These days everyone has opinions on both Mac and PC’s. I have been using the Mac for over a year now and wanted to share my opinions on what I like best. I am going to start off with a bit about my background with computers.

In 1994 I was 14 and I owned a Honda 80cc 4-wheeler that my father had bought me when I was 5 years old. I was still able to ride it however it was just not fast enough for me. This was also the time when I wanted my own computer but we were unable to afford one. I ended up selling the 4-wheeler for $750 and buying my first computer with it. It was a Tandy 1000 RL which if you are not aware had no hard drive for saving data. You had to boot the OS from disks and then load games from the disks. I am not sure how the entire internals of this system worked however I would guess that the games were loaded into ram or onto a hard disk for temporary use. I never did open the system to see the inside. A few years later my parents bought me an IBM Aptiva that ran Windows 95. I used this for a while and loved the bonus items that came with it such as Home Director where you could set it to turn your lights on and off at certain times. Anyway in 1997 I started working at a community center where computers were readily available and then Windows 98 hit the market. I continued to use the various versions of Windows up until 1996. Over the 12 years of using Windows I had become fed-up with the Blue Screen of Death. There were other irritations that I ran into while using Windows as well, most notably were driver issues. The latest version of Windows called Vista is just a joke. We have a laptop with it installed and it is slow as slow can be. I also hate how it second questions your every move. Are you sure you want to do that? Are you REALLY sure you want to do that? Just do it already, I confirmed once. Most of the new features in Windows Vista were taken from OS X anyhow.. Just compare them

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It has taken quite a while but with a lot of work the iPhone SIM has been cracked so that you can use it on a carrier other than AT&T. I am not sure about the details but it seems to me that it would work with any provider. You will however lose features like visual voicemail because that is specific to the provider. For those who could not get service in their area or country, you will be able to use this software to enable the phone.

I am going to try to get one of these phones after xmas providing the unlock software is affordable. You can find out more at iPhone SIM Free or in the initial write-up by Engadget.

Would you like to grab a piece of history?  The second iPhone to be unlocked is for sale on eBay!  This is the only unlocked phone besides their own personal iPhone that has been unlocked and was done so live on their blog.  Check out the eBay Auction for more information!

I do not mean to disrespect anyone’s religion here but when you buy a book from someone would you expect to flip open the cover to find reading material about something you did not pay for? I bought the book “Step Into Xcode” from a seller on Half.com and when I opened it I found a card which contained a $2 bill and went on about sins and using the lords name in vain. The way I am looking at it is that is is just another $2 off my book because I am not religious in any way shape or form.

The main question in my mind is how unethical it is to do something like this? I could see if I won it in a contest that was held by a church but on Half.com? Is it a big deal that this was included? I paid less for my book so I don’t care. Even if there was no money in the item I would have tossed it aside and went on to reading. Since when do they try to pay you to read about the lord and “try” to convert you.

I wonder if this guy is doing it for all of their customers. The person I bought it from is the-book-guy they do however have 100% feedback at Half.com.

Last week we were in the hospital in Syracuse and Kaytryn decided that she wanted to have pizza for dinner. One of the nurses had suggested a few places but it was Sunday and they were not open. Another one of the nurses said that Dorian’s Pizza was pretty good. When we called they were courteous taking out order. About an hour later we got a call that our food was there so I went down to the lobby and paid.

When I returned to the room and opened the pizza’s they looked really good. However after the first bite all we could taste was burned pizza. We looked at the bottom to find that both pizza’s were in-fact burned. Charmaine called the restaurant to complain about the food,. When she told them that the pizza’s were burned he got defensive and said that he himself just cooked the pizza’s and that they were not burned. They were just done… He was being really sarcastic with her on the phone and when she finally asked if there was anyone else there that she could speak with he said “would you like to talk to the driver?”. With all the sarcasm given to her on this conversation she hung up on the guy.

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If you have not yet heard there is now a hack for the AppleTV which will allow you to connect an external drive up to the USB port on the AppleTV. This is a great achievement on the part of the developers. It now means that you can have a 2TB drive sit next to your AppleTV and use that for storage of your movies.

To read more and find out how to implement this, visit the AwkwardTV blog post.

Recently i switched jobs, going back to eFashion Solutions. At eFS we remotely mount our user directory to our local machine using SMB. On OS X it just mounts as if it were a local drive on the system. While using Zend Studio it works great for the most part, all except for one little issue. It causes the Samba install on the server to use 90% of the CPU. I tried to use Eclipse however it wont work with the SMB drive at all.

We believe the issue with Zend is that it sees the SMB drive as a local drive (which in many ways it is) and does not cache the directory listing. Without caching the directory listing it is constantly transferring data between the server and my client. The IT dept told me that using SMB with Zend Studio is not an option due to the increase in CPU use.

I contacted Zend online through their online chat (Sales) to find out if there is a phone # that I could call to get this question answered or possibly report a bug in their software. They insisted that they do not have phone support. Hey guess what, you want to buy a license you have live chat on the site and or a phone to call. Once they have your money though, you are screwed. You have to wait upwards of 24 hours for a response to any support ticket that you submit and no way to contact anyone at all for immediate support issues. I’m sorry but if it is keeping you from being able to work they should assist you almost immediately.

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