Leopard Server 10.5.2 on ADC (Build 9C31)

So, in my typical A.D.D. state of mind yesterday I totally neglected to tell my fellow ADC’ers out there… 10.5.2 has been reseeded as of 3/26/2008. Go check it out… (Select / Premier membership required, but you already knew that)

Leopard’s Alex – Next American Idol? (VIDEO)

Hey, it could happen… (heheh)

Firing up Rails

Was about this time last year I installed Rails, Ruby, Gem and an updated MySQL on my development laptop (which was running 10.4). Since then I wiped it and installed Leopard. As infrequently as I do any development work… this hasn’t really been an issue until now.

So, I go back to square one and do my

gems -v

rails -v

gcc -v

And, to my very pleasant surprise… With the stock Leopard install I have 0.9.2 gem installed, Rails 1.2.3 and gcc is at 4.0.1. I’m tickled not to have to go through all that again.

OSX 10.5.2 Now Available

Apple released 10.5.2 (client and server) into the wild today and immediately issued a graphics update to it. So, if you download 10.5.2 be sure to run Software Update once again after your restart to pick up this other updater as well.

The combo updater weighs in at 340 Mb.

Odometer hits 400,000

Last November I blogged about reaching 300,000 visitors here at the gWHIZ blog. While I was taking a hiatus from blogging/tweeting it hit 400,000. That took less than three months. For some, that’s a couple hours or a long day

Here sometime soon I’ll pass the 925 posts mark on posts too. That’s roughly one entry per day since I started blogging. I can feel good about all that.

A couple of interesting bits of tid:

• There are 825 comments on the gWHIZ blog (a ratio I’d like to improve). But, it means we do have discussions sometimes (gasp!);
• The gWHIZ Technorati rank is at 110,648. I’d love to break into the top 75,000… Favorite us and help that along please? (shameless, I know);
• According to Google there are only 31 links into the gWHIZ bl0g (could use more…doh! shameless again);
• The single biggest day on the gWHIZ blog was  17,479 visits on October 30, 2007;
• I’ve used 635 tags (half of which are misspellings I can’t seem to delete);
• And the gWHIZ tag cloud says I’m HEAVY on Apple, Leopard, iPhone, iTunes, MacOSX and WWDC;
• Surprisingly there have only been 7,572 spam comments (all caught and killed by Akismet);
• And the all time post “views” leader is sitting at 124,346 views. (over 1/4 of the total traffic) and it’s not that good a post…

Now, I’ve been totally winging this and posting on an “as I can” basis. I’m not a professional journo and 110% sure I don’t want to be. The beautiful thing is… most of the people I enjoy reading aren’t either. They’re either subject matter experts in interesting fields, highly opinionated and interesting on that alone, or they have something unique to offer.

A couple of things learned in the last several months: Pick a handful of topics and work them like mad; Digg and StumbledUpon are super helpful; Tagging is super helpful; Writing often is super helpful; Insightful commenting on other peoples blogs super duper helpful; Trackbacks to other blog entries indispensable; Most of all LINK OUT liberally but with good reason and pure intention; Establishing an alternate FeedBurner feed is super helpful.

To follow up that last point… RSS Feeds… I happen to be of the mind to ALMOST always offer a full rss feed. There have been two exceptions I can think of recently. I highly recommend full-feeds. Once I did that… traffic went ballistic (by my standards).

I also highly recommend WordPress.com as the engine behind your blog. Free with some primo options you can pay for… Very nice. The number of times people have said, “Wow, you stayed up through the big Digg.” Yeah, because I have great infrastructure (for free).

Why this post? Why now? Blogging is gaining in speed, popularity and acceptance. My post earlier this week on helping a local family with some serious needs wasn’t a massive success in traffic count, but it was a help in getting the family some relief and additional attention from people who were in a position to be able to help in big ways. Blogging did that. Sure, the emails I sent out helped. But, they simply linked back to the blog.

This post is for people who don’t yet blog who wonder what they can expect in the way of traffic, participation and how long it will take to build a following. The real answer to all the above is, “It depends.” of course. Look at Fake Steve Jobs blog. That went nutso crazy. It’s unique and super hard to duplicate. There are precious few blogs out there focused on the Apple platforms right? 🙂 So, I’ve found my place by focusing on things others don’t, but things I like. Reviewing high-end software (Daylite, DivX), writing detailed How-To’s, all things Apple Developer Connection (ADC) and live blogging the big events. Podcasting and XServes are really my passion in the middle of all of this and I’ll focus more on that in the coming year.

Leopard Seed 9C16 (10.5.2) on ADC

Developers fire up your engines. 9C16 of both Leopard server and workstation are now seeded on the ADC.

iPredict iChat For Windows

It’s going to happen: iChat for Windows will be announced at Macworld Expo next week.

There’s just too much going on in that one app to remain bottled up for OSX alone. You wait and see. Next week. iChat for Windows. Oh, and one more thing

Leopard 10.5.2 Seed on ADC (9C7)

For those out there with ADC accounts… 10.5.2 is now posted for evaluation.

It’s tagged Seed# 9C7. Read the Seed note as there is some importanté stuff in there about the combo installer.

Be careful out there.

Leopard Install… Upgrade? Fresh + Migrate?

MBPro has been running Leopard for many moons as my main development machine. It was bought stock with 10.4.x and promptly wiped in favor of 9a### revs of Leopard until launch.

Not so with the PowerBook. It still has 10.4.11 and I’m contemplating the move to Leopard this week. I’ve heard some people had problems “upgrading”. Wonder what the groupthink is on this one…

Upgrade over Tiger? -or-

Fresh install and migrate stuff over?

Auto-accept iChat Screen-Share Script

Graydon Stoner had the fine idea to whip up a script to automatically accept screen-share requests via iChat (Leopard version only). Why would one wish to do this? Hmm?

Apple Remote Desktop, as much as I like it, has too much screen lag for my liking. Most of the time all I’m wanting to do is take remote control of the screen on the far end. For this, iChat is FAR more responsive and lithe at the task… to the point it all but dissolves the arguments MS remote control is vastly superior in the responsive dept. I don’t know how much more responsive Apple could make this.

Problem is, until Graydon’s script popped up on the interweb… there had to be two consenting peeps involved. No longer. Now, with this script installed and waiting for the proper Apple Event… I can now substitute ARD in favor of iChat if I really wanted (or needed) to.

Graydon, thanks for a cool solution. Hope you get lots of link love for your hard work.