July 2004 Archives

Dave Pollard just found the weblog of someone he didn't know about but with whom he seems to have shared interest. He's making a good point about how useful the Internet can be in helping people find like-minds, if only we'd have something beyond search engines and newly-born social software to find them:

All of this, besides letting you know about a great blog and a fascinating company, is my round-about way of making a point that I'm going to blog about next week: The Next Economy, whether that be a World of Ends Economy or a Support Economy, in which entrepreneurs will find and associate with each other to provide innovative, deeply valuable services to customers in a way that multinational corporations can never hope to match, depends utterly on the Internet providing us with a powerful means to find like minds and experts on anything under the sun. The bit of serendipity that I described above that allowed me to find Mark is a perfect example of how impossibly difficult that is with the tools, and shortage of knowledge, we struggle with today. The issues are:

1. How do we get people to post to the Internet (and keep up-to-date) sufficient information about themselves in an appropriate format to allow us to find them, easily, when we need them?
2. What kind of tool is needed to filter, qualify and leverage that information and (ideally, proactively and organically) connect us with like minds and needed experts, kind of a context-rich audited Yellow Pages of millions of people's individual interests and expertise. We know that search engines and first-generation social networking tools aren't up to the job. We need something completely different.

Time for some creative, very innovative thinking. Time to think how nature would solve (or does solve) this complex problem -- I'm thinking of the thousands of spring peeper frogs in my pond all calling out for the perfect mate. The solution probably lies in that place where parallel paths converge.

I will get back to this subject in a few weeks, with a story on how weblogs helped me get a dream team work together with me on a little something that I think wouldn't have been quite the same had I selected suppliers the "classical" way.

Gosh, I learn from El Reg that there actually is such thing as the sysadmin day!

Let's face it, System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year. This is the day that all fellow System Administrators across the globe, will be showered with expensive sports cars and large piles of cash in appreciation of their diligent work. But seriously, we are asking for a nice token gift and some public acknowledgement. It's the least you could do. Consider all the daunting tasks and long hours (weekends too.) Let's be honest, sometimes we don't know our System Administrators as well as they know us. Remember this is one day to recognize your System Administrator for their workplace contributions and to promote professional excellence. Thank them for all the things they do for you and your business.

So I post this note to pay tribute to a few select sysadmins working here and here, who're doing a great job (they'll recognize themselves).

And I guess I'll have to congratulate myself on behalf of myself for all those servers that I secretly manage to save on our budget ;-).

So, Apple and RealNetworks are not in real harmony, who would have guessed? Real Networks came out recently with a DRM translator named Harmony, which can transcribe RealNetworks' DRM format to a variety of other DRM formats such as Apple's FairPlay so that music bought on the RealPlayer Music Store can be played on different devices such as the iPod.

Apple said that RealNetworks has adopted the tactics and ethics of a hacker to break into the iPod, announced their intention to investigate a legal challenge over the DMCA and other laws, and lastly warned that when they change the iPods firmware Real's Harmony technology is likely to break.

RealNetworks dismissed the legal threat, arguing that reverse-engineering is legal and that they're bringing more choices to owners of portable music devices. They also questioned quite ironically whether "Apple is complaining we're helping them sell more iPods?" They have a point here, as one might question where Apple makes money in this ecosystem. (Hint: I don't think it's with the iTunes Music Store.)

RealNetworks might well be right about the vacuity of the legal grounds in this affair, which explains why Apple hinted their ability to technically wreak Harmony by a firmware change.

What's important to me is that Harmony is embodying the idea that DRM protections, if they cannot be universal, should at least be portable to all popular devices so that you can buy music where you want and play it where and how you want (something, BTW, we've been able to do for decades!)

Which brings me to the conclusion that if Apple has no legal ground to stop RealNetworks and makes a technical move to prevent Harmony from working, they will anger a lot of people, notably their own customers!

What do you think?

It's been a while since my last French lesson du jour. Most Mac users know about Aladdin Systems, makers of Stuffit. Aladdin changed its name to Allume.

Allume in French means light on, switch on (from the verb allumer, to light). Allumé means alight, burning but also, in slang, nutcase, nutter, as in crazy, off one's head or rocker. Needless to say, the French are likely to think about the familiar form when they'll see this name. I thought you'd like to know.

Six Apart unveils the first details on Movable Type 3.1. MT 3.1 is due to ship on August 31 and, contrary to MT 3.0 Developer Edition, is the upgrade meant for all users of MT. The following new features and plugin pack make it a significant upgrade for both 2.6 and 3.0 users:

• Dynamic vs Static publishing: choose best of both world on a per-template basis (requires PHP for dynamic pages)
• Post Scheduling: prepare your post and have them published at a specific date and time
• Subcategories
• Comment and TrackBack Spam management: along with the new comments/commenters management interface, MT 3.1 will ship with MT-Blacklist
• Better search engine with XSearch/Plus
• KoalaRainbow for those who want to go creative with dynamically generated images
• Even more fun mixing several webogs into a single site with MultiBlog
• Markdown for those who prefer replacing FUC with lesser ugly code
• and a better email notification system and subscriptions management with Notifier

Application-level callbacks are a new addition to the development framework for the plugin developers. The MT-Plugin Directory is being updated to include new plugins, notably those which have been submitted to the MT3.0D plugin contest.

As with the previous versions, I'd love to take part of a beta test (hint! hint! ;-).

How to put a 3M pixels camera in a phone? Well, Samsung did it, by reversing the problem: putting a phone into a 3M pixels camera!

May be one day moblogging will not be just linear postings of ugly pixelated images.

Ah! Personnalized 419 scams. I just received this, in my professional mailbox, no less:

Barrister Edu Evans& Associate Palm grove House, 1 Shaam Ave, I lupeju Lagos State. Tel:+234-803-394-7345 Alternative Email:( barr_edu@jumpy.it

Dear Nonnenmacher,

I am barrister Edu Evans A solicitor at law. I am the personal attorney to Mr.Larry Nonnenmacher,a ational of your country, who used to work with shell development company in Nigeria and as well a one time secret
agent in transfering of money overseas for the Late head of state of Nigeria {Late Gen.SANI ABACHA}.my Before his death On the 21st of April 1999 client, his wife And their three children were involved in a car accident along shagam express road in which all occupants of the motor died}.

My client{MR.LARRY}deposited as family belongings in a CONSIGNMENT {ie jewelries} the sum of $15m in a finance company here in Nigeria for himself, with the hope of transferring it to his country as soon as he is on leave.

Since his death I have made several enquiries to your embassy to locate any of my clients extended relatives this has also proved unsuccessful.

After these several unsuccessful attempts, I decided to trace his last name over the Internet, to locate any member of his family hence I contacted you.

I contacted you to assist in repartrating the money and property left behind by my client before they get confisicated or declared unserviceable by the Finance Company where this huge deposits were lodged.

particularly, Citi Trust Securities & Finance Ltd where the deceased had anaccount valued at about 15million dollars has issued me a notice to provide the next of kin or have the account confisicated within the next ten officialworking days. Since i have been unsuccesfull in locating the the relatives for over 4 years now I seek your consent to present you as the next of kin of the deceased since you have the same last name so that the proceeds of this account valued at 15million dollars can be paid to you and then you and me can share the money. 60% to me and 30% to you and 10% for any expenses which may be incurred in the course ofthis transaction. I have the all necessary legal documents that can be used to back up any claim we may make.

All I require is your honest cooperation to enable us see this dealt through.I guarantee that this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the law.Please get in touch with me by my email or through my mobile telephone number;+ 234-803-394-7345 or alternative email:(barr_edu@jumpy.it) to enable us discuss further, kindly forward your Address,private elephone and fax number.

Best regards,

Barr. Edu Evans.

Sure Edu, I knew Larry very well.

For fun and facts about 419 scams, search The Register. I particularly like the cosmic 419er lost in space.

Six Apart just announced the winners of the Movable Type 3.0D Plugin Contest. We have, in order:

1. Jay Allen with MTBlackList 2.0 -- spam-blocking and management system for comments and trackbacks
2. Andrew Sutherland with KoalaRainbow -- visualization engine
3. Tim Appnel with Xsearchplus -- a Plucene-powered search engine and system for plugging alternate search engines
4. David Raynes with MultiBlog -- a plugin that allows the user to include templated content from one blog in the template of another
5. John Gruber with Markdown -- a text-to-HTML conversion tool
6. Chad Everett with Notifier -- a subscription service for email notifications

These plugins, along with more others, will be distributed by Six Apart in a free plugin pack near the release of MT 3.1. This materializes the bet of Six Apart that the plugin architecture of Movable Type will foster a lot more innovation that the company can provide alone.

Personally I wish I could get a hand on those plugins asap, specifically MTBlackList 2.0, MultiBlog and Notifier for which I have an immediate need!

This is so funny, Tim Bray is having his own Powers-That-Be at Sun complain that authoring web pages on their weblog is painful:

I’m hearing private gripes from our internal writing community, from the President to the marketers to the Solaris geeks, about how their writing tools stink. The state of Web authoring tools is kind of like the state of what we used to call “Word Processing” twenty years ago when I was getting into this business. If everyone’s going to write for the Web (and it looks a lot of people are going to) we need the Web equivalents of Word Perfect and Wordstar and Xywrite and Microsoft Word, and we need them right now.

Hardly news to me. Looking back at my own publishing history about this subject:

1. January 24, 2003 - I want a rich text editor in Flash -- this is one of the most popular posts of this weblog, there are TONS of people looking for a good rich text editor. Ironically, none of the links you'll find from that post work. I found nobody who has come out with something acceptable (to the folks at Ektron, no more spam please, your stuff isn't what I'm looking for)
2. January 26, 2003 - NetNewsWire Pro -- Brent Simmons adds a weblog editor to a desktop application. I'm still using NNW to edit my posts today, although it still requires a little knowledge of HTML.
3. January 31, 2003 - I argue that we'll remain lost in semantic space until the user interfaces properly hide the technology behind the scenes. No one who just want to write and use the web to publish should have to worry about tags
4. February 09, 2003 - a look at Postmaster gives me the occasion of a little follow-up about RIA and Flash as rich text editors
5. April 01, 2003 - big rant about old-school rich text editors -- I'm afraid we're still surrounded with those, even some which pretend to be better like Midas (which generates CSS compliant tag soup)
6. May 23, 2003 - It's the interface, stupid! -- my first foray at one of the biggest opportunity for weblog software editors to set themselves apart from the crowd (hint, they should still pay attention!)
7. May 25, 2003 - I reported on BitFlux, finally an open-source XML visual editor that pays attention to semantic. Still a work in progress
8. October 21, 2003 - digging around the future of content management, I toyed with some ideas about desktop applications and office suites. Hey Tim! I seem to recall that your company owns Star Office, have you thought about that as an editor?
9. November 17, 2003 - YAOSHE! -- it still amazes me that some people waste their time building yet another old-school editor instead of building what people really need
10. March 24, 2004 - I dreamed about a couple Contribute + Movable Type -- Contribute is one of the best editors for content workers out there
11. May 08, 2004 - FUC Weblog software! -- one year after the first one, another rant about how terrible the current weblog software still are in terms of wysiwyg editing
12. June 10, 2004 - When dynamic content looks static or how to use Contribute on dynamic content. May be Atom will add possibilities (but frankly I don't care about the plumbing)
13. July 19, 2004 - Blogger goes Whizz-ah-ma-wig -- first attempt from a weblog service to bring WYSIWYG editing to their users. Unfortunately, it generates an ugly tag-soup (but at least it's a step in the right direction)
14. July 19, 2004 - Macromedia with its Web Publishing System is getting more serious about a simple desktop application for web content management

So I guess we had to wait until corporate weblogging lift off and the CxOs of big software companies start confronting themselves with the state of affairs in web publishing before things could get better. I just hope someone will come out with something good before Bill Gates starts his weblog and decides to impose this thing to the rest of us.

TypeMover is a plugin that adds backup, restore and migration features to a Movable Type weblog. Among a very interesting list of features is a little gem for me:

TypeMover will convert your data from it's original to the new server character encoding as needed. This is very useful when moving from an MT2 server using ISO-8859-1 into an MT3 server using UTF-8

Yes! Finally I'm going to be able to switch to UTF-8 while keeping everything in the same weblog.

Adrian Holovaty, frustrated with a backward redesign of All Music Guide, has written an extension for Mozilla Firefox that modifies the site behavior to his liking. He calls for more:

There's a huge potential here. Site-specific Firefox extensions are an elegant, one-click-install solution to the problem of, well, lousy Web interfaces -- a problem Web users have had to shut up and deal with for as long as the Web has been around.

Along the same lines, the BugMeNot extension embeds the functionality of BugMeNot right within a Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape browser.

I like the idea a lot, using the potential of the web as a platform and routing around monoculture, annoyances and mediocrity.

Blogger adds WYSIWYG editing to its interface and Christopher Jason Wetherell's discusses the usefulness of WYSIWYG editing in the browser (he also provides a more technical note on this implementation).

What you see is mostly what you get.

So, it became evident during testing trials at Google of WYSIWYG editing that a large set of people have learned a minor set of HTML for basic expression needs, and have grown so accustomed to using them that a WYSIWYG mode which didn't easily allow these people to compose using that markup presented large and sometimes unacceptable interruptions to their content creation task. Furthermore, having a place for them to enter a "source mode" only frustrated them further as they wondered where the styling went. You see, some of us know some HTML but not all, and with broader expression available to them, these new-to-them tags presented challenges that were, at times, more annoying to them than if WYSIWYG didn't exist.

One solution, implemented now at Blogger, is to create a mixed-mode enviroment for WYSIWYG where a user can enter rich styling and HTML and have both work. So (as coined by Jason "Mr. Product" Goldman) the result is more of a WYSI-M-WYG or "What You See Is Mostly What You Get" editor.

We believe that is helpfully pronounced "Whizz-ah-ma-wig".

There are some caveats, though... As one who has complained many times about old-school rich text editors, I fingered Midas some time ago for its propensy to generate tag soup. As evidenced by the HTML code on Christopher's posts above (e.g. it's full of <span style="font-style: italic;">...</span> à la Midas), this kind of rich text editor is not going to do its users a favor on the long term! This said, it's a move in the right direction, and I hope others will follow suit in a way that is more respectful of the semantic/style XHTML/CSS couple.

I remember having told several Macromedia marketing and product managers visiting me during their European tours that their future in web software was with content producers, not just web designers. That was five years ago at least.

With their new Web Publishing System, they seem to be going this road now. WPS looks like a marketing wrapper for the following tools:

• Studio MX 2004 -- a full creative suite for designing web sites. Aimed at technically skilled web designers
• FlashPaper 2 -- Macromedia's response to Adobe Acrobat, which now becomes usable because it produces... PDF files! (not just Flash). Aimed at content producers
• Contribute 3 and Contribute Publishing Services -- see below for a more detailed explanation. Aimed at content producers

Contribute 3 is an upgrade to its cross-platform, lightweight web publishing desktop application that was introduced some 18 months ago. I keep a close eye on desktop software as I still believe they're the future of content management, and seeing Macromedia continuing the development of Contribute (and furthermore with good support for Mac OS X) is a good sign.

Contribute can be seen as a trimmed-down version of Dreamweaver, Macromedia's flagship HTML editor, targeted to non technical people who need to manage their content, not fiddle with technology. At that, IMHO, it does the job pretty well as being one of the best WYSIWYG tools out there, as opposed to the vast majority of WYSIFUC ones.

I've not tested version 3 yet, but I'm happy to see that they've added a few Mac OS X features: use of WebKit (refered to as "Safari technology"), the ability to easily include QuickTime movies, integration with .Mac (consequence of supporting WebDAV as one of the connection protocols), and FlashPaper with PDF capabilities (which was previously Windows-only and still ships separately on Windows).

Contribute Publishing Services seems to be an add-on to Contribute that provides central administration (hooks on enterprise LDAP and Active directories) and tracking of user access and publishing activities on the website. You can live without it, managing users manually on a site-per-site basis.

The CMS market continues to shift from complex and expensive gas plants to down-to-hearth, get-the-job-done, affordable tools. And this is a very good thing.

Interesting changes visible in the BBC RSS feed. I just posted to my linkblog a link to a story titled Senate rejects gay marriage ban (caption: "An attempt to change the US constitution to ban gay marriage has been rejected by the Senate.") which not so long after was replaced by Bush vows to pursue gay union ban (caption: "US President George W Bush says he will carry on trying to make homosexual marriages illegal in the United States.")

The first story is still accessible at its own URL, but only if you were lucky enough to catch it during its ephemeral appearance in the RSS feed. It is now gone from both the feed and the BBC world landing page.

There is probably nothing behind it apart a refinement, though I find both titles and captions quite different in the message they carry. The final article also misses a few points that were in the first one, such as "Same-sex marriage has been thrown into the spotlight after some US states and towns moved to make it legal" (action) only to keep the fact that 38 states have moved to ban it (reaction). Overall, my impression is that it moved from pointing to the rejection by the US senate of this project of Bush to relaying his efforts to have this issue on the radar before the election.

Let's forget the subject of these articles, the point is that it's still very interesting to watch how new channels such as RSS can expose things that were previously quite hidden, such as re-editing web content after its first publication. Cooking the books and RSS are not meant to go along.

I found Beyond Bullets via Sylvain Carle. For those of us who are forced to use PowerPoint to feed bullet thinking to the corporate powers-that-be, this is a gold mine.

Though I'm less and less keen to produce any PPT for my presentations nowadays. Like some, I'd rather improvise to fit my audience. And with the spread of weblogs within the company, I'll eventually be able to rely on page-slapping when I want to make a point ;-).

If you are upgrading your Movable Type weblog from any version to 3.0D or 3.01D, here are a few advices from the trenches:

• If you are hosting it under Apache 2, beware of charset mismatches. MT3.0 now uses UTF-8 as its default encoding (which is good) but Apache 2 backwardly dictates ISO-8859-1 by default (which is wrong)
• In a freshly downloaded MT3.01D folder, check in the lib/MT/Template folder for a file named #Context.pm# and remove it if present (its name may cause your FTP server to balk and screw up the upload for subsequent files). I have filed a ticket to Six Apart and this will be sorted out in the distribution packages. This problem pertains only to the current MT3.01D version
• If you cannot login after the update with an error that refers to a hash problem (the error message is different depending on the version), delete the mtauth cookie listed under your domain and relaunch your browser. This is an old issue

I hope this helps others to not waste as much time as I did with those tiny but annoying problems.

While setting up a new weblog using UTF-8 as the default encoding charset, I spent literally hours trying to figure out why my first name persisted to show up as François instead of François. Not that I'm not used to it already, but I have this foolish hope that computers should eventually facilitate our life.

It turned out that despite a correct definition of the charset encoding in all pages (<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />), some pages (output from CGI scripts) would be recognized as carrying the proper encoding while others (HTML, PHP) were always reported as having an ISO-8859-1 charset.

Thanks to the excellent Web Developer toolbar for Firefox, I found out that certain pages had a charset definition superposed on them via a Content-Type HTTP header (See headers in Tools > Web Developer > Information > View Response Headers, very handy). After more digging, I found that the pages that were behaving properly would already provide a Content-Type header, which turned my suspicion to the brand new Apache 2 installation on my server.

Bingo! Apache 2 now ships with a default AddDefaultCharset directive that forces the charset to ISO-8859-1 when one is not provided in the headers by an external module (such as a script). Since the HTTP headers have precedence on the META headers tag in the HTML code, this basically voids your efforts to provide this information within HTML pages.

This has been flagged, with merit, as the Apache bug 23421 (see also Apache bug 14513).

If you experience this odd behavior, what you have to do is find the AddDefaultCharset in your httpd.conf and change it to this:

AddDefaultCharset Off

This will prevent Apache 2 to override the charset encodings that you provide through META tags. Apache 1.3.x ships without this directive, which means it's off by default. You should have Apache force the charset only in very specific cases, but that should never be the default behavior IMHO.

I have a question for you. I'm convinced that a successful adoption of weblogs in the enterprise goes through the internal adoption of the couple news feeds and newsreaders/aggregators. But I found one major issue with disseminating internal content through RSS/Atom feeds: how do you secure the feeds?

Using an online aggregator through a web browser seems the easiest way, since every company already has its own way to secure web access to its intranet. However I tend to prefer desktop aggregators, but they don't necessarily implement things such as SSL/https and cookies which are commonly used in such cases.

Have you got secured news feeds on your intranet, and how are they implemented (security, authentication, compatible newsreaders/aggregators)?

I saw Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 last night at the Metreon downtown San Francisco. I wanted to see it there rather than in France to find out how an American crowd would react to it. I found the documentary great but the crowd quite atonal (pop-corn crunchers apart). I've seen more expressive reactions to hollywood blockbusters, and that is a bit disappointing. Though, there were several moments when people (inclujding myself) were crying. I'm going to see again in France to compare.

You should see it too, and if you don't want to shell a few bucks to Moore, well, he won't go after you if you grab it for free on the Internet.

Or so it seems. I've tried to buy one in New York in March then almost everyday in San Francisco for the past two weeks and all I've ever heard is "sorry, we're sold out"!

Sold out, sold out, sold out...

Someone makes a song with that anthiem, and sell it on the iTMS, please.

At the WWDC, I got some disconfort about the appearance of new "extensions" to HTML done by Apple in its WebKit. Tim Bray nails it:

I’m a major admirer of Safari and of its primary author Dave Hyatt. But a couple of Dave’s recent notes have caused me serious discomfort. Here he notes that Safari will support a new search= attribute on the input element, and here he discusses a new canvas element. Even more troubling is the opening phrase: Another extension we made to HTML is... I’d be really happy if someone explained to me how this is different from what Netscape and Microsoft did to each other so irritatingly back in 1996 (<MARQUEE> anyone?). What the W3C and Web Standards Project were created to stop? [By the way, there are namespaces, there are class= attributes, there are legitimate ways to extend HTML.] Someone please explain to me why I’m wrong, because I really hope this isn’t what it looks like.

I'm afraid that it might be exactly what it looks like. What's the next step, MS XHTML 2.0?

QuickTime was my main reason for attending Apple's WWDC, more specifically what's up with the codecs and the streaming server.

The codecs (coder-decoder) are those algorithms that are used to 1) encode content in order to compress it, 2) decode the compressed content in order to display it. Codecs are at the heart of the battle between technology suppliers. The WWDC just confirmed what should now be quite obvious in the IT world, in the field of codec standards, it's a Microsoft vs. the rest of the world battle. To summarize it: everybody but Microsoft is moving towards MPEG-4 Part 10 AVC, aka H.264 depending of which standards body (ITU or ISO) names it (H.264 and MPEG-4 AVC are the same thing.)

The most noticeable characteristics of H.264/AVC are:

• The standard only defines the bitstream, roughly how to decode the stream. This way it guaranties the compatibility on the client side (all compatible clients will decode a standard stream). By not defining the encoding part, it lets technology suppliers compete to provide better encoders that still produce standard streams
• This codec has the broadest client scope, it is meant to support anything from HD-DVD down to 3G phones with the same format
• It has a quite broad industrial support (i.e. everyone but Microsoft)
• It has a better licensing model than the current MPEG-4 Part 2 format (you have to check the fine prints for specific cases, but generally those who don't make money out of encoded content don't have to pay a fee to distribute their content)

You can expect encoders to appear anytime soon (e.g. Sorenson Squeeze 4, Apple QuickTime Pro shipped with Tiger) and mass distribution of H.264/AVC compatible clients within a year from now (QuickTime in Tiger and very likely all 3GPP and 3GPP2 compatible mobile phones). Warning: if you ever get a hand on the encoder that ships on the preview release of Tiger that Apple gave this week at the conference, do not encode and store anything vital with it, it will NOT play with the final version of the codec.

As for the streaming server, I'll have to digest a whole bunch of information before I can come back to this subject, so that'll be for another time.

Photographs from the WWDC Beer Bash event at Apple campus in Cupertino. Click on any image to zoom.

It starts in the bus to Cupertino. The fog is slowly descending the mountains:

A fine gentleman attending Apple's WWDC expressed some surprise yesterday when I told him I was working exclusively with Macs at work. His assumption was that working for a big IT company, I had to work on a Windows PC.

Indeed, Macs are not exactly the cup of tea of corporate IT departments. But confounding the needs of the average corporate citizen (e-mails, memos, presentations, time-sheets, expenses reports) which are very well embraced by Microsoft's Office suite and an average hardware configuration, with those of someone who needs to develop web sites for the widest audience, is an unfortunately common stupid mistake of many IT folks.

The reason I'm now working exclusively on Mac is simply because Mac OS X along with the fine Apple design of both hardware and UI make them the best IT platform for me on the market, by a long shot. Here are a few main reasons:

• It's obviously handy to make sure a site works well for Mac users
• I've neverrarely had to add any extra hardware to do advanced work such as complete digital video workflows, wether on my desktop machine or my portable (correction: back in the time when I had a PB3400, I bought a FireWire PCMCIA card to hook a digital camera)
• All my production environment being based on Unix and Linux, I can prototype everything on my Macs before moving it to production, even with my portable. This is Just Great™!
• Everything I need for multimedia web development exists for Mac OS X and offers more often than not a better UI and productivity than their Windows counterparts
• I can still be a perfect corporate citizen with Microsoft Office on the Mac, actually no one in the company has ever been able to tell that I was using a Mac without actually seeing it
• I can use the hardware much longer than a PC (three years is my average hardware life, while the productivity of my colleagues on "standard" PCs falls dramatically after two years)
• No lost days because of virus, patches gone wrong, registry gone south, system degradation and crashes, you name it. In the past 12 months, I remember seeing colleagues doing nothing for days until the IT folks figured out how to cure a company-wide infection
• I'm the one they come to see in order to open all those fancy files that the creative agencies send us. OK, that's not a reason I should list, but the IT mono-culture has ironical side effects
• Apple happens to be the first supplier of Unix OS in volume, and it's simply the best desktop Unix that exists today (I find Linux nowhere near in that respect)
• I can always emulate Windows on the Mac, should I have to (the temporary absence of Virtual PC due to the conjonction of their acquisition by Microsoft and the incompatibility with the G5 made me realize that I don't have a vital need for this anyway)

Translated into corporate speech for CxOs, it boils down to this: with a Mac and for my particular job, I have a system that is more efficient/productive/capable/secure/resilient with a lower TCO than an equivalent PC. "Don't tell me that you'd prefer that the company spends more money so that I can be less productive!". I've actually served this several times to a few top managers, and it has worked very well so far, since they can't challenge it (two of the last three CIOs I've seen have tried, they're not with us anymore but I doubt I've had any influence on that ;-).

This said, there are tons of excellent web developers out there who do a great job with Windows PCs. The TCO calculation in my particular case includes the fact that I had no software legacy to replace nor any training for switching, being already a long-time Mac user. In terms of money, and change of habits, switching has a significant impact. But if you have no strong ties with Windows, and lurk around Linux, you should give Mac OS X a try, you will not regret it.