The Beeb has a piece describing how Macintoshes were used to clean up the original Star Wars Trilogy. In this case, literally, as the main problem seemed to be dirt.

John Lowry, CEO of Lowry Images, says the biggest single problem with the Star Wars series was dirt.

“The films have been, as everybody knows, extremely successful, and success means dirt, scratches, handling of the film.

“Film is, in fact, a very delicate medium. A New Hope, for example, which was the worst of all, had maybe a million pieces of dirt in the first couple of reels of that movie. Unbelievable.”

The praise given to the G5 for video editing should pretty much remove my colleague Corey to have a last-second renunciation of the Dark Side, much like Anakin Skywalker in the last installment of this trilogy.

For me, on the other hand, anything having to do with George Lucas ripping me off for any more money or bastardizing and pussifying his old films (Sorry, George, Han is a much better hero if he shoots first, because then he has what we like to call a “character arc.” This is from a process known as “writing” which has nothing to do with scripting computer graphics.) is anathema. So while these may be marginally the best Star Wars movies, I’m going to give this a miss as Lucas already has too much of my and my parents’ money that he doesn’t deserve, and more importantly, several hours of my life that I’ll never get back.

In spite of this, I still think Macs are cool. If this technology could be used for evil, maybe some clever souls out there could take the DVD and restore the original scenes, or even restore the movies of a better director.

My default browser at home (at work I now use Firefox for its Web Developer toolbar), Camino, has just hit the 0.8 release. I’m using it and it’s faster than Firefox and quite stable. Plus it has a nifty “tabgroup” setting for toolbar folders that is more useful than the click->hold->scroll->’Open in Tabs’ function in Mozilla/Firefox.

Congrats to the Camino team.

I’ve had a problem with OS X’s Mail.app popping up an “Unable to verify certificate–do you want to proceed anyway?” message every time I open it and it connects to our company’s SSL-encrypted IMAP authentication with a self-signed certificate. It forces me to click “continue” every single time. While there is a workaround that involves long and complex command-line action, there is an easier way that now works.

My &uumlaut;berblogger friend Jason has been bugging me to document solutions to weird problems. After reading John Gruber’s article on writing for Google, I thought I’d try my hand at it.

Continue reading →

Over at MacNN, they cite an SF Gate opinion piece by a Muslim woman who uses a Mac. In it, she makes this rather startling statement:

As every Mac user knows, suggesting a Mac product to a PC-using friend may end the friendship. I’d feel more comfortable encouraging a Christian friend to learn more about Islam […] it’s always open season on Macs.

Eh? Since when? I’ve given and recieved my share of good-natured ribbing from friends, and even some outright scorn by anonymous trolls on the ‘Net, but never has saying “Get a Mac” (a la “Get a Horse”) ever caused anyone to do anything but either say, “Pshaw,” or “You know, those PowerBooks are sweet…”

On the other hand, I am usually interested to know informal details of religions that I don’t know that much about–my friends Becky and Todd have patiently endured my education on Judaism, for example–but I’m not eager to hear about why Your Faith is Great unbidden.

I can just see it now:

“Damn, I keep forgetting the words to the Lord’s Prayer. How will I ever get into Heaven?”
“Ya know, if you just converted to Islam, you wouldn’t have this problem. Islam is designed to be easier to use.”

To her credit, the author does give an example of how she sucked it up and dealt with the relative lack of neighbor-kid-variety free tech support for the Mac, but still, don’t make silly comparisons…or get better friends.

A while ago, when OS X 10.3 came out, I noted that it had fixed a long-standing bug which finally made OS X ready for the corporate desktop.

A certain wag said that the only thing holding people back from widespread adoption was Battlefield 1942.

Taste game, Jason!

Somehow while perusing VersionTracker yesterday, I got distracted by Apple-flavored goodies and missed my second-favorite text editor’s release (no, I don’t mean pico).

SubEthaEdit is now at 2.0. This thing is seriously cool, especially as it lets you do pair programming without sitting at the same computer–you can discover other users and share documents with them ad hoc. For my purposes, it’s fast, color codes well, and supports UTF encodings extremely intelligently. The user interface is just slick, and it doesn’t get in your way. It just works.

Now of course, they’re no longer just giving it away totally for free, but unlike Moveable Type 3’s controversial new licensing scheme, it’s simple: free for personal, non commercial use, and USD 35 for commercial use.

If you have a Mac and a coworker on the same subnet, definitely give it a try. You might try it anyway if you ever work with character sets other than Western Roman.

With every other browser release being trumpeted, I thought I’d take the opportunity to help plug what is still my default browser, Camino.

They’ve released 0.8 beta, and it could use some pounding on to hammer out the last bugs for a final release. It uses the Mozilla 1.7 rendering engine, and it has a Google toolbar to keep up with Safari’s feature set. It still feels like it renders faster, though such measures are inherently subjective. Mainly I like it because the fast open source release cycle means that an annoying bug will usually be gone in a few nightly releases if it really irks me.

There are still some sites that give Safari problems, but most sites are Mozilla-compatible. I don’t see all the browser-widget funsies of Firefox, but it is an order of magnitude faster on the Mac.

I keep all these browsers (and many more) around on my computer, but for daily use I use Camino, switching occasionally to Safari. So thanks to Pinkerton for keeping Camino alive after its original author went to work for a fruit company.

There are so many good browsers on the Mac, it’s hard to choose sometimes, but I keep coming back to Camino. If you’re on a Mac, give it a try. If you’re not, don’t you wish you were?

So take this story about a new worm hitting MS-based PCs, combine it with this story about Arlington, VA county schools moving to MS-based PCs and you’d think that somebody was about to lose his job.

However, if you combine it with this story about the U.S. losing scientific dominance, you’ll deduce that, given the current state of public education, the man in Arlington will likely be rewarded with larger budgets to manage the mess he’s created.

As an aside, my personal solution, were anybody ever stupid enough to elect me to a position of power, would be to allow Microsoft to continue publishing their software, but force any user who allowed a virus or worm onto their system to use a typewriter exclusively for six months following the infraction.

But seriously, were I an ISP, I’d be offering discounts to people who attached any other operating system besides Microsoft’s to my network. To keep support costs reasonable, I’d only offer hardware and network-level support to these customers (further increasing the profit margin) and test their computers regularly for MS OSes. I’d probably offer support for one well-understood configuration (probably Macs, because they’re easier than Linux to administer for non-technical users) with the discount intact.

Hear that, Comcast? I’m saving you upstream bandwidth…

The subject was “Re: Question”. Here’s the raw code, so you can see stuff hidden from you normally, like whether that’s really a Word document:

------=_NextPart_000_0016----=_NextPart_000_0016
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="Windows-1252"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

I have attached the sample.

+++ Attachment: No Virus found
+++ Bitdefender AntiVirus - www.bitdefender.com



!DSPAM:4061eacd269117260116317!

------=_NextPart_000_0016----=_NextPart_000_0016
Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
name="word_doc.zip"

Yeah, I wonder why it wasn’t in ISO or Mac encoding. But at least it tells you that it scanned itself, and honest, there’s no virus! Eat Worm, suckers!