Monthly Archives: August 2009

Snow Leopard – Intel only

It had to happen, right? Mac OS Snow Leopard is out today. It’s the first version which doesn’t run on PowerPC Macs.

“Snow Leopard is an upgrade for Leopard users and requires a Mac with an Intel processor.” — Apple Store

I suppose it’s been about three years since Apple stopped selling PowerPCs. I wonder how many 3rd party software vendors are also abandoning them. I know my sister has a PowerPC Mac laptop from circa 2004, but I wonder how many others are still out there in regular use. Perhaps the more significant issue will be how long patches for newly discovered vulnerabilities will be supplied.

Perhaps it’s no biggie, but I’m just imagining the fuss that would be made if Microsoft made a new operating system that didn’t work with four-year-old PCs.

Ikea font outrage

There’s outrage in web land, as Ikea are switching the font used in their catalogues and other publicity to Verdana.

(Original source, translated from Swedish to English.)

Odd choice. Verdana was specifically designed for on-screen use — something which I suspect will become less relevant over time as displays improve in resolution and quality. And while I can understand the logic of wanting something that can be used in all languages, surely they could have found something else that would fit rhe bill and looked better on paper?

While I don’t hate Verdana as much as those who are running the petition against it, I don’t particularly like it. It’s unpleasingly wide for me.

(What fonts are installed on computers on the web? Here’s a list.)

First tr.im, then bit.ly

If after tr.im’s near shutdown you came over to bit.ly, happy they’d had funding and had Twitter’s approval and seemed rock-solid and had 100% uptime, think again.

Now bit.ly’s looking dodgy too, with a two hour outage earlier today.

Bitly outage

OK, it’s not a full outage or anything, but if people are relying on this thing for Twitter and other uses, and maybe this isn’t the worst thing in the world… but there are going to be times when you can’t wait two hours to generate a short URL — you need it NOW!

Is the answer really to host one of these things yourself?

Twitter.com’s “remember me” is broken

Dear Twitter.com,

How about a “Remember Me” option that actually bloody works?

OK, so I can understand what’s happening: it looks like if you try to logon from a different PC/phone/whatever it figures the IP address has changed and wants you log on again. But WHY? If other high-profile online services like Gmail can keep you logged in from multiple places, why not Twitter?

Or at the very least, if the web interface is going to insist on making me log back on constantly, at least give me direct access to the smegging fields I need to do it, rather than giving me the new user page, and making me find and click on a Sign In link that’s a quarter the size of the Sign Up Now button.

Twitter's logon is broken

So, Twitter people, I love using Twitter, but please fix this.

Pac-Man Championship Edition for mobile

Turns out I don’t need an XBox to play the new(ish) Pac-Man Championship Edition; it’s also available on mobiles.

I’ve had a go of it… great graphics, and the gameplay is a really clever twist on olde Pacman. Very cool. Though oddly the sound doesn’t seem to work…

The problem is the controls. You can either use the phone’s numeric keypad (2/4/6/8 for up/left/right/down… pretty logical)… or the directional buttons. But on my Nokia N95 phone, it’s hard to find the right numerics to direct Pacman, and if you use the directional buttons you’re at constant risk of pressing one of the surrounding buttons, some of which will unceremoniously throw you out of the game.

I expect I’ll get used to it.

tr.im goes west

After some problems in the last week or two tracking stats (often they’d show zero hits), URL shortening service tr.im shut down suddenly this morning around 8am AEST, citing lack of investment:

tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.
Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.
Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.
We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.
There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.
We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.

Personally I liked tr.im, but with its demise the quest for the ultimate URL-shortening service continues. Search Engine Land has a good list from April.

I’ve signed-up for bit.ly, and it looks okay, though already I can see one annoyance: it tracks everything by US time, with no apparent options to change that.

And I guess I’ve got about 4 months to manually go through the best of my Tweets and save the expanded tr.im URLs — something I started doing last week to prevent any future problems with stuff I’d written being lost.

Interestingly at least one of my older URLs from tinyurl.com (which has a very good record, having been around for 7 years) looks to have been corrupted: http://tinyurl.com/34sov somehow points to http://51744jqgt36.jqgt36/JQGT36 instead of http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/10/so-you-think-yo.html Odd.

Another example: http://tinyurl.com/263hx would have linked to some media article I think; now it goes to a Polish photo web site.

Update Tuesday: More interesting reading on tr.im

Update Wednesday: tr.im is back… for now.