The blog is broken for a while. Sort of…

That’s it then, I’m turning off comments for the whole weblog until I decide and implement whatever mechanism I will put in place to stop spam.

They won, hurray for them.

If you have a weblog of your own and wish to contribute anything you can still use the trackback mechanism (if I don’t start getting spammed that way, of course) but other than that sorry, no luck.

Yes it is sad, very sad indeed.

I will eventually settle on some way to deal with this and I hope it will be as little intrusive as possible. I also wish I could tell you that in a day or two everything will be fixed but I know myself and we wouldn’t want to turn me into a liar now would we? ;-)

I am really, really sorry about this. Not that this will affect many people but on a principle I hate having to do this. But then my time is much to valuable to spend chasing spam comments all over the weblog.

The upside of this is that now I know I won’t get the same comments I get every time I post something about spam comments, telling me to read the documentation and to use mt-trackback and so on even if I already stated time and again that yes, I have every single bit of possible protection in place short of upgrading the software version.
Hum… So there is a silver lining after all! :-)

In other news… Mac still rocks

After the bad news some good ones to try and maintain the balance. (But I’m still really put off, do you hear me Apple?)

Even with a measly 512MB of RAM the G5 already lets me fully experience and enjoy a few things I had given up on on the iBook.

iView Media

One of them is iView Media Pro. I had already tried it and given up on it but with the G5 and lots of disk space it really flies!

I have tried it with some 1000+ photos and it was faster than iPhoto both in importing the photos and later in managing them, managing their meta-info, arranging them and so on. I need the pro version instead of the “light” one because for me Canon RAW support is a must and even managing these behemoth files it is amazingly fast.

A keeper then.

iMovie

Then I tried looking at iMovie again for a pet project of mine.

I don’t do “home videos” or any of that stuff. What I do is take lots of pictures when I’m on vacation.
The kind of pictures I don’t count as “photography” per-se but as vacation pics. You know what I’m talking about.

And after the vacation is over what do I do? I make a selection of them in iPhoto and if any poor soul (most likely family) asks to see the vacation pictures I just put the iBook in front of them (or connect it to the TV) and play the slide-show until they collapse of boredom or the slide show ends (whichever comes first).

Some time ago I had this idea that it could be nice to make a movie with the pictures, put some music in the background and maybe try not to bore people to death (not so much anyway). The thing is that after importing some 20 pictures, some of them with effects (Ken Burns, of course) :-) the iBook started freezing at each mouse click so I abandoned the idea as not practical.

Enter the iMac and whoa!, not only did I make two movies with 7 to 14 minutes duration (and I made them really fast) but I also did a DVD project with them, all really easy and I’m now ready to burn the DVD (which I’d have done had I not spent my entire DVD-R stash making backups of my pictures).

While I’m not going to be a regular user of this kind of applications I’m definitely won by the power and especially the simplicity of them. And yes, I know things like Final Cut are way better then iMovie but for my purposes iMovie still cuts it. If and when I out-grow it I’ll look into Final Cut.

The shell, the shell

This is probably what I do most on any of my computers: program. And for me programming means (for the most part) lots of terminals running vim (often many instances of it, one active and others in the background but hits is not relevant here), so screen real-estate is a big issue for me.

And guess what: I can now have something like 6 terminal windows open, a browser window and some other random things (like iTunes and so on) and see it all at the same time! Now this is programming nirvana.

Cupertino, we still have a problem

First off, the title was shamelessly stolen from a friend’s blog.

And it applies perfectly! :-(

My shinny new iMac G5 20’ has a display problem which apparently is quite common. My computer’s problem in particular is the brightness dropping after a few minutes of uptime and there is no way to get it back to the normal level.
Now this doesn’t prevent me from using the computer but it is a big ergonomic issue and I most assuredly want to get it fixed.

“Well then why haven’t I?” you may ask. And I’ll answer you. The best way to deal with it right after the purchase is to just swap the computer. Only in Portugal there are no computers for sale! All the stocks are empty and there is no way to know when we will have them for sale.
So if I decide to trade mine I’ll just be left iMac-less for God knows how long! :-(

And so I endure it and wait for the Apple gods to decide to look at this part of the world and send some iMacs our way and then I’ll try and get it fixed.

And you know what’s even sadder? In the USA Apple is simply sending people the replacement part and the users are fixing their iMacs themselves thus keeping their iMacs with them all the time (as described in the forums I linked to above). Now I’m trying to imagine this happening in this our country of Portugal.
Well, I may be just being too pessimistic, but I don’t see it happening in Portugal. Not at all, which will mean some time without the iMac.

The only thing that keeps me a bit cheered up is that when it comes to Apple’s support in Portugal, their partner (Interlog) has left me and many other people happy with them in the past so I’m hoping for some more of that. One can only hope…