Monthly Archive for August, 2008

For a few months now Psystar has been selling Mac clones, flying in the face of Apple’s End User License Agreement, which forbids people running Mac OS X on non-Apple branded hardware. Not everyone knows, since moving OS X to run on Intel processors, OS X will run “pretty much fine” on regular PC hardware. I’ve done it before myself.

Apple have naturally sued Psystar for doing this, and Psystar have now replied with a counter suit of their own, claiming unfair competition! Lots of places are reporting this. I’m excited to see where this goes. If Psystar have some decent lawyers, and anti-competitive litigation continues the way it’s been going, we could conceivably see legally enforced Apple open-ness. What a concept.

I’m no Apple lover, let’s be honest. It’s not because I don’t like their products, or because I like Windows or any other superficial reason. It’s because I wholeheartedly believe that in a different world they would be the Microsoft. The things that are fundamentally wrong about Microsoft are fundamentally wrong about Apple as well. But I digress.

Apple’s being stupid (read: being normal) about recent 3G iPhone problems. There’s been lots of talk about dropped calls and other connection issues with the 3G, and Apple have been typically silent about it. They’ve just released an update for the phone which may be causing more problems than it’s worth.

And did you hear Apple has finally confirmed problems in FIRST GENERATION iPod Nanos? Good for them.

Work has been pretty wild lately. I was talking to my boss today and I said that IT at TACF is probably about as full-on as it has been in about 5 years.

- I’m managing the relaunches of 5+ websites, which as anyone familiar with that process knows, can be a crapload of work. We’re going to rebuild our DotNetNuke infrastructure from a clean slate, as we’ve been upgrading this thing since version 2, and have fundamentally different requirements since the customizations made at that time.
- We’re ramping up our CRM/ERP application, Everest, customizing it more than we’ve ever done, utilizing more areas of it than we’ve ever done, and plan to have the remaining departments at TACF into the system within the next 6 months. This has been a mammoth effort, for the last 3 years, and we’re nearing the next phase, which is optimization and cleansing.
- We’re developing a bunch of sweet applications to make our lives easier and more productive.
- We’re testing an Asterisk based VoIP solution and integration with our existing PBX, to leverage all sorts of great new features. We’re also looking at a Jabber/XMPP server (Openfire) and rolling out staff wide intranet chat.
- We’re evaluating a large software rollout for the final few months of this year, possibly rolling out Office 2007 to our staff. Our long term plans involve more open source usage, like Open Office, so I’m hoping we can use Office 2007 for a couple of years, and then when it’s time to move on from that we go open.
- We’re also finally examining Windows Server 2008, and what systems of ours could benefit from that.

There’s lots of other stuff too… it’s all go. It’s exciting. I love it.

There are a serious lack of pirate themed video games. There really is. If Bungie ever follow through on their famous joke to produce a call called “Pimps at Sea,” I will be in rapture. Dirty dirty rapture.

But that’s not what this is about. Cliff ‘Cliffski’ Harris, owner of Positech Games (a small indie games developer), formerly of Lionhead Studios (much respect), has caused a bit of a stir recently by publicly asking game piraters why they pirate his games. He’s just published a letter summarizing the responses, and how he plans to adjust his methods and games based on the feedback received. I think this is absolutely top notch. I don’t know the number of times I have had a problem with a game, and literally not known where to turn. Most triple A game developers are silent monoliths, offering no support or assistance for the game you’ve shelled out upwards of 50$ for.

Chris, I want to say “Good freaking job.” This kind of creative thinking is what the video games industry needs more of. Your public commitment to offering better support is pure gold, and I hope it nets serious revenue for you. For my part, I’ll be buying a couple of your games shortly, once my current financial pressures have worn off a bit.