Friday, February 27, 2004

After all the ranting on my site some good has come out of it, I have just reinstalled panther on an iBook at work for the 3rd time as it keeps freezing every 10 minutes and you have to force restart, which doesn't always work as it sometimes tries to restart and hangs on the grey screen (left it on all night came back this morning and it was still trying to boot) as you can imagine I was getting a bit pissed off with this so I called the shop that sold us the machine (who by the way looked at it and said it was fine and sent it back not long ago). I asked the guy if the memory could be the cause of our problems as suggested on most of the comments in my blog and he said that could well be the case. So I took the extra 512Mb of RAM out of the iBook and hey presto it hasn't frozen all day.

So thank you to everyone who helpfully pointed this problem that has had me swearing at poor old Panther for a few weeks. Sorry Panther I didn't mean what I said :)

Jon 5:15 PM Permalink

Thursday, February 26, 2004

I was just looking into buying some antivirus software for our company and came across this article which seems to pronounce OS X immune to viruses as all viruses are aimed at Windows? Does anyone know if this is still true? It will certainly make my boss happy if it is!

Judging by recent comments posted on my site I would have thought that Mac users don't want to waste their time on attacking an OS they love so dearly, but the article above is out of date so if you know of any virus attacks please post a comment :)

Update: As Wes Carr just pointed out my use of the word of immune is incorrect - thanks Wes, my wording has got me into trouble lately ;) and I have changed the title to reflect this.

Jon 9:42 AM Permalink

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

I just looked at my referral log and the last 10 pages were all coming from MacSurfer.com it seems my post that caused so much debate is on the front page which would explain why the today's stats show 46% of users on Macs. Still that is an impressive statistic! Due to the volume of Mac traffic the browser stats also show a 39% majority for Safari (IE 6 35%) which, as a web standards evangelist makes me a happy man!

Update: by the way the stats refer to over 1500 unique hits yesterday.

Jon 5:08 PM Permalink

...and then I'll shut it I promise!

Anyone who regularly reads my weblog will know I am a fan of Panther, Safari 1.2 even Mail is so much easier than most Email clients, I think all of the core apps rock on Jaguar and Panther. I have had exposure to OS X since 10.1 and although I have only used it solidly for a year I was using it on and off throughout the past couple of years, as a freelancer it depended on the client setup or else it was back to my rusty old PC, which is crap.

I have managed to ruffle quite a few feathers by suggesting that Panther is far from perfect, but no OS will ever be perfect otherwise there would be no inspiration for developers to add new features like the excellent Expose in Panther which has proven itself to be incredibly useful and the much improved Finder. So for all the people wondering whether to switch, I did pre-OS X due to my work environment but I would have been a lot happier switching to OS X than OS 9. My brother has also switched his home setup and loves OS X.

I'll say no more on the matter!

Jon 1:18 PM Permalink

I managed to stir a few people yesterday by sharing my experiences with OS X. Reading the comments apparently nobody experiences any problems and in fact I stand accused of not knowing what I'm talking about and being full of shit. By the way, I don't claim to be supreme OS X expert in fact I have only been using it for a year, before that I had the misfortune of using OS 9 for the previous few years. One person who flamed me then goes on to say "daily, weekly, monthly scripts? what the hell are they?", ok I suppose as a dumb user you don't need to know after all these scripts are scheduled to run overnight, but what if your boss insists you turn off your machine every day? I use the terminal to force run these scripts to clear up potential problems and if that is screwing with your machine then why the hell would Apple include such utilities as core applications. Thanks to the people who actually offered some possible solutions, it could well be a hardware problem I suppose, I assumed that a G5 straight out of the box would have the correct RAM etc.

What does make me laugh is how passionate people get over Macs, a few years back I was in the minority as an OS 9 user, now it seems everybody is making the switch and slagging anyone who uses PCs. I personally don't care which I use, my machine hasn't had any problems as yet and I never said it had only that I have been asked to sort out problems with the other machines in the studio particularly an iBook which seems unable to run for more than 2 days without the rainbow wheel appearing and spinning for hours on end.

For those of you who don't know how to run scripts from the terminal an anonymous post in my comments listed the major utilities (thanks by the way!):

sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly

repair permissions with terminal

sudo diskutil repairPermissions /

Updating the Prebinding

sudo update_prebinding -root / -force

Jon 9:14 AM Permalink

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

Yes that old chestnut, only this time I was reading an article on ZDNet by David Coursey about the problem with Windows crashing all the time. He writes:

"In my computing life, there's one constant: The Macs don't crash and the Windows machines do."
"The nice thing about Mac OS X is that it's darn near uncrashable. No matter what programs I install or uninstall or how I use it, OS X just runs."

Well I've been using it since Jaguar and so far have had to re-install the OS on 3 or 4 machines in our office (Jaguar and Panther) due to serious crashes resulting in hard drives not mounting and core applications not running such as mail and safari. OS X is not unbreakable by any means and I have tried 3rd party software to try and restore the OS, indexed the HD, run the daily, weekly and monthly scripts, run ONyX to optimise the system and verify and repair disk permissions, I have run disk utility running from the boot disk to have first aid check the drive and I have run Pacifist to unpackage and re-install Mail and Safari and still one machine in my office will not run these apps.

Now don't get me wrong, I like my G5 but Apple still has some way to go yet!

Jon 4:28 PM Permalink

Last night I went to the National User Group meeting at Star City which included a short seminar from Russ Weakley of the Web Standards Group (Sydney) which was a great insight to many developers in the room who may not have started to make the shift yet. Russ pretty much skimmed over the major issues of accessibility, css and semantic markup but everyone enjoyed his presentation and it was definitely a valid (pun intended!) contribution. Next up was Macromedia's Sean Corfield (the Director of Architecture in IT at Macromedia) with a look at how accessibility and web standards are being implemented at Macromedia.com and how to plan such a large scale project. There was also a good Q&A session with Sean, Mike Chambers and the entertaining Tim Buntel (Macromedia Product Manager). I also finally got to put a face to Mark Stanton from Gruden who is a great contributor to the FUGLI/CFUG Sydney mailing lists.

It was a good turnout, hopefully it might inspire a few more people to attend the next CFUG next month. I also plan on attending the Web Standards meetings from now on as this is another worthwhile group.

As you can tell I'm not at MXDU and I'm gutted, it is currently taking place about half an hours walk from my office, very frustrating.

Jon 9:13 AM Permalink

Friday, February 20, 2004

Well Apple clearly think so and have reacted to criticism over the price which at US$249 is only US$50 less than the iPod 15Gb version, so would you pay $50 less for a 4Gb version in one of 5 dodgy colours? No thanks, in fact I think the iPod is overpriced anyway so I'm going to look at cheaper alternatives!

Jon 11:53 AM Permalink

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

My boss is currently running 3D workshops once a week for all of us here at One Of A Kind, we are using the excellent Cinema 4D and I thought I would put a simple but nice example of something I designed as my header image!

Jon 11:39 AM Permalink

I just replaced my DIV centering method with the Negative Margin method and it seems to have fixed the problem I had with Opera 6.03 on the Mac! Just in case anyone was experiencing similar problems.

Also I have only just found out via the CF Aussie digest that there is a Web Standards Group and Russ Weakley will be speaking at the next CFUG meeting at Star City on Monday 23 February, the day before MXDU. Russ' presentation is entitled 'the benefits of Web Standards to your visitors, your clients and you!'

I am looking forward to this meeting as unfortunately I am unable to attend MXDU, gutted...

Jon 9:41 AM Permalink

Thursday, February 12, 2004

I get a bit fidgety if I don't redesign every now and then and now my blog is coded in xhtml and CSS it's not too much of a task to give it a new lick of paint. I've checked it in Safari 1.2, Firefox, Firebird, Camino, Mozilla 1.5 and IE 5.2. It's absolutely buggered in Opera on a Mac which I can't figure out, but I'm looking into it.

If anyone experiences any problems please let me know as I work on a mac and don't have a PC to check it on!

Jon 3:32 PM Permalink

Wednesday, February 11, 2004

This made me laugh mainly because of one of the main features: power cd players.
Ladies and gentleman the PC 12v Cigarette Lighter Adapter Kit

Jon 3:43 PM Permalink

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

I know I've said this before but I have just gone through a tutorial that rocks on EasyCFM this ever expanding resource for beginner to intermediate coldfusion developers who need to be pointed in the right direction is great.

Jon 5:00 PM Permalink

Only a few days after apple release Safari 1.2 for Panther and now Mozilla release the excellent FireFox, thank the W3C that all we have to worry about these days is which standards compliant browser to use...

Jon 2:42 PM Permalink

Tuesday, February 03, 2004

I just had a quick look at 2Advanced as I like to check out their latest work, they have just launched a site for The American Youth Soccer Association which incorporates full implementation of Microsoft's content management system, so that would explain this then, click on programs and view frame source. In case you don't know what I'm on about (come on now!) check out this tag input type="hidden" name="__VIEWSTATE" and the following value... YIKES!!

Also as I am on my new quest for web standards I have a few problems with the markup, but I won't go on about it anymore. Sorry Eric!

Jon 3:45 PM Permalink

I have just installed Safari 1.2 on my G5 running Panther. For a list of fixes and features check out Surfin' Safari.

Jon 10:27 AM Permalink

Monday, February 02, 2004

I know this is totally OT but then when have I ever cared!? Went to Good Vibrations festival in Sydney on Saturday and apart from the music being shite all day there was one band that rocked and blew me away, Freeland if you haven't seen or heard them get the album "Now & Them" best album I've heard in ages and best live band I've seen in years!

Jon 10:17 AM Permalink