Matt Croydon::Postneo

Year: 2005

  • Meet the Mac Mini

    Here is a collection of links with more information about the Mac Mini:

  • Keynote Frenzy

    So begins a tradition that I usually spend either at Apple’s Reston, VA office [pdf] or online at #mobitopia watching the quicktime stream. This year I’ll be madly refreshing the dozen or so sites I mentioned the other day and I’ll also be lurking in #mercworld on irc.slashnet.org with the hopes that someone at the keynote has batteries long enough for “one more thing”

    What I expect

    • iTunes Flash – 1GB coming in at $149ish (which would be a great place to be: less than the mini butmore in cost and value than a 256 or 512 meg player for $100)
    • A solid ship date for Tiger (and various demos) and mention of iWork.
    • Talk of (and demos of) the Moto-Apple phone which is really just a mobile phone that can consume iTunes store stuff.
    • Minor speed bumps in Powermacs, Powerbooks, iBooks, the 80gb iPod, and general shuffling of the iPod line.
    • I expect Steve Jobs to say something along the lines of “Over the years we’ve brought you some of the best products on the planet. In 2005, we’re going to bring them to everyone else.”
    • one more thing… the cheapmac. I hope the price point will hit $499 but I wouldn’t be suprised to see it higher.

    What I don’t expect

    • The G5 powerbook
    • A tablet ibook
    • Newton 2.0
    • A major unrumored announcement

    I’ll be updating this post throughout the day as information comes in, so stay tuned.

    10:26AM EST: MacNN’s barebones Macworld coverage page is up.

    10:29AM EST: Mac OS Rumors has a dedicated page for coverage.

    10:50AM EST: MacMerc has gone Lite.

    11:31AM EST: Erik points out ipod-shuffle.com, though it’s not registered to Apple.

    11:44AM EST: This iPod Micro story is a fake..

    12:15PM EST: Steve was a little late but the show has begun.

    So far there’s been an hour of WWDC wrapup, the mac mini, and the ipod shuffle (“great for podcasts.”

    I could have easily skipped the first hour, especially with my only feed being IRC channels and websites. I am extremely impressed with the form factor on the mac mini and on the price point of the ipod shuffle.

    The Unofficial Apple Weblog has excellent coverage of iWork ’05. I’d love to see it in action.

  • Keynote Delayed by 9 Hours

    The Mac Observer notes that Steve’s MacWorld keynote will (hopefully) be available around 9pm tomorrow evening, almost 9 hours after the actual webcast. In other news, Mac Rumors has a good wrapup of the rumors that are out there. It looks like the flash-based iPod is going to happen according to some detective work done by MacCityNet.it.

    I’m still holding my wallet for the cheap mac…

  • Preparing for a Keynote Without a Webcast

    I’ve made peace with the fact that there will be no live webcast tomorrow Tuesday. Instead, I’ve prepared a collection of bookmarks to ‘open in tabs’ and refresh as neccesary during the keynote. Here’s what I’ve armed myself with so far:

    I’d love to know if anyone that will be there plans to be on IRC during the keynote (until their phone battery dies anyway), or if I’m missing any crucial sites that I should be watching tomorrow.

    Update: Thanks to Jonathan Greene for pointing out that MacMerc will have live coverage at #mercworld on irc.slashnet.org. I’ll be there!

  • What Ubuntu Needs

    I love Ubuntu. It takes some of the best parts of Debian (god bless you apt-get) and fuses it with a good philosophy and some leading edge (but stable enough) Gnome technology. The thing that got me to try Ubuntu was that they were the first distro with Gnome 2.8. I just had to check it out, so I installed it on some tesbed hardware. I was immediately impressed at the clean lines and the improvements in Gnome 2.8.

    After awhile I got busy and the testbed got reappropriated to some other task. I went back to using my trusty Celery 600 (with lots of ram) Debian-testing desktop nearly fulltime again.

    I decided to take a look at Ubuntu again when Edd mentioned it in his weblog in late September. I decided to pop it on the linux space of my dual PIII 733 box. I keep most of the drive space on this box dedicated to Windows, because there are still just some things that can’t be done with the penguin. I switched back over to Ubuntu for everyday tasks for awhile: mail, web, irc, etc. It’s really pretty, really clean, and extremely repsonsive. I used the Synaptic package manager for the first time and was extremely impresed. I installed an SMP kernel. I installed Python and other apps that I had been missing.

    Eventually though I went back to my slow and steady Debian box. At the time I wasn’t sure why, but now I think I’ve figured it out. With Ubuntu, you can install a program in no time with Synaptic or with apt-get install. It’s really braindead-simple. Unfortunately when you install a program on Ubuntu you get the program and not an associated start menu entry. This gets really annoying quickly. After I install the program I then have to either manually add a shortcut to the programs menu or (more frequently) have to guess the name of the executable and run it from the ‘run program’ prompt or from a shell. This gets old really fast, as often the binary does not carry the same name as the package.

    From what I’ve come to understand from lurking in #ubuntu on Freenode and from poking around various wikis and documentation is that not adding programs to any menu is a philisophical decision. I’ve got to disagree. I really think that what Ubuntu lacks most is an ‘Ubuntu’ or ‘Extras’ menu that newly installed programs get shoved in to. Yes, it gets crowded. There’s really no way to avoid it, but if you put it in its own menu you keep the ‘clean’ looks of the everyday tasks like Internet, Office, etc. I really think that such a menu would add value to the Ubuntu distribution and would definitely make it easier to use various programs that have been installed but have faded from view.

    What do you think?

  • Comeon Steve, We Need Our Feed

    For the past several years I’ve tried to follow the big MacWorld keynotes by Steve Jobs. I’ve sometimes watched the Quicktime stream from home, other times watched it from a satellite viewing location such as Apple’s campus in Northern Virginia. In the leadup to MWSF05 I’ve been getting a little nervous that they haven’t announced satellite coordinates, viewing locations, or a stream location. AppleInsider may have an explanation.

    They cite a memo exerpted at MacInTouch:

    Apple will not be making satellite coordinates available. Although the keynote WILL be available on our web site – it will NOT be available until sometime AFTER the keynote is over. They do NOT have a time determined, so it may not be immediately after the keynote is over.

    Wow, that really sucks. I’m sure that Steve is pissed at the thunder-stealing that the rumors sites tend to do before keynotes. (Hint: don’t sick the laywers on them until after the keynote, it’s a dead giveaway.) Couple that with BillG’s miserable keynote the other day and Steve might just be a little spooked.

    Seriously tho, I’m reather bummed about this. Watching the stream and drooling over tech I can’t afford has become a semi-annual tradition for me. Especially if they are indeed rolling out a Mac in my price range, I want to see it in real time.

    This move could really backfire on Apple, as they’re going to instantly piss off a ton of geeks who might be thinking about that $500 price point. Then again, Apple might just be heroes if they reinstate the feed at the last second…

    Update: In the past when I’ve not been able to plunk down in front of a Quicktime stream I have found that MacNN tends to have very good realtime coverage of MacWorld. In the past they have updated their live coverage every few minutes during the keynote. As always, Frank is on top of this news too.

  • Win32 Wget

    I use wget on my linux boxed on what seems like a daily basis. This morning I got fed up with using browsers to download stuff on a particular Win32 box and went in search of wget binaries for Win32. Google led me to Heiko Herold’s windows wget spot, has a wonderful binary of wget 1.9.1 with SSL support.

    I’ve got it installed, in my path, and it’s rocking my world.

    As an aside, if you’re looking for a more complete Unixish environment under Windows, you might want to check out Cygwin.

  • Stable Before It\’s Stable

    Debian stable tends to be ancient. With Debian “sarge” just around the corner, the “testing” disto has become even more solid than it usually is. For production systems, a traditional (but aging) “stable” distribution is great. Only proven and rock solid components can be found in “stable.” The problem with “stable” is that it gets stale. It’s been almost three years since “woody” (the current “stable” release) came out. “Woody” is just getting tired. Apache 1.3.x and other tried and true packages just don’t do it for me anymore.

    I joke with my fellow geeks that Debian “testing” (and often even “unstable”) is more stable for desktop use than many other distros. I tend to keep a “testing” desktop, as it seems to hold a good balance between the bleeding edge and stagnation. But “testing” just isn’t always good enough for production environments. For this, we need something more stable.

    I’m just getting ready to commission a Debian box for semi-production use, and I’ve decided to replace my normal “stable” or “testing” entries in /etc/apt/sources.list with “sarge.” My reasoning is that for now it’s somewhere between “testing” and “stable” (we’re in release candidate territory here), but once it becomes “stable” it will remain fresh enough for my tastes for quite some time. I’ll be happy with Apache2+Dav+Subversion+other goodies that I’ve come to rely on from “testing.” At the same time, it will stabalize in the very near future and allow me to keep it in production as a “stable” box.

    This is just something for people getting ready to deploy Debian-based servers in the near future to think about. If you reference “sarge” in place of “stable,” “testing,” or “unstable,” you can have the best of both worlds. You’re running “stable” before it’s “stable.”

  • Debunking Dave: McDonalds and Wi-Fi

    I’m not going to venture a guess on most of Dave Winer’s 2005 predictions. I agree with some and disagree with others. I am however going to debunk his prediction #12:

    12. There will be a wifi signal at the top of the Empire State Building and in every truck stop in the US. Also in every Best Buy. McDonald’s won’t embrace the Internet.

    I had Wi-Fi in a Palo Alto McDonalds over a year ago. It was during their initial launch period, so I didn’t even pay for it, they handed me a coupon for free access when I inquired how much the service was and how I could pay for it and log on.

    Of course this McDonalds is across the street from the original Frys in the heart of Silicon Valley. Maybe that was a bad example.

    Let’s look at the big picture then. McDonalds Wireless Site is down for maintenece right now “to help you find Wi-Fi enabled McDonald’s more quickly and easily.” I intepret that to mean that they just can’t keep up with the addition of new locations and need to revamp their site. The original site was just a bit map of the US with little blips in Chicago, New York, and a few other cities.

    If you head on over to the Wayport locations page, you’ll count some 40 or so states that have Wi-Fi McDonalds locations. I did a quick check on Maryland and found 13 locations with Wi-Fi statewide. There are 3 in Baltimore. The one down the street has wireless. There are 9 other Wi-Fi McDonalds locations throughout the state, though they are mostly in urban and suburban areas. What about other states? Texas has over 100. California has more than I’m willing to count.

    I think it’s a little too late to say that McDonalds won’t embrace Wi-Fi and the wireless internet. They already have.