Apple fans the world over await this year’s MWSF with bated breath, as not only are we going to hear news about OS 10.5 “Leopard” and the iTV, but the rumor mills have been spinning full bore with speculation that Stevie J will finally unleash some sort of Apple branded Cellphone on his throngs of faithful minions.

The prospect of getting an iPhone seems pretty small to me, as Apple has said time and time again that it doesn’t see a viable market for such a device. Still, we’ve been surprised before, so only time will tell. Have a look at the links below to follow the news, it’s sure to be an interesting week!

MacWorld San Francisco
Think Secret
Macrumors.com live coverage

Web developers often use local servers to mimic the environments their code will eventually live in once it launches. OSX allows a wide variety of configurations to run code locally, such as XAMP, WebserverXkit, and good old fashioned Apache via the command line.

Another great entry into this list is MAMP, or “Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP”. Much like the other solutions out there, MAMP provides an all in one package for your web server, database, and scripting language. MAMP brings a lot of polish to the table though, as it comes with phpmyadmin preinstalled making database administration a snap, and the ability to toggle between php4 and php5. A great finishing touch, MAMP provides an OSX dashboard widget that displays your server and mysql service status, as well as giving you the ability to start and stop those services on the fly. The one addition I’d make at this point is the ability to tie given directories to virtual hosts, rather than requiring the user to change their document root when ever they pick up on a different project.

Multiple project directories aside, MAMP is free, so give it a try: I’m finding it to be a great solution!

Ever since making the switch back to Mac over two years ago, I have really enjoyed using iCal. I bought a .Mac account thinking that I would be able to keep up to date with my appointments no matter where I was. However, anyone who subscribes to .Mac knows how poorly implemented their online calendar is. All you get is a static calendar that can’t be modified. With the launch of Google Calendar and its ability to sync with iCal I thought that I had finally found the answer to multi-location calendar modification. I was saddened to learn that the synchronization only works one-way: Google Calendar to iCal. Changes made in my iCal software would not be reflected when I logged into Google Calendar while away from home. The result is that I find myself using solely Google Calendar while iCal just sits in my dock looking lonely.

It looks like this may be about to change. Spanning Sync enables two-way synchronization between iCal and Google Calendar. Check out the very promising video demonstration on the developer’s site. The product is planned to go into a closed beta soon. We’ll keep you up to date as more details emerge!

Sun is onto something really cool with their new Project Blackbox portable datacenters. The plan is to convert ordinary shipping containers into mobile datacenters that can be dropped into any location for customers that need to expand their capacity and data processing capabilities fast. These boxes are complete IT solutions that, fully maxed out, would place them within the list of the world’s top 200 supercomputers.

They offer:

• 250 x64-based servers with 1000 cores
• 1.5 petabytes of disk storage or 2 petabytes of energy-efficient tape storage
• 7 terabytes of memory
• Suport for up to 10,000 simultaneous desktop users
• Power and cooling to support 200 kilowatts of rackmounted equipment

Check out the movie over at the Project Blackbox site. It’s so impressive that I decided to max out all the credit cards and put one on order for the Crashpod offices. Even if we don’t need it for Crashpod version 5, I bet it would make a sweet gaming rig!