I’m lost. Do you have a FAQ ?
You’re looking at it.
What is this site?
Well, first and foremost, it is my personal Wiki – a custom-designed content management engine where I jot down some technical notes and (of course) my bookmarks and topics of interest.
No big articles, no in-depth discussions – just a digital scrapbook on steroids with a lot of notes (both technical and related to the telco market), short (and hopefully efficient) articles and the odd opinion.
But it looks just like a WordPress site!
Yes, but it isn’t WordPress – this is a Yaki installation that has gone through a number of designs, the longest-running so far used the Kubrick design by Michael Heilemann.
Why “The Tao of Mac”?
Well, because using a Mac is a lot like Taoism: It just happens. Things just (mostly) work, and it doesn’t get in the way of enjoying other stuff.
What is Tao ?
Click here. Enlighten yourself. You can also buy a “personal enlightenment kit” on any supermarket (hint: look for the flashlight section).
Why the Mac ?
If you really have to ask that question, then you have probably been using computers the wrong way around most of your life. You see, the whole point of using a computer is getting things done on it, not letting the computer use you to keep it running.
That’s just one of the reasons I prefer using Macs, but I won’t get into that. Arguing about computer platforms is like arguing about cars – it’s a matter of personal preference, period.
Where do you live?
In Lisbon, Portugal. Although I’ve often been asked if I wanted to move elsewhere (and have friends scattered around the globe), I like it here.
If you’re Portuguese, why do you write in English?
If you’re asking that question, then you’re probably Portuguese yourself.
The short answer is: Because I spend half my waking hours thinking, writing and speaking in English, and have done so for several years now.
The long answer involves explaining in rather painstaking detail why I don’t subscribe to the usual navel-gazing attitude followed by Portuguese bloggers (usually along the lines of “if foreigners want to read my stuff, they can stick a fish in their ear”), which stems from our nation’s peculiar form of nostalgia for the imperial days and prevents us from making any sort of headway into the modern world.
The even longer answer includes a statement to the effect that I did, in fact, write in Portuguese, and still do – just not here, where I take notes on tech stuff that is of general interest and don’t want language getting in the way.
Where do you get all this info?
You mean the actual news interspersed with my notes and rants? Simple. I have a hand-picked RSS subscription list, and a finely honed workflow that helps me breeze through them and sort out the wheat from the chaff without wasting my dwindling free time.
Plus, you know, there’s this thing called Google that helps you find stuff you’re looking for – I just take notes of some of the stuff I find.
Why a Wiki ?
Because it’s better than a traditional weblog. It makes it substantially easier to jot down down notes on interrelated concepts and (with a few enhancements like the See Also section at the bottom of each page) makes it easier to find related items even if you don’t know all the relationships.
Plus it’s probably the oldest way to publish content out there (no matter what “Internet historians” and journalists say), and – most importantly – it is, conceptually, the simplest thing that could possibly work.
Why won’t you allow people to edit your Wiki or write comments on all pages?
Because people aren’t responsible enough. Even if versioning meant I never lost data, I often had to remove clueless comments from people with nothing better to do with their time. In fact, I still do that on occasion when someone fails to read the Comment Policy.
I do, however, accept contributions and have thought of late of getting a couple more people to help maintain the site – pretty much all my closest friends use Apple gear anyway, so it would be trivial to setup.
Why use your own Wiki engine?
Well, PhpWiki was great and had a well thought-out internal structure that made it easy to bend to my every whim and that weathered well in face of all the changes, tweaks and additions I did over time, but despite that I wanted something simpler. You can read more about all of that here.
Wasn’t this called mac.against.org ?
Yes, it was. Not being a platform zealot in any sense (I use Windows, Linux and Mac OS X every day), I thought it peculiar to be put on when I decided to switch to the Mac as a primary platform at home.
Since part of the experience of being a Mac user has always been feeling the scorn and prejudice of non-Mac users, I thought using that name was a nice way to say that this Mac user would, at the very least, shoot back…
Aren’t you the guy that ran/wrote/coded/did/sold/designed (whatever) ?
Yeah, I’ve been around for a while. I used to run a FPS online games site called accao.net, kept a Portuguese weblog at na-cama.com, worked for a few consulting outfits and integrators, did quite a few site designs for other folk and contributed small snippets of code to quite a few Open Source projects in my leisure time.
Last time I bothered to check, a few FreeBSD and ISDN posts circa 1994 were still archived somewhere, and I do have an e-mail archive from 1990 or so with VAX / VMS stuff in it…
Do you do this sort of thing for a living?
Definitely not. around 95% of what happens on this site is related only to my off-work pursuits. I don’t actually code for a living (only when I get called in to fix something really nasty), or maintain the site for profit (the banners don’t even cover hosting costs).
Pretty much everything you see here is the result of a few minutes a day keeping tabs on current technology or noting down some of the things I do in my spare time. If I did this sort of thing for a living, I’d probably blog about Fine Arts or something.
I do use the site to store some interesting information that I come across during work, but nothing of real consequence to what I do. And that’s where this little bit of text comes in.
And that’s it, really. You can go back to the HomePage now.