I got a new Apple iMac G5 from Absolute Mac computer store of Germantown, Maryland.

I bought a G5 iMac in late May 2005. It had been about three and a half years since my previous computer purchase. I was very looking forward to it.



It arrived in early June.

The most impressive thing to my so far is the screen size. I bought the 20 inch screen model. In just a few days, it turned me into a total screen real estate bigot.

Now the monitors and LCD displays on my other computers seem tiny by comparison. Except at work, that is. There, my manager was kind enough to show me how to turn up the resolution on the large secondary monitor she had gotten me several months ago.

The speed is wonderful too: I leaped from 800 MHz to 2.0 GHz (2000 Hz!!) in one jump.

Two days after I turned it on for the first time, Steve Jobs announced that he was taking Apple's Mac from a PowerPC (G3, G4, G5) CPU architecture to an Intel Pentium based CPU.

Oh, well.


It is still a fantastic machine that I bought. The new Intel PCs will not even start to come out for a year.

Thanks to Apple's flexible new software tools, developers like me can generate PowerPC and Intel compatible applications at the click of a mouse. When someone does something you sort of do not like but they make it so easy to deal with that you sort of do not mind - that means they have skill.

Jobs has done everything necessary in advance to make sure that current Mac users and future Mac users land in the new world of the Mac without a bump. He has earned a lot of gratitude with this play.

The Mac development tools are high level enough that most already knew how to run on different platforms: GCC C/C++/Objective-C compiler supports a lot more than just these two processor families, so no problem there; scripting languages just do not care what CPU they are running on; and the Java that Apple licenses from Sun ran on Intel before it ran on the Mac PowerPC.

So, the only code that will need to be changed is badly-written C family programs, and perhaps some device drivers or game programs that take advantage of assembly language. Apple is taking care of device drivers to some degree, I have a hunch. That leaves some games. These days, OpenGL is what 2D and 3D games on the Mac use - either directly or through the speedy Quartz API. I doubt even video games on the Mac make much use of assembly language now.

Apple will need to do Pentium versions of their profiling and performance-measurement tools and disassembly in the debugger. Those are no big deal. Apple's programmers probably do stuff like that just to relax. :-)

I am bullish on the future of Apple and its existing customers.

Here is a del.icio.us backup - using a Ruby script.

One of many nice Code Snippets: del.icio.us backup [ruby] [sqlite] [del.icio.us] [backup].

It looks like not only a handy tool for del.icio.us "social bookmarks service users, but also a very nice example for people learning to program in Ruby.

Curious about the Ruby programming language? You can get Ruby from the site listed above, or if you have a Mac (yeah, baby!) then you have already got it.

Apple includes quite a lot of programming languages and tools with their computer operating system. Some are not installed by default, though. Especially, the fantastic Xcode IDE. Ruby is getting very popular.

So if you don't see it on your Mac already, then install latest version of Apple's free Xcode IDE. Version 2.1 at the moment. Xcode 2.0 is included on the Developer DVD that comes with Tiger (Mac OS 10.4). But, on June 6, 2005 when Steve Jobs announced at the Apple Macintosh WWDC that the Mac was going to start transitioning to using Pentium CPUs for a while, Apple instantly rolled out Xcode 2.1. Might as well get started with Xcode 2.1, or whatever the latest thing is right now. If you haven't used Xcode already, that is.

To check if ruby is on your Mac already, open the Terminal application and type: man ruby

If you have Ruby, you will get a man page for it telling the syntax of the ruby command. Note that you exit the man page by typing the letter q. It stands for quit, in this case.

You have to try this del.icio.us thing on the Internet!

Using the free del.icio.us "social bookmarking" service on the web gets you access to your most essential bookmarks anytime, anywhere.

It is so handy to be able to bookmark pages to your area on the web site, and include a little description and some "tags" - they work like "groups" in iTunes and keywords in Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape and Microsoft Word - so you can find them again quickly, by doing a search. Also, your searches are bookmark-able too!

Try it out. Click its about link in the top right corner area of the page command bar links to get more info on what you can do. Sign up next, so you can get your own bookmarks area.

Note the site publishes an RSS feed too. So you and your friends can keep up with what you are down with.

RSS feeds can be monitored and viewed using lots of programs these days: Safari 2.0 (requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later), Firefox (you must install the Sage extension, or equivalent, to subscribe/view RSS feeds I think), NetNewsWire (yay! a great Macintosh OS X application), etc.

Posting to Blogger via email

I can post to my blogspot.com weblog by sending an email.

I just discovered I can post messages to my weblog on blogspot.com by
sending an email to a special address @blogger.com - how cool!

I just started using Ranchero Software's MarsEdit application today. MarsEdit lets you post entries to your weblog using a nice Macintosh graphical user interface (is there any other kind?).

It works great with Blogger and a bunch of other weblog sites.

Another really great thing about it is that it works with Ranchero's NetNewsWire 2.0. I have been a NetNewsWire user/customer since back before 1.0 went final. The company's support is great.

Other applications are now showing how easy it is into seamlessly integrate them with NetNewsWire 2.0. Here is an Adium script written by Michael Rowe. It will insert the URL of the current headline in NetNewsWire into your current Adium chat.

Adium is a fantastic instant messaging (IM) chat program for the Macintosh. It has a very fancy, terribly cute - but not annoying - graphical user interface. What really sets Adium apart is that it supports ten different IM services at the moment. The number just keeps climbing.

You can download Adium and try it out, if you want. It is free and personally, I think it is just a great application for Mac OS X.

If you have a Wintel PC, you will have to wait until you get a Mac. I do not think you will ever see it on MS-Windows. That old operating system does not really have the capabilities that are needed for something like Adium. And of course, MS-Windows cannot use NetNewsWire either!

I have to say, I am very grateful for MarsEdit. It made quick, easy work of entering this 'blog journal entry.