On April 1, Apple celebrates its 30th birthday. And although I’m not exactly an Apple user, nothing fascinates me more than the cult of Mac.

Well, anyway, the internet is full of special Apple features to celebrate this anniversary. One of my favorites is a Wired feature that is basically a chronological study of Apple’s OS.

Indeed, the evolution from this interface (1978: Apple II DOS 3.0)-

to this one-

was quite an interesting one.

Check out the gallery here.

The dudes over at Mozilla have released Firefox 2 Alpha 1, code-named Bon Echo, which, in their own words, is “the first of many developer milestones on the path to Firefox 2.” The download page has a nice big warning that says “Please Note: We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download this Alpha 1 milestone release, as it is intended for testing purposes only.”, so I won’t be downloading it just yet, but rather, enjoying some screenshots and videos from CNet crew.

Apparently, the changes aren’t exactly drastic, but they include a History drop-down menu to the toolbar, a new feature called “Places”, search history, and improved RSS. Cool. For more, check out a video tour courstey of CNet.

A team of scientists have created a conductive plastic that could soon lead to the cheap printable electronics that we’re often promised but have yet to see. Researchers were able to tweak the structure of a regular organic polymer to create a so-called “semi-conducting polythiopene,” which improves upon standard silicon in that it can be laid down using simple inkjet printing techniques while at the same time producing less waste.

Might not sound like a big deal, but the fact that this team has created transistors with the new technology may mean that the promised land of disposable e-paper is closer than we think.

Amazing.

[Futurismic]

Posting will be slow over the next couple of weeks; I’m swamped with work (two major projects due next week) and won’t be posting much. Meanwhile I’ll leave you with a few Haiku Windows Errors that I find quite amusing
The 404 Replacement
The Web site you seek
Cannot be located, but
Countless more exist.

Blue Screen of Death Perhaps
Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

Missing DLL?
Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

Network Down
Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.

Data Loss Part 1
Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

Data Loss Part 2
Having been erased,
The document you’re seeking
Must now be retyped.

Abort
Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

Combining the hipness of design with the mind-blowing technology of geek produces the most fascinating results. Take this beautiful faucet for example, using a really geeky technology- LED. And not only does it equip LED lights, this Hansa faucet actually changes the color of the water depending on the temperature. So hot! So cool! So amusingly geeky! But I love it. It’s absolutely fantastic. I so want one for my home.

Another geekish technology equipped in design is probably the most technological piece of clothing I’ve seen in a long, long time- scrolling LED belts. Yes. Really. Quite honestly, that’s wayyy too geeky for me. I mean, I really don’t want people running around with flashing sentences across their stomachs, but it’s interesting nonetheless. You can even put up to 256 characters in it, program and store up to 6 changeable messages, control which direction the text scrolls from, and adjust text display speed!

Also on the platter of geeky design is this LED binary clock. This is beyond uber-geeky though. Way beyond.

Now, here’s something awesome- “A High Tech Horizontal Beverage Containment Device“, or, in non-geek terms, circuit board coasters. Fantastic aren’t they?

I have some good news and some bad news; if you’re trying to get Windows XP to run on one of those sweet Mactelsl; you can no longer win the $13,000 grand prize. The good news is, you don’t need to waste anytime trying to come up with a solution to circumvent EFI and get WinXP/Vista to boot. The solution is up for grabs. I still haven’t tested it but it should work.

So if you want your mac to look like this

Download the Patch From Here

Last January a bunch of bloggers got together and pledged their hard earned cash to whoever is able to boot Windows XP on an Intel based Macintosh (mactel), when I wrote that post $5678 today the amount has doubled to $12,000; and it’s possible narf2006 is the winner.

Following is a video of Windows XP booted on a dual-partitioned Intel iMac; the video seems legit; however as anything on the internet has been met with skepticism. The procedure still haven’t been submitted or reviewed yet so no one can actually tell. I’m putting off my next laptop purchase till it’s confirmed.

Carry on to watch the quicktime video and tell us what you think.

(more…)

Google seems to be on the roll buying companies left and right this week, first Writely and now Sketchup. If you haven’t heard of sketchup yet; it’s time to get acquianted.

Sktechup is a 3D sketching software designed to make 3D graphics creation insanely easy, even for the novice user. I still haven’t used my trial version properly; in which case this would have became a review. But from the first impressions, this tool is much easier and spontaneous than anything I’ve used in the past, although it doesn’t really compare to Autocad.

But why would google buy a 3D software company you’d ask? Apparently Sketchup has a Google Earth plugin that allows you to model your sketch in real world context; a possible add on to the Google Earth Pro edition tool chest. Quite smart and very useful for an architect I presume.

Congractulations to the Sketchup team for being Googled:

Well, about the biggest thing ever: we’ve been Googled. That’s right, Google Inc. has acquired @Last Software… so you might have just spit your coffee all over your keyboard, or you’re rolling your eyes thinking this is another one of my April Fool’s jokes. Believe me, we’re still having a hard time believing it ourselves, but it’s real — we are now Google!

Now I wonder who’s next? numsum?
[Via] [Don't Miss out on the 8 hours trial version]

Ha!This mash-up showing Google in 10 years is hitting the nail right on the head, at least for someone as messy as myself.

Back in Novermber, Yazan had a post that cracked me up (because we all relate don’t we?)

I wish Google would index my apartment, things would be much easier to find!

Dreams about to come true?
[2:48 AM]

If you’re an enterprise database developer who’s not on the Microsoft side of things, or if you’re considering a change of platform chances are you’re using/thinking a healthy combination of Oracle & Java. If that’s the case you’d be glad to learn that Oracle will be holding 3 developer days in 3 Middle Eastern cities this month.

The focus of the ODDs (Oracle Developer Day) will be Simplifying Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and J2EE development. The ODDs will be held on and in:

• Riyadh on the 27th of March 2006 at the Sheraton Hotel [Register]
• Jeddah on the 28th of March 2006 at the Crowne Plaza [Register]
• Amman on the 29th of March 2006 at the Grand Hyatt [Register]

So go ahead register immediately and mark your calendar. Space for the presentations and sessions is limited. Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis.

We’ll see you there.