Tao of Mac

Nov 10th 2004 · 2 min read

Slight Overload

The upcoming release is a wish come true - I stopped by #growl late yesterday and fetched the latest trunk, which has bubble-like bezels, priority-based coding for notifications and a much improved plugin (so much so that I ditched ). I was also pointed towards a nice clean bit of code that might come in handy. My thanks to all who put up with me (I seldom use IRC, but it's come in handy of late).

I'm preparing to upgrade most of my home boxes in one way or another, after having installed Core 3 on my yesterday after "close of business". Today I took 15 minutes to drop in Thunderbird ( still sucks and crashes when used with my server), mounted my NTFS partitions, used apt to get a couple of essentials, rebooted to make sure I could access everything, and spent the entire afternoon working inside .

I was able to do everything I needed (mostly mail, project management using our internal web-based tools and stuff) except editing a Visio file (which I did via to another machine) and scheduling a meeting (for which I used Web Access inside that session because works better).

I also skipped the internal streaming video coverage of the launch (incidentally, Russ, you can go in to one of our stores here and get a handset for months now...), but I think David got to use his to excellent effect.

But back to : It's still far from perfect, but it's getting better. As soon as I have time to install Wi-Fi drivers and figure out Bluetooth support, I might even start doing major documents inside it (so far I'm just doing reviews and commentary, which is the bulk of my current work). True hackers would have spent hours trying to get everything to work at once, but I take this sort of thing 15 minutes at a time.

After all, it's not like I have time to waste - I only spent the afternoon running because I already knew I could work properly inside it (I've been editing documents with it at home for a couple of weeks now), and the "15-minute attention span" is my personal threshold for declaring something usable (i.e., if I don't give up on it and go back to a tried and true approach, it's probably pretty damn good).

Which reminds me, if anyone has any hints on activating the 's Bluetooth under Core 3 (or 2, provided you also use a 2.6 kernel), drop me a line. It is far more urgent than Wi-Fi for me, since I need to work via next week. And yes, the stock kernel has toshiba_acpi, and I've read everything about BlueZ on 2.4 series kernels before dinner.