Dear Apple,
Would you please quit making your software ask me if I want to install more of your software? All I wanted was to watch a Quicktime movie and now you ask me every couple of weeks if I want to install iTunes, if I want to install Bonjour, if I want to install Safari. You don’t let me say “no,” instead you just keep asking me. Well, here’s my answer: NO! I don’t want to install all that. I’m happy with Firefox and WinAmp. I enjoy having a physical CD that I can rip the songs off of whenever I end up losing them due to my children screwing up my computer. I have no clue what Bonjour does, but I probably already have something that do

If you live in the Amarillo area and need computer help, swing by Amarillo Technical Helpers [AmaTechHelp.com]. They provide computer service and repair, custom software and website development, and network installations, among other things. Their page includes a handy “Tech Tip of the Week,” which gives you some good information that can save you money.

Currently they are offering a “PC Tune-Up” for $75 – 50% off regular price.

Want a free X-server? Cygwin too bloated and slow? Don’t want to spend money on XWin-32? Check out X-Deep/32. A freeware version was released in ’04 and can still be found. I found my copy here: [http://www.caslab.queensu.ca/LabHelp/XServer/]. The site gives you a good summary of how to configure X-Deep and use PuTTY to run X11 apps from a Linux box on your Windows PC.

So where have I been lately? Well, I’ve been working on the Armadillo Shortline (more pics coming soon) and playing City of Heroes (well, actually, City of Villians). Here’s a cool little primer about how to handle your superpowers:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7xQUlQ-iys]

This one ranks right up there with “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” (or Jamaica, your choice).

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM2rFZGujhk]

Ok, so I’m not much of a Mac person – I prefer Linux but have to use Windows at work – but I decided to download Safari and take it for a test drive. Normally I use Firefox, the only time I use IE is if the website requires IE – primarily internal sites at work that depend on IE specific hacks or the old MS JVM (and then I use the IETab extension for Firefox to load IE in a Firefox tab).

My experience using Macs has been pretty brief, mainly back when I was in college or when I’d wander into Schlotzsky’s and surf the web on their free boxen. (Side note: my old site design caused Safari 2.x to crap out and reload the site constantly, locking up the browser)

So here’s my observations of Safari 3 beta on Windows.

• Pretty. I’ll give Apple this much- they know how to make things simple and elegant.
• Inconsistent. Some buttons on the web page are rounded, some are square, some are 3D, some are 2D. Not sure if that is the fault of Safari or if the pages I observed this on were using a combo of images and buttons.
• Slow. Page rendering times felt slower than Firefox. (No, I didn’t break out the stop watch)
• Clobbers the taskbar. If you have the window maximized and the taskbar set to autohide + always_on_top, moving the mouse to the bottom of the screen doesn’t bring up the taskbar. You have to either press the Windows key or un-maximize the window.
• Breaks some keyboard shortcuts. In WordPress, you can press [ALT]+[A] while writing a post to embed a link. That doesn’t work in Safari. Pressing [CTRL]+[B] doesn’t bold the selected text, it deletes it.

Overall opinion on first use: Nice eye-candy, but nothing to switch over.

I’ll try to keep using it for a few more days and see if my opinions change.

To help you out with learning Vim, here’s Jonathan McPherson’s “Efficient Editing With vim”

[http://jmcpherson.org/editing.html]

If you’re a serious geek and you’ve never tried Vi (or Vim), you should read this article and then give it a shot. Give it a little while to grow on you, once you get used to it you won’t want to use anything else.

The article:
[http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html]

Get Vim:
[http://www.vim.org/]

“Graphical vi-vim Cheat Sheet and Tutorial”
[http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial.html]

So you’re stuck on a PC but you really wish you had a Mac, huh? Well, check out FlyakiteOSX, a free way to make your PC look like a Mac. Head to the Flyakite site for screenshots.

[http://osx.portraitofakite.com/]

This is one kick-butt utility. Wintabber allows you to group multiple windows under into one frame with tabs. So, if you happen to use, say PuTTY, you won’t have 3 or 4 windows open – everything will be grouped under one window. Makes things a lot neater and a lot easier to find. Download WinTabber at:

[http://www.wintabber.com/]