Myles Braithwaite

This is a blog post I wrote the a few weeks after iPad was shown to the world and never got around to publishing it on this blog. It was on an internal company blog though. Sorry for bring up such an old news item.

A lot has been said the last two months about how Apple's iPad will kill the Kindle and how the iPhone/iPod Touch has already killed Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DSi (because the iPad will be able to play games it will some how destroy a extremely large industry). Personally I never like the idea of a device that did it all, Multi-Function Printers always gave me a bad feeling why combine the three most complicated systems in an office Printer, Fax, and Copier? Yes I will be buying an iPad when it comes out (not sure if Wi-Fi or 3G) but I will not be replacing my Kindle that has a better screen for reading and it will not be replacing any of my portable video game systems. I will use the iPad for the purpose I believe is servers: a netbook.

@mylesb I hear they have the revolutionary feature of only allowing the user to run one application at a time.

At quote from Chirs Browne's tweet on 27th January 2010 at 1:46pm.

Yes the iPad can only run one application at a time. But if I need to run more than one application at the same time I can easily take out my laptop. I see the iPad as more of a internet device than a computer.

I recently installed Geektool on my MacBook Pro. I used so many sources to set it up that I thought it would be a good idea that I write a blog post about some of the more complicated configurations.

Sunrise & Sunset

I am getting the sunrise & sunset data from weather undergroup mobile website.

Sunrise

curl --silent http://m.wund.com/global/stations/71265.html | grep 'Sunrise' | sed -e :a -e 's/]*>//g;/</N;//ba' | sed -e 's/Sunrise/Sunrise: /g' | sed -e 's/EST//g'

Sunset

curl --silent http://m.wund.com/global/stations/71265.html | grep 'Sunset' | sed -e :a -e 's/]*>//g;/</N;//ba' | sed -e 's/Sunset/Sunset: /g' | sed -e 's/EST//g'

IP Addresses

Weather Image

Weather Forecast

I am using Yahoo Weather to get the weather image.

curl --silent "http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?p=CAXX0504&u=c" | grep -E '(Current Conditions:|C<BR)' | sed -e 's/Current Conditions://' -e 's///' -e 's/<b>//' -e 's///' -e 's///' -e 's///' -e 's///'</b>

For some reason I love to see Apple products destroyed:

iPhone 3Gs Shot

Powermac G4 Explosion

I haven’t talked a lot about the mobile platform, mainly because I do not know anything about it, but I thought today would be a good day to add my two cents. Full disclosure: I have an iPhone, Nokia N800 (which runs Linux), and a Symbian OS device,

I got a MobileMe account Saturday morning and loving it! I am thinking of working with my iDisk making a mirror of this site, some crazy JSON to Ajax stuff. Really excited.

Over on CIO.com there is an interesting article about ditching your Mac for a PC and a rebuttal, I believe both of these authors are wrong.

I have been using a Mac for about six years, Linux for about eight, and Windows since 3.11. Currently I have an Apple Laptop (which I consider my main computer), an Apple Desktop (at home), a Windows Laptop (for developing in .NET), a Windows Desktop (at work), and my OLPC which I take on the road (also five Linux and one FreeBSD servers). If I go onto anyone of these computer I have my Email, Tasks, and Calendar but because of this mess (which is my life) I have had to learn:

1. Never run Virtual Machines: I have great respect for VMware but I don’t really like running virtual machines on my desktop for more than a hour.
2. Never Commit to a Software that cannot Play While With Others: iCal and Sunbird are great examples of good standards compatibility while Outlook on the other hand sucks.
3. Use Open Standards: CalDAV and IMAP are great examples.
4. Switch to Web based Products: I recently built an Address Book for a client to solve this issue. It took a hour in Django.

These are the wrong questions. The right question is: Why doesn’t Jobs just say what he means, instead of spinning vaguely technical explanations that don’t really make technical sense?

The simple truth is that Apple is committing to nothing because that allows them to keep all of their options open. They’re promising nothing because they don’t have to promise anything – the iPhone needs neither additional publicity nor higher expectations.

Appel to relase Drawin Open Source.

• Subject: Apple Opens Up: Kernel, Mac OS Forge, iCal Server, Bonjour, Launchd
• From: Ernest Prabhakar
• Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2006 16:15:51 -0700

As of today, we are posting buildable kernel sources for Intel-based Macs alongside the usual PowerPC (and other Intel) sources, starting with Mac OS X 10.4.7. We regret the delay in readying the new kernel for release, and thank you for your patience.

It seems like Wired thinks that Steve Jobs Lost His Magic but has all of Apple lost its Grip on there market share. I will now list the resons I see why:

• It seems like quite a few people have switch from Mac to Ubuntu (or SuSE) this last month.
• People have always said that Mac’s are for Graphic Design, but a recent post at NewsForge about trying to switch art students to Ubuntu is not going to help Apples reputation as the Graphic Designers Computer/Operating System.
• But the real kicker for me was… I wasn’t excited about Leopard, when Tiger first came out I order a copy in advance even thought I didn’t have a DVD player to install it on. When it arrived I quickly ran to my local apple store and bought one. But when I look at Leopards features it just doesn’t do it for me any more.

Nothing much to say just liked the title!