I took some golf lessons last fall. I was told by my instructor, a golf pro, that the average difference in handicap between the top 10 money making pros and the 2nd tier guys who struggle to make a living is about 1 or 2 strokes. That is, as a very good pro, if you…
John Martellaro
John Martellaro was born at an early age and began writing about computers soon after that. With degrees in astrophysics (B.S.) and physics (M.S.), he has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple. At Apple he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager, a Federal Account Executive and a High Performance Computing manager. His interests include chess, science fiction and astronomy. John is the host of the TMO podcast Background Mode.
Articles by John Martellaro
Oh, Apple, That Thing You Do (Part I)
— Andy Grove No company with more than one employee is perfect. Changing companies often simply replaces one set of problems with another set. So if you’re thinking about going to work for Apple, or even some other company, and you’re wondering what’s good and bad about Apple for comparison, I’m going to describe the…
Will Twitter Kill E-mail?
Physicists like to talk about the probability, calculated by Statistical Mechanics, of all the air in a room moving to one side and suffocating the inhabitants. It can happen, but the probability is such that it’s unlikely to happen or have ever happened in the lifetime of the universe. Similarly, the probability of everyone abandoning…
LoJack Can Recover a Stolen Mac, Activate Remote Wipe
Many times a week, a Mac user experiences that sickening realization that a treasured MacBook has been lost or stolen. LoJack for Laptops from Absolute Software Corp. recovers about three out of four of the stolen computers and can initiate a remote wipe to protect sensitive personal or corporate information. It’s an all too common…
Particle Debris (week ending 3/20) Movie Tizzies, Sigma Iotia, and Fizzbin
You either run with the herd or get left behind and eaten. That’s all there is to it. Also, on Monday, there was an interesting New York Times article about how the escalation in use of cell phones on the 3G networks is revealing infrastructure problems. Even though AT&T has been spending billions, technical issues…
HOWTO - Getting Started with Twitter
Twitter, when approached properly, can be an important tool for networking and staying in better contact with friends and colleagues than something abstract like LinkedIn. One need not be seduced into thinking that one must use Twitter to reveal personal thoughts or describe in detail your toothache. Rather, think of it as a new, sub-space…
Three Sky Simulators for Astronomy Tested: Two Winners
The International Year of Astronomy The year 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. From the website: “The International Year of Astronomy 2009 is a global effort initiated by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and UNESCO to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night-time sky,…
Temperature Monitor 4.6 Gives Warm Fuzzies
Macintosh users, especially Mac Pro and MacBook Pro users, are often concerned about the temperature condition of their high performance computers. Temperature Monitor 4.6 from Marcel Bresink provides not only full temperature data, but also history graphs that can be exported for research and documentation. I have been using a wonderful utility called iStat to…
Microsoft's Illusion: Netbook & Linux Threats Can be Neutralized
For a long time, Apple enthusiasts have watched with amusement as the Windows OS has grown to become a monster on the desktop. Typical users are befuddled by the modern Windows OS, like Vista, with its Registry and complex maintenance issues. As a result, users just ignore potential problems, then get into trouble, especially with…
HOWTO - Watching Internet TV on an HDTV
High Definition TVs are just now starting to appear with Ethernet connections. But with every vendor singing deals, protecting turf, and wanting to lock customers in, one has to think for a bit about how to get TV from the Internet onto the living room HDTV free of gotchas.ABC uses its own browser Plug-in (Lost)The…
Intel Nehalem Unleashes the Supercomputer in Mac Pros
Sometimes people, especially scientists, are anxious for Apple to jump ahead of the competition. That’s a natural reaction — Apple’s ease of use and UNIX roots make it a natural for scientists on the desktop. However, Apple often ends up lagging. Apple was slow to move from PCI-X to PCI Express, and they were also,…
TubeStick Delivers HD Television on Mac Desktop
The Equinux TubeStick is a combination NTSC and ATSC tuner the size of a large pack of chewing gum. It can be connected via an antenna or home cable (coax) connection and comes with TiVo-like software to tune, watch, pause, do instant replay, record, and export directly to iTunes. The TubeStick has two components. The…
A New Way of Working with Mac OS X: Glimmer Mode
For most casual Macintosh users, the concept of workflow on the Mac OS X desktop isn’t an issue. However, for professionals who use a lot of applications at once, display real estate and workflow start to become an issue. That’s because, based on the typical application size, the acuity of the human eye, the Mac’s…
TMO Quick Tip - Printing a Single Page in Apple's Numbers Spreadsheet
Below is a sample spreadsheet like the one described above. It’s a mythical list of school kids in acting class kept by a teacher, not likely to get much larger. The goal is to print it on one sheet of paper. (Note: For clarity, this screen shot doesn’t show the default, empty columns further to…
A Comparison of TaxCut and TurboTax
These two companies, Intuit and H&R Block, are very competitive. They pay attention to what the other company is doing, pay a lot of attention to customer feedback, and take the their brand and customer trust very seriously. As a result, the two programs, given the same user inputs, are very likely going to produce…
e-quinux Stationery Pack Spices Up Apple's E-mail
A lot of e-mail is business correspondence, and it should be crisp and simple. However, for special occasions when one wants to spice up e-mails with, say, travel photos or get well wishes, e-mail templates are a welcome touch. The Stationery Pack 2 from e-quinux has hundreds of customizable templates in an application that is…
The Story of a Scientist Living in Windows on his Mac
I spent all of last week skiing in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. For those not familiar with the area, Steamboat is a major destination ski resort in the northwestern part of Colorado, about a three hour drive from Denver. It’s a week of heaven for skiers, and with 24 years of skiing under our belts, my…
Multisite 2.4 Adds Website Flexibility to iWeb
Apple’s iWeb uses a quasi-hidden location to store multiple Websites, and users don’t have control over either the file management, location or breaking multiple sites up into logical components. Multisite 2.4 from Clarkwood Software solves that problem for iWeb users. iWeb works by hardwiring a path for a single package. That package is found in:…
An Exercise in Whimsy: Maximum Mac Leverage
This article falls under the label of an editorial, but it’s really an exercise in whimsey and playful thinking. Follow me along for a minute.MacBook Pro: CPU, about 12-16 gigaflops, GPU, about 125 gigaflops I’m sitting here in front of a computer that can execute 100 million sines in 20 seconds. And that’s in Perl. It…
iLife '09: iPhoto and iWeb Reach Tipping Point
Many people have a technological tipping point. That’s the point where software, iLife ’09 for example, becomes so compelling that it can persuade one to give up personal, specialized, or UNIX geeky ways of doing things and just throw one’s entire weight behind a product. iLife ’09 did that for me with iPhoto and iWeb.…
On Being a Computer Language Omnivore
I am in the process of learning Python. It’s a very nice scripting language, but like any language, it has its own unique approach. That’s not lost on me who’s been a Perl nutcase for the last 17 years. Perhaps the biggest issue surrounding Perl vs. Python (and perhaps Ruby) is this idea of the…
Second Gear's Today is iCal's Little Helper
Today is a light weight, tidy Mac OS X app that extracts iCal calendar events and tasks and places them in a small, time ordered window. It’s a summary screen that can be launched at login, so that iCal doesn’t have to be running, and new events and tasks can conveniently be entered into Today…
The Half-life of Steve Jobs' Leadership
First of all, one has to remember that the management structure, as it exists with Mr. Jobs was uniquely designed by Mr. Jobs. In simple terms, Tim Cook handles the procurement and operations side, Peter Oppenheimer manages the money, Scott Forstall handles the iPhone software, Bertrand Serlet handles Mac OS X, Bob Mansfield handles the…
Apple Posts Leopard Security Guide, 2nd Edition
The new security guide is listed, along with other security guides for Leopard Server as well as Mac OS X Tiger and Panther. The 2nd edition for Leopard client is 260 pages. One section that may be of interest is the security auditing process associated with the Common Criteria certification process. The Apple Security Guide…