I've said this privately before but it just occurred to me to make a blog posting so I can say "told you so" when it finally happens.

We are going to be seeing 16 core ARM based Macs sooner rather than later.

Think about it. They (Apple) have moved entire processor architectures twice on the mac (68k->ppc->i386); have already ported the majority of OSX to ARM; have bought an ARM based design company and are making their own chips; both OSX 10.6 and iOS4 are all obsessive about parallel execution of tasks and now ARM will be making (or, rather, licensing) a 16 core design.

It's gonna happen.

It appears Apple have finally relented on the dreadful section 3.3.1 decision. Noteworthy changes are:

• You can now use whatever tool you want to write apps.


• Apps can include interpreters provided they don't download additional code.


• The analytics section has been rewritten to basically un-block other ad networks.

There are also stated guidelines on app store inclusion (or otherwise) policies. As usual, John Gruber has done a great job of summarising these.

They sent the password back in plain text. It's 2010, what's wrong with these people?

Omnigroup provide constantly updated stats on running OSX version numbers from their update server.

tl;dr 10.6 is 55% odd, 10.5+10.6 together is 75%, 10.4 is still 25% of the market. I have version number logging in my update server now, I should probably get round to actually peeling the numbers to bits.

So ... in 2008 bunny bought a camera with him to Kiwiburn. Then Bunny and Paul sat around and turned it into a movie and, right now, are pimping it around the indie movie circuit. This is their trailer.

It appears my words are not all that good today. Hmmm.

Wow. That is just unbelievable. Why would you take (by far) the largest "vote news up and down" site and break it completely. It appears you now choose from one of a number of channels, basically, to "follow" - instead of, say, the whole Internet.

I never was all that much into digg but I know a lot of people were and now it's gone completely. Insane.

At last. Get Version 2.2.2 and do the usual untar, then "sudo python setup.py install" and you're away. Phew!

Python's standard urllib.quote and urllib.quote_plus are not unicode safe. Yes, the thing designed to convert extended characters into non-extended ones doesn't work with extended characters. When someone works out why this OK I'm all ears.

Until then Django saves the day, again, and provides django.utils.http.urlquote() and urlquote_plus() for your delectable amusement.

First the Google thing, which Google are painting as an attack on OSS when it's probably more an attack on freeloaders ... and now OpenSolaris getting the boot.

To be honest I don't think it's either a bad move or a big deal. Sun never really gained much traction with the OSS world ... not really ... and Oracle, to me, have a quite clear value proposition: They are a closed source integrated stack of hardware, database and application language/environment/whatever that is ugly, costs and arm and a leg but is hugely reliable and well supported. People who want open can have the Linux x86 world (and heaven knows that's what most of us choose). It's just a question of market positioning and being clear on who you are.

I'm at a loss as to why so many people are upset about all this, to be honest.

Edit: that being said, the future for btrfs has got to be looking pretty bleak right now.

The promo ran the weekend of 17/18 July with a week's extended promotion but not on the homepage. Here are some numbers. Bullshit free marketing advice - whatever next?

And I know Dalvik is not really Java and that is why the lawsuit is actually over patents, embodied in Java but implemented in Dalvik. Without permission. I would write a lengthy blah blah blah except that, of all people, Miguel de Icaza has written a short, well researched and probably entirely accurate summary of the entire situation.

Personally I'm a little lost. I've been trying to work out why Google are doing this whole Android thing anyway and can only assume that the OEM licensing agreement for Android entails sending Google all the search traffic. And maps. Yeah, I guess that would be worth a fair bit.

A freebie - BetterTouchTool - adds a little control thing that means you can map new gestures on the surface of a magic mouse to actions. For example: I now have two fingers swiped upwards to engage exposé, and a four finger click sleeps the computer :)

Hmmmmm. So, before I start it's worth noting that Magic Trackpad is a 10.6 only thing. If you're still running 10.5 (on, say, a very many thousands of dollars quad core G5) then can't have. Not for you. Also, and unlike many Apple peripherals, there is not even the claim of PC compatibility. It is "stock" bluetooth, however so I imagine some level of interoperability would be a goer - but probably not much. It did give the impression that compatibility issues may be a problem even when staying in the part of the garden that Steve says you can play in ... the included instructions say to use "setup bluetooth trackpad" in the bottom right corner of the "trackpad" part of system preferences. It wasn't there so I paired it anyway then did a software update and Lo and Behold! Someone has decided they want new software. An install and reboot later and everything is working as planned.

The system preferences pane for trackpad is now replaced by a very groovy setup pane including a tiny little video tutorial for each of the gestures. Nice. Sadly there is no detection of actually what kind of keyboard you are using so my initial experiments with screen zooming failed because I was pressing the button shown in the video - control on whatever keyboard they filmed it with, option on mine. Fail.

Then good things start to happen. If you forget you're playing with a new toy and start just using it like a big laptop trackpad then it just magically works. I tend to rest my thumb on the gigantic button on my MacBook Pro (on the rare occasion that I use the trackpad) and this works just fine on the magic trackpad. However, and for presumably the same reason, it can prove tricky to use your thumb as part of a zoom or rotate gesture.

Speaking of which, the zoom in Safari is really granular and gives the impression it doesn't work until ... it does. iPhoto suffers a little of the same, although preview seems to suffer less - particularly with rotation that it does reasonably well and almost entirely without purpose.

Seeing as how I'm supposed to be an Apple fanboy I suppose I had better say some nice things about it. Well, for a start the fact that you can click and drag without using a thumb means that MixTape is surprisingly usable. Perhaps this means that it's usable on all MacBooks with the single piece trackpad (all the unibody ones plus a few macbooks). The inertial scrolling is very cool although I find the "friction" on the inertia to be a little high for my liking and not configurable. Two fingers to context click is awesome although it would take practice to get used to it - likewise the four fingered swipe down to engage exposé or swipe up to hide all windows (an action like pushing all the stuff aside) could get very addictive. I'm just saying that because I'm addicted to middle mouse button as exposé through.

Is it worth it? I suppose if you really like trackpads it would be. I mostly have it so I can get MixTape to support pinch zoom movements (a user request). To be quite frank it's already starting to drive me up the wall so I don't see it getting far past that. It might be just *killer* for HTPC crowd - it would certainly be a lot easier to use from the couch that a mouse is, but then I have a playstation for that and it's even easier still.

Conclusion: loads better than a 'previous generation' trackpad. Play with one in the shop before you buy it. You might like it, or you might not.

Edit: Magic Mouse, on the other hand, is pretty much perfect.

OK, so Komodo 5's Python debugger is streets ahead of that in K4. It may be that I finally bothered picking through the prefs to set up the location of the python install correctly - it always gave the impression it was repeatedly timing out something rather than just getting CPU bottlenecked but still. At least a factor of 10x faster and actually quite pleasant to use. Hurrah!

The release date of the iPad in New Zealand is on the front page of stuff. I've played with a couple now and I do think they are, clearly, the next coming of the personal computer but even so ... it's not like it's a cure for cancer or anything.