Rui CarmoBrought work home. Rather than spending all weekend hunched over my 12" Toshiba M100 and scrolling sideways to fit the humongous network diagrams I'm working with, I'm using it via Remote Desktop on my 20" iMac (still the G4 - I expect the new one to arrive next week).
It's interesting to note that Visio works beautifully over RDP (even to the point of doing anti-aliased lines, fonts, transparencies, the works) while PowerPoint crawls, rendering the same images miserably as if the screen was 16-color (I have tried it in thousands and millions, and it behaves the same). I will be using PowerPoint 2004 at the earliest opportunity, as soon as all the illustrations are done (even then, I've already noticed that enhanced metafiles do not render that well on Mac OS X - Microsoft definitely needs to improve that).
A nice thing about Virtue that makes it trivial to jump between Mac OS X and a full-screen RDP session is its active window tracking - the only downside is that I sometimes find myself yanked from Visio to another virtual desktop as an IM session fires up or Software Update takes it upon itself to remind me that I have the new security update pending.
In the meantime, news has been less than interesting, but here are a few tidbits:
- Cursor eyecandy (and iLife themed icons, if that's your cup of tea).
- Dvorak re-hashes the "Google Browser" meme. It's been blogged to death already (including the recent Google hire), but I guess Dvorak is simply trying to be hip.
- I cannot believe that people would believe a car could get a virus via Bluetooth. Most likely there's some kind of bug in the dash computer's firmware, and some clueless soul who believes in Symbian viruses (another myth, no matter how many proof of concept virii are hashed out) connected the wrong dots. This sort of thing is obviously being actively divulged by the people who would sell you a useless anti-virus in the first place, and just goes to show we still haven't learned our lesson with PCs and PDAs - instead of fixing the bugs, we try to use yet more software to prevent them from being exploited.
- Which reminds me - Microsoft is going to restrict Software Update, which is a surefire way to guarantee that the next Windows worm will have much longer-lasting effects. This has got to be a marketing-driven initiative, even though their profits went through the roof last year. Check out the chart and the map on that page. 12.000 employees during the next 20 years? Wow.
- MIDI bagpipes. What will they think of next?
- The Economist debunks WiMax. Heck, I could have written that.