Marc Palmer

Mark Curtis has a great piece on some research and theory about the advent of TV being the cause of the breakdown of social behaviours of the past – socialising with neighbours, being nice people, caring, doing stuff – you know, that kind of thing our parents used to do.

We’ve often moaned about how almost nobody cares about their neighbours any more, how we all shut ourselves away in the boxes we call home. There’s a compelling case for TV being the major factor here.

Now we just need someone to build social housing with one huge central TV and we can all be entranced together!

MacOS is great. It’s taken me a couple of days to adjust but I think I’m nearly Mac-ified.

I had to switch back to my XP box to share some drives to pull the files over to windows. It was strange – the PC seemed a lot faster than the Mac Mini, but then the Mac Mini is running so much more than the XP box and looks a lot fancier. One thing I still haven’t got used to is the smoothing of fonts on the mac and the reduced font sizes. I’m so used to everything being "sharp" and without much smoothing in Windows.

However everything looks much nicer, things are easy to find once you learn how to use the Finder (the far superior MacOS equivalent of Explorer).

I burned a test DVD yesterday with some video clips of my daughter… presented in a spinning "mobile" on the DVD menu using a cheesy default template. The thing is it’s cheesy but really reasy and JUST WORKS. And the software was free and is actually useful for simple usage.

The only bad things to happen so far:

1. GarageBand will not start if my Cyberphone K USB phone is plugged in, and seems to crap out the whole USB bus
2. I tried to write wont there but pressing apostrophe in mac firefox invokes the "Find:" feature!
3. iTunes crashed once (but hey it successfully transferred gigs of MP3s and AVIs over the LAN from my windows shared drive)
4. The DUALPhone USB phone I have is not Mac compatible so no cordless Skype calls for me until I get something else

It took me a while to work out how to access windows shares but its all easy now.

The built in mail app is a bit unusual, I’m used to Thunderbird. Not sure if I will switch to t-bird or not, will give it a bit longer.

The biggest trouble I’m having so far is finding out what these applications can do – they’re so "simple" that with my Windows mindset I can find it hard to find the features!

I’m in love though.

My new Mac Mini is here. It is new and small and matt (as opposed to shiny). I haven’t plugged it in yet, I’ve had too much work to do. However it looks lovely and easy to get going. Even the packaging was nice.

I’m really impressed that the power supply is only rated at 85W – compare that to a PC that typically has a 350W-400W PSU! Also I notice Apple have a very good "return for recycling" policy.

Hooray for Apple having a vegan at the top eh!

It’s taken me a long, long time. Finally I decided the other day that enough is enough – I’m fed up of grinding PCs that actually used to perform fine, fed up of application crashes and lockups (even in XP) and the high maintenance of Windows with respect to patches to avoid fatal exploits etc.

So I’ve ordered an Apple Mac Mini. A stroke of genius by Apple – you buy it, move aside your huge noisy PC tower and replace it with a tiny silent box and plug in all your existing hardware. Perfect for migrating from Windows. You can always flip back to your old PC for any application transition problems, and you get a new "PC" with a much better OS (by all accounts) for very little money.

So it should arrive next week. I haven’t been this excited about computers since I was a child. It should mark a sea-change for me. How often is it that you can look at webpages about an OS and actually get excited about the default applications that come with it – even the calendar application looks sexy!

Windows XP doesn’t even come with a calendar application – even most mobile phones include one for free! If it did come with a calendar application you can bet it would suck just like Notepad, WordPad and Calculator! Trivial applications that are still incredibly basic.

I can’t wait to try it out. I’m lucky in that most if not all of my work is in Java so as long as my Java tools work on it and I can browse the web and use email I’m happy – goodbye Gates! If you want to blame somebody Bill, it’s partly this guy’s fault. Just reading about problems with Mac OS X made me take the trouble to look into it more, That and a couple of my friends are dedicated Macophiles.

Oh, and for what it’s worth I gave Linux/KDE a try first and I found it to be sorely lacking. Linux is great for server apps and console mode development but I just get frustrated with the problems getting applications to work, keeping them updated (without ending up with multiple RPMs for different distributions of the same application) and so on. It’s "not bad" and certainly more stable than windows, but productivity did not improve – if anything the opposite.

I’m hoping for some serious improvements in productivity from Mac OS X. Let’s see if I get them…

After some hard work by WebMacro stalwart Lane Sharman, WebMacro 2 is finally publicly released.

WebMacro 2 has been at RC status for a very long time and is incredibly stable. This final release fixes a couple of bugs and formalizes the robustness of the code base, and Lane has added tons of unit tests and refined the build processes. My JSP and Spring integration for WM has not made it into this release due to work pressures but hopefully we’ll get a 2.1 cut very soon with that stuff in it.

New in WebMacro 2 is native support for map variable types using a simple syntax:

#set $myMap = { "key1" : "value1", "key2" : $someValue2 }

This is of course very useful, especially when you need to collate some data in the view layer. I used this feature extensively recently in a client project to render statistics served remotely as XML to HTML. This required sorting on certain columns and rows, and I pre-collated the information into maps to make this task easier – indexing from sorted lists into the map. I also used the maps to cleanly pass collections of parameters between included templates to avoid polluting global scope.

It’s been there a long time now but WM 2 also introduces some major improvements in the Context Tool mechanism. These are tools that are only instantiated per-request on demand, i.e. pages that do not need them do not create the instance of the tool. The new Context Tool Loader mechanism allows you to supply custom context loaders to create these objects on demand at runtime. There’s also the delegating template loader stuff that allows you to plug in "stacked" protocol-based template loading mechanisms so it is really easy to change where your templates are loaded from now.

There’s a whole lot more in there but it’s hard to remember what changed since 1.0 because 2.0 has been around in RC for so long!

Thanks to Lane for putting in the time on this. I’m looking forwarding to using it in my the new version of Ignition, my web framework.