What's it all about, Alfie?

I "listened" to the MacWorld keynote today on IRC chat and was very happy to see that iLife and iWork got significant upgrades. I'm sure we'll be getting the Family Pack for iLife as the kids will all enjoy the additions to iMovie and iPhoto, and I will certainly enjoy having the additional features and graphs in iWork and Numbers. Great work, Apple.

Then we got to the cool stuff for me - the new 17-inch MacBook Pro. True, it's not a quad-core like I've been asking for, but I think in their plans, it never will be. The addition of OpenCL in Snow Leopard is going to make the use of one of the two GPUs for computing far better than an additional two cores in the CPU. I'm guessing the GPUs have on the order of 20 to 40 cores, and that, coupled with the OpenCL, is going to make the machines really scream.

What I may need to do is to focus on programming for OpenCL and the GPUs and in that way take maximal advantage of the machine, but even so, the machine is a nice one - fast CPU with 8GB RAM, and matte screen... with a fast hard drive, and up to 8 hours of battery life. I'm not upset about the loss of the replaceable battery - it's understandable why they did it. I haven't replaced the one in my 17-inch MacBook Pro yet, and it's fine. If it ever does need replacing, then it's time to go to the Apple Store and let them swap it out.

In general, the new 17-inch MacBook Pro is everything I'm looking for. It will be shipping at the end of this month, and unfortunately, cost a boat-load of dough. But good things cost. And if my current laptop is any indication, then the new one will last me several years. Excellent.

As long as the display looks nice, and in my case, my 17-inch MacBook Pro looks very nice, I haven't spent a lot of time worrying about the correct rendition of colors on the screen. You know, is it calibrated for the correct Pantone colors, etc. Well, yesterday evening an old friend twittered that he'd calibrated his display, and it was an amazing difference. Having never done this, I got to thinking: Was I missing something important? So I decided to look into it.

In the System Preferences, Display pane, 'Colors' tab, there's a button to calibrate the screen by a simple process that almost anyone can do. You start by clicking on the 'Calibrate' button:

from there, you'll see a new window pop up - you need to make sure that you have selected the "Expert Mode" and then click 'Continue'.

What you'll see is a series of Apple logos within a field of horizontal lines. The goal of each screen is to make the logo "disappear" by matching first it's intensity and then it's shade. After five of these screens, the assistant has all the details it needs to correctly set up the display for the best representations possible.

What I found was that the first time I did this I was a little off. The second time was a lot better. I'm guessing if I did this a few more times I'd be pretty darn good at it. It's a question of know how to move the cursor in the boxes to make the logo disappear. Clever idea, really.

So now I have my laptop's display calibrated, and I have to say, it's different. A little closer to reality, I think. The original "Color LCD" was a little brown (dirty) in comparison to what I have now. Not exactly night and day, but nice.

The guys at Flying Meat have updated Acorn to version 1.5 and added a ton of new stuff. Chief among the new features is the Brush Tool and it's pretty impressive what it can do. I've watched Gus' demos of the Brush Tool and I have to say, it'll make a tablet buyer out of you. I'm sure Marie is going to love this as we got her a decent tablet for Christmas and she's already loving what it can do in Acorn.

There's a ton of other nice features as well, and a raft of bug fixes. It's really a significant upgrade, and I'm excited about seeing what I can do more easily, etc.

The one thing that's a little odd... v1.5 was released and then v1.5.1 with a test of the updater. But so far, I haven't been able to update to v1.5.1, and on the Flying Meat website, the only downloadable version is v1.5 - so it seems that there's something he has to do to get the v1.5.1 on the update server, or something. I'm sure it's getting worked on.

Even without Steve, it's clear that something is going to be shown at MacWorld tomorrow. The most likely ones seem to be about Snow Leopard - due out the first part of this year. There's also the possible update to the Mac mini. There's the news that the updated 17-inch MacBook Pro will not have a removable battery like the current 17-inch has, the word being that the new battery has a significantly increased energy storage - upwards of 50% more.

Now this last bit makes me hopeful for a quad-core 17-inch MacBook Pro. The new battery may be necessary to keep the 'lifetimes' of the machine in the same ballpark as the existing machines. It's certainly possible with Intel's recent announcements about more mobile quad-core CPUs available - and Acer's announcement that they will be shipping a quad-core laptop.

Thankfully, with Twitter so common this time around, it'll be easy to listen to the updates from the keynote. I would surely like to see the quad-core MacBook Pro... but I have my doubts.

Today I started looking at the XML tools available to me in C++ as I have a project coming up that is going to need to have XML document creation and accessible from C++. There are certainly several libraries to choose from, but after talking to friends about it (at some length) I think the best thing is to use Xerces-C from the Apache Project.

It seems complete, feature-rich, and as with all Apache projects, it's got to have been hammered on for a long time to make sure there are so few bugs it's as good as fool-proof. There was one issue, however, and that was with the documentation.

In the package for Mac OS X (version 2.7.0, 32-bit) the formatting of the DOxygen comments is not very nice. In fact, after looking at the web pages on the Xerces web site and the docs I downloaded, the difference was two little CSS includes:

    <link href="doxygen.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
    <link href="tabs.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

I was fixing up the HTML files in the doc/ folder, but then realized there were a ton of them and needed an easier solution. So I did a little digging, and noticed that the one CSS file that was properly imported was XercesApi.css in the same directory. So to that file I simply added the two lines:

    @import url(doxygen.css);
    @import url(tabs.css);

With this, and a few other well-placed <br> entries before the <h1> tags, things are looking much better. Now I can build this on my Mac as well as linux and things should be fine. I really needed the docs online, and this does the trick.

This is an interesting note from Steve on his reasons for not attending MacWorld for the keynote. His reasons are purely selfish, and I understand every one. Seems very reasonable, and unfortunate that he has to defend his health every time he's not looking and acting like the Steve of a decade ago.

Alas, that is the cost of having told the world you have cancer. Sad, but true.

I really enjoy his parting comments to the continued cycle of rumors - addressing this not to the analysts, as they are always going to do what they do, but instead, to the Apple faithful:

I have given more than my all to Apple for the past 11 years now. I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple’s CEO. I hope the Apple community will support me in my recovery and know that I will always put what is best for Apple first.

Go ahead, Steve, have the Holidays off. You deserve it.

I read this article this morning and I have to say that I'm very impressed. To get all the changes and version control from the entire Perl 5 project into Git is clearly a significant body of work. Additionally, I have to say that I'm really pleased that they chose Git, as I did a few months ago, as I believe it's really the future of source control for non-institutional developers.

There's no way a big place is going to allow developers to control their own repositories, but that's really only a small part of all the development that's being done. Several small to medium shops don't want the overhead, and all the open source software is perfectly suited to this tool. I'm glad to have gone through the curve and seen what I needed to do. Don't get me wrong, I'll still have CVS for a long time to come as I don't feel the need to convert off it yet, but it's nice to know could, if I needed to.