SynApps The Open Source and Gadget blog

Kind of hard to believe but we are moving into the new house this Saturday, Jan 23, 2010. A year and half of planning, another year and half of building, and probably another year and half of fixing and finishing up. Like a good piece of software.

You can find some shots from other angles than the House Cam here: http://gallery.me.com/rafbuff/100095 Read more ...

I've been going through Kindles with every new release of the hardware. So far it was a limited experience for the lack of wireless outside the US and for the lack of anything WiFi. So I had to download the books via USB. 

Guess how happy I was when Amazon announced their "International Kindle" that could also do GSM for the "Whispernet" service, what Amazon calls it. Today the Kindle arrived and it actually worked, "Whispernet" is active in Germany, different from my other Kindles where it only works when in the US. Read more ...

I was very very happy with my SSD in my Jan'09 MacBook Pro 15" until I upgraded to a June MBP 17" and slapped my OCZ Vertex 250gb into the shiny new machine. It worked like a charm - for a while. On one rainy day after a couple of weeks of using the machine I got very erratic behavior, read errors, no boot drive at startup, regular lock-ups, very unapple behavior! Read more ...

When the EU ruled that Microsoft can not ship Windows 7 only with Internet Explorer pre-installed it suggested to also pre-install other browsers like Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome or what-have-you. Read more ...

A day in the bush of ghosts. My kids thought this was a typical weekend setup. Hmm...

Please check out the new home for my Open-Xchange related blog at http://www.open-xchange.com/en/blog

See you there :)

Update 4: The dev team finally did it - at least for the 3G. There is some progress for the 3Gs also, but this will probably take some time.

  Read more ...

The next big improvement in hardware technology comes from the switch from steam-punky mechanical hard drives to solid state disks. You can make the switch now if you are somewhat insensitive to, umm, money.

I tested and used 3 SSD's on my Dec 08 Mac Book Pro (2.8GHz Core2Duo, 4Gig RAM) and compared it to the 7.2k 320Gig hard drive that came with the MBP. 

Not only do the benchmarks (XBench 1.3) speak a clear language. Also it really shows in your normal day to day work. The machine simply feels much more fluid, responsive, fewer rough edges, really fast. Read more ...

It's always inspiring to talk to Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun. Matt Asays email conversation with him and a very interesting Webex session we at Open-Xchange had with him a couple of weeks ago seem to have lead to the same thoughts, with somewhat different results. Read more ...