adoption curve dot net

It’s taken a Powerbook to convince me of the worth of Bluetooth – synchronising with my P800 is way, way simpler than it used to using the Windows software. Pair up the phone with the Powerbook (which worked flawlessly, to my total amazement), hit iSync and away it goes.

Then I started getting adventurous, and wondered what would happen if I used the P800 as a GPRS modem. I never managed to get this working under Windows, and ran out of patience trying. But OS X has made the whole thing a lot easier if you know how – and Dave Miller does. Follow his instructions, and you’ll be surfing away in no time – although your GPRS bill will be mounting at the same time, which is why I haven’t been surfing with wild abandon just yet – but it may yet come in useful for those moments when I absolutely have-to-must get on the net..

We were woken up at 8 o’clock this morning by a thunderous banging on the front door, so cursing whoever it was who was so damn antisocial as to be banging on the front door at that hour, I got up. Which was a mistake. Rather than the warm, dry carpet that normally covers the bedroom floor, this was cold, wet carpet – squelchily-wet carpet in fact.

Turns out there was a leak in the apartment next door, and as our next-door neighbour is apparently away for a couple of weeks, it had been leaking unchecked for some considerable time. So now we’ve got cold, wet, squelching carpets throughout, anything that was on the floor overnight is soaked, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of it drying out any time soon. The efficiency and effectiveness of the contents insurance policy is about to be tested. The irony of all this is that living by the side of the river, we’re regularly asked what we’re going to do when it bursts its banks and floods us out (for the record, it would need to rise something like 25 feet and overwhelm the flood barriers before there was real cause for concern.) We now know exactly where the lowest point on the whole floor of the building is – it’s about two feet and slightly to the left of our front door…

I can’t decide whether this is the sign of obsessive attention to detail, or just a hardware designer out to lunch – but when you put a PowerBook into ’sleep’ mode, there’s a little white light on the screen latch that slowly pulses. Almost like it’s snoring.

Scoble on Microsoft and RSS:

I really wish all of our teams here would publish in RSS. Syndication is another area where Apple is really kicking our behinds again.

Which I guess is a direct result of being the supertanker of the software world – you might have a hell of a lot of momentum, but it’s going to take you a hell of a long time to turn around. The smaller, more agile players out there are able to provide what people want now, while M$ is still obsessing about its roadmaps.

A slightly hair-raising moment a couple of days ago – logging into the Powerbook, everything seemed suspiciously – default. No bouncing icons, no backdrop, no contacts and worse, no mail. Turns out I’m the victim of the vanishing Filevault syndrome – the logging-out process is supposed to go through some sort of a clean-up process before shutting down. and sometimes it’s a little too enthusiastic about cleaning up. With the net result that everything vanishes.

As it turned out (after a call to the Apple support people – oh the shame, seeking help from another real human being instead of Google) the data was still there once I’d gone back in and turned Filevault off again. It popped back up as a .sparseimage file, buried away somewhere non-obvious. Double-clicking the file brings up a prompt for the password, after which it mounts as a disk image. Then copying over the Library folder and playing around with the permissions means that it’s possible to retrieve application settings etc.

The first entry to force a page rebuild

An exceedingly cool online clock…