April 2005 Archives

I've upgraded my PowerBook now.

First: It's beautiful. Lots of little things have been improved and shined up. Drool-drool.

• Spotlight is no LauchBar. Great to search your mail and documents, I think. Maybe. Haven't used it enough yet. Not good to launch applications. Fortunately LaunchBar is Tiger compatible. (I'm still using the 4.0beta9 version. There's a 4.0.1 version on their site now).

• The Cisco VPN client isn't supporting Tiger yet, so I didn't upgrade the PowerMac. Graham says it's supposed to come in a few weeks or so.

• Spotlight takes a while doing the initial indexing. While that's going on the computer is a bit sluggish. (The powerbook with the somewhat slow disk is anyway).

• I had trouble with something iSync related crashing. I have Missing Sync installed to sync the Treo. According to the Mark/Space Tiger info page then I'm supposed to start iSync once to make syncing with the Palm device work. It looks like it's much better integrated with iSync now. Yay.

• The AirPort/wireless thing seems flakier than usual. The net just suddenly drops out and then a little bit after comes back full strength.

• I was looking forward to trying the new Mail.app, but it's importing/converting all my mails to whatever new format it's storing them in (and indexing them for Spotlight searching I suppose). I have 327480 mails on the powerbook, so it's taking "some time". (7-8 hours ...)

• The Safari RSS thing is very lightweight. Not much competition for NetNewsWire (as expected), but I'm sure it'll create more interest. Yay for Ranchero.

• There's a new GPGMail for 10.4.

• The new .Mac Sync will be awesome. I can't wait to get the other macs upgraded and for more applications to take advantage of it.

• Be sure to make it do a sync before you start editing data though. It seems to think it's a "first sync" the first time...

• AntiRSI is still working. i still ignore it too often.

• The Battery menu bar thing has items for selecting the different powersaving modes. Excellent; maybe I'll ever use them now?

• Automator looks great.

• iCal now has an automatic "Birthday calendar" (enable it in the iCal preferences) getting data from the address book. Finally! There's also a "automatically retrieve invitations from Mail.app" option. Yes, I know Outlook has had that for a billion years. I hope it'll work better here that it does in Outlook.

• The Addressbook got "smart groups" too. Great for automatically making a group of everyone working in a certain company. Or living in a certain country. Or with upcoming birthdays. I made one with "birthdays within 10 days or in the next 30 days" to see birthdays that just passed and birthdays in the next month. Another neat address book improvement is that it shows when a card was last updated. Don't think you can use that date in a smart group though. Ooh, and a "find duplicates" feature. It offered to merge 80-something of my entries though but didn't want to show me which ones. I don't have that many duplicates. No thank you.

• There's some sort of support for S/MIME certificates in Address book. In Mail.app too? Finally we'll get easy to use standard encryption for our mail? Crossed fingers... (although I doubt it).

• What's the "subscribe to address book" feature about? It wants me to enter someones email address? I can allow people to access my addressbook. How does that work?

• I like how the "sync with .Mac" option is in each application now instead of in iSync. iSync is only for syncing phones and PDAs now.

• Did the X11 server always have a full screen mode? Seems very useful.

• Bluetooth preference pane is much improved.

• As James Duncan Davidson pointed out some weeks ago, that they had to rename Rendezvous to Bonjour is just sad.

• The printer setup thing seems to work better. It's better integrated into system preferences and the workflow in the printer setup utility has been improved. They could have saved us all the "Buy Supplies from the Apple Store!" buttons though.

• Having to pay for QuickTime Pro again sucks. Maybe they do it to to get some money for the windows version and not give mac users an "unfair advantage"?

• Sorting by size in the finder is really weird sometimes. Items just jumping up and down randomly (yes, way after it figured out all the sizes)

• The Dictionary application doesn't seem to access the net. Or at least it doesn't use the proxy settings... Awesome. No more clicking through to dictionary.com all the time.

• System Profiler is giving much more useful information.

• The equation Grapher program looks beautiful.

• The Calculator now has a "programmer mode". Think binary and hex.

• Dashboard is (as expected) all sorts of fun.

• Tons and tons of little new options and improvements. And that's after just playing around briefly...

yay. got tiger. foolishly I wandered by the apple store at 5.30 to find a long line of people waiting for them to reopen at 6.

Guy comes up to the line and asks the two girls behind me what the line is for. "mac store. they are giving away free stuff!! ipods and you know stuff", they tell him with excited voices. Guy turns around walks a few steps away and then comes back. "Maybe you have a better answer, what's with the line?" he asks me.

"FREE STUFF" a guy in front of me almost yells before I get to tell him that they are releasing their new operating systen today.

I must have looked very approachable standing a step away from the line typing on my treo. More people walk by to ask me what the line is for. "Mac store" rings more bells than "Apple store". People would have understood "free stuff!" better than "new computers and operating system", but I couldn't quite make myself say that. And I didn't know about any free stuff.

When I come inside as number 100 or so there's no line for the 10 registers where they take your money. They don't give 10% off on tiger, only on everything else.

(yes, I will probably return to the apple store the copy I will get from amazon in a few days...)

O'Reilly are spending lots of time keeping track of what is going on in the geekosphere™. Now they have the O'Reilly Radar site to talk about it.

(via Rael on IM as he never updates his weblog anymore (hint hint!))

Silicon Valley Watcher says they have seen the tracks of the Google Browser. They don't show the full user agent though, so maybe their log analyzing software just got confused by the Google WAP Gateway or some such?

A few non-Googlebot Google useragents:

  MOT-A835/70.20.18. MIB/2.2 Profile/MIDP-1.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.0 (Google WAP Proxy/1.0)
  Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1),gzip(gfe) (via translate.google.com)
  UP.Browser/6.1.0.1.140 (Google CHTML Proxy/1.0)
  Mediapartners-Google/2.1

It's also curious the Googlebot sometimes is pretending to be Mozilla. Or was it someone modifying the User-Agent?

 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3; Googlebot/2.1) Gecko/20040914 Firefox/0.10.1

update: As Phil in the comments and Mark Bracher pointed out while I was writing the entry: If they are working on a Google browser they'd not call the User-Agent "Google".

I'm in Santa Clara for the MySQL conference. The hotel is approximately in the middle of nowhere. Vani was supposed to be here too, but we're not quite ready to board the crazy new dog yet. (Must post pictures soon).

There are at least 4 apple stores within 15 miles, but they are all ~$25-30 cab fare away. I forgot to bring an Airport Express, but I don't miss it that much.

I got here yesterday after all the sessions and went to my room to catch up on some work and decide if I should pass out or if it was too early for that.

Before I managed to pass out Tim called so I ventured downstairs for a beer. (Tim says google is his website, so there it is).

Jim Winstead posted the sessions he plan to attend. I'm not that organized yet.

It's strange with such a focused conference. Relatively to OSCON or even ApacheCon there's a lot of overlap. With the topics I know well I can appreciate the difference between the sessions as they are in the program, but after a quick glance it's not really clear which of the talks on MySQL Cluster I should see (this one I think...)

Anyway, off to find the speaker registration and get my oversize name tag.

Last summer I was talking about iChat in 10.4 supporting Jabber. Today a commenter confirmed that iChat in Tiger is supporting Jabber. Whee. Very cool. Thanks Laird! Hopefully it'll support the transport agents too so MSN, Yahoo and AIM (etc) can work in iChat via an appropriate Jabber server.

If you didn't see it already, Tuesday Apple announced that OS X will be released on April 29th.

Amazon still has the $35 off rebate thing; making the price $95.

I haven't tried it, but this sounds great.

The Toilet Tank Traffic Shaper - DUMMYNET rocks.

Is there something similar for PF? For Linux?

In vaguely related news I haven't had time to setup the Soekris box yet. My excuse is that I need to either work with OpenBSD or wait for FreeBSD to import the if_bridge code into 5.x to make it work well as a bridge.

There's a patch for the if_bridge thing, but I couldn't get it to work at all as soon as I added queues to the PF rules. (I also made it crash).

(via ben hyde on the ASF infrastructure list)

My last postings have been the boring non-illustrated kind; so here's a photo Kåre, Janus and I caught last year of two UFOs colliding in Death Valley!

.

We were lucky to catch this photo and another one of eerily human-like aliens from outer space after Kåre and I had been sitting in the desert for more than an hour trying to take a photo of the stars with a D70. Maybe Kåres photos from his F3 worked out better, but as far as I'm concerned the UFO photo is much more interesting. :-)

Thanks to the friendly Perly people at Six Apart we now have a Perl.org Infrastructure Weblog.

Water on Mars - Beautiful!

More photos of the cosmos at their archive page

As I've linked to before: NASA also have some amazing images of the earth.