Note: Updated and republished for 10.6.4’s release; skip it unless you really really care about all the OS X releases. Originally published on November 14th, 2005.

Below the break is a table showing all major releases of OS X, from the public beta through the latest public version, which is 10.6.4 as of June 15, 2010. Note that this release marks the 55th release of OS X (counting both major and minor versions, and skipping two ill-fated updates). Wow.
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It’s not very often that I see a movie that moves me enough to write something about it. Sure, a couple years back, I put together a list of some of my favorite comedies, but those were capsule summaries written about movies that were, in general, quite a few years old.

Yesterday, however, I saw Avatar, and was, for the first time since the 1977 release of Star Wars (I refuse to call it ‘Episode IV’), absolutely amazed by a film. As such, I felt moved to write a little bit about Avatar.

This is not a review, and it (hopefully) doesn’t contain any spoilers. Instead, I’ve focused on my reactions to Avatar, some comparisons to that original Star Wars movie, and what I think it means for movie making going forward.

First off, after sleeping on it, I definitely stand by the three-word (five, counting the parenthetical) review that I tweeted yesterday:

Go see it (in 3D)

Go see it because it’s entertaining. Go see it because it represents the state-of-the-art in movie visual effects. Go see it if you’re a fan of cinema in general, and want to see where filmmaking may be headed in the future. But really, just go see it–Avatar is well worth the cost of admission, regardless of the reasons.

Does that mean it’s a perfect movie? No, in fact far from it–the story, in particular, is too predictable and has been seen many times before. Then again, Star Wars wasn’t necessarily a completely original story, either. Another recent favorite of mine, Star Trek, was itself very similar to Star Wars (this funny video demonstrates just how similar). In short, I don’t necessarily mind a predictable story if it’s presented well and the rest of the movie works with the story.
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Veering off the usual technology/toys focus of my blog, I have a nutrition question. My wife and I are having a friendly debate over the relative healthiness of a couple of different breads. One of these breads is a traditional “whole wheat” loaf, and the other is one of the newer “whole grain white” loafs. I’m hoping some nutrition wizard out there can help settle the debate as to which is better for us to be eating. After the jump, you’ll find the nutrition labels from each loaf. I’m curious as to whether or not one is clearly better than the other…
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I was helping a friend set up a site for their family, and they wanted it to be password protected. I protect our family site using Apache’s basic access protection (httpauth), and it works well enough, so that’s how I set up his site as well.

However, we then had nothing but trouble with the Flash-based image uploader in WordPress, which is a tool I don’t personally use. After some digging, I discovered that the Flash-based image uploader simply won’t work with httpauth.

Because the objective was to keep out unwanted visitors, I found a workaround — it’s not perfect security, but it seems to do the job well, and allows the Flash-based image uploader to work. I disabled the httpauth access restriction, then installed two plug-ins:

• Restricted Site Access: This plug-in prevents anyone from seeing the site without first logging in. We then created one generic username/password for my friend to give out to all his relatives (which is what we would have done using httpauth, too).
• Peter’s Login Redirect: This sends users to the home page of the site after login, instead of to their control panel. I’m not sure why, but after logging in, our generic user was going to their control panel. This plug-in solved that problem.

The end result is a site that’s protected from casual visitors, as well as robots (though we’ve also got a robots.txt file set up, just in case). It’d be nicer if WordPress would just fix the httpauth issues, but it seems they’re not interested in doing that.

Thank you, Michael Letzig, for demonstrating just how difficult golf can be. Yesterday, during the Buick Open PGA tour event, Michael hit a shot that I’ve replicated many times (too many times!) myself–a good old-fashioned full-on hook shank. This shaky YouTube video shows just how bad the shot was.

That clip, however, is quite dark and it’s hard to spot the ball. So I snipped a bit of it out, and processed it with ScreenFlow and QuickTime Pro. The end result is this version, which makes it much easier to track the ball and see exactly where it wound up. Urgh.

The bad news for Michael is that, despite that shot (he saved par on the hole), he played well enough to…get paired with Tiger Woods in the final pairing for today’s final round. Urgh.

Last week, we took the kids to a family reunion in Destin, Florida. For those who’ve never been (as I hadn’t prior to last week), here are some observations from my experiences.

• Highway 98, the main arterial road that runs up and down the peninsula, is seemingly always crowded. This is especially true on Saturday and Sunday. We sent some folks on a grocery run to a Sam’s Club when we arrived on Saturday. It was 16 miles away, and it took them nearly an hour to get there. The rental office was five miles from the bridge where we crossed to the peninsula, and it took nearly 20 minutes to cover that distance.
• The sand (at least on Crystal Beach, which is where we stayed) is simply astonishing. Pure white and very soft, with nary a hard shell to poke you in the foot.
• The water temp near the surface was 80F+, and very pleasant. Waves are generally small, but large enough for the kids to enjoy some boogie boarding. We went scuba diving one day (though Destin isn’t the greatest of dive destinations), doing two relatively short dives (as they were somewhat deep). One decent picture (click for larger):
  

  The water temp was about 73F to 77F at 60 to 85 feet; we wore 3mm wet suits, which kept us warm enough for the two dives.

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I’m in the midst of a huge round-up of iPhone golf-specific GPS (range finder) and/or scorecard apps for Macworld. As of now, I’ve identified 32 of them, but I’m wondering if I’ve missed any. If you have a second, please check out this list and let me know (via a comment here or via Twitter) if you’re aware of any other apps.

Read on for the list (note that some of these may be mis-categorized as I haven’t tested all of them yet)…
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Recently a friend introduced me to something called literal videos. A literal video is a remake, with a twist, of a popular music video, usually something older from the 1980s or 1990s.

The twist in the remake is that the lyrics for the song in the video are changed to reflect what’s actually happening in the video. So if there’s a shot of a car driving down the street, the literal video’s lyrics will be something along the lines of “So there’s a car … driving … driving down the street.”

The words are sung by someone doing their best to match the musical sound and pacing of the original singer, making it seem like this is how the video has always been.

It’s actually much harder to explain than it is to demonstrate. So, without further ado, here are four of the funniest (to me, at any rate) literal videos I’ve found. If you haven’t seen the original versions of these videos, the literal videos may not be quite so funny; I’ve included links to the originals, too.

• Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart [original • literal video]. This one is, by far, my favorite. Some of the lines are absolutely hysterical. After watching it way too many times, there’s no way I can watch the original now without hearing the literal video version’s lines playing in my head.
• Meatloaf’s I’d do Anything For Love [original • literal video]. Another very good effort, with some bits that are laugh-out-loud funny.
• The Beatles Penny Lane [original • literal video]. John, Paul, George, and Ringo have never been quite so funny…and what is with that horse?
• Journey’s Separate Ways [original • literal video]. Not as good as the first three, but still worth a chuckle or two.

I’ve searched YouTube pretty extensively, and these are the best examples I’ve found. Anyone have any other recommendations that I may have missed?

This is a story about chance, and how, well, chancy it can be.

Today I flew across the country to visit my dad for a few days. The first leg of the flight left at 6:00am, which meant a very early start to my day (even by my standards). Out the door at just after 4:00am, after parking and shuttling to the terminal, it was a bit after 5:00am. Check-in went fine, so then it was off to the security lines. At the Portland airport, they run two security lines–one for first class and one for those of us in the cattle car.

Both lines were quite long this morning, but moving at a good pace. As I neared the front of the commoner line, I looked to my right and noticed a familiar face standing almost right next to me, in the first class line. It was Bill (names have been changed, as I didn’t get permission to share this story), whom I worked with at my last job (prior to joining Macworld full time).

I hadn’t seen Bill in person for probably three years (I left the company in 2005). However, Bill and I had been trading voicemails for a few weeks, trying to get together for lunch and to set up a round of golf at some point. But we kept missing each for one reason or another.

So it was very odd to stumble into Bill at the airport, especially at 5:15am on a Tuesday morning. He was traveling with his family, heading off for a week-long vacation. What was even more chancy about this encounter is that, for at least a couple days, Bill and I will both be in the same city on the east coast! How very odd.
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The following is my rough timeline for the aging of Jack Bauer, lead character on 24. The original inspiration for this post was the 24 Wikipedia entry. While browsing, I noticed the way time absolutely flies between 24 seasons.

24 first aired in November 2001, and was set on the day of the California presidential primary, but no specific year was provided. Just to make things simple, I’ve arbitrarily chosen 2000, which puts day one in June of 2000. Any year, however, would work just fine for tracking Jack’s age.

In June of 2000, Kiefer Sutherland was 34.5, so let’s assume that was Jack Bauer’s age as well. From there, as the seasons progress, time moves rapidly. In the following table, all of the After Prior Day values came from the 24 Timeline on wikia.com.

The only real issue with this is that the timing of the Redemption movie is off–it’s supposed to occur on the day of the presidential inauguration, which has been on January 20th or 21st for over 70 years now, but the timeline shows it in February. I’m not sure why there’s a discrepancy.

Little is known about season eight, other than it’s set in New York City and will begin “very quickly” after the end of season seven. Let’s hope so, lest Jack reach mandatory retirement age prior to the day’s start date. Of course, after preventing seven major terrorist actions in just over 13 virtual years, Jack’s probably earned early retirement!