February 2003 Archives

Before Safari build 60 was released I saw all build 58, 59 and a bunch of earlier builds in my logs, mostly from apple.com IPs.

$ grep Safari * | perl -pe 's/.*(AppleWeb.*)/$1/' | sort -u | tail -1
AppleWebKit/62 (like Gecko) Safari/62"

Amusingly it's not from 17.* IP addresses (Apple), or even IPs that looks like they are from California.

ThinkSecret posted a report about build 62 saying that it has tabs (yay). Maybe it leaked?

ObSafari: Neato trick. Shut down Safari and run from a terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Update: So I don't use Chimera/Camino/whatever they renamed it anymore. Do I miss my tabs?

Last Friday, for valentines, Viridiana got me all these red balloons. We are so wonderful geeks that we spent probably far too long photographing the balloons. Very Fun. I had the nerve to suggest that maybe some of them should have been blue, because I like blue. I'm the only one I know who regularly wears blue tennis shoes, socks, jeans, sweater and eyes without thinking it is weird at all.

On Saturday we went to Joaquins Big Oh-One, as the invitation said. Joaquin is the now one year old son of Nick and Raquel. Nick and Raquel took care of me when I first came to California. They are very kind and generous people. They made sure I ate every day and things like that. I worked with Nick, indeed he was the one who got me to come over here in the first place. Him and the weather. It was February and the weather in Santa Barbara was in distinct contrast to the weather in Copenhagen at the time. My verbal English was not exactly exquisite when I landed first, and not only because my flights were so delayed that it took me more than 25 hours from door to door.

When I arrived I spoke Danish and Perl. Luckily I was wanted for my skills in the latter. It's four years ago and my English is much better now. And when I really concentrate I understand a bit of Spanish; but really much less than I should. My Danish has deteriorated a bit, but my Perl has improved a lot, so I think it's all for the better.

Nick thinks having a weblog is incredibly silly. I wonder if it's a bit like mobile phones, where everyone will have one eventually even if they at first laugh out loud at the very idea. Viridiana already knows better, so we are going to setup one for her very soon. The Guardian knows that in the future news spreads on the web first (for better or for worse).

Happy Valentines! (requires flash)

(via Joey Troy)

Zimran Ahmed writes that he doesn't think SMS will do well in the US, but cameras will.

I find SMS text-entry slow and painful, and belive it's popularity in Europe stems in large part from the high per-minute charges Europeans endure. But taking a picture with your phone and mailing it to someone is quick and easy, so I think it will prove quite popular.

In Europe you are generally charged per second (not per minute), so
giving a quick message "via voice" might not be more expensive than
sending an SMS. The per minute charges are comparable to our charges here and sending messages is actually often more exensive there than here in the US. Sending messages is less intrusive than making a call, both for the people around you and for the recipient.

Entering a short message on a reasonably modern phone with T9 is quite fast. Even on my 3(?) year old T68i it's pretty good. I'm sure it's even better on newer phones. And besides, we did pretty well way back when when entering a "c" always meant three key presses. :-) Practice, practice.

Sending a picture serves a completely different purpose. I can't imagine how you can (quickly) send a picture to tell that you'll be 15 minute late. And you can't always call either, because the meeting might be started and noone will pick up their phone to take a call.

Getting a GSM phone here, I was surprised to find that the providers finally have figured out to let you send SMSes to phones on the other networks. Without that it was no wonder that it wasn't in common use.

And unrelated to my point above, did I tell how neatly OS X integrates SMS'es when you connect your phone over bluetooth?

A while ago the display on my powerbook started to come loose. No, it is not falling off, but it's tilting backwards all the time. Bang! Slam! Smack! Down in the table it goes. Really Bloody Frustrating. I want it fixed.

Back in the days I could take a Powerbook 5300 apart and put it together again in just over no time. Except for the displays. The displays were always a pain.

Gustav told me there's no way to tigthen the screws keeping the angle of the display when it's open. Did he try? He has a Pismo just like mine. It sounds too odd to me, but I haven't been ambitious enough to take it apart and check it out yet.

Some days ago while waiting for a database to add some indexes, I searched around to see if I could find instructions on how to take it apart. You see, it's not just unscrewing all the screws. To take a laptop properly apart there's a billion small plastic things you have to twist and push, and everything must be done in the right order.

I did find some guy who replaced the LCD in his Powerbook Firewire. Very encouraging at first. The best part though, was that he said I could search for the "Apple Service Manual".

You see, back in the days the Apple Service Source was what made me able to take the laptops apart so quickly. They have instructions on how to do everything, including the little hints not to bend the round thing before you have pushed the other thing or you'll break the third thing.

So a bit of googling later, I find a list of Service Source manuals. Brilliant. This is The Good Stuff if you need to take your Mac apart. You might have to Google some more if your Mac is of a newer date though.

Looking at the manual it does seem like Gustav might be right. Grrh. If I can get to the screws at all, it looks like I have to not just take the powerbook apart, but also take the LCD apart. And even then it's not clear from the pictures (around page 100) that I can tighten the screws at all. Arrgh! I am definately getting AppleCare for my next PowerBook.

While searching for the above, I noticed that some kid has been terminated from his job in one of the Apple retail stores for having a couple of screenshots of "Internal Apple applications" on his website. Pretty dumb. And pretty cheap of pbzone.com to make a story out of it (and thus certainly not making it easier for the poor guy who made the mistake of putting them in a publicly accessible folder). Or maybe I got it backwards.

Viridiana brought me "Dried Bing Cherries" a while ago. I just started eating them. They are really good.

British political debate.

TONY BLAIR: [....] I think it's my duty to tell it to you if I really believe it and I do really believe it. I may be wrong in believing it but I do believe it.

JEREMY PAXMAN: Prime Minister, thank you. And thank you all and goodnight from the Baltic Centre.

American political debate.

O'REILLY: Man, I hope your mom isn't watching this.

GLICK: Well, I hope she is.

O'REILLY: I hope your mother is not watching this because you -- that's it. I'm not going to say anymore.

GLICK: OK.

O'REILLY: In respect for your father...

GLICK: On September 14, do you want to know what I'm doing?

O'REILLY: Shut up! Shut up!

GLICK: Oh, please don't tell me to shut up.

O'REILLY: As respect -- as respect -- in respect for your father, who was a Port Authority worker, a fine American, who got killed unnecessarily by barbarians...

GLICK: By radical extremists who were trained by this government...

O'REILLY: Out of respect for him...

GLICK: ... not the people of America.

O'REILLY: ... I'm not going to...

GLICK: ... The people of the ruling class, the small minority.

O'REILLY: Cut his mic. I'm not going to dress you down anymore, out of respect for your father.

GLICK: That means we're done?

O'REILLY: We're done.

(via Jim Winstead)

"In the case of Thor vs. Ug, wherein Thor, holder of patent 0000000001 for Method and Apparatus to Kill Large Beasts for Purposes of Eating, as implemented by Heavy Rock on End of Stick, contends that Ug has contravened the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by disassembling Heavy Rock on Stick to make Pointed Rock on Stick, and that method of Poking Beasts Until Dead is essentially a foreseen variation of Hitting Beasts Until Dead, the Appeals court has ruled in Thor's benefit.

Punitive damages assessed in the amount of 1 (One) Beast from each family descended from Ug are due to the family descendants of Thor."

(via Thomas Jakobsen in a private newsgroup; illustration from someones pages on stone age hand-axes)

Enabling IPv6 on OS X. Very neat. Very easy. Dancing turtles everywhere. Use en1 instead of en0 to use the AirPort interface instead of ethernet.

Of course, as Aaron points out, the IPv6 transition is a big mess, so who really cares? I've been vaguely contemplating to make my private network run IPv6 instead of on 10.x addresses, but the only advantage is the neat factor (and that would grow old fast I'm sure) and there are many disadvantages. Hmn... Go and read djb's analysis of the IPv6 transition. I just read it a few days ago from a reference on the qmail or the djbdns list, funny that it came up again here.

Gustav made a small ~12 second clip of his bicycle trip to visit some friends. It's very neat. He sent me to Final Cut Pro project file and the OfflineRT media, and I cut a new version (MPEG-4 Quicktime) that grooves a bit better with the music. There are still a few things I'd like to change, but it must stop somewhere. :-)

I made a good set of "embed tags" that made the quicktime player show the jpg and then the movie when you click on it. But I could not make it not suck on my Linux box and having the mpeg 4 file downloadable might make it easier to get it to play without quicktime. Mplayer seems to play the video, but not the mpeg4 audio. Hmpfr.

(Via jwz)

I can't even begin to describe how inconvenient that was. I have 6 virtual workspaces stacked with terminals open with emacs on different projects, log files tailed, odd users logged into odd places and what have you not. Bang. Gone. Like having Java enabled under Netscape 4.0.

I guess this makes it a good time to install the new fast CD-RW I bought in December but haven't installed because I'd have to close all my windows and reboot. Hmn... Sucks anyway. Piece of shit linux box. I'm sure it's just a few years ago something like this last happened.

Yes yes, I know it's all quite insignificant compared to the space shuttle, to the hundreds killed in traffic today and to the 40 people murdered today (and that's of course only counting in the US).

I'm a small person. I have small problems.