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Apple are making computers with Intel chips. Dell are dumping Intel, we’re told.

Cringely says Google won’t enter the desktop OS market – the margins are too thin, there’s just no money in it, they won’t do it. “Google WON’T go head-to-head with Microsoft for a desktop operating system or a cheap PC” says Robert X. Makes sense. But El Reg says Google are working on a version of Ubuntu Linux (let’s hope they make it less… ochre… but then I’m a SuSE boy if I’m anything, mainly because TillyPaint runs in SuSE but not in Ubuntu).

And if you compile Applescript apps that call Unix command lines, in Panther they just run. In Tiger they throw up a warning dialogue box, which sucks if you want to use it as a start-up item to get a machine to boot up and run the Opera web browser in Kiosk mode, with no human intervention. But if you take the app you compiled in Panther, and run it in Tiger – no dialogue box! Which is weird, quite useful and yet maddenning. And why can’t I find anything about this stuff on the internet?

I blame Google.

Okay, so I was obviously doing something wrong – thanks to a kind soul on the Opera forum, I now know that typing

/Applications/Opera.app/Contents/MacOS/Opera -kioskmode

in the Terminal does indeed launch Opera 8.51 for OS X in kiosk mode.

So now I just need to work out how to get URL filtering to work (I can’t! – I think it’s not finding my ini file) and how to get Terminal scripts to launch at startup or login…

I’m really keen to get a web browser in OS X running in Kiosk Mode – this means full screen, no scroll bars, AND NO MENU BAR. It also means locking down the browser to severely limit its functions, so it can be used in displays in museums, etc.

It’s surprisingly difficult. Most OS X browsers don’t seem to have a kiosk mode. One that claims to is Opera.

The instructions at http://www.opera.com/support/mastering/kiosk/ don’t really help me much – I’ve tried and failed to run Opera from the command line with a -k or -kioskmode switch.

Opera allows you to run it in full-screen mode, but to launch it in full screen mode you seem to have to do some crafty tricks with Universal Access – after a very long Google session I found this web page which shows how to do it. I had to tweak the application name slightly, and here’s what I did with Mac OS 10.4.3 and Opera 8.51…

Go to System Preferences and under Universal Access, tick ‘enable access for assistive devices’

Then launch the Applescript Script Editor and paste this script in:

—
if my do_menu(“Opera”, “View”, “Full screen”) is false then error number -128

on do_menu(app_name, menu_name, menu_item)
try
tell application app_name to activate
tell application “System Events”
tell application process app_name
click menu item menu_item of menu menu_name of menu bar 1
end tell
end tell
on error error_message
return false
end try
end do_menu
—

Then save this in Script Editor as an application and, if you like, put this app in login/startup items for a new user account you’ll create for the kiosk mode. Then lock down the kiosk user account as far as possible.

It’s not pukka kiosk mode, but it’ll do the job for some applications, especially ones where you can work without a keyboard connected.

I have to say I utterly despise courgettes (or zucchini, if you prefer). Hard to think of a blander, more watery, useless vegetable.

I mean, has anyone ever, in the entire history of civilization, ever had chance to utter or hear the following words:

“Well, yes, it would have been a marvellous meal – if only there had been some courgettes!“.

I feel the same way about courgettes that Dr Johnson – and a good many of his contemporaries, no doubt – did about cucumbers:

At Grissipol we found a good farm house, belonging to the Laird of Col, and possessed by Mr M�Sweyn. On the beach here there is a singular variety of curious stones. I picked up one very like a small cucumber. By the by, Dr Johnson told me, that Gay�s line in the Beggar�s Opera, �As men should serve a cucumber,� &c. has no waggish meaning, with reference to men flinging away cucumbers as too COOLING, which some have thought; for it has been a common saying of physicians in England, that a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.
James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (Tuesday, 5th October)

I’m moved to write this for even now my wife is boiling courgettes to feed to our youngest, as she sleeps blissfully unaware of the tasteless pap that’s heading her way.

Bollocks. Now my PowerBook is 4 times SLOWER!

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/