Visitor numbers continue to increase and I now seem to hit my bandwidth limit every month (I must do something about that). I've also finally achieved my objective of being the top hit on Google when searching on my surname, although of course that could easily change!

A big thanks as ever to all those who continue to drop by here and read my random outpourings and also those who leave comments and e-mail me.

The Apple store is a fairly long way down Regent Street from Leicester Square, but worth a visit because it's exactly how an Apple store should be i.e. it's stylish and packed full of wonderful toys to play with. For example, I marvelled at how big the metal case of the G5 is and how cool it was that you can see the front fan through the meshing. I swooned over the Apple Cinema Displays, which give about four times the desktop of my humble 12" PowerBook. I was overwhelmed by the wall of iPod accessories that confronted me and then I went to pick up a copy of OS X 10.4 Tiger. And this is where things started to go a bit wrong and the experience turned sour.

I joined the moderately-sized queue to pay for my purchase and waited to be served. And waited. And waited. And waited. There were initially three sales assistants serving, but I'm sure Apple have a less prosaic title for these employees. Then one of them decided to go and do something else and we were left with two assistants. One person was discussing something with a customer, whilst another one seemed to be having great difficulty working out how much to charge for a Mac mini. I could have told him.

Meanwhile, I spotted three other members of staff hanging around looking jolly and chatting to each other. One of them looked to be in a more senior position, so I kept eyeballing him and tried to use Jedi mind tricks to get him to open another till, but the Force was strong with him and it didn't work. After waiting for twenty minutes I tossed the Tiger box onto the counter and walked off in disgust. I felt so let down that I've dispatched a letter of complaint to the manager of the store. I pointed out that prestige brands bring with them a certain expectation about levels of service, so we shall see what comes of that. Anything less than Steve Jobs himself personally delivering a dual-processor G5 to me will be a further disappointment.

After the store fiasco I ordered my Tiger from trusty Amazon UK and it promptly arrived and I installed it. I like the way there's one disc for both a full install and an upgrade, and I thought the price was quite reasonable at £74.99. Apple also sell family packs of five licences which is a good idea that Microsoft would do well to copy. It's really nice the way the install boots from the DVD and you get a nice proper graphical installer. Far better than Windows XP which I believe still copies the installation files to your hard disk first and still has a nasty old text mode portion of setup, which Windows NT has had since 1993. What's not so nice about the Mac package is the cheap paper sleeve that the DVD comes in.

When installing a new version of Windows I always go for the full install, but seeing as how my Mac is still quite new and doesn't have a great deal on it yet, I opted to try the upgrade. However, I did pick the custom install option because I'd remembered reading that by default it installs 1.2 GB of printer drivers, which seems excessive—particularly as I don't have a printer! It also insisted on installing lots of foreign language support and wouldn't let me not do this, presumably because my Panther install had come like this and the feature couldn't be removed, only upgraded.

Everything went well and after nearly an hour I had successfully upgraded to Tiger! Spotlight indexed my disk in about three minutes—told you there wasn't much on it yet—and my Dashboard widgets zoomed into view just like the promo movie showed they would. Unlike others I quite like the default set of Tiger widgets, particularly the beautiful weather one. Overall, I was impressed again by the Apple experience.

The overall system performance doesn't seem to have suffered as a result of doing an upgrade rather than starting from scratch and many have observed that OS X actually gets faster with each release, which is quite a feat. To be honest, I haven't used Tiger enough to be able to comment on that yet. The Safari Web browser is noticeably faster though and is now my favourite browser. Talking of Safari, a major new feature is its integrated support for RSS feeds, but I don't really understand this because I use a Web browser to…browse Web pages and an RSS reader to…read RSS feeds.

OS X is still very much a work in progress because Apple can never resist fiddling with things that you might previously have been happy with. For example, the Apple menu item in the top left-hand corner has changed colour and now implements Fitts's Law, and the Mail application introduces another user interface style that breaks Apple's own guidelines—a decision that has met with near-universal disdain. It's a good job I don't use it. The ability to place frequently used System Preferences in the System Preferences window toolbar has been taken away and replaced with a Spotlight search box, which is actually incredibly accurate no matter what you throw at it. For example typing “wallpaper”, “image” or “background” will all highlight the Desktop & Screen-Saver icon which is what you go to to change your desktop wallpaper. The ability to save Spotlight queries as Smart Folders seems like a great idea until you consider how they could have been implemented and realise that Apple could have been a bit cleverer on this one.

One of the new Mac OS X 10.4 features that most intrigues me is the Automator application, probably because I thought of a similar idea for the PC years ago. It was when I'd just discovered how useful batch scripts could be and I thought it would be great to have a program that would let non-programmers achieve similar things just by dragging basic building blocks around and connecting them together and setting a few properties on them. Nothing came of that idea because I didn't know enough then about software component technology and because it seemed like it would be a major project to undertake. Anyway, Automator looks like a perfect implementation of what I envisaged. So the Mac now has two superb automation solutions: AppleScript and Automator.

One feature of Tiger that I didn't anticipate was that it would break my Wi-Fi network. As Panther did before it, it found and joined the network automatically and the signal strength even seems to be improved. However, I wasn't able to access the Internet at all. According to the network status I was connected to the Internet via AirPort but Safari simply couldn't find any websites. Then I went to my PC to verify that it wasn't a network problem and that couldn't access any sites either! Whichever site I tried, Firefox said that it couldn't be found, which suggested a DNS problem to me. After rebooting the router, I regained Internet connectivity on the Windows XP box. Trying from the Mac broke it again. Interesting.

I tried disabling all Wi-Fi security but that didn't help. I ran the Mac's Internet connection troubleshooter and that didn't help either. As far as Tiger was concerned it was part of my Wi-Fi network and could access the Internet. Then I started to root around on the Web for the answer and found a couple of possibilities, the first of which solved my problem. It appears that Apple have changed some aspect of the way networking works in Tiger and that it's now necessary to specify your ISP's primary and secondary DNS server IP addresses in the connection's TCP/IP properties. This fixed the problem for me and all was well again. If that doesn't work then try changing the host name to a name that's six characters or less and with no spaces.

DNS servers now required. Click to enlarge.

This gripe aside, I think that Tiger is a compelling upgrade with a great number of worthwhile features, some of which are a bit buried. An example would be the new slideshow function in the Finder for previewing groups of pictures. What I particularly like is that it improves on the same Windows XP feature because it allows you to view pictures as an index sheet. It's this sort of thinking that leads me to conclude that the gap between OS X and Windows continues to widen. Microsoft have an increasingly daunting task on their hands, not only to get Windows Longhorn out of the door but to wrestle the crown of best personal computer operating system in the world from Apple's OS X. The next few years are going to be very interesting.

Being the inquisitive sort I clicked the XHTML 1.0 compliant button to have the site validated against the XHTML 1.0 standard by the W3C. So imagine my surprise when the validation results came back with eighteen errors!

Don't these people check their own sites or do they think that you can just display the appropriate hallmark without having to do the work that earns the badge? I think that the W3C should be able to detect failed validations that have come via one of their banners and act accordingly i.e. get the banner removed until the site complies. The W3C eat their own dog food, so why can't the UK government?

A few days ago I was telephoned in the evening by the same people and asked to confirm the first line of my address—I wouldn't have minded, but they called me! Then I was asked to confirm that I really did want my account to be cancelled and would I mind telling them the reasons why. No, I haven't changed my mind and yes, I do mind actually because I've already told you the reasons and I'd prefer not to waste my time going through them again. Why don't you just look at my account details on the screen in front of you and you'll see all the details there? I know that working in a call centre probably isn't the most intellectually stimulating job in the world, but the man on the end of the line really didn't sound like the brightest sparkler in the box—in fact he sounded patronising—which made me even less inclined to spend a lot of time on the phone telling him information he already had.

After having gone to the trouble of setting up broadband and changing ISP and all that involves, why would I have suddenly changed my mind about the whole thing and not wanted my account cancelled? If I tell you to do something then I want it done unless you hear otherwise from me. I've never actually had any complaints about their service, but Wanadoo's reputation had actually increased in my eyes following that first cancellation call I made and the efficient way it was dealt with. Now all that good work has been undone and I've had to write about the experience on here!

In light of this, I fully expect them to make a complete hash of ceasing to deduct the money from my bank account each month and they'll have to be phone calls and letters and in the end I'll probably have to go around to their headquarters with a big gun, all just to cancel my account. Why can't I do the whole thing online?

On a positive note, ADSL broadband is fantastic—having an always-on high speed Internet connection really does make a big difference to the way you use the Internet. I took the opportunity to go wireless too and bought the superb Netgear DG834GT to handle ADSL, firewall, routing and Wi-Fi duties. The whole thing works brilliantly and the Mac picked up my new 802.11g network completely automatically. If only organisations worked as well.

“We recently have determined that different computers have logged onto your PayPal account, and multiple password failures were present before the login. One of our Customer Service employees has already tryed to telephonically reach you. As our employee did not manage to reach you, this email has been sent to your notice. Therefore your account has been temporarily suspended. We need you to confirm your identity in order to regain full privileges of your account. If this is not completed by April 13, 2005, we reserve the right to terminate all privileges of your account indefinitly, as it may have been used for fraudulent purposes. We thank you for your cooperation in this manner. To confirm your identity please follow the link below:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run

Thank you for your patience in this matter.

PayPal - Customer Service

Please do not reply to this e-mail as this is only a notification. Mail sent to this address cannot be answered.”

—Different computers have logged into my PayPal account? I think about the fact that I've just bought another computer and the complicated steps I had to go through before to verify myself to PayPal, so I click the hyperlink in the e-mail and get taken to the PayPal login screen. And then I pause in my tracks and read the e-mail properly.

“One of our Customer Service employees has already tryed [sic] to telephonically [sic] reach you.” I hover the mouse over the hyperlink in the e-mail and look at the Thunderbird status bar. It tells me that the hyperlink actually goes to:

http://www.paypal.com.login-user43.info/webscr.php?cmd=LogIn

…which when clicked on, takes you to a passable clone of the genuine PayPal login screen.

Another giveaway: I actually received two of these e-mails, one sent to the editor address for my domain and the other to the webmaster address. Neither of which are the e-mail address that I use for PayPal.

Finally, I view the message source. The Return-Path is set to an account at lil.univ-littoral.fr, which turns out to be a French university. If this is the genuine account from which the e-mails were sent, then the sender was extremely naïve, or else some poor student has been set up to appear as the sender. I fire off an e-mail to abuse@lil.univ-littoral.fr and postmaster@lil.univ-littoral.fr so that they can investigate.

I'm horrified that I came quite close to divulving my PayPal credentials, but in the end the worse that happened was that I clicked on a dodgy hyperlink and maybe verified that the e-mail had got through to me. If there's a moral to this story then it's that in an Internet age when everybody seems to be out to get you, you have to make sure you're fully awake when you read your e-mail.

I wasn't particularly in the market for a notebook computer, but I'd lusted after the PowerBook for quite a while and my recent bad luck with the Windows box convinced me that it would be useful to have another computer as a backup. Also, I thought it would be a good way to get some UNIX experience and generally be less Windows-centric. However, the event that led to the removal of credit card from wallet was Apple recently simultaneously lowering the price of the PowerBook range and upping the specifications—seen by some as a sign that G5 PowerBooks are on the horizon at last.

I went for the SuperDrive model, which is Apple-speak for a built-in CD-RW/DVD-R drive. I also paid an extra £50 to take the RAM up to 768 MB and bought a Brenthaven backpack that's tailor-made for the 12" PowerBook. Shortly afterwards I added Microsoft's Philippe Starck optical mouse as a suitably stylish two-buttoned accessory.

They might as well write Mug Me on the side.

Those who read my iPod review will remember how enthusiastic I was about the design of the box it came in, and my new purchase didn't disappoint in this regard, either. The PowerBook comes in a black box with a plastic carrying handle on top. There are white Apple logos on the ends and actual size pictures of the machine with the screen both open and closed respectively on the sides of the box. Although the handle implies practicality, I don't think I'd want to carry this box around in public, at least not without some heavies at my side.

The box unfolds open to reveal a polystyrene molding covering by a shiny piece of white cardboard with the Apple logo on the left and “Designed by Apple in California” on the right. Removing this cardboard uncovers a compartment containing the manuals and paperwork as well as the bundled accessories. You get Mac OS X and OS 9 install discs—the OS X one is actually a DVD, not sure about the other one—a mini DVI to VGA connector, a mini DVI to full-size DVI connector, a modem cable and the components of the power brick. The power brick is a scaled-up version of the iPod one, with a missing corner into which you can slot either the Apple-supplied plug or the Apple-supplied extension cable. It also has two flaps that fold out for winding the computer end of the power lead around.

Underneath this top compartment is another polystyrene molding that holds the computer itself. After removing the protective wrapping I picked up the PowerBook and was surprised by how heavy it was. The build quality is excellent and I shudder to think how heavy the 17" model is. There are no external protrusions sprouting from the casing like you get on lesser notebooks. Even the underside is beautifully designed, with a fairly large silver screw that you turn through ninety degrees to release the battery and access the memory compartment. The battery has five tiny holes in a line that glow lime green when you press a small button, to indicate the current charge level without having to turn the computer on.

Depressing the button on the front releases the screen, which opens in a clamshell arrangement, rather like the bonnets on some cars, for example, the original Renault Clio. This button also contains a LED that gently pulses white when the computer is asleep. The screen catch is completely flush when the screen is in the display position and it only protrudes just before the lid is fully shut. I'm not sure how the mechanism works but it's neat. Also neat—albeit completely shameless—is the Apple logo on the back of the screen that illuminates white when the screen is on.

The external ports are all arranged down the left hand size in descending size order—modem, Ethernet, FireWire, USB 2.0 (x2), mini DVI, audio in, headphone mini-jack and finally a slot for a cable lock. On the opposite side is the SuperDrive, which uses a slot instead of a drawer. That's all there is; no serial or parallel ports and no PC Card slots. This is 2005 and Apple won't compromise the design of their machines for legacy technologies. The combination of FireWire, USB and Ethernet should be sufficient for most needs. The metal casing replete with allen screws and the silver colouring elsewhere all combine to produce a gorgeous look that says technical.

I plugged in the power lead—which emits an amber ring when charging that changes to green when charged— and switched on. After a few moments the bleepy sound of Royksopp's “Elpe” came over the built-in speakers and I was in the final stages of Mac OS X Setup. I answered a few simple questions and then I was logged in and could being exploring the alien and wonderful world of Mac OS X. Oh and the X is pronounced ten if you didn't know.

It's really a rather disorientating experience to switch to a different operating system after about twelve years of using Windows. I imagine that it's like being with someone new following a long marriage; there are lots of new experiences to be had, but things you take for granted are no longer true and other things are just plain different or not there at all! Fortunately I had a guide to ease the transition, but it's still disconcerting. I'll give you a few examples of what I mean.

In Windows, closing the main window of an application almost always closes the application, but not so in OS X. The application continues to be in memory as indicated by an arrow at the bottom of its Dock icon. You have to quit the application explicitly to shut it down. Something else that takes a while to get used to is the different keyboard layout. Obviously the Windows keys are gone, but there are now Command keys and a mysterious Option key. I actually quite like it now, particularly because the clipboard uses the Command key, which means that text can be copied and pasted from a Terminal window without sending Ctrl+C or Ctrl+V, as happens in a Windows' Command Prompt. Alt-Tab is present, only it's Command-Tab and although it beautifully showcases OS X's alpha-blending effects and photo-realistic icons, bizarrely it doesn't activate the main window associated with the application that it gives the focus to.

I've now been using OS X Panther for three weeks and can honestly say that it blows Windows XP away. Aside from the fact that it gives you access to FreeBSD UNIX, everything that I've encountered so far just seems to have been thought through more than on Windows. I guess that's the luxury that not having to be compatible with twenty year old software gives you. My PowerBook has a 1.5 GHz PowerPC processor, which although it doesn't sound very fast nowadays, is a RISC chip, so the speeds aren't directly comparable to Intel's CISC processors. Anyway, in spite of its theoretically lesser specs, graphics are noticeably smoother, without the stuttering caused by the compatibility cholesterol clogging the arteries of Windows.

Windows NT was designed to be a multi-user operating system, but that decision never really seemed to make its way through to the Windows shell, which often feels like it was designed with single user computing in mind. Apple may have copied Fast User Switching from Microsoft, but they do it so much better and that's not taking account of the flashy cube animation that heralds a switching of users. Throughout the OS, if you haven't the permissions to do something then OS X will obligingly offer a dialogue where you can enter the credentials of an administrator before carrying on as normal.

Browse the Applications folder using the Finder and you could be forgiven for thinking that the stunning icons in there are executables. They are in a sense because you can double-click them to open the application that they represent. OS X is much cleverer though, for these are actually packages and you can see inside them if you're so inclined. What this means is that everything the application needs to run is hidden away in the package represented by each single icon, which in turn means that applications can be moved around as easily as any other file. It's brilliant and it works.

I haven't even mentioned AppleScript—the English-like scripting language that can probably automate any task—nor the built-in speech and speech recognition support, or the amazingly high-quality iLife suite and GarageBand 2, or the fact that Java and Python are both built-in. Mac OS X isn't perfect though: dragging the icons of removable media over the Trash icon to eject them is still insanely stupid, even if the Trash icon itself does now change to an Eject icon to give you a clue as to what will happen. As for everything else, well it seems to not only look beautiful, but work beautifully too and without any fuss or problems. There can be no higher recommendation than that. Why wait for Windows Longhorn when you can own a Macintosh today?

Knowledge Base Changes

I've re-organised my knowledge base slightly to better reflect the technologies that I'm actually using now. Back in 2002 I was on the verge of learning .NET and even bought a C# book, and then my employer decided to adopt J2EE, so that was the end of that. The Delphi section only had one trivial entry in it and it was never going to expand because I haven't used Delphi for years. Those two are out and in come Mac OS X and Python.

The Ant series provides a basic introduction to the tool that is aimed squarely at those completely unfamiliar with Ant. And for anyone wondering, SitePoint Photoshopped the picture I sent them—I have it on good authority that I don't look that ghostly in real life!

I shy away from saying that I'm a software engineer, because engineers are grown-ups who are very good at maths and who studied for years at university. Neither of those apply to me, so I don't quite feel justified in applying that moniker to myself, even though I try to approach what I do in a professional way. People who are good enough to develop software for Microsoft are software engineers and I'm just not in that league. Not yet anyway, but I'm constantly learning.

Sometimes I've affectionately been called a Coder, a compliment implying a Real Programmer. However, I couldn't put it down on a form because it sounds like a clerical job and I did one of those for seven years; in all honesty, no aspect of it was as interesting as what I do now.

I work for the Civil Service in the UK, so how about calling myself a Civil Servant, as technically that's what I am. The problem is that I'm not always civil—especially when configuring J2EE applications—and I don't like the idea of being a servant.

A few years ago I went to a comedy club and had the misfortune of being hauled up onto the stage—along with some other members of the audience—by the comedian. He asked each of us in turn what we did for a living and I stupidly (really stupidly) said that I was a Civil Servant, and at that point I was instantly transformed into the least sexy person in the entire room. I don't know what made me do it apart from this very dilemma over my job title that I'm describing here. Another problem with Civil Servant is that it still conjures up an image of pinstripe suits and bowler hats, neither of which I possess.

Ian Craig Marsh: Computer Programmer

Although it's a bit old-fashioned now, I like the title Computer Programmer. To me it sounds almost futuristic in a retro, late 1970s/early 1980s kind of way. Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware were both computer programmers before they co-founded the original line-up of The Human League in 1978 and started writing slightly frightening synthesizer-backed songs about urban decay. On the other hand, Computer Programmer also sounds quite mundane and makes me think of someone feeding punch cards into a huge mainframe.

That just leaves Software Developer, which isn't a bad description for someone whose job is to develop software. From now on I'll be a Software Developer until a better title comes along.

We approach these wizards with slight trepidation and ask them to shine a little of their brilliance onto our humble difficulty. For that brief moment of contact we're prepared to look past their unkempt appearance, and we try to ignore their poorly-developed interpersonal skills, because we've wasted a week trying to puzzle this out for ourselves, and because we need to get on, dammit!

They help us, the problem is solved pitifully quickly and then we can get back to coding our getter and setter methods whilst they write the next generation engine that's going to give us the competitive edge and win awards for technical innovation. Normally all would be well again, but they can never leave it at that. These guru's gurus always have to give us a mini lecture about Real Programmers.

You must know how it goes. Real Programmers don't use IDEs, they use Emacs, or perhaps vi if you dress on that side. IDEs are for lusers [sic]. Real Programmers customise their chosen editor using a language that only other Real Programmers can understand, so that it completely simulates that obscure machine that they wrote their first assembly language program on when they were four years old. And no-one else has ever heard of that machine.

Real Programmers don't use Windows. Windows is the spawn of the devil, although on a good day they might grudgingly admit that the Windows kernel has some useful abstractions. They run God's own operating system, UNIX. On their PDA. However, they'll be switching to Linux as soon as they've got around to finishing their kernel improvements and submitted them to Linus.

Real Programmers certainly don't use GUIs, which only slow them down. And why use a GUI when you can perl -e '$n=1; while ($n++) {print "\n$n" if ("p" x $n) !~ /^((p)\2+)\1+$/ and "$n" eq reverse "$n"}'?

Real Programmers work on exciting projects in their spare time, projects that are at the forefront of technology. They're designing a nanocomputer or working on the system software for some future space mission to Neptune. None of this boring business software crap.

In spite of what you might think from this parody, I like Real Programmers. I like them because they're enthusiasts and I think that's something to celebrate. However, I believe that what I call Real Programmers are rather different creatures to the caricature I've just painted.

True Real Programmers use whatever tools make them more productive, which may well be an IDE (gasp). They customise their working environment, but not obsessively so. True Real Programmers can use Windows without complaining about it because they understand that a large amount of software runs on Windows, which means that it's an important platform for lots of people. They also understand a lot of the reasons as to why Windows is the way it is, because they read Raymond Chen and Larry Osterman et al religiously.

True Real Programmers use GUIs and command-line interfaces as appropriate and recognise that there's a time and a place for both. They can probably get certain things done quicker using the command line, but they don't belittle people who prefer to use a rodent for getting around the screen.

Most of all though, True Real Programmers develop software because they get a real kick out of the thought that something they've done has made a difference in some way to a user's life. Even if it's just saving the user a half second wait before that search results screens comes up, because they spent three months tuning the messaging plumbing that the user will never even know is there. The Real Programmers are the rounded individuals who approach software development with a balanced and holistic approach.