Today, for those of you not in Thailand, is Loy Krathong, one of the nicest festivals here, when people float their problems away in decorated floats [krathongs] on rivers, ponds or the sea. Some even do it in backyard pools: it is the symbolism that counts.

This week, I am continuing with my Systems Preferences series: this time looking at Spotlight and the Startup Disk.

Systm Preferences in OS X Spotlight and Startup Disk

In a bit of a surprise, I had a phone call on Tuesday from Apple in Singapore, telling me of the inauguration of a long-overdue Apple online store for the Land of Smiles.

Customers can now choose from the complete line of Macs and iPods as well as a wide array of accessories all priced in baht. The Apple Online Store offers the same options for customizing Macs that were available elsewhere, as well as the service for personalized iPod engraving.

Coming up to the New Year period, through the Apple Online Store, (PRODUCT) RED Special Edition iPod models are now available for the first time in Thailand. Shipping is free for online orders over 2,000 baht (about US$58 currently). There is discount for educational purchases and I have a link to a page which shows if you qualify for these.

For customers who order a Mac or iPod through the Apple Online Store there is a Limited edition Apple T-Shirt (while stocks last) to commemorate the grand opening.

The number for telesales in Thailand is 001-800-65-6957 and there is more information on services onlne. They speak English and Thai.

About an hour after I had uploaded the podcast last week, I had email from Apple in Singapore inviting me to the MacWorld conference in San Francisco from January 5 - 8. Actually, the lady phoned later and I managed to squeeze an extra day to give me more time looking around at the hall and even parts of San Francisco.

As in the last two years, I will be writing my column from there and also doing regular Bangkok Diary updates. If the internet holds up, I will also do the podcast from there: I did manage that the last couple of times. The pages from 2008 are still up and so are those plus the images from 2007.

Every year, at the time of the conference, the Internet speed drops to the standard I get in my office and my blood pressure rocketed trying to send my article to the Bangkok Post just short of the deadline last year. It looks also as if we shall be at the same hotel.

I was in an office near Asoke [Bangkok] last Friday and the owner had installed a number of Macs. He had a legal copy of Office for the Mac, but was switching to Open Source software as he wanted the staff to have full access to Thai fonts and was fed up with what we might call the MS overhead: additional demands Redmond puts on a Mac user just to install, leave alone use the product.

Although he downloaded both NeoOffice and Open Office, he decided on NeoOffice as it just suited him better and he wanted to install extra dictionaries: much easier he found than with Open Office.

I commented on the fact that he had a legal copy of Office, and he told me that he did not dare do otherwise: the Business Software Alliance have been busy and some offices are well aware that they do raids. One person, he told me, not only had heavy fines but also lost the computer: something that business owners, with the amount of data that may be on a computer, cannot afford to lose. That Phantip (or even Mac shop) install may be far more expensive than the cash people are trying to save.

I am still collecting loads of apps for the iPod touch and this week saw one called Easy email which enables one to write an email with the widescreen format -- the iPod is on its side. In addition, they have a large selection of fonts available over and above what the touch usually offers. Any suggestion, the company asks? So, I wrote: Why not Thai? This isn't included in the iPod touch or iPhone standard installation of keyboards of course. I had email back the next morning: "Thank you for your suggestion. It'll be added into the next version."

I am sure they are going to try, but wonder if there may be difficulties (or if there may be some other delays), but at least the developer is thinking about this.

Apple aparently have the ARM-designed chips for the iPhone made up by Samsung, but there are rumours that they might take over the production themselves so Brain Caulfield, in Forbes, reports. Having bought PA Semi, they may use it. Sounds sensible, but as Caulfield writes, It is never a good idea to second-guess Apple.

I checked the Apple iPhone countries page at the weekend and it showed that 60 countries have the iPhone while the Coming Soon section has been reduced to 20. A few days later it was 62 and 18.

Is that online shop a hint?

Related to these numbers in a way are the costs of Steve Jobs jet fuel use. Lots of sites had this last week. This is reported to the SEC as required by regulations as he uses it on company business.

A warning for all of us although this particularly refers to the MacBookAir. An owner kept having problems with the display going black when he was using Entourage. My immediate reaction, of course, would be to suspect the software, but the owner eventually realised the screen problem was happening only to him and not his wife. The problem was he wore a bracelet with magnets in it. In the Macsimum News item, by Dave Merten, a Mac genius comments that Macintosh laptops have a magnet and sensor embedded in the screen and topcase so that the computer sleeps when the lid is closed. The magnets must have triggered the sensor into thinking the lid was closed.

One of the early disappointments for me was the way the new trackpad on the latest MacBookPro I have on test would not register clicks. Tapping the pad was OK, but pressing the pad, which moves to behave like a trackpad bar, sometimes did nothing. I was not alone and last Wednesday, the internet was full of this, including a lengthy thread on the Apple forums.

By Thursday morning, it became evident that this was probably not a hardware problem and that a fix is on the way. How do we know? Steve mailed a customer who asked and replied, "Software fix coming soon." Four words: to the point.

I had a good example of brain-fade, writing the first MacBook Pro article for next week, when I mentioned the power connector and called it not MagSafe, but MagLev. For some reason I must have been thinking about trains. I hope the editing staff get to that in time.

There may well be a new USB standard -- USB 3 -- sometime next year if the standard specifications are finalised at a meeting next month. Several manufacturers are backing the new standard, although Apple is not listed in the article by Brooke Crothers. This may actually be interesting for Apple as they recently dropped Firewire for some notebooks, partly through design considerations, and changing one USB port might be attractive.

And an update that is expected to be released soon is the 2.2 update to the iPhone. These updates usually trickle down to the iPod touch too. An interesting feature is that, like the way we can already download App updates directly, so podcasts will be downloadable too.

Having swept over the Internet like the Mongol hordes (and my apologies here to any extant Mongols) pretty much destroying Mozilla on the way, sad to say IE has been the dominant browser for a while, and to such an extent that misguided programmers, taking the easy way out, almost barred a lot of online resources to non IE users: particularly banking sites and particularly here in Thailand. Do the banks understand how much snake oil they bought?

Now we hear that MS's erratic head thinks the idea of using WebKit as the rendering engine within its web browser was "interesting" and added "we may look at that." Webkit? That's the core of Safari and was Open Source, but Apple took it in house and developed it.

He was asked at a developers' conference in Australia, by a student, "why Microsoft insisted on dumping money into the rendering platform, rather than adopting a faster open source model." Electronista tells us also that the CEO thought that the question was cheeky, before giving the answer that has been reported.

Cheeky? My question is why didn't Microsoft hire him on the spot? If a student can have the insight expressed here, and the confidence to ask such a question of Ballmer, then he clearly has an idea of what makes the world go round.

Another example of Ballmer-ese, this time from an Investor Briefing (I wonder, did they just walk or run away?): Ballmer expounded on the Google phone perhaps revealing more about what little he understands about modern business methods. He reasons that because Google doesn't charge for Android and is after development from the open source community, they cannot make money from it. Come to think of it, they don't charge for that search engine either, do they?

We cast our minds back to the release of the iPhone which clearly Ballmer did not understand or was choosing to ignore. Not going to work, won't sell, too expensive, etc.. Now it is available in 62 countries in the world officially, which is about 61 more than Zune is sold in; and is also on sale unofficially in most other countries. Like here.

Ballmer's useless iPhone, by the way, last week came first in a survey conducted by J. D. Power and Associates which ranked it highest in terms of customer satisfaction for business people who use this type of device. Blackberry, Samsung, HTC, Motorola and Palm use was also covered. In another report, the number 1 seller of phones in the US is now shown to be Samsung.

CNET tidied up Ballmer's comments later with a video of the man and the comment that, No they would not be trying Webkit and would be sticking with Trident, the engine for IE. Trident? For British minds, that name harks back to a beautiful but obsolete jet used in the 60s as well as a UK missile system: also obsolete. I rest my case.

One of the many effective ways to get the message out by the Obama campaign was an app for the iPod touch and the iPhone. Of course I downloaded this free app, out of academic interest and I wrote about it in one of my app reviews in the Bangkok Diary.

I used the app and subscribed getting daily emails, most of which I would never be able to react to. After the election, there was an update, but it wasn't a "Goodbye and thanks" change so the news sections are still getting changed.

As the White House email system has had another attack, one speculates that a new admin should have some new computers: Macs for the White House? And that is a distinct posibility, at least at some levels. It was reported this week that the President-elect and his daughters have MacBooks. Publicity you cannot buy, eh?

I see from MacNN that the Shockwave player has been updated to be friendly to Intel Macs. MacNN, use the term, "at long last". I finally found this online on Monday via another MacNN page, but it is not wholly clear from the Adobe page that this really IS the new Intel-friendly version although once downloaded I see that it is. The page tells us it is version 11 for OS X 10.4.

F O U R!!

Too Good to Miss?

A note on those Obama emails. According to Ari Melber in The Nation, the list they used had 10 million addresses on it: not wonder they got the message out.

We carried some news about the departure of Tony Fadell last week and the arrival of Papermaster from IBM. Fadell has had a hefty financial handshake and officially is hired as a special adviser to Steve Jobs, to keep him from spilling the beans: which he denies.

IBM meanwhile have managed to convince a judge that there is some merit to the objections they have and a hearing is scheduled for 17 November and AppleInsider has some more on this.

This week the profile of Fadell was removed from the Apple site.

If you have downloaded the iPhone developer kit there is a way to test apps on a virtual iPhone, but Tryphone have a virtual iPhone online that we can all have a go with. They also have another 14 phones including Nokia N95, Palm Centro 690, LG Shine and HTC Shadow.

My podcast downloading doesn't work at the office because of closed ports, so when I get home, I clear all those "won't work" exclamation marks in iTunes by clicking on the refresh button. When things start to download, I check to see what is coming down. Last Thursday, unsurprisingly, was Keith Obermann's Countdown and a music podcast; and then I saw a movie I already had from the Portable Film Festival. I looked in the complete podcast list and saw that the whole entry had been revised and, as well as those I already had, 10 new ones were listed. Lovely little short movies here between one and twelve minutes: perfect for the iPod. And there are more online.

Pakistan has decreed death for those convicted of cyberterrorism. The BBC's M. Ilyas Khan has the details.

This somewhat draconian measure may simply be an indication of what many countries may bring to bear, although the death penalty bit is over the top. The problem with any law like this is that it can be abused. If a terrorist, for example, broke into the electricity generating company's network -- and these power guys always have better communications than home internet users -- then that terrorist could bring down the system, in theory, so causing harm to millions. In that, and in many other cases, there are already adequate laws to deal with the criminal.

And this is sometimes so easy. I stood outside a rice shop this week and got online instantly with my iPod touch, then with the tools installed found how many computers were using the network and their IP numbers too. A simple local situation and I did tell them last week but did not get through. It was still an open network this morning. A lot of wifi outlets are secure as I see when I travel round Bangkok, but not all. It takes a few seconds to put a password on.

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