Apple better not switch to x86!

I really hope John Gruber is right in Daring Fireball: Intel-Apple Odds and Ends.

I just purchased a 15" PowerBook in late December. I was hoping it would last me the next 3-5 years.

Last time I purchased a Macintosh computer was in 1994. Apple had just introduced the PowerPC line, but I didn't have the funds for one of the new PowerMacs - so I purchased a Quadra. The Quadras were based on the 68040 processor, and were the last computers shipped by Apple using that CPU. Apple had just started the transition to a new processor platform and I got left behind from day one.

In 1997 when it was time for me to upgrade I went with an SGI O2, as SGI had been on the MIPS architecture for years and showed now signs of leaving it.

A year or so later SGI announced they were eliminating the MIPS processors from their lineup and moving to Intel processors. This didn't worked out very well for SGI, and I was stuck with a MIPS based SGI. SGI is just barely alive. I'm surprised they haven't closed their doors yet thanks to that (and other) disasters.

The SGI/Intel event prompted me to move to x86/Linux for several years.

But now I'm back on the PowerPC based Macintosh, as I just got fed up with the GUI environment on Linux not working well, and most laptop hardware is crap (when compared to Apple's current offerings).

So I guess its just about time for Apple to switch architectures on me. Again. At least I purchased Tiger.

First post written in LaTeX

This is my first entry posted directly from L^ATEX. It is actually a
L^ATEX source document residing in my Subversion repository which is formatted into HTML by latex2html. I have written a small wrapper Perl script which cleans the output from latex2html into slightly more readable HTML, adds CSS classes to facilitate presentation in Movable Type, then posts the entry into Movable Type through the Perl API Net::MovableType.

What‘s also very cool is the graphics drawn in L^ATEX code will be automatically converted by latex2html and uploaded into the archive directory. Therefore I can do equations or graphics in
L^ATEX and they will appear correct on the website. For example here is the fraction “1 over 2” as an equation:

h =

(1)

Nifty, isn‘t it?

What‘s great is that I no longer need to worry about HTML formatting,
or really any other presentation issue while I am writing an article.
I can just focus on the content. This is perhaps the greatest strength of L^ATEX and why I can‘t seem to give it up as a means of presenting my thoughts.

I won‘t really use the posttex script for small entries such as quick links, etc. as it is too much work to write up a L^ATEX source file and check it into SVN. But I do plan on writing some longer entries at least once week from now on, and these will all be written in L^ATEX. If space on my webserver doesn‘t prove to be an issue I may also offer PDF forms of the longer articles.

Remind me never to eat at McDonald's again

Six years ago I learned that the McDonald's milkshakes make my stomach hurt, so I stopped eating them. Heck, I pretty much stopped eating at McDonalds entirely - their menu isn't very healthy (as proven by the 30 day guy in his movie) and it really isn't all that tasty either (no matter what their marketing machine would like you to believe).

Today though Sara and I were out shopping for cars. It was 89 degrees out and we were getting thirsty. While doing a U-turn in a shopping center plaza (can't make a left turn across a very busy 4 lane road in that part of town) she suggested we stop at McDonalds so she could get a milkshake. The milkshake idea sounded good, right? It promised to be cold. I was hot. The sign at the drive-thru said "2 smalls for $3.00". How wrong could you go?

Couple of hours later my stomach is killing me and I suddenly remember why I don't get milkshakes there anymore. I can be such a moron sometimes. I should have just gotten a small soft-drink instead.

Going with latex2html Anyway

So I couldn't get the whole latex2html blog idea out of my head. The latex source is just plain easier to read, and I would most certainly rather work in vi than in a browser textbox. So I hacked together a Perl script which can generate an HTML snippet to be fed into MovableType. This should work nicely when I am trying to write longer articles.

I plan on hooking the script up to Subversion and having it automatically publish tex article files when they get created or get updated. This should make it very easy for me to write up an article, commit it to SVN and let it move its way up into my webspace without me really having to think about it.

Clothing for Chickens

Keep your chicken warm. Don't you think your chicken will look great with its own little windbreaker? Yea, me neither, but you can get one and try it on him or her anyway.

Google Sitemaps

Google's introduction of the sitemaps XML API is very cool. It permits a web developer to better inform the search engine about the websites intent to change content, rather than making the search engine guess and crawl at whatever intervals it wants to. After all, there is little point in fetching my archives every couple of days if they rarely change. The beta is here. Via Slashdot.

Why bother getting vendor support?

Today the server which hosts our bug tracking system crashed due to hardware failure. Its been down all morning. Yesterday our main file server and domain controller crashed due to a faulty power supply. In both cases we spent extra money to purchase Compaq computers with support agreements rather than building our own for half the price. In both cases we were down for half a day while our own support people went to replace the failed parts themselves.

What's the point in paying the Compaq price premiums and support contracts if the business is still doing the support itself? My best guess is the business doesn't want to hire the quality of staff it needs to maintain its own computers, so it hires slightly lower quality staff who can replace a Compaq power supply via the pretty pictures in the Compaq instruction manual. We're just paying Compaq to give us pretty manuals instead of paying for some staff training.

At every other company that I've worked at in the past we've supported our own computer equipment. We generally had less down time and were able to afford faster disk drives, CPU, more memory, etc. for the same cash amount. As my earlier note today points out, spending a few more dollars on your disks can really decrease how much time your developers waste on a daily basis. (Yes, I'm waiting for a build to finish right now; its still going. sigh).