November 29, 2007
SatNav
Quick, LazyWeb: what's a good Sat Nav for a Mac user?
My TomTom 910 is toast (after updating it, it won't start up despite resets) and I've had it with TomTom Home (the desktop app) continually crashing on OS X Tiger and OS X Leopard. It takes hours to download the 1.4gb maps update from their website (despite my 10mb cable connection). TomTom support is so bad it makes me want to chop off more fingers (not necessarily mine), and the recent maps upgrade I bought has meant that the traffic alerts I purchased no longer work.
So: Garmin? el Reg has more reviews. I'm supposed to drive to Brussels tomorrow so this is really great timing from TomTom :-(
Open Source software: is it really a free lunch?
This evening I'm participating in a debate alongside a legal counsel from Microsoft Research, looking at the rights, obligations and intellectual property issues around Open Source software. It's organised by the Cambridge Network, and promises to be an interesting discussion ...
Technorati Tags: intellectual property, microsoft, open source, debate, software, sourcesense, uk
November 26, 2007
ouch
Good thing I'm not right-handed.
Technorati Tags: accident, life, pain, knives
November 23, 2007
Push Pineapple
Sometimes the only way to explain the full rich tapestry of English culture is to, well, show it. So, without further ado (hahaha), here it is. Enjoy!
Technorati Tags: culture, life, music, uk, youtube
November 13, 2007
November 11, 2007
Sterling AWOL
Here's a fun little hiccup in OS X Leopard:
Those of you of a more British persuasion might notice the glaring absence of British Pounds Sterling from the list. The currency popup says "Currency exchange provided by Yahoo! Finance" so it's entirely possible that Yahoo mislaid our currency rather than Apple, but it's still somewhat annoying. Almost as annoying as the name of the currency changing frequently in Tiger: Pounds Sterling, pounds sterling, British Pounds, etc.
Meanwhile, xe.com has a very good currency converter that includes United Kingdom Pounds.
Technorati Tags: apple, leopard, osx, tiger, bugs, yahoo
November 9, 2007
Mail update update
What did I do to cause this? I rudely deleted an IMAP folder within Mail. I know - I'm dangerous and impulsive and a destroyer of machines. I promise to behave from now on.
I've seen the Problem Report dialog box quite a lot over the last few days. I sincerely recommend Mac OS X 10.5.1, should it ever arrive. Meanwhile, 10.5 Leopard is one buggy big cat.
Technorati Tags: apple, leopard, mail, osx
November 8, 2007
Mail update
After a lengthy discussion with the fine folks at Zimbra (who not only took time out to try and help me, but did so on my blog), it seems my Mail problems are twofold.
Firstly, I'm running an old version of Zimbra (4.0; current version is 4.5, with 5.0 in RC). Well, it's good to know, but doesn't really help me out: most of my colleagues won't be updating to Leopard until they get new hardware (hopefully Apple will announce new laptops soon, so they can upgrade), and the sysadmin time to upgrade the entire organisation to the latest version of Zimbra certainly can't be justified to solve one person's problems.
Secondly, Apple's Mail.app is broken, according to this lengthy thread on the support site. Six of one and half a dozen of the other, I guess.
So, what to do? Downgrade to Tiger, or something more drastic?
I opted for "more drastic", and set up a permanent redirect for all my email, pushing it over to my Google Mail account. Since GMail now supports IMAP, it should be a safe place for my data. I followed this howto on proper GMail IMAP for Apple Mail, which usefully explains special folders such as Drafts, Trash, Sent. There's a few wrinkles to sort out, but mostly it's working. It was easy to set up filters in GMail to match my most important Apple Mail filters.
My biggest concern is that the 'All Mail' folder on my Mac will end up holding duplicates of every email stored (since it is the equivalent of Google's 'Archive Mail'); this could be a huge space waste. I would remove it from the list of IMAP folder subscriptions, but subscriptions don't seem to be supported by GMail's IMAP implementation.
The biggest problem is I'm currently limited to ~ 40k/s upstream, so synchronising my existing mailboxes and moving my mail archive from machine to machine is proving painful. GMail seems to time out every now and then as well, dropping SSL connections, which causes Mail to grind to a halt.
Meanwhile kottke picks up on another problem I'd noticed - unread mail counts are incorrect with IMAP.
More notes when I finally get everything stabilised.
Technorati Tags: apple, gmail, google, leopard, mail, open source, open standards, osx, zimbra
Java 6 for Mac OS X
13949712720901ForOSX
It would be nice to have the latest JDK on this machine now I've upgraded to Leopard.
Technorati Tags: apple, java, leopard, osx
November 6, 2007
Zimbra + Mac OS X Leopard + Mail.app = WOE
It seems that Zimbra and Mail version 3.0 (shipping with OS X 10.5, Leopard) are incompatible.
I'm able to download, read, move and delete mail messages via an IMAP connection, but Zimbra considers all these messages to be unread and keeps the original untouched in the Inbox. This means that all the messages appear new and are downloaded again the next time Mail sees them - which is every time it checks for new mail.
Combine that with client-side mail filtering rules, and the net result is you end up with folders containing thousands of duplicate messages. This is especially exciting for busy mailing list subscriptions, as I'm sure you can imagine :-(
Why does this suck so much? Simple: IMAP is supposed to be a standard, so if it's not working between Zimbra and Mail it means that either Zimbra or Apple have not correctly implemented the standard (or possibly both of them). Given that Mail is working just fine with three other servers, I currently suspect Zimbra are the culprits. Bad implementations of standards annoys me.
The Zimbra website doesn't offer much help - apparently the Zimbra server doesn't support 10.5, but there's nothing else showing up there or in a Google search for zimbra problems.
Anyway, the net result: please consider my work email address "offline" for the time being, as I'm restricted to using Zimbra's web client.
The lengthy "I upgraded to Leopard and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" posts and the "yes, I know I was quiet for over a month but..." posts are suspended while I try and resolve this issue.
Technorati Tags: apple, leopard, mail, open source, open standards, osx, zimbra
November 5, 2007
November 2, 2007
links for 2007-11-02
-
Problems with Parallels on Leopard ... workaround appears to be "try the beta"
November 1, 2007
links for 2007-11-01
-
Rotates screen on N95 based on the orientation of the phone.