Recent blog entries for mitsue

About a week and a half ago I go my hands on a shiny new Macbook pro and after a week of tinkering and getting used to this beastie I must say that Windows looks like an ever bigger kludge then it did before. I mean WOW, an interface that actually works, certainly a step beyond Windows and even KDE, which I've used in the past. Perhaps the biggest plus is that things just work, without having to spend extra effort on figuring out obscure error messages that tell you nothing or changing a gazillion settings just to do simple task. The application installation is also very neat, where each app. is a folder and installing a program with few exceptions is nothing more then drag & drop. Uninstall is equally simple, just delete the folder. Another very neat feature is the spotlight search that allows you to very quickly through virtually any kind of document and has little if no delay in getting results, very neat. Lots of other neat things as well that would take too long to describe, so just need to try it for yourself.

As always there are a few downsides, for example a lack of good exit browser such as ExifPro on Windows and Photohop is still ran via Rosetta emulation so it is admittedly sluggish even on a 2.16Ghz computer with a gig of ram. Same is true for Microsoft Office, so I try to use OpenOffice as much as possible for which there are Intel binaries available. It'd be also nice to have valgrind giving me access to a complete development environment, but hopefully that is something that will be rectified soon.

Overall however, I am very pleased with the change, certainly eliminated a number annoyances such as a daily virus scan, weekly security patch reboots and a pile of other Windows nonsense. So, I guess that makes me another happy Apple customer.

Generics in Delphi?

While I was looking for something else, I came across this interesting piece, about how to create and use template (generics) in Delphi. It is fascinating all the ways you can hack Delphi to get what you want. Before anyone from the C++ world complains about the use of ``preprocessor defines'' to simulate templates, it ought to be noted that the first version of Visual C++ purporting to support templates actually used preprocessor macros to simulate templates.

Grab your Powerbook and head on out to a local amusement park. Thanks to the Apple Motion Sensor (AMS) built in to the 2005+ line of Powerbooks, there's all sorts of fun to be had with it in meatspace. A fabulous exploration of the AMS on kernelthread.com digs into the nitty gritty details of the underlying technology and provides some fascinating applications that play with the AMS. The Orientation Visualizer "displays a 3D image of a PowerBook 15 that appears to 'hang' in space. ... The orientation of the on-screen image is a real-time approximation of the computer's physical orientation."