Author Archive for Chris Holland
Chris is a web application developer by day who's been enjoying productivity afforded by OS X since the first public release of 10.1. His Mac history started circa '89 with a 40MB hard drive Mac Classic, with 2MB of RAM, and System 6. He still owns a '96 PowerMac 7500 which he retired from operation in 2002. It ran System 7.3 thru 7.6, switched it to LinuxPPC 2000 (RedHat hybrid) around the time Mac OX 8.5 came out. It ran POP, DNS, HTTP services for years. It'd at time double as a TV, a Video Editing Suite, and most often a development platform.
Chris owns a "BBEdit, it doesn't suck" T-Shirt.
He'll never sell it. Or the PowerMac 7500 for that matter, despite knowing full-well each item could easily pay-off the mortgage if sold on eBay.
At night he secretly believes HTTP and SMTP to be the least exciting opportunities afforded by the Internet Protocol, hoping to soon live in a globally connected world powered by smart protocols and smart devices that let him focus on the *People* in his life, rather than the myriad of identifiers by which he currently clumsily attempts to contact them.
Chris believes in the profoundly positive disrupting forces behind a competitive Broadband landscape amidst Net Neutrality, in fields ranging from communications to education and entertainment.
If you've got a cool peer to peer project, especially one that has mad NAT-busting mojo, Chris will likely want to hear from you, and plug you on his otherwise inconsequential personal blog ( http://chrisholland.blogspot.com/ ). And if it runs on OS X, it'll likely make its way onto theappleblog.com.
Site: http://chrisholland.blogspot.com/
Before Apple disabled FrontRow with its Mac OS X 10.4.8 update, I was a happy FrontRow user on an aging PowerBook G4, courtesy of Andrew Escobar’s fine “FrontRow Enabler 1.3″.
If you’re running 10.4.8 do not run FrontRow Enabler 1.3, and if you just did, do not reboot … Or you won’t be able to boot [...]
If you have a G4 iBook or a G4 PowerBook, go to the Apple Battery Recall for G4 iBook and PowerBook (Coral Cache Mirroring, just in case?) Press Release now, check your battery model number and serial number to determine whether you’re affected. Some have been reported to catch on fire … bad stuff.
I hear [...]
update 08/07/2006 midnight: Tests went well so-far.
Note to prospective relayers:
i’ve worked with a couple of users to get them set-up as possible party-line relays, should the call load get too heavy for me, i can forward SIP calls to their addresses. If you’re interested in being a relay, get SJPhone configured according to these instructions, [...]
Back in late April I needed to do some advanced validation and testing of a RESTful XML web service we’ve been enhancing for various projects.
To that end, I put together a rudimentary test … “page” … in HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Then figured … “what the heck”, I might as well throw this in a Dashboard [...]
A buddy of mine, Mike Panoff, has been obsessively working on a pet project aimed at making del.icio.us slightly more usable: A dashboard widget he’s calling “cloud.lic.io.us“.
It essentially does one simple thing: Make all your del.icio.us tags available from your dashboard widget.
He’s looking to release a few more features over the next couple of weeks, [...]
Many of us think we do. Yet it’s widely-known and accepted that most of what we see, hear, and read in traditional media is owned and dispensed by a handful of corporations, whose interests and/or technological limitations all-too-often conflict with giving us effective coverage of all issues at hand.
Why is it that in the U.S., [...]
update 04/27: Twist, points out that Microsoft is looking to port its presentation framework to Mac OS X and other platforms.
As dramatically unimpressed as I remain with the consumer-end of its upcoming operating system, Microsoft is doing a number of cool things for Windows software developers. Let’s take a brief look at the Windows Presentation [...]
4null4.de is giving us an English overview of a Safari Security Hole being reported by IT Portal Heise Online.
The security hole hinges on a preference being checked. I’ve yet to figure out whether or not this option is checked in a default installation of Safari. Mine was checked.
Either way, it could be bad, very [...]
The idea that Microsoft would ditch its own OS for the key underlying technology that powers Apple’s flagship operating system came to me in a most auspicious e-mail from a dear friend of mine, Dr. Arnold E. Handy, a well-regarded professor of gynecology, who wrote me convinced the process had already begun.
Om’s got a short but sweet interview of the Camino developers, along with a brief overview and history.
What do you think? Could you see it replace your Safari in a near future?
A couple of thoughts:
- I wish all browser vendors would more or less agree on the proper shortcuts for viewing a document’s source. No [...]
In his latest infinite-loop entry, Om Malik tells us how he managed to sync his Nokia Phone with Yahoo and iSync. Yahoo doesn’t provide facilities for synchronizing your Mac to their service. They use Intellisync, and that’s Windows-only, as far as i can tell. Om is basically using his phone to “bridge” Yahoo and Mac. [...]
Om Malik is offering a more in-depth perspective of this event being mused about on Slashdot, and Nicholas Carr’s blog among a few places:
Perhaps the “commoditized” technology trend is being slowly replaced by “using commoditized technology to create a compelling user experience” trend? [ Read ]
Om Malik and Nicholas Carr offer interesting counterpoints to the [...]
I’d heard various complaints about the MacBook Pros not having a PCMCIA PC Card slot, further confirmed by Dan Lurie’s “mini” review, which also mentioned the MacBook Pro however sporting an “ExpressCard” slot.
It turns out ExpressCard™ is an industry standard developed by PCMCIA to
carry forward the benefits of ‘plug-in’ I/O cards to the next [...]
The current iChat systems requirement prevent a PowerBook user to host a 3-person Video conference. We can participate in one, we simply can’t host one. One G4 processor just isn’t enough for that.
I’m now wondering whether it’s possible for a MacBook Pro user to host an iChat Video conference with 3 people.
Has somebody tried it? [...]
Dan Lurie is in there. If all goes well, we’ll be relaying updates from him in real-time. Stay tuned to this post. The Keynote starts at 9am Pacific Time. Please forgive the dust as i set things up
For Text Coverage, jump to here. Note that there’s a good chance that our blog system [...]
From Apple’s Java Developer site: “Mac OS X is the only mass-market operating system that comes complete with a fully configured and ready-to-use Java Development Kit. Professional Java developers are increasingly turning to the feature-rich Mac OS X as the operating system of choice for cross-platform Java development projects on the Macintosh and other platforms.”.
A quick one to point out that Think Secret is scoring a juicy alleged scoop regarding the next evolution of the Mac Mini and its impact on your living room, ahead of MacWorld San Francisco 2006.
Om weighs-in.
Apple has just released a Broadband Tuner, a simple application that tweaks a few system configuration parameters regarding TCP packet size, to optimize data transfer over connectivity with high latency and high bandwidth. From the Broadband Tuner support page:
The Broadband Tuner allows you to take full advantage of very high speed Internet connections that have [...]
A couple of months ago, a coworker of mine showed me Tiger’s really cool “mouse over” dictionary. Hold command control and hit d. Then mouse over just about any word in any Cocoa app, and a definition of the word pops-up below it. I can’t seem to snag a screenshot of it. It keeps [...]
In his latest Business 2.0 article, Om Malik analyzes the “iPod Influence” on the handheld communications device market, comparing the ROKR to the RAZR. What if Apple were to truly enter the communications device market? What do you readers think?