I Have really fond memories of summer 1994 when I did a summer job in Ipswich. (Yes, I’m talking about Ipswich in a blog entitled “Oslo.” Bear with me.) Now Suffolk isn’t a glamorous location necessarily but it was a good time for me and it was a great, hot summer. A few years ago I stopped back in the town on the way back from a wedding. I really wish I hadn’t. Maybe it was the grey and the rain or maybe the years had not been kind, but Ipswich just wasn’t what I remembered.
I’ve been using Mountain Lion, the new version of the Macintosh operating system, for less than a day so this isn’t intended to be detailed (see John Siracua’s review) or thorough. I have, however, kicked the proverbial tyres so here are a few, quick thoughts.
Good
- Probably the most stable 10.x.0 release I’ve used
- Little earth shattering but lots of really nice improvements, not all of which I’ve seen documented (for example, attachments in Mail now appear in the “All My Files” view in the Finder, multiple Time Machine disks)
- Notification Center works well; AirPlay mirroring is going to be really useful
- I’ve not found any software that worked in Lion that no longer works. That includes stuff like VMWare (scary because it’s low-level) and Photoshop Elements 6 which is not listed on Roaring Apps compatibility list
Bad
Imagine the scene…
Okay, that’s a bit dramatic.
Recall that I have an iPhone app called Yummy. It has, or rather had, a website called YummyApp.com. Last year I formed a company called Wandle Software and since then have been merging my various web “properties.” The website moved over to wandlesoftware.com earlier this year, email was the last thing that needed transferring.
My email is hosted using Google Apps — Gmail but without the gmail.com email address if you’ve not heard of it. What I wanted to do was move yummyapp.com from being a “proper” domain to what Google refer to as a domain alias for wandlesoftware.com.
There are no guarantees when travelling in the UK. Even in May the weather can be all over the place, beautiful, bright and sunny one minute, drab, grey and miserable the next.
There are no guarantees when travelling with a five month old baby. They can be bright and cheery and laughing one minute and crying and screaming the next.
This is really starting to bug me. Nearly a week after Facebook’s IPO and the papers are still saying that it was a failure. It wasn’t, or at least, whether or not is was depends on who you are. And I suspect you prefer the winner to the so-called losers.
Let’s start with the basics. What is an IPO? It’s simple: a company sells a part of itself in exchange for cash. In the physical world, that’s the same as me making something and selling it to you. For the sake of this example, let’s say that I sell it to you for £1.
Blocking content from the Internet is getting a lot of press of late. The last couple of weeks has seen the Pirate Bay being blocked by a number of large ISPs and debate over whether the blocking of “adult” content should be opt-in or opt-out.
Unfortunately the enthusiasm to “protect the children” and “protect the copyright holders” seems to have pushed aside much of the debate of whether we should be doing this at all or whether it’s practical.
- The save page bookmark works with Google Reader. That is, it saves the link I’m reading rather than the Google Reader web page.
- Page turn. Rather than display the page as a long, scrollable single page, Instapaper paginates the document. You can “turn” the page much as you do in iBook or the Kindle app.
- Progress indicators. I like that it shows roughly how long a document is and how much has been read.
- Clean, minimal interface.
- The trick of reading the current page to make site like NYTimes (with page view restrictions) or LWN (pay walls) is a great idea but not completely reliable.
- Recent updates have been less stable. Going from day to night mode — an otherwise nice idea — almost always crashes. Putting the app into the background often loses the current location (it returns to the end of an archived article).
You’ve probably seen that it’s the Sinclair Spectrum’s thirtieth birthday today. There are lots of great retrospectives — this is probably the best single source I read — so I’m not going to rehash all that. But I thought it might be worth a few words of my own.
Like many Brits my age, the Spectrum was my first computer. Technically it was the family computer, but after a few weeks I was pretty much the only one who used it.
So there I was, trying to be a good Internet citizen. I updated my web server to use the latest version of Linux and… Boom! It would display the first post and then just peter out.
Unfortunately I don’t have the time or patience right now to track down exactly what the problem is — presumably something to do with PHP — so here you go: a new theme. It’s one of the ones I considered before I switched last time. A bit more minimal, more monochrome than last time. I like the minimal, and the lack of colour makes the pictures pop a bit more so it’s not all bad.
- Why the world needs introverts – “Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are.”
- Rubber Duck Problem Solving – Asking the question often gets you to the answer. I should know… nearly 20k reputation on Stack Overflow but less than a dozen questions asked!
- A TED speaker’s worst nightmare – This is brilliant.