Short and sweet: Minefield is generally incredible, and shows how far the Mozilla engine can be pushed. Most of the Firefox extensions don’t work yet, but you still owe it to yourself to take the 3 minutes to download this and try it out. It is the fastest Mozilla browser ever, and by a long shot.

Two really big thumbs up for where this one is headed. Wow.

There is no easy way to slide into this, so I will put it right out there: I was completely and utterly wrong about the rumour that Apple would be milling their Macbook cases out of a single chunk of aluminum. The fact that they are able to do it without adding waste is wonderful, and the end result is stunning, and I am mostly happy to be eating crow on this one.

As far as the other “stupid rumour”, I did indeed get that one right, but I can take no real credit there. You would have had to have been spectacularly stupid to put any credence into this sort of thing. What was interesting was that Apple made special note to point out “we make money by building quality products and not pushing low-end crap” which was – as far as I can tell – directly aimed at the simpletons and fenderheads who were pushing this stupid idea.

It’s no secret that fundamentalist and/or totalitarian regeimes are not fans of citizen journalism in any way shape or form. This usually takes the form of blanket bans on sites like YouTube, blogger.com, wordpress.org – any site that gives people the tools to say their piece is verboten in toto by the powers that be. China, Iraq, What-Used-To-Be-Burma, even Turkey has joined in on this particular fray.

But blanket bans are easy – you just block an entire domain, a scattershot of oppression if you will. Banning sites that are blogs on personal or one-shot domains, however, takes a lot of work. Which is why I am thrilled to report that attempting to surf to “geekboy.ca” from anywhere in the United Arab Emerates gives you this delightful result:

Yeah, baby! I feel like I have arrived!

They just posted official notice on the Google blogs – Google Earth is up and running on the iPhone. And, more to the point, it is absolutely glorious. Read about it here, and then get it on iTunes, stat.

Yes, it’s free.

And duh, it’s beta.

It has taken me a few days – okay, a couple of weeks – to get around to writing this because I honestly thought that Canadians were better than this. I know I shouldn’t be, but I am shocked and dismayed that my countryfolk don’t seem to care one whit about the health of a planet that we have to fucking well live on.

Look – this guy has summed up the U.S. election perfectly. It’s worth reading the whole article, but the money quote is here:

“… think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

Canadians had pretty much the same choice, except that ours was a selection between chicken, fish, a pork chop, a nice dinner salad … or the aforementioned platter of shit. And incredibly, Canadians – a minority thereof, mind you, but enough – chose the platter of shit. Complete with broken glass.

There was one party out of five (or out of four, if you don’t count the Bloc Quebecois) that had no plan, no credible ideas, no care for the disaster that is the environment. One party that didn’t understand that we need to do something now or we condemn the next generation to an unlivable ball of dirt. And to my everlasting shame, that is who we voted for. Stephen Harper and his Plate Of Steaming Shit Party.

I am still embarrassed.

I feel obligated to apologize for the sporadic posting schedule of late. My dog recently had cardiac surgery – and is now sporting a pacemaker, of all things – and I was more than a bit preoccupied with that. She is fully healed and up and running on bionic power now, so things should more or less return to normal around here.

Thank you for your patience.

The news wires are all a-twitter this morning about RIM’s impending launch of an “Application Store” for Blackberries. This is a good thing. One of the big gaps between the iPhone and the Blackberry is a thriving developer community. There are hundreds of third-party applications for the iPhone … for the Blackberry, not so much. Worse, anyone can buy iPhone apps on a whim, and have them in hand and installed with about 20 seconds of wait time and a single mouse click, whereas dealing with aftermarket programs for your ‘berry can be a world-class pain.

I hope, however, that RIM has their wits about them and copies the idea of the iPhone App Store, but stays as far away as possible from the execution. On the surface, the iPhone store is brilliant – it gives developers an almost cost-free distribution channel, it gives them more margin than a traditional store and production process, it gives users a one-stop shopping experience, it gives instant gratification, and it encourages prices that are so low that for the first time ever there is “impulse buying” in a software market.

But – and this is a huge but – all of that is corrupted and overridden by the fact that the mechanism is broken, and Apple has taken a stupid and selfish approach about which applications are okay and which are verboten, and doesn’t seem to be willing to give anyone any valid or concrete information on how they decide what is what. They are reserving the right to randomly pull and/or disallow applications based on some nebulous-yet-incosistent policies regarding competition and/or usability. But mostly, of course, competition. This is the same sort of bullshit that Microsoft pulled regarding web browsers and it is nothing more than greed and very dirty pool. In fact, this is worse since Microsoft at least had the consistency to try and squash all competition, whereas Apple is being randomly draconian, with no rhyme or reason beyond being general assholes.

Apple needs to fix this problem, and RIM needs to make sure it never happens to them. On today’s investor conference call it was revealed that Apple outsold RIM in handsets in the last quarter – not a secret, but this was the first official confirmation. If RIM plays their cards right and shows Apple how software should really be sold, they could reverse that trend before spring.

Waterloo, the next move is yours.

The online Apple Store is closed, two full hours before today’s “event” is scheduled to start. That means that no matter what they announce today, it will be available for sale as soon as the words pop out of Steve-o’s mouth.

So here we are. Another election campaign behind us, and today is the day that Canadians troop to the polls for the fortieth time and mark our ballots. Exercising the franchise, and all like that.

And, as promised, I wrote to each of my candidates and will score them based on their responses to my email (as well as some other sundry criteria) and vote accordingly. Without any additional ado, here are the results (in alphabetical order, to avoid any biases):

Terry Anderson – Conservative
SCORE: 7/100

Answers to my email questions: 0/75 – never bothered to write back
Party leader: 0/10 – Harper is just a troll
Party’s web site: 2/5 – It works, and doesn’t have goofball flash all over it, but it is completely lacking in substance – you cant find any facts
Facebook: 5/5 – No link to Facebook, way to go Terry!

Tyler Banham – Liberal
SCORE: 12/100

Answers to my email questions: 0/75 – never bothered to write back
Party leader: 8/10 – Dion is smart and personable and has a vision. And his dog is awesome\
Party’s web site: 4/5 – Pretty clean, and the “Green Shift” tax calculator is awesome.
Facebook: 0/5 – Sorry Tyler – Facebook is for wankers.

Stephen Brotherston – Green Party
SCORE: 81/100

Answers to my email questions: 70/75 – good answers, well thought out, a personal response, and the balls to tell it like it is in Caledonia.
Party leader: 9/10 – May is the bomb. If she wasn’t so “goofy left” on a couple of non-environmental issues, she would be pretty much perfect.
Party’s web site: 2/5 – It works, but is a bit 2004. Get with the times, gang!
Facebook: 0/5 – Ack! Facebook!

Chris Charlton – NDP
SCORE: 1/100

Answers to my email questions: 0/75 – never bothered to write back
Party leader: 0/10 – Layton is the worst sort of hypocrite, a typical rich leftie who claims to speak for the common man while wearing his Canali suits
Party’s web site: 1/5 – One word. Blah.
Facebook: 0/5 – She spends time in Facebook, which is more than you can say about her office.

There you go. And despite the fact that our Liberal candidate has the best chance to unseat our incumbent commie – and therefore help to torpedo Harper – I have to go with the plan and put my vote for the candidate that is best. I’ll be plunking my vote down for the Greens. You gotta go with what brung ya.

JohnJohn dropped me a line to point out that you can only superficailly spec a Dell machine to be the same as a machine from a quality brand. A lot of the places where Dell cuts the worst corners and uses the absolute lowest-quality shit – power supplies, planes, disk controllers – are places where you cannot upgrade, and have to take the low-end crap whether you want it or not, no matter how much you pump into the machine.

Point taken.

If you are unfortunate enough to be an Entourage user at a company that has an Exchange email system, you have probably noticed the incredibly annoying “feature” where it likes to accept meeting requests automatically – before you have even read or replied to said request. You end up being scheduled for meetings that you have no desire to go to, and either have to actually show up, be an absentee, or specifically cancel the meeting request, none of which are particularly good options.

There is a switch on the Exchange server to turn this off on a user by user basis, but Microsoft wasn’t swift enough to put a control for the switch into Entourage. So you would seem to be stuck … unless you use this awesome 2-step little trick:

1: Create an event in your local calendar (the one listed under “Folders on my computer” in the sidebar) that runs from now until the end of time. Or December 2021, whichever is easier. Make sure you check off the “all day” box and turn off any alarms.

2: Done. That’s it.

Really. Now that you have that local event in place, every invitation you get will conflict with it and Entourage will wait to confirm the meeting request until you actually deal with the thing manually. No more automatic acceptances, no more meeting heartache.

You’re welcome.

When the iPod event rolled around a couple of months ago, I mentioned that there would be another Apple event in October to announce some laptop news. I mostly mentioned that for the sake of my pal Gene, who is in the market for a laptop – I wanted to tip him off to wait until the new stuff comes out and the old stuff maybe gets a price drop to clear it out. So here were are, in October, and whaddya know: I got my invite to an Apple event on Tuesday, one that is all about (surprise!) laptops.

Of course, I am not the only one to get this invitation, and with all of the brain-dead mainstream media types also getting one, there are now a handful of really stupid rumours floating around. You will hear them parroted endlessly from now until Tuesday, and if you are clever you will completely and utterly disregard them, because they are the product of weak minds.

Stupid Rumour 1: There will be an 800 dollar MacBook. Er, no. This would require putting Dell-quality components into the machine, and if there is one thing that will never ever happen as long as Steve Jobs is in charge, that is it. Baseline Apples cost more than baseline Dell machines because they have top quality parts. However, a lot of people can’t see past price, and don’t have a clue as to what is a good piece of silicon and what is absolute shit. Could Apple sell a lot more machines if they downgraded their quality? Absolutely. Will they? No – it goes against the business model, which is to make a fair profit selling things that are “insanely great”. If you spec a Dell machine to the same performance and quality as a comparable Apple box, you will find that they are exactly the same price. The difference is that the Apple starts at that quality point, you have to buy a bunch of upgrades for the Dell to get there. The annoying part of all this is that the morons in the media who have arbitrarily decided that there will be an $800 dollar machine will get pissy about it when it doesn’t show up. Assholes.

Stupid Rumour 2: The case for each new MacBook will be “carved” out of a solid block of aluminum. This is just inane. Apple has made huge efforts in the “reducing waste” area of their manufacturing processes to try and make a rather ambitious set of “green” goals. Carving cases out of a solid block of metal would leave a ton of unusable leftover material, which is so incredibly stupid that only a moron would even think about it. It’s not even worth discussing.

So what will be announced? There are a couple of for-sures:

Bigger solid state hard drives: This is pretty much guaranteed, since they are both more energy efficient and create less waste during the manufacturing process. Wicked fast, too.

Dual graphics cards in every machine, even the MacBook: This is more than guaranteed, since the next iteration of OSX (the one the kids are calling “Snow Leopard” ) has CoreGraphics support for dual graphics processors. This is not any sort of secret, it is right in the developer notes that we all got in July (along with the note reminding us there would be an Apple event in October, which most idiots seem to have forgotten about). Since CoreGraphics is such an important part of the platform moving forward, there is not way that Apple will let machines out the door that don’t come up to snuff in that area.

Multi-touch trackpads on every machine: This is also a given, since the trackpad on the Air has been such a gigantic hit.

Beyond that, I haven’t a clue. I would love to see a return of the 13 inch Pro, and maybe Blu-Ray drives, but I am not holding my breath. Unless it is a for-sure, then there is no reason to even think about it. Better to be pleasantly surprised than to be disappointed when idiot dreams don’t come true.

2: The number of home runs hit by Charlie Brown during his Little League career.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, or your life is so vapid that you are completely consumed with pop culture and don’t actually realize that there is this thing called “news”, you have been hearing about the “credit crunch” and the associated whining and panic that goes along with it. You hear big time financial players go on about how the whole world will go down in flames unless there is some sort of financial rescue plan with taxpayers money, and you have this sneaking suspicion in the back of your brain that this all might be hooey but you don’t know for sure because, quite frankly, you – like pretty much every other average mope – don’t know enough about this whole thing to really be able to parse it out.

This might help. It is the most concise and easy to deal with explanation of who is actually at risk here, what kind of money is involved, and where the chips are going to fall either way. It is also not something that the doom-and-gloomers want you to read, because you might come to realize that a small handful of people controlling a lot of money that doesn’t really exist are the ones making decisions – and stupid ones – that affect everyone.

As a complete aside, it might also help of companies like General Motors didn’t take a short term loan every other fucking week to do their payroll. Just saying.

So yeah, once in a while professional journalism still manages to hit the mark. Good stuff.

This is, to put it mildly, absolutely horrible. I can’t even bring myself to describe it, you will have to go read it for yourself.

I used to say that having to sit through a slide show that the presenter was feeble-minded enough to put together in PowerPoint was the worst thing that could happen to you. The visual pain of that unmistakable ghetto look that coats every show like a dripping layer of phlegm, the slapshod transitions, the poorly-scaled fonts … it is invariably a choice slice of optical torture.

Yes, I used to say that.

I was however, wrong. I came instead to realize that the worst thing that could happen to you is to sit through a slide show that the presenter was feeble-minded enough to put together in PowerPoint, and then shows in “edit” mode because he or she is too dim to know how to actually start the show. Instead they just page up and down through the thing while you stare glumly at the toolbars and menus and the like. Same horror, but with agonizing trappings of incompetence serving to magnify the pain.

Of course, that was a naive realization. Because I now know that there is an experience that goes beyond the black terror of the grim situations outlined above and plumbs the absolute depths of horror. Something that will blast your soul and leave you naught more than a gibbering wreck.

The absolute most horrible thing that could possibly happen to you is to sit through a slide show that the presenter was feeble-minded enough to put together in PowerPoint, and then shows in “edit” mode because he or she is too dim to know how to acutally start the show … and they have “Clippy” on the screen.

It’s too late for me. Save yourselves.

Delightful and incisive quote from Gruber today:

There are two types of people in the world: those who can’t tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica, and those who despise Arial.

Amen, brother.