Mac.sis making macs and S60 handsets talk

Season's greetings from the dark depths of Finland to all Mac.sis readers! As we're winding down 2007 and bracing ourselves for 2008 I thought that a little bit of a retrospective would be in order, so here are a few thoughts on the past year and expectations for the next.

Is your RSS reader populated with dozens of mobile and Mac feeds? Do you feel a constant need to check your feeds for new stuff? Does a newfangled trick to have your S60 phone and your Mac exchange a mostly futile piece of information give you warm fuzzies?

If yes, there may be a Mac.sis writer in you, just waiting to come out of the closet.

OK, somehow the captcha failed with the discussion forum and a spammer flooded the forum with pr0n ads. I have now taken the discussion forum offline, and am currently thinking about how to proceed with it. It has not been very busy, with the main activity taking place in the article comments.

I would nevertheless want to offer a place for people to ask questions, so please bear with me while I think about how to achieve this.

I will be taking the last day of my winter vacation tomorrow Friday and enjoying a long weekend before heading off to the XP 2007 conference in Como, Italy on Sunday for entire next week.

If there's anyone in the Mac.sis readership heading to the same conference and you spot a short haired individual with geeky automatically shading sunglasses sporting either a white Macbook or a black Thinkpad, come and say hello.

Any tips for sights or good spots to eat in and around Como are also welcome!

I took my 1st generation MacBook in for warranty repair last week, and got the machine back today. The dealer changed the top case (to fix the discolourisation) and replaced the battery, both under warranty. The new top case has the effect of making the MacBook look almost brand new, and it even came with the New Mac Smell.

The whole Mac.sis server suffered an MySQL crash last night, and apparently the crash was bad enough that the hosting company has reverted to day-old backups. Therefore, yesterday's content is to a large part in the bit bucket. I am reposting my own articles (got local copies, thanks to Ecto).

So, if you sent in questions or comments yesterday and cannot find them, here's why. Please repost if you can. Apologies for the inconvenience this may cause.

When Mac.sis got a mention at Tommi's blog earlier this week, I must admit that I was rather surprised by the traffic on the site as well as the friendly messages sent by many visitors. Thanks to everyone who sent words of encouragement – they were truly appreciated.

The Mac.sis site has now been opened for business, with some rudimentary content in the HOWTO section. More content is to come, and I hope the information provided here is useful to anyone with a Mac and an S60 handset. Just in case you do not know what S60 (or its maiden name Series 60) refer to, let it be known that S60 is a smartphone platform developed by Nokia on top of the Symbian operating system. You can find more information straight from the horse's mouth at http://www.s60.com/.