Macintosh

Students with iBooks Get Better Grades

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Writing in the Granite State News about New Hampshire’s Technology Promoting Student Excellence Program, Mary Saliba reports, “The Governor provided each Paul School 7th grader with a Macintosh iBook laptop in January, and in this short time, principal Matthew Jozokos reports, ‘Every child has increased grades.’ He also said there have been decreased absences, and that the students were much more excited to be learning. He added that the teachers were learning a lot too.” [Apple Hot News]

iTMS & .Mac problem

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I just purchased 4 songs from iTMS and only two were downloaded before I got an error. When I try to check for purchased music, I get an ‘unknown error’ 11502. I also haven’t been able to log in to my .Mac email this morning.

Crying Wolf

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A look at the ‘MP3Concept Trojan Horse’ fiasco.

[Daring Fireball]

This whole mess demonstrates why HFS metadata needs to go. When file types are identified by two different methods, it’s inevitable that they’d get out of sync, causing these kind of problems. We also need to get rid of resource forks for a portable cross-platform file system.

Which Launcher

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Question: LaunchBar or QuickSilver? [from NSLog();]

I also prefer LaunchBar. I’m now using the 4.0 beta and it seems pretty stable. I had resisted trying it for a long time, since I used DragThing and I was satisfied with it. When I finally tried LB for the first time I was hooked instantly and purchased it the next day. Now I rarely make the trip to DragThing – it’s just faster to hit a key and type a few letters.

I tried QuickSilver but I got annoyed with it pretty quickly. None of the 3 options are as nice as LaunchBar’s unobtrusive little bar.

The best thing about LaunchBar is that it learns. I can now type ‘IN’ to launch Interarchy, ‘FF’ to launch FireFox, or ‘MW’ for MS Word.

KeyStation arrived

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My M-Audio Keystation 49E arrived. It worked immediately when I plugged it in – no software needed. It looks a lot nicer than most cheap MIDI keyboards I’ve seen, and the keys have a nice feel. I’ll write a full review at MacMegasite in the next day or so.

Keystation 49E

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I had ordered a m-Audio Keystation 49E from MacMall at the beginning of February. Every time I called about it, the ship date was pushed back. For a long time they said it would ship Mar. 31, which didn’t happen. Now they don’t expect to receive any until the end of this month. I checked other online stores and the story was the same everywhere. I finally canceled the order today and ordered one from the Apple Store, where it’s in stock and will ship in 1-2 days.

UPDATE: it just shipped!

Taming the x86 beast

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This is why I always disliked PCs, not for any religious or ideological reasons. I always thought the x86 instruction set was the ugliest thing ever.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of programming an x86-family processor in assembly language, you don’t know pain. The 32-bit x86 chips (including the ‘386, ‘486, and Pentium-class parts from Intel and AMD) do an amazing job of dragging one of the world’s oldest processor designs into the modern age. They do it while still maintaining binary compatibility with chips that are three generations and 15 years behind. It’s impressive, really, but it makes these chips tricky to program with low-level code.

Since the discussion forum has gotten into a question of evolution and popularity, I thought I’d pop in with the parallel universe of assembly language. IMHO, x86 assembly language is far inferior to many of the other alternatives. Yet, the biggest target cpu is the x86.

The only upside, I suppose, is that Intel managed to single handedly destroy the art of hand crafted assembly. The vacuum being filled in by C. The problem with the popular choices is not just restricted to higher level languages (and that’s not even getting into the question of Operating Systems). [Lambda the Ultimate]