Saw Confidence, a 2003 movie... so I was behind in seeing it. Excellent, wish I'd caught it earlier. Everyone was good in it.
Also learned that condoms in Canada are under the "family planning" section of the supermarket. Had porridge, with "flax". Porridge is odd, always heard the name but never actually had it. Tastes a lot like cream o' wheat. Don't know why the person insisted on mixing this "flax" stuff in, and showing me the container, but it's supposed to be good for you. Looked like wheat germ to me.
Also got to eat at Swiss Chalet- do yourself a favor if you are ever up in the Ontario area, eat there. Reasonably cheap, but damn the food is good. If you're a guy, order a half-chicken white meat with fries and an extra thing of dipping sauce... yum. Girl'll want a quarter white meat. Great fries, but that dipping sauce seals the deal. They don't really have these in the states, just a few in FL and NY, but they're all over Canada I guess.
Weird, quick trip that went surprisingly easy. Now I'm just trying to catch up, I got in last night but crashed, was way too tired. Might get dragged to the butterfly effect tonight, which I'm trying to avoid. It's not getting good reviews, and I'm really just not in the mood.
posted on January 25, 2004 at 06:01 PMI have a bad feeling about this. Supposed to leave in 4 hours, and there's snow and high winds. Bracing for the airport delays. O'Hare + winter = good chance of never arriving or leaving on time.
I also have everything done... backups made, laptop all set, files on disc... I'm always wishing I had a few more hours. It's been a pretty easy week, so I'm sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Which probably means I'm going to get strip searched at the airport or something. note to self: wear clean underwear
Maybe I'm just wigged about going somewhere actually colder than it is here right now.
Tiff pointed me to a decent article on Justin Frankel over at rollingstone.com that's worth a read.
He's the guy who did winamp, gnutella, waste, etc. It's overdown and overly dramatic, but a fun read and gives some tidbits behind the headlines I'd been exposed to (especially when waste.exe was released).
Have to have the "i love toxic waste" tshirt. Haven't seen one of those since Real Genius.
An excerpt:
But Justin, despite buying himself a used turbo Audi, was in no rush to sell out. Early on, he had included the tag line "Winamp whips the llama's ass" (riffed from a line in a song by the late schizophrenic Chicago street singer Wesley Willis) on every player. When a pharmaceutical company offered big money to adapt Winamp for use in sales presentations -- on the condition that he remove the tag line -- Frankel balked, and the deal fell apart.
At least he's not on the cover. Nowadays that pretty much guarantees you're about to disappear.
If you've never tried Adium, and iChat or the OSX port of AIM really annoys you, its seriously worth a look. It was my client of choice for a long, long time. Done by Adam Iser I believe, it had tabs, clean UI, and solid, resource-conscious code. Looking at its code versus another project like Fire is a bit sad. It was really best of breed.
I lost track of it for various reasons, mostly because the original author stopped development and i was trying to make do with a bunch of the multi-protocol clients out there, which all suck.
A random passed on a link to a new project called AdiumX. Cool. They're taking the old code and moving to backend based on Gaim. It's rough in a lot of areas, and isn't quite what the old Adium used to be. But it's interesting and has a lot of promise, and it supports the Address Book. It's really worth a look.
I also got pointed to this plugin, which logs your Adium chats to a PostgreSQL database. Slick. As. Hell.
Also of note on that site is this MP3 on their music page which I swear for a second had me wondering if I was listening to an old undiscovered Pixies track. But I could just have pixies on the brain due to the rumors of a reunion that are springing up everywhere.
They also have this nifty picture, which makes me laugh. Hard. I'm not sure why.
Red Hat plans Linux push in China
Really, really interesting story. Everything cool is happening in Asia right now, especially China. Everyone knows it, and everyone is worried about it. They're just to god damned big, and they want to join the rest of the world in a big way, and they want to do it on the cheap... IE, not necessarily just buying Dells with WindowsXP.
But with the kind of volume you're talking about, you don't need that kind of money. Linux is prolly going to make a huge splash, which will help it in the USA also... it's going to be strange to one day be waiting for the English port of some uber-cool app just released in China first.
What's interesting is that it's a market where Apple just doesn't really play at all, save Japan. One day, theoretically, but not right now. Even more interesting is just how gang busters Linux could come on in the desktop space due to Chinese adoption. If there are 100 million linux desktops there, you can be damned sure people here are going to be trying to sell them apps.
So if Linux makes massive inroads on the desktop, does that help or hurt a company like Apple? IIRC, economic theory would say markets generally can support two competing standards: VHS vs DVD, CD vs cassette, etc. So would Apple be a 3rd standard (linux & windows being the other 2), or will it ride on top of Linux, as an uber-brand, or will it get creamed. Should be interesting.
Schwartz has offered to help IBM migrate to Linux desktops by selling it Sun's Java Desktop System, released last summer. "We can offer a desktop for every one of your employees--with a free right to use the desktop at home--for $50 per employee. Consider this a formal quote from Sun--but only if you're willing to buy in volume."
This one is kind of lame, really. More than anything it seems to be Sun trying to grandstand and get some free press mentioning "Sun" & "Linux" in the same paragraph without also having "erosion of marketshare" or "feeling pressure from" included. If you've followed, Sun went from taking big steps with Linux (their own distro, the cobalt line), then killed it, and is now trying to make a name again with Linux in a big way and made a big splash with a huge China deal. It is kind of interesting to get a sense of what Sun is willing to license their Java Desktop for in volume.
I'm preparing to head off to canada again on friday, and wanted to import my new Kill Bill soundtrack (it's yummy) so I could have it with me.
At some point in the near future, I want to rerip my rather large music collection from standard 192k mp3 to one of the newer formats. I basically just have plenty of storage now, and I can really tell the difference with some of my music. IE, Lords of Acid really shows some artifacts at 192k mp3, but not at 240+. I know I could re-encode everything with much better quality for the same amount of space.
It's just becoming a bit of a hassle. There's:
- Ogg Vorbis
- MP3
- AAC
- FLAC
- AIFF
WMAWAV
WMA and WAV are out right off the bat. WMA isn't a bad codec, it'd just be way too much of a hassle for me to access my stash. WAV is just a crappy encoder. The only thing I find interesting about these are WM9's lossless encoding option, which would be handy. If I used windows most of the time I might look into it... but it wouldn't play on an iPod or some of the less mainstream players.
MP3, with the LAME encoder, actually sounds excellent. LAME is just slow as hell on Macs when encoding, although I know they're working on an altivec-enhanced version. It's also CLI based, which is fine, but it'd be nice to have something a little simpler. It's attractive only because MP3 is so universal. Things like LameBrain make the whole thing so much easier... but again, Lame is just so very slow on PPC.
Ogg-vorbis is extremely attractive from a quality standpoint, but it limits you greatly in the players & peripherals you can use right now. It's also not the fastest to encode, and uses some decent CPU while decoding. If there was more player support (especially quicktime!) and peripheral support I'd prolly be jumping towards this one.
FLAC is probably the most interesting, if you have mondo space to spare. Lossless compression, so you basically rip everything to FLAC, then as different formats come along... no big deal, just re-encode the original FLAC files to whatever you want. One of the big chores of this endeavor is going to be sitting there feeding in hundreds of CDs and ripping. Whipping up a quick shell script or pointing an app to an HD of FLACs and telling it I want MP4s or MP5s one day would be cool. There's at least one CLI wrapper for ripping, but egh, without CDDB support and the like it's a drag. Entering tags by hand is 199* territory.
AIFF isn't very appealing. If you're going to use AIFF, you might as well just make disk images of the actual CDs or something.
AAC is pretty fast to encode, and has good quality, but again you limit your player support. It is, for the moment, pretty much a mac thing. That'll prolly change if the iPod and the iTunes Music Store keep going as they are. Right now only the iPod supports AAC I believe. It's just a real hassle to say "Here, listen to this track, these guys are great" if they aren't on the mac. Yeah, you can convert it to an MP3, but lossy + lossy = eww. And even though in the grand scheme of things AAC is very much a mac thing, a lot of the cooler tools for things like HE AAC aren't available. Suckage.
I'm really interested in Ogg & FLAC, but doubt I'll go that route right now. I'm not looking for iTunes support completely, as iTunes constantly pisses me off with its CPU usage, but a lot of the lower-CPU players just don't have great features or aren't really stable or have other problems, like Whamb. I really miss the winamp experience in OSX sometimes.
So I prolly won't do a damn thing about re-enconding for awhile until things shake out, or there is some other catalyst to spur me on, like a new digital audio player. Who knows, maybe AAC will take the world by storm, or Ogg will. I'm prolly still reeling from trying to rip radiohead's "hail to the thief" album... it's DRM protection really screwed up my Macs drive for a bit.
There's a new 1.5gig Ogg-friendly mp3 out, the Korean D-Cube. Actually looks kinda nice. I've been looking for a decent FLAC player (rio karma comes to mind), it'd be nice if iTunes supported it. The rio is supposed to play Ogg files too.
I'm a big fan of the iPod, but I'm really sorta leaning towards the Rio Karma or Nitrus since they support the formats I'm interested in. I can handle USB 2.0, but dont' want it to be a big hassle getting my music to and fro. Ethernet support is another plus. And it's getting good reviews.
Tried to microwave some coffee a bit ago. Did so, took it out, and poured in some sugar. It bubbled up in the blink of an eye and went everywhere... all over the counter. Within a second was done, and there was 1/3 of a cup left. Never seen anything like it. After wiping everything down, I'm left unamused. I'm just glad I wasn't holding it. I need to clean the carafe, so the microwave becomes unnecessary.
I've been keeping a list for awhile of things I'd like to see in GyazMail while I use it, and check them off as they get added, or get annoyed as they don't. :)
Figured I might as well put it online:
- A delete thread command. This really speeds up going through larger lists, especially with the preview pane. Just make it command+option+delete or something.
- Don't update status icon with a delete icon whenever you remove a file. I guess if your machine is super slow it might be nice, but really, when you're deleting 100 messages having to wait for it to refresh is a drag. Apple did this with their finder recently for a nice speed boost.
- An empty all trashes command would be nice, as having to select all your mailboxes before you run the command is a drag.
- Allow the damn "end" & "home" keys to work in a message. For some reason, they dont seem to.
- Double clicking a seperator bar should collapse the side/bottom view, while remembering the current sizes when you expand again.
- Why show the horizontal scroll bar at all if nothing needs to scroll? Gyaz does this, both in the mailbox view and the folder view, for wasted space.
- A "hide/show preview pane" button for the toolbar would be nice.
- An undo command for more actions. IE, when you delete an item accidently, being able to hit "undo" and have it moved back would be a lot nicer than having to go to the trash, fish it out, and then moving it back.
- It'd be nice if the preview pane was smarter, and remembered its size depending on the folder. IE, in some mailboxes i don't get that many messages, so I'd want the preview pane to be larger. In others, I'd want it smaller to better keep track of threads.
- Ability to select "search within all folders" (or more customizable options) would be awesome without having to select all the folders.
- Please show quoting and formatting information while you're composing an email. If it is going to wrap, show where it will wrap! Showing colors for quoting makes things so much easier to follow and respond to while composing a message. I've requested this from the author, but never heard back.
- I don't understand why "new message" and is under the "Message" menu item instead of the "File" icon. Not a big deal, but I always have to look twice for it as it's not where I'd expect.
- Wide screen support!
- Alternating colored rows for threads. Very helpful for scannability. I suppose you could also give alternating rows as an option for individual messages too, ala iTunes.
- I'd wish the grid would just seperate out the messages themselves, not also the subjects and attachments... IE, horizontal lines, but not vertical lines.
- Add a global "take all offline" menu item, or key combo. Because really with how Gyaz is setup, if I don't want a bunch of error messages when I can't connect coming up I have to take it offline, which means selecting all the mailboxes. No reason why there can't be a global command.
- Option not to show messages in the trash as read, as it reduces scannability when looking for folders with unread mailboxes.
- Option to only check for new mail when you have an active internet connection, so I am not bombarded with can't connect messages.
- Consider throwing the can't connect messages into a single window, download-manager style. Having to hunt for them (I have a lot of mailboxes) is a drag.
- A global search option from within search mode. Having to select individual mailboxes is a chore when I don't know what folder or mailbox the message was in...
- If the mailbox with unread messages is not collapsed, don't highlight the mailbox itself as unread, it reduces scannability when looking for folders with unread messages.
- Add a "collapse all" and "expand all" option for the folder view.
- Better integration with the Address Book: especially in a wide screen mode, there's more space to pretty things up and perhaps snatch picture info, etc.
Continuing my quest for a decent wide-screen mail reader in OSX... I pretty much gave up. Since I had some time last night waiting on the testing peeps, I figured since we're just talking panes, modifying their nibs shouldn't be too hard, right? So I grabbed and made copies of the GyazMail, Mail, and GNUmail bundles.
I tried Apple's Mail first, which didn't go well. Everything seemed to go well, but it seems to do something strange with its custom view in its mail view, so I kept getting the content cut off.
GyazMail was easy, really. GyazMail basically has 2-pane and 3-pane modes:
2-pane
Pretty basic view... mailbox + individual message. You can keep good track of all the messages, and open each individual message in a new window. On a tech list this is a big deal, as the messages are longer and will often have bits of code.
This one isn't so bad, as I have key combos set up so that I don't really ever need to leave the keyboard. Hit "N" and it shows the next message, etc. It still gets a bit wearing, though. Especially when I'm flipping between different boxes & messages.
3-pane
This is the one a lot of people are familiar with. Standard mac way to view mail since eMailer (R.I.P.).
This view allows you to quickly get the fist of a message, and read further if you want. But since iBooks & Powerbooks, you are constantly scrolling through messages, even if you can hit the space bar it's still annoying. It also makes it more difficult to get a mental snapshot of the message, especially if there are bits of code.
So more than anything, I'm having to switch between 2-pane and 3-pane throughout the day.
Wide-screen version
I actually got a little annoyed while messing with GyazMail while doing this, which isn't it's fault, as it was just too damned easy compared to Apple's Mail. If you have the developer tools installed, it'll take you all of 5 minutes.
Here's a shot of it (click for larger):
This actually works really well, considering, especially on my powerbook which is wide-screen. I'm using it as I type this out. The only real problem is that the mailbox viewer isn't really setup for this kind of viewing, especially with how the threading is done.
But even still I'm using it, as it gives me the benefits of 3-pane and 2-pane, I can just use the arrow keys to go down through threads. Saves me a lot of scrolling & clicks.
Unfortunately there's no real way for me to change how the mailbox view is handled without the source, which means I'd have to start looking at something like GNUmail instead, which is open source.
Optimal wide-screen version
But here's a quick mock-up I did of what I'd ideally like to see, since modifying GyazMail went so fast. And no, it's not perfect, but I spent all of 15 minutes on it.
- Included a "sort by" menu item above the mailbox view, as it wouldn't be that efficient to keep the same column-clickable views unless you were on a monster screen. You'd want to remove "address" and call it "ascending" or "descending", and when its clicked it changes how the items are sorted. The rest would be touch up stuff, which I don't really have the time for at the moment.
- Moved the subject under the author, and moved threading to just indent once under the main thread. I moved the date into the middle of the row, just to help break up the space, but you'd probably want to have the size of the message or something under it.
- You wouldn't really need the scroll bars at the bottom anyways if there'd be nothing to scroll... I don't know why GyazMail insists on leaving them in anyways.
- I alternated threads with a color, basically a 5% shade of black. I've kind of wanted to see this in the real version anyways, along with a "delete thread" command, as it just looks nice and improves scannability.
Microsoft is suing a 17 year old canadian, mikerowesoft.com, for copyright infringement. Nasty stuff. Lame. I had something similar happen with AOL Time Warner awhile back, but it got resolved with some wacked out emails and phone calls. It did give me the shivers for awhile, and I got to keep the domain, but geesh.
And, since nova seems to love sending me icky stuff, more ick.
Dave Miller has a very cool tutorial on getting GPRS running with OSX and a bluetooth phone.
Bluetooth is something I've wished Apple would pick up on in a much bigger way, and judging by the rumors that are constantly about of their "iPhone" I'm not the only one. It's not that they haven't started integrating it, or been doing some nice work on it, especially in the area of interference. Just that they've introduced virtually no catalysts for it. Yeah, their wireless mouse & keyboard, but those are lame as hell.
There are three really cool things about bluetooth:
- It's local, with a small sphere of influence
- It consumes very little power
- It's cheap as hell
So far, it's been pretty tame from Apple. It's included with their powerbooks, but not the iBooks. And as a build-to-order option with the PowerMacs, but not the iMacs or eMacs. And, if you don't BTO it on the PowerMac, you're SOL, you can't add it later. So, there hasn't been a big push.
I don't know precisely what the current cost for a bluetooth chipset is, but a few years ago it was somewhere in the $10 range. I'd have to believe it's gone down, and some quick googling shows people like Texas Instruments offering BT chipsets for under $5.
There's a new windows worm starting to spread in Australia, and it's already hit in my inbox. This one doesn't seem to be so bad, really, with the January 28th expiration date, but yup, chances are there are going to be more variants. Doesn't look pretty.
How to know if you're infected:
Users who suspect their computers may be infected with the virus should look for a file called bbeagle.exe in their Windows System directory. The file disguises itself with Microsoft familiar calculator icon.
On a related note, there's an interesting, and dark, take on the impact of a lot of this stuff in Scott Berinato's "The future of security", over at Computer World. Guess it's been out for a few weeks, but I just saw it due to slashdot.
It's well worth a read, and at it's heart seems to be about the unknown and well-worn term "digital pearl harbor" that will occur at some point, and cause a fundamental shift in the public consciousness regarding digital security. It then tries to prevent what could happen from that outcry. An excerpt:
"We need to distinguish between the mischievous and the malicious," says Darwin John, who served recently (albeit briefly) as CIO of the FBI and is considered one of the godfathers of the CIO profession. "We've tolerated the attacks until now because they're mischievous. The malicious attack will be the one that moves the public consciousness, and it's so much harder to know what that attack will be."
...which is an eloquent way of saying something lots of others have said in the past: we've gotten off really damn easy up till now. Every time something like NIMDA or code red comes out someone says "You know, thank god this thing isn't sending out its copies and then doing the equivalent of $rm -rf $HOME
Mozilla 1.6 is out for OSX. Click to download, it seems to be a nice release. Feels faster, and more stable. It'd be nice to see it using the default Firebird theme, that thing is getting really slick.
Apple released iCal 1.5.2, which is as slow as ever, but they've bowed to the outcries of the users in at least one way, and let them choose whether to use a drawer or a separate window. Yay, that drawer thing was a joke.
I've installed the v5 Intellimouse drivers for OSX to be productive with my favorite mouse... it's not going well in punter panther.
Most everything is fine, but it seems to have really weird problems registering single clicks in apps. I'll often have to click twice to get a hyperlink to register, etc. Starting to look at the logitech MX500, a pal passed on good things about it, and it has the buttons I'd want.
The weird thing about these is that awhile ago, a manager at the MBU (microsoft's mac business unit) passed onto me that they, and another mouse manufacturer for the mac, simply license and use usb overdrive.
Considering the large gaps in their driver versions for their mice, I'd doubt they're keeping that up to date. So I'm going to wait awhile and see if it magically clears itself up, as things have a habit of doing in OSX, and if not, will give USB overdrive a shot.
Going kind of nutty here, been spending part of a day helping a friend get their Xserve up and running on panther. Most things went fine, but mysql was throwing hissies. Code that worked fine on other boxes/platforms was borking big time after installing 10.3.x server. It looks to be confined to inserts & ordering by datetime.
That at least gave us a clue, as there is a well-known bug in the earlier 4.x series of MySQL that got caught very fast and was fixed, involving just the above. Turns out yeah, Apple is shipping the borked version with 10.3.x, specifically 4.0.14. Ew. Downloaded and installed 4.0.16 and everything is back to normal.
This is just so fricking lame, we wasted a huge amount of time tracking this down, which is partially our fault as we just dismissed them shipping that broken of an install. It'd be caught in any real testing whatsoever, and gives a feeling of "download, slap together, $$$profit!!!" to OSX Server, and still hasn't been fixed.
There are prolly lots of people out there hitting the same thing and having no clue as to what's going on.
Killing some time waiting for testing to come back for changes on the app, so I made some changes to the blog as I got tired of catching up on emails. Nothing really of consequence:
- Raised most font sizes, and lowered a few
- Added the pic the top left pic, from a pal's camera phone at the pub. As an aside, camera phones suck in low light considers (can't imagine you'd want a flash on them, tho, so I understand) which means I had to get on my knees under the light. There's a reason why there aren't many pictures of me with a pool cue in hard: I suck. Bad. To the point where it's not even funny. It's been documented. Alcohol doesn't help. Much better at darts. I hit the board, usually. Oddly enough, alcohol does improve my skill at darts.
- Added my favorite cow. Don't ask about the cow.
- Changed some colors around
- Locked the content DIV down so it doesn't automatically expand to the browser window. It bugged me.
- Made the links a 'lil prettier
It should all look something like this, and if it doesn't, lemme know. I haven't really taken the time to test it. Still haven't even touched the other pages, ala archives, comments, etc. Pretty sad.
Especially for non-MS platforms, Oracles move to support/certify Mozilla for all of its business applications is a big deal for them in the in the enterprise/midsize business segments, and potentially gives Mozilla a big boost also.
From Spaceflightnow.com:
A final planned shuttle mission to service and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most scientifically productive spacecraft ever launched, has been cancelled, primarily because of post-Columbia safety concerns and a new directive to retire the shuttle by 2010, NASA officials said today.
Basically what's happened is that due to the shuttle disaster last year, they don't want to do missions that aren't going to the shuttle for safety reasons. It's sad. :(
I loved the Hubble, once those pictures came rolling in... they were just amazing. Yea, the Webb is going up, but not until 2011, and there are instruments that are completed and just sitting around. A lot of good science has come out of the hubble.
My first instinct is that if they asked for volunteers that would be willing to go up, there wouldn't be a shortage of takers. But I guess it's not just human lives you'd be risking, but rather billions of dollars in a shuttle.
Maybe they could just tap it towards the moon or something at some point, where it'd crash into 1,000 pieces and we could check it out when we have our moon base. Or just slingshot it out into space. The idea of it burning up in the atmosphere when it's gyros have winded down just doesn't sit well with me for some reason.
I'm still laughing at this one, even though it makes me feel kind of bad. I have a good, old friend who does a bunch of software development and works with a team in Russia (specifically Kyrgyzstan). He's been working with them for a long time, and has several employees.
Olga, who is his manager, and 3-5 (depending on the current project) developers. Basically, he pays for 3/4 of a large apartment, where Olga lives and the other two bedrooms are used for computers and such for the developers. Olga and I talk regularly on ICQ- nice girl, around 24 or so.
Since the background is out, here is what he forwarded me yesterday:
Ted-Sorry for bad news.
What I was afraid is happened.
The district militia officer came to our apartment by denunciation of our neighbors. Someone told him we have an illegal computer club. The officer made a search and established the fact of presence of 4 computers and the printer. He checked Alexs and Pashas passports. Vadim and I were arrested. We spent 3 hours in the militia office.
They brought the charges against us such as keeping an illegal computer club and, for some reason, propagation of a forbidden religion sect.
They used of our juridical illiteracy and the info they got from our ill-wisher neighbors.
They did not want to listen any our explanation and threatened to put drugs into Vadims pocket and to charge us with holding drugs. I did not expect that way of events.
To stop all that horror I paid them 4,500 as they asked.
I am in shock still.
I am going to change the apartment and register as privately businessman as soon as possible.
I hate Kyrgy militia.
Yeah, I felt bad for laughing, but it is so far out of what I could imagine happening here now, and my personal experience... things that make it helpful to understand the above:
- 4,500 is like $100 USD
- Olga was asked, dare we say told, to go get a business license. She didn't do that, as well, most everyone she knows doesn't do that, because then they don't have to pay taxes & the like. This country is one big pothole, really, since the Soviet Union disbanded. But since she didn't have a license, she basically has no recourse, and the militia knew that. It'd be like going to the cops and complaining your drugs had been stolen.
- Olga was scared shitless, and if she knew I'd laughed out loud when I read it, she'd want my head on a stake. Good thing she doesn't know about this blog.
- A "computer club" is basically an internet cafe there. There aren't a lot of computers in Kyrgy, it's something for the elite. Money is also a problem. Not a lot of bandwidth either, as it's so expensive... hence, internet cafe's are extremely popular. They're also often the only way for some people to communicate with those outside the country, and lots of people of russian descent got semi-stranded when the soviet union dissolved. Necessary + Popular = heavily licensed & taxed.
- She's applying for a license this week :)
I've really been pining for a sideways mail reader in OSX. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out the screen shot to the right, although in Outlook I believe it's called a "reader pane" or something.
At any rate, most email clients stick to a two/three pane interface, as you can see by checking out Apple's Mail or my personal fav, GyazMail. Long and short, these are fine for the most part. Especially if you have more vertical space than you do horizontal, but most of my machines have the opposite... they're wide screened. By going to something like the clickable shot above, it ends up being much more efficient.
Especially for technical lists, which might have bits of code, or longer messages in general. Basically I either end up scrolling way more than I need to, or having to open more messages than I need to.
I looked around awhile ago, but no luck. Then I saw my favorite RSS reader Netnewsire has added a widescreen mode to their newsreader, and it is so much more efficient it has me itching again.
So far, no luck. Only the lowly Thunderbird seems to offer it. And no, I'm not Thunderbird, the problem is that it is very windows oriented, and as such, all of its performance goals go windows first and other platforms second. I also just don't really enjoy using it.
This sort of thing should take all of 5 minutes to add to a cocoa program, but since there aren't very many of them (Apple's Mail & Gyazmail & GNUMail), I guess there just isn't any real push.
*Sigh*
I hate waiting for disks to spin up, but at the same time I don't want them to be running constantly when I'm not at the computer, especially with someone like a laptop... has a penchant for kicking the fan on. Having "spin down hard drive when possible" checked can save you some heat.
So you'll be sitting there working away, and go to save something. *wwwRRRRR* For some reason, the OS decides it needs to awaken every single drive connected to the computer, and in my normal setup I have a whole bunch of firewire drives connected. That'd be annoying, but not a big deal, as a HD doesn't take that long to spin up... except it does it sequentially.
IE, first drive wirs up, then it sees the second and wakes that up, and eventually you're hanging out for 5 seconds waiting to be able to save your document. It's not really long enough to multitask to something else, but long enough to really crimp your style. Carbon apps seem especially prone to it...
I found some .plist setting you can modify, but it wasn't something I really wanted to mess with. But if you have the developer tools installed on 10.3, under:
/Developer/Applications/Performance\ Tools/CHUD/Hardware\ Tools/
...you'll see a nifty little app called SpindownHD. It's not really well documented at all, really, not even through googling. But it seems close to what I'd want. You can modify the default sleep time, as well as change the polling frequency, but I can't really seem to get that to stick. It also doesn't show all the drives connected for some reason. Weird.
There's an article over at wired regarding Bush's proposed space plans, well, an opinion anyways.
Excerpt:
Whatever the pros and cons may be of President Bush's newfound enthusiasm for the U.S. space program, one thing should be obvious: Any permanent space station on the moon needs to be an international undertaking.
I don't really see how it's obvious at all. We kinda tried the "huge space project as an international public relations project" under Clinton, and while it was an interesting idea (from an international relations POV), it didn't really go well and hampered the original goals of the station in a big way.
You can google on that if you'd like, and you'll pull it all up. Long and short, we basically paid for almost everything anyways, but the project got delayed over and over for redesigns to allow the other modules to be able to connect, went drastically over budget... and was never able to do much actual science. I mean hell, at one point NASA was having to talk about paying Russia $600+ million just to complete what it said it would.
So I guess you'd have to define the goals: actual science, and getting the damn thing done, or politically-oriented international group hug.
I'm really disappointed Wired even ran it: I don't have a problem with someone thinking that the group hug route would be the best long term, but that opinion piece is just poorly done.
Anyways...
There's a much better article (that's actually interesting, instead of an excuse to toss in words like USA & hegemony & insanity & bush & nazi's in the same story) about the new plan: that it might be a trojan horse for retiring the shuttle program and allowing a transition to cheaper, and probably safer alternatives.
Wired has another article on the currency detector in PhotoshopCS, basically on how easy it is to circumvent. What really kinda wigged me out was:
The inner workings of the counterfeit deterrence system are so secret that not even Adobe is privy to them. The Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group provides the software as a black box without revealing its precise inner workings, Connor said.
Maybe I'm just getting paranoid in my old age, but the idea of software makers just taking this magic code from the government, which they don't even understand, then implementing it in their products without informing their customers is just, well, creepy as hell.
Looks like NetBSD is going to replace their logo in February. Can't imagine why. A bunch of midget demons conquering a stack of fallen computers? lol, priceless. I can see how it might rub a lot of people the wrong way, though. And it would be hard to reproduce on different media and smaller sizes. But it's still kinda cool in a campy way.
They better keep the daemon in some form, though. They just have to. As cool as I think the dragonfly bsd project is, and I do like its logo, it's kind of annoying that it's not a variation on the daemon. It's tradition.
Although I'll admit Hexley has prolly stolen the clever & cute crown for awhile. Get it. Darwin OS. Platypus with a demon hat... har. Oh well, it tickles me. Especially if you read further and see that it could have been a bulldog instead... a platypus is much more in line with the whole "BSD in drag" that Darwin has going on.
Holy crap, I hope this pans out. I'd love to know what they're using for actual drives. The form factor doesn't seem big enough for there to be four 3.5" 250gig disks and a controller, but it looks as though thats what they're doing. Apparently the case is very thick, and helps disperse the heat along with the big honking fan.
Two of these striped at level 1 for redundancy, or 3 at RAID5 might be worth a look. $1.2k for a terabyte of data isn't bad, and ~$2.4k for 1 TB of striped data is really attractive.
Mr Cook was kind enough to point out that the iPod getting .wma has been debunked by, well, HP themselves. Would have been really surprised if anything different had come of the situation, due to the format wars. But I could see how you might not want to use iTunes/AAC, but do want an iPod.
From Apples current fiscal filings, they're almost selling as many iPods as they are Macs for the quarter. Something like 700k+. Scary. Of course their sales have dropped to 20% share, I believe. I like the new mini, but damn, if they could have gone 1gig instead of 2gig, and gotten it down to $199 or $189 I'd be a much happier camper for the long term.
At any rate, it turns out I'm going to see the Canucks again next week for a quick 2 day trip to Toronto. Leaving friday morning, getting back saturday night. Knowing my lucky with flights, and the fact that you're flying into Chicago in the winter... I'm expecting to get home Sunday. Know what I mean, aye?
One of the things I always laugh about there is the coffee I end up drinking, made by some specific developers of indian descent. It's crazy... you're pretty much one step away from sucking straight grounds. I drink a lot of coffee in a day, and like a nice, strong brew. You know, throw an extra scoop in, and I'm not counting out the beans when I'm throwing in the grinder.
I'm not one of those "use the same amount of grounds, but half the water" type of people, at least not yet. I have some friends like that, there's on in particular in Texas who does that, who takes it a step above everyone else I know... he'll let it sit in the damn pot for a few hours, getting nice and toasty. Lord, but I digress.
So I'm not super particular about my coffee. I'll take extra strong over weak any day, but its not a big deal. But these indian developers just kind of freak me out with what they make. I haven't actually taken the time to ask them, but I believe it involves a french press of some sort and an insane amount of grounds, as its viscosity almost allows a spoon to stand straight up in it.
I also know there are two different types of coffee that get made in that office: the ones the developers drink, and the pot the secretary makes that everyone else seems to drink. I've only had one cup of the normal office brew, which tasted normal, as there always seems to be some occasion for one of the developers to be dropping off a cup of whatever the hell it is they're making.
What gets even weirder is that it doesn't seem to be some ethnic indian blend- the first time I had it my eyebrows shot up (I was trying to resist turning the cup outside down to see if it would stay) and the developer said "Yes, like Turkish" with a smile and then went to his cubicle. So apparently Turkish coffee is basically chewed grounds of some sort.
On another note, this is kinda disturbing: (Carnival Booth Algorithm) It makes some good points on how to beat a system like this, but still, creepy. Snippet:
In an article in Slate magazine, Microsoft Chief Architect Charles Simonyi related his experience of being flagged by CAPS.[16]During a routine business trip, security personnel insisted on completely unpacking and repacking all of his carryon bags. This happened time after time. ”Then it hit me,” Simonyi writes. “It was not that security was especially tight: It was only me they wanted. The label my friendly hometown airline had affixed to my bags had unexpectedly made me a marked man, someone selected for some unknown special treatment.” The bottom line is that if CAPS flag you, you’ll be treated differently, and you’ll know it.
There's been some good buzz about the new Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie that's in production, a lot of it to do with some very good casting. I would have loved to have seen someone like Ewan McGregor in the role, but this guy will do. The guy who played Arthur in The Tick would have been great too, but hey. The Office is funny as hell, sort of a more inter-personal Dilbert, so I have high hopes.
It did make me go to the bookshelf and find an old book I'd loved... Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I saw they had a new version out, updated to cover Adam's death and some other bits. I was never a hitchhikers nut, really. I loved the first book, and enjoyed some of the earlier follow ups, and tolerated the latter books...
But I loved the above book, which is sort of a pseudo-biography of Douglas Adams focused almost entirely on the makings of the books, the radio series, and the tv series. The anecdotes are just hilarious, and really give a lot of insight into why some of the books are the way they are. I especially loved the parts on the making of the tv series, and the problems they had with Zaphod... you really get a sense of Gaiman having long talks over hard liquor with Adams, hearing all the old funny stories, then writing them down. It's just great, and I can't recommend it enough if you like HHGTG. Actually it'd probably be enjoyable even if you haven't read the books.
And yes, it's written by Neil Gaiman, of Good Omens & Sandman fame. While you're at it, pick up Good Omens too, I hear they've optioned the movie writes. If anything, Gaimen is 10 times funnier than Adams when he puts his mind to it, which is probably why Don't Panic is such a great book.
This is just kind of surreal: the rumor is that HP is working with Apple to get WMA support added. From the article:
HP's blockbuster deal with Apple will have one exciting side effect, I discovered today. The company will be working with Apple to add support for Microsoft's superior Windows Media Audio (WMA) format to the iPod by mid-year. You heard it here first.
I dunno. From HP's standpoint, I could see how they'd want it. Almost all of the other paid music download sites use .wma, and if you check out kaaza and the like you'll find it becoming really popular. Hence, there are lots of people that would want to be able to play .wma files on their iPods.
What I don't get is one of the things that haven't really been touched upon by Apple or others much: That Apple is in a war right now with MS over media formats. Really similar to the browser wars... basically, if everything goes .wmv/.wma/etc, Apple is going to be kinda screwed in the consumer space. If everything goes mpeg4/AAC/etc, MS is gonna be really unhappy.
Apple says the iTunes store is all about selling iPods, but really it's also about pushing AAC adoption. Adding .wma support would help sell iPods, but really hurt AAC adoption, so... At any rate, Dell having nothing to say was kind of a nice bonus. :)
There's a review of Sony's X505 Centrino sub-notebook over at designtechnica. It's expensive $3.5k-$4k, but gawd is it pretty. It is:
- 2 lbs
- 1GHz Centrino, 512 megs of RAM
- Nickel carbon or carbon fiber construction
- 10/100 ethernet
- WiFi Card
- USB & Firewire
- mini-VGA out
- 4x AGP w/64 meg of VRAM
- 10.4" XGA screen
- Extremely quiet
- Excellent battery life
You have to give them some real credit on this one. I'm not saying I necessarily want one, but from an elegance, design and technical innovation POV you have to respect it.
IE, I don't respect Apple's 17" laptop. They basically took their current case, made it bigger and smacked on a 17" screen. Woo fricking hoo. It doesn't even use the space to its advantage... like oh, say, having a full size keyboard w/numeric keypad instead of the same keyboard used on the 12" & 15" laptops. About the only innovative thing Apple has done in the notebook arena for the last few years has been their uber-cool ambient-light sensing keyboards.
Even looking at the bottom end- I like the iBooks and 12" alum book, but they don't feel particularly well designed and integrated. The iBooks use 4 year old tech, and the 12" alums are either incredibly hot or, with the new battery update, cooler but extremely noisy because of the fan.
Your laptop should not be whirring like a banshee simply because you're listening to mp3s and browsing the web or watching a DVD. And I'm not just talking about the technical features, Sony seems to have really tried to make a real-deal package for those who need a notebook like this. Credit where credit is due.
Been a pretty slow week, what with MacWorld whimpering its way back to its hole for next year. Things have actually slowed down this week, and instead of being just an overwhelming amount of things to accomplish, its more just a normal amount of extremely aggravating things to accomplish.
Going back through my history file for the week, I did find some cool things I came across...
You have to love Woz.
I'd seen his site, but a pal passed this specific story on from his site: him buying sheets of $2 bills and having fun in Las Vegas... Casino security gets involved, as does the Secret Service. It's pretty damn funny:
You can purchase $1, $2, and now $5 bills from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving on sheets. The sheets come in sizes of 4, 16, and 32 bills each. I buy such sheets of $2 bills. I carry large sheets, folded in my pocket, and sometimes pull out scissors and cut a few off to pay for something in a store. It's just for comedy, as the $2 bills cost nearly $3 each when purchased on sheets. They cost even more at coin stores.
Interconnection, Peering, & Settlements
This thing is kinda huge, but chock full of information on the different peering/business models on the net. It doesn't just give a rundown, but tries to quantify what's successful. Found it pretty interesting, but probably need to reread it as I haven't had a chance to cross check a lot of what it's saying. Seems to jive with what I already knew, tho. From the abstract:
Above this engineering layer is placed a level of financial interaction between providers, commonly termed "financial settlement." The paper will examine the various models of settlement commonly used in the communications industry, and then examine their applicability to the Internet environment. The requirements of a financial settlement will be examined, as will the relationship between retail service models and settlement models. The conclusion drawn in the paper is that the zero-dollar peering relationship and the customer/provider relationship are the only models that are stable within the Internet environment, and other models of financial interaction pose excessive risk to one or both interconnecting parties. This polarization of the interconnection environment into just two models is an important feature of today's Internet industry.
I'm not dead!
This is just surreal... the living dead in India. Apparently through corruption and other means, the government is declaring people dead so that others can take their land/property. Something like 35,000+ people. To quote:
"My son produced a fake death certificate to revenue officials and grabbed my 12 acres (five hectares) of property. The government still refuses to recognize me as alive," said Rashida Bibi, 62, who was declared dead in 1993.
Carly Fiorina is making friends with developers
No way I'm going to take sides on this one... but saying something like the below prolly can't be good for your employee morale, nor something people will just love hearing in a depressed economy:
"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," Carly Fiorina, chief executive for Hewlett-Packard Co., said Wednesday.
Creating VCD Info
Pretty *nix oriented, but still lots of good info no matter what platform you use. Explains when you might want to use specific sizes, different encoding parameters... helpful. It'd be nice to see something this in depth for divx.
Killer robot dogs. Seriously.
Shades of the rat-things from Snow Crash. One step closer to my lethal pack of roving Aibos. Cool.
What is OSX?
Excellent introduction to the history and technologies of OSX for those with a technical bent. Reminded me a lot of Oreilly's short book on OSX for linux switchers, but much more general. From the abstract:
This document does not aim to regurgitate Marketing KoolAid,not that there's anything wrong with itâ„¢, but is intended primarily as an introduction to Mac OS X of those members of the technical community who are not familiar with it. You can think of it as a somewhat low-leveltaste of Apple's operating system. Consequently, some parts are fairly technical, and the implicit assumption is that you are familiar with fundamental concepts of one or more of BSD, Mach, UNIX, or operating systems in general. In many cases I have made no attempt to provide background details of the concepts referred to in the discussion.
Crazy as hell upgrade policies, lackluster upgrades, intrusive (um, it modifies your boot sectors...) product activation, lackluster performance, and now... an algorithm that checks every aspect of what you're working with to make sure it's not money.
Every. Aspect. Every image gets scanned, the clip board gets scanned... and its not a "light" algorithm either, it can handle just parts of currency, rotation, color shifts... christ. You can read more about it here, but you have to create an account to view. There is this PDF which tells a bit more on how some of the protections work- it seems to be very similar to the ones in the high end color copiers.
Apparently it's not just affecting currency itself, but also large, high-DPI scans, where it seems to accidentally see the printed dots as the anti-piracy dot groupings in current currency. It's just kinda yucky, IMHO. I haven't been bit by it, nor the product activation crap as the current OSX version of PhotoShop CS doesn't require it, but it's coming.
The bad part in a lot of this crap is there isn't really much competition left to eat Adobe's lunch in the print market, so what happened with Intuit with its customers all fleeing to a competing tax product isn't guaranteed here.
There's a pretty good writeup of Macworld over at Ars. It's getting a lot of flak, mostly from mac people, but really, it kinda says it like it is. It's very, very short. Normally these things are a long blow by blow over every announcement and demo: this is extremely short. It talks more about the culture & atmosphere than the actual keynote, and barely mentions the announcements.
If anything, I think people are taking it too literally: it doesn't gloss over the keynote to be spiteful, it's just putting it in perspective. It was probably the lamest MacWorld I can remember since Amelio stepped down to be honest. So if you're reading it to find out all the tidbits that went on, it'll be worthless. As a commentary on the experience, it's very good. So yeah, I think it was intentional that there is more space devoted to the illicit surfing habits of the media representatives as there was to the actual keynote itself.
Some favorite tidbits:
"If you worked at Apple, if you breathed coolness every working day, how could you tell if your breath went bad? You couldn't. So you might make a Cube. Worse, if you reinvent the music industry with the ultimate player/store combo, how could you get past that? Why wouldn't you do more of the same and think it would be great — it would be to you. But that still doesn't answer the question of why I didn't see it coming."
...and:
"The entire event was macabre and possessed of itself an almost feverish quality, as if everyone was pretending something, or ignoring something, and they knew it but would not speak, and as the program progressed they grew more desperate. That was Keynote 2004. And if you think I went on about nothing, well at least you could get up and go to the bathroom. Unless they are handing out iCatheters at the entrance next year, count me out."
There's a decent article on hyperthreading over at 2cpu.com which is worth a look if you haven't been following. No it's not a panacea, but it's still very, very cool. You have go give Intel props on this one... people have been talking about it for years, but they beat everyone to the punch by a good margin, and in a commodity CPU no less.
IBM & Sun are still working on it, but it'll eventually make it into the Power CPU's and hence, probably into some upcoming Apple CPUs. And since the mac world is so boring right now, if you're interested in this sort of thing its worth a gander.
Basically, hyper-threading is about trying to use current processors more effectively in most cases by making the CPU appear as two separate processors instead of one. When a CPU is working on a process/thread, and has to pause to wait for more data before it can proceed... the CPU is basically hanging out wasting potential cycles. Bubbles get formed in the pipeline, meaning if that part of the pipe could have been filled more work would have gotten done. HT allows the CPU to swap in a second thread for processing instead of hanging out and waiting for more data to proceed.
Not sure about what pipelines & bubbles are? Ars has lots of good info, especially this article, as well as this one. But basically, because CPU speeds have scaled an order of magnitude faster than the architectures designed to feed them data, they do all sorts of crazy (and cool) things to stay ahead of the data. Caches help a lot, but are expensive. Better branch prediction helps, but has gotten so good that its getting very expensive to progress, and even then, its going to fail.
Hyper-threading doesn't seem to be perfect, and it certainly doesn't take the place of an actual secondary processor. Its just a very cheap way to allow current processors some more performance headroom- and the cases where HT will actually slow down a computer seem to be fairly small. But a 20-40%+ speed increase is pretty slick.
Here's the thing I'm actually hot about: it drastically encourages threading in development. You can't really count on a machine having more than one CPU, so often really threading your app well can be a hard sell. It makes it more difficult to code, and you can even see a minor performance hit on a single CPU machine. Even in Apple land, which is considered to be huge on dual processors really isn't.
IE, it's fairly clear that Apple really only goes the dual CPU route when it feels it really needs to in order to add value, either because their chips aren't fast enough or other reasons. They've seemed to have gotten their dual config act together (there was a time where you could buy a dual CPU machine from them for less than their top end single CPU offering, which was ~100MHz faster if that) but you can't really count on them.
Developers can't count on them either: out of something like 12 different machines they sell, only two configs are dual CPU, and before a month ago it was only one! There are still lots of reason to look into threading, but its generally kept fairly basic: IE, having your main process run in a separate thread so that it doesn't block the UI while its doing its thing. Similar things happened with Altivec: it's only very recently that every single box Apple ships supports it. With HT support across the board, even single CPU machines start to see real benefit from pervasive threading.
This is something from the old BeOS days: thread the hell out of every single damn thing you do, and it will take a hell of a lot to bog down the user experience. Of course from what everyone has said, BeOS was a nightmare to program for because of it. But that's something I'm hoping to see Apple tackle too in the future... lord knows the Cocoa & Carbon frameworks at the very least could use a serious once over with threading in mind. But even beyond that: things like performSelectorOnMainThread really helped making threading an easier job in 10.2+, but there is so much other stuff that could be done.
I know they're working on some of it: IE, things like improving the funnels situation (something really kind of screwing over OSX's performance & user experience right now). Sigh. But back to my original thing: that having HT on Mac CPUs would greatly encourage developers to go nuts with threading, especially if Apple goes out of their way to also encourage. By increasing the thread-reentrancy of a lot of the Cocoa & Carbon frameworks, as an example.
The bad part about all of this is that you're probably not going to see it on your desktop for awhile. IBM is talking it up something fierce, and it's going to be hitting the Power5. When that trickles down to the G5 is anyone's guess, but I wouldn't expect to see it in the next revision that is supposed to take it to 3GHz. And even then, by the time those CPUs actually make it into the entire line...
Since I've been trying to find out more information on it in my spare time, so I might as well list some of the good linkage I've found:
...are just kind of lame. Why can't someone just say "Yeah, that kinda sucks" instead of having to be some weird evangelist? The idea of tying a company/product so heavily into your sense of identity or self worth is just creepy. I don't normally pay it much mind, but most of the mac-oriented lists have become worthless over the last few weeks due to it.
They're stupid enough that you want to respond, but voracious enough that its just not worth ones time. There's one dweeb who has posted on one of the lists ~30+ times in one day. I'm not sure these people even have jobs.
The virus rarely realizes it is killing the host.
Hot. Buttered. Jesus.
Now something has started where, when I try to control-click on a bunch of files in the finder, it somehow registers as trying to open them, and even then it does it is this really weird and stupid way. Anything that is a file tries to open, anything that is a directory opens in a new finder window.
I'm probably the most pissed because I had 347 things selected when it happened.
At least I got some good news today if this pans out. With my current daily coffee intake, I'd estimate my risk has been reduced by 95% or so.
Yay me.
Six complete hangs, as of 10 minutes ago. And now I have 50+ files intermingled in a directory that I can't overwrite and have to hand pick through using $sudo rm -rf because the finder thinks they're "busy".
God. Damnit.
I'm nearing the end of my rope with 10.3. I've really enjoyed the speed increases and some of the UI refinements- but it's the stability that is killing me. And I'm not the only one... a lot of developers affectionately dubbed the release "punter", inferring Apple got in sight of the goal and instead of bringing the ball in, just gave a good kick and hoped for the best...
...with some pretty damn awful results. I was lucky enough not to have been bit by the firewire bug (causing you to lose all your data on external firewire drives), nor a lot of the others.
I have a few machines- but my powerbook is my "rock". I don't mess with it- everything is very vanilla. With 10.2, by and large the worst I had to deal with it was that after 5 days or so it'd be craving a reboot. Things would get slow, etc.
But with 10.3, I've had way too many kernel panics, lock ups, etc. Most of them have been with the finder... I had a kernel panic today emptying the damn trash. Repairing permissions fixed it. As we speak I am doing two large transfers in the background, and they've both hung. iChat seems especially prone to cause them too- I've come back three times to a machine that won't respond, but a new iChat window is in the background, so it happened after someone tried to message me.
Five kernel panics or full hangs in two days.
I've done everything- reformatted, reinstalled from scratch, swapped out RAM... and just for kicks, went back to 10.2.8, where everything works fine, and I even have airport connectivity again.
This stuff is not good.
Apple had their keynote today. Pretty tame, really. Least I was semi-right about the colored iPods I blogged about... but no faceplates.
I've been spending some time looking over the DragonFlyBSD project, which honestly is kind of exciting, even if it doesn't change the world™.
Depending on who you ask, the *BSD's are either in a big transition period, waiting to come into their own, or they are in their last throes of death, and the bright spots you see are simply death gurgles. Either one could probably be right really, or somewhere in the middle, who knows.
There's been a lot of consolidation going on, so a new fork is kind of interesting, and this one seems to really be going for fundamental changes in how the *bsd's are going to handle scaling in general, due to a pretty large difference of opinion on how to procede.
The only downside is the guy behind it has a reputation as being brilliant but has a problem playing well with others. Perhaps he'll come into his own in this sort of situation.
There's a lot of better information at their site, under "Goals", and its worth a read if you're into that sort of thing.
Beat the big winter snow that is about to hit Chicago on my way back from Toronto. Wasn't sure I was going to, things were pretty heavily delayed, enough that I was bored enough on the concourse to snap a pic.
It still kind of sucks- security was even worse than usual, almost down right insane due to this whole orange alert thing. Plus, while you're waiting for an hour to get through security with your shoes & jacket off & laptop out, the tv's are talking about nothing except how they've been grounding planes due to "special intelligence". Disconcerting.
It's really getting to be a drag, I can see how people would be looking for alliterative methods of travel. I mean, really, what else can they do at this point. Have us all fly naked? I suppose I'd actually have a use for the blanket that's always left in my seat.
At least its snowing outside, and its late, so it hasn't been mucked about by cars too much, and its very beautiful.
Had an interesting discussion today with a developer on the merits of the different PDA OS's, specifically Palm versus WinCE versus Blackberry, etc. All have different strengths, pro's & con's. We were trying to go over what each one seemed to do right, and where each one seemed to fall down... both from a interface standpoint and a capabilities standpoint.
It got a little long, as we started reminiscing about other, older products... Apple's Newton, and the old General Magic stuff, which was huge for awhile. I remembered a lot about the Newton- but virtually nothing about what actually ended up happening to General Magic. I'd seen the interface and done some reading in high school, but that was about it.
He was kind enough to pass on this interesting diary-type history of General Magic, from someone who had a smidgen of inside info and a lot of hands on experience with them. Not pretty stuff, but it's a very good read in the category of "things not to do if you're a company" sorta way. Their experiences with the product pretty much speak for themselves. If you're a Woz fan, its prolly worth reading for the tidbits involving him alone.
One of my favs:
A few days later Andy proudly demos for us the OAG airline-schedule flight guide and other business apps and games on his 2- and 4-Mbyte SRAM cards. Steve is steaming.'How dare you walk around with 2- and 4-Mbyte RAM cards?' he asks. 'You owe it to your customers to live with what you have designed and are shipping them!'
I also found a neat picture of the device I'd seen back in high school when visiting a university.
Ooooooo. Omniweb has a neat little preview up about their new browser shipping in a bit, which looks kinda interesting. You can check it out here. In looking it over, these things come to mind:
- Using Webcore
Good! I'd been playing with the betas a bit, but just in a cursory fashion as they were mightily unstable. It's a little disconcerting that, from what I've been hearing, they're going to be a bit behind on the current versions. Webcore is still a little immature to not be staying on top of it- stuff is getting fixed all the time. I know there are some caching, speed, resource usage & rendering things coming down the pipe.
I'm also a bit sad to see another engine die- it was obvious omnigroup's engine couldn't keep up with the others, but diversity can be a good thing. Right now, due to the other browsers sucking royally, it seems to be down to webcore vs mozilla based browsers. - Tabbed Browsing
Also good! Up till now, the betas were practically Safari in drag. Differentiation is good. I'm a little concerned about the whole thumbnail in a drawer thing... this was discussed a lot back on theChimeraCamino list. The consensus, from a UI standpoint, was that while it was a nice idea it'd pretty much fall flat in general use. IE, 10 thumbnails of slashdot pages are all going to look the same (you see this with Apple's Expose, too), meaning you're still going to have the label, so lots of scrolling is going to ensue. Still, I'm interested in checking it out and seeing how it'll work in real use, maybe I'll be surprised. I have a hunch it will be nice, but people with lower-rez monitors are going to be pining for normal-style tabs across the window.
What is very cool is that you can drag and drop "tabs" to different windows, something no other mac browser does right now. Back in the early Chimera days I know they were looking at it, but it would have meant custom widgets as Apple's tab frameworks didn't support it, so they were trying to avoid it. - Workspaces
Slick. I know Opera has had this for awhile, and I've always liked it and wished it would make its way into other browsers. This could be a real time saver, and is one of the only thing Opera has over the competition on this side of the fence. They seem to have taken a step further, which could be very cool. - New Bookmarks
With the exception of some RSS feed capabilities (which I don't get- if you're in a web browser, why not just go look at them? But I could see why things like netnewswire would have them edgy as hell) it seems to be a straight Safari clone. I like the search field built into the interface, ala the address book, as Safari is pretty confusing the first time around. - Search Shortcuts / Page Marking
Egh. Search shortcuts has the potential to be really sweet, and save you a few clicks. Nothing big, but a nice refinement of what others have. Page marking just seems to be Apple's snapback with a little more ooomph, so it's hard to get excited about it until I use it. - Icons
Just an aside, but Omniweb's toolbar icons have always bugged the hell out of me and these don't look any better. The color schemes aren't consistent (detracting from the content), they use different degrees of drop shadows and even different angles for them. Egh.
Of course all of the above is null & void until the beta is released in February, but still, it's exciting, as Omniweb has a lot of potential and there are a lot of areas in which Safari is lacking.
What I'm really worried about is the idea of a lagging webcore- I can understand it from a development point of view, but there are lots and lots of areas that could use improvement, and enhancing webcore is another area they could differentiate themselves.
Came across this tidbit while catching up on some stuff. Not good at all, really. The only positive thing about all of this is that at least security guys are giving Apple's stuff an actual look... but isn't this the 2nd exploit regarding inadequate checking over input fields in like 2 months, both different?
Yeah, I know the first was a system-wide problem with cocoa text fields, and this is application specific. But come on- this is input checking on the keychain, the jewels to most of what the user might hold dear.
Basically, two things are coming to mind:
- Apple seems to not being real thorough on some of these things, which could bode ill. For every MS exploit out there, the other platforms (*nix, including osx) gain some positive brainwidth. When that starts getting overwhelming, you've got something. For every one Apple has to patch, they erase a lot more brainwidth than they gain through MS having a bad day. After the first cocoa text field exploit, I'd have hoped they'd been going nuts reviewing all others... as I'm sure that's what turned this guy onto looking into it.
- Apple doesn't seem to have any set policy regarding security issues- the left had doesn't seem to know what the right hand is doing. In both of the last few cases, if I recall correctly, the researchers waited a bit over a month after notifying Apple to go public, usually because they simply couldn't get any word from Apple. They're in a whole different world with a lot of these guys, and are really going to need to adopt a strategy that doesn't end with security guy after security guy going public because they couldn't get a straight answer out of Apple.
