String-by-String

Gibson has been more or less synonymous with the electric guitar and along with Fender one of the two major historic manufacturers of the instrument. The introduction of digital technology in what was generally considered acoustic or electric territory was gradual and troublesome. There are lots of people that scoff when faced with computers, modelling […]

See you in court!

I had been planning on getting a new Merom MacBook Pro ever since I found out about the processor more than 18 months ago. In the end I never did. Right after my last trip to London in early December 2006 I wrote a long rant about how the displays of the, then new (and still current) MacBook Pro on show at the London Apple Store looked horrible; my complaints included uneven backlight, narrow viewing angles and a grainy display. I guess I was not the only one to notice these; these are supposed to be Pro machines used by Pro people after all. So now Apple is getting sued for false claims in its marketing/advertising material regarding the quality and capabilities of its displays. It's quite reminiscent of the G4 MDD Leafblower towers when it took an organised effort, several web sites and constant 'harassment' of Apple executives to pay attention and own up to their crappy hardware. Yet with so many fanatics spending money on Apple products without paying attention to what they're buying as long as it's got an Apple logo somewhere I'm not surprised Apple keeps ignoring its customers and the quality issues of their products.

Is Formula One finally getting exciting?

After many years of boring championships, 2005 was the first time signs of ‘change’ began to make their appearance in F1. Renault won the championship instead of Ferrari, Alonso became a respected driver of his generation ending a streak of five championship wins for Michael Schumacher and Ferrari and, a year later, Schumacher, the undisputed […]

How to disable the WP Dashboard blog posts.

Ever since WordPress started including blog entries from WP-people in the Dashboard (first page of the administration panels) it annoyed me. Not only because I don’t care or wouldn’t like to read their blogs (I don’t in principle, but don’t mind them), but also because it did so without asking me and without explicitly giving […]

The Xcode Bugs

For reasons unbeknownst to me, Xcode has been seriously misbehaving lately. In most cases the problems had to do with its buggy parser/writer and required me to open the .xcodeproj files with TextMate and fix them. One example, that tortured me the other day, had to do with spurious compiler flags added there for no […]

The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company.

I've followed Jonathan Schwartz's blog for a while and more than often he has interesting things to write. Sun has long been one of the major forces in the computing industry and it's gradual decline in mindshare and presence after 2000 was saddening, even though it was justified. After years of confusion within the company about its strategy and the role of Open Source, it seems that it's starting to 'get it'. An interesting 'apology' by Schwartz, Sun's CEO, coupled with the usual marketing-babble. I hope he means it.