Archive for January, 2007

A Networking Dilemma

It’s my 21st birthday on Tuesday (16th) and my wonderful girlfriend, Caroline, bought me (and herself) an Apple MacBook. The subject of how much I am enjoying this computer deserves it’s own post.

Having said I’d sell my IBM ThinkPad to my twelve year old brother means that I need to install Windows on the MacBook, eating up another 10GB of the standard 60GB drive (which is half full already, after OSX, iLife and a 4GB iTunes library) so it’s time to think about external storage. With 320GB I could store pretty much every CD in the house in the iTunes library, keep all of my digital photographs on one drive (no running into 20GB) and keep regular backups of everyone’s home folder.

But external hard drives are expensive, and even more so for NAS (Network Attached Storage) - however, I do have £100 or so to spend on external disks and a MacMini G4 at my disposal.

So, I thought about for a while and came up with the following plan:

I’d buy a large MyBook hard drive (or similar), format it to HFS+ and connect it to the MacMini via USB 2.0, and leave both machines running 24/7 (or maybe put them into to standby between 2:00 and 8:00) and allow Sharing + Windows Sharing on the Mac, allowing everything to connect to that computer via the 802.11g wireless network.

Obviously, 54Mbps isn’t going to be fast enough when it comes to transferring large amounts of data between my MacBook and the external drive, so (and this is the part I’m not sure on) I would ideally connect both computers via Firewire whilst I’m at my desk.

It all seems too easy to me. Any suggestions?


I Wont Mention The iPhone

Apart from to say I want one.

So, the most blogworthy thing I noticed about yesterday’s Mac World Stevenote was Apple Computers Inc’s decision to become Apple Inc.

Of course, if there is one thing that Apple fans fear the most then it’s change. In the last 18 months we’ve already seen the Mighty Mouse, the switch to Intel processors, and the end of the PowerBook/iBook name which were all met with some venomous blogging and hysteria. I thought nothing of the name change (only it reflects the product line more accurately) until I work up this morning and was confronted by the posts of thousands of angry fanboys.

“They’re going to kill the Mac!”, “I’m going to take a serious look at Vista” and “Apple are going to become the next Sony” are just some of the classic (paraphrased) lines I have read in the last couple of hours.

Get over it.

The iPod is Apple’s biggest selling product, it’s the product that made the Apple logo identifiable to people my parent’s generation for the first time in fifteen years, and it’s the product that convinced the majority of Sports Science students at my university that they needed a MacBook.

I imagine that if I were to hold up a 15″ MacBook Pro to the average man on the street they would say “It’s a laptop” - if I were to do that with an iPod they would tell me the generation, capacity and the contents of the box it came in.

Apple Computers Inc was a good name 30 years ago, when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were hacking together just that, a computer. Apple is no longer just a computer manufacturer.


A Fresh Idea Concerning IE

I’d sat down to work on my university web project, and though I’d better just test the layout in IE. As I waited for Windows to boot I had a quick glance at my RSS feeds and came across nomoreiehacks.org (via Digg).

The idea is simple, but one I hadn’t ever really contemplated before: simple stop hacking.

37Signals produced a book called “Getting Real” (which you can and should read, free, online) - the book makes a really good point in saying that we should be deciding things for the users (for example, not allowing the user to choose how many results are displayed per page, but telling them it’s going to be 25) and this is something we developers don’t do enough.

Okay, we have two options. On one hand we can spend hours making up for Microsoft’s decision not to comply with current web standards, reaching a wider audience, and letting one company dictate how websites are built. Or we could stop that.

We could stick to W3C standards, and politely remind Internet Explorer users that any problems they might encounter are not down to our coding, but their browser’s lack of compliance, and that they should probably download and install Firefox. Which, by the way, can make you money thanks to Google’s Adsense scheme.

Before I get any “Professional web designers who have been working in the industry for ten years and would be sacked tomorrow if they stopped supporting a browser with an eighty-something percent share” - I understand the need for those customers, and I would never develop an e-commerce site that didn’t support 99.9% of browsers, and I know that all my lecturers mark with IE7 and a little bit of web activism isn’t worth the grades - but from now on, it’s up to the browsers to support my own sites.

Luckily, the majority of my sites work first time in IE, and 75% of It’s Samuel readers are using Firefox/Safari/Opera - which I’m sure is common across the majority of tech blogs - so I think that if a portion of the tech community take this approach then it could be a real boost for better browsers.