I went out and picked up a new MacBook Pro yesterday, after the display issue on my wife’s iMac got so bad that finally the machine has become unusable. We’re gonna do a little swap – she’ll take my MacBook, I get the MBP, and the iMac is going to get thrown off a bridge or something.

What I wanted to comment about here is Apple’s Migration Assistant – which absolutely and undisputedly rocks my little world.

After pondering the long hours I was in for getting all my apps reinstalled, settings, passwords, serial numbers for apps, bla bla bla up and copied and running onto the new Mac – Nick pointed me to the Migration Assistant (which I’m not sure I even really knew about) and off I went. Plugged in my male-to-male FireWire cable into both machines, and booted the MacBook into Target Disk Mode (hold down ‘T’ while powering up until the FireWire symbol displays on the screen). The Migration Assistant asked me what users I wanted, if I wanted the Applications as well, and blammo. I went into the hot tub for a while, and when I got back I had my user, files, documents, library, settings, applications und alles.

So far there are only two apps that didn’t come over seamlessly, and those would be Parallels and Mozy (which, if you haven’t tried, is the best backup software I’ve ever laid my hands on), both of which I needed to reinstall, but after a bit of fiddling are working fine again. All told this thing saved me hours, and I’m sure I’ll use it again on my next Mac purchase.

Updated: Shortened and fixed some grammar.

Seth Godin has posted (a number of days ago) an interesting piece on how even governments market themselves (in this post he is describing his experience at an Indian consulate).

I find that what Seth describes here, relates on a certain level to how a lot of businesses don’t need more technology, better web sites, or online e-commerce systems. Granted that these are all good things, and heaven knows there are a lot of businesses out there with really crappy websites. What a lot of businesses need are better ways of doing business, aside from the technology. Better workflow. Better customer experience. Knowledgeable employees. Common sense.

Someone passed me an interesting link to a recent blog entry by Dave Thomas on what he dubs the RADAR Architecture. It’s a pretty interesting read, and I think that one thing I’d love to see is the browser to become a bit more of a smart client / application platform in the coming years.

One thing that he suggests architecturally in crafting applications is building web-based applications as essentially REST-based services, and separating out what he dubs an “HTML Presentation Server” in one form or another as a thin proxy in front of the actual application. It sounds great to me in theory, but I seriously wonder how much code duplication (logic-wise) would be necessary in order to facilitate that.

Some of the comments on the post seem to talk about how the presentation layer would then be confined to working with a data structure (probably XML) without any smarts in it, instead of having an actual object instance with which you can do some smarter things like validation and what have you.

Either way, it’s a really interesting read, and I’d be willing to bet that Dave’s onto something with the coming years hopefully seeing a transformation of the browser from a dumb recipient into a smarter application client.

If you thought Steve’s demo of Multi-Touch on the iPhone was impressive, you need to see this TED talk from Jeff Han, who is a research scientist for New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Get the feed or download a zipped copy of the QuickTime file.

This is multi-touch gone crazy. The keywords that grab me are “low-cost”, “scalable” and “high resolution”.

This is a must-see.

I’ve grown tired. I really have. It seems almost paradoxical that one can love what they do so much (software engineering, problem solving) – and yet grow so tired of feebly attempting to answer the inevitable question: “So, what is it you do, exactly?”

It becomes more complicated in that much of my work is short-term engagements. One month I’m consulting for a Vancouver firm coding back-end server-side distributed Java code, and the next month I’m using Ruby to write an e-commerce system that integrates with Authorize.net, Fedex, UPS, USPS and QuickBooks APIs for a company in Texas that sells motorcycle leathers.

If that weren’t enough, I’m consistently dabbling on the side with a few close friends / developers / business partners working on building our own company (Micro ISV / Consultancy).

So, not only does Person X not have the foggiest idea about what it means to “write software” (that’s not meant to be a derogatory statement, but it is plain fact), but it becomes more aggravating in that one week I’m doing one thing, and the next week I’m onto the next.

My business card says that I’m a “Problem Solver”. I like this title. It accurately and succinctly describes exactly what I do. The fact that I utilize technology to solve problems is incidental. The problem with “Problem Solver” (heh, that sounds funny) is that for most people, it’s too abstract. “What do you mean you solve problems? What kind of problems? Give me a concrete example.”. And here it seems to break down.

Maybe I ought to take a different approach, and say “I build web applications.” Technically it’s correct. Most of the problems that I solve involve the development of some sort of web application for somebody. Even this answer involves a lot of confused glances. “Um. What’s a web application?”. Usually at this point I have to try to think of some web application that this person has used, and so I usually choose Gmail or Hotmail as an example. “So um, you build Gmail?” At this point, I really want to lower and shake my head in hopelessness and find myself a glass of Shiraz.

At least if I went and got a ‘real job’ I could just say “I work for XYZCompany”. Unfortunately no such luck. When I have more time to really think about this, I hope to put a half decent article or essay together. One of the best examples I have seen of this was an article entitled Palaces of Abstraction that I found years ago (April 2003) at Netcrucible. It since seems to have been lost – I’m very happy that I saved a copy as a PDF and still have it kicking around on my drive. From that article:

If you went back a century or two and asked your great-great grandfather to describe his job, quite likely you would report back that “He built houses”, or “he constructed locomotives”. People used to be able to touch their work, smell it, see it. Computer people can do none of these things. I push electrons around. None of what I do really exists; it is all imaginary.

And again:

Between keyboard, screen, and hard drive, I build palaces of abstractions. Layer upon layer, and when the abstractions become simple enough to do my so-called work, I feel happy. When the abstractions let me down, I refine them. Hopefully I can wrestle these abstractions into submission and accomplish what I want. When everything is done, I will have built a shiny new abstraction for someone else to use to do so-called work. If lots of people use my abstraction in their palaces, I will be very happy.

While in Kuala Lumpur on the weekend, wandering around some of the malls (Berjaya Times Square, Suria KLCC, Low Yatt Plaza) – I noticed there are quite a number of Sony Stores around. One of the large poster advertisements caught my attention, as the only thing that it seemed to claim was that the intelligence of a laptop is somehow directly proportional to the amount of carbon fibre it contains.

Now, I’m not exactly a hardware engineer, but I’m also fairly certain that I’m not a total maroon (I don’t think?), either. This leads me to draw one of the following conclusions:

a) Sony’s engineers know something that we don’t

b) Sony needs to fire a few people in marketing, and hire some marketing folks who have a clue

That on top of the fact that the PS3 is clocking in at somewhere around US$600, it would seem that Sony is trying to flush themselves down the toilet even faster than Sun Microsystems was with Mr. McNealy at the helm.

Two weeks ago while Carly and I were in Macau, I somehow managed to get my wallet ripped off, along with our digital camera. Then at the end of last week (Friday, I think it was), I lost my cell/hand/mobile/whateveryoucallit phone.

All in all, none of this has proven to be a good experience, in the slightest, and I’m sure I’ve taken a few years off my life in trying to deal with insurance companies, and the general frustration that goes along with getting stuff stolen / lost.

Today though, I managed to head down to Sim Lim Square (huge IT type mall here in Singapore) and picked up a new handphone and camera.

The last camera we had was nice and small, a Canon Digital ELPH (SD110), but we were starting to really crave something with a much better optical zoom. After doing a boatload of research, it seemed that the best options were the Canon S3 IS, Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7, and Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ1 (5 Megapixel and 10x Optical Zoom in a Compact format thanks to folded optics). We settled on the latter of the three as it is a bit more of a point and shoot, and we’re not really photography ninjas. Kodak released that crazy V610 a few weeks back, but it always makes me nervous buying electronic gadgets that I can’t read any reviews for.

On the phone side of things, as much as I really would have liked to pick up a Motorola PEBL, I can’t really justify dropping S$500 on a phone that I only talk on for 22 minutes a month, so I settled on a Nokia 6021, which was a great find. Nice little phone that has bluetooth, without all the camera/mp3/magicpixiedust/othercrap.

Jim Louderback, editor-in-chief of PC Magagine has recently posted an article entitled Boot Camp: Apple Bobs for Suckers.

He rambles on and on about how Boot Camp is a snore, and that the only reason people want an Apple Computer these days, is because they look sexy. Hello? Jim? Where have you been for the past 5 years? He says that “there are dozens of better-looking notebooks out there than those tired, industrial-looking iBooks and PowerBooks that dribble out of Infinite Loop.”

He goes on to give some examples about one of the Toshiba Portege’s and the Acer Ferrari, of which I must say I find neither at all appealing.

Following this, he bashes the Mac Mini saying that it can’t do high-end graphics. Jim, wake up for crying out loud. The Mac Mini is a budget PC for home users, not a high-end workstation for graphics professionals. When’s the last time you picked up a $500 Dell box and handed to a professional graphic designer telling them that this 512MB machine with an 80GB disk is all they’re getting.

Unfortunately, the pain doesn’t end there. He starts rambling on about how useless it is to run Windows on a Mac right now, because there aren’t any Desktop machines with expansion slots. So we’ll never know if we can use our ancient legacy SCSI adapter on the Windows install on our Mac.

One quote that I’m afraid I just can’t leave alone is this one:

The really creative computer users are the case modders who build extravagant designs to house their systems.

Jim? What are you talking about? I thought the really creative computer users were the ones who build awesomewebapps, wrote amazing webframeworks, utilized technology to improve business, and made completely unreal artwork, among other things. But then again, clearly I’m mistaken. Apparently the only really creative computer users are ones who do build “extravagant designs to house their systems”.

The remaining sections of the article are labeled “Reliability”, “Flexibility” and “Price”. But I’m afraid I’m out of time, and feeling rather nauseous at how biased and clueless Louderback seems to be. The whole point of Bootcamp is to:

a) Ultimately, to get people to switch from Windows to OS X.

b) Help you run that one windows-only app you just can’t live without.

The hypothetical situation, I’m sure, is that your PC user Joe will buy a Mac, install bootcamp, and maybe use 80% Windows and 20% OS X. Then they’re going to get a bunch of malware and viruses on the Windows install, at which point they’ll be using 60% Windows and 40% OS X. Then they’re going to go through Driver Hell to try to get their new digital camera to work on Windows, and realize that if they use OS X, they just have to plug the camera in and it works. Now we’re up to 60% OS X and 40% Windows. Can you see where this is going?

Wake up and smell the coffee, Jim.