"A Crude Awakening - The Oil Crash" - Thoughts on the Movie

Just finished watching "A Crude Awakening The Oil Crash" by Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormark a thought provoking documentary on the future of oil production. The documentary centers around questions about the history of oil, the use of oil then moves on to topics covering the growing demand for hydrocarbon based fossil fuels.

The filmmakers gather a broad series of perspectives in presenting their case for the point that we are running out of cheap easily recovered oil. The film consists with interviews with a number of experts including: former Oil executives, oil geologists, various academics and political advisers and takes the viewer on a journey across the world (e.g., Britain, China, India, Venezula, Russia, USA, and the Middle East). The film is an interesting journey covering the early discoveries of oil, through to the case of peak oil in the U.S. in terms including the definition of Hubbert's Peak (named after American geophysicist Marion King Hubbert).

This movie does what any good documentary should do which is to make you think critically and thoughtfully about the topic being addressed. In this case it leaves you with as many questions as answers including:

• What happens when its clear we've peaked in terms of discovering new oil?
• How do we best adapt to the reality that the era of cheap oil is coming to an end?
• Are the alternative energy sources being put forth a stop-gap or a clear alternative

Overall, well worth renting or picking up a copy from your local library for a watch.

Prepping for Leopard - Only a week to go!

Okay, its only a week to go before Leopard hits the street at 6pm!

Have you pre-ordered your copy? I'll admit I have a copy on the way and will be getting the discounted version since I recently upgraded to a Macbook Pro from the white Macbook I'd been using for the past year. Hopefully, the web orders will ship in time to arrive for next Friday. Although, if you're near an Apple store and don't qualify for either the education discount or have bought a Mac that qualifies (in the past month) and you want the full fanboy experience you may want to line-up supposed free Leopard t-shirts are being handed out to an early number of buyers.
If you need a fix Apple has posted a guided tour that covers the key features watch it here

Alright time to talk about getting prepared. The following are some useful links that I've encountered in thinking about prepping my machine (since it was a migration of my previous OSX image from my Macbook).

1. Start with this article from MacWorld
2. Next I'd move on to reading this set of tips from Lifehacker
3. A great post about cleaning up your hard drive
   
4. My starting advice would be to back-up you Mac to an external drive using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner.

Huzzah! Apple announces SDK for iPhone & iPod Touch

GREAT NEWS!

Following on the heels of the rumors from yesterday regarding the potential for Apple to relent and open up the iPhone and iPod touch platforms to third party developers - this announcement was posted on Apple's site today:

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

...

We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.

Steve

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch. [Oct 17, 2007]

Digital Signatures: The other interesting topic that is directly addressed in the posting is the topic of mobile security and the desire on the part of Apple to control. Nokia is cited as using digital signatures issued to developers as an initiative to allow third parties to develop for their handsets yet still enable Nokia to ensure control over content in the name of security and stability. While I'm sure there will be some that snipe and grouse about the lack of unfettered freedom my take is that this is a logical and should cut down on the level of frustration for all concerned.

I think that everyone in the Mac community owes a HUGE hats off to the dedicated set of hackers that forced this issue by developing some interesting and compelling apps beyond Apple's initial weak "Web 2.0" excuse of using browser based apps. My take is that the future for this platform looks bright and in general Apple's creativity and moves have given the handset manufacturers a wake-up call. We're starting to see some interesting innovations related to user interface as opposed to the thin, bland and often weird designs the handset makers have been putting out over the past couple of years.

As a side note - stop by Engadget and have a look at the recently released Nokia 810 definitely some nice advances on an interesting device that I think will continue to point to the direction of personal computing.