Author: Rick Sutcliffe
Another month with the new Spell Catcher has convinced the Spy that it shall remain a denizen of his permanent tool set. The reader will recall from last month that this is an OS X version of a product that was installed as an extension under OS 9. Now it lives, like just about everything, as an application. However, it can be set (application specifically) as the input method and so be interactive in any or all applications. This allows…
Apple recently astounded developers (some of whom had made plans, including hotel reservations) by moving WWDC from San Jose to San Francisco and postponing the affair by a month. This after the date had supposedly been set a year in advance. Ostensibly this was done in order to place into developers’ hands copies of the new version of OS X, code named “Panther”. However, there is apparently much more going on at One Infinite Loop than meets the eye. What…
OS X Ramblings The Spy has mentioned problems and concerns with OS X in this space several times. Applications quit suddenly, permissions get unglued, and updaters fail to solve the problem. Recently the Applications folder on a new 1G TiBook got a mind of its own: Any attempt to move an application to it or to a subfolder caused the finder to quit and restart, the attempted action not performed (a self-taught folder action). No problem with text and other…
“Hey, Professor, how’s it going?” “Oh, hi, Nellie,” I replied, sparing her a mere nibble of attention from the article I was writing. Then I did a doubletake. She shouldn’t be here. When I turned around, Nellie had claimed a chair and was perusing one of my Macintosh magazines. (Of course I read the competition.) “What are you doing here on a Monday morning? Aren’t you supposed to be working?” “Worm”, she announced laconically, flipping to the game reviews. “What…
The introduction of the one Gigahertz version of Apple’s TiBook, closes the gap between the high end laptop and desktop units. Compared with the 500MHz model of two years ago, the new units have twice as much of almost everythingÑspeed, cache, video and main memory, and disk drive space. Both the video memory and the 1M L3 cache are DDR, which ought to improve throughput on many common functions. The main memory is PC-133S. There’s also a Super Drive in…
‘The time has come,’ the walrus said, ‘To talk of many things: Of shoes– and ships– and sealing-wax– Of cabbages– and kings– And why the sea is boiling hot– And whether pigs have wings.’ –from The Walrus and the Carpenter Lewis Carroll appropriately introduces this annual (four times at least) roundup of next year’s happenings, especially since this is the second anniversary of the all-electronic, eclecticly meandering Northern Spy. The Spy fared well last year as some forecasts for 2002…
The Spy has written and spoken many words concerning the fourth civilization or, as some term it, the information age. The universal availability of information via the Metalibrary that is its paradigm and premise is not yet been fully effected, but is clearly nascent in the primitive web we now have. Availability provokes some to worries about information ownership, accuracy and security, and there have indeed been some unpleasant incidents surrounding these issues. But far more pressing are the concerns…
The usual shill suspects (say that quickly) at the various Mac mag rags universally laud the advent of Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) as though it were the Olympic 100m, the Stanley Cup, and the return of Elvis rolled into one. The Spy has an alternate view. Throughout the OS X era thus far, I’ve regarded the new look as experimental, running it only on one of my four machines and staying with 9.1 or 9.2 on the others (depending…
“An (abstract) metalibrary is the entire collection of a society’s data, information, and techniques, together with the means by which it is stored, accessed, and communicated. The Metalibrary of the fourth civilization is the complete, electronically linked and accessed version of its abstract metalibrary.”—from “The Fourth Civilization–Technology Society and Ethics” by Rick Sutcliffe “What kind of title is that?” Nellie Hacker demanded, looking over my shoulder at the beginnings of my latest Northern Spy column. “Everybody knows you can’t…
About the author: Richard J. (Rick) Sutcliffe, is Professor of Mathematics and Computing Science at Trinity Western University in British Columbia. He represents Canada on international computing standards committees, and has written two textbooks and more than fifty papers, articles and reviews. He has been a columnist, software author, and active in electronic publishing. He has also been an invited speaker at numerous churches, educational and computing conferences, and technical symposia at local, national, and international levels. He presently resides…
Introduction We’re not talking about “bibles”, say about some piece of software or the Mac platform here, Nellie. The software under review this month relates to the real thing–front ends to search the Scriptures in the original languages and multiple translations. These packages are for the person who wants to move into the twenty-first century from the massive old paper versions of Strong’s and Young’s concordances, Nave’s Topical Bible, interlinear Hebrew-Greek-English, and parallel KJV-NASB-NIC-RSV that can consume vast resources of…
Introduction All right, Nellie, today the Spy puts on his teaching hat for a primer on Internet history and usage. He was there, an early Internet user, but has forgotten a lot of this stuff himself, and has to ask you to look up some of it on the net for a reminder. Disclosure statement The Spy’s Arjay Enterprises owns Arjay Web services http://www.arjayweb.com which in turn runs a domain name registration service at http://www.webnamesource.com and a web hosting…
Introduction We’re not talking about “bibles”, say about some piece of software or the Mac platform here, Nellie. The software under review this month relates to the real thing–front ends to search the Scriptures in the original languages and multiple translations. These packages are for the person who wants to move into the twenty-first century from the massive old paper versions of Strong’s and Young’s concordances, Nave’s Topical Bible, interlinear Hebrew-Greek-English, and parallel KJV-NASB-NIC-RSV that can consume vast resources of…
The History Lesson Hands up everyone who remembers the Super Bowl ad for the original Macintosh computer, the one that aired in January 1984–that utopian, libertarian, iconoclastic production that scared the Apple board silly, then ushered in new eras for both computing and advertising. Now, keep your hands up if you actually used one of those computers that very month. What if you had your hands on a Fat Mac on January 24, 1984? “Wait a minute,” the history buffs…
About the author: Richard J. (Rick) Sutcliffe, is Professor of Mathematics and Computing Science at Trinity Western University in British Columbia. He represents Canada on international computing standards committees, and has written two textbooks and more than fifty papers, articles and reviews. He has been a columnist, software author, and active in electronic publishing. He has also been an invited speaker at numerous churches, educational and computing conferences, and technical symposia at local, national, and international levels. He presently resides…
Back in the late seventies and through the eighties, the quintessential user group was the Apple Puget Sound Program Library Exchange (A.P.P.L.E.) later known as TechAlliance. Based near Seattle (hence the name), A.P.P.L.E. provided its members with Apple ][ software collections at low cost, held informational seminars, and published the magazine Call-A.P.P.L.E. Steve Wozniak was an enthusiastic supporter, and the club prospered for a number of years. In 1990, many of its functions were taken in house by Apple, and…
Apple’s recent product announcements have a one-shoe ring. True, Macworld saw a redesigned iMac (with an already heavy back order book), the new iPhoto software, and an iBook with a 14 inch screen. The iPod is also doing well. and today’s announcement of a desktop Mac speed bump will satisfy others whose heeds are more to the heavy-duty side. I may buy one of the latter myself. But it’s not enough beef, not by a longshot. On the desktop, the…
This month marks the first anniversary of the all-electronic Northern Spy. To commemorate, I’ve recycled a title last used as “Prognostics 1985–The Hardware Industry (Computek March 1985)”. As a long-time watcher over the fruit industry, I’ve every reason to ask what buds the Apple tree is putting out these days. After all, their desktops have been stuck under 1GHz far longer than is comfortable in view of P*nt**m speeds starting to push the 2GHz mark. As the platform wars wage…
Back in the late seventies, I often received software in copy-protected format. The idea behind all these schemes was to prevent a second useable copy of the original disk being made. It was a bad idea. Those five inch floppies didn’t last long before they wore out, so savvy users made copies, filed the original in a safe place, and only put a copy in their drive after that. Any disk whose data could be read into the computer could…
I needed (wanted) external FireWire drives on both my TIBook docks. This way I can have multiple locality backups of my important files and storage for local files as well. The household being Mac-centric, yet another such unit was required at the same time. We decided to get three IBM 61.6G 60-series ATA 100 IDE drives at local (Vancouver) parts supplier Atic ($260 CDN plus taxes, but prices change daily) and to obtain firewire cases to mount the drives. For…
