… to us! Yes, today is the 25′th anniversary of the day Deb and I got married. Wow, it hasn’t been that long has it? Let’s see, there was the time we bought a house, and then Dennis was born, and then suddenliy he was old enough to be left at home while we went to Halifax for a week. 25 years. Really?
Speaking of Halifax, we’ve been having tons of fun so far. Yesterday we managed to see a mix of sights we had seen last time we were here and a couple of new ones: the Public Gardens and the Natural History museum.
I will try to post more pictures when I get home, but it’s quite difficult to get them from the iPad (I’m using to write this) to my home server. Just to prove that it is possible, here’s a photo I took at the Citadel yesterday:
Today we’re off to see “Pier 21″ the immigration museum and hopefully a Mac store, then maybe some time by the pool and dinner at a fancy restaurant. Ah the life of the idle rich.
Woot! Eclipse 4 is out! Everyone involved put in a huge amount of effort to pull it together so that we could ship on time. WTG, all!
If you’re looking for more info, check out the rather lengthy blog post I wrote on my “official” Eclipse blog. There’s a good overview of the the cool features, and (of course) a plea for your participation.
As a result of some new hiring we’re doing, we’ve finally gotten around to re-organizing our office layouts. I ended up in a nice office, with an interesting shape, that used to be the one Nick was in. Unfortunately, Nick ended up on the “puny” end of the office lottery as a result. Sorry, Nick.
Here’s a pic of my new space…
And I even have enough room for my couch (just off camera to the right).
To me, the critical point is that (as it says in the article title) they do not allow “digital locks” to block your fair use rights. Just so everyone is aware, this is not true for the new Canadian copyright law that is currently being introduced.
(I know this is the kind of thing that we tweet, in this modern age, but I wanted to keep the link around for future reference (and I still like the “link of the day” concept).)
… bit of lame-and-obvious marketing that appears in the top right corner of my home page — the Google search page.
Now, it used to be that I could click on the close box on this ad and it would set a cookie that prevented it from re-appearing until the next time I reset my local browser state (or it may just time out; I don’t know). In any case, that meant that I’d only see it once every few weeks or so which was unpleasant but bearable.
In the last few days, either Google has changed the code, Safari has changed in some incompatible way, or my local configuration has been corrupted somehow, but whatever the cause, the result is that I now see the add every time I open the page.
To be blunt, I can’t take it.
I. Use. Safari.
I guess I’ll go set my home page to Bing for a while. Somebody let me know when Google figures out that alienating their consumers isn’t smart.
(Image is on Apple website; if it gets moved, follow the link above to see them.)
It’s basically just two plastic doingles with iPod connectors on one side and a USB port and SD card slot (respectively) on the other. Not exciting, and presumably not particularly difficult to make.
So, why is it that still, months after the iPad was released, these things are basically impossible to find? I just polled the Rideau Apple Store, Carbon Computing and Best Buy/Future Shop. Result: Nada — and several places indicated that there was a waiting list when they did show up. Even the online Apple Store is saying 4..6 weeks delivery. WTF?
Maybe Apple misjudged the popularity of this add on initially, but surely in the first few days it must have become obvious that nearly every person who has an iPad wants one.
I’m too sane — now, be nice — to believe that there is some kind of conspiracy here, but maybe Apple just doesn’t want us to have these, for some reason. In any case, I’m tired of waiting, so if anybody sees aftermarket versions out there, please let me know.
MacFixit has a nice little workflow for simplifying the task of getting a document onto your iPad for offline reading. It’s not surprising what’s going on — you just create a PDF and then copy it to iTunes to make it available in iBooks — but did you know it was trivial to add a “Save PDF to iTunes” menu item in the standard print dialog?
This morning I saw something that made me happier, and more proud, than just about anything that’s ever happened to me: My son graduated from high school.
After changing my Apple ID password (which is used by MobileMe, iTunes, developer connection, etc.) I found that I could no longer publish pictures to MobileMe from iPhoto. Even though I was logged into MobileMe — sync was working; iDisk was available — iPhoto would tell me that “an error occurred with the publication of an album” because my “MobileMe account information is not correct”.
As I’m sure everyone knows by now, Apple finally announced the new iPhone yesterday. There are much better sources than here for all the details so, just for grins, I’ll point you at Gizmodo’s summary.
Some of the more interesting points:
The processor has been bumped up to be the same as the one in the iPad. That’s good, because it will help with sluggish web page loading, but also because the display has been increased in resolution to the point where it needs the horsepower just to paint it.
Speaking of the display, the resolution is now 960×640 which gives it >300 dpi resolution. To keep that in perspective, that’s better than a cheap laser printer. I’m not sure how they have pulled off changing the dpi without effecting the way applications look, but the claim is they’ve got it to work. Let’s hope it’s not the “2x” mode from the iPad.
Really for me, the best new feature is an improved camera. I actually use the camera on my 3GS, but it’s absolutely terrible in low light conditions. The new one is supposed to be better resolution, better low light behavior, and it has an LED flash. I guess we’ll see. Any of the example pictures I’ve seen so far still seem to have a fair amount of noise in them.
They’ve also added another camera on the front of the display, for doing video conferencing. There’s an app called “Facetime” (ugh.) to support iPhone-to-iPhone calling, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why they didn’t just put iChat on it. If I could video conference with Deb on her Mac, I could actually imagine using it. Also, currently at least, it only supports calling over wifi. boo.
The device will, of course, be running the new version of the iPhone OS, which has been renamed “iOS”. I suspect this was in keeping with the rumours of the new Apple TV box, which is purported to be running this OS. They probably have dreams of running it on other devices that don’t look anything like phones.
The good news about iOS 4 is that will be a free upgrade for any iPhone/iPod that can run it, and should be available June 21. The bad news is that won’t be available for the iPad until “this fall”.
Sorry, Nick.
