Sorry folks.. I managed to break a few key bits of my previous Gnu/Linux install by installing GTK2 and figured I might as well install a proper distribution rather than trying to hack the old one back in to shape..
Everything appears to be back to normal now though 
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The great thing about coursework is that it has the ability to focus the mind wonderfully on the seemingly mundane. It is possible to whittle away the hours taking the utmost enjoyment in the most menial tasks while books gather dust and word processing programs containing half typed essays are swapped out of primary memory and placed in the furthest reaches of your swapfile.
Today I have been mostly drooling over The Nanode and The Tapwave Zodiac while having delusions of grandure about porting the delightful VisualBoyAdvance to either the Zodiac or the GP32 despite the fact I have absolutley no idea how to go about it. Well, I have a rough idea but currently it’s well above my ability. Roll on the summer, I say, although by then, chances are I will have lost all interest.
*trips over pile of books and is brought kicking and screaming back to reality*
Shit.
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A friend recently deposited his iPod with me (mwahaha!) to look after until the nice man from AppleCare comes to take it away to be repaired (he lives in halls of residence and these things have a habit of.. disappearing..). He also wants to back up all the music on it in case Apple send him a replacement unit.
Now, I’ve heard some horrible stories about how hard it is to get music off the iPod due to attempts at media control, DRM, etc etc. So I dutifully set about using the wonderful multi filesystem support of the mount command in GNU/Linux to mount the iPod as a firewire hard drive feeling pretty confident that it would pay no heed to the DRM hoojum woojum that was likely to be present. Indeed, the iPod mounted with no problem and slightly shaky firewire support aside (you know who you are, sbp2), there was not much of a problem until I tried to copy a certain file from the device (just a random mp3, in case you were wondering) when the whole thing would grind to a halt and crash, necessitating a hard reboot (ouch..).
Not to be put off I decided to plug the iPod into my PowerBook and see what magic I could weave with the Terminal. To my surprise, exactly the same files were visible as on the GNU/Linux box, but not from the Finder. A quick download of TinkerTool, and hidden files were showing up in the GUI, no problem. It was then trivial to copy the files across.
The mp3 files on an iPod are kept in sequential folders in /iPod_Control/Music/F00-19 (on this iPod, YMMV) and are renamed XXXX.MP3 (where XXXX is a four digit number). A problem? No! Thanks to id3 tagging, when you copy the mp3s into iTunes, if you have it set to reorganise your music for you it will rename all the files and arrange them in a nice, logical order.
Looks like Apple’s famous ‘ease of use’ triumphs again - although a little bird tells me the same can be accomplished by viewing the iPod with ‘Show Hidden Files’ on with Windows. Either way, I am a little disappointed it didn’t put up more of a fight…
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Nearly a week after it was supposed to stop spreading, MyDoom.A is still finding it’s way into my inbox, albeit at a trickle compared to the avalanche of the previous few weeks.
I can only assume that those brain dead enough to get infected with the virus are also too stupid to figure out how to set the clock on their machines correctly. I mean, it’s not as if it’s a fucking VCR…
But what do I care, I got my PowerBook back yesterday
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I’ve been playing a little game recently and I thought I’d share it with you, dear reader. The game is to see how long it takes you to spot someone, anyone, listening to an iPod in the time it takes you to leave your house and get to wherever it is you are going. As I live just round the corner from where I seem to be spending most of my time at the moment, this doesn’t leave much time to spot one of the diminutive white jukeboxes. Thankfully though, they have rather distinctive earphones whose earbuds stand out a mile away and whose cable has a way of hanging just so.
The game has become somewhat easier of late, with all those iPods sold over Christmas finding their way into the hands of London’s hipsters (What? You didn’t get one? Me neither. Guess we just ain’t cool enough 
). My current best for time is at the bus stop (which for the record is about fifteen seconds walk from my front door) - which was almost broken the other day as I looked out of my window, about the house and spotted what turned out to be a Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen NX (snappy name, eh?). Although not really related to a journey from home to work/whatever, my frequency record currently stands at four iPods in a space of about 50 metres (The ground floor of the library - spotted during a walk from the communal discussion area to the exit).
This (admittedly rather dull and slightly techno-fetishistic) game may become a lot more amusing when the iPod minis become available, in particular the ghetto-fabulous blingPod…
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Not too happy at the moment. My PowerBook is at the menders as like a troublesome adolescent, it’s come down with a nasty case of white spots. I’ve been trying to read through the 650ish post long thread at Apple’s discussion board, but it’s all a little depressing… 
All is not bad though as they should replace the whole display unit, which should take care of those two dead pixels
In other news, the new iLife suite arrived today to compliment the better half’s new iBook (Penfold - to replace Brain, which was sadly stolen in the break in). I’m surprised she managed to get to work as she was quite taken with the cheese-o-licious loops in GarageBand this morning.
There are now officially more PPC based computers than X86 ones in the house. This is a little troubling and yet strangely comforting at the same time.
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Yes I’m bored. This is bad because it makes me want to spend money on stupid bits of nice looking but ultimatley unecessary technology. Consequently I’d like to present Alex’s Techno XXX Toplist.
Single males with poor social skills only please…
1. Mature
3. Poor man’s Mature
4. Slim looker
5. Fetish
6. Midget Fetish
7. Outdoors
8. Kids
9. Barely Legal
10. Buxom
Now where did I put that lottery ticket?
*sighs*
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Hmm. Yes, indeed. When you’ve stopped composing that comment (you were, weren’t you?) about how lame the title of this post is, check out this site:
http://www.csszengarden.com
Some superb alternate CSS layouts accessible from the menu on the right. Or the left. Or anywhere, depending on which layout you are currently using.
All good and nice, but the applicaton? How about if you are browsing a website on your teeny tiny GPRS/3G/802.11blah’d up mobile phone/PDA screen? Wouldn’t it be great to have websites mould themselves around what you are using to view them?
Mmmh.. CSS..
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Occasionally when talking to techy type people about how Linux isn’t making the progress it should on the desktop, I volunteer the idea that it’s because it is harder to use than Windows. This is usually greeted with blank stares and ‘Well, actually I don’t think it is.’ It’s at this point that I usally feel like a bit of an imbecile and start looking for the door.
I have been trying unsuccessfully for the last four fucking hours to clone the output of my fucking monitor onto the fucking telly next to me via the fucking s-video output on my fucking graphics card so I can watch fucking DVD movies without having to strain my eyes at my tiny fucking monitor.
Several people on the Internet seem to have found ways to do it, but they are all different, none of which seem to work.
The man pages for XF86Config only seem to make sense if you know what you are doing which kind of defeats the fucking point of reading the fucking things in the first place. Don’t even get me started on the readme file.
I managed to achieve the same effect on my Windows box with three fucking clicks of my mouse in the fucking Display Properties box while my PowerBook set this all up automatically when i plugged the fucking cables in.
I am now going to the pub under a little fucking cloud with little fucking lightning bolts coming out of it.
FFFFUUUUUUCCCCKKKK
There. Now I feel better.
– Update –
All better now. It turns out that in order to use the S-Video Out port on my gfx card, I didn’t want to follow the instructions in the readme under ‘Enable S-Video Out’. No, in fact I needed to follow the instructions under ‘Enable Twinview’.
Obviously.
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A couple of days ago the much maligned LZW compression patent expired in the US. Y’know, the compression routine behind the .gif (Graphic Interchange Format) file format. Previously, anyone wanting to produce software that had the capability to produce .gif images had to pay a royalty to the patent holder, Unisys. This kinda put the kybosh on using .gif images in open source software as I found out much to my dismay when using the GD library for PHP a while back.
The patent free alternative to .gif, .png (Portable Network Graphic - pronounced ‘ping’) was a great idea that has sadly never had the support in browsers it deserved. It comes in two flavours, 8 and 24 bit. 8 bit .png most closely resembles the .gif format, with the ability to have transparent pixels but lacked support for animation (for that you’d use .mng - pronounced, well, you get the idea). The main strength of 8 bit .png is that it tends to produce smaller file sizes than an identical .gif. 24 bit .png is a much more interesting animal. With .gif and 8 bit .png a transparent pixel is either 100% transparent or opaque. Problem here is much jaggedy edges when layering a transparent .gif or 8 bit .png containing a curve or anti aliased text over another image. 24 bit .png, on the other hand, supports multiple alpha channels - or variable transparency of pixels. 24 bit .png is also a lossless format - say bye bye to those nasty .jpg compression artifact. It also has much better gamma settings than either .gif or .jpg which means colour representation across browsers and operating systems is much better - anyone who has created a .jpg on a pc and then looked at it on a Mac will know why this is a good thing. All in all it’s a bit of a jack of all trades type of image format that could, and should, in theory replace .gif and .jpg as the file format of choice for graphics on the world wide web.
So why aren’t we all using it? Originally take up was slow due to the fact that a plugin was required to view the images, although all major browsers from version 4-5 onwards include at least rudimentary support. Sadly the blame lies firmly in Redmond, Washington. Although 8 bit .png displays correctly in Internet Explorer, 24 bit .pngs with alpha shaded pixels do not. Since IE commands such a large market share it is pointless relying on alpha shaded .pngs as part of your site design.
So where does the expiry of the LZW patent leave .png? Tough question. Support for .png has been growing for a number of years, but mainly as an alternative to avoiding the Unisys tax. Chances are .png will now sink into obscurity when faced with wide spread acceptance of inferior alternatives and inconsistent support that destroy it’s chances of gaining mainstream use and acceptance. Which is a great shame due to the unique strengths of the format.
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New Matrix movie! Woo hoo! Trinity uses nmap! And exploits the SSH1 CRC32 hole from 2001! Keanu Reeves is shit, again! Neo may still be in the Matrix when the film ends! There’s even less plot than last time! But isn’t it pretty! The Twins were underused! There was a pointless dance scene! And a pointless snog involving Keanu and that random bird who had about 5 minutes screen time! In a three hour movie! Lots of Agent Smiths! Lots of pop philosophy!
Ugh.
To be honest, who gives a shit? I’m waiting for Return of the King.
Ps. Given the subject matter of the film, wouldn’t it have been more correct to title it ‘The Matrix: Rebooted’?
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Using Mac Os X after a lifetime of Windows (if you don’t count DOS, an Amiga 500 or an Acorn Electron when I was a wee nipper) was a bit of a shock. Not an ‘Oh my god, where’s my other mouse button’ shock, but an exercise in discovering different ways to do things. I think, deep down, the reason why Mac people find Windows PCs hard to use and vice versa is because they are very different animals and people don’t like having to relearn how to do things once they’ve become accustomed to doing things a certain way. But really, once you’ve sorted out that Ctrl+Alt+Delete is replaced by Apple+Alt+Escape it’s not all that bad…
Aqua, Quartz extreme, etc etc
What can I say? Antialiasing of fonts throughout (thankfully you are able to set at what font size it stops, lest teeny weeny text become a miasma of blurgh), the hyperactive Dock‚Ñ¢, genie in a bottle type effects when minimising/maximising windows, gem type interface buttons on the windows and sliders, the horizontal lines, active windows cast a shadow over inactive windows, etc etc. Beautiful. When items are minimised to The Dock‚Ñ¢ they stay active (after a fashion) to the extent that you can minimise a playing Quicktime window and still watch the presentation while it sits in The Dock‚Ñ¢. Does it help me work better? Not really. Does it make people stop and stare? Not really, but if they did…
iSo Called Life
Unlike Windows, Mac Os comes with a load of useful programs. Well, mostly useful at least. I couldn’t afford the PowerBook with the Superdrive, so iDVD is not much use to me. Neither is Mail. I refuse to pay for iDisk or .Mac, and I don’t use iChat. I can’t afford a video camera, so iMovie is out of the question and my mail client has a perfectly good calendar system so iCal doesn’t really see much use either. iPhoto? Well, since the manufacturers of my digicam decided not to support Os X it’s a bit of a sore point.
iTunes, however, has quickly become my favourite music player bar none. I’m a bit of a purist - I like my music player to play music and not make a fuss about it. I don’t need to be shown psychotropic light displays while listening to Miles Davis, nor do I want it to play my DVDs. iTunes doesn’t do any of these things. Nope, it just sits there with a rather good media navigation system and plays my music without getting in the way. Bliss.
What goes where
Configuration is pretty easy. The control panel type thing seems sensibly laid out. I like the way the Ethernet, 802.11g, Bluetooth and 56k connection settings are grouped together under one heading (instead of Network Connections and Dial Up on Windows). I would have liked a bit more control over the interface though without the need to install third party progs though, and the ability to add and removing items from the Apple menu would be very nice. The addition of configuration tools for programs such as Samba and peripheral setup progs all have their place in the System Preferences window which keeps everything neat and easy to access. Which is good.
Thwak! ‘AVE IT. Rock solid, me.
Of course, the best thing about Os X is the fact that it runs on top of a BSD Unix layer that Apple have chosen to christen Darwin. This has the effect of, as a friend pointed out, replacing the bottom deck of the house of cards that is the Mac operating system with a row of bricks. I have always regarded the Windows 2000 family of operating systems (2k, XP, etc) to be pretty solid (don’t even mention 98) whereas my experiences with Mac Os 8 and 9 have been somewhat… disappointing. On this front, Os X has finally done Apple justice. It has to be mentioned though, that like Windows, although the OS is solid, applications are still just as crash prone, it’s just that now they don’t take the system down with them. Aside from the stability, the two greatest things about the POSIXification of Mac Os is that it now has a command prompt (hussah!) and through projects such as Fink, the Mac now has access to the huge library of open and closed source programs available to the various *NIXes, including The Gimp, GCC, Ghostscript, Samba, the Apache Webserver, MySQL, etc etc, the list goes on and on. Also, with companies such as Adobe and Macromedia porting their progs to Mac Os, it will probably not be such a huge jump to continue a bit further over to FreeBSD and ultimately, Linux, but perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself…
Endgame
There’s something about Mac Os X that makes it, well, more fun to use. I’m not entirely sure what it is, but since I bought this PowerBook, my desktop PC has be relegated, it seems, to a life of file storage, the occasional game session and a bit of media playing, whereas everything else seems to get done on the laptop. I dunno, maybe it’s the hovercraft like noise of my desktop but I can’t really bring myself to turn it on anymore.
See, it’s not all bad…
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When I bought my first Mac a couple of weeks ago I bought it for a number of reasons. One of those was that I had been led to believe that the Mac operating system presented the ultimate in user friendliness and ease of use…
Now don’t get me wrong before I’ve even started. I am pretty enamoured with Os X’s smooth lines and nice antialiasing, it’s aqua, it’s quartz extreme, it’s genie trick when minimising windows and it’s magnifying dock. It truly does look very very nice. In fact, the more I look around the web, the more I see little bits of Os X creeping into the public view - some horizontal lines here, some small blurry text there.
However having used Mac Os for a while now, there are a few things that are really starting to bug me. Before I start though, a caveat. I am well aware that tinkering or the installation of haxies can fix some of the things I mention (TinkerTool, etc). The things I refer to are most evident when the operating system is in it’s default state, or if you prefer, how Apple would like us to use Os X.
Navigation and The Dock‚Ñ¢
Let’s get this one out of the way first. It sucks. Big time. I have yet to find one person who really, truly likes the dock. For those of the windows persuasion, imagine your start bar not reaching from one side of the screen to the other. Then quadruple its height. Add the name of each application above its icon, which has also grown in height. Position it in your mind, in contact with the left, right or bottom of the desktop, slap bang in the middle of the screen. Then try to maximise a window. Hmm.
Application switching is also pretty clunky ‚Äì you can switch between applications by using Command+Tab, but there is no uniform way to switch between windows in a specific application. While I’m on the subject of uniform navigation, my PowerBook has no dedicated Page Up/Down or Home/End buttons, only arrow key secondary functions. This is not so bad and is quite standard in a lot of laptops. However depending on which application you are using you either have to press fn+arrow key or Command+arrow key to access the same function. ???
Ctrl-Command-Alt-Fn-Thatsquigglyone
Whaaaaaat? We live in an age of five button mice and space age game controllers and I’m still having to use both hands to execute simple commands and input so called ‘obscure’ characters? Incredible. Let me illustrate… In order to take a screenshot and copy it to the clipboard, ready for pasting into another document on a Windows PC, you press the button on your keyboard marked ‘Print Screen’. In order to do it on a Mac, you have to press Command+Ctrl+Shift+4, which unless you are Andr√© The Giant or Richard Kiel, requires two hands.
It took me weeks to work out where the delete button was (fn+backspace) and I still can’t find the bloody hash button (Update: alt+3! How ridiculous - shift+3 is the ¬£ sign. Someone’s having a laugh…)
Also, there is the fact that the alt and command keys have several names. Alt is also known as ‘option’ and has a strange water-divining stick type illustration on the key. The command key (which in my mind is a name too easily confused with the control key) has a picture of an apple and a kind of Escher influenced noughts and crosses board. Is this really necessary? They should, imho, just be named the ctrl, alt and apple keys, like you have the ctrl, alt, dele.. uhh.. Windows key on a Windows keyboard. Much simpler, don’tchathink?.
The Finder
Ah, the Finder. Lovely that it is, I can’t help wondering why they chose to make the grid the icons sit on so large. Or why the path to the current directory isn’t displayed anywhere in the windows so you know where you are at all times. Or why you can’t have a shortcut to your home directory on the desktop. Or why there is no easy command (apart from divining-stick+Escher-grid+H, which you have to click off the current window and hopefully onto the desktop to use any way) to minimise all active windows, a la the ‘Show Desktop’ button in the Windows quicklaunch bar. Or why there is no visual equivalent of the ’sudo’ command.
*Sighs*
Getting into a Fitt
While browsing around the internet a while back, I came across a mathematical model which deals with the prediction of human movement and motion based on rapid aimed movement and has vast implication for usability and user interaction with computing systems. This little gem is was developed in 1954 and is known as Fitts Law. In terms of usability it basically states that target areas (buttons etc) can be rated in ’size’ depending on their proximity to the mouse pointer or and edge of the screen. If a target area is touching the side of the screen it is deemed to have infinite ’size’ as it is impossible to overshoot it with the mouse pointer.
Now, to apply this to Os X. Take the Apple menu button for example. The button appears to be in the top right hand corner and as such must be of infinite ’size’. However someone decided to stop the button from reaching all the way to the left hand edge making it all too easy to overshoot. This phenomenon also occurs in Windows where the start button is one pixel from the edge of the screen. Microsoft managed to fix this for XP though…
Also, think about the Dock’ and it’s magnification. The target is moving. This is bad. Although with closer inspection, the way Apple have executed the magnification is quite clever as the icon the mouse pointer is directly above stays in the same position and all the others move to accommodate it’s growth. I still can’t help but think I’m chasing the icon around the screen though. Not very easy with a track pad…
Another implication of Fitt’s law states is that if a target area is clearly labelled (think ‘Back’ and ‘Forward’ in a web browser) and does not move around, it’s ’size’ is increased.
Why oh why does Os X and the programs that run on it rely on so many floating pallettes? When Macromedia released their MX line of products they made a great fuss about the fact that everything now takes place in a single layered docked environment, and oh the difference it made. No more did I have to juggle little pop ups to view different parts of the document I was working on. It was Christmas come early. As Fitt points out, because the palettes don’t move it is easier to learn where they are and as such my productivity increased markedly. Any of this make it to the Mac? Nope. I’m back to window juggling,
I’m going to stop now. This is getting a little out of hand. I had planned to mention the ridiculous idea of needing a powerful 3d accelerator to power the 2d environment of the Finder, and to attempt to debunk the equally incredible idea that ‘You plug it in and it just works’ for peripherals (I effectively have no printer or digital camera now) but I may save this for part 2.
Hopefully some of this stuff will be sorted out in future revisions of the operating system…
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Well, I finally caved and bought a PowerBook. In fact I’m typing on it right now. On the train. Surrounded by businessmen with clunky looking Compaq and IBM things. Mwhahaha.
First impressions? Well, it looks great, all tiny and silvery, the screen is pretty good and the keyboard is one of the nicest laptop keyboards I’ve ever typed on. It’s got great connectivity, with got yer Bluetooth built in (syncs great with the phone + allows me to use my mobile as a modem when I’m on the move and just have to get some pr0n *shrugs*), firewire, a couple of USB ports (only v1.1 though ), video out, and a groovy slot for wireless networking - groovy because it’s on top of the battery with the attenna hidden in the body of the laptop. When wireless is turned off it has pretty good battery life - 3-4 hours, or so the battery indicator tells me. Oh, and it also has the envious looks of said business people who keep glancing in my direction.
Hardware? Yes. Software? Os X. Hmm. When I first heard that Apple were going to be basing their next generation of operating system on a Unix variant I was quite excited. The idea of a properly stable platform with true multithreading and pre-emptive multitasking etc etc sounded too good to be true. And alas the majority of the Mac owning people I know said the first couple of revisions were somewhat buggy and most of them were sticking with Os 9. Enter X10.2 and reports seem to be that most of the problems have been ironed out (if they were there in the first place - ‘What do you mean I can’t allocated memory to a program? Oh look, the program has crashed. Os X must be b0rked’). I’ll save my thoughts on Os X for later though.
Oh my, I hear you say? Alex has turned into a Mac fanboy, what a hypocrite! Oh no he hasn’t, Alex says, he’s just trying to convince himself that 1400 quid spent on a laptop he probably didn’t really need was a wise investment.
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