Unable to control my excitement

Snow Leopard is set to be released on Friday. I had originally ordered it from Amazon, but once I saw that the Apple Store guaranteed delivery on Friday, I cancelled my Amazon order and ordered from Apple. Amazon dropped the price a few bucks today and without tax, would have been cheaper, but I couldn't wait! Amazon may actually deliver on Friday, but I decided to spend the extra bucks so I could play with it this weekend (not sure I'll have much time, however).

I ordered the Family Pack as I have 4 computers and may get another one to use as a media center. While I know that there is no difference between the single user copy and the Family Pack, I'm doing the right thing by getting fully licensed copies of it. It's not all that expensive, so it doesn't hurt much to spend the money on it. If it were $150-$200, I probably wouldn't have gotten the family pack and would only have upgraded my main machine.

As others have already written, most of the changes are under the hood. Those changes should lead to a more stable operating system, at least that is the hope. I'll likely do a clean install (if the install DVD lets me) and start rebuilding my system. This will take awhile, but after having my machine for 10 months, I've installed a lot of cruft.

We'll see how this upgrade goes; at this point, I have no plans on upgrading our company as I need to kick the tires for awhile and see if there is a real benefit for deploying it.

Fun day at the hospital

Most people my age have not yet experienced the joys of having a colonoscopy. A few of us are lucky enough to not only have had 1, but 2 colonoscopies. My 2nd was yesterday and boy was it fun. The procedure itself isn't too bad; it's pretty quick and I was sedated during it (I remember Tom, the nurse handing me my glasses so I could see my colon on the screen), and before I knew it I was done. When I got home, I slept for 3 hours.

The bad part of a colonoscopy is the prep for it. The day before the procedure, I could only consume fluids and eat Jell-O (no red or purple colored, however). Then starting at 4 pm, I had to drink GoLYTELY (actually a generic of it). I was supposed to drink a gallon of it, but only made it through about 3/4 of a gallon when I knew I was completely cleaned out. I'll let the reader imagine what getting cleaned out means...let's just say it isn't fun.

I'm hoping my doctor has some pictures for me when I see him in several weeks!

Apple Tablet Rumors

The rumors of an Apple tablet are quite amusing to me. While I believe that there exist prototypes of tablet like devices, I don't see Apple jumping into the tablet market quite, yet (I may be proved wrong in the near future, we'll have to wait and see). The market isn't mature enough and I don't think that consumers are ready to abandon their keyboards for a bulk of their computing. The combo devices with a flip around screen haven't really become mainstream, either. Apple, of course, is ahead of the curve in some areas; I don't think this is the year of the tablet.

Anyone that has ever had a behind the scenes tour of Apple knows that Apple works on lots of different designs. Many years ago, I interviewed with and was offered a job with the Newton group at Apple and got to see some device designs that never made it to market. If I recall correctly, there were at least a few tablets (larger than any Newton produced).

So the existence of prototype hardware at Apple means very little. I wouldn't bet on seeing a tablet quite yet.

Amazing spam filter

These days, any site that has comments or lets users send email, must have some type of anti-spam system. The most common type is a captcha challenge. For me, it usually takes 2 or 3 tries (if not more) for me to get a challenge correct. I stumbled upon a WordPress plugin called WP Hashcash that uses a Javascript "challenge" to fight spam. The really cool part is that people that use standard browsers that have Javascript turned on (if you have Javascript turned off, you pretty much can't see many cool sites), don't see a challenge and can just comment normally. Automated systems haven't been trained to actually run the Javascript on the comment pages therefore the plugin marks the comments as spam. The plugin is catching a ton of spam.

This is just too cool to have a system in place that (for now) combats spam without inconveniencing my readers!