Sunday, October 13, 2002

The top-10 things I missed in 10 days without OS X. With my PowerBook away to be repaired for the first 10 days on this month, I found myself using Mac OS 9.x and even Windows in between shifts of using my wife's PowerBook. Here is what I missed most about having my own OS X-based machine to work with: Speed - The move from a G3 PowerBook with 1GB of RAM to a PowerBook 3400c with 144MB of RAM or a Windows box with 64MB of RAM was a painful slowdown. Stability - It is hard to beat the stability of Mac OS X, no matter how much I may point out shortcomings of the operating system. Radio 8 - The additional speed of Radio under OS X cannot be appreciated enough until you run it under Mac OS 9.x on an underpowered machine. There is truly a reason computers keep getting faster. NetNewsWire Lite - One of the first programs I fired up when I got my Pismo PowerBook back was Brent Simmons' excellent RSS news aggregator. Chimera and OmniWeb - Neither of these Web browsers can be touched by anything under Mac OS 9.x. OmniOutliner - How did I used to live without an outliner? iTunes - Yes, I can run iTunes under Mac OS 9.x, but that older version of the program is not as flexible as the newest running under Jaguar. Fire and Proteus - It is hard to touch the OS X goodness of these two multi-protocol chat clients that let me communicate with people using AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber and IRC all from within one application. Unix under the hood - I don't dig into the command line a lot on a day-to-day basis, but there is no beating it if you need to fire up Terminal in order to see what process is eating up all of your processor time. Complete flexibility - Mac OS X offers more ways to access your data and to customize the way you work with your data, through shareware, Unix and other means than any other OS in the world right now. And it is customizable in a completely user-friendly way. [Mac Net Journal] I haven't booted 9 since I bought my fax machine - the only reason I used to run it was to fax my time sheets, since neither FaxSTF X or Cocoa eFax worked reliably. On the other hand, I'll have to be running 9 a lot more often when I start working on the 9 version of the CompuTrace client. Hopefully I'll be able to do most of it from classic, without actually having to boot 9. 6:45:17 PM    Comments []

Cthulhu goes to Nigeria. [ via L A Morse ] Baiting "419" scammers has become the Internet's favorite spectator sport (that, and posting fake personal ads then publishing the responses). In this round, a researcher from Miskatonic University gets in over his head, but not with the scammers. "The last thing he saw, as the fraud descended upon him, was the fraud, descending upon him." -- after Lawrence Person's BLFC Lovecraftian entry. [More Like This WebLog] 3:06:35 PM    Comments []