If you were watching the 2004 Apple WWDC Keynote, or even just checking out the upcoming 10.4 Tiger release you may have noticed Apple giving a lot of time to something called 'H.264/AVC' which it looks like they're moving to whole hog and has me pretty excited. Apple has a fairly glossed over page which talks about it, and if you're going to actually read the rest of this I'd head over and at least skim as I'll reference it some later. Plus it has some pretty pictures.
As a disclaimer: These are the pieces as I know them; and if I know something wrong hit me with the clue stick or fill in gaps. I'm pretty sure its reasonable, if a bit over-the-top in terms of length again.
posted on July 28, 2004 at 06:30 AM
It was with a heavy heart that I read that Yellow Dog Linux will be dropping support for 'old-world' macs with the advent of their upcoming new fedora-based distro, meaning that the beige G3 machines have just been struck another blow.
The old 233MHz iMacs are supported, as they're 'new world', meaning their ROM is loaded into memory and actually jammed onto the motherboard.
Years ago there used to be this thing called the "World's Fair" which I guess is still sort of going on, but their real heyday used to be back in the 1900s.
Just to decompress a little last night I wiped an entry off the blog to-do list and made a start on the trackbacks; they should be showing up above the comments now instead of in a pop-up. They're not dynamic, in that movabletype doesn't seem to automatically rebuild the individual archives when its pinged but that's for another day.
So last night was a fun saturday night. A pal sprained their ankle several weeks ago, and last night for some reason someone started going on about this red spot on their ankle and how it could be a blood clot...
So earlier today I ended up around a group of people, one of which I won't mention by name, but I will say I deserve a damn medal for not leaving an impression of the Apple logo on their forehead by using my Powerbook as a clue stick, nor just tearing into them verbally.
This person seemed to feel the need to educate those around him on how bad their Dell and other laptop screens were, and why his Powerbook screen was so much better and so much thinner while being so much better! A person rightly, since they had their x86 laptop right there, seemed to be kind of confused by this supposed quality disparity and kept pointing out how he either couldn't tell the difference or areas where his x86 laptop seemed to actually have a sharper, or higher contrast picture.
Ah, but then he laid down his trump card: that web pages on the x86 laptop was so small and thank the $Deity that Apple hadn't bought into the resolution game and knew it was better to ship screens with a low PPI, and that if he had been given the same x86 laptop he would have returned it because the web experience was so poor.
So, rather than test the resolution of his damnable forehead with my laptop, I bottled up my anger into that secret place inside which all men have and chased it with some drinks and the following post.
Another special treat for my 12 loyal readers: Evan Schoenberg, co-lead developer on AdiumX was gracious enough to sit down for another lengthy chat about a whole range of topics.
As a quick primer, AdiumX is a multi-protocol, multi-user instant messaging client for OSX. But wait, you say you already have iChat for instant messaging, so why should you care?
iChat is fine, but what if you want to use more than AIM? AdiumX allows you to access all the networks at once from within one application. If you have more than one AIM name, you're screwed in iChat, but AdiumX allows you to have them online at the same time. If your iBooks' tiny screen is overwhelmed with 10 chats, AdiumX has tabbed windows (draggable!) and a compact contact list and much, much more.
If you've never heard of it, it's really worth checking out. If you've tried an earlier version, chances are you'll be surprised with how far its progressed. It's most assuredly been slapped with the coveted DrunkenBlog Seal of Approval™, so I hope you enjoy the chat and send these guys some love for their hard work.
I'm the first to admit I'm a total girl in a car... I've gotten much better, but I'm still that guy squealing like a girl in the passenger seat whenever I think the person driving hasn't per chance seen someone making a turn, or breaking, or they seem to be veering just a bit out of their lane.
Been a rough week, its a good thing I don't really blog about personal stuff. But the good news is that I've gotten a big chunk of bloggywork out the door, namely shot off the last round of questions for the next chat which has taken way longer on both our parts than expected, and got the first round of questions off for the following chat, and made a start on the research for the one after that.
The next chat will be with the guys from AdiumX, which is worth a look if you haven't looked lately. Most who have are familiar with it from the 1.6 days, but its come a long way. Go get it now and check it out so you have something to say when you read the chat, plus it takes some hurt off their servers by spreading out the traffic of my 12loyal readers.
...would have to be the PowerMac G5, right? It's metal, has a door that swings open from the side, and impossible to get serviced locally. Unfortunately the PowerMac G5 just isn't quite over the top enough...
I guess some people looking at the video I posted were wondering what the hell I was looking at on one of the web pages, as they weren't able to see it well, or at least not the URL. Basically its a PC mod of the highest order, called the Orac3, and I'm lusting after the thing like you wouldn't believe.
...or as I mentioned yesterday, what I like to call the "Wall of Slashdot". A bunch of the email I've been getting lately has been in the vein of:
- What kind of traffic do you see when you get slashdotted?
- How do you keep your site so fast when its slashdotted?
- Should I link to drunkenblog.com or drunkenbatman.com?
- What is drunkenblog running on?
There are variations, like my favorite "HAHAHA your site is screwed you're on slashdot" by people who I swear don't even read the article or anything of the such, that's the first thing they do is email... I guess because they want to get it in before the server dies.
Most of this stuff can be found in countless other places, but since I'm getting so much mail about it I'll do my best to pass the knowledge on. We'll start with the next-to-last, as its the simplest....
Well it didn't die, but it had the hurt put on it in a big way again with (after having this happening before and looking at the bandwidth graphs) what I like to call "the wall of slashdot". 4MThanks to geekGirl for the heads up that it'd been posted so I could make some changes to keep things fast. And really I prolly jinxed myself by including the 12 readers line, which was, if you'll remember, the line I jokingly used back in the Rhapsody in Yellow post.
At least I was sober this time, but going from 0.2 Megabits/second to 4 Megabits/second in under 5 minutes is really a wonky thing to see.
Mostly I was just extremely grateful to that I didn't post a 20meg movie I'd made of my screen to give an idea of how virtual desktops worked along with the chat, as I think that would have done things in.
movie removed
Mostly just posting it as there's a joke in it that made me laugh, but it is choppier than it should be... I was using a Powerbook and SnapzPro puts the hurt on especially when you're scp'ing a big file over the network at the same time.
Thanks for all your kind words, I'm super glad you enjoyed it and yes there are several more coming that are in various stages of being done with similar types of people and projects. The next should be up sometime early next week.
For DrunkenBlogs' 300th post I have a special treat for my 12 loyal readers: a chat with Rich Wareham, the creator of Desktop Manager for OSX. I also couldn't resist the gentle irony of putting this up on the 4th of July. Remember kids, cultural differences are meant to be bridged, and the sharing of alcohol and pejorative phrases are generally a good start.
As a quick primer, virtual desktops are a way of organizing open windows on your screen instead of constantly hiding or minimizing windows or applications. You might have one virtual screen for emailing, one for web browsing, and another for your design application. Switching between them usually involves either a key combination or a graphical pager which holds icons representing open windows. That's a really lousy way of explaining something that will become obvious once you've downloaded it and tried it, so I'd encourage you to do so.
Just about every *nix desktop comes with them, so switchers from that side of the fence often lament on their absence in Apples' OSX. There are other virtual desktop solutions for OSX, but Desktop Manager has garnered much praise for being high-quality, free, and open source. It hasn't won any awards that I'm aware of, but it sure as hell gets the coveted DrunkenBlog Seal of Approval™.
Rich was gracious enough to sit down for another lengthy chat covering a whole slew of topics, everything from iBooks to the GPL to hacking Quartz. Keep your eye on this guy.
Businessweek.com has a decent article up about Apples changing relationship with their resellers which is something I've talked about from time to time. It's kind of old news, from about a week ago (yeah, I'm behind) so I wasn't going to bother posting it...
But I'm clearing out some bookmarks before I try to post another chat tonight and I found the subject a little ironic when put into the context of Apple kinda sorta basically having nothing to sell in the consumer space for the next 3-5 months (yes mindflayer I saw it before I crashed ;)) due to the delay of the iMac.
