Koozie Notes

Another OS X Review

I read through Joshua Wood's review of using OS X for his desktop os this afternoon and generally agree with his points.  I used to dual boot between Windows and SuSE linux on my old laptop and basically got tired of having to flip back-and-forth.  I prefer using the bash shell for some of my computing tasks and for other tasks I prefer a nice GUI with commercial apps.  Apple's OS X fits me nicely in this regard.

-Chris

Tennis Court on the Helipad of Burj Al Arab

(via BoingBoing)  I think I would have an extremely difficult time trying to play tennis on a tennis court this high in the air.  I just get nervous looking at these pictures.

-Chris

Reed Hastings & NetFlix

Slashdot posted a link to a story by Gary Rivlin on the success of NetFlex, a mailorder DVD rental company.

Today, the company operates 30 distribution centers around the country, but in the late 1990's, it operated a single facility near San Francisco, so DVD's could spend days in the postal system traveling cross-country. "It wasn't a very consumer-satisfying experience, except in the San Francisco Bay Area," Mr. Hastings said. Now, one of every nine residents of San Francisco is a Netflix subscriber, he added.

I'm still an ardent fan of Netflix, even though I have trouble finding the time to watch all my movies.

-Chris

Make Arrived

I was a tad upset after reading on Slashdot that someone else had already received his copy of Make magazine a few days ago. What? Did O'Reilly misplaced my subscription or screw up my order?

After I pulled into my drive from work today, I made my way to the mailbox that sits in front of my house. Inside I found my copy of Make! Yeah Baby!

Even though the cover is torn in a couple of places, I'm still a very happy camper.

-Chris

iPod and Me

About two weekends ago, I purchased my first portable music player, Apple's 20gig iPod.  Since I finally got to use a $100 Best Buy gift card, I'm only out $200 plus tax.

I've been holding off on purchasing a music player for some time, because I never thought I would really have a compelling use for it.  I really don't listen to music very often and I prefer tuning into a good radio talk show while driving.

After two weeks of playing with my iPod, I came to realize that my assumption that the iPod was just for music lovers was completely wrong.  I just found a new tool for listening to wide range of talk radio programs, via podcasts and the iPodder software.

At first, I just manually downloaded mp3 files that I thought I would enjoy like the talk Steve Wozniak gave at Gnomdex 4.0 and Adam Curry's presentation at Bloggercon.  I just stuffed these mp3's into iTunes and sync'd my iPod.  After listening to Adam's talk, I installed iPodder and downloaded even more podcasts to sample. 

This is just plain cool. 

-Chris

Fake News from Lindon, Utah.

(via Groklaw) I got a good kick reading this funny story posted on humorix.org about what would happen if IBM provided ALL the documents that SCO has requested in their lawsuit.

LINDON, UTAH -- The City of Lindon issued a disaster declaration today after the first tractor-trailer arrived delivering documents from IBM as part of the discovery process in the SCO case.

"Our town simply isn't large enough to support the mass of documents that IBM has been ordered to deliver," said a Lindon city official. "The trucks will destroy our roads, cause traffic gridlock, and create blight within a 20-block radius of the SCO World Headquarters Complex."

-Chris

Delphi Creates Fast Executables

Nick Bradbury, the lone developer behind FeedDemon, discusses the strengths of Delphi as his programming language of choice.

As some of you know, I used Delphi to create all of my shareware programs (HomeSite, TopStyle and FeedDemon), and I've been very happy with it (although I will admit that I'm toying with C# as well). One of the main reasons I use Delphi is because it creates fast executables that don't require runtime DLLs.

-Chris

Opinion on SCO vs. IBM

An attorney, that goes by marbux on Groklaw, has written an interesting piece on how the SCO vs. IBM case is proceeding from Judge Kimball's point of view.

U.S. lawyers know that what judges do is to pick winners and losers, then help the winners win and help the losers lose. The goal is finality in a dispute. That means helping the winner create a record that has the best chance of being sustained on appeal. Even more importantly, however, Judge Kimball has decided that this case is going to get what judges call "active case management." That means that the judge is dropping the default mode of just letting the lawyers develop the record while the judge plays referee. The judge is going to actively manage development of the record.

This looks good for IBM and Linux.

-Chris

UltraEdit-32 Version 11 Released

While going through some e-mail this morning, I noticed that IDM released a new version of the popular text editor, UltraEdit-32, for under $40.
 

I've been using UE32 for a couple of years and I'm still running version 9.10.  One of my favorite features of UE32 is its ability to open large text files without barfing.  If you are in the market for slick text editor on windows, I would highly recommend giving UltraEdit a spin.

-Chris

Logfinder: Remove Unwanted Logs

(via BoingBoing)  Seth Schoen, EFF Staff Technologist, released a new tool named logfinder [tarball].

Logfinder was conceived by security consultant Ben Laurie and written by EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen. It's intended to complement EFF's recent white paper, "Best Practices for Online Service Providers," in which the organization argues that administrators should remove as many logs as possible and delete all personally identifying data from them.

-Chris

Update: 9 FEB 2005
Logfinder covered on Slashdot.