Midweek Miscellany

Tagged as Personal

Written on 2009-07-24 00:35:53

So, a quick post of things that have been happening.

It's official. Apple and Palm are at war. And I couldn't be happier about it. Apple has pulled stupid, anticompetitive maneuvers many a time that simply serve to frustrate users of its software. One is making sure that iTunes only works with iPods. Palm made a phone that was designed to sync with iTunes and sync it did. Apple intentionally released a patch to iTunes shortly after the release of Palm's Pre phone that broke that functionality. Palm has just released a fix that restores the sync functionality. So guys, are you just gonna keep doing this or will there be a court date I should know about?

The HTC Hero has finally started to see reviews drop and while the software is good, the phone's CPU is old and underpowered...so now I'm waiting...again...for either a wild Maemo phone announcement from Nokia or some solid reviews (or just confirmation at this stage) about the Sony Ericsson Xperia X3 (aka "Rachael"). I certainly wouldn't mind getting the Hero but it looks like my next phone purchase won't come until at least Xmas.

In the meantime, there are plenty of other things holding my interest. One is the Coders at Work book Peter Seibel is working on. It's schedule keeps getting pushed back but it should be out "Real Soon Now". Nick Levine is also working on a book called "Lisp Outside the Box" for O'Reilly that has some cool contents. No word on a release date yet though. I'll be watching.

One piece of big and great news is that Teresa has switched to Ubuntu. Jaunty i386, to be specific. Her XP install kept having problems and I didn't feel like spending time fixing them. Since switching her last weekend, things have gone quite smoothly.

I also had a little interest in trying Karmic out because of their Android support but didn't feel like messing with my partition table. I figure I'll upgrade her system when it releases and won't have an Android phone anyway. I still have a little bit of a distro fixation lately it seems because I finally want to play with a source-based distribution and have been particularly intrigued by Daniel Robbins' Funtoo project. It's a gentoo derivative and given how much free time I have I'll likely try it in Virtualbox soon. It'd have to be insanely great to pull me away from Arch however. As OSWatershed.org attests, Arch's "stable\current" packages just can't be beat. :) Of course, there are disclaimers on OSWatershed.org's site about the numbers. I'm not trying to start a flame war and I'll be trying Funtoo unstable/future anyway.

My buddy Max posted a link to coder girl. This doesn't fit in anywhere, it just makes me speechless. Cheers.

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