Jonathan Norman

I have a powerbook G4 and I was looking at upgrading the RAM from 2x512MB sticks to 2x1GB sticks. I went to Crucial’s website and found this, It is 1GB DDR333 laptop RAM for just under £60. I go and have a look on apples website to see if they sell upgrades for my laptop and they do. Here is the 1GB DDR333 RAM that Apple sell for my laptop for £210. That is three and a half times the price of Crucial. Do they really have people buying this ram for that extreme price when they can get the RAM and someone to fit it for less than half the price.

In yesterday’s post about Apple and Microsoft I added a reddit button to the bottom as I thought people might be interested in that comment. Today I removed the reddit button from the post and added a plugin to wordpress that allows me to add reddit buttons to posts that I want to and will automatically show the reddit button if someone has submitted it.

On the 7th of Augest Apple released their new Aluminum iMac with the top end spec being powered a 2.8Ghz Intel Core2 Extreme X7900 processor. This is excellent for the performance as the Intel Extreme processors can run a faster front side bus and higher multiplier than their Quad and Duo counterparts that have limited multipliers and FSBs. This is all well and good but the thing that bugs me is that Intel only released this processor yesterday (23rd of August), Almost 3 weeks after it was released to Apple. This means that competitors of Apple such as Dell, HP and Sony have been unable to use the X7900 processor in their high end range. Computer enthusiasts have also been unable to get this processor and because it was only released yesterday to everyone else their is currently no place in the UK that sells it, This is probably the same situation globally. It seems that Intel has done apple a favor by allowing them to use a processor before it’s been released to it’s competitors.

In the past year both Apple and Microsoft have been getting on my nerves with their attitude. They seem to be more interested in making profit than high quality products that people would want to buy.

Microsoft are pushing people to upgrade to Vista, their new operating system, by not releasing DirectX10 for windows XP meaning that if people want to play the latest games they have to have a vista computer. Microsoft have also caused confusion not only for it’s general users but the computer experts as well by releasing several different versions of the same OS. With Windows XP you had home edition or the professional edition if you wanted extra security and network abilities, There is also the 64bit version of Windows XP Professional for those who needed a lot of memory or used 64bit programs but this was only used by the high end market. Vista has about 5 different versions and that is without going into the different types of ways you get it. These are just the versions for the desktop or workstation, they probably have just as many versions for the servers. I think it would be so much easier for everyone if they had one OS for desktops and workstations and another OS for servers.

Apple have been annoying me with they iPod / iPhone because they seem to have put in a lot of resources into this instead of concentrating on their computers. Apple used to be mainly a computer company as shown by their name that was Apple Computers Inc. before they changed it to Apple Inc. after they starting making shinny things that you can put in your pocket. The development of the iPhone has pushed back the release of the new OS called Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and as a result OS X 10.4 Tiger has gone to subversion 11 instead of stopping at the subversion of 9 like all the other releases of OS X have.

I have has an account with my friend over at www.idleentity.net where I hosted my websites before I moved over to my own server. I was thinking about clearing all of the websites that I still have on his server and leaving my account clean. He also had this idea and last night we archived my accounts and copied them over to my laptop so that he can close my accounts on his server. The only website I still host on his server was www.amiapoil-burmese.co.uk so last night I closed it. This morning at 9am GMT I moved the files over to my server and pointed the domains to it so now www.amiapoil-burmese.co.uk and it’s various translations are hosted on my server with no problems. In other new a new version Amiapoil Burmese will be coming up in the next few months that will be built from the ground up.

I’ve been working still on my laptop to day and I have managed to get mod_ruby onto apache without apache crashing or failing to start. I had to download and compile my own MySQL install so that I could compile PHP with MySQL so I now have the latest Apache with the latest Ruby, PHP and MySQL. I have also installed HP Linux Image and Printing drivers onto my mac allowing me to use my old HP P1000 at 1200dpi. All that it left to do is to get rid of the 403 errors I get from ruby with apache.

I have been upgrading the software that I use on my laptop to the latest versions by compiling them myself. Instead of using Apache httpd 1.3 that comes with OSX I compiled and installed Apache httpd 2.2.4 and have just got it working without any problems. My next task will be to get it to work with Ruby and then PHP. PHP will be harder as it has to be compiled with MySQL if I want database support, which I do. Oh and I also seem to have IPv6 working as well 🙂

Something I have been working on is an installer for Mac OSX for the Tomcat JSP server. After some work I’ve managed to get it so that it installs the server into the correct area and start it for you. It then opens Safari to show you that it is working. I have asked Apache if I can develop this more and then allow people to download it from my server or possibly a mirror. I am still working on this installer as the server does not start when the computer starts but has to be started manually.

I’m sorry for the server being down since Wednesday but I was on holiday and unable to fix it remotely. There was a power cut that forced the server to restart without closing the programs correctly so when it booted again it thought that the web server and other services where still running and didn’t start them.