Tiger on Notes

Xgrid, infant, pre-teen or hormone-charged teenager?

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 02:07:52 +0000

Check out MacDevCenter article on Xgrid by Drew McCormack.

Xgrid is nothing terrible new, for those who where into distributed systems in collage. I was into them, and it was my favorite subject, the one I got the best grades.

What make me click about this one is the fact that for the first time that I remember, a full distributed computing platform is being distributed with a mainstream operation system. Every Mac that runs Tiger has this client installed (maybe not running, of course, but it is there).

The possibilities are endless, of course. But my radar will be tuned to two events:

the first mainstream application that makes use of this: I suppose photoshop or something like that. iMovie HD? I think Nuno would like that :).
the first integration of a Paypal-like system with Xgrid, so that you can rent your spare cycles.

The second one? That’s an new economy right there…

Security issues, or blunders, as always will be the headlines first.

Tiger notes

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 14:46:16 +0000

As I said before, I’m not upgrading to Tiger until sometime next month. Yet, I need to keep some links to things that I need to test or fix in my Tiger setup.

The good news in Tiger for scripting fans like me, is that Perl and Ruby have decent and recent versions. The bad news is that at least Ruby has a bad configuration file. From what I could understand, it seems that they left a CFLAGS=-arch i386 in a config file… I can’t wait the rumor sites to get this one… A fix is available.

One thing I want to test is the new CoreData framework. Cocoa Dev Central has two articles entitled “Core Data Class Overview” and “Build a Core Data App” that seem very nice.

I’ll keep this post updated with all my things-to-see in Tiger-land.

Upgrade time for my powerbook

melo@simplicidade.org (Pedro Melo) — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 12:29:56 +0000

So, it’s upgrade time to update my powerbook.

No, I’m not installing Tiger yet, I need my powerbook in working order. I’ll wait until 1 week after 10.4.1 to install that one.

I’m upgrading to 10.3.9 only because I want to upgrade to Quicktime 7 and try some H.264 goodness (see also this impressive report).

Right now, I have 11 items in my Software Update Window. So, I’ll see you all (three of you) in 20 minutes or so.

Updated: 11 done, 2 to go. The Java fix and Quicktime 7 are installing now. Quicktime still needs a reboot after it finnish “optimizing” my performance…

Update 2: all seems ok. Audible.com is flaky with Safari, but I always have problems with them. It’s probably the worst site I need to visit on a regular basis.