Category: Apple

A very nice birthday party on a boat

Yesterday a good friend of mine had her birthday party on the boat called Patricia in the harbour of Stockholm. She had written really sweet notes about our neighbors at the table which was a good introduction for conversation. It was a very nice evening and I had a wonderful lobster soup which interestingly was served in a small porcelain pitcher. I have noticed that I nowadays like to have a nice calm evening with friends and eating really good. Sure, I still like to dance but it has not quite the same attraction as it had before. However, I also guess I still struggle a bit with myself and maybe avoid certain situations even if I maybe shouldn’t. I sometimes see these very self-confident sexy women on the dance floor and I would like to be like that for a while. Well, I guess it is only a matter of challenging yourself and accept that it also includes the risk of looking slightly stupid. But I guess I have over the years tried to know how to be the “perfect woman” in certain public situations which means that I have rather high expectations on myself.

A welcome surprise was that a fellow blogger was at the party as well. We have both read our respective blogs for sometime now and it was nice to meet her again. It is quite interesting that you through someone’s blogs get access to rather personal things in life even though you don’t meet that often. We decided that we should try to make it for a fika (a good Swedish word) soon. I think it could be really interesting to hear what she think of the things I have written about here. She looked really good in a bare shoulder dress and it made me look forward to have my breast augmentation surgery. After that I think I will be more confident wearing these kind of clothes.

After the wonderful dinner we went back to the birthday kid’s apartment and we were all mesmerized over two examples of iPod Touch. What a wonderful piece of technology!

A good day overall

Last week I got some of my “work spirit” back again and today was a good day overall. Started by dropping by my tire specialist to shift to winter tyres. The first time I have done it before the first traffic chaos due to snow. Felt good. Then to work and a briefing to our new Colonel, followed by some catch up in administration and a good talk with my section commander. In the evening I got a call from one of my collegues who told me about her experiences from having a LGBT-workshop held at the Militaryacedemy. Feels good to know that there are people in the Armed Forces that actually are interested in putting the spotlight on LGBT-issues and actually tries to do something about it. Finally I learned that Apple sold more Macs in a quarter than ever before which followed last weeks reports of a 8.1 % market share in the US.

När man är hemma har man lite extra tid och idag läste jag lite i MacWorlds forumt och hittade en tråd som handlade om hur nån försökt flama igång en debatt om varför Mac-människor är så “sekt-lika”. Jag kan bara konstatera att alla som varit del av en minoritet som upplevt sig missförstådd känner igen sig i argumentationen. Det handlar ofta om “varför måste ni homosexuella/macanvändare/kvinnor/osv alltid….”. Representerar alltid ett utanifrånperspektiv från den som sitter i en maktposition att definiera ramarna för ett samtal. En av användarna på forumet sammanfattade Mac-fördomarna på ett utmärkt sätt:

Mac-användare är trötta på windows och dess användare/anhängare pga:
• Deras okunnighet på området men ändå väldigt bestämda uppfattning om att det inte finns någon programvara, att plattformen är utdöende och att eftersom MacOS är lätt och logiskt så är det inte kraftfullt utan är till för okunniga eller för barn.
• Deras ständiga småleende “jaså du kör mac”.
• Deras jämförelser mellan dagens PC-datorer och någon Mac de sett på 90-talet.
• Åsikten att en mac-användare inte kan vara teknikintresserad/-kunnig, utan man är en lurad, inlåst design-nisse (det hade varit ok om man köpt en ful pc-burk för en billig peng och samtidigt en tavla för ett par tusen, men köper man mac är man lurad).
• Att fast man har full koll på att vissa saker inte går att byta på en kompakt-mac, och man har gjort ett medvetet val eftersom man ändå inte skulle bytt dessa saker så är man ändå “lurad”.
• Att man kan inte försvara sitt val utan att bli kallad fanatiker eller mac-taliban.
• Den klassiska idiotkommentaren: “Om Mac är så bra, varför har windows nästan hela marknaden?”

Diskussionstråden finns här: MacWorld Forum

A post about the most common prejudices around Mac-users and why that is similar to outside perception of different minority groups. As long as you are not part of a minority it can be hard to understand the feelings of being misunderstood (or at least act as a defender for the whole group) or the need to be proud among like-minded people once in a while

iPhone

The product that so many Mac-users have been waiting for has now been launched and what a launch it was. I especially like the story about Steve Wozniak waiting in line with a specially designed t-shirt stating “the line starts here”. However, it is again very interesting to listen to people and media trying do their best of making the iPhone an irrelevant “hype thing”. There seem to be an almost Microsoft-like incentive to crack down on anything Apple is doing today with some simple arguments around “what’s new, actually, it is not exactly the first phone around”. To me that is just missing the point or perhaps a blindness of abvious flaws of current products in the market. I own a Sony Ericsson P990i and it is a phone that have all the features when reading the specifications. Fine, but it is a terrible user experience. There seem to have been little or no usability testing and the updates they send out does not seem to fix anything. To me that counts and that is what Apple seem to have a good job fixing. Just as it is a bit more fun and easy to use a Mac, I believe it is more fun and easy to use an iPhone. Apple IS good at creating a spin and a hype but unlike Microsoft the actual products they sell are great and not full of bugs. The reason for that is that Steve Jobs strive for perfection and that kind of corporate culture do count in the long run.

As a sidenote, if you want to have a look at Alfresco on the iPhone have a look here

The Apple TV isn’t so bad after all…

I recently decided to buy an Apple TV to use together with my LCD projector. I had gotten tired of using my laptop as the playback device since I always had to move cables around. Thought it would be good to have everything permanently setup for once. Earlier I had some doubts about the Apple TV since it is a bit crippled compared to other solutions out there including using an old Xbox with the hacked media center application. But buying something from Microsoft to my home seemed a little bit too much for a Mac-person like me. The main drawback of the Apple TV is of course the limited set of codecs it supports. However, that turned out to not be a big factor when I discovered VisualHub which is a great media transcoding application. It eats a lot of useful formats and has presets for converting to the Apple TV or an iPod and even adds the content to the iTunes library. So when everything is converted it is automagically synched to the harddrive of my Apple TV and is ready to watch.

The image quality is great even on my big screen. I use component cables now and the 720p PAL resolution and for HD-encoded clips it looks just great. The interface is very good looking and it show it comes from Apple which I really like. The recent updates also adds content from YouTube and it also works just fine. Even there the image quality surprised me. Not as good as the HD-clips I have of course but not that much worse than standard resolution TV sometimes.

Enterprise Content Management on Mac OS X Server

Today I have an article posted on a Swedish Macsite called www.macpro.se which focuses on professional Mac-users. It explores the concept of ECM and points out the open-source solution Alfresco as a good alternative for Mac-users. Unfortunately the big ECM-vendors in the market do not support Mac OS X on the serverside.

Idag har jag artikel om avancerade dokumenthantering publicerad på sajten www.macpro.se

Alternativen för ECM på Mac OS X Server är tyvärr inte jättemånga. Dock börjar förutsättningarna för detta komma i och med att Apple anammar fler och fler standarder. Idag går det t.ex. att köra såväl Oracle som Sybase som databasmotor och som applikationsserver för J2EE fungerar t.ex. JBoss bra. Med Apples Unix-baserade operativsystem är Macen igen aktuell även för affärskritiska lösningar som jag ser det. XServe är också klart konkurrenskraftig vad gäller pris och prestanda jämfört med t.ex. motsvarande server från Dell. Open source-plattformen Alfresco är idag ett mycket bra alternativ för de som vill ha en ECM-plattform med officiellt stöd för Mac OS X Server.

5th Avenue Apple Store

Alexandra outside the 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York City

Today we arrived in New York and the weather was just great. The sun was shining and the temperature was rather warm, like an early summer day in Sweden. We decided to take a walk in Central Park and everywhere people were relaxing and sun-bathing on the green lawns. After the park we ended up in corner at the 5th Avenue Apple Store, you know the one with just a big glass-cube with the Apple logo in it. The actual store is below the street level. It was wonderful to see the stream of people going down the glass staircase. Apple products are really popular.

Mac Pro…for me!

I have been waiting for a couple of years now. I sometimes do some small film projects like documentaries and similar movies and I do want to use the new cool features of Final Cut Studio. However, my PowerMac 867 that I bought in 2002 have really become too slow for that. So I have been longing for a new Mac with multiple processors and today I bought it. I settled for a Mac Pro with Dual Duo-core Xeon 2.66 Ghz processors with 5 Gb RAM and dual Samsung displays. I felt really good to be back on top of the required specs for the software again. I can´t wait to start playing around in Motion to create some stunning graphics.

Jag har ju brunnit för streaming på webben sedan länge och har legat bakom våra tidigare streamingprojekt som inleddes med kongressen i Borlänge 2002. Förra året var jag tyvärr på resande fot och i år så är jag ju konvalecent efter min operation så jag kan inte vara med i år heller. Jag har dock som vanligt försökt stötta med teknisk kompetens så mycket jag orkat och i år har vi lyft oss ett steg till genom att vi bytt från QuickTime Broadcaster till Wirecast från Varasoft. En underbar liten programvara som klarar multipla bitrates och flera kameror med snygga övergångar. Nytt för i år är att vi alltså mixar helt digital på en Mac Pro från Apple. Det är inte utan att jag blir lite stolt över att RFSL även år har en livestream gående från kongressgolvet och det var kul att se EU-ministern invigningstala i år. Nytt för i år är också att vi testar ett kongressystem som kallas Congressus som jag och Martin har tagit fram. Hoppas verkligen att det fungerar bra. Vore roligt att med hjälp av bra teknik kunna göra kongressen smidigare och mer demokratisk/transparent. Jaja, i år får jag alltså följa allt från sängen. Har fortfarande klara problem med att sitta upp i mer än 5-10 minuter max.

Kolla in sändningarna här:

Livesändning från RFSL:s kongress