Thursday May 19, 2005 Spotlight on NeoOffice/J
NeoOffice/J is an Openoffice.org implementation that runs on the Mac. It's main goal is to run on the Mac platform without requiring the use of X11. It is very succesful so far in this goal, and it is nearing the official release of it's 1.1 version.A very pleasant surprise on the 1.1RC patch 4 is support for Apple's Spotlight technology. As a result, you can now search for NeoOffice/OpenOffice/StarOffice documents stored on your hard drive and locate them like you would any other Mac document. This is really, really cool :)
Much thanks to Patrick Luby, Edward Peterlin and the other developers involved in this project.
-- Fred
PS: Another Neooffice & Spotlight related tool is Neolight, available through Apple Downloads.
( May 19 2005, 08:30:58 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Wednesday May 11, 2005 Kudos to Apple
I had difficulties with my PowerBook a couple weekends ago. The hard drive S.M.A.R.T. subsystem was reporting that a failure was eminent.After backing up the hard drive, I called Apple where I talked with a polite and competent technician who walked me through the troubleshooting process and arranged for my Mac to get repaired.
So I waited for the box, packed the Mac up and shipped it back to Apple's repair and services facility. It only took a day for the system to be repaired and shipped back to me.
As impressive as this is, the most impressive part is that they didn't just replaced the hard drive. They also replaced the LCD which had a small white spot on it without having to ask for this as well as other parts that apparently needed to get replaced.
I must say that I am quite pleased with this service, the technician and the whole experience.
-- Fred
( May 11 2005, 11:09:54 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Netbeans 4.1 Released
It appears that Netbeans 4.1 was released. I have used the beta and release candidates of Netbeans 4.1 for a while now, and I am quite pleased with it. It runs on both of my development platforms (a Sun Blade 2500 workstation and my trusty PowerBook) and is a definite improvement over what Netbeans and Java Studio used to be.You can go get it at http://www.netbeans.org.
-- Fred
( May 11 2005, 11:06:28 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Tuesday May 03, 2005 Get Connected
Finally! The Sun Update Connection service was announced! It is the first service delivered under the Sun Connection umbrella of services and products.Think of it as a way to make it easier to update servers and workstations. You can manage them through the Update Manager, which is a rich client application residing on the Solaris 10 system. Or you can use the Sun Update Connection portal to manage more than one system at a time. This works for both Sparc based systems as well as x86 and x64 systems. A big emphasis was put in making sure that the x86 and x64 systems were fully supported.
If you watched the NC05Q2 keynote, you had the chance to watch the demo of the Sun Update Connection. You wouldn't believe how much work and preparation went into a 90 seconds demo. I do think that it is all worthwhile though.
I must admit that it is a Big Deal[tm] to have this product introduced by people such as Jonathan Schwartz and Johnny Loicano (EVP of Software). it shows how much excitement and energy was created by this product in the upper management teams.
There's still a lot of work to be done before we go live for full general access. But it is looking good so far, and there is some light at the end of the tunnel :)
-- Fred
( May 03 2005, 03:42:54 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Sunday May 01, 2005 Got Tiger?
I received and installed Tiger. I foolishly did an upgrade as soon as I got my hands on it. Foolishly since I learned after the fact that it wasn't the best approach to do so.So I'm backing up my data to a firewire disk. Once Apple replaces my HD (it is sending warnings of its pending failure), I'll be able to do a clean install and copy the data and software that is relevant.
-- Fred
( May 01 2005, 11:12:51 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [2]