Ok, we all know what we should do with this, don’t we? If you think they’ll coming to pick you up before the Vogons bust the planet then maybe that’s the place to claim your seat.
Monthly Archive for July, 2005
I upgraded my PowerBook to the latest Tiger release. In 20 years of working with computers I never experienced a system upgrade that was so easy.
After cloning the complete internal harddisk to an equally sized external one (with Carbon Copy Cloner) I did a clean re-install of MacOS X 10.4 Tiger. Tiger comes with a migration wizard that copies all data and settings (and it seems “all” really means absolutely everything – including bookmarks in any browsers, photo libs, music, desktop settings, aso). I opted against copying applications – I wanted to re-install just those I really needed. After the new mail application re-imported 90.000 e-mails I was set to go: I just had to copy over the applications I wanted to keep from the cloned partitions. No “re-install” necessary (installing and un-installing applications by simply moving its icon around is something I first saw in NeXTSTEP in 1994 by the way – something windows is unable to do up until today!). I never had to answer any mysterious system-related question or re-configure anything I had configured in the previous system. I hardly can imagine a simpler way to upgrade a system.
And in addition to that: The new system feels more powerful and snappy. The spotlight search engine allows me to manage the 90.000 E-Mails as if they were 900. I can find data that I didn’t knew I still had on my harddrive in a second. And again this system upgrade improved the performance of the user interface like the others did before.
An interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about webloggers that apply for academic positions claiming that most blogs are not benefitial:
Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know “the real them” — better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn’t want to know more.
Google Maps really seems to take off after offering their Google Maps API for web developers. People are quickly developing very interessting variations (e.g. this incredible mixing of map and satellite views or someone tracking the hotspots he was using with plazes.com). You’ll find much more at this del.icio.us tag »googlemaps«.
Several weeks now without any update here. Why? Well, too many reasons to list here. I was too busy on the one hand – on the other hand I did not want to blog just to remain »active«. I know I ignored one the »post early, post often« rule for running a successful blog. I was still posting here there in some of the seminar weblogs I maintain and I am still reading RSS feeds. So I wasn’t dropping out of blogging at all.
Another reason is that I want my personal blog become more a commentary blog with more thinking going into the content – not so much a filtering blog which just collects cool links. That I am doing with del.icio.us – so no need to do it here… (BTW: if you are using del.icio.us you have to see the del.icio.us direc.tor!)
Finally there are so many threads to follow currently, that I need some time to think about them. That’s probably one of the privileges as professor: there is a lot of noise around you all the time. This is rewarding – but also stressing.