If you grew up in the 80′s, go try your hand at the 80′s Music Quiz… I knew most of them, but in this format, it’s harder than it looks.

So, I’ve upgraded my TiBook to Panther, and, in a word, woah.

My machine now runs, easily, 30% faster. I didn’t really see that on Cynthia’s Pismo or Matthew’s iMac DV, but my machine is definitely snappier and more responsive. Apps start faster, menus pop, the whole user experience seems smoother.

There are a number of sweet things about the upgrade, functionality-wise, to love as well. Expose is very cool. The speed at which preview renders and walks PDFs is amazing. The new Finder is very clean, usable, and navigates networks much easier than Jaguar.

There are tons of small touches that I continue to find as time goes on. For example, the volume-up and volume-down keys work much better than they did under Jag. Closing the system preferences window actually quits the app (which is usually what is intended). Most “you don’t have access to do that” dialogs now include “authenticate” buttons, letting me temporarily authenticate as a user with higher access, instead of having to log out and log in.

Overall, my experience with the new OS has been very positive. I’ve seen the reports floating around the ‘net about various problems that people are encountering, but that’s to be expected. It was the same with Jag, and with Cheetah before that. All I know is that Microsoft is demoing their new OS (code-name: Longhorn) this week, it won’t ship until 2006 according to most estimates, and it’s still behind. By then, OS X will be another 2 or 3 major revs down the road.

Finally got around to posting pictures from our camping trip a week ago.

We went to Tyler State Park and spent the night; did the tent, the campfire, fishing, hiking, the whole deal. The kids had a good time (Matthew commented that “Nature sure is dangerous!”). We didn’t catch anything fishing, but both the boys got pretty good at casting. We went on a nature hike and saw lots of trees, plants, and bugs.

Two changes before our next trip: more lanterns and an air mattress. The ground is really, really hard.

Panther has been set loose!

My copy came in via Fedex about 2:30 today, but bounced back to the depot when no one answered the doorbell. So I had to drop by and pick it up at 5:00, still a full 3 hours before the general public got to stand in line for it at the Apple store. I decided not to do that again this year like I did for Jaguar last year.

It’s currently being installed on the kid’s Grape iMac, we’ll see how it goes before I do the install on Cynthia’s pismo or my TiBook. I’m going to have to clean both of our machines a little first, anyway, to open up enough disk space to install it.

This past couple of weeks has been really busy. Both at home and at work. Hopefully over the next few days I can get back on a semi-regular schedule of posting.

We’re working on a prototype at work, building an educational offering centered around advanced development techniques in Domino development. We ultimately would like to deliver this on DVD, but are doing the prototype of one segment of material to see if we’ll be able to pull it off with the time and budget we’ve decided we can afford. If not, we shelve it for the time being.

At home, we’ve been dealing with the bug that’s been going around. The whole family’s had it at one point or another except me, and I guess it’s fortunate that I’ve been working so much; I haven’t been around enough to catch it from anyone else. I think I missed it, we’ll see.

Dad sent me this link to a fairly detailed history of computing: Computer History

Another interesting link contains a number of historical documents in Computer Science, including such gems as the introductory papers of a number of programming languages (Pascal, C, etc.) and other goodies such as Flowcharting templates and the patent for ENIAC.

Apple posted their 2003 4th quarter results today, and although consensus on the street was $0.07/share, they blew the doors off, nearly doubling that to $0.12. The stock is sitting at close to a 2 year high (although I read it fell a bit in after-hours trading). Almost all indicators for the company were up: Revenue, Mac shipments, iPod shipments (up 140% over last year!). And the company is firing on all cylinders: G5′s: shipped. New Powerbooks: shipped. iTunes for Windows: Look for that tomorrow. Panther: Next Friday.

Speaking of which, the DOW is above 9,800… if it makes it to 10k (which I think it will by December), it’ll be a major watermark for the economy. Optimism seems to be picking up, despite the efforts of the doom-and-gloom crowd. I know unemployment is still high (comparatively speaking), but let’s see what happens over the next 6 months. Something tells me that the Dems want the economy to remain in the toilet up until about, oh, November 2004, but I think we’ll see it continue to rebound. Won’t that just stink?

For them. Not for the rest of us.

For those of us who can’t afford a Segway HT: Building a Balancing Scooter

Forget the Grand Canyon display, I found a new contender for drool-worthy display, the “5 over 5″ by 9X Media.

The FAQ talks about Macintosh support, but says you need a GIII or greater. I assume they mean G3.

$155,799 isn’t too much for a display, is it?

OK, so now SunnComm decides they won’t sue the Grad Student that located the shift key after all.

In an abrupt reversal, SunnComm Technologies said Friday that it would not sue a Princeton University graduate student who had published a paper that describes how to bypass CD copy protection technology simply by pressing the Shift key.

SunnComm had angrily assailed Princeton doctoral student John “Alex” Halderman just a day before, claiming that his academic paper was “at best, duplicitous and, at worst, a felony.” The company had pledged to file a civil suit against Halderman under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and lobby federal prosecutors to indict him on criminal charges.

…

Since Halderman’s paper appeared, SunnComm’s shares have slipped precipitously, losing about $10 million in value. The company’s stock appears on the Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board and was trading at $0.109 on Friday morning.

Well, how big of them. The fact that their stock dropped like a rock since the public found out their “technology” was so frail had nothing to do with their decision, did it?