I just got a comment from someone called Jack (Dunford), on my last post. That’s not remarkable in itself – I get comments from people I don’t know fairly frequently.

Checking his blog, it looks like he also attended the West Quay Apple Store opening.

That’s a pretty unlikely coincidence, if you ask me. What’s even weirder though, is that he happened to take a photo of the queue, and I happened to be in that photo! Considering there were hundreds of people at the store opening, the likelihood of someone happening to have taken a picture with me in it is really really low.

That is one seriously weird coincidence. Weird, but cool.

Here’s the full photo, and I’ve cropped it a bit and pointed me out below.

There’s also a set of lots more photos from the opening here.

Really really strange coincidence.

Oh, and in response to the comment, the OLPC would be too low powered for my needs. Not quite a MacBook with my spec. 🙂 I want to see what they’re going to do with the interface though.

My MacBook apparently got dispatched today, one day ahead of the estimated time (yay!) and the shipping estimate is now the 23rd February.

With any luck, though, the shipping will be quicker than expected too, but I won’t get my hopes up.

In any case, my MacBook is now configured and on the way (expect a rush of posts once it’s here). 😀

• MacBook 13″ white
• Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz
• 2 GB RAM 😛
• 120 GB HDD
• And all of the other specs of the MacBook

It will take 3 business days to configure (that RAM upgrade and the HDD upgrade), then 3-7 days to ship.

And I can’t wait.

Just to clarify – this will not mean that I will stop using Linux (I certainly now don’t have the money to buy a new desktop anyway 😀 ). It’s not a ‘switch’ either, it’s expanding my horizons, being proficient in all three operating systems (not only does that look impressive on a CV, it’s fun too) and playing around with new stuff.

Expect a massive load of Mac-related blog posts coming as soon as it arrives (unboxing photos included hopefully) and then the platform balance will probably return to about 45%:45%:15% (Mac:Linux:Windows). Or something like that. 🙂

And I’ll try and get that Safari bug to reproduce. Plus there shouldn’t be future Safari bugs, as I’ll actually be able to test in it!

I can’t wait also to have a play around in Xcode and compare it to MS Visual Studio (the latter being a very good product, so I hope Xcode is mind-blowingly good 😀 ). In fact, I better shut up right now or I’ll be here all night explaining what I’m going to be doing. And annoy everyone.

Just got back from Southampton (~30 miles away from where I live). The new Apple Store in the West Quay shopping centre opened today, and I managed to get my hands on an exclusive t-shirt for apparently being one of the first 1,000 people to go in!

I managed to leave without buying anything, this time. It was pretty cool to go there and be there for the opening, but it was really packed and I was queueing for over an hour to even get inside in the first place!

While there, I also discovered a rendering bug with this site under Safari (which doesn’t show up in Konqueror), so I’ll have to take a look at that and hopefully get it fixed!

UPDATE: I can’t seem to see the same issue using BrowsrCamp to get screenshots, so I have no idea what caused the bug. In case it shows up again, the sidebar on the left seemed to have the text appear twice – once on top of the existing text, so you couldn’t read it. Anyone else see this/not see this with Safari?

UPDATE #2: This bug is really nasty. I’ve been unable to get it to consistently happen, so I’m afraid I’m unable to fix it. If anyone else comes on this site on Safari and sees this bug, please screenshot it, tell me as much as you can what you were doing when it happened and send me the information. Thanks.

FireBug is an awesome Firefox extension for web developers.

The FireBug developers have just put out a 1.0 release and it includes loads of cool features. There’s one that I just have to share, though, and it is awesome.

If you use inspect to select an element on the page, you can then double-click on bits of the CSS in the right hand pane, and get this, edit them in real time! That means you can literally play around with how a website looks in real time and it’s really useful when you want to make a CSS tweak to something. You just use FireBug to preview it in real time and adjust your edits to make it just right, then you can tweak the actual file. No page reloading needed (or worse Ctrl-F5 to clear the cache).

Download and install it from the official Mozilla add-ons page.

Sorry for the lack of postings recently, I’ve just got back online following a nasty period of ISP downtime. Sucks, huh.

You’ve undoubtedly read this all over the place already as I’m so late to pointing this out, but Apple have released some UK-centric versions of their now famous (and much spoofed) Mac guy and PC guy ads.

While I think the formula is getting a bit tired, the UK audience for the most part haven’t been exposed to these ads, so I think they actually work really well. Actually, I’m quite surprised that most of the ads are virtually word-for-word the same as their US counterparts in places, except for one unique one (Tentacle) and liberally sprinkled British colloquialisms.

Interesting to watch, anyway, though – if only just to see how they differ from the US versions. Watch them here.

On a completely unrelated note – how is it that when you come back from a couple of days and you get almost literally drowned in feeds? I think I’ve just about caught up…

I haven’t mentioned this yet publicly, but I’ve decided that I’m not going to wait for Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) to come out before I buy a Mac.

The signs seem to point to a bit of a later release of it anyway, and I’m itching to try stuff out; I just can’t wait that long!

The bottom line is – within two months, I should be triple platform. And it’s going to be so cool.

Plus, Apple’s educational discounts mean that I will be able to afford the Leopard upgrade anyway, with the money I save for being a student. Can’t wait.

One more footnote – I’m getting 2 GB of RAM (the max the MacBook can take) and with any luck, a hard drive upgrade too.

I’m pretty disappointed about no news of Leopard and for the first time in a long time, no iLife/iWork updates at the Macworld 2007 San Fransisco keynote.

It was all iPhone, Apple TV and all that. Yeah, pretty cool – but not what I was really looking for. Apple may have just as well gone to CES, because there was literally no Mac stuff in the whole keynote (I didn’t watch it, but I was following the MacRumours live feed). And I wanted a 10.5 date…

I am pretty disappointed that we still only have the oh-so-slightly vague ‘Spring’ as Leopard’s release date. Oh well…

Mozilla have released Firefox 2.0.0.1, which contains some important security updates and a couple of other fixes, plus official support for Vista (it worked fine in RC1 for me anyway, but now it’s officially supported).

To upgrade, go to Help > Check for updates (running as an administrator) and restart the browser when it’s done.

If anyone wants to use BoxCheck (a Firefox extension that allows you to shift-click to select multiple tick boxes on web forms) on Firefox 2.0, I’ve updated it to make it compatible.

Note that this is hacked – all I’ve done is change the supported versions in the script to work with 2.0. It works for me, but if it eats your Firefox, don’t come complaining (execute FF with -safe-mode to remove it if it kills it).

You will have to add me to the list of allowed sites to install software, but don’t worry, it’s pure BoxCheck just with a hacked install file (you can verify for yourself, just Save Target As the .xpi, rename to .zip and explore it).

Tutorial on how to hack your favourite FF 1.5.x extensions to work with FF 2.0 coming soon.