Macintosh vs Hackintosh

I heard an excitement about a Hackintosh project a couple of times last month. Hackintosh makes Mac OS X available for computers designed by vendors other than Apple.

I do not want to discuss legal or moral issues here. I think Apple has all rights to limit its software to its hardware. They are the owners, they have all rights to define license terms.

What remains mystery to me is why so many people are excited about using those other computers and notebooks to run Mac OS X?

Mac is not only Mac OS X, it is also hardware. Since I bought a Mac I never could find anything that looks better, works smoother and more pleasant. Everything in Mac is very well though, from size to the "breathing" tiny light and mil–colored shining Apple logo. I read at the Adobe site that Apple has created over 100 real prototypes before they released a MacBook. Can anybody compete with the company that puts so much effort to research if the usability and ergonomics? Can all these PsyStars compete? Nope. Their products are ugly. Their products are surrogates. They will work for people who want a beautiful shiny Mac but cannot afford it. Those surrogates are not Macs! They do not make Hackintosh users Mac users.

This is why I cannot understand all this excitement about Hackintosh. Yes, it is fun as a software project but only like that. It is not worth anything else. It is not a Mac.

Mute your next web site

Did you ever happen to furiously mute the sound of your computer because of a web site making it?
It is near 9 a.m. in the morning. My wife worked late yesterday and she is still sleeping. I am reading my mails before I jump to work. The owner of the blogs that I read regularly contacted me privately and asked to subscribe to his newsletter. The blog is great and the value of the newsletter is great. So I subscribed.

How NOT to create a page browser

Page browser is a complex piece of code. It is often tricky to have it done. An example from the iStockPhoto below shows that clearly:

Cleaning your Apple Mighty Mouse

If you own an Apply Mighty Mouse (excellent mouse, by the way!), you can ran into the famous problem: mouse stops scrolling into one or more directions. I was able to fix it for some time by following Apple's advise to scroll the mouse on the paper (up side down). This helped for a while but today the mouse stopped worked completely.

If this happens to you, it is really easy to disassemble and clean the mouse. The only important missing detail in the linked video is about cables. If attach a green cable the wrong way, the mouse will still work but as a one button mouse. So if the right mouse button does not work for you, open the mouse again and turn the green cable 180°.

And my mouse did not require any superglue to hold the ring. The ring stays in place. Just to be sure that it does not fall in the least expected moment, I put a tiny bit of transparent scotch tape on it. This way I will not have to break superglue again if I ever need to clean it.

Happy cleaning!

I make two talks at T3DD09: come!

"TYPO3 developer days" event, 2009 edition starts next week on Thursday. I will make two talks there:

• How to become a better programmer (Thursday, 15:15—16:15)
• Writing secure code (Saturday, 16:30—17:30)

The first talk is what I like most. It is tips from my own practice that I would like to share with other people. Following them will help you improve professionally. In the extreme case in will make you an exceptional programmer. I really like to give these tips away because I like when people around me are good in everything they do. So, come and listen how can you improve yourself, your career and your skills!

The second talk is a necessity. The number of security incidents in the TYPO3 is increasing and mostly due to trivial security issues. Therefore I'd like to show what they are and how to avoid them easily. This is very important for every extension programmer.

I have slides an narration ready. It will be also published as PDFs on this blog very soon after the talk.

Come and join me at T3DD09!

Google SEO recommendations

TYPO3 SEO becomes a hot topic. I covered several TYPO3 SEO topics on this blog. This time I want to share a link to Google's SEO paper that I accidentally found while checking a Google Webmaster central for the customer.

In this document Google shares tips about optimizing your pages. These are official recommendations. It means that are not only safe to use but also highly recommended for every web site. As a side note: I was happy to find that I use almost everything from this paper on this site.

The paper is very useful for anybody interested in SEO. Please, get it, read it and implement.

Download the Google SEO paper.

TYPO3 SEO: keywords from the TypoScript and a page

I like TypoScript! It is a fantastic language. Almost everything is possible. For example, today I had to solve an interesting task. I have to show keywords on the page. Keywords shouls be taken from the page's "Keywords" field and appended by the content of a TypoScript constant. Any of these too could be empty and there should be no extra comma if one of parts is missing. If no keywords are set, there should be no keywords meta on the page. So there are four choices:

Is Google Analytics reliable?

I have problems with Google Analytics. Looks like something is broken there.
I am checking a number of visitors on one site. I took yesterday (May 5, 2009) as a day to look at. The graph shows a different number of visitors for the same day depending on the start day of the graph! Have a look: