JamesX

There comes a time in every blogger’s life that you have to face the dreaded upgrade. Tonight I decided it was about time I drag Wordpress (the engine behind this blog) up to the latest version. It’s usually about every six months (at least) before I can be bothered updating because it’s such an effort to do that you need to set aside about two hours to do it properly.

So why update in the first place? Well the fact is that if you don’t, you end up getting so much spam and open yourself to security risks that, well, just aren’t worth the risk. :) Plus you get a handful of new features with each version and when you take so long to update, that’s a lot of versions. So sit back, relax, and enjoy Wordpress 2.3.3.

Oh and I managed to fix the AJAX (real-time) searching too so I turned it back on. Go take it for a spin!

I know it’s been a while since my last entry, it’s been a busy time. However, today is a turning point in Australia’s history and I feel compelled to make my opinion known…

As most would know, today Kevin Rudd apologised to the Aboriginal people of Australia, on behalf of the nation and the government, for the wrong actions of those in the past. It’s something that’s long overdue, and as was debated in parliament yesterday, it’s “unfinished business”. What I am shocked about, however, is the attitude that some people have had to this milestone in Australia’s history. Rather than a time for everyone to unite for a common cause, it seems to be a point of contention for some that have formed blatantly racist and ill-informed propositions about the issue.

I think it’s disgusting that in this day and age people want to stick to the myth that “you lost this country when you didn’t defend it.” If you really believed that, perhaps it’s time to put the shoe on the other foot. From those I’ve spoken to today, this sticking point demonstrates just how ill-informed these “radicals” are - the central issue surrounding reconciliation is that of the “stolen” generations. For 60 years, until 1970, the Australian government took mixed-race Aboriginal children from their families and put them in dormitories or industrial schools, claiming it was protecting them. This led to a whole range of social and political issues for the Aboriginal people as families were torn apart and left in harsh, poor conditions. To those who believe that an apology is not warranted, I ask you this: Would you be happy if the government came along and forcibly removed your child purely based on your race, or hair colour, or gender? One would assume not.

I think that saying sorry is a step in the right direction. It’s a move that takes great courage, both politically and personally, and has paved the way for a long road of healing. One can only hope that today’s apology can lead to further developments towards reconciliation in the future. While you might view it as too little too late, I think you’d be hard pressed to provide a better alternative.

I could get into a political debate very easily here so I’ll simply leave it by saying thank you to Mr Rudd for putting into words what many have felt for years. It’s a pity the same can’t be said for Dr Nelson who despite agreeing, insisted on bringing the Liberal agenda into the equation.

What are your thoughts?

I forgot to make an entry about my latest header pic when I uploaded it a few days ago so I thought I had better include one. The photo is unedited and almost got thrown out for being blurry (I took it while the car was speeding down Mt Hotham) but then I thought it was perfect for the blog.

This trip was one of the hottest with the temperature soaring into the mid 40s. It was a good opportunity to take lots of photos with the new camera though. I still have a lot of learning to go with that thing, but it’s good to be able to relate some of the features with practical, real-life examples.

Being up in the hills only makes me long for the winter ski season to begin!

I don’t know what it is, but as I’m getting older, Christmas seems to just creep up faster every year! It was only four days ago that I finished work for the year and it’s already here! I can already smell the turkey and ham in the oven ready for the traditional family Christmas lunch - the aroma is making me more hungry by the minute.

In about an hour (when Ed is forced out of bed), we’ll start to open all the presents around the tree. There seem to be an awful lot this year - maybe everyone is feeling extra generous. I hope everyone likes what I got them. :)

I also think that this is one of the coldest Christmases we’ve had in a while (it’s a mild 16 degrees at the moment). With the weather as it has been these last couple of weeks I’m not surprised either. It sure beats the 30 degree days we’ve had in the past.

In any case, no matter how you choose to celebrate the day, I wish everyone a safe and happy holiday. I’ll be back later in the week to write about my presents (not to mention the present I bought myself - yes, I finally got that TV!).

Cheers!

A random thought for the day…

Too few people realise that the ICT industry has revenues of nearly $70 billion. Our employment is larger than banking and finance, larger than television, media and communications, larger than mining, and larger than wool, wheat and sugar combined. We are a significant contributor to the social and economic wellbeing of our country.

Why is it then that so few understand how important ICT is?

It’s now been a couple of days since I got my hands on Apple’s latest rendition of OS X, Leopard, so I thought I might share some of the things I’ve discovered as well as some of the things that are slightly frustrating. To commemorate the occasion, I’ve uploaded a new header pic that shows off the fancy new default Leopard background (albeit edited slightly).

The Good

• Stacks - I have to say that overall, stacks are quite a useful feature. My Downloads stack has already saved me numerous clicks through the Finder so I’m quite happy with that little addition.
• Cover Flow - Now this one I was thinking was just going to be another one of those “pretty features” but I have found myself using Cover Flow view a couple of times already. It’s particularly useful when bounding through folders of images trying to find the one you’re after.
• Quick Look - It sorta goes hand in hand with Cover Flow and it’s another one that I’ve quickly started using. It’s particularly good with video files, in fact I’ve even started watching TV shows from quick look because it’s faster than loading VLC. Just don’t click out of the window… the sky will fall on your head if you do!
• Address Book - It now has Google Maps natively (out goes my old plug-in) and finally has a little date selector for birthdays. That one used to drive me nuts.
• Spotlight - Spotlight now selects the first item by default which makes it much faster to launch apps. I’m one of those serial “Run command” people so I love to launch apps this way. The added calculator functionality is also a nice little trick.
• iChat Effects - The new video effects are really fun. I can’t see myself using them all that often but they keep giving me a good laugh. If only Apple left the hologram effect in the final build.
• System Preferences - Apple seem to have done a huge tidy up around system preferences and it has certainly addressed a number of issues. The old system used to be cluttered and some of the preferences were categorised under very unusual tabs (Firewall was under Sharing for instance and now it’s under Security). It just seems more logical now and the Networking tab, where I seem to spend a lot of time, is particularly friendly.

The Bad

• iCal - iCal would have made it into the good list but it has one serious flaw that is frustrating me somewhat; there’s now like 3-4 clicks involved in editing an event. The only workaround I’ve found is to select an event and press Cmd+E but that’s hardly a solution. I’d like to be able to edit my events more easily like I could with the drawer.
• Mail - The random To-do/Notes functionality that has appeared in Mail seems to do nothing but mimic functionality that already exists in Stickies and iCal. This leads me to the question, why have it there at all?
• Spaces - This is one of those features that I can actually see myself using. I often have a lot of windows minimised while I’m not using them and shifting them off to other spaces seems like it’d make sense to me. The only problem is, I can’t figure this thing out. I can drag an app from one space (that is, if it has a window - Dreamweaver and Photoshop don’t seem all that easy to move around) to another only to find when I click on it, it comes back to the space I’m working on instead of changing to that space. I can set an app to appear on all spaces but it only appears on one. I can lose several windows from the same app over different spaces. In fact, I can do pretty much anything that is counter productive and doesn’t seem to behave how Apple say it should. Perhaps it’s just my set up, I don’t know. I’m hoping an update will address these ones.
• Apache 2 - Ick! What was going on here? It seems that Apple have upgraded to Apache 2 in Leopard and it wreaked havoc on my off-line web development environment. Not only did it kill my virtual hosts, it also stuffed MySQL and it took me quite a while of Googling and calling in for backup (enter Richard) to get it back to normal. If you need help with this one, head over to Remy Sharp’s Blog for some tips.

The Ugly

• Dashboard - Dashboard seemed to go all nasty towards a good 60% of my existing widgets. Some have font problems, others have alignment issues and some just don’t work at all. It’s a shame that widget developers are having to play catch up to get these simple things working again.
• The Dock - or should I call it the ridiculously shiny piece of metal at the bottom of my screen. I really don’t like the new dock. It is overpowering to look at on my glossy iMac screen (it doesn’t look so bad on my MacBook Pro) and so it had to go. Luckily it’s an easy fix with the following command: defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock
• The Menubar - My next gripe is with the transparent menu bar. I can understand the logic behind making it transparent, but I don’t understand why I’m being forced to look at it. I haven’t found a way to disable that one yet, so I’m currently using a black background under the menu to mask the transparent parts.

I haven’t had a chance to test Time Machine yet. I need to go spend some more cash on an external HDD or two. I’m sure I’ll post more as I delve deeper into the OS. Overall, I’d say that I’m pretty happy with Leopard. 75% is how it used to be, just cleaner and looking a lot better. Another 20% is new and perhaps has a few teething issues and the other 5% is just wrong, missing or poorly implemented. But hey, compare it to Windows Vista (any edition for that matter) and it’s still light years ahead. Microsoft, I think it’s time to get a bigger photocopier.