As was discussed in the forums, the concept of downloading (and paying for) legitimate copies of TV shows is a reality in the iTunes Music/Video Store. With NBC on board with episodes of the Office, Law and Order, Monk and Jay Leno, this is the start to something more involved.

I was going through my hard drive the other day in my hotel room (what else is one to do without Internet) and found a bunch of stuff I designed and created back in the early Dalhousie days (circa 2002). So without further ado, I will bring a little bit of the past to life.

• Anthrax
• Neil the Spacefish
• The Gingerbread house
  • Under construction
  • Isn't it great
  • Maybe a few too many lights.

Looks like I jumped the gun by about one month. I knew that Intel chips were due out in 2006, but I didn't realize that they would do the Powerbooks first!! Introducing the Mac Book Pro. It is the 15.4 inch Powerbook (like the one I just bought) pimped out with 4x the speed, twice the video, more HD capacity, etc, etc and a built-in iSight!!

I guess I should be happy. When I'm done my program here, and I get a great international job, I'll be able to afford one of these beauts.

Also released today is the new iLife '06 which features iWeb.

And a new version of iWork featuring Keynote 3 and Pages 2. I haven't read about the changes yet, but Pages needed some and I'd be tempted to order the new version pending some research.

No this post has nothing to do with Kieran and his vices. Around the time I upgraded my computers to Tiger (end of April 2005) I also experienced a problem with my iTunes Music Store account. Looking in my archives I can't find a mention of it, which surprises me, I thought I would have posted. The meat of it was I couldn't access my account info to authorize other computers or to change any of the detail of my account. I couldn't even de-authorize any computers. Nor could I buy music. So what I did was create a new account and voila — problem solved. Fast forward to a time when I buy a new laptop and I no longer can listen to the many tunes I purchased on the old account because I can't authorize my new computer.

I emailed Apple Music Store support asking for help and they said it was a tech support issue and it could incur costs. Great. So today I decided that I would try to reset my account password via the web. Even though I knew what my password was (that wasn't the issue) I clicked the venerable "I forgot my password" link and entered my email address. I waited.

When my reset email arrived, clicking a link brought me to a spot to set a new password. I did. And now I have successfully authorized my computer on my old account and I suspect I can buy music with it too.

The real mystery here isn't what went wrong with my account, but why did I wait almost 8 months to try and reset my password. Excuse me while I go listen to my music.

I'm in love. After three years of searching, I have found my dream editor for the Mac. I'm sure that I've mentioned the quest for a text editor on several occasions. In my last post about it, I even mentioned that one in particular could be it. Could be the alpha editor if you will. Well it really and truly is. TextMate.

I really can't go into all the benefits that this editor brings to the table. For starters I am currently writing this post in TextMate because it comes with an Input Manager which allows me to edit any native Cocoa text field with it. This means any text fields in Safari and Mail which may or may not appeal to everyone, but it means a lot to me. If you have ever felt that a web site's text boxes were too claustrophobic feeling then this might help. The ability to have context specific tab triggers and keyboard commands is incredible. I'm still just learning the ropes and I have already created a couple of different language definitions and many commands and snippets. Even while still learning the keyboard shortcuts I feel that I am at least 50% more productive now. Just imagine hitting Cmd-Shift-Return while editing source code and have it insert a semi-colon at the end of the line and go down to the next one.

The things that it can do with LaTeX are incredible and you should check out the screencasts that demonstrate some of the things it is capable of. Obviously this isn't an editor for everyone. It was designed for programmers and power users. It comes with a blocking version of its command line launcher and one of the things I've done is to use this for my EDITOR and LESSEDIT environment variables. Now I can edit my crontab file and my Subversion comments from the comfort of this sexy editor. Highly scriptable using bash, this is perfect for those people who want to automate their text related work-flows. So for those of you who fall within the intersection of Mac users and programmers/power users might want to take a look.

Did I mention that the background of the editor can be made transparent/translucent? It is very convenient being able to read the documentation on a certain function or class through the editor. The only catch is that is costs 39€ — around $55 CDN. However I think once you try it, you will find out that it is extremely worth it. I bought it just the other day. No regrets. It has a 30 day trail period so give it a shot.

Only a full three years after implementing it for the forum, I have finally added full text search on the web log posts and titles. As much as I do enjoy browsing through the posts on my site and reminiscing about the good times had, I was also getting pissed at needing to skim through a whole year worth of posts in order to find the one I wanted to reference. All because I couldn't remember when in my life it happened. :P

But now at the top of each/most pages should be a text box with "Search" written in it. You can click in there, type a couple words and then hit Enter/Return and that should submit the query. What you get is a list of posts that are sorted by relevance. Click, read, enjoy. Let me know if you encounter any issues with it.

At the moment it only returns results for posts, not other pages, but that should change as soon as I decided I want to implement it. Could be a few minutes, could be a couple years. :)

• There go your credit card numbers. — I particularly enjoy the line about Visa at the end of the article.
• Interesting article about Dominoes