Rants from Vas

Well, John Gruber is at it again. This time, he’s calling MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan a jackass over this article about the iPhone’s battery performance. It all stems from this fragment in the iPhone specs: A properly maintained iPhone battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity after 400 full charge and […]

As you probably didn’t notice, I’ve moved this site from a data center in the US to a data centre in Brisbane. To my surprise, the operation was completely painless. I had everything back up in a couple of minutes. The Internet really is becoming simpler and more accessible to non-technical users. I guess it’s […]

With all the talk that goes on about how and why Macs are or aren’t as secure as any other computers, I thought I’d weigh in. Now I’m not a professional security expert. I’m just a regular software developer, although I do put on the “white hat” regularly and try to find exploits in the […]

I’ve gone and got myself a new MacBook. Not a MacBook Pro, just the plain old white MacBook. I’ve been using it for long enough to form some opinions, and overall I’m satisfied with it. But it definitely isn’t the perfect notebook computer.

Lately I’ve been doing some programming in my spare time, and working on putting the proverbial polish on some applications. Among other things, I’ve been using Shark to profile applications and look for hot spots to optimise. Now before I say anything else, I just have to say that if you develop for OS X and […]

Last weekend I happened to be at Eastland shopping centre in Ringwood. I don’t go there very often as it’s not that close to where I live. As I always do when I’m in Eastland, I went to GameTraders to see what new and/or cool games are out. Yes, JB Hi-Fi have a big sign telling […]

Why, oh why did you do it Apple? The new MacBook could have been great, but you had to ruin it. Shiny screens might make people go “Oooh!” but they don’t make a better notebook. They pick up all kinds of horrible reflections and glare. Not that long ago, we were buying CRT monitors with […]

OEM’ing someone else’s product is great. You get more features with minimal development and they get upfront development funding and ongoing royalties. They recommend your product and you promote them with a “Powered by…” logo in the finished product. Everyone’s eager to help everyone else, because the outcome will be beneficial to both companies.

Well, I never would have seen it coming, but I’m now doing my first really serious Windows programming. It’s for work, of course – not for pleasure. And I know I’ve programmed for Windows before, but that was in Visual Basic of the pre-.NET variety and ASP.NET. Now I’m actually writing Windows applications and tools. […]

A couple of months ago I bought a new 3G mobile phone. I replaced my NEC e616 with a brand new Sony Ericsson Z800i. I was really looking forward to getting away from the problems I’d had with the e616, but the more I use the Z800i, the more I realise how great the e616 […]