Andrew's Blog

It seems that 10.5.3. is out to get me. Not that I believe I am being paranoid or anything but I have never had this much trouble with an OS X update before and I tend to be one of the "bleeding edge" crew in terms of installing these updates. I am having problems with it now because I finally decided to reinstall my system, my justification being that I have played around with my current system so much and that it has so much crud on there that it would be quicker and easier to reinstall rather than manually clean up. At the same point though I didnt want to be without my machine for any length of time, yet I didnt want to have to either rush the new installation or try to find the time to do it around the baby and work, so what I decided to do was to cheat a little. I installed OS X 10.5 onto an external USB drive that was connected to my mac and then afterwards booted from that. This worked like a charm and very soon I was running a clean version of OSX 10.5.1, all well an...

I found out today that 10.5.3 breaks StarCraft :( Basically, after installing 10.5.3 if you launch StarCraft it will show the initial configuration dialogue but then crash back to the desktop. Apparently the reason for this is that StarCraft tries to switch to 256 colour mode but this was disabled by Apple in the latest update, so the game simply crashes. So far neither Blizzard nor Apple has published a fix, what was disappointing though is that neither of the companies has published this information on their websites. For example I downloaded StarCraft from the Blizzard store and after a 2 hour download, it installed fine but obviously wouldnt launch. No where though on their site do they state it doesnt work with 10.5.3. This supposedly also impacts Diablo II as well but I havent had an opportunity to test this. Lets hope that they fix this soon and in the meantime, please consider letting Apple and Blizzard know that they should fix this!

So Ive been using Twitter for a couple of days now and although I believe that I finally "get it", I have to say that like anything these days the community is key and thats what has left me a little disappointed here. I was kind of hoping that it would allow you to find like-minded people and generate some discussions of sorts, whether it was about the latest movie or a plea for help but for me personally, it just seems like a lot of broadcasting with very little going on in terms of actual conversations. Now I freely admit that what Im saying could be boring (I have 28 followers so far), pointless or whatever but even when Ive replied to comments other people have made it doesnt seem to generate much in the way of discourse. Perhaps I need to use it longer or perhaps I dont get it after all but it does seem like being on an island at times. Lets see how it goes after a couple more days

So the new 3G iphone was released yesterday and it looks like this could be the one that would push me over the edge, GPS, Exchange support, push mail, contacts etc and if Apple manages to make the resellers stick to their "global price", it would be dirt cheap compared to its current price here in CZ. Not much I can do now though but watch and wait but for once Im quite hopeful.