As you all know, I switched to Mac about a year ago. It was really great to have a fast machine with real Unix underpinnings to run Lilypond and various build script for dealing with my sheet music archive. When OS 10.5 (Leopard) was released last November, I upgraded right away. Unfortunately, Apple made some far reaching changes that caused several programs to stop working - among those Lilypond. Not to worry, I thought. These things sort themselves out pretty quickly. There will be an update soon ...

... or not. None of the current developers of Lilypond seem to use Mac, so we poor users were all left in the dark. And we waited, and waited, and waited ... Finally someone realised that we could run the PowerPC version unde Rosetta emulation. This worked, but it ran way too slow. Until finally ...

This only concerns those few who have legitimate user accounts on my site.

When the web host I use upgraded the PHP version on the servers a few weeks ago, it suddenly became impossible to log in to my site. Well I finally found a fix for that, so everything is back to normal again.

I started my computer life as a Mac aficionado. Well, actually it started before there even were Macs or PCs, but that is ancient history. Anyhow, for various reasons I switched to Windows about the time when Apple released System 8. I have glanced occasionally at what Apple has been up to with it's various versions of OS X.

I finally caved in a few days ago and got myself a MacBook Pro. And, by golly, is that a nice machine or what? The Unix underpinnings makes it excellent for me as a web developer. And it has Textmate, the greatest text editor ever (yes, even better than emacs!) I have some relearning to do here, but so far it seems like it was a good decision to make the switch.

I encountered a funny scam here in Tenerife that seems to be pretty popular. As you might know, there are a lot of electronics stores here with pretty aggressive sales people. A new way of getting tourists to buy terribly overpriced stuff they don't need seem to go like this:

You are grabbed on the street by someone who wants to look at your digital camera and wants to know if "you have an infrared or regular memory card". You go, "huh? well, a regular one, I guess" and the person drags you into the store "just to show you the difference, no need to buy anything." After complimenting you on your excellent camera the person (or persons) hook it up to a tv, snaps a few pictures to your own memory card, and shows the images that looks really awful - murky and fuzzy. He then swaps to the "infrared card", repeats the process, and - lo and behold! - the images are bright and clear.

I found this recently while searching for vibration damped hard disk mountings. It's the smoking and drinking front panel attachment!

Don't you all feel that this is a must have? Although there should be a beer can instead of a cola tin. This and other fine products are available from the Chinese firm www.sunbeamtech.com.