensource freeware all round, the data is also free, and so it is mostly given away for free – obviously you have the option not to use the service

twatter/identi.ca is a public timeline that subscribers can submit their menial day to while other subscribers can be informed of certain ‘tweets’ from their buddies. When facebook took off, I kinda got on that particular band wagon for a while, but this one… I’m really not sure what the point is.

For example, while I was hamming around:

• Matt was using gwibber and facebook.
• thomallen was having lunch with his wife
• sirclown82’s laptop froze completely to where Skinny Elephants wouldn’t work
• damcla was eating pasta for dinner

Since you can opt to get SMS’s from twatter (and this option is coming soon to identi.ca) when your buddy announces the above, you get charged… I suppose this is it’s own private irony, but it will lead to people policing it, or not using it. Hey, I’m all for more taxing of stoopid people.

In May 2007, there were over 111 twitter look-a-likies internationally… why? who knows, but there looks like there is a need to share every damn second of your life with your buddies… But see how difficult it is tweeting your vinegar stroke… Well, twitter are soon to offer a voice to tweet service… if they can keep their site up for longer than 5 minutes.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there is a niche somewhere for this junk. I mean “it’s the telegraph system of web 2.0″ says an obviously deranged author and technologist (man I hate that word as well). I did find one fond reference that made me smile, and almost restored my faith in the stoopid. While googling about what twitter is, I found the wikipedia article, and the bit about twitters use in the media. Apparently some bloke got arrested in Egypt and didn’t have his phone confiscated: he then twatted his mates who then arranged for the press, the US embassy and a lawyer to get involved pretty quickly.

The other one that amused me greatly was the first trade union twitter service was set up in June 2008…

All out

<sigh> Well, at least it’s still in beta.

For information, I will be banging on about “built around Safari” throughout. I know that technically its built on top of the web toolkit that Safari is built on, but a lot has also been taken from Safari itself, so technically, until Chrome becomes a new product I will probably be coining the phrase Safari2 a bite later as well – deal with it.

While Google Chrome doesn’t have any really radical down sides, I don’t seem to be able to bring myself to use it as a fully fledged browser, and it only has a couple of interesting up sides – not nearly enough to cause me to spontaneously googasm.

The only reasonably cool thing I can see is the “application shortcut” feature. This is the bit that allows you to store a link and have it launch in a window without all the “chrome-isms” which aren’t actually all that many in the first place. The benefit here is that if you use web-mail for example, it can be saved as a link on your desktop, start menu or quick launch and… well, that about it really. pretty similar to actually saving a shortcut to the website in the first place. Google docs, Google mail… If you’ve just had multiple googasms, then Chrome does make these apps (and other web site/apps) look a little nicer – other than that though, not more features that I can see.

Another “nice” feature is the sumary home page. Instead of your normal google homepage the chrome homepage can be set to show you mini screenshots of the sites you have visited recently. Wooo. This page seems to be the only place you can access book marks as well.

It is pretty pretty. With Vista glass console the ‘etched’ banner is really nice, and it does resample scaled images a little nicer than Internet Explorer.

So where do I start with the “googrumbles”. 

The most annoying feature for me as a developer is that it is another flippin browser to code for. Not happy with the 2 mainstream browsers in the world – Firefox and IE – I now have to code for the third most annoying browser on the planet – Safari. Luckily the majority of sites I have visited that work smoothly in Firefox seem to work pretty well in Chrome. Ironically however the Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) changes you can add to control both Firefox and Safari toolkits invalidate the CSS – meaning that your site is technically not W3C compliant. Oh, and the flash uploader in WordPress does not work – even with the flash plugin plugged in and working.

My only other real annoyance is the complete lack of any useful plugins. You do get the dictionary “plugin” by default (which does not work in rich text fields by the way), but that’s about it. Since it is built around Safari though you can get Flash, Shockwave and Acrobat components as separate downloads from the vendors, however you are currently forced into needing an experimental version of Java to make anything javay work. JRE 6 update 10 will soon move into mainstream so this will become less of an issue. If you want anything like Firebug, Adblock, Fasterfox or nay of the thousands of useful plugins you can get for Firefox, well, tough. Maybe when Chrome comes out of beta people may start writing stuff for it

A couple of other niggles are that the browser has problems displaying lists in that the ball in LI items seems to render as a blocky plus sign, and the way you navigate the cursor though a text field is odd in the word boundaries.

In summary my beloved reader, if you got it already then more power to ya. If you are thinking about getting it, well, you can probably not loose any sleep because you don’t have it – you’re not missing much.

Buddy: Google chrome is so cool, it has a spell checker built in.

The Doctor: Yeah, but so does FireFox.

Buddy: Yeah, but this is ‘built in’, straight out of the box and not a plug-in

The Doctor: yip. I’m moist. But if you wanted a german dictionary though, you’re a bit screwed as it only comes with US English, and you have go select another language in the options, and then it downloads an new plug-in, and this has been reported as a bug. Whoop!

And my buddy is right the spell checker magically scans all know human language to determine what you’re up to, or has every single dictionary built in… it’s just truly magical… check out the wobbly linage on that bad boy:

There are a couple of issues with the out of the box stuff, i.e. spell checker seems to be the only plug-in already installed by default, for example, you tube has an issue:

The best bit is that the link above for you tube actually came off their own chrome features site… Oh, and the one that comes up magically when you first install it. In fact the page you see straight away is really a bad advertisement for the product, as it to has issues with plug-ins.

So without even reviewing it, my advice is sure, join the bad-wagon of idiots rushing out to install the latest piece of stuff. If you wanna browse the web though, well I’m guessing you already have at least 2 products installed that do that already.

being the paranoid type, I use PGP encrypted disks for a lot of my data. It can slow playback of movies, but I found that a quad core 3GHz CPU and SATA II seems to remove most of the latency

Anyhow, due to a lack of Vista support in my free edition of 9.3, just over ago I purchased a pukka copy of their (not inexpensive) desktop software. Recently the bit that mounts disks broke and now I can’t access my sensitive data. Turns out it’s only the latest edition that is compatible with XP service pack 3. My options are to forget about my data, or pay to upgrade to the latest version, and by pay they really mean pay. I can purchase (at the full retail price) the regular edition, or get a discount on their Pro edition, which is still more expensive than the entry level edition.

Another interesting consequence is that my support account has also been cancelled, apparently the use of the word “extortion” is against their acceptable use policy.

King Ted’s article

To be honest I love “The register”, it is a source of many a frank discussion, and usually quite accurate information, but this post had me in stitches. It kind of rivals my post on the cloud attack by a so called tech guru, but this one suggests a very plausible reason why people buy straight into the hype, oh and it is bloody funny to boot.

A buddy of mine suggested that would be loading the google OS onto his new ASUS Eee 901, and having been on holiday for a month I thought I may have to investigate this some more… mental note, then this… Maybe it’s the same thing. Once I have stopped giggling like a girlie I may look it up some more… maybe not