It's too bad they don't make Adium for windows.

I'm looking into getting a new laptop. (My four-year-old Dell is slowly turning evil. First it stopped communicating with the iPod, then it stopped communicating with the printer, and now it throws a hissy fit before it will communicate with the internet.) I think I've settled on the 1.83GHz MacBook, with an 80 GB hard drive rather than the standard 60. People who know Macs better than I do -- good choice? Anything else I should be looking at?

I'm pretty much going to be using it for internet, music, maybe downloading some movies and TV shows, some photo editing, some word processing, basic money software like Quicken, maybe playing around with basic video editing, and I'm most likely going to buy the Mac version of Maple (math program) for some stuff. Last time I worked with Maple on a Mac, it seemed to run much slower than the PC version, but it could have just been that particular computer or the computation I was trying to get it to run, which was admittedly quite ridiculously long and should have been done with Monte Carlo methods rather than what I was trying to do, but I didn't know how to program that at that point.

Is Maple a Universal binary? If not, it's definitely going to be a lot slower than the PC version.

Maple appears to be part universal, but much faster on Intel Macs than it was on PPC.

For the stuff you want to do, a MacBook will work great. It's good for pretty much anything but 3D graphics. For that, you need a MacBook Pro.

Make sure you get 1GB or more of memory, though, as the MacBooks share the same memory for graphics and everything else.

Definitely invest in 1GB of memory. It's the most useful thing you can get for your computer. I think the 80GB of hard drive space is a good investment too.

Speaking of GTK ... for those who still read Usenet, check out the Pan newsreader. It runs under Windows using GTK and is a great program.

[link]

Anyone use SQL Server 2005?

I got this error:

Ad hoc updates to system catalogs are not allowed.

when trying to run this (I know what I'm doing):

delete from sysusers where uid=5

because that's not the correct uid for that user (it got that way because of a restore from a client's database - which means I can't delete the user in the usual way). There's a way of doing this in previous version of SQL Server....

Too long since I used SQL for me to be of direct help.But obviously there is some sort of trigger on catalog (system) tables to prevent direct access. Probably there is a command to override it. I'd check help index and key words for "Modify system catalog".

Probably there is a command to override it. I'd check help index and key words for "Modify system catalog".

In SQL 7, you can set the database properties to allow this. So far what I've come up with is I'm supposed to use the proper API - something like

ALTER DATABASE database_name SET EMERGENCY

but I don't know what comes next. DROP USER?

eta: Bah, I've wasted too much time on this. I'll just restore the database to an SQL 7 server....

Is now a good time to buy an iBook? (I've read rumors of an upgrade to a better CPU in time for the "holiday season" - whenever that is.)