..idle writings from an idle mind..

It’s been a month since I’ve written (slack!) and not a great deal of good news for the folk at Virgin Blue. Short summary:

• The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has offered a preliminary determination denying the proposed joint venture between DJ and NZ
• The United States Department of Transport has done the same thing for the proposed joint venture between VA and DL
• DJ’s shiny new rez system, New Skies by Navitaire, suffered a truly spectacular meltdown which took all booking and automated check-in functions off the air for 2+ days last weekend

In slightly more positive news, the ACCC has granted preliminary approval for the co-operation between VA and EY – ahead of a more formal determination that’s expected by the end of the year or early next year. The codesharing arrangements have already begun, and there is quite a decent sale on at the moment (ending October 18) for cheap return flights in economy to Europe:

V Australia and Etihad sale details

(though I don’t personally recommend booking through Best Frights … see your trusted travel agent or book directly on the VA website)

Unfortunately the premium cabin fares are less inspired; certainly cheaper than QF, but still plenty of other, more keenly priced options on other carriers.

As for the DJ/NZ joint venture – Canberra Airport has added their opinion to the mix, supporting the agreement (though most likely because a DJ/NZ alliance would bring International service to CBR; probably CBR-WLG and possibly CBR-AKL).

The ACCC have given the airlines until Monday of next week to show cause for approval of the joint venture.

Apple have very specific design rules for applications that run on OS X — you could sum a bunch of them up by saying something like “thou shalt not fuck with how the application looks”.

With the release of iTunes 10, they’ve gone and broken their own rules with awful new left-aligned window resize and close buttons; see the attached example.

While there’s many other things to dislike with iTunes 10 (just one example .. the new application icon that appears to have been created by an junior artist lacking in time, talent or both); this one is at least fixable — open a terminal window and run the following command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1

Restart iTunes and the buttons are back to where they ought to be.

If you decide you really prefer the new button location (what? why!?), you can reverse the above command with the following:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window 0

- zac.

Recently, I was asked to get a family member set up with a new laptop … naturally enough, I recommended a Mac. Got a great deal on an end-of-line model, but have been a little stumped with what software to put on it. It’s for general use (Internets, games, photos and so on), and it’s also for a first-time Mac user.

Beyond installing Mac OS X and iLife, here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

• Microsoft Office 2008, for working with documents
  (lets face it, both Open Office and iWork are a little bit shit)
• VLC, for media playback and weird video formats
• Perian, to help with moar of the weird video formats
• NodeToad, a really nice Internode usage meter
• PopCap Mac Pack – who doesn’t like Bejeweled and Peggle?
• Classic Solitaire – covers prettymuch all of the card games
• Quinn – Tetris clone

That’s about all I’ve managed to think of, at least in terms of important stuff. Is there anything I’ve missed? Bear in mind that it’s for general use, and I’m trying to get away with installing as little as possible.

Mexicana, oneworld’s newest member and the 4th oldest commercial airline in the world has been operating on borrowed time it seems – filing for bankruptcy protection in both the US and Mexico to stop moar planes being seized (depending on which report you read, two or three were temporarily held in Canada like this one – and another in Chicago besides); dropping long haul routes and stopping forward ticket sales do not for a healthy airline make.

It seems that the other Grupo Mexicana airlines MexicanaClick and MexicanaLink (single class domestic/short haul ops) are both still doing just fine – their lower cost base means that they’re both still profitable.

It’s never good to see an airline implode, especially not one that I really enjoyed flying with — smiling staff, clean planes and reasonable food/bev that you didn’t need to find a credit card for certainly made for some great flights — I sure hope they manage to get out of the mess they’re in. Doubt it, but it’s not played out yet.

For no particularly good reason, I decided I needed one of these gadgets – I mean, my existing mouse works just fine, but it’s not nearly as cool as one of these, right?

Apple fanboy comments aside, it’s pretty awesome. Documentation is fairly sparse (where’s my apple stickers dammit!?), however it’s nice that they actually include batteries to make the thing work (though not of the rechargable kind, sadly).

Still getting used to the best/most precise way to use it, and getting a hang of all the gestures might take a while. Definitely nicer than using a regular mouse; two-finger-slide to scroll as opposed to a scroll wheel feels more natural somehow. I’ve found that the click “action” works best on the lower half of the trackpad, so am experimenting with where the trackpad sits in relation to the keyboard to see if there is a “best” place for it.

Sadly, the download to enable the trackpad for my laptop didn’t also grant full gesture support to my laptop’s built-in trackpad. Oh, and the glass surface on the Magic Trackpad is at least a thousand times more awesome than whatever my laptop has!

Unnecessary purchase? Absolutely, but it’s nice to treat yourself every now and again