Criminal Defense Law With An Apple

Seems like the only reason I fire up my emulation software is to visit a site that can only be viewed with Internet Explorer. It takes a while to get Parallels Desktop up and running. When I do, my CPU gets hammered. This makes any sort of multi-tasking a sure fire way to obtain the spinning rainbow beach ball of death. However, today I saw on TUAW that Internet Explorer has returned to the Mac via ies4osx.

Now there’s another option for Intel Mac owners: ies4osx, a Mac port of the ies4linux package. Built on top of the Darwine version of the Wine Win32 API translation layer, ies4osx downloads and installs an official version of IE (you pick from v5, 5.5, 6 or 7) and then runs it inside the X11 environment on your Mac.

The resulting browser looks a little weird — almost like a Bizarro version of IE, with the slightly altered type and menu look of the X11 windowing system — but this bear can dance. OWA runs nicely, with full rich-text editing and message search, and the administration pages for MS Virtual Server also work pretty well. I wouldn’t depend on ies4osx in a production role, at least not with the current build, but for one-off testing of websites in IE it’s worth the (free) download. The ies4linux developer plans to roll the Mac-specific fixes back into the main package, so the next version of ies4 will probably support both Mac and Linux users from the same codebase.

Read the instructions on the page (you need to download Darwine in order to run ies4osx). You can read the full TUAW article here.

Update: After using this for an hour I can say that it works. It is still a very CPU intensive program but not quite as much heavy lifting as Parallels. It is also a bit wonky but it is the first build.

I am still having fun with the new OS and seeing if I can make Bento do my bidding. In the meantime, enjoy the videos.

The new parody. A whole bunch of these spoofs can be found here.

The old parody

The music video parody

The Democratic parody

Apparently a University is trying to compensate for the choice to run a Mac. Exam software for a law school exam is built for PC. Most schools will not allow emulation software or even allow dual boot (I don’t know why).

Because we want our students to concentrate exclusively on finals, the law school administration has determined to provide $12,000 towards the cost of laptop rental for all upper-level users of Macs that are incompatible with the exam software,” explain Dean Claudio Grossman and David Jaffe, the associate dean for student affairs, in a letter to the law school community.

The full article can be reviewed here.

How To Charge An IPod Using Electrolytes And An Onion – Watch the best video clips here

Any criminal defense attorneys using Bento? It looks like a slick Filemaker template. Anyone that is using this for as a case management tool, shoot me an email and let me know how it is working.

Update Nov 14: More on Bento from Appleinsider

Looks great!

Update Nov. 15: I have received enough emails to convince me to try out Bento. Of course the difficulty is that I was waiting for a few more kinks to get worked out of Leopard before upgrading. However, to use Bento, you must have Leopard. I hope to provide my initial thoughts of this product, as a case management tool, in the next week.

This may be useful to some. The name of the program is Pagepacker. The purpose is to create a small wallet-sized booklet of important (or not important) information. The program comes with a wide range of templates (DIY Planner forms) to add to the booklet or you can drag and drop your own image, doc or pdf. Then with a few folds and a cut: instant booklet. Super easy to use. You can’t beat the price (free). I might not be doing the description justice. Take a look here.

For those of you that were not convinced that 1Password was going to be ready for your dock, Agile has a deal for you. The folks that provide Macworld newsletters are offering a free, fully functioning version of the program for signing up for the newsletter. From the page:

1Password is the most popular password manager and we are really proud of the current version. With that said, we have some big plans to make 1Password even better and also have some exciting new products as well.

Once you use 1Password for a few weeks we think you will love it as much as we do. When the new version comes out we hope you will upgrade, but of course you are free to continue using your special license if desired.

This is a fully functional version of 1Password, but this offer will not include upgrades nor access to the my1Password online service.

I paid full price for this software and still do not regret it.

I recently had a difficult case with a number of events that needed to be untangled. My previous way of dealing with this situation was to create tables in a Word doc and create a timeline. I had seen Bee Docs’ Timeline a few months back and decided I should give it a spin. I really dig this program. A few of my peers have reviewed the program. Some liked the program and some believed it fell short. Rather than blather on about how great I think this program is, download it yourself the next time you have a case that needs to be visually laid out. There is a free trial but it does limit the number of events you can enter.