Mac Mojo : a love letter to Entourage
A Microsoftie in the MacBU has crafted the above article on MSDN, where she describes her love for the PIM creme-de-la-creme (cough) Entourage.
It would be nice if the MacBU would stop patting themselves on the back for the useless My Day application and spend their time on application compatibility in a mixed environment with Outlook and Entourage.
Sadly though, they aren’t doing much in that area.
So this morning, I decided to try to get to the bottom of what causes iChat AV to fail with my router. I was testing with my stepfather who also has a WRT54GS router (by Linksys).
I read on the Apple site that some routers break when using UPnP, but in general, they have a list of ports to forward. Since I’m planning on multiple Macs in the house, forwarding ports to a single system isn’t going to work for me. I disabled UPnP, then used a remote assistance session on my PC to do the same on my stepfather’s router. Then I returned to the Mac, fired up iChat, and bang, what do you know… that resolved it… without forwarding any ports. I can now have an iChat session with my Mac to my stepfather’s PC without issue.
I was pretty depressed to hear that Apple went ahead and proclaimed October as the month of Leopard. I was really hoping for June, but alas… I can understand if they need time.
I was listening to Macbreak Weekly tonight while exercising and I listened to the panel bring up the merits of the 8-core Mac Pro and… well, it just seems like for me, that’s just money not very well spent. I should set my sights back down to the 4-core level because I just won’t be pushing the machine that hard. With that in mind, I could do two Macs like we wished for $6,400. That’s probably way more reasonable in this day and age.
I’m just now starting to get into the powerful hacks that OS X offers via Automator and Applescript, but I just ran across this one that is just so sexy it’s not even funny.
There’s plenty of positive Apple spin to go around these days. It seems like every day that I look, there are prominent Windows journalists making the switch to Mac and encouraging others to do so. There’s a “vibe” in the air of change. Windows news sites that I frequent daily have not been the source of much excitement since Vista’s release. There is a very positive stock market buzz about Apple as well. There is so much that bodes well for Apple right now that it seems dreadfully easy for them to capitalize.
The hot post today that has the blogosphere churning is this essay by Paul Graham entitled “Microsoft is Dead.”
I like the way the author of this post has just suddenly realized that Microsoft’s business model is in trouble. I had an epiphany much like this while I was in the very den of the mothership itself. While standing on the third floor of building 25 in Microsoft’s Redmond campus… fighting with their products to get some test data put through on our… unusual deployment of their products… came the word that Apple went Intel. That’s when I had the epiphany: Microsoft is toast. Thus begins their slow, painful demise as people wake up to the innovations happening elsewhere. Microsoft’s lack of supporting standards and their blind eye toward security… combined with failing in just about every endeavour except Windows and Office… was finally starting to do them in.
So the 8-core Mac Pro is introduced on the Apple Store this morning. Drool. Sadly though, it’s $1400 extra for an 8-core setup vs. a 4-core.
I should point out, though, the memory prices have dropped pretty significantly, so getting 4gb of RAM is no longer a heinous violation of your credit. They’ve also pulled back on Cinema Screen pricing by $100.
I can hardly wait to see what my corporate discount can pull off! That part of the store still isn’t open yet.
There’s an enlightening and interesting article up on InformationWeek discussing the Leopard server product. It’s basically a guy who headed out to the sites covering public information on Leopard server and summarized it. It’s still a good read. My favorite piece? Clustering for email and iCal servers!
One thing the author did mention is that while it’s compelling for SMB, Leopard server isn’t shaping up to be an enterprise-bound powerhouse. I would agree in that respect, but I diverge away from this when he declares that Apple just clearly isn’t aiming for this market.
I am likely the most indecisive user I know. I’ve mounted a collection of hundreds (maybe thousands) of bookmarks in Firefox on Linux, Windows and Mac. I’ve amassed almost a hundred feeds that I prefer to be checked daily.
I’ve grown tired of Firefox and Google Reader, so I’ve spent some time today syncing my bookmarks and importing feeds into Safari. I really like Safari – it’s minimalist, integrates well into OS X, and blazing fast. It has issues with some sites that prefer IE browsers, but hey, that’s the breaks. Firefox has that problem too.
My motivational transportation has sprung a leak and suffered a flat. I’m at work, but could give a damn if I get anything done. The weather is too nice outside. I’ve not been able to shake the sleepy haze this morning and I have a tinge of a headache. It’s one of those headaches that you get when your assbone digs into the fluff of your chair so much that it starts to harm your circulation and you feel minor little spasms in the back of your head. Top that off with being quite hungry and knowing that you have several meetings to attend in the afternoon, it makes for a flat tire.
