With my old MacBook Pro, doing ‘make all’ to build several projects totaling around 200,000 lines of code took about 3 minutes. With my new MacBook Pro it now takes 2 minutes.
Mike Cohen
The software awards scam
This article confirms what I’ve long suspected: most shareware awards are bogus. As an experiment, the author submitted a text file with the words âthis program does nothing at allâ? repeated a few times and then renamed as an executable. The majority of the sites accepted it, and about 7% gave it an award. He even got emails like âGreat job, weâre really impressed!â?.
I hate my Toyota dealer
I didn’t hate them until they refused to stop calling me about taking their survey. I brought my Prius in for its one year scheduled maintenance last week (which was free of charge) and I was happy with their service. HOWEVER, they’ve been insisting that I take their survey ever since.
I started getting mysterious calls from an 800 number with no answer. Finally one time an actual person called me and told me they were from my Toyota dealer and asked me to take their survey. I told her no and that they should NOT call me again because I DON’T want to take their survey.
That didn’t stop them. I’ve still been getting their automated calls every day. I got one a few minutes ago that was a recording telling me to call an 800 number to do their survey.
Message to Toyota:
I do NOT want to take your survey. If you don’t stop calling me about the survey, I will never go to a Toyota dealer again. You just lost me as a customer because you won’t allow me NOT to take your damned survey.
Update: I just got a reply email from them saying that they took me off the phone list. Thanks!
VMware beats Parallels in benchmarks
This benchmark comparison from CNet Labs confirms my own subjective non-scientific observation: VMware is a lot faster than Parallels. I found that Parallels would sometimes make my old MacBook Pro freeze for as long as several minutes while starting up Windows, which didn’t happen with VMware Fusion. I haven’t installed Parallels on my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, so I don’t know if the performance would be any better.
links for 2007-08-16
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How to set up your own server as a .Mac replacement
New MacBook Pro
I got a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with a 200G drive to replace my old one, which was starting to run out of disk space (despite the 150G drive) thanks to having multiple operating systems installed including several VMware images of Windows & Linux.
The difference between the old screen and the new LED backlit screen is quite striking. The new screen is much brighter and the white looks much purer. This picture can’t really convey the difference.
It came with iLife 08 installed, plus trial copies of Aperture & iWork 08. The speed difference is quite noticeable, especially running Windows under VMware. With the new one, Unity mode is usable. It was too slow on my old MacBook Pro.
A great man died on this day
Elvis wasn’t the only musician who died on August 16th. On this day in 1997, one of the world’s greatest singers, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan died in the prime of his career. That was the same month Fela Kuti died, making it one of the saddest months in world music.
Nusrate Fateh Ali Khan sung a style of Sufi religious music called Qawwali and helped bring that kind of music to a wider audience. He had an incredible voice and performed with artists such as Eddie Vedder and Peter Gabriel. Jeff Buckley was also a big fan of his music.
If you haven’t heard his music, listen to mustt mustt, his most popular song, at the WorldBeatPlanet podcast.
Tropical Storm Dean
The first storm this season that may threaten us. It’s still too early to tell what’s going to happen, but the maps show it becoming a Category 3 hurricane early next week and heading in our general direction.
Adieu Madilu
Benn loxo du taccu reports that Bialu Makiese, better known as Madilu System, a member of Franco’s TPOK Jazz since 1980, died suddenly on Aug. 11 in Kinshasa from complications of diabetes. He was 57 years old.