2008 February » Life of Andrew

Free Music (or Free Chocolate)

Feb 132008

NestlÃ© may catch some flack for pushing milk substitutes on developing countries and of having used forced labour on Cocoa farms in the recent past, but to give them credit they really know how to throw a promotion. At the moment, marked packs of NestlÃ© confectionary brands contain a code to get a free song at the iTunes store.

The great thing about this promotion is that it even extends to things like KitKats which cost less than the $1.79 iTunes charges for a song (I just bought one on special for 99 cents). This is an offer that is impossible to pass up for anyone who likes music or chocolate.

Supposedly the offer is only good for 5 songs per iTune account, ~~but nothing seems to actually enforce this~~* – I just purchased my 6th song. I recommend using this service to buy only upbeat exciting music in the hope that this will help burn off the huge number of extra calories you will be consuming from the chocolate bars.

* UPDATE: Sadly, this hole seems to have been plugged – now iTunes won’t let you redeem more that 5 codes.

CSS Animations and Transforms

Computer No Responses »

Feb 132008

I have been trying out the new nightly builds of WebKit, the open HTML rendering engine that powers Safari and a small host of other browsers. WebKit’s claim to fame has always been its speed and relative lack of bloat, but it is starting to get some quite interesting features.

This entry talks about (and demonstrates) two of these news features – Animations and Transforms.

This cow is here for a reason

Mac OS X Version 10.5.2

Computer No Responses »

Feb 122008

I just installed the latest patch for Mac OS X on my MacBook. It fixes a whole host of things, almost none of which I ever found to be a problem.

First the bad news – the update take a very long time. First there is 5 minutes of watching a progress bar (no problems here), then there is a reboot and 5 minutes of watching an alarmingly blank screen, than another reboot and then another 5 minutes of blank screen before at last being dumped unexpectedly back at your desktop. This is not quite the Apple experience I signed up for when I bought my MacBook.

The good news is that 10.5.2 seems great so far. A few cosmetic issues have been fixed and the desktop seems a little snappier, probably due to the new graphics driver that is included.

Western Culture; reports of its decline are greatly exaggerated

Culture No Responses »

Feb 102008

There are some who say that Western Culture is dying – slowly being trampled by influx of other, stronger cultures and the general apathy of the an uneducated public blind to the artistic traditions that put us where we are today. These people point to the unwelcome resurrection of Rocky, Rambo, The Bionic Woman, and American Gladiators (can The Solid Gold Dancers be far behind?) as portents of the coming fall.

Others look more closely, and find the flowers of legitimate art growing the cracks in the pavement of mediocrity, in the form of an opera based on the 1986 movie “The Fly”.

NeoOffice

Computer 3 Responses »

Feb 062008

Since the hard disk crash a few months ago, I had not bothered to reinstall a word processor. Most of the writing I do these days is destined for this web site and a simple text editor suits my needs better. However, last week I needed to do some work on a word document, so I decided to take another look at NeoOffice.

NeoOffice is a unofficial MacOSX port of the famous OpenOffice suite of software. Its claim to fame is excellent Microsoft Office compatibility, both in reading and writing documents, and in the general look and feel of the product. All of the tool bars from Microsoft’s much ~~loved~~purchased product are there in much the same places.

Older versions of NeoOffice had some fairly serious problems, notably that they were very slow. This newer version is actually quite snappy, even spreadsheet graphs (a major problem area) are usably fast. It is now much better integrated with the MacOSX desktop as well, and actually looks like a normal Mac application to a large degree.

I think NeoOffice will be added to my list of applications to reinstall after my next hard disk crash.