My 24" iMac turned up today. First thoughts: It's all really high quality but I'd rather that ejected CDs were cool enough to touch. Also 24" is massive and makes my TV look too small, but Logic Pro really needs that much screen. Note to self: write enough music to pay for new computer. Next up is bootcamp, I can't get by without running visual studio and Parallels just doesn't quite work well enough for real coding if you want and xbox or a robot to be involved.

Have a random video from Brian Eno talking about Ambient 1: Music for Airports. The world needs more ambient music.

On the way: One nice new 24" iMac to replace my PC, which has developed the little problem of only turning on the graphics output about one time in 7 tries. Yes, it'll get bootcamped but I'm going to use crossover and Parallels as much as I can to try to avoid this. Eve Online will run under Crossover, Parallels for Office 2007 and most of Visual Studio, but bootcamp will certainly be needed for XNA and possibly Robotics Studio. It'll be nice to have my music setup always available as I'm running it off my Macbook Pro at the moment...

In this day and age I expect to be able to download demos from the internet. It's that simple, I have no need to buy computer game magazines beyond Edge and so it was with a certain amount of general background annoyance that I braved a proper shop and grabbed a copy of the September issue of the official XBox magazine. Why? Yes, the desire to roll more Katamari. The comic is from the excellent xkcd.com, go read it. So why an exclusive demo on a magazine? A desperate attempt to make people buy it I think. Words...

Using IE7 it's possible to search the MSDN library from the search box at the top right if you follow these steps: Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/en-uk/default.mspx?dcsref=http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx# In the "Create your own" box paste in the following as the URL: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fmsdn2.microsoft.com%2Fen-us%2Flibrary%2F+TEST&btnG=Search&meta= Give the provider a name, something like "MSDN Library (Google)" sounds good and then click Install. You can now search the English version of the MSDN library using Google from the search box. What's more it's far better than the search that's built into the library because it's Google.

Some things are more useful than they seem. Take 360voice.com for instance. It gives you an amusing little post each day saying what you've been doing on your xbox, but from the point of view of the xbox itself. That in itself is pretty useless past the amusement of the first few entries, but where it really comes into it's own is the RSS feed. I subscribe to the feeds of a few friends and it's a perfect way for me to see what they've been playing recently. It's much better than the proper friends UI that you tend to...

Lots of apple announcements happened yesterday. We're getting Safari for Windows (1st install failed with an error and the 2nd on my work PC failed to get through to external websites because it's not as clever as every other browser ever made. There isn't going to be a 3rd attempt for a while), which is strange and quite possibly a very bad move because it'll just cause more people to target it while looking for vulnerabilities and quite soon it'll be like Firefox and start loosing it's secure reputation. Now I use Safari all the time because it's so much better than...

 One of the dirty little secrets of the side of the industry that I'm in is that I have to work with big companies who love these requirements things. You know the sort of thing, massive documents with lots of mentions of the word shall everywhere. In fact I've got one open at the moment that the customer wants traceability for, including a lovely thing called a traceability matrix. Now I'm using Team Foundation Server and that's great for traceability because I can do things like see what task a line of code was changed for and auditors love that kind of...

So, CAPTCHA is annoying but necessary in these days of spam, but why not use it. Ben Maurer posted something interesting he's found on the subject: Exploring: reCAPTCHA: A new way to fight spam What a brilliant idea: You use the entry to also OCR a word at the same time in order to digitise books. The best part is that it only puts out real people slightly, but also puts the automated spam bots to work on something useful! What a genius idea.

Back here I commented on the beta of Crossover Mac and basically said that it had promise but most of the applications supported had Mac versions or counterparts. Well this post is an update to say that it supports an application that I like, use and need and so my review has changed to this. Crossover Mac is a great product that is a must have if you want to use any of the supported applications on your Intel Mac. It's far less hassle and more usable than Bootcamp and even beats Parallels for usability because it uses far less...