Friday, November 1, 2002

I will no longer update this site at radio.weblogs.com. I will now be publishing my weblog at http://www.mc-development.com/~mike. 10:56:20 AM    Comments []

	Tuesday, October 22, 2002

I've converted my code to use Apple's OTMP library for multi-tasking. Although it works under X, I still can't get it working under 9. 1:50:52 PM    Comments []

	Thursday, October 17, 2002

Ballmer Sees Free Software as Enemy No. 1 [Slashdot] Poor Microsoft! ... they're getting hit from Linux and Mac OS X. Dance your way out of this one, monkeyboy. 10:38:22 PM    Comments []

	Sunday, October 13, 2002

The top-10 things I missed in 10 days without OS X. With my PowerBook away to be repaired for the first 10 days on this month, I found myself using Mac OS 9.x and even Windows in between shifts of using my wife's PowerBook. Here is what I missed most about having my own OS X-based machine to work with: Speed - The move from a G3 PowerBook with 1GB of RAM to a PowerBook 3400c with 144MB of RAM or a Windows box with 64MB of RAM was a painful slowdown. Stability - It is hard to beat the stability of Mac OS X, no matter how much I may point out shortcomings of the operating system. Radio 8 - The additional speed of Radio under OS X cannot be appreciated enough until you run it under Mac OS 9.x on an underpowered machine. There is truly a reason computers keep getting faster. NetNewsWire Lite - One of the first programs I fired up when I got my Pismo PowerBook back was Brent Simmons' excellent RSS news aggregator. Chimera and OmniWeb - Neither of these Web browsers can be touched by anything under Mac OS 9.x. OmniOutliner - How did I used to live without an outliner? iTunes - Yes, I can run iTunes under Mac OS 9.x, but that older version of the program is not as flexible as the newest running under Jaguar. Fire and Proteus - It is hard to touch the OS X goodness of these two multi-protocol chat clients that let me communicate with people using AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber and IRC all from within one application. Unix under the hood - I don't dig into the command line a lot on a day-to-day basis, but there is no beating it if you need to fire up Terminal in order to see what process is eating up all of your processor time. Complete flexibility - Mac OS X offers more ways to access your data and to customize the way you work with your data, through shareware, Unix and other means than any other OS in the world right now. And it is customizable in a completely user-friendly way. [Mac Net Journal] I haven't booted 9 since I bought my fax machine - the only reason I used to run it was to fax my time sheets, since neither FaxSTF X or Cocoa eFax worked reliably. On the other hand, I'll have to be running 9 a lot more often when I start working on the 9 version of the CompuTrace client. Hopefully I'll be able to do most of it from classic, without actually having to boot 9. 6:45:17 PM    Comments []

	Sunday, September 29, 2002

I now have a dialup ISP to use when I travel next week. I just signed up for access-4-free, which was $5 to sign up with 10 free hours per month. Best of all, they don't require any special software and it works great with Mac OS X (in fact they even have Mac OS X setup instructions, although it refers to 10.0). I've been looking for a free or cheap dialup ISP since I switched to AT&T Broadband last month. Unlike BellSouth DSL, they don't provide dialup to use when I travel or when the service is down (so far it hasn't been down). This looks like my best choice. 9:12:54 PM    Comments []

	Saturday, September 28, 2002

I just upgraded WorldBeatPlanet to PHP-Nuke 6.0. The upgrade went flawlessly. I've got it down to a quick & simple routine. Upload all of the files to a temporary directory, since uploading can take a while. When everything's up, run the upgrade script, and then move the uploaded files into the live directory. Since copying the files to another directory takes a lot less time than uploading, only a few seconds pass from the time I run the upgrade script until the upgrade is complete with all of the files in place, and there's little or no downtime. It did take me a few minutes to activate some new modules & rearrange blocks, but the site remains usable during that time. 12:02:47 AM    Comments []

	Thursday, September 26, 2002

iPlugs. I can't believe MacSurfer actually linked to this. 4:59:52 PM    Comments []

BounceWeb is currently upgrading their servers, so MacMegasite & WorldBeatPlanet are both down right now. The upgrades should be finished this weekend. I'm also unable to receive email at both domains (and all of my email addresses except my domain mc-development.com are forwarded to my macmegasite IMAP account). 9:42:02 AM    Comments []