Originally published at http://dan.makovec.net/blog. Please leave any comments there.

Can somebody please tell me why the fuck in 2007 can I still not send an MMS message from my Dopod 838pro on 3 to Brian’s Samsung E250 on Virgin/Optus?  I mean, seriously now, has MMS been abandoned like WAP in favor of expensive 3G video calling or something?

I just wanted to send a fucking photo of a special lightbulb that blew out on our IXL Tastic for him to pick up from the shops on the way home so he could see what it looks like.  How hard could it be?

Originally published at http://dan.makovec.net/blog. Please leave any comments there.

Just installed Leopard on my iMac last night, and to be honest it’s a bit meh so far.  There have been some small improvements, but surely nothing that required a dot upgrade?

I bought it for Time Machine, which I’m sure will pay for itself after a while - lazy as I am at doing backups and maintaining scripts to tar and untar archive files.

I notice some minor improvements with Mail.app - for my purposes, iCal’s Todos showing up in Mail is nice, since I hardly ever look at iCal.  One neat feature (to me anyway) they’ve done in Mail is a change to the way multiple messages are selected.  If you click on a message and drag up or down, you select the other surrounding messages.  If you drag left or right, it realises you want to move the messages and groups them together to drag.

The old Tiger Mail grouped them no matter which way you dragged, so you had to shift-drag to select multiples.  The “Move to XXX Again” context menu is also nice.  I have an enormous IMAP folder hierarchy and it’s a bitch to drag lots of messages between various folders, so after doing it the first time, the above menu item gives you a nice shortcut.  New keyboard shortcuts (apple-1 to apple-8) let you jump through folders easily.

The most controversial “feature” is the new desktop translucent menu-bar.  Depending on the picture you have on in the background, this can make viewing and using the menu extremely difficult.  This is a rare slip up for Apple, who normally pride themselves on good UI usability.  I never got the whole transparent thing, but if it’s there then there should at least be an option to turn it off.  I know I’m not alone in suggesting this.  If they wanted to conserve desktop space, they could have made it an auto-hide menu (a la the Amiga c. 1985).  As far as I can tell though, this new transparent menubar is just wank for wank’s sake, and actually reduces productivity by making the damn thing harder to read.
Oh yeah, they’ve also finally done away with the rounded corners at the top of the screen.  I kind of miss them, but they really were a relic of the old CRT macs. and looked a little dated.  I’m not really a fan of the new folder icons either (they’re pretty chunky), but I’m sure I’ll get used to them.

Finder has had a serious makeover and now works the way I thought it always should have (when it doesn’t lock up).  Coverflow view is kinda cute but a bit gimmicky.  Accessing network machines is now far more logical than before though so quite an improvement.  Smart folders (a la Tiger’s Mail.app and iTunes) are also a welcome, if overdue, addition.

So, would I upgrade all my computers to Leopard?  Probably not.  But this upgrade’s cheaper than Tiger was (especially with work paying for it), and the built in backup makes it a good idea for a work machine if you don’t already have a decent backup system in place.

Originally published at http://dan.makovec.net/blog. Please leave any comments there.

For our move to Brisbane in April, B had to take a bit of a punt.  Take on a reasonably well paid 6 month contract with big bank “X”, with the possibility that it wouldn’t be extended beyond November.  Actually, he’d originally been offered it as a permanent job, but when the paperwork came out, it had been changed to the aforementioned 6 monther because of a “staff hiring freeze” while the company was undergoing restructure.

Now its the end of October, and his contract officially runs out next Friday.  Bank X need him to stay on and carry out the work, but can’t guarantee his employment beyond another 4 weeks.

Fortunately for B, he had foreseen this problem in September, after repeatedly asking his managers for an indication as to the likelihood of a contract extension.  Upon getting no firm answers, he did what any sane person would do, faced with uncertain employment over the Summer: he started job hunting.  At first it was by scouring through Seek, then by contacting agents.

Now, upon asking around the office at Bank X, he discovers that staff morale is low. The hiring freeze in place for most of the year has meant that most staff in his department are on contracts, and most of those contracts are running out within the next few weeks.  The staff are nervous, and many of them have now also started looking for work.  Some of them are even off to job interviews with other companies today.  Management is not happy, because they feel that they’re being deserted en masse, and are now up for significant work disruptions, re-hiring and training costs.

There’s a blindingly obvious moral to this story: if you want to keep your staff, give them some certainty of their employment.

Everybody knows that the arse drops out of the job market mid November and doesn’t pick up until late February.  If you’ve got employee contracts coming to an end over the Summer, decide by the beginning of October whether to extend them into the next year or not.  Then tell the staff to give them a sense of certainty.

Nobody wants to be out of work for 3 months - particularly those with families and/or mortgages.  Hence, if your staff don’t know your intentions by October, they’re going to start jumping ship in droves.  You’ll be left to pick up the pieces over the lead up to Christmas (at which time, the smart permies will already have booked their leave).
So what about B?  Well, as of last week, he’d been offered a permanent role, on higher salary, with Bank X’s arch-rival, Bank Y.  He’s arranged to start 2 weeks after he leaves Bank X, the departure date conveniently coinciding with our moving into our newly bought house.

Originally published at http://dan.makovec.net/blog. Please leave any comments there.

Google’s Desktop search for OS X is pretty neat - it lets you search documents by content rather than just by filename (a limitation of Tiger’s Spotlight).  It’s also pretty sexy how it remembers web page content from firefox.

All that aside - it just crashed my 6 week old iMac.  Not happy.  I was doing my work as normal (Mail, Emacs, Firefox), and the computer started slowing down.  I immediately suspected GDS - since it was the only program I’d installed on the computer in 2 weeks.  Eventually, the screen stopped responding altogether, so I hopped on the laptop and ssh’d in to run top.  I saw 1.8G of my 2G of RAM was in use - 1.2GB of it was being used by GDS alone.  Straight over to John Gruber’s blog, where I read up on all the files that were installed by GDS, and removed them by hand, then killed the processes.  Unfortunately it was too late for the GUI, which by now was so twisted up in swap that it just couldn’t recover, so I had to hard reboot.

This was only the second time I’d ever hard rebooted this machine, the first time being yesterday, 2 days after I’d first installed GDS.  Not hard to guess who the trouble maker was on the system.

So thanks but no thanks Google.  I’ll stick to Quicksilver + Spotlight for now.

Originally published at http://dan.makovec.net/blog. Please leave any comments there.

Is it just me, or is Mind Meister one of the best web 2.0 apps ever?

This is the first such app I’m not just considering paying for, but am actually paying for.  I’ve always found mind mapping tools (e.g. Freemind) useful - but this one takes the whole tool concept one step further with its real-time team collaboration features.  It allows us, a work-at-home, geographically dispersed startup, to collaborate on ideas and actually get them documented in a logical and centralised fashion in a way that wikis just don’t allow. Plus it’s so easy to use that the learning curve is pretty much non-existent.

Keep up the great work, guys!

Originally published at http://dan.makovec.net/blog. Please leave any comments there.

Just downloaded Joost (www.joost.com) and decided to give it a spin.

My prediction is that this will do for TV what Skype did for the telephone. Considering it’s been public for under a week, what they’ve done is simply phenomenal, both with respect to technology and content.

Definitely give this a go if you have broadband…

Originally published at http://dan.makovec.net/blog. Please leave any comments there.

It’s no wonder I love reading The Register - their sense of humor is just down in the gutter enough for me.  This article has a couple more wanky terms

Originally published at http://dan.makovec.net/blog. Please leave any comments there.

I was just reading The Register’s article about a prisoner who had his jail sentence extended for wanking in his cell without covering himself up with a blanket, when it occurred to me how many terms for masturbation there are.

Just in the one article, we had:

And my favorite (which you probably have to be a sysadmin to appreciate):

Originally published at http://dan.makovec.net/blog. Please leave any comments there.

Just popped into Sydney today to do some server maintenance and do my taxes.

All I can say is: wow! I’d wondered over the past month or so if the move to Brisbane was a good idea -  mainly owing to the fact that I’m still stuck working at home and now know even fewer people than in Sydney.

I can happily confirm that getting out of Sydney was the best decision we could have made. I have reached this conclusion after, in my first 6 hours here, I:

- Was delayed in the plane in a holding pattern over Sydney airport for 30 mins

- Watched the thick brown flu inducing smog haze that covers the entire city from the comfort of said plane at 10:30am
- Got stuck in traffic for another 30 minutes between the airport and the city (it’s a 6km journey), listening to my driver belittle me for moving to such a backwater as Brisbane.
- Upon hailing another cab from town, was told by a taxi driver that we would go his way to Mascot and not the way I want, meaning I’d have to lug my equipment across a 7 lane road to the datacentre, because it’s less convenient to him to go the way I wanted.
- Was rejected by two taxi drivers back from Mascot to the city, because the fare wasnt’ big enough for them, so having to walk to the train station, loaded up with computer equipment.

- Missed the train back to town because the ticket machine didn’t accept dollar coins, and the ticket office was so far behind the gates that the person there couldn’t see me to let me through until i jumped the gate and promptly got accused of trying to dodge my fare

- Was abused by a turning driver for daring to continue walking across the road after the little red light started blinking as I got half way across on my way back to the hotel

Ah, Sydney!  What a hole.  Back home with my babies tomorrow night!

Originally published at http://dan.makovec.net/blog. Please leave any comments there.

What an interesting few weeks it’s been since arriving in Brisbane.  Work has been interesting for reasons that if I disclosed here in too much detail, I’d be updating my CV.  Suffice to say that people can really surprise you and you should never think you know anybody.  The last couple of months of work have been hell on Earth, 50+ hour weeks 7 days a week.  I’m definitely looking forward to putting Q2 2007 behind me.  I’m flying down to HQ on Monday for a 2 day meeting, after which hopefully we can get over the past 2 months and concentrate on a new project that I think will really take off for us.  Vroom vroom.

Meanwhile, tonight I’m in Adelaide.  It’s Dad’s birthday on the 30th, so I thought I’d surprise him with something a little different.  Graz told me about a BMW advanced driver training class being held this weekend out at Mallala, and I thought Dad might get a kick out of spinning somebody else’s $140,000 M3 Coupe around a racetrack for a day.  Graz kindly organized the whole thing about a month ago, and today the three of us turned up for a bit of fun in zero degree temperatures.  Deb pulled the wool over his eyes and got him all prepared for the day while keeping the whole thing a secret, and I came up with some ridiculous excuse to get Dad to drive me out to the middle of nowhere at 7am this Saturday morning. Nothing twigged until I had to finally tell him what we were about to spend the day doing when he caught a glimpse of the dozen 325i’s and M3’s all lined up in a neat little row in front of him as he drove into the race course.

Tomorrow, Nadia and Nanna are coming around for an afternoon lunch to round out the weekend before I hop back on a plane Monday.  No time for visiting friends this weekend unfortunately - this has literally become a flying visit!

Back up in Brizzy, we got a new puppy on Thursday night.  Casper is an eight week old Golden Retriever/Standard Poodle cross, looking slightly more Retriever at the moment and cute as a button.  Brian’s playing solo daddy for the weekend, dealing with the separation anxiety induced whimpering and “little accidents” on the back deck of the house, but over all they’re getting along fine.  Once I’m back on Wednesday, I’ll be working from home for the next few months so I’m sure I’ll get plenty of Casper contact time.  He’ll make a welcome break from the computer every couple of hours and give me some company during the day.  I’ll get some photos online soon (doesn’t everybody do that these days with a new child/puppy?)
Yes, I know, I’m terrible - never writing to anybody.  I seem to live my life lurching from one crisis to the next, never leaving enough time for a phone call or email, even though I’m always thinking of my friends back in Adelaide, London, Sydney and around the world.  The good news is that we’ve settled into Brisbane very nicely and the lifestyle is certainly far more relaxed than we had down in NSW.  If it wasn’t for the current work crisis, I’d be spending more time lounging around in my hammock and talking to everybody.  Hopefully soon I’ll be in that situation!

So yes, we’re alive and well.  Still living on the edge of nervous breakdowndom but definitely enjoying it a bit more.  More to follow!