I’m stuck at home with a cold, so I thought that I’d write something on the old weblog. I mean, a cold in summer sucks pretty badly. Even worse is that I’m on holiday from work and I think it’s a little cheeky to take some of the time as sick leave — it’s been a low-level thing for most of the week and as such has not been too bad. It seems to have mounted a counter-attack today, however. Therefore, I thought it best to stay in for a night.

So far my experiences with the Mac have been mostly positive.

Graphically, I’ve never used a system that seems so fluid and, almost, physical in the way it is displayed. Things smoothly move around the place, message boxes emerge from the windows they belong to, staying firmly attached to their parents, and moving windows around feels far more solid — I guess this is all made possible by having properly composited and accelerated graphics so you can get the graphics card to do all the nice effects. Unless Vista is a huge step forward over Windows XP I don’t see this lead changing.

I’ve borrowed a Mac Mini to try out. It looks like this:

I’ve not played with it much, so it’s still fairly much an “out of the box” desktop. Still, can still spruce it up a little with some website or other, can’t I?

I’m testing linking photos from Flickr by draging-and-dropping using the Flock Flickr toolbar. If it works, you should see a lovely picture of a bird.

There’s only one thing that bothers me about Thunderbird, which is this bug. I’m sure it’s not a Thunderbird-only problem, but it’s annoying none-the-less and should be fixed.

A summary of the bug goes as follows: when you open an attachment from an email, Thunderbird saves a temporary copy of the file and then opens that. All fine so far. If you modify and save that copy, however, Thunderbird will happily delete the temporary file on exit (or Windows does it for you, I’m not sure as to how temporary files work). The result is that you loose your changes. This situation will only bite you once in a blue moon — as editing an email attachment directly in this manner is uncommon —, but when it does it’s rather annoying.