Weaver’s Loom

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I’ve been playing with the beta of Live Mesh from Microsoft for some time now, and find it a very useful technology. So far the only problem I’ve run into has been some bug that was introduced when I upgraded to Snow Leopard.

For some reason, after restarting or hibernating my machine, Live Mesh gets left in an odd state that leaves it unable to connect to the mesh, leaving it in a weird state where the login action is greyed out:

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This month has been a bad one for me and computers. First my MacBook Pro died (due to a video card that had been recalled), and then my desktop PC decided to fall over dead.

The Mac failure was another study in why I love Apple service: The video just died one day, no screen, external monitor wouldn’t work. Since a Mac has a real operating system (Mac OS X - a Unix variant), I was able to determine that the machine was actually still working by connecting from my desktop PC using ssh.

I did a bit of system administration black magic, and turned on the remote desktop service (see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2370 or http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2081446&tstart=1 for a writeup of how), and was able to connect to my MBP using VNC. That allowed me to validate things were working, and to make sure I had a current backup before doing anything else.

A quick call to Apple’s support desk, and the helpful tech looked up the problem, found there was a recall on the video logic board for certain MBP systems, and walked me through a few things to validate it wasn’t just user error. He gave me a case number, told me to go to the Apple store, and have them check for the recall.

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…Or how to brick your phone with an upgrade, and recover…

Earlier this month, Apple released the fifth beta of their 3.0 firmware for the iPhone. As usual, I raced to the site to download it.

I became very excited by the email that I got saying that submissions to the Apple store have to be compatible with iPhone OS 3.0, which to me means it won’t be long before this is a production OS. With that in mind, I strapped on my crazy cap and decided to upgrade my phone to beta 5.

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Today I read a blog that was a continuation of the series of ads that Microsoft has about why you should buy a PC instead of a Mac.

The article (see http://tinyurl.com/cncx73) was one of those cutesy marketing ideas that looked at the alleged difference in cost between a Mac and a PC and came up with an imaginary tax rebate based on the savings. The author used this whitepaper as the basis for the comparison. Like all of these comparisons, comparing apples to oranges results in the preferred hardware (in this case the PC) being shown to be a better deal.

I do most of my work on a MacBook Pro, after being a laptop user for more years than I care to count. I switched when it became possible to do so without giving up Windows. With the current crop of Apple machines, you have the option of running Windows directly, setting things up to dual boot (BootCamp), or running Windows in a VM (using Parallels, Fusion, VirtualBox, etc.)

Which once again leads me to ask why would Microsoft bash Apple ? (more…)

Recently I downloaded the iPhone beta 3.0 firmware upgrade and decided (without thinking it through) to update my phone to use the new version. In hindsight, Apple makes it pretty clear this is a bad idea, and warns you that you won’t be able to revert to a prior version of the software:

But warnings were meant to be ignored, so I blithely went ahead and updated with the new firmware. Immediately after doing so, I had a d’oh moment when I realized I better not have my business phone running on beta software, so I wanted to revert.

No problem I thought, I’ll just follow the steps to downgrade that I wrote about previously …

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