Cahier / Notebook

You’ll always remember your first. For me, it was a Mac Plus. Purchased by my parents as a family Christmas gift in the mid-eighties, it later ended up in my room and quickly became the center of my universe.

The killer app for me was always HyperCard. Of course at the time I had no idea how prescient that experience would be, since the hypertext driven world wide web did not exist yet nor did my resulting career.

While’s I’ve kept that original Mac in working order (including the original 20MB external hard drive), at some point parts are bound to fail and my trips down memory lane will be over (especially attacking conveys in the Pacific).

Enter Mini vMac, a Mac Plus emulator for modern computers. Now assuming I can successfully migrate the contents of that SCSI hard drive (connected to a computer with LocalTalk but no TCP/IP networking) to the disk image running in the emulator, my Mac Plus can live on indefinitely (that is until 10 years from now when I’m emulating Mac OS X to run the Mac Plus emulator).

It’s only took a couple of hours to get cooking. Notice the top (black and white window) is actually the Mac Plus (running a HyperCard stack I created in the early 90’s), with the purple window being VNC giving me access to the desktop of a headless G4 running OS 9 (for the SetFType utility that does not run on Intel Macs), then some OS X finder windows with access to the G4 shared drive to move the disk images back and forth, and of course Safari with the emulator site.

Note how much more real estate I get to use these days compared to the original 9 inch screen. It really is amazing when you step back and think about it.

Following a fresh install of System 6.0.8 from Apple, I had success! Welcome back Larry, John, Steve and Bruce. Mounting disks is easy, just drag them onto the emulated screen and they mount. Don’t have to worry about only having one floppy drive!

And for those a little more curious, back in my early teens I developed several HyperCard projects, including this piece of shareware that generated random yet pronounceable words (perfect for passwords) based on a consonant/vowel/number structure you could customize.

I’ve toyed with the idea of getting the physical Mac Plus onto the internet via a LocalTalk to Ethernet bridge, or perhaps just getting the SCSI hard drive accessible via some kind of adapter to Firewire. I’d be curious if anyone else has undergone a similar effort—let me know. In the meantime, I’m off to sink a convoy!

Hopes are high for the next version of Windows, and early indications are that Windows 7 will be a refreshing improvement over Vista.  I’m typing this, mind you, on my Mac Pro.  If you’d like to preview it, you can download the release candidate, and for those with VMware you can follow this guide.

Never has the default SharePoint UI looked so good!  As previously discussed, next on the list for implementation in the lab was Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, otherwise known as MOSS, which is now complete.

In addition, SharePoint Designer (now a free download) was added alongside to complete the Microsoft experience:

With this addition, the lab now has a robust range of web platforms suitable for experimentation.

Thanks to the new 8-Core Mac Pro, now demonstrating enough practical application to belie its original moniker of “glorious overkill”, our new CMS lab is online.

Aside from the primary Windows and CentOS systems, we are currently running TurnKey Linux Appliances of the following platforms:

• WordPress
• Drupal
• MediaWiki

with plans to include others such as Joomla, Concrete5, and of course Microsoft SharePoint in future waves.  If you are passionate about another platform you think we should include, please feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments.

Especially relevant for our Mammoth friends, simply install an ad blocker (in the case of Safari, the free SafariAdBlock) an add “meraki.com/toolbar” to the list of custom filters. Excellent solution for the desktop browser, but will still have to explore something for the iPhone.

So I stood in line for the first iPhone back in June 2007.  In fact, my girlfriend did as well (me at the Apple Store and her at the AT&T store to ensure I got one; we reached the front of each line simultaneously).  I didn’t camp out.  In fact, I wanted to wait a couple weeks, but alas, we were leaving on a long trip the next day.  As it turns out, I was delighted to have the device with me on the trip.  I quickly fell in love with the phone (oh, and I married that girlfriend).

A year later, the 3G phone came out and I was planning to skip a generation.  I really didn’t have a compelling need for 3G or GPS, and besides, I could get Apps on my FirstGen following the firmware upgrade.  Which I did.  It didn’t take long, however, for my faith to get shaken in the whole franchise.

Suddenly, a patch of my touch screen stopped working (on travel mind you, not exactly convenient considering the island I was on didn’t have an Apple Store).  No matter what I did, from software resets to finger gymnastics, I couldn’t get it to respond.  And worse yet, it was the portion of the screen at the bottom where you swipe it to unlock it.

Note: This screenshot is from a 3G phone, my problematic device is a first generation Edge iPhone.

When I brought it in to the local Apple Store to seek repair, I was informed that my warranty expired one week prior and that my only option would be to purchase a new 3G phone.  Well, needless to say I wasn’t happy.  I was an early adopter (had my $100 credit to prove it) and sold countless others with demos of the phone in those first few months.  I’ve been a loyal Apple customer for decades (since my Mac Plus in 1986) and this is what I’m stuck with?  A defective phone after 53 weeks?

Well, I wasn’t happy but my only option was the new phone—which I bought, have loved, but handle gingerly (always clothed in rubber, screen protectors, you name it).  This screen better last!  Anyhow, I pitched the old one into a box and tried to forget about the whole fiasco.

It’s only recently I wondered if I could use the old one for anything, knowing I can’t swipe to unlock it or use the (fairly important) icons on the bottom strip.  I’m thinking that if I can reorder icons strategically, I might be able to have myself a 8GB video iPod, a 3.5” digital picture frame, or a $500 digital alarm clock.

Any suggestions?