Newton’s Lore

Apple’s job listings report that they’re looking for a Marketing Coordinator for FileMaker in Australasia

The evil David Letterman suggested that after a reported Apple battery fire they were releasing another product, the iStinguisher.

So, I’m looking for a message I’ve received in Mail.app, but of course it doesn’t appear when I do a search (which is now of course powered by Spotlight). Fortunately I can still grep the Library/Mail folder. Sigh.

While we’re at it, here’s a link to my new Technorati Profile. Because the old one is lost somewhere in Technorati’s database.

• The beta version of NeoOffice for the Mac, now with Aqua look and feel
• The Mac Mini take-apart guide. The PDF includes instructions on how to sharpen a spatula if you don’t have one of Apple’s provided shanks to take your Mac mini apart. Or you want to assassinate an industrial designer or something.
• Updated Keyspan USB drivers. Because I still need a Keyspan to talk to my GPS
• Opal because I’m still in search of good text tools
• Snakebite to see if I can make a Mac build from the debian package
• MT-Newswatcher 3.5.2 because I need to plug this blog in the .sig of my news posts to various Mac forums

So I went to Apple’s Battery Exchange Program web site and entered my PowerBook’s serial number, and its battery serial number. Then, after it said they were both covered by the recall, I printed out the web page (twice, so I had a copy of my battery’s serial number).

I then e-mailed my local on-campus Apple reseller. I got back two responses, one saying I needed to fill out the form and bring it in with my battery, the other indicating that they were still waiting to hear back from Apple about what to do.

I then took my battery in and dropped it off with the printout. They wanted me to write my contact details on the printout. I then asked for a receipt (after all, the batteries cost AU$100+), and they then made me fill out a service submission form for the battery.

I’m hoping they streamline the procedure by the time everyone else brings their batteries back for replacement.

I have reason to believe that when you load a 64 bit application under Mac OS X you have to wait for all the 64 bit libraries to load, which may take some time. Fortunately I guess people aren’t likely to be loading and quitting 64 bit apps regularly.

Suggestions on how to make WWDC better:

• Wait until after the Keynote to provide the pocket programme guides so there aren’t huge ‘To be announced’ sections that make the programme guides useless.
• Hot food was ok, but need better food in the cold lunchboxes.
• Get the Company Store to run a booth at WWDC rather than trying to get everyone through the store during the Campus Bash.
• Need more concrete info on what will be in the next OS release, developer seed needs to be closer to the release GM. Developers don’t want to develop for immature technologies that may change or get axed before final release.
• Have a wind-down event on the last day.
• Management of Apple staff and speakers was annoying to them and other attendees, ie having to enter venues last, having to get their food separately etc.
• Management of venue seating and queuing was a bit over the top and could have been toned down.
• What exactly is the point of the NDA? Is Apple worried about someone stealing its ideas? Surely if you wanted to steal Apple’s ideas you could just pay to attend WWDC yourself. It’s not like the Microsoft development team aren’t there.

With the Intel Xserve not shipping until October, it looks like customers wanting an Xserve will have to scour third party vendors looking for any remaining G5 Xserves, as you can’t currently buy them from the Apple store.

Apple have released a document on how to fine tune AppleShare’s parameters by altering the AFP quantum size or number of available threads.

This is great, I always have dozens of tabs open in Safari, and I find the AppleScripts for saving and reloading the tabs to be, well, unreliable.

Now, Forget Me Not is a Safari plugin that remembers what tabs you had open and re-opens them when you launch Safari again. It requires you to instal SIMBL (Smart Input Manager Bundle Loader) though. And there’re some security concerns about Input Managers.

But it seems to work for me. There’s also a Firefox/Mozilla plugin which does a similar thing.