On Apple’s announcements about upcoming Snow Leopard

Proud Apple person decides to say a few triumphant words about the success of their strategy vs Microsoft’s one… in public. Something along the lines of we’re so great and you’re in such a big trouble, man!. Makes me laugh: for all that I know, since the first day I installed Leopard I have had nothing but trouble. If that’s a good operating system, I’m happy of not having any Vista-running computer.

Then, about the upcoming version of Mac OS X, is there anything interesting to speak about? Is there any type of breakthrough concept that will really revolutionize the way we think about computers, so to speak in hyperblasting marketing terms? No, there isn’t anything that could be labeled that way:

• a new version of Safari – which essentially incorporates the same eyecandy idea they developed for iTunes covers and then a few functions that aren’t surprising, rather something to be expected at some point in every browser: Top Sites and History search. They also remark pompously about the speed of their javascript engine — except everybody serious about browsers is optimising their js engines too. This obviously doesn’t include Microsoft, of course.
• a new version of QuickTime – oooh! including things that were only available for QuickTime Pro users. They probably noticed too many people running VLC which allows fullscreen without having to enter a serial number, and thought that was abominating. Hence they freed several functions from the Pro version, to avoid people using non-Apple software.
• basically the same Finder, Expose and Stacks ancient, unfinished and unpolished technology
• and compatibility with Microsoft Exchange, which will only ring a bell if you use such thing

They should rather be dispatched in a Software Update, but that would prove they have been playing with all games in the iPhone store and not doing their homework meanwhile. Funnily, what could really be interesting (64 bit support, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL) is hardly heard of. Even though, 64 bit support is not a new idea, GCD will only work if applications are recompiled to make use of it (as far as I understand) and OpenCL is pretty much the same.

I’m happy to read, though, that Snow Leopard won’t support PowerPC computers. That will force me to finally switch to Linux on my laptop when Mozilla stops providing updates for Firefox, for example. If that was an strategy for making people buy new computers for running their new operating system, it didn’t work here, sorry.

Bing? Bong!

The ‘new’ Microsoft search engine was unveiled not so long ago, and it already looks dated. I just tried it once, and performed an egosearch. Dissatisfied with the results, I decided it wasn’t worth to use it. And what’s about that image thing? Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Oh wait, there was an study comparing the effectiveness of bing vs google for ads; because it has that image, it helps balancing things in the page, I deduct. Very clever, except I don’t see ads (using Adblock) and hence that’s probably why it looked odd to me.

Conclusion: another maneuver for getting traffic and clicks. They don’t care at all about search engines or search quality.

WordPress 2.8

Now let’s have some nice stuff to compensate for the fair amount of ridiculousness above. WordPress 2.8 it’s out and working — I have actually updated the site some minutes ago. So far it seems to be working fine.

The update process was smoother than ever: the one click update process is something every other piece of software on earth should have. More relevant though is the fact that they have improved the Widgets area and specially, the API. I haven’t finished yet (for my tastes) the custom widgets I did for this site, and the new way of handling Widgets (by extending the WP_Widget class, instead of defining tons of functions) looks like it will help a lot for having cleaner and easier to follow code.

I don’t generally use other people’s themes but the ability of installing them right from the admin interface looks very slick. I also heard they were about to merge vanilla WordPress with WordPress MU in a future version; that’s going to be interesting too.

I finally found a use for twitter!

I went to the British Museum on Tuesday and found out that an sculpture that was there in the entrance past October when I last visited was missing. So I wondered where it was, but I needed to find out the name of it. Unfortunately there was no way I could find it searching the museum’s online catalog; even Google image search or Flickr didn’t help at all. In a desperate move, I decided to express my frustration in a tweet. And surprisingly, some minutes after, I got the answer, via another tweet by a member of the Portable Antiquities department at the Museum. I imagine he keeps an eye on tweets containing certain words (such as surprise, surprise… British Museum!), so it’s not like this is psychic science. It’s more like being in a giant chat room where some people keep an eye on certain words only. The Portable Antiquities guys also have a blog, just in case you want to have a look.

As you may easily deduct, there haven’t been any changes at all to my router’s configuration, so with all other factors remaining the same, why should it stop working?

Searching for answers to that question unveils a crazy painting spattered everywhere with mystifying cargo-cult affirmations. First comes the number one mac-advice:  repairing permissions, which seems to be the magic fix-it-all for all mac-pains (although it doesn’t seem to be related to anything else than applications which are not properly installed). There’s also the classic it’s not me, it’s you argument, also known as it’s probably a fault in your router’s configuration, and that, as expected when trying to give subjective explanations to an objective fact, can be translated to a myriad of reasons:

• you’re using { nothing | WEP | WPA | WPA2 } but you should be using { nothing | WEP | WPA | WPA2 }
• you need to update your router’s firmware
• you need to select a different wifi channel
• your router is incompatible with your computer
• you need to reset your router’s and computer’s configuration and start anew

Obviously all of them are useless, since the fault is not in the router but in the computer itself, miserably unable to rejoin the very same network it was using before going to sleep.

However, since cargo cult is so tempting, solutions multiply, like loaves and fishes. No one seems rational, and worse of all, you feel like there’s nothing else you can do but surrender and try them all, or at least consider them for a second — such is the absurdity of the Mac world:

• You can’t have Bluetooth activated at the same time than an Airport card. “Then I will need to sacrifice my wireless mighty mouse”, argues another person whose mac doesn’t behave as expected. But Jobs sayeth: “in life, thou shalt need to make choices, painful as they are”.
• You need to archive and reinstall
• Or even worse: you need to start from scratch, and reinstall Leopard in an empty disk
• You need to create a new user, log in with that account and then try to connect to the wireless network, to discard it’s not a problem with the former user account (like if the router had developed a certain animadversion to that user)
• You need to activate and deactivate Airport (probably inherited from Windows)
• You need to open Keychain Utility, delete every appearance of your Network passwords, log out and try again
• Same but restart and try again (very Windows style)
• You need to remove some arcane com.apple.* property lists from the /Library/Preferences folder. Oh wait, or was it in ~/Library/Preferences? Never mind, log out, or restart, and try again.
• You need to make sure that System Preferences.app is in the /Applications folder (I would have thought that the main point of bundles was to be able to have apps wherever one wanted to place them, but if this one is true, it would prove another of their magic features false)
• Then there’s the most bizarre solution of all: open Safari and type in your favourite address. Since the computer is not connected to any network, it will suggest you to run the Network diagnostics utility. Then select Airport, and choose your favourite network name, and it might connect. In fact, I tried this one, and it “worked”, but just once, and I think it was just a coincidence, because the next time I tried, following the very same sequence of steps, it didn’t work again.

And it’s not like my computer’s hardware is new  and the drivers aren’t totally fine tuned yet (Apple is well known by the unreliability of the first versions of each computer model). It is a 2005 PowerBook, which is one of the last models in that family of products, before they got replaced with the MacBookPro. I would expect Apple to know an awful lot about their own hardware — after all, that’s their whole selling point: since we are the ones that build and program it, It Just Works™.

But they don’t seem to know that much (maybe their China assemblers are keeping some juicy bits to themselves), and it just doesn’t work.

But… what’s going on with XCode3? It’s just me the only one which has to close it and reopen it again every X debugging attempts? or maybe that’s what the X in XCode stands for…

The symptoms are: you Build and Go (Compile and debug in ye olde jargon) and then one would expect the debugger to pop up. But nothing happens because a) it didn’t rebuild at all or b) it couldn’t attach the debugger to the process. So it runs as normal.

There’s another weird thing, sometimes I add a new method in a class header (I’m working with C++) and when I write the method body in the .cpp file and try to compile, I get a message saying that there aren’t matches with the definitions of the class, blabla. I solved this one cleaning all targets and rebuilding again, but if you know a better way of fixing it, I’m all ears.

Maybe there are hidden options which can be configured with

or something like that!

Event though, I must say that I like XCode2 way more than the previous version. If I had to choose a single reason it would be the removal of ZeroLink, then I would say the new finder, code folding, etc. (I never use its SCM features or design features so I can’t tell)

What it doesn’t tell is that it won’t connect by itself automatically when that ghostly compromising menace disappears, even if the network password is stored in the keychain. So if you were doing something which depended on the wireless connection, it will never finish unless you’re there and make sure you manually connect again to the network.

There are lots of speculative solutions such as changing the encryption method in the router from WPA to WPA2 and whatever… but why should I change anything only because Leopard’s wifi support is defective and can’t distinguish between failure and attack?

So far, these are Leopard’s good points:

• better VNC support
• tabbed terminal
• some tools are preinstalled (svn, ruby… although it’s nothing one couldn’t get done dedicating a few hours)
• nicer XCode

And these are its annoyances/weaknesses/useless features, plus some more that I can’t remember right now or have been fixed in system updates (such as file uploading in the flash plug-in, which was broken from day 0):

• “Your wireless network has been compromised” – and it has just happened again while I wrote this! OH YEAH!
• continuous errors with firewire disks such as my ipod mini
• intrusively inquiring about what do I want to do with what I download
• absurd behaviour after returning from stand-by: on my mac mini left click acts as a right click until I do a control+tab and switch to a different application, on my powerbook the trackpad works like at a 0.00001% of the normal speed and accelerates progressively until it reaches normal speed – even after a completely clean reinstall
• horrible wireless performance. How come the signal strength is only 20% when another computer, side by side, has 100%?
• no more decent mp3 preview – if you switch to a different application while previewing it will stop. It sometimes does not work at all, instead. And there’s no way of going back to the previous interface.
• amazingly it still hasn’t a decent image viewer which can operate fullscreen
• super ugly folder icons

I wonder if this can be considered a defective product… by all standards it looks like that: these errors are recurrent and I’m experiencing them every single day.

I’m tempted of going back to Tiger but I’m just not willing to spend a single minute of my life re-installing software for the n-th time.

Instead, I hereby demand an immediate fix for these bugs!! I wonder if there’s an open case in petitiononline for this…

… Are you sure you want to open it?

Firefox.app downloaded this file today at 10:22

Yet another stupid change in Leopard. Each time I download a php/ruby/python/etc file (which is quite common) I get this dumb question being asked. Even if the file is inside a tgz/zip/tar/rar archive!!

I’m pretty sure there might be a hidden setting somewhere which needs to be modified by writing to some property file such as com.apple.stupid_questions but as I don’t feel like digging into the intricacies of Leopard and I haven’t found anything in the System Settings nor asking mighty Google, I wondered if any of you know a solution…

UPDATE: Henrik knows how to fix it! Thanks!!