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I use a Macbook pro for doing all my software development. Since switching over to Mac, I can't imagine using any other computer to develop with. The combination of the OSX operating system with the power of the Macbook Pro makes for an unbeatable development platform.

I have also eliminated all windows machines from our house now as well. I have a linux server for my websites, an Imac for our 'TV', which also acts as our primary media server for music, photos and family media, and an old 17" Powerbook G4 that my wife uses. I have the three Mac machines backing up to a 1 terabyte Timecapsule.

The Timecapsule is a great innovation on Apple's part, and has already saved my life on a few occasions. Not only does it handle all my media etc. but with the new version of VMWare fusion, I am able to have automatic backups of my local development and document files that I use on the Windows side.

Time Capsule was easy to setup, and had run without an issue until a few weeks ago, when I started getting errors during backups on my Macbook Pro.

These were 'Backup failed - Error mounting volume', or 'Network error during backup'. After digging around a bit through various log files etc. I found that the likely culprit had nothing to do with the network, but was the fact that my hard drive had bad files and directories on it.

Resolving this issue involved booting up from the OSX CD and running the Disc Utiltiy Repair function on the Macbook Pro hard drive. Since doing this, Timecapsule is up and running again without a problem.

It would be nice if Time Capsule/Time Machine could produce a more informative message, or offer to take some kind of corrective action in the event of a failure like this instead of the misleading cryptic message it had generated. Thus this blog post so hopefully the next person who hits the problem will be able to fix it without having to dig through log files...

Needed to set the style of a line in Virtual Earth.

This seems to be a bit of a hidden function, so took a bit of work to find:

Usage: shape.Primitives[0].symbol.stroke_dashstyle = "Dot";

Other line types:

Solid, ShortDash, ShortDot, ShortDashDot, ShortDashDotDot, Dot, Dash, LongDash, DashDot, LongDashDot, LongDashDotDot

I have an old Apple //e that I first learned to program on back in 1981 or so. Its still fully functional, and amazingly most of the disks and programs I have for it (several hundred) are still working.

A while back I managed to copy most of the interesting stuff I had written on the Apple // over to the PC using ADT where I can run it on the PC using emulation. Why? Well - nostalgia mostly, but my mom also wrote quite a number of sermons using the machine, and really wanted to get them back - which was really the main objective of the exercise.

I used ADT (Apple Disk Transfer) for that excercise, which is a fantastic utility. However, I recently discovered that a2RetroSystems makes an ethernet card for the Apple //: so I absolutely had to pick one of those up.

Using the Contiki operating system, its possible to browse the web, send and receive files using FTP and even send emails (albeit all in uppercase, since the Apple I have can only run the 40 column, uppercase only version of Contiki).

One of the difficulties with open source software is knowing which offering to select out of the multitude of open source alternatives that are out there.

There are excellent quality systems available - but it is not always clear which might be the best fit for a given case. One of the big problems in choosing a system is the whole process of having to build up a linux box with the appropriate packages in order to run a particular engine to test.

This is a great blog about the internal workings of Microsoft. Having applied there a few times, I am very interested to see what the place is really like...Or more really like. You can never know what its really like unless you are actually there of course.

At any rate- the blog is very insightful and welll written so check it out..

http://minimsft.blogspot.com

http://www.nature.com/nsu/040614/040614-11.html

Music and semantic context:

"

In both written text and speech, the frequency with which different words are used follows a striking pattern. In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of its frequency. In other words, a graph of one plotted against the other appeared as a straight line.