Rants from Vas

It still isn’t the year of Desktop Linux. People may be ready to move away from Windows, but Linux still isn’t ready for them. Let me tell you about my recent operating system experiences. It all started when my venerable Pentium III died. (Well it didn’t quite die outright, but the power supply became unreliable.) The […]

Mobile data was one of the coolest things that came with GSM: I could connect a serial cable to my Nokia 5110 and get ISDN connectivity everywhere. It was billed at one cent per second and ran at about 9600 bits per second. Now most GSM and UMTS handsets can run a PPP server to […]

Well, Mac OS X 10.5 “Tiger” has been released. As usual, it’s feature-packed, and goes faster than the previous release on the same hardware. And as usual, Apple has deprecated and dropped several legacy features. It seems with every release, there’s a little less of NeXTstep hiding under the covers. In Leopard, Input Managers are […]

Well, since everyone else seems to have an opinion on it, I may as well, too. First up, I wouldn’t buy one, for a number of reasons: I like having a mechanical keypad – say what you like, but you can’t use a virtual keypad without looking at it. I like being able to use […]

After reading this and this about the new Apple keyboard, I got the itch to write, so here are my random musings. I think the new keyboard is just plain ugly, but that’s purely subjective. I think the PowerBook keyboard feels better than the MacBook keyboard, too, and would have preferred a desktop keyboard based […]

Well, John Gruber is at it again. This time, he’s calling MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan a jackass over this article about the iPhone’s battery performance. It all stems from this fragment in the iPhone specs: A properly maintained iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity after 400 full charge and […]

With all the talk that goes on about how and why Macs are or aren’t as secure as any other computers, I thought I’d weigh in. Now I’m not a professional security expert. I’m just a regular software developer, although I do put on the “white hat” regularly and try to find exploits in the […]

I’ve gone and got myself a new MacBook. Not a MacBook Pro, just the plain old white MacBook. I’ve been using it for long enough to form some opinions, and overall I’m satisfied with it. But it definitely isn’t the perfect notebook computer.

Lately I’ve been doing some programming in my spare time, and working on putting the proverbial polish on some applications. Among other things, I’ve been using Shark to profile applications and look for hot spots to optimise. Now before I say anything else, I just have to say that if you develop for OS X and […]

Why, oh why did you do it Apple? The new MacBook could have been great, but you had to ruin it. Shiny screens might make people go “Oooh!” but they don’t make a better notebook. They pick up all kinds of horrible reflections and glare. Not that long ago, we were buying CRT monitors with […]