KaiSchaller.com

My dad is planning on buying me a new 24″ iMac as a graduation present in December and I’m beginning to get very excited about it. A lot of this probably has to do with the release of Leopard, since I know it’ll look and function even better on a newer system than on my dated PowerBook G4.

I can definitely see myself making the iMac my new primary computer. I’ve always been a PC guy when it came to getting actual work done, but that is looking to change. What I will still need my PC for is the occasional game of Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, or whatever else the fellas happen to be playing at the time. However, now that EA has signed on with Apple (and the fact that AAPL is gaining market share) it probably won’t be long before game developers start releasing Mac-compatible versions of their games.

In other news, my capstone project is trucking along, and I shouldn’t have a problem getting it finished in time for the November 26th presentation. In the end it will be functional, and time will determine how feature-rich it becomes.

You know it’s bad when having to wait for an operating system to load prompts me to boot up my laptop so I can write about how I’m waiting.

It is taking Windows Vista (Business edition, by the way) an inordinate amount of time to load. It’s been displaying the boot screen for over 2 minutes now….

Ah, finally.

But it doesn’t end there. Once I actually get into the operating system I’ll have to deal with the horribly slow update system. The update process for Windows Defender is so slow that it comes close to causing me physical pain. On top of that, I am forced to click through several “permission” screens because Vista has to double-check every single little action with me before it runs. Even from within the control panel!

In contrast, OS X seems to perform its intended tasks with much more grace. Besides actually doing a convincing job of looking pretty (although I suppose that’s more a matter of taste than anything), it doesn’t bother me with inane messages, or annoying bubbles that pop up from the system tray. It handles security beautifully without me having to do anything. And it boots in a matter of seconds, not minutes.

As a final point, consider this: I’m running Vista on a high-end desktop PC. Some specs:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.14 GHz
• Memory: 2 GB DDR2 RAM

Compared to my Mac laptop:

• Processor: IBM PowerPC G4 @ 1.67 GHz
• Memory: 512 MB DDR2 RAM

I find it odd that the PC (with a dual-core processor!) has to labor through Vista, while the dated Mactop just cruises right along. I think you dropped the ball on this one, Microsoft.

After a formidable amount of brainstorming I’ve finally put together an acceptable capstone proposal and am only 1 more faculty signature away from approval.

I will be developing a plugin for WordPress that adds mailing list functionality to the interface. The goal is to make it really easy for people with WordPress to create and manage a mailing list without having to deal with database and server-side code creation. This plugin is being developed specifically for our state representatives website, but I think I should be able to submit it to the WordPress Plugin Directory without rewriting any code.

I have until roughly Thanksgiving to get everything completed, wish me luck!

One of the frustrating incompatibilities that still exist between operating systems is which file system you use to format your hard drives. I have a few external hard drives that I use for storing my media, keeping backups, etc. As far as I know FAT32 can be used by both Macs and PCs to read/write, but using it limits your file sizes to less than 4 GB. NTFS and MacOS Extended do the trick for their respective operating systems, but I learned the hard way that OS X couldn’t write to NTFS. I haven’t tested how Windows responds to the MacOS Extended file system, but I would imagine it’s the same if not worse.

Let’s standardize, people! Sadly, this probably won’t happen.