Blackboard Updates
Jun0
Today our great and extraordinarily expensive VLE goes down for some upgrades to prepare it for the next academic year, where it’s taken out of the hands of the unfortunate computing students who have been giving it a thorough hammering and replaces the venerable and admittedly shit Virtual Campus.
Will we get features we have been asking for like RSS feeds of course content? Will we finally be able to use the message boards without Java? Will the university finally get it into its head that not everybody uses Word, and perhaps some form of PDF document would be far nicer? Will the academic staff decide on a single, sensible format for all the content so you don’t have to remember how each individual tutor stores their notes?
Probably not. Still, any update which requires the entire system to be taken offline for several hours is either going to be a nice improvement, a major behind-the-scenes set of tweaks, or a total cock-up. I await the results with great anticipation.
Hooray! My iPhone Contract Is Decent!
Jan0
I got a text today from O2, the people behind my iPhone contract, saying that they had some new goodies for me. They are upgrading my monthly contract from 200 minutes, 200 texts and unlimited internet (Which is actually quite poor for the money) to 600 minutes, 500 texts, and still unlimited internet (Which is actually not bad for the money). Same price, nothing else for me to sign, and I predicted they would do this a few months after release anyway. I get more talking and texting, and the warm glow of being right.
I’m Back!
Nov0
Following that brief and somewhat irritating spite of hackers, who got in through a hole in someone else’s unmaintained site (The offending user has been thoroughly rollocked), my blog is back with no loss of content despite their best efforts, all for a mere 3 minutes of my time. Ladies and gentlemen, this is why you take backups.
I also took the opportunity to upgrade my slightly old codebase to the newest WordPress version, so I’ve got some new buttons to click. Nothing to worry about though. Sit back, relax, enjoy life.
Roar! I have Leopard!
Oct0
I’ve picked up my copy of Leopard today, and got it installed after a couple of hours. It’s good, and OS X continues to beat Windows into the ground.
Leopard, for those who don’t know, is Apple’s latest version of OS X (10.5), the operating system which powers all modern Macs. It’s touted as having over 300 new features, but you’ll be hard pushed to find most of them. Let’s start with the headliners.
Time Machine is arguably the biggest feature, but I need an external disk to use it. I’ll be picking one up soon though as I need a better backup solution, so I’ll go over this in a few days. The Coverflow and Quick Look features are nice, as they allow you to see if you’ve got the right file without actually opening it. As I’ve already got a mountain of PDFs, lecture notes and reports hanging around in various folders, this has proven quite useful in not wasting bounces opening Pages only to discover I actually wanted OcTeX.
Visually it’s nice – the unified window appearance is a welcome improvement on Tiger’s mix of styles, although there are still a couple of different ones out there. Apple’s Pro Tools (Aperture, Final Cut, Pro Logic) spring to mind, as does GarageBand. I’m not sure the transparent title bar does much though, since I seldom sit looking at my desktop. My laptop is for doing things, so being able to always see the top 1cm of my desktop image isn’t the most amazing of features. The new Dock isn’t earth-shattering either. It’s a place for applications to live, and shouldn’t feel the need to reflect all my windows. There is a tweak you can use in the Terminal to change it to a more robust translucent black (Similar to when you move the dock to the left or right of the screen) which I’ve used. Far nicer, and icons are much more visible over applications.
Behind the scenes, a lot has changed. It’s 64-bit throughout (With noticeable performance boosts), there’s Core Animation (Which is very nice indeed, and may be used later in the year when I’m doing some application development work), apparently big pieces of Core APIs have been improved as well. The whole OS somehow feels more… bright and responsive. However, there seems to have been an increase of Marble of Doom occurrences in various apps, most noticeably Safari.
Other minor tweaks include the new Mail and iCal, some .Mac improvements, much better network options and user interfaces (Finally, search domain in the GUI!), screensavers and iTunes visualisers. There’s a full list on apple.com for the curious.
Recommended upgrade? Definately. Worth the money? On the outside, no, but developers will love working in Leopard, so expect a lot of Leopard only apps in the future.