At work I use Mac OS X on one machine and Windows XP on another. Across the way my cube mate is using FreeBSD on an old desktop machine and Mac OS X on a TiBook, and so on down the line.

We need this stuff because this is how we make our living. It’s a helluva lot of fun … that is, unless you’re in IS or happen to be the CTO.

Our VP of Technology and Chief Operating Officer, C.J. Rayhill, was recently interviewed by InfoWorld, where she talks about open source, Mac OS X, and what it takes to be chief cat herder of a myriad of laptop and desktop systems here at O’Reilly.

Related link: https://www.iconfactory.com/ip_home.asp

iPulse is a simple, attractive, somewhat useful application that highlights the benefits of an Operating System that combines UNIX with a high quality front end. The Mac OS X graphical indicator can sit on your desktop or just in your dock and give you visual feedback on CPU usage, Network activity, and Memory management. Once you get used to which segments represent which (not hard — CPU in the middle, Memory on top, Disk on the bottom), you’ll find yourself glancing over periodically to see what’s going on with your computer. Sure, other applications do the same thing, but this is well designed and elegant.

Students from UC Berkeley’s Computer Science, Law, School of Information Management and Systems, and Journalism Schools have launched bIPlog — a weblog covering modern intellectual property issues. The weblog is the product of two months’ prepration — students have been exploring IP issues to gain the footing necessary to make informed posts. Interesting notes on the site’s development in the About section (Full disclosure: I take care of class’ technical needs).

One of the most interesting aspects of the class has been watching the old guard traditional media and the new weblogging culture try to find a middle ground… to create something with editorial integrity, but which would still be extemporaneous enough to be attractive to rapid-fire blogging culture. More on that in my personal blog.

Boing Boing reports that the Mac OS X for x86 rumor is resurfacing. Who knows if it’s true?

Imagine if Apple got Mac OS X running on x86 hardware and included a
Windows environment based on Connectix technology that let you
run Windows apps with Classic-like integration. Connectix is
already a Windows-bundling OEM. In their forums, Connectix reps have
expressed interest in running Windows apps in a separate
window, rather than in a single Window that contains the Windows desktop.

All the pieces are there, and Apple’s more than capable of assembling
them. Running on x86 hardware would allow for Windows compatibility
without the performance penalty that Virtual PC users are currently
experiencing. All you’d have to do is get a copy of Windows to go with
your x86 Mac if you wanted to run Windows apps. This could make the Switch a little easier for some folks.

Would something like this make it easier for you to Switch?

The Oracle World Conference is underway at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. As you may know, Oracle recently made available a developer release of their 9i database software for Mac OS X. This is a big deal for enterprise Mac computing, and we’re starting a series by David Simpson on Tuesday evening that examines the Oracle release for OS X.

Apple has a booth at the show, and David spent the day yesterday nosing around the trade show floor. He just sent me this report:

I visited the Apple booth and had a nice talk with a number of the people there. They had Oracle on at least one of the machines, and were showing RealBASIC, JDeveloper, WebObjects, Xserve and the Xserve disc array (no shipping date yet). It’s a nice-sized booth, probably at least 30 x 50 and was reasonably busy with attendees. The only disappointment is that Apple is listed as an official equipment sponsor (along with Dell, Sun and Toshiba) but I didn’t see any Apple servers at any of the other exhibitor booths. This is even true of the Oracle exhibit areas. This may be due to the fact that the Developer Release for Mac OS X is not yet a shipping product, however Oracle World is the place where Oracle does often show off technology demos of new software. I would anticipate that this situation should improve by next year.

I spoke with several vendors to request that they create Mac OS X versions of their applications. I didn’t get much of a positive response from these vendors because they apparently had not seen demand for a Mac OS X version. I did however have a very nice talk with a salesperson at keeptool gmbh about Mac OS X. He said that he had the Oracle 9.2 Developer Release installed on his G4 Titanium Powerbook and was then running his company’s products via Virtual PC. He was an enthusiastic Macintosh supporter and said that he greatly preferred Mac OS X.

I was a pleasantly surprised to find that the show floor was almost completely filled with booths. There was one empty aisle at one end of the show hall and about half an empty aisle at the other end. Some space was taken up by a generously sized booth by Electronic Arts where people could play games, Oracle car/plane racing sponsorship booths and a human football arena at the edge of the main show hall.

I will try to find out when the next Developer Release or production release of Oracle 9.2 will be available on Mac OS X.

We’ll continue to follow the development of Oracle tools for the Mac platform. In the meantime, be sure to check out David’s first installment of “Installing Oracle on Mac OS X” Tuesday night on the Mac DevCenter.

An enjoyable aspect of Mac community life is watching the various hardware-centric neighborhoods and the rivalries among them. The two most happening boroughs in my world are the TiBook and iBook camps.

I’m sure to the eyes of uninformed visitors who surf the Apple Store, the iBooks are the “entry level” notebooks and the Titanium PowerBooks are for pros. Ha! Nothing could be farther from the truth.

iBooks are lighter, more durable, and have greater 802.11b networking range. They won’t roast your chestnuts when resting on your lap. They also have their ports conveniently placed on the side of the laptop instead of hidden in the back. Plus they are a helluva lot more affordable.

TiBooks have bigger screens, faster processors, bigger hard drives, better graphics cards, and more advanced optical drives. The new models allow you to burn DVDs and have returned the “audio in” jack to the back panel. One of my favorite features is the PC Card slot on the left side.

Unlike some of the other rivalries we see in the computing world, this one is friendly with a little good-natured teasing just to keep it interesting. And as of last week with revs announced for both lines, each camp has a lot to smile about.

Alright, just for fun here. Which do you prefer iBook or TiBook? Why?

As far as I’m concerned, one of the most delightful projects to come out of the Mozilla effort is the Chimera browser. I’ve been using it since 0.5, and the latest stable version, 0.6, is even better.

What do I like about this Gecko-based browser? Here are just a few of my favorite features:

• Speed: Chimera loads and scrolls fast.
• Beauty: Its Cocoa roots are apparent as soon as you open it.
• Tabbed interface: Once you’ve had it, it’s hard to go back.
• Popup blocking: Eliminates those bothersome unrequested popups that some sites inflict upon us.
• Keychain enabled: Makes password management much easier.
• Sidebar: Didn’t think I’d use it much, but I’ve grown attached to the sidebar drawer.
• It’s not bloated!: The engineers have created a beautiful, trim browser here; can they show the discipline to keep it lean?

I still use the OmniWeb and IE in certain situations. But when I’m in the mood to zip about the Internet for research or pleasure, Chimera is hard to beat.

Related link: https://msdn.microsoft.com/net/sscli

Geoff Shilling writes: “The 1.0 release builds and runs on Windows XP, the FreeBSD operating system, and Mac OS X 10.2.”

If you’ve been following the news feed on Mac DevCenter lately, then you’ve seen stories like Dell to sell iPods , PCWorld rates Apple customer support the best, PCMag says Xserve is an impressive server at a truly reasonable price, and Fortune Magazine says Jaguar is the most impressive new software of the year in its Fall Technology Guide.

PCWorld, PCMag, Fortune? Dell?! These are not traditional Apple fans.

It appears that we’re seeing the begrudging acceptance of Apple in the traditional PC universe, and the Mac seems to be evolving from a niche platform for artists, educators, and scientists to a serious business tool for just about anyone.

Why do I say “begrudging” in reference to this acknowledgement? Well, Windows XP did edge out Mac OS X in PCMag’s annual technology awards …

Related link: https://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/election2002/

I’ve fallen in love with Movable Type over the past few months, using it both for my personal weblog and for the J-School’s not-yet-public Intellectual Property Weblog. The deeper I dig into the software, the more I realize how flexible it is, and ways it can be coaxed and cajoled into resembling a Content Management System. When the charge came for me to build a site on which journalism students could publish their 2002 election stories, I decided to see just how far I could push it. We’ve got 25 pre-election stories up on the site already - many more will roll in over the next few days.

But MT is not a full CMS, and we had to work around a few significant limitations.

News sites and weblogs have enough similarities that the project was possible, but enough differences that problems still arose. I was able to use MT’s “Categories” feature to create regional election returns departments. I was able to disable comments and TrackBack, and modify MT tags so that headlines were linked to story bodies rather than the usual timestamp/permalink. I removed the calendar object that’s present by default, and enabled the new search engine in MT 2.5.

As soon as you try to automate something like this, you impose a system on an organic process that may or may not be compatible with the technology. The biggest problem is in how a news site like CNN features stories differently than a “blog”-style site like slashdot. “Real” news sites place the most important story at the top of the page. Blog-style sites put the most recent story at the top of the page. That’s a critical difference, but MovableType does not let you “weight” stories to live higher on the page than others. The only way I could think of handle this was to output the homepage to a hidden URL, then have the actual homepage be manually updated based on output to the automatically generated index. So in the end, we have a mostly-automatic publishing system, rather than fully automatic. That’s okay - technology never has taken the place of the human editor.

Another issue that bit us was the fact that Movable Type assumes that the person posting the story is also the author of the story. In our case, we had about 40 student authors and two people posting stories to the Movable Type back end. Thus, in order to get the bylines right, our posters had to create an author for each student, post the story as themselves in draft mode, then change the story author from within Power Editing mode. A big hack. For our needs, we wanted separate fields for author name and email address, distinct from the poster.

Then a professor threw me a curveball by announcing that some stories would have double bylines. Since the system was set up to link one author to one email address, this raised the question of how to generate email links from bylines. We decided to create authors that consisted of two names but with one email address. Obviously this wouldn’t fly in the “the real world,” but was good enough in a pinch.

Short story: We were able to get a database-backed publishing system up and running in record time, and the posting students loved working with it - light years easier than it’s been in previous election years, and we’ve got a quasi-dynamic site that can be updated on a moment’s notice without any HTML skills. And we came to learn that Movable Type is not a full-blown CMS, though it shares enough traits with CMSs to act like one in many ways. Movable Type’s homepage says:

What is Movable Type? It is a decentralized, web-based personal publishing system designed to ease maintenance of regularly updated news or journal sites, like weblogs.

Yup.

Would love to hear your tips on making MT behave like a CMS…

I worked for Sun for 4 years during the Java boom. And during that time, if you wanted good server software, Solaris was your ticket. IBM, yeah, Linux, yeah, but really, Solaris was tip top.

But that was a year and a half ago. Now, I’m working on a stealth mode project for a client in Silicon Valley and am looking at a whole lotta software as part of the operation. Some of it is cutting edge stuff, some isn’t. The thing is that it all sucks on Solaris. Bugs, crashes, you name it, it’s happening. And it’s obvious that the vendors of this software (big names most of them–the stuff that you may be using) have spent zero time qualifying the entire package on Solaris. Furthermore, one vendor’s download site is even set up so that you can’t download the Solaris software package using the default Netscape browser that comes with Solaris 8. How stupid is that?

The really bad thing is that its all working a hell of a lot better on Windows. It’s really sad. This means that even though Solaris is a better server OS than Windows, it’s becoming harder to build next gen apps on top of. This isn’t good for Sun.

One theory that I have to explain this: Most developers are working on laptops these days. And that means that they are running Linux or Windows. Solaris x86 on a laptop? Hah! Sun never put any effort into that, and they may be reaping the seeds of that decision now.

Are you noticing the same thing?

RubyConf 2002 was held this weekend in Seattle WA. Rael Dornfest and I managed to join fellow O’Reilly Network author Daniel Steinburg for the day Saturday and watched as the small, but vibrant group of 50 something Ruby devotees in attendance swallow up the information being presented.

Unfortuntaly, I missed Dave Thomas talk about the relatively large web application that he just built using Ruby, but I did catch a few other sessions. The best of these were Rich Kilmer’s great talk about the FreeRIDE IDE for the Ruby language and Dan Sugalski talking about Parrot. I had no idea that Parrot was so damn cool.

The highlight of the day was when Matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby) gave the conference keynote. His theme was that even though Ruby was small and had a small community, that there was great potential there, and that it was even good to be small. Matz has a great outlook on life that comes through when he talks. A few of his memorable quotes (paraphrased a bit, he was speaking in his non-native tongue of English):

"It is not the responsibility of the language to force good looking code, but the language should make good looking code possible."

"Fun is the most important thing in the world… Ruby makes programming fun."

"Ruby improves mental health."

After the keynote, there was a wide ranging discussion on how to improve and widen the Ruby community. My take on it is that the Ruby people should just do what they do best. The rest will come in time. The proof in the pudding: Ruby is starting to ship with mainstream operating systems. Just type in % ruby -v into the Terminal on Mac OS X to see.

Digital photography is its own medium. Over the last few years I’ve noticed a subtle prejudice against digital imaging, that it was “toy photography.” In other words, real men don’t use digital cameras.

Boy, what a crock.

You might want to revisit the home page of your favorite “real” photographer. Chances are that he or she switched to digital when you weren’t looking.

This all came to light the other morning when I was working with Tim O’Reilly on the Digital Photography Pocket Guide. I’m fortunate to have Tim as one of my two editors on this project.

We had planned to release the book this week. But in the late stages of production, we noticed that some of the photos “just weren’t doing it” for us. To everyone’s credit involved, we stopped the presses, reworked a few of the images, and sent the book back to the printer. It will ship within 2 weeks.

As Tim and I were grappling with some of these images, he popped open his TiBook and began to show me pictures from his iPhoto album. Tim is shooting with a Canon PowerShot S200 these days. He was trying to show me examples of compositions he had in his mind, but were difficult to describe.

(BTW: He had some handheld night shots using 1 second exposures that were really fun to view.)

At this moment, the notion that digital photography is truly a different medium became clear. Tim popping open his laptop and scrolling through pictures to convey ideas has happened to me many times recently in different circumstances: with friends, at the Mac OS X Conference, even with strangers in coffee shops.

The convergence of digital imaging and portable computing enables us to carry our life’s stories with us at all times. Yes, a picture is worth a 1,000 words, and having those pictures with us makes us better communicators. And I might add, just a little bit more interesting.

I ended up substituting four photos in the Photo Pocket Guide as a result of my conversation with Tim. When I looked at the proofs yesterday, I thought those changes really improved the book.

Digital imaging will never replace film photography. The VCR did not kill movie theaters. It’s not about one instead of the other. We have a new medium here, and its possibilities are very exciting.