Monthly Archives: August 2005

OSX on Intel

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Squinting bleary-eyed at slashdot earlier, I noticed that some people have finally got Mac OS X Running on Non-Apple Hardware. If you dig a little, you can find install guides for a native usable version of OSX for your beige-box PC (if you have supported hardware), or a VMWare version which emulates the supported hardware.

You need an SSE3-capable processor to run Rosetta, but given that people have already hacked the core OS to boot with SSE2 processors (which it isn’t supposed to support), it can only be a matter of time before drivers and patches are available for more and more recent commodity x86 hardware.

I think Apple really have to decide to sell OSX for x86 now, rather than requiring customers to purchase a specialised Apple x86 machine. If people can either pay £50 for a copy of OSX that’ll run on their Dell, or spend a day hacking, then plenty will pay Apple their £50, and Apple will make money. If spending a day hacking is the only option, then people will do that instead, and Apple will get nothing…

(Oh, and on the subject of OS-porting:)

Finally after many, many yeas of running on everything-but-your-toaster NetBSD is there too. #

At last :-)

IE7 fulfills expectations

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IE 7 is neither CSS1 nor CSS2 compliant, and also fails the ACID test. The tabbed browsing features are completely lame and cannot be configured. For instance, it’s impossible to easily open a link to the same server in another tab, and it’s impossible to prevent it opening another tab when following a link to another server. #

Disappointed, but hardly surprised. IE’s market share has dropped by maybe 10% overall in the past few years since the emergence of Phoenix Firebird Firefox, but unfortunately I suspect that even given the next apparently bug-ridden release of IE, it’ll still maintain a vast majority share – thus stifling innovation and thwarting the adoption of standards in web development.

This is why monopolies are bad folks – good technology suffers, to the benefit of “popular” bad technology…

The Cyclist

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After spending three hours upgrading servers last night, I had the morning off work. So I finally bought a bicycle.

I am rather disappointed to report that I am even less healthy than I thought. Frustratingly, the route to work has an enormous uphill bit at the start, and another enormous uphill bit at the end. Given that I’m generally less than cheerful in the mornings anyway, I don’t think this is going to help. It does make the ride home more enjoyable though.

Anyway, I made it – five miles to work, and five miles back again.

My arse hurts.

That is all.

Blisters

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So that’s the first week of the new job over. I’ve been getting there in the mornings using public transport, and then either walking two miles to the city centre to get a bus home, or biting the bullet and walking the whole five miles straight home.

So in the past five days, I have walked approximately 20 miles. My feet are very sore, but I feel healthier, and am currently wearing the most comfortable shoes in the world, which is helping a lot.

I might buy a bicycle over the weekend, and cut out the public transport part entirely. Cycling ten miles a day will be a step up, but I don’t think it’s entirely unrealistic. Words I suspect I may come to regret on Monday morning…

Contrasts

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From hacking live systems with crossed fingers, to a structured development/candidate/release system. From no source control and no backups, to a sensible CVS setup. From obsolete whitebox hardware, to funky branded servers. And from Windows XP, to Debian Sarge. I’m enjoying the new job , but sadly things will be a little quieter here whilst I get on with it.