www.nickhodge.com

Apple finally releases Intel Core 2 Duo ver­sions of the 15 and 17″ Mac­Book Pro. The concept of 200Gb of disk space and 3Gb of RAM is attract­ive, but we’ll have to see … I don’t think Santa is that gen­er­ous. Unless someone wants a 5 month old 15″ Mac­Book Pro.

Myriad of things from Adobe. Apollo gets US$100m of back­ing from Adobe; but still no code to get your hands dirty. Flex Builder 2.0 for MacOS is out. Woot!

DigitalEd­i­tions com­ments from Ryan Stew­art; in fact, Ryan has some excel­lent com­ments on Adobe Apollo too.

How­ever, the biggest announce­ment is a parry to Microsoft’s XPS: Adobe Mars pro­ject. This is a rep­res­ent­a­tion of PDF in XML, but packed in a ZIP con­tainer. This one has been bump­ing around for a while: and it seems the SVG might just be get­ting another run at Adobe.

Just as Adobe starts to head toward the moon in the Apollo, we have another space meta­phor to deal with: Mars. Or mabye it’s just a pen­chant for Roman Gods?

Fit­tingly, Mars is the Roman god of war.

Too much stuff, my brain hurts. Espe­cially as I have some ser­i­ous Javas­cript and Adobe Extend­script revolving in my head.

Tech­nor­ati Tags:
adobe, apple

I’ve always wanted a search engine for just the sites I’ve tagged in del.icio.us.

With Google Cus­tom Search Engine, I’ve added my del.icio.us sub­scrip­tions page to the Included Sites. You could prob­ably do the same thing with Google Marker from your subscriptions.

Yes, a smarter way of set­ting this up could be a dynam­ic­ally gen­er­ated page con­tain­ing just links from your tags.

The simple con­nec­tion method seems to work.

Google Cus­tom Search Engine.

Adobe DigitalEd­i­tions.

… and prob­ably more toys to come tomor­row. Like Fire­fox 2.0 (form­ally). Rumours of new Apple laptop hard­ware. Prob­ably some stuff from Adobe.

Tim Kleemann, Man­aging Dir­ector (no less) of Next­Byte, responds to my post on “iShonky”

Tim’s reply goes to show that you must buy from a retailer who cares.

So, armed with the facts from the horses’ mouth: one must ask what data Choice has used to determ­ine their “shonky-ness”?

The last thing we need in Aus­tralia is a magazine out for column-centimeters rather than the truth about products.

Con­spir­acy The­ory #6574: There is always a new Phar Lap story just before Mel­bourne Cup.

Get over it people! Just like Rus­sell Crowe, the horse is from New Zea­l­and. Unlike Rus­sell Crowe, the horse is DEAD!

The CHOICE iSHONK for Dual-level Shonky­ness is awar­ded to the Apple iPod, mainly relat­ing to the repair “procedure”

Choice Magazine has been the respec­ted voice of Aus­tralian con­sumers; and with strong con­sumer pro­tec­tion laws in Aus­tralia: you must com­ply with the laws.

This comes on the back of the RMon­virus on 1% of video iPods sold after 12^th Septem­ber. Now, that’s doubly shonky. Who was spot checking?

Repairs to tech­no­logy where the mar­gins are slim and the volumes are large can wipe out profit in an instant. The key is to make the product cor­rectly in the first place. Qual­ity sys­tems, W. Edwards Dem­ing.

Someone at Apple PR should be get­ting cranky about this — there are com­pet­it­ors on the hori­zon; and cus­tom­ers expect more than Aus­sie Post style repairs.

Uncle Mike’s at Hotel Hodge. Inspired and refreshed again thanks to lots of thought­ful conversation

In my quest to read bio­graph­ies of 20^th Cen­tury Lead­ers (from Hitler and Stalin, Eis­en­hower, Tru­man, Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Khrushchev) — the latest com­pleted bio is ‘Mao: The Unknown Story’ by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.

Whilst there seems to be con­tro­versy in the his­tor­ical com­munity about some aspects of Jun Chang’s facts: if even half are cor­rect, that still makes Mao a very self-centered man. Hitler and Stalin had sim­ilar traits.

Firstly, the “Happy Days 1950s” is a myth. I sur­mise that Baby Boomers (or The Big Chill gen­er­a­tion) have fond memor­ies of a time that didn’t exist. A-Bombs, H-Bombs, Korea. The list goes on. We should not return to an inglori­ous past.