nightmare... or not :)

As the good Apple citizen that I am I downloaded the latest combo patch and proceeded to install it on my iMac this past Sunday. When the iMac reboted itself things were taking so long that I figured I should reboot again... Bad idea. Let me say that again: BAD IDEA. The system wouldn't boot up normally anymore and instead it left me with a nice light blue screen (of death?). I tried every possible solution in the Apple support center and couldn't make the bloody thing to work.

In the end I had to mount my external hard drive manually, move my personal files there and re-install the system. Trust me, I wasn't happy. One of the main reasons to get a Mac is not to have to deal with a problem like this that, whatever people say does not happen so often in Windows systems anyway. I started to drive myself into a frenzy of complains when it hit me. This had nothing to do with Mac or Apple or the update, it was simply my fault for rushing things. I can't say for sure, because other people have reported similar problems, but I suspect that if I had just waited a few seconds more my update would have probably been properly installed and I wouldn't have had to re-install. So. Lesson learned. Patience is important. Next time I will not rush to reboot when things take two nanoseconds longer than I expect. Maybe I simply need to relax...

Mr. C

F1 in Singapore!

Oh, yeah! From next year Singapore will host one of the F1 GPs, and it may even do it in the form of a night race! The changes made to F1 in the last two years have opened the competition and made it much more interesting than it was a few years ago. The addition of street races like the ones that will be held in Valencia and Singapore is just the icing on the cake for me. I'm happy...

Mr. C

LED MacBooc Pros

Please, pretty please.... I hope this rumor is true. Don't care much for the Santa Rosa stuff, but a decent LED screen and extra battery life would make the MacBook Pro the perfect laptop for me. This rumor has been around for a while, but after the recent declarations of Steve Jobs about "going green" and introducing LED screens for the smaller size displays in the Apple range I am inclined to believe that we will see this in WWDC07. I guess Apple will also introduce minor upgrades in most of their product line, but this would be a key thing for me, as I have looking forward to get a Mac laptop for a while. The ultra-portable 13"? Sure, it will come out, eventually... Worth waiting for? I'm not sure, the small Vaios are as sexy and tough as the MacBooc Pros and available now. Apple better do a fantastic job with that model because they are coming very late into the segment...

Mr. C

open-x11

Ok, this is the tip of the month (or however long it has taken me to update my blog). If you are running OS X and have X11 installed you can open any X11 program from the apple terminal by simple calling "open-x11 application". This opens X11 and your application. One of the advantages of using this way of calling a program is that you only need to set the path correctly in the terminal application, and not in X11 itself.

Bye for now....
Mr. C