I remember my first computer. It was a TI-99/4A. I bought it back in 1982 (I think), and it cost around $300. The entire computer fit inside what looked like a really thick keyboard. It had a slot on the right for cartridges, and I had a cassette tape drive that I used for backing up the BASIC computer programs that I wrote. I thought that it was a great computer at the time, but I really didn’t have anything to compare it to. The games were the best part of the computer (really the only fun part – my BASIC skills were lacking). And even though the games were fairly lame by even 1982 standards, but they were still plenty of fun to play.

I also remember when I saw a Macintosh for the first time. I had followed Apple for some time, but I had never had the opportunity to actually see a Macintosh. I think it was in 1987 or 1988, when I was a student at the University of Georgia. I believe it was a Mac SE, and it had one megabyte of RAM and a …

A busy week at Casa Turner, as the infamous Home Renovations of Doom wrap up, I finish the final chapters of "Developing Enterprise iOS Applications" (buy a copy for all your friends, it's a real page turner!), pack for two weeks of vacation with the family in California (Palm Springs in August, 120 degrees, woohoo!), and celebrate both a birthday and an anniversary.

But never fear, WIR fans, I'll continue to supply the news, even as my MacBook melts in the sun and the buzzards start to circle overhead.

The law of unintended consequences

If you decide to install Lion Server, you may notice something missing from the included software: MySQL. Previous releases of OS X server offered pre-installed MySQL command line and GUI tools, but they are …

Over the course of a workday I tend to accumulate lots of browser windows, and even more tabs inside them.  Up to now, I would often lose track of what which tabs were open in which window and in which space. In the end, I would often just open a page again in a new tab of the window I happened to be in at the moment, increasing the overall clutter.
With the advent of persistent application state across reboots or application restarts as well as fullscreen apps in Mac OS X Lion that situation has gotten even worse.

The "Window" menu in Safari does not help too much, because it only shows the tabs of the currently focussed window. Today, while wondering why a website was not displaying correctly, I accidentally found a remarkably simple (and built-in!) way of showing all open tabs across all open Safari windows.

Just hit Cmd-Alt-A or pick "Activity" from the Window menu in any Safari window to open or focus the …

I wrote last year about the way Google’s Android mobile operating system was serving as a more open alternative to Apple’s iOS, but not so open that it didn’t leave opportunity for an even more open alternative.

Given that we continue to see software patent-based attacks on Android, as well as swirling FUD around coverage of the attacks and never ending suits and settlements and courtroom developments, it is clear it will be a long time before any of this legal business is ever close to settled, unless ended by settlements first, which is likely.

However, I’m more interested in the technology in the meantime. I also think it’s interesting to see, if not a ‘more open’ …

CloudBees raises $10.5m. Microsoft commits $100m to SUSE. And more.

# CloudBees secured $10.5m in Series B venture funding.

# Microsoft renewed its vows with Attachmate’s SUSE business unit, committing to invest $100m in new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates over the next four years.

# Oracle announced that it has acquired Ksplice, twhioch offers zero downtime update technology for Linux.

# Ingres announced that Steve Shine has been named Chief Executive Officer and President.

# Dell …

After my recent Mac OS X 10.7 Lion upgrade I was greeted with a dialog box after reboot telling me that
com.apple.dock.extra.xpc needs to take control of another process for debugging to continue. Type the name and password of a user in the "Developer Tools" group to allow this.
No problem, I thought, and entered my credentials. Alas, to no avail. My name and password were rejected, which had me a little panicked at first, because I thought the OS upgrade might somehow have botched my account, potentially locking me out of my Mac later.

Hitting cancel would only get rid of the message for a few seconds, then it would reappear, again and again.
Turns out the solution was quite easy: Go the Mac App Store and download Xcode 4.1. Once the installer has finished downloading, …

[Update]As can be read on Mac OS X Hints here, this setting also applies to the side bar in Mail.[/Update]

Apple has - as was to be expected - slightly modified the appearance of many Mac OS X controls in 10.7 "Lion". Some of those changes have caused protest and debate around the net, but I believe this is just the same as it is with face-lifted car designs, which means in a few weeks everyone will have gotten used to the new style and consider the previous version old-fashioned.

However, there is one particular little issue that I could tell I would not come to like immediately: The icons - and more importantly the font-size - in the Finder's left hand sidebar is way bigger than it was in Snow Leopard. This makes the source list look much more cluttered in my opinion.

At first, I headed for the …

This is about wasting a lot of time, effort and some energy on an unfortunately not so successful transition from smaller to bigger disks. Actors include a few external drives, Time Machine, an iMac with a dying system disk and me, being a little stupid. Fortunately there were no really serious consequences, however if I ever face a similar situation again, I might come here and read up on how to migrate systems and backups more sensibly.

Previously on Lost Daniel’s machine

To understand the situation fully, this is what my drive and partition layout used to be:

• 320GB internal hard drive called “Snow Leopard internal”
• 2TB external USB drive
  
  • 500GB partition called “TM500” for Time Machine
  • 1.5TB partition called “TMRest” for media, disk images etc.
• 2x1TB in a Firewire 800 Western Digital MyBook II …

Another week of industry hijinks has passed, which means it must be time for another edition of the Developer Week in Review.

Apple offers some cover

After developer complaints that Apple was leaving them out to dry, in regards to the Lodsys patent threats being aimed their way, the House of Jobs stepped up to the plate and announced that they considered iOS developers to be covered by the existing licenses granted to Apple by Lodsys for in-game purchases.

This is a bit of a good-news, bad-news story from an intellectual property perspective, as it doesn't offer any relief to non-Apple developers from the patents themselves. Apple paid off Lodsys, which in a sense increases the perceived validity of the patents. Other non-Apple-based developers (such as Valve's Steam), could find …

Lesson for the week: If you really want to stir up an anthill, attack the conventional wisdom of code development best practices.

In other news ...

Another piece of Sun falls off the good ship Oracle

At this point, I could almost follow the practice of Gregg Easterbrook 's Tuesday Morning Quarterback and put this text on Autotext, but in the past week, Oracle cast off another piece of their acquired Sun technology. In this case, it was the integrated build platform "Hudson." Either fed up with the infighting that had led to the spin-off "Jenkins" project, or simply …