Yes, it's true. My MacOS installation is still in place and is being actively used. I discovered that if you stay the hell away from the terminal then it's a lot more reliable. It seems that you can totally kill performance by, say, uncompressing a load of file while doing lots of other things in the UI. I've even been developing under it, which is amazing considering my inability to type "#" without resetting the keyboard layout. Admittedly I've been coding in C# which means I can avoid needing to type it for most of the time, but it's the thought...

The first part of the new Battlestar Galactica is out this weekend on DVD over here. That's my Easter weekend sorted then.

So what do I think of my Mac? The actual box itself is great. It's silent and small, which is what I wanted. The English layout keyboard has one tiny flaw: It has no '#' key. WTF? What kind of incompetent designs something that developers can't use? One who hasn't learnt that platform adoption is driven through nice applications being available, that's who. And then there's MacOS X. Where should I start... Yesterday I averaged one critical crash an hour (one everything hanging and music looping, one Finder hanging and not being able to be shut down and one "Um, you...

Where's my Mac? In a box on my desk, that's where. You've got to hand it to Apple, they really know how to make a nice looking box. I'll give MacOS a go at the weekend to see if I like it before it gets replaced with something (possibly) better. The box itself fits my two requirements perfectly: It's very small and silent when it's not chomping on a CD.

I was sort of asked through comments the other day about my opinion about Eclipse. I don't like Eclipse, and something has been bugging me for the last few days about why. Eclipse is well featured, but I don't like it because it doesn't work the way that I do. My ideal IDE has a smattering of syntax highlighting, Intellisense (insert your name for this feature here) that actually works and a debugger that allows me to do exactly what I want. The first two are easy for .NET, but harder for C++. My life still involves far too much...

I think next year I'm going to be a bit more biased towards archaeology with my studying than plain history. The new course has the advantage of not making my study anything past the late medieval period, which is great because I find everything after that slightly boring at the moment. There's at least 6000 years of interesting history out there (ok, I find the 6000+ years just as interesting but there's not as much ground to cover), and I'm forced to study events that happened a decade before I was born. Now why didn't I decide to learn something that...

I've come up with a great example of why all applications should have a UI that is native to the platform on which they are running: You probably neither know or care about all of the functionality that's available. Take, for instance Internet Explorer and Firefox. Internet Explorer is my browser of choice for my laptop and Firefox for my desktops. Why? Because my laptop is actually a Tablet PC and Firefox uses a dodgy home-baked control for the address control. This means that whereas I have a nice browser specific input panel that comes up for when I'm entering...

I'm thinking of registering www.wheresmymac.com. I miss Dell, they have much better customer service so far.

I think I get it: I understand the attraction of Linux. OK, I still have to find a development environment that even comes close to Visual Studio, but I've replaced everything else except for games. And, of course, Photoshop (No, Gimp doesn't compare if you're more than a casual user). On the other hand I think that Office was replaced rather too easily (when it comes down to it I don't need much more than a feature level comparable with HTML for my documents, and there is a large choice of mail clients. PDFs load much faster than under...

It starts out a little spaced and I was actually missing Bonny Langford to begin with. The music sucks, David Arnold did a version a few years ago that would have worked so much better but I can see why they did what they did with the theme. It's the incidental music that really lets it down. Steed was much better against them, but it certainly was more Steed than any scarecrow managed before. I also expected Tubbs to turn up any second, but that was to be expected. The thing is that as things went on the references were flowing and...

Now that I have Linux installed and Gnome is running happily I can give a few of my first impressions about Linux. Actually that's not totally true because I've been able to stay in Gnome and now worry about what's underneath yet. So, what do I think about Gnome? It seems quite snappy, looks OK and comes with most of what I needed out of the box. Firefox feels a bit wierd, but that's probably because it looks slightly different than I'm used to. It also got top marks for recognising my external HD and the card reader slots on...

Well I've got Fedora installed on this PC now and although it's regigged my drive letters so that I can't get back into my XP installs until I put some more effort in I'm reasonably happy. It did a better job at recognising my network card than Windows did for a start...

I think I may be there installing Fedora now that I've disabled some of my more obscure hardware. At the moment I like Fedora, but that may change when I start to do some more things. I've also been looking for somewhere to move to recently and I think I may have found somewhere quite nice. There's just one question about the kitchen that could spoil it but hopefully it'll all work out quite quickly.

After a Friday night of trying to install various flavours of Linux I have com to an unescapable conclusion. Linux is not ready for the average user, and unless something really drastic changes it never will be. Linux is too hung up on power users and totally ignores casual users, which is a problem because 99.99% of all users out there are casual. The strange thing is that it's the Mac that has convinced me of this. I've installed MacOS X and it was easier than Linux. It doesn't pretend that anybody cares about the command line interface and just...

Recently I've been struggling with the curse of computing: The PC that's running too slow. Once again I chided myself for not spending the time to figure out what was actually wrong so I could fix my installation of Windows and ordered a nice new large hard disk. A few days later it arrived and was sitting in my PC after a less than professional installation caused by Dell not providing enough hard disk mounting points for my particular needs and I set about thinking about how I wanted to partition up the disk and what operating systems to put...