Comedian & actor Bernie Mac has died in a Chicago hospital after being admitted earlier in the week for pneumonia.

Mac’s character Frank Catton in the Ocean’s movies was hilarious, the ‘cracker’ scene with  Matt Damon & Andy Garcia was a classic.

Sad condolences to his wife & daughter.

First, here’s the obligatory Harbour Bridge & Opera House shot.

Now, Google has introduced it’s Street View imagery for Australia.  And when I say Australia I mean all of Australia

Except Darwin.  Sorry Mum & Dad, no street view for you.

Those blue lines are roads where street view is available.  This means that some poor guy had to drive all the way across the Nullarbor in one of the camera cars.

Anyway it is quite amazing, privacy complaints notwithstanding, how much detail you can see.  Here’s the Esplanade at Manly Beach, where you can see the blurring effect (actually you can see it being a little over-zealous, it’s blurred the traffic light too!) .  Here’s the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the ANZAC statue on the ANZAC Bridge, looking back down Leura Mall or down the main street of Beechworth. 

It’s a bit of a pity that it was overcast on the days when the shot a lot of the Sydney imagery, but this is very cool.  It’s a game changer for real-estate too.  The real estate agent hasn’t got a shot of the outside of the house?  Doesn’t matter, you can probably look it up.  Trying to find a location, now maps can not only give you the directions, but show you what the place looks like too.

This was actually quite handy today. I needed to find a factory to pick up a new trampoline mat & thanks to Google Maps, not only could I find how to get there, I knew what the building looked like when I was looking for the street.

The Google Australia blog has more details and a video about the new release.  So go check it out.

I gave in this week & installed iTunes, purely so I could purchase Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.  Of course as all Whedon fans who don’t live in the US now know, when you try & buy it you get this

Not. Happy Jan.

So now I’ve installed iTunes for no good reason at all!

I’m really not a fan of Apple’s client software, they tend to be bloated & they have a nasty habit of installing stuff that you weren’t expecting.  Unfortunately iTunes is no exception to this rule.  After installing it I went to my Windows Control Panel & I see this little icon there

MobileMe is Apple’s new sync application for the iPhone & iPod.  Now I don’t own an iPhone or an iPod (not through lack of *wanting* one) so I’ve got no use for this software.  I didn’t do the custom application when I installed iTunes like I normally do with new software because I was in a hurry, so there may have been an option to not install it there.  Either way, I never said to install this & I’ve got no use for it.

Removing it

Removing it is actually fairly simple.  Go to the Control Panel & click on Add/Remove programs (or whatever the Vista equivalent is).  You should see an entry for Apple Mobile Device Support. Click the remove button on that.  It may complain if you have Outlook open, but you can ignore that.

Once that’s finished (it took a surprisingly long time on my computer) refresh the control panel & the application will be gone.

Just in case you didn’t know, you can see what the new Facebook profiles are going to look like here http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php

The new layout has a lot more dependence on AJAX/Javascript and they’re clearly focusing on the news feed.  To access the application boxes & info that used to be on the profile page you need to click on one of the tabs under the person’s name.  Also the link to comment on a news item is now the word ‘Comment’ instead  of the rather ambiguous little icon it is currently.

The obvious comparison here is with FriendFeed.  The current version of Facebook doesn’t allow you to comment on items directly from the news feed, you have to go to an individual person’s profile to do that.  We can’t see whether this will be possible in the new version of Facebook because it’s not showing us the news feed yet.  When you click on the home link on the new facebook site it just reloads the profile page.  If they do allow this it will become very much a FriendFeed clone. 

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FaceBook has been slowly updating the Mini-feed displayed on a user’s profile page to look more and more like a FriendFeed-esq lifestreaming application, by allowing you to include actions from other sites, and now allowing comments on the items.

Triston McIntyre has a good post on the details and possible implications of these changes on Profy, especially as to why FriendFeed probably doesn’t have to worry too much about this:

In execution, I seriously doubt Friendfeed has anything to worry about. Though Facebook does have a friends feed on each user’s homepage, and individual mini-feeds on every user’s profile, Facebook’s feeds are structured very differently than FriendFeed. Where on FriendFeed, the feed is pretty much the focus, mini-feeds on Facebook are largely overlooked, except perhaps by those jealous lovers and "interested" others (oh, come on, everyone has them.right?).

Facebook is essentially Social 101 for those looking to get connected to friends. Platforms like FriendFeed and Twitter, at least at this point in time, are just a higher level of social media. Adoption of both platforms is increasing, but I don’t think that FriendFeed needs to worry about losing its user base to Facebook-happy comment heads. Sleep easy, FriendFeed, and enjoy the flattery by imitation.

However, Google Operating System has a post today outlining the features in the new beta of the iGoogle homepage.  The new iGoogle will have a lot more ‘social’ features in in, including a gtalk chat & gmail directly on the page, but the thing that I noticed was the ‘Updates’ box on the right.  This seems to be a feed of all the things you’re doing on Google’s products.  The box there has a number of items on it: shared items from Google Reader, photos from Picassa, shared themes for iGoogle, shared gadgets and status from Gtalk.  There’s also the ability to add free text (and presumably links) in a box above the list.  There doesn’t seem to be any non-google content in there, but I can’t believe that it would be possible to do that.  If it’s not a feature now, you know it will be very soon.

So FriendFeed may have some more competition in the not too distant future.

From the SMH:

Apple iTunes users in Australia can now buy television shows – some of which have long been offered for free elsewhere – for the first time at $2.99 each.

After a protracted tussle with local networks and the studios for rights to distribute episodes to Australians via the internet, Apple has secured deals with the ABC and Nine networks in Australia, as well as Disney, ABC and MTV in the US.

Local shows on offer include Summer Heights High, McLeod’s Daughters, Canal Road and Sea Patrol, while US favourites are also available including Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, The Hills, South Park, Pimp My Ride and Scrubs.

Single episodes cost $2.99 but unlike overseas there are no discounts for buying full seasons. In the US, where TV shows have been available through iTunes since 2005, individual episodes cost $US1.99.

‘bout time.  Hopefully this is the beginning of some better online entertainment content for Australia