Rogue Wolves

Apple just released a firmware update for all us MacBook owners that adjusts the fan behavior. This firmware update may be a direct result of all the complaints of heat and strange fan noises (a.k.a. Mooing). I installed it and the firmware update scared the crap out of me. It turns your fan on full blast for some reason during the update. I had no idea the MacBook fan could be so loud.

I'm wondering how this update will affect heat, battery life and fan noise. Also, will the dreaded Moo sound become a footnote in history? Personally I never heard the "Moo" very often and when I did it was fairly quiet.

Now that I've updated I hear a low fan noise that I don't recall before. It sounds like the fan remains on low spin continuously. If it keeps heat down that's fine with me.

Odd, I'm starting to feel a bit sentimental and I'm already missing my MooBook.

Oregon State University Linux Users Group documents the creation of a Firefox crop circle. This rocks.

Linux Users Group - Oregon State University:

Planned in under two weeks and completed in under 24 hours, the crop circle had a final diameter of 220 feet. We constructed the circle in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable from the sky. Our team consisted of 12 people, mainly OSU students, and we carefully stomped down oats from 3:30pm Friday afternoon until 2:30am, putting on the finishing touches between 7:30am and 11:00am Saturday, August 12.

Somehow I missed this but I noticed ZigVersion mentioned in an Apple Developer Connection email recently and that it is now 1.0! Congrats!

I did a quick review of ZigVersion a while back and I have been using the beta version off and on for my own personal projects ever since. It's a great simple to use graphical Subversion client for OS X.

From the website:

ZigVersion is a Version Control interface for Mac developers that works with Subversion servers. Instead of simply reproducing the command line concepts as a graphical interface, we looked at the typical workflows of professional programmers and designed an interface around them.

Note that it isn't open source and requires a valid license. However, you can use it for a trial period to see how you like it first. I'd recommend they lower the commercial license cost as it's a bit high and might chase off potential customers (particularly small independent developers). They have promised to offer a free non-commercial license in the future.

You can see ZigVersion profiled on the Apple Development Tools Download page.

Here is an amazing collection of stupid error messages. Some of these are good examples why you shouldn't just stub out your error traps using goofy messages like "Handle Error Here" with the intent of going back and doing things correctly. Do it right the first time.

I particularly like the subway car heading to (null) station. Oops. I think it's time to get off...