Raible Designs

Phoenix Tip

I made the switch today to using Phoenix as my default browser on Windows, and I discovered a sweet feature! When you have tabs visible, double click in the tab bar and it'll open a new (blank) tab for you. Doesn't appear to work on Mozilla (1.2b).

In "The Zone"

I'm in The Zone today and loving life. God this is fun! The music is cranked, the cat is scared and my body tingles every time something goes right. So I'm a "body buzz" about every 15 minutes. Who could ask for a better line of work!?

Everyone wants a Mac

Greg tried to download an x86 version (I did this about a year ago and got Darwin installed before I realized you couldn't run OS X on x86), James wants one with a cinema display and even Gerhard longs for one.

Well I was lucky enough to buy one last Christmas. I got a 667 Mhz Powerbook with a gig o' RAM. I wanted a laptop for traveling to client sites and this seemed like the best laptop at the time. So 10 months later, you ask, "Was it worth it?" Yes and no.

• Yes: It's great to have OS X and I don't long for a Mac anymore.
• No: I hardly ever use it except for testing and surfing, not much development.
• Yes: My boss bought it for me as a Christmas bonus last year, so the expense was easier to justify.
• No: It doesn't give me much over Windows XP with Cygwin and Red Hat - they (seem to) both have Unix cores and my Win XP install seems to be just as stable as OS X.
• Yes: My client uses Macs for all their video-production and website-viewing. I can test their product on the Mac (with Mac browsers) before I release it. This is the #1 benefit to having the machine and it's paid for itself because of this.
• No: The screen resolution is fixed to 1152 x 768 and I'd like it to go higher. I can change it to be higher when plugging it in to an external monitor. The new Titanium G4's go up to 1280 x 854. Most Windows laptops I've seen allow you to 1600 x 1200.
• Yes: iSync rocks and it's great to sync with my T68i phone and have no wires.
• No: I expected a fast laptop because megahertz don't matter on Macs. Yeah right, my Windows XP machine (1.5 Ghz) was a year older than the Mac and with half the RAM was still twice as fast. I've heard that this has more to do with OS X than the hardware.
• No: I've used Windows most of my life and I'm much less productive when working on the Mac. I'm just slower, plain and simple, and that frustrates me to no end. I admit, this is my problem and not the Mac's, but it is a reason that I don't like it so much. Keyboard shortcuts have started to make my frustrations subside.
• No: I expected Virtual PC to run on the Mac so I could get the "best of both worlds" running Windows and OS X on the same machine. However, it runs so damn slow that it's unusable. My 300 Mhz, 256 MB RAM old Compaq runs faster - and it takes 5 minutes to boot up!
• Yes: People drool and it gives me buyer satisfaction.

I think if I used it more, I'd probably like it more and get faster at using it. However, with 5% of the market share, it doesn't get much love from the application vendors. And while Java runs great on the Mac, it's revisions are too far behind the other platforms. If you were on a project that wanted to upgrade to JDK 1.4, and use some new APIs in that version, you wouldn't be able to develop on your Mac for a year.

I too dream about the Cinema Display and my boss has been thinking about getting me one for my Christmas bonus, but is it work the money? $3500 for a fancy display you can brag to your friends and fellow bloggers about? Tough to justify, easy to buy. I have dual 19" monitors setup right now and they probably provide me the same function without the form.

Record Snow!

Vail posted this picture today on their website and mentioned:

With snow falling all night long Vail reports 13 inches of new snow at Mid-Vail and a 20 inch settled base!!!! This surpasses our record for snow on this date. THINK SNOW!!

Sweet, and I got my season pass today in the mail! This ski season is lookin' good awesome!

Did I mention that my ski pass is good at 5 mountains? Vail, Keystone, Breckenridge, Arapahoe Basin and Beaver Creek - all for $299!

Good Wiki vs. Good Java Wiki

I discovered yesterday that I have PHP installed on this server. Today I discovered Tiki. And I ask myself, "Are you looking for a good wiki, or a good java-based wiki?" If you've noticed Tiki's release date (1.0 Released Nov 28 2002), it appears to be ahead of it's time.

Phoenix 0.4 Released

Phoenix 0.4 is now available. This release features type ahead find and improvements to the address bar, tabbed browsing, toolbar customization, popup blocking, themes, and more. Downloading now...

.NET vs. J2EE Performance

If you've read this thread or this story at The Server Side, you owe it to yourself to read Rickard's rebuttal.

In other news, Simon Stewart (no blog to my knowledge) has sent me the font I needed, and therefore iCal is working again. What a guy - thanks Simon!

iCal Quits - Helvetica Neue Needed!

My latest problem in Mini-Me's resurrection is that iCal quits when I open it. According to this article, it's because I've somehow lost my Helvetica Neue font from my /Library/Fonts folder. You would think after my Archive Install, I'd get this back. Harrumph, I've searched my hard drive, searched the Jaguar install disks, and I've even asked folks in the Apple Knowledge Base to send me the font - but no luck yet. So I'm asking you, my OS X-using readers, can you send me this font? Apple's support seems to suck.

Also, I'm jealous of Dave's ability to attend the meeting on Eclipse tonight. Hoping this is a touring preso, I looked up my local Websphere User Group - but it doesn't appear to be coming here.

The picture on the right is for Russell, I bet he wishes he was in Denver right now - 6 inches and counting!

First Snow

This view is what we woke up to this morning. Julie cringed and moaned, while I yelled "yeeee haaawww!" It motivated me to buy my ski pass for this year and I can't wait for my first 9" day...

Outage Tonight at 8:30 MST

I doubt this will effect anyone, but this site might be down tonight for a few minutes. In case it doesn't come back, here's your warning.

There will be a brief outage at KGB Internet Solutions on some servers. We will be upgrading server memory on the server your web site is hosted on at approx. 0230 UTC. We will be forcing the web sites over to the backup server during this process, so the outages should only be for five or ten minutes while the secondary takes over, and then again when the primary takes over again after the upgrade.