和而不同

無線新聞派者往尖沙咀採訪，了解風神襲港時的風勢，除了拍攝了記者和巿民在街上的狼狽，也有白鴿舉步維艱的情況。（無線《午間新聞》約 1 分 05 秒。）

風球除下後香港人要趕着上班，紅隧巴士站排長龍，巿民投訴天文台太早太遲除下風球，這些畫面我們都熟識，只是久違了。

李氏力場、颱風。

Almost every Mac OS X application has these two options under the application menu: “Hide Others” and “Show All”. I never have a good reason to use these, but now, I know what they are for. I figured when I watched Scott Forstall demonstrated Interface Builder for iPhone in the WWDC keynote video—he hide all windows from other applications to make the desktop uncluttered.

One of the inconvenience of using Mac OS X to me is that the desktop seems always cluttered by all the opening windows. In Windows, a window can be made maximised to make it occupy the entire screen and it is then locked in place. This thing doesn’t exist in Mac OS X. Mac just works this way. Some even go so far to proclaim that Mac users are more likely to multi-task. I have always believed that there is no native solution to this, as people have written many applications to free user from distractions (none of them is entirely for this purpose).

It turns out that when you want to work inside a single application, just click the “Hide Others” option, and click “Show All” to go back. There is a hack to make the Dock dims hidden applications’ icon.

(Im)patiently waiting.

多謝各朋友的祝賀。我對未來沒有甚麼計劃，只希望除咗找到一個真命天子以外，一切都不要變。

呀，務求各位可以找我吃飯，我空閒得很，而且要多啲見人。

I think this article covers some aspect of typography that people is not well aware of… especially if you are not sensitive to pixel level differences.

Just scroll to “Kerning”, Firefox is clearly better in that particular comparison.

Holy Crap! I have finally waited the shit out of me long enough to see others’ status messages on MSN and I can have the whole world (well, my contacts) see my status too! With Adium, I can now forget that there existed something called “Microsoft Messenger” which has a hideous, non-Mac interface.

The unofficial Adium build I am running now has these for me to play with:

• Contacts Search
• IM’ing to Facebook contacts
• Setting my status message and seeing others’ status messages
• Sending and receiving offline messages
• Have a message box pops up before a buddy sends the first message

All Mac users rejoice! But maybe a little bit too early though… the build is unofficial and unstable and whatever—read and understand everything before you start testing. I warn you: all data can get wiped clean by this.

I originally planned to go to see a movie in Broadway Cinematheque when I was taking the trains from the University station, but I soon realised that I would certainly have missed the opening by then. So I threw away the whole idea and alighted at Shatin and headed back home.

At a Starbucks enroute, I saw a young woman heading my way when I was waiting for my decaf iced tall latte. The woman’s clothing reminded me that it is hot sunny summer despite it was cold and rainy outside. The way she walked to me was what I hate the most. I’m not particularly sure why girls have to walk like that as if they were models in the Shiseido commercial, besides the idea that they are trying to induce male hormones. Well… after all it is pointless—she wouldn’t be able to induce any sex hormones anyway. And I’m speaking this on behalf of the general male population.

Luckily she was approaching her companion behind me. Then it kept me thinking while I was still waiting for my cup: if she genuinely enjoys walking like this way it wouldn’t be a problem. I walked awkwardly, sometimes on purpose. However I think she wasn’t genuinely enjoying it by the look of it.

I mentioned that after I upgraded to QuickTime 7.5 the music cannot be played correctly both by QuickTime and iTunes. Turns out it is logical that they couldn’t play these files—these MP3 music files are corrupted. I don’t know why they go corrupt as over the last few days I have been testing some programs, many of them music related. I don’t know which one of them is the culprit. It could be the QuickTime update itself, the RealPlayer 11 that I installed recently or some Windows music converter software that I run in VMware.

After I restored the music from the back up (not through Time Machine, but rsync), everything seems fine now.

Every now and then someone will say that the keynote from Apple’s WWDC is boring. There is no doubt that expectations are high towards any keynote speech of Apple—Steve Jobs is an excellent speaker and his reality distortion field transforms even the most simplest feature to become state-of-the-art innovations. Too high the expectations can lead to disappointment, especially for consumers viewing the WWDC keynotes. The target audience for WWDC keynotes is clearly the developers, and lay-persons might not feel interested in, if not bored by, the content.

Consumers generally like to hear key points with a high WOW factor—iPhone with 3G+GPS capabilities or thin MacBook Air with MultiTouch trackpad—which are also the points which the consumers can understand and talk about. They are happy to hear this and they expect to hear these things in any Apple’s keynote. On the other hand the consumers won’t understand a bit of “Oh! Apple’s announced the Push Notifications Service!” Even if the keynote is all about these innovative technical details, consumers won’t feel interested in any way. The consumer is ignorant (which is a bliss) of the technical innovations that will benefit them in the long run. This is why the WWDC keynote is often “boring”, but in fact, they just lack the WOW factors.

Of course, Apple wants more hype and rumours before the keynotes to generate higher expectations and attention to their keynotes. In fact, they are believed to intentionally leak (fake) product features. The rumour mills are, well, okay at expecting what will be announced next. But they aren’t necessarily correct. There are numerous times do they predict that the (then) Apple phone would be announced but these rumours turned out to be false. And Apple sometimes release something entirely new without the rumour mills saying a word about it before the announcement.

To me, watching the WWDC keynote is like watching a football match (some friends may point out that I never watch football matches, but anyway I’m just making an analogy here). I watch it because I want to know how Apple announces their new products, not what they will announce. If I only want to know the results I could simply skip the keynote and read the news afterwards.

People are always anticipating new gadgets. But how about the software? I believe that good software is a large contributing factor to Apple’s success, though the general public seem to direct their attention to somewhere else. This is why I like to ask people why they buy an Apple product—it seems pretty shallow to me if “being cool” is the only reason. I like Apple because I like their way of working with computers, and this is software related.