Well I have now update MT to 3.12.1 and have started to revisit the page header. The new compact header layout seems to work quite well. Need to re-work all of the additional content, infact I have droppped my PHP templating thingy I wrote years ago, and have decided to just use MT for everything since Smarty is now integrated into MT. In fact I have even enabled dynamic pages and so far so good, no more static archives. I still need to fix the archive and permalink templates. However I think the content is more important which is what I will press on with.
Monthly Archive for November, 2004
Went to the Apple Store today to sort out my iPod battery. As it turns out, Apple are able to offer replacement units at the Genius Bar in their stores. Since my unit was still under the normal warranty, and matched the replacement criteria for an immediate replacement. I had to wait for a couple of hours since I had not booked in an appointment however I was very luck, only waited about 90 minutes or so. Used the waiting time to play with iMacs and G5s.
Once I was at the Genius Bar, it took about 15 minutes to complete the paper work, fortunately they still had a couple of re-conditioned 3G iPods. Reconditioned meaning, new battery and totally reworked parts, the metal plate on the back was also new, I think the only bits that weren’t were probably the main board and hard disk. The unit was even sealed as new. I have to say I was quite impressed with the service.
Since I have been farting about a very cold customer server room for the last day or so, I think I’m coming down with something. Have been coughing since the afternoon, hopefully after taking it easy tonight plus some medication I will be ok. I don’t really fancy being sick over the weekend.
Went and watched After The Sunset last night, needed to get out and didn’t think anything else was worth watching. As it turns out After The Sunset is actually a pretty decent film. Pierce Brosnan plays the lead, a diamond thief trying to retire with his wife, played by Salma Hayek. Woody Harelson plays the FBI agent which has been trying to catch the pair, but without much success. If you liked the Thomas Crown Affair then you will most probably enjoy this film. It is unfortunate that MGM did not renew Brosnan for another Bond feature, still not sure who is going to replace him. Can’t think of anyone that I would like to see playing Bond. Apparently Ewan Mcregor and Clive Owen are on the shortlist.
Big Mac day yesterday, the last day of the Mac Expo UK and the opening of the Apple Store in London. First stop was the Expo, which as usual was the same small affair in the Islington Business Design Center. What is spooky is that I have been going to the same show for about 3 years now, and the stand location for the majority of exhibitors never changes. In fact in some cases the things they have are the same.
Having said that were a few changes this year, MS and Adobe had swapped, the gamers area was bigger. The volume of people attending the show was not massive, but the place was quite busy. Apple were not selling anything at the show themselves instead they were telling people to go to the new Apple Store in Regent Street.
So we headed there. I think the number of people at the Apple Store was quite impressive we had to queue for 10 minutes just to get in, on top of that they were controlling the flow of people through the doors, crowd control and fire safety reasons I guess.
Unfortunately I did not have a camera with me (I’m not one of those people who has a camera 24×7.) otherwise I would have taken some pictures. (Yeah I know I have a camera phone, I guess I just couldn’t be asked 
) Any how from the outside the shop front is very bright, you can see the Apple signs from either side of Regent Street and from both sides. Inside the layout is very much like the New York Soho store although in scale terms it is most definately larger. The stair case is exactly like the ones used at the other Apple Store, design consistancy and image reason which are Apple traits I guess.
The queues at the tills were quite long I think everyone was buying iPods or iPod accessories. People were walking away with G5′s, iMacs, Powerbooks and iBooks, so I think they did a fair bit of business just on the first day. Just so that I did not feel left out I got the Applecare pack for the iPod, so that I could get my battery swapped out under warranty. Still looking into how this is going to be done in the next couple of days, soundd like a bit of phone time to Dublin is going to be needed.
It will be interesting to see how successful Apple are with their own retail outlets in Europe. At the Expo I was speaking to a few retailers that when asked about the Apple Store made some negative comments about Apple’s plan. Since of course the smaller Mac retailers are going to be hit quite hard by Apple’s move into the retail side. I guess only time will tell. Apple faced the same problem in the US when they started to open stores in the US over 18 months ago. As I understand it some legal action in California is still taking place.
MT 3.12 is out, will have to upgrade soon so I can use the dynamic page features Brad Choate has added to MT. Tried to do it with 3.11 tonight and everything broke again, so I had to revert back to static mode, also screwed up the site header again, might fix it over the weekend going to get some sleep now.
I have been using CodeWeavers on trial for a while now to get Office and the like working under Linux however I couldn’t quite bring myself to buying it since I’m also using Transgaming’s Codega as well. However a few days ago CodeWeaver’s announced that iTunes support went gold so I was compelled to give it a go.
Since I’m running 64-bit Ubuntu I have to run CrossOffice in a 32-bit root jail, which I worked out how to do thanks to the Ubuntu and Debian mailing lists and howtos. Most of things that only come as 32-bit binaries work fine in this environment, mainly RealPlayer, CrossOffice and Codega. I uninstalled CrossOffice and installed the 4.0 release after paying for it (only $39), since I was feeling brave.
Installed Office again and a bunch of other apps just to prove that it worked fine. Once I was happy with it I installed iTunes, now the mistake I made here was that I used the 4.7 installer I had downloaded already. This of course did not work, clicking on a track renders iTunes in a hung state. So I checked the CrossOffice supported apps database and realised that it only supports 4.6, so I used the download/install feature in CrossOffice, after which it started to work.
However after a bit of use it sort of hangs, which is a little upsetting. Will keep my eyes posted on updates and news.
Halo 2 came out yesterday, had a bit of a bash with it yesterday. First impression is that I like the game however it is more of the same. The weapons have all changed, the physics are slightly better, the story game is okay I guess. Have been playing the co-op game, tried out X-Box Live however the servers are maxed out, takes ages to get on, then have loads of connection issues. I hope things get better in the coming weeks.
Bowling was a hoot last night, not a major turnout but the 10 of us that were there had a good time as always. Got Khilna’s birthday bash next week so hopefully will see more APRites then.
Went and got myself a PStwo at the weekend since my PS2′s laser has been playing up for a while now. My original unit was one of the very first PS2 in the UK, thanks to Sony’s pre-order crazyness. Any how it had been messing up for the past year or so, which was begining to annoy me since I just got San Andreas last week.
What a small package, the power rail is only 8.5V meaning that this thing can be fitted into a car without the need for a DC convertor. I had seen the unit last week when it was released however it is not until you get to play around with one properly do you appreciate the design. There are some good pictures here
Bring on Gran Turismo 4 and MGS3!
Well things are sort or returning back to normal at work after our big deadline. Had a couple of support nightmares in the last couple of days but nothing we couldn’t handle. Having said that doing anything thing recreational has been hell for the last couple or weeks. Haven’t seen any friends in weeks. Having said that I have arranged a bowling evening for tomorrow looks like we will have a reasonable turnout.
Trying to get into a regular pattern again, with Ramadan coming to a climax as well I think I might just be able to sleep properly after the weekend. Looks like Eid will be this saturday.
Since I have been running Windows again at home for a bit again, I have been using iTunes on Windows a fair bit. It has to be said that it does seem faster at performing operations, for example doing a library re-build or additions takes only seconds. (I keep all of my music on a file server served to the PC or powerbook via a Samba share.) My powerbook however takes minutes. As for actual interaction speed there is no difference. The convert from WMA feature is also very nice.
CodeWeavers are also working on support for iTunes on Linux via CrossOver, which will be nice as well, my only worry will be getting updates.
My only major niggle at the moment is that I can’t share iTunes meta data across platforms, I have tried hacking the XML in the iTunesDB file but just end up with corrupt files. Plus the path differences cause problem, even tried regex’ing them but still end up with corrupt library file. If anyone has a way of doing this then please post a reply.
For the past couple of weeks I have been running Ubuntu as my main linux desktop, of course it is the AMD64 variant. There were a couple of install issues, but nothing I couldn’t handle. The only real issue I had was gaining proper x86 binary compatibility for running things like Crossover Office, Transgaming’s Cedega and RealPlayer 10. No specific documention so I used the debian equivalent. Actually made some proper notes so I might put together a mini-howto for the ubuntu-user’s mailing list, when I get the chance.
I like ubuntu, has all of the benefits of debian, but has more current package releases as well as growing support and interest. The GNOME 2.8 Desktop is very nicely configured. Was going to try out the most recent release of enlightenment but decided to keep with the default GNOME setup. Ubuntu is being backed by Canonical, a company owned by Mark Shuttleworth the founder of Thawte.
