Which is my way of saying: I think it is butt-fugly.

This is the Aero look, where translucency, shadows and psuedo-reflections abound. It’s like a team of Microsoft middle managers crowded around OS X and decided that they could beat those latte-sucking Apple snobs at their own game, having apparently never heard the adage Less is More.

Buttons on windows don’t just change color when you hover your mouse over them, they also emit an eerie fuzzy glow, as though being viewed through a foggy window. The window frames themselves have this blurry translucent effect on them, so you can see underlying windows well enough to be visually distracting (but not enough to be useful). And inexplicably the heavy drop shadows around windows don’t appear to extend under them, which implies that either a) the windows have some sort of illuminating effect on the screen immediately beneath them or b) Microsoft’s designers don’t give a shit about visual consistency.

Windows and dialog boxes swell and shrink when you open and close them, which adds a kind of temporal blurring effect to the visual fuzziness inherent in the interface already. The whole thing feels squidgy; the opposite of crisp.

And this squidginess goes beyond aesthetics; Vista’s performance compared to WinXP is pathetic. It takes forever to start up, and something as simple as closing an explorer window can takes up to 3 seconds! The mouse cursor is constantly doing the glinting blue ring of eternal waiting. And it’s as though when I press a button or select an item the system is saying "dude, wait wait, I’m going do something cool………… check it out, I’m glowing!"

And UAC… I’ve heard people bitching about this but wasn’t sure why… every time I open network preferences or similar "sensitive" settings I get a "are you sure this is OK?" dialog. That in itself mightn’t be so bad, but in this install at least I get a half second black screen before this thing comes up, and then again when it goes away, and each time I get this shock because for a moment it feels like the computer has spontaneously crashed. OS X causes less irritation even when it forces me to enter a password!

When an operating system is superceded, it’s successor should be faster, not slower. When you the user are simply choosing which application you want to run, there is no excuse for sluggishness. If Vista looked smoking hot then maybe I could understand, but it looks like shit! Cheap plastic laminated shit!

And so another Vista install has bitten the dust, as I have now downgraded this mid-range Sony Vaio* to good ol’ WinXP, and it finally feels like the new machine that it is. I can’t say for sure that all of its sluggishness was due to the Vista install, since big vendors like Sony are notorious for bogging down their machines with proprietary "Crapplets", but as first experiences go this was the pits, and it jibes perfectly well with the stuff I’ve been hearing from others.

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* No I haven’t bought yet another computer— I am doing this downgrade as a favour to an extremely dissatisfied Vista user.

iPhone Plans	250	500	1GB
Cost per Month	$80	$130	$250
Included Minutes	120	250	600
Included TXT	600	600	600
Included Data	250 MB	500 MB	1 GB
Additional Usage
Per minute	$0.69	$0.55	$0.53
Per TXT	$0.20	$0.20	$0.20
Per MB	$0.10	$0.10	$0.03
iPhone with plan
8GB iPhone	$549	$449	$199
16GB iPhone	$699	$599	$349

So the minimum plan from Vodafone NZ is as follows:

8GB iPhone 3G, 24 month contract, 250MB per month
= $549 + $80 x 24
= NZ$2,469*

I am livid! I sold my iPod Touch recently, so sure I was that I would be getting an iPhone, and now I just want to send hate mail to Vodafone.

(Funnily enough they are the only providers to offer the iPhone 3G upon its release in New Zealand— I wonder if this could be at all related to their extortionate pricing…?)

Compare this great deal to what Optus Australia is offering:

8GB iPhone 3G, 24 month contract, 250MB per month
= $0 + $56 x 24
= A$1,344

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* NZ$1.00 = US$0.75 = AU$0.79

I feel compelled to point out that Mad Men is giving Deadwood a run for its money for the title of my favorite TV show ever. It’s just so… captivating. And beautifully lit. And both John Hamm and his hair are incredible.

I guess I must be in the deplorer camp…

"As foreign minister, he made one heck of a mark, mercilessly slaying his political opponents while determining Australia’s foreign policies. Some will never forgive him and John Howard for taking Australia into Iraq. Many will admire his conviction in confronting Saddam Hussein and the scourge of terrorism. Some will deplore his role in the Tampa asylum-seeker stand-off. Many will respect his determination to foil people smuggling. Some will sigh with relief at another Howard man gone."

— The Australian, July 1st 2008

I hate DVD as a video format. It deserves to die, NOW. Preferably painfully, like with knitting needles through the ears. I lost several hours this weekend to trying to burn one of these motherfuckers and ultimately failed.

iDVD, the craptacular Apple DVD creation software, refused to recognize VOB files as valid media so I had to convert them to AVI first (VOB files are the native format which DVD video is encoded in, so a DVD creation tool should really recognize them).

Converting to AVI was done using the free sofware Handbrake, and was wonderfully fast, converting a two hour movie in about 20 minutes. Converting the movie back to DVD took 3 hours and 40 minutes. And then it failed.

And then it failed again.

Also, iDVD has no additional compression settings to squeeze content slightly larger than 4.2 GB into a size slightly smaller than 4.2 GB… meaning it demands a Dual Layer disc when a single should suffice.

And on a vaguely related note I paid $20 in fines to my local video store recently for keeping two of their shitty scratched silver discs (and some bad photocopied covers) out a couple of days longer than I was supposed to. Boy, that’s sure going to make me drive back in my 2 tonne car sometime to pick up some physical media again next time I want to see a movie. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll download that movie next time, because it will be better for me and the environment.

Here is some ammunition for Apple haters who are sick of people smugly declaring OS X the best operating system evar:

Ok, I’m out, I didn’t make it to 10 this time… I was going to bitch about the full keyboard not having a Fn key on it (to modify behaviour of F1-F12) but then I noticed it does; just in a very different spot to my laptop… * chagrin * I also have to take back #2, sort of; If you hold down Control as well you can get multiple item info in a single pane— I still think that should be the default. And yes ok #3 can also be mitigated by holding down the mute button while your machine boots— but that’s a pretty damn annoying requirement (you actually have to hold the button down until you see the Apple logo on the screen).

BTW I know that some of these points are more hardware related than OS specific… Sosumi!

(Leopard is a strange looking word. It looks so much like leotard that I want to pronounce it LEE-oh-pard)

It’s kind of surprising how much Apple junk I have now, considering that I’m a Windows programmer. A quick review of the Apple products I have owned over the past few years:

Macbook 13"

iMac 24"

4 iPods — nano 1st gen / nano 2nd gen / nano 3rd gen / iPod Touch 8GB

Airport Express, with the over-hyped 802.11n*

Various accessories, multiple keyboards and mice including both Bluetooth and USB versions

One real pain is that I now have 4 operating systems running on any given day; Tiger + WinXP on the Macbook and Leotard + WinXP on the iMac. Keeping them all synchronized and not losing track of data is getting to be a bit of a problem. I had a quick google for synchronizing tools and tried Chronosync briefly, until it informed me it was so badly crippled that I would have to buy it before I could even decide if I wanted it… so screw you, Chronosync, you just lost a customer by acting like some asshole software vendor from 1995.

I’d love to use the built-in rsync command but unfortunately I only have a genius level IQ so am not confident enough to try it without help. If someone who already uses it can point me at a simple example of how I can synchronize two home folders (ie the home folders on each Mac) which doesn’t involve tarballs or gcc I would greatly appreciate it.

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* I was glad when Apple updated the Airport Express to include the latest protocol, but to be honest I hardly notice any speed improvement over my generic Netgear 802.11g router. Also it appears the audio-out feature only seems to be available in iTunes and not FrontRow (even when playing music). I believe there is software out there to enable Airtunes as a generic sound device, but installing miscellaneous third party apps is a hobby I have grown out of— JUST WORK DAMN YOU! Also also there is no way to tie Airtunes volume to system volume, so I can’t use the Apple remote to adjust volume when playing music, which means fiddling about with two remotes (and this is particularly painful when using multiple speaker mode, since the levels on the iMac and Airport Express really should be linked for this).

I succumbed to an itch last week and went and bought myself a 24" iMac. With Apple desktops still significantly more expensive than a similarly specced PC, I justified this to myself on the following grounds:

• With a new iMac I can run both Leopard (MacOS 10.5.x) and Windows on the same machine. This new machine also has a nice HD screen (1920 x 1200) and pretty decent stereo sound built-in, so I can also use it as a replacement for my crappy TV and stereo.
• PCs are ugly and noisy and I HATE THEM I HATE THEM!

I’ve been using PCs for eighteen years now and they never gave me the pride of ownership, nay, the smug self-satisfaction of the well balanced all-in-one iMac. A PC is always an ugly box, either boring and beige or black and silver and embarrassingly blinged out with superbright blue LEDs. And they’re noisy. And by the time you have them set up there are cables everywhere. And the keyboards are enormous and clacky with 50 extra knobs and multi-media buttons jammed into them.

The iMac is the quietest computer I have ever owned, in fact even quieter than my MacBook, which emits a faint high-pitched whine from its fans. The iMac does have a small amount of fan noise but it is more a low thrumming sound and you will only notice it if you eliminate all other noise sources in your immediate environment. So this thing is the ideal media center for my reasonably small living room. All I need now is the bluetooth keyboard and it will be perfect (with a bluetooth keyboard and wireless network the only cable required is the single power cord).

I have had a few issues which I should just point out to balance my enthusiasm:

• Leopard (OS 10.5) is more tacky looking than Tiger (10.4). Also I’ve had a few crashes and even managed to somehow lose my Dock bitmap for a session too, so I suspect it’s not yet as stable as Tiger.
• Inserting DVDs in the vertical slot drive is rather dodgy, because unless you lean around the side of the screen you are basically doing it blind. Also when the discs are ejected they don’t protrude far enough, so I find myself touching the disc surface in order to grasp them properly.
• When I first powered it up I noticed that about a third of the screen was actually foggy/blurry. At first I thought this was residue from the plastic wrapping on the screen, but after a bit of rubbing I realized that it was actually on the inside of the glass — Yikes! A quick google for iMac + condensation quickly revealed that many others were encountering similar problems (and in varying states of distress about it). Fortunately I am way intelligent and understand that condensation evaporates in warm air, so I pointed a fan heater in the general direction of the machine for a few hours and the fog went away (has not returned since). In looking it up I learned that the glass screen of the iMac is in fact held on by magnets, and easily removed with the aid of suction cups (or even a plunger!), but I didn’t actually need to go so far. The fact that it’s not actually sealed explains how moisture can get in there in the first place.