The world has changed this week with the son of a white mother and a black father becoming Formula One world champion. Any other similar changes may come later. This week, the second of the new iPods, the 4th generation iPod nano.

Generation 4 iPod nano

With the presidential election season coming to a close this week, I was not expecting many changes as far as Macs were concerned. A few updates, a couple of third party applications, but that should be about it.

As I put this together finally on Wednesday morning, the TV networks are showing 338 to Obama with 155 to McCain and McCain has conceded. 270 electoral college votes were needed. That makes another son of a white mother and a black father who has won this week: but this will have far more of an effect than Lewis Hamilton's win.

[The image is from Huffington Post - click on the photo for the link.]

I mainly watched the coverage from the BBC here on Thai cable TV. Some of that came from a bar in New York's Times Square with Republican and a Democrat blogger prominently shown, both using MacBookPros.

The speech by Obama later in Grant Park, Chicago, was both conciliatory and powerful with warnings but an overall positive flow bringing tears to many eyes. Clearly he is a powerful orator. That skinny kid with a funny name has achieved much.

In this neck of the woods, I had emails last week concerning the new Macs: one for me and one for the editor, Tony Waltham to look at. This was an idea I put forward last year as I am pro Mac, of course, while Tony has a wider view, particularly with the number of PC notebooks he handles in a year. He had a MacBook last year and he may have another this year.

The MacBookPro arrived at my office late Monday afternoon. At home I took it out of the box -- even the box is sexy -- then opened it up. As I write these initial reactions, I was a bit disappointed that the way it had been set up left me with an automatic log-in, but no security and no password. This means some of the testing I might want to do and some of the things I might want to set up or install, are closed to me. I asked and was told the password. Mind you, they gave me the installation disks in the box so I can change the password myself anyway.

If you want an early look at the inside of what I am playing with, take a look at the strip down and rebuild of a MacBook Pro that MacUser has for us.

A rumour was doing the rounds last week concerning the NEXT MacBooks which some think will come with built-in 3G connectivity. Not much good here of course, although I read in Monday's Business Post that DTAC are still aiming for next year to have 3G in some areas and that they have a meeting about this real soon. The MacBook rumour is suggesting that the MacWorld conference will be the perfect time for these 3G Macs to come online.

I also found once or twice during my first look at the new MBP that although I clicked the trackpad, the click did not register. Must be me, I thought, and I probably need to get used to the slightly different angling of this. When I checked the Internet on Tuesday morning, there were several other reports of this. And Steve does know.

The Register and other sources suggest that simply moving the tracking speed slightly may fix this, so if that is the case, it is probably a firmware problem.

We have heard it said that Apple does not take part in the user forums, but they may be listening. A user reported a problem with the trackpad and the engineers at Cupertino asked for it back as they were interested in the problem he reported and wanted to check it out themselves. They of course gave him a new one. I mean that literally: someone emailed him and he set the forces in motion, so Apple is having a look.

One of my students came into the office on Thursday and brought in a new MacBook he wanted some hints on. No problem there. While we were discussing software and the installation, he told me he used the Microsoft Office suite which had been put on by the shop. They asked if he wanted it, he told me. And NeoOffice and iWork and loads of other software that some of us have to pay for. And when I showed him how to access the Thai fonts, I saw hundreds of fonts I did not recognise: all put on by the shop. If this is just one user, and just one shop, I wonder how many others are having all this stuff pre-installed, along with all the problems that these cloned systems bring with them. No wonder some people have problems.

Another new user of the MacBookPro, is President Medvedev of Russia. There is an update of what he is up to on the Kremlin website -- the English version -- and there, several images have the Mac prominently displayed.

The latest rumour I have seen about new Macs -- iMac and Mac mini -- is 11th hour of the 11th day of 11 month. Could only be more sinister if we rolled them out at 6pm on June 6th. MacNN, however, settled on the 10th for both the Mac mini and the iMac. But then come Tuesday, Apple said that there would be no more updates and this was reported on several sites; but only a few hours later, the Apple online shop went off the air with the "We'll be back soon" sign displayed, which is sometimes an indication of a new product. . . . I think it was just some updating for the beginning of the Xmas period.

We hear that the updated MacBookAir that was due out in a bit, has already come on sale in the US. With the notebooks arriving here now, and some more expected, Apple is really gearing up for the new year period.

Apple has updated its Mobile Me web service software, but didn't tell any of us about it . There is, however, a new KB article that details more than two dozen changes, including the way it works with IE7. That will help those of us with Mobile Me galleries who want to share with Windows users.

There are reports of a warranty scam in Australia. It is rumoured that someone is billing for warranty work never done. I expect that if this is so, they will have a lot of time on their hands in the future and may learn some new trade.

I was not too impressed when I heard about the 2Mega pixel camera in the iPhone. A sort of "so what?" as we have plenty of phones and small cameras with much better resolutions. However, some of the images I have seen are not too bad a t all: not in the professional photographer class, but even so, we can do a lot with a phone these days. One user, amateur astronomer, Mike Weasner, attached his iPhone to the narrow end of a telescope and took some fairly interesting images of Jupiter and its moons.

Sometimes our wishes do get answered. Last week, I was wondering about the 101 series of help articles on customisation that have been appearing and hoping for more. They have been coming thick and fast in the last 7 days, so if you know someone who wants some basic help or guidance, send them over to the 101 pages at Apple. There are also pages on Switching and on getting started.

One remembers a while back, there were a series of problems with Sony batteries and even my long lost PowerBook had to have a replacement under the program that Apple put together. Lots of other computer makers also had such incendiary batteries. Now, apparently there are some more Sony battery problems we read in a TechNewsWorld article by Walaika Haskins.

The BBC whose Cluck Online is well worth missing are one of those organisations that do not play well with Macs. We had to wait for a long time for their video player among other things, and Aunty BBC really seems to think that the only computers that exist have Windows operating systems installed, while down at their Bristol nature films unit -- people who make real films -- they switched to Macs years ago.

This week the BBC reports on a stealth Trojan that has been stealing data from PC users for a couple of years, but they used a Mac to illustrate the article according to MacDaily News. By the time I got to the BBC page, the image had been replaced, but they now seem to be using a 90s vintage PowerPC. A number of other sites, like the Register had reports on this virus which appears to emanate from Russia.

A former IBM exec jumped ship and headed straight for Apple. There is a problem, however, he seems to have signed a clause that would keep him away from other computer companies for at least a year. Steve Jobs had a clause like this when he left Apple, although John Sculley was so worried he made the clause 5 years: then came NeXT.

AppleInsider, as well as several other sites, tells us that the former head of IBM's blade server team is Mark Papermaster: and IBM are trying to block this appointment.

ComputerWorld's Seth Weintraub asks why he would move to Apple, speculating that it is connected with hardware and the Cloud: Mobile Me. But the answer came a bit later when Tom Krazit at CNET tells us that Papermaster is to be in charge of the iPod group as Tony Fadell is leaving for personal reasons.

A rumour last week told us that Opera, the well-known browser had had its iPhone browser rejected by the Apple App Store and there were some moans about this. It turns out the rumour has as much currency as some of the things that have been circulating about Barack Obama and PC World reports that the rejection could not possibly be true as Opera has not yet submitted this to Apple. Daniel Inescu suggests that this may even have been a publicity stunt.

McaFee are having their own security problems with good old-fashioned fraud. A former executive and her husband have been arrested for helping themselves to $3.8m of McAfee's hard earned cash. Another former employee had also been arrested for a similar charge last year. This is a company that deals with security?

I had to laugh when I first saw this. Then I groaned at the pathetic nature of what Microsoft is doing placing recording booths outside Apple stores manned by three "Softies" -- sounds like a brand of ice cream to me. These MS wimps are part of the MS "I'm a PC" campaign and are there to help users "make a short video explaining why they, too, are PCs".

This reminds me of the unnecessary guilt box at Redmond after the Zune was introduced into which Microsoft employees were expected to show corporate responsibility and chuck in their iPods. Bloody sauce, eh? Pay $300 of your hard-earned cash for a music player that works, and the boss want s you to buy his. Are they indentured at Redmond.

Actually, they were once: with share options, I think they were called, as long as they were faithful slaves to the company for a certain time. It was rather well spoofed in a book with the title Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland, that came out in 1995. I reviewed it then, but I think that was a time when the Post was not accepting anything I sent in, so it never appeared. A really good read. I have it here somewhere. It had a number of ideas that later became reality. There is an outline on Wikipedia.

A couple of updates now. Posterino, which is one of my favourite little graphics utilities, for making posters of course, has just been updated to version 1.4.

Next, one of the highly thought of utilities that checks the files and system in OS X, Leopard, Cocktail has also been updated to version 4.2.

Microsoft released an update this week for Office 2008: 12.1.4.

There was an update to the way the Mac handles RAW images this week. On Wednesday morning, Thai time, Apple released RAW File Compatibility Update 2.3.

Too Good To Miss

It might also be an idea to invest in some voting machine technology as some of the problems there -- we hear Diebold machines in particular have been suspect for a while -- need fixing.

On the whole, however, US politicians are not very good on technology at all. Make that any politician. Most of the time it is a shut the door approach that is aimed more at voters than at reality. Local users here will probably be able to think of several knee-jerk reactions when technology, and particularly the internet have come to the fore. Politicians need to be able to control things and don't understand about leaving well alone.

A major tech retailer in the US is about to close 155 of its stores there leaving 566 open in location that it is hoped will be more profitable.

MacNN tell us that Netflix is reported to have released early a beta of its movie streaming software for Macs. It is based on Silverlight, the Microsoft player.

It is downloadable now.

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