John Lindal’s Blog

Highway Robbery

Forget rising gas prices. The real crime, at least here in Los Angeles, is that millions of drivers are being forced to pay for expensive, sophisticated electronics in their cars that they never use! What are they being scammed into buying, you ask? The turn signal.

Los Angeles Zoo

We visited the San Diego Zoo during the Memorial Day weekend, and today we visited the Los Angeles Zoo. I’m happy to report that I was very impressed by the L.A. Zoo. It was actually a lot more fun than the San Diego Zoo. I don’t want to knock all the great research done at the San Diego Zoo, of course. Perhaps it was only because the San Diego Zoo gets so much hype, so my expectations were too high, while the L.A. Zoo gets none, so my expectations were too low, but the view of the animals and the ease of getting around seemed much better at the L.A. Zoo, and it’s much cheaper, too!

MacBook Pro

It’s upgrade time. After 2.5 years, my trusty Powerbook G4 running Tiger (10.4) can no longer keep up, because I need something, anything that can run Windows so I can test on IE6 and IE7, and that requires an Intel chip. Hence the MacBook Pro.

First I tried Tiger with Parallels, but it refused to work correctly, and X11 drew all cursors yellow — which is really hard to see on a white background!

Then I tried Leopard with VMWare. Much better

But why did Apple have to chop 60 pixels off the height of the screen? The Powerbook G4 had 1440×960, but the MacBook Pro only has 1440×900

And X11 on Leopard has regressed. It doesn’t work correctly with Exposé. When I try to select a window, it doesn’t switch focus to that window, so the click goes to the original window and pulls it back to the top of the stack. Thank goodness all my X11 programs have a Windows menu. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to select a window from a stack. Argh!

Update (2008-10-07): The X11 issue has been fixed.