The fact that the Amazon Kindle per se exists, has attracted a copious amount of comparisons to the now unveiled Apple iPad. The Kindle of course, is a (reportedly, I don't own one) great e-book reader and Sudoku console. One should be comparing apples to apples, since comparing these two devices is like comparing a Nokia 5110, with an iPhone (ok bigots, or with a NexusOne), simply different times, different action scenarios.

I read here or there a tweet from someone saying that given that the iPad is 2x as much as the Kindle, they would be getting a Kindle instead. Of course, this is a big pile of stupidity. First off, let's make clear that the iPad, besides from all of the hype created around it, is much more than just an electronic paper display. Let's compare both devices when I can watch the entire second season of True Blood on the Kindle, seriously. Or let's compare it when you can browse your music library and listen to it while you're replying to your job's email conversations on why Bill, your co-worker on the next cubicle, should throw away his rotten food from the fridge. Or let's just compare the lack of free browsing and/or Wi-Fi connectivity from one of both. Come on.

In spite of the fact that Apple could have made the world go insane by reducing the iPad price by a hundred bucks more, comparing sale prices for the Kindle and the iPad is purely wrong, let's be clear here. But then again, it's just because of the fact that Amazon made a good and popular e-book reader first and started making it successful, why there's such wrong feelings and thoughts about the usefulness of a single feature on Jobs' second coming of Jesus Christ.

But if you still try to compare both, the Kindle will fail miserably. And Amazon could profit from that actually, they can assume their own niche of market and reduce the price to something that would make sense for people to carry such a device instead of the good old book/newspaper commute carrying. Otherwise, it'll leave it as a shitty alternative to the stunning unaffordable Ferrari next door.

We ordered a family pack of Snow Leopard for the whole development team last Tuesday. They arrived yesterday Friday, early morning.

A few thing don't work entirely as they were, which was expectable, among other things: MacPorts starts broken (but you simply have to upgrade to the actual Snow Leopard version). Visor only works on position Full-Screen. iStat Menus simply doesn't. No support for GrowMail yet neither. And everything else does, as far as I can tell.

I will post updates on those products as soon as they happen.

As I tweeted yesterday, I received my new MacBook Pro. I was a bit skeptical on choosing this computer being a Linux user/developer for quite some time now. I thought it was worth giving it a try anyway. Besides, I still use my old Powerbook; as my home server since I've always liked the Mac hardware.

For the time being, I'm not running Debian in it, but I will install it sooner or later, for now, I've reached some stability and productivity on the current setup, I'm running MacPorts, which brings all the nice open source goodies to Leopard, Vimperator, TwitVim and all sort of terminal scripts to make Terminal.app more delightful to work with. We'll see how it goes.

Hard obstacles that I've found so far that were a pain to deal with:

• More than one Ruby and RubyGems installation (the base system, and the MacPorts installation).
• MySQL on MacOS (specially hard if you are trying to make all work from MacPorts).
• Getting used to "Spaces". I like one row with up to eight or ten columns. Apparently, you can only have up to four column spaces.
• GNOME-Terminal vs Terminal.app.
• CA certificates to make Mutt (or fetchmail) work properly with SSL (post to come).
• MacOS' postfix.

All of this is obviously workaroundable, but being a Linux dork it sometimes takes more time