Podcasting, what a great way to use the internet! I have to say, over the last week and a half I have become totally addicted to podcasting. Now, I am not talking about running my own podcasts, I really have nothing interesting or useful to contribute in that way, but I have become extrememly addicted to listening to them. My favourites are:

• This week in Tech
• Security Now

They are quite geeky, but that suits me fine, I am a geek! I quite like how the internet, and particularly more recent phenomena such as blogging and podcasting, has given people the ability to voice their opinions, and share their thoughts.

I am a mac freak, and as such I would do almost anything for a mac (particularly a powerbook), but recently I have been confronted with a very intriguing experiment: Running MacOs X on x86 hardware. Theoretically this shouldn't be incredibly difficult because, as was announced at this year's Mac Developpers conference, MacOs X has always been able to run on intel based hardware, natively. There are images available on filesharing networks such as BitTorrent that allow you to install MacOs X Tiger on an x86 machine, and the only difficulty you may encounter is that lack of driver support, and the requirement of a chip with SSE3 for full compatibility. BUT, since Apple are moving over to intel hardware over the next 18 months, it may interest you to know that much of the recent intel hardware is actually supported. I think you will find that ATi graphics cards are probably supported as well (as that is what Mac's have shipped with for years now). So, for around $400 I can build a PC that will run my favourite OS natively.

Obviously, this is illegal, and thus should not be undertaken, but it does beg the question that, if Apple are so convinced of their OS' superiority, why don't they consider licencing it to more reputable PC manufacturers, and in effect become a softeware company. I for one would be lining up for it. Of course, there is more to Mac than it's OS, their hardware is really cool, and they have paid insane attention to detail, but I think that they would get a few more people hooked if they put their OS out there as a taster.

On the e-commerce front, I have finished (well actually I thought of one more thing I need to put it, but it will take maybe 10 minutes), and the beta is ready for testing. I was up until 5:45am this morning finishing off the admin interfaces, and then I have spent most of the day (since about noon) tidying up loose ends. So head on over to http://sherman.sitehost.co.nz:3001/artstore/ and check it out. I would really like to see it tested under a bit of load before I deliver it as a final version. This product has ended up being incredibly good value for money for my client. I did it for $400 because it is the first thing like it that I have ever done, but I think by the time it is all delivered I will have spent about 100 hours on it. Anyhow, I have a contract which leaves the IP in my hands, so I can get a bit more out of my time, and there have been whispers of more interested parties.

Ciao.

[edit 6-September-05]
As you may or may not have noticed, my sitehost redirect is broken again, so go to my no-ip one if you want to test the e-commerce package... (oh yeah, the no-ip one is
[edit 10 Sep 05] http://guysherman.no-ip.info:3001/artstore/ [/edit])

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[edit again 6-September-05]
Seems it was my bad that my sitehost redirect wasn't working. There were 1000 copies of index.php in my /root folder so the wget command stopped working. Anyhow it is piping it to /dev/null, so that shouldn't happen again.
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