As an Apple developer, I was keen to get hold of the new Intel-based macs as soon as possible, so when the opportunity came up for us developers to get hold of one of the early machines I went for it like a shot.

While, of course, there were limitations about what I could talk about, I was, on the whole, thoroughly impressed with the machine that we were given as part of the Apple Transition Kit (ATK).

Now Apple has honoured an original (perhaps slightly veiled) promise to replace the original kit with an iMac. It's been on the desk for a little less than 2 hours and so far I'm impressed.

Earlier this week I talked about the ongoing advance of the VMware software through a range of different environments and how they compared to other solutions.

The VMware player software has been available for some time now, and it's been a hit. I am even considering producing some of my own VMware player packages that could be downloaded and used by VMware player users.

For me though the most useful product of VMware is their server offering. I run it on a server here, set up a number of different operating systems and then at any time I can log in to an environment and run an application or lookup a particular element. It certainly makes certain aspects of the job much easier. Within just a few minutes I can test an application within BSD, a number of Linux variants and Solaris without ever having to reboot, and for many, without having to do anything more than login.

Unless you have been sleeping rather a lot recently, you may be aware that the Kama Sutra Worm/Virus hits tomorrow (and indeed any other 3rd day of the month). Kama (or Karma) Sutra, or Nyxem-D or Blackworm is comparatively rare among viruses and worms in that it is simply destructive - there doesn't seem to be any other purpose to it at all.

Generally if you have up to date virus software, it should be identified and trapped before it causes any problems. If you have email virus scanning software on your network border, even better.

If not, make sure you have a valid backup, and be prepared for a long day tomorrow.

I've been a big fan of VMware's virtual products since they were first released. I've been a user and beta tester of their VMware Workstation product since before the original v1.0 release and I still use VMware today.

Not only is VMware good for testing different operating systems and applications in a safe environment, but it is also an excellent way of testing entire networks (for example, when testing grid applications) and, in a server environment, it becomes an excellent way to consolidate multiple servers onto a single piece of hardware and achieve better server utilization and eke more power out of fewer pieces of hardware.

In my younger years I was something of an arcade junkie. Being, as I was, at the bleeding edge of home computer technology (my borther bought a Sinclair ZX81 when they were released), games were pretty thin, and usually low quality.

Arcade games however, were cool, in colour, with comparatively high resolution graphics. Probably the most exciting moment of my childhood was going to the Computer and Video Game show in London with a group of friends.

Now Asteroids was one of the games I played. It was highly addictive, and yet comparatively simplistic.

Apologies to regular readers for my tardiness today.

The reason is very simple - I discovered this morning that one of my websites had been cracked.

Doing some more digging, I eventually discovered that the server had been modified so that pages would now display an embedded IFRAME which in turn would lead users to a site called toolbardollars.biz.

This, in turn, is designed to distribute a couple of exploits (documented well here) intended to let people get hold of your machine.

I'm still investigating, but I have a suspicion that there may be another new spam method on the block.

There seem to be a proliferation of sites that now allow pretty much anybody to submit 'articles' for publication. The sites make money by presumably getting page views and advertising clicks. On one site I've seen recently one 'author' has written about 10 articles, all on the same day, all published on the same day. The articles are short - less than a page - and the content is less than accurate or useful. It is, however, all related to web hosting.

However, the author does include a convenient link to his own hosting company.

It is tax month here in the UK. It is the nastier of the two tax months for those people who have to do their tax through 'self-assessment' - i.e. the endless form-filling required to declare all of your different assets and income.
 
Up until last year I did all of my accounts in Quicken. Intuit have an interesting approach to their software here in UK. They only support Quicken under Windows - even though Quicken on Mac OS X is popular (and in fact supplied as standard with most new Macs). Having consistently brought out products for a few years with an interesting array of features (some of which simply did not work), they suddenly announced in January last year (yes, tax month) that they would be dropping support for their Quicken XG software in the UK within (from memory) about a month. Support would go on for a bit longer.