I had every intention of checking out all the tutorials this morning at the Mac OS X Conference, that is, until I stopped for “just a minute” in Sal Soghoian’s AppleScript class.

After a few minutes I understood more AppleScript than I had after years of fumbling with it on my own. This is why I love these events.

Next thing I knew, it was lunch time, and I had missed the other two stops that I was going to make. Ah, such is the serendipity that is conferences.

I’ve added a new presentation to my repertoire: "Mac OS X, Why the Alpha Geeks are Using It." It’s an obvious tip of the hat to Tim O’Reilly’s thoughts on OS X, with a focus on showing to people why OS X works for Unix weenies and giving a hands on exploration of the system.

At this last weekend’s Rocky Mountain Software Symposium in Denver, I gave this talk to a pretty sizeable group of people. Questions ranged all over the map, but included:

• Does emacs run on it? (yes, it comes with)
• How about vi? (yep)
• SSH? (yep)
• X windows? (yep, you gotta get it separately though)
• vim? (compiles fine)
• Do you really use it as your primary machine? (yes)
• Is it stable? (yes, x180.net runs 24/7 on it)

The part of the talk that always gets a lot of applause is when I show top and point out Microsoft PowerPoint running as a process. Where else can you see that?

But the most telling part is how I spent the last 15 minutes of the presentation. I was answering questions about what my recommendations were for hardware configurations. They boiled down to:

• How fast should I get? (as fast as possible)
• No, but really, what’s the minimum? (600Mhz, in my opinion even though my PowerBook is a 400)
• How much memory? (348 is where things get smooth, I use 640MB on the laptop, 1.5GB on the desktop)
• What kind of hard drives? (ide, get whatever you want)

Obviously, people are looking to buy. I wish I knew how many Macs I’ve helped sell over the last few years, but I know its a fair number at this point.

Related link: https://webdev.archive.org/texts/bookmobile.php#thebookmobile

The Internet Bookmobile Launch Party

Last night people turned out at the Internet Archive in San Francisco for the launch of the Internet Bookmobile.

The bookmobile includes all the equipment needed to download, print, and bind public domain books on the spot. During the next next week and a half, Brewster Kahle and his eight-year-old son, Caslon, will drive from the Bay Area to Washington DC, bringing the bookmobile’s services (and message) to schools, libraries, retirement homes, museums and gatherings along the way.

They plan to reach to their destination on October 9, where they’ll park at the United States Supreme Court building and print books as the court hears arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft. From the Internet Bookmobile web site:

On October 9th the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft, a landmark case that will decide how many books are part of the digital library the Bookmobile brings. The founding fathers decided that copyright protection should last for 14 years and then another 14 years if the author chose to renew. Over the last 200 years, this has been extended many times to where it is now life of the author plus 70 years. Each time this is extended, this decreases the number of books that enter the public domain. Without those books, there can be no digital bookmobile.

The bookmobile uses a MotoSAT satellite system for internet access. At schools, kids will be given the chance to select a book to download and then print with an HP4600dn color laser printer. They’ll use a Fastback Model 8 binder and a Triumph 3905 cutter to finish their book. During the trip, Kahle will educate libraries about what it takes to make, print, and bind public domain books for their own patrons.

To see if the bookmobile is planning a stop near you, check their Where is the Bookmobile pages.

Stay tuned for more coverage from our own Richard Koman, who will be traveling with the bookmobile to Washington.

I just finished reading a c|net article titled, Ballmer: United, we’ll stomp on Linux, in which Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO is quoted saying, “Linux is not about free software, it is about community.” The article goes on implying that Microsoft now wants this too. The logic being, that if Microsoft creates a “community” like Linux, then they can finally crush this bothersome foe.

Since I didn’t conduct the interview myself, I have no idea how accurate these statements and conclusions are. But, if they’re true, then I have to laugh.

Indeed, Linux has community, as does Apple. There’s something about banding together as underdogs that creates a sense of camaraderie — not to mention a true belief in the technology itself. Why the hell Microsoft is concerned about the one missing piece of computer domination it doesn’t have, is beyond me. Unless … oh, I get it.

As a member of the Mac community, and as a friend of the Linux community, I can tell Microsoft this:

Money can’t buy you love, friends, or piece of mind … only market share. Apparently, that’s what “community” means to them.

My friend writes that his company won’t let him “use tools like Tomcat, Eclipse, JUnit, or Ant, unless a vendor provides the software and the vendor indemnifies” his employer. Think about what that might mean at your company.

“How far does this insanity go?,” he asks. Well, since his company “can’t find a vendor that will indemnify PERL, they are seriously talking about removing PERL. Yikes, can you imagine a system admin doing his job without PERL?”

If you can answer his concerns below, please use the talkback to provide advice. His letter continues:
“there have been some issues arising about indemnification
from copyright or patent infringement. If a developer
contributes a piece of software to the Open Source community
that contains intellectual property, and I use that open
source software, am I liable? As far as I know, open-source
licenses do not indemnify me from liability of copyright
infringement.

Questions:

1. Is this a real concern? Has anybody heard of a case
where a company has been held liable for using Open Source?

2. Is there a work around for this problem? In other
words, is there a company that will take on the
indemnification role?”

How do you help him convince his company that it’s safe to use Open Source software?

Last week I announced via weblog the Most Embarrassing Computer Moment contest where readers could submit anecdotes involving escapades that relate to computers. The turnout was great, and if you have a moment, you might want to go back and read some of the entries, especially these three winners:

First Place: Allergies by “jprsha.”
Second Place: Pop-unders by anonymous.
Third Place: Funny Story by “jkruer01″

Each of these winning entries wins a conference pass to the upcoming Mac OS X Conference in Santa Clara, CA, starting on Sept. 30. Winners can claim their prize by contacting me directly, and I’ll verify your entry and provide you with registration instructions.

Congratulations to these three winners, and thanks to all who participated.

As soon as Mac OS X 10.2.1 was available via Software Update, I grabbed it. As much as I like Jaguar, the initial release had caused a few problems that I was anxious to fix.

Start with CDR burning. I burned a disc with my Sony CRX10U drive and tested it in Windows XP. Hooray! The Windows compatibility issue that had plagued Disc Burner in Jaguar seems to be fixed. The disc behaved well on both Macs and PCs.

Speaking of Windows, Virtual PC does run better with 10.2.1. I especially noticed improved scrolling in the Web browser — almost a natural experience on the TiBook 667 running VPC 5.0.2. Other behaviors were smoother also. It’s still not an environment I can spend too much time in, but for light Windows testing on the TiBook, VPC is now much more pleasant.

Other speed improvements on the TiBook include snappier Finder performance, better Entourage behavior, and much zippier Web page loading in IE.

For a real browsing treat in OS X, download Chimera 0.5. It’s a clean, responsive browser that you might enjoy bopping around the Net with. The tabbed interface is a joy on laptops.

I was experiencing some Rendezvous connection problems in Jaguar that I haven’t been able to duplicate in 10.2.1, and I ran through all the iApps without a hitch. Scrolling through large iPhoto libraries seemed better too.

So far, after a couple hours of use, 10.2.1 seems like a pleasant enhancement to Jaguar without any noticeable problems.

Let me know what your first impressions of Mac OS X 10.2.1 are.

Thanks to the efforts of program chair Rael Dornfest (and some help from Peter, too), we have a handy expermental iCal version of the O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference schedule.

Just fire up iCal, go to the Calendar menu and choose Subscribe. For URL, enter https://conferences.oreillynet.com/macosx2002/macosx.ics — you can accept the default values for other fields, though you may want to ask it to refresh daily (schedule changes to the conference are very infrequent, so there’s really no need to have it update more often, at least until the conference starts).

You may want to adjust your iCal views a bit — in the default interface, it can be difficult to work with time slots that hold several sessions. Turning the “show search results” panel may help, as you’ll be able to see the sessions as a list. And the “show info” option will let you change the default color or refresh interval for the calendar itself. You can also use the info panel to show more details about each session.

Enjoy!

Any questions or suggestions? We’d love to hear them!

This past weekend, I decided to test my movie production skills by giving iMovie a whirl. Sunday was our housemate’s birthday, so I decided to surprise him with a video of his dog that I shot the weekend before at a lake up in Maine.

This 60-second iMovie was amazingly easy to put together. There are some things I could have done better — like the transitions and timing some of the text slides — but I managed to whip this together in about an hour.

One thing I wasn’t expecting was having to shell out a $29 fee for a QuickTime Pro registration. Why, you ask? Well, I needed to take the .avi video I recorded with a Canon S200 digital camera and convert that to a digital video QuickTime stream so I could import that clip into iMovie. But since this is something that I’ll probably do a few more times in my life, I figured the cost was worth it.

Another worthy investment was the $50 I spent to keep my mac.com address (er, get a .Mac account). The sound clip you hear in the background of the Happy Dog movie comes courtesy of the FreePlay Music, found on your iDisk in the /Software/Extras/FreePlay Music directory. The audio files come in 10-, 20-, 30-, and 60-second bytes as MP3 files (there’s also a full-length clip for each one, too). For this one, I used the 60-second clip titled “Shopping Spree”.

Okay, I know I’m not a video producer by any means, but iMovie is pretty easy to use for hacking together quick movies like this. Just imagine what I could do with a little more practice, footage, and sleep.

So, without further ado, I’m pleased to present Happy Dog, my crack at ripping off a Visa commercial.

Have an iMovie you’re particularly proud of, or willing to share some tips with me? Let me know (unless you’re Roger Ebert, of course).

I’ve had a SPARC 10 kicking around my home office, but it’s fallen far short of reaching its full potential until now. What held me up was decent graphics. Although I had three cards available, CG3, TGX, and the built-in SX graphics board, the only card that worked well with my SVGA monitor was the CG3, the slowest of the bunch. I got the TGX and SX to display on the SVGA monitor, but only with a faint image.

I’ve been accumulating odd parts here and there to make this machine more useful: 224MB of RAM, a 4MB VSIMM to enable the on-board video, and a 9GB hard drive. All that I was missing was a Sun monitor, which arrived last week while I was out-of-town. So, after I decompressed from my trip, I consulted the SPARCstation 10SX configuration page on SunSolve and found this document: SPARCstation 10SX System Configuration Guide. One helpful portion was Figure 2-1, which explains the layout of the DSIMM and VSIMM slots. Next, I came across the section titled “2.5.3 Recommended DSIMM/VSIMM Configuration,” which explains which configurations work. I followed the second example configuration, since it was closest to mine:

1 16 MByte DSIMM in slot 0
1 16 MByte DSIMM in slot 3
1 64 MByte DSIMM in slot 2
1 64 MByte DSIMM in slot 1
1 VSIMM in slot 4 or 5

Then, I removed my old TGX card and plugged my monitor into the SX graphics port on the back of the machine. I booted up, and to my delight, the monitor turned on. Once that was done, I powered down, dropped my remaining 64MB DSIMM into one of the other slots, and booted OK. Because I had installed Solaris 9 with the TGX card, I used Stop+A to halt the system before it booted, and rebooted with boot -r, so that Solaris would reconfigure itself as needed to adapt to the new hardware.

Now that I had the system up and running, I was stuck with the default Solaris installation: Ye Olde Common Desktop Environment (CDE), and no development tools. I had to fix that problem!

Development Tools

Sunfreeware.com has a generous collection of tools. I’m sure I’ll install lots of them over time, but to get started, here’s what I grabbed:

autoconf-2.53-sol9-sparc-local
automake-1.6.2-sol9-sparc-local
bison-1.35-sol9-sparc-local
flex-2.5.4a-sol9-sparc-local
gawk-3.1.1-sol9-sparc-local
gcc-3.1-sol9-sparc-local
libtool-1.4-sol9-sparc-local
openssl-0.9.6g-sol9-sparc-local
tar-1.13.19-sol9-sparc-local
top-3.5beta12-sol8-sparc3264-local
wget-1.8.2-sol9-sparc-local

I su’d to root and installed each one in turn with pgkadd -d filename. After you download and gunzip the files, this command should work under /bin/sh:

# for f in *-local; do pkgadd -d $f; done

All the binaries ended up in /usr/local/bin, which was not in the my path by default. So, I added it to the PATH setting in my .profile file, logged out and logged in.

The Desktop

So much for the essentials… now on to the fun stuff! I went to the Sun downloads page and found the link to Beta 1 of GNOME 2.0 for Solaris. It’s a 90MB download, and it claims that it will need 400MB when it’s done. I extracted the gnome-2_0-beta1-solaris-sparc.tar.gz file, which exploded into a gnome-install subdirectory.

I ran the ./install script, and a friendly Web Start installer appeared. I accepted the defaults, and let it rip. About 20 minutes later, it was done.

To start GNOME, I logged out of CDE, and returned to the desktop login panel. I clicked on the Options menu and chose Gnome 2.0 Desktop from the Session menu, then I logged in. After a minute or so (my SPARC 10 is slow–a 60mhz CPU), my desktop appeared.

I’ve got some basic development tools and a desktop environment that’s appropriate for 2002. I declare this SPARCstation fit for service, until someone decides to send me a free Ultra :-)

Do you have any tips and tricks for configuring a low-end workstation?

Related link: https://www.disobey.com/dnn/

I’m wondering if there’s a new trick out there for verifying email addresses, and/or adding them to spam mailing lists. In going through my list of accounts on various servers around the Net, to weed the chafe from the wheat, I signed into Topica.

Topica, as I’m sure a lot of you know, is an email list directory, much like Yahoo Groups! Yahoo! Groups allows you to customize your account to say that no one may add you to another mailing list without your approval. I’m not sure if Topica has a similar precaution as, after I logged in today, I discovered I was on far more than the four lists I recognized (EGR, Finkydoodle, joho, and eeggs.com).

I’m pretty positive I didn’t sign up “California Premier Attorneys 1″, “Corporate Counsel 1″, “Enlarge Today”, “Great Offers”, “Miscellany”, “new”, “Open Letter”, “Web Services”, or “WI_Pulse_20020311″. Even more interesting are that all of those lists have zero messages sent (or archived).

Are they waiting for me to say “well, who the frel are these people?” and unsubscribe? The act of unsubscribing, presumably, would send them an announcement that “morbus@disobey.com” has been removed, thus confirming my existence.

Thoughts?

So the Switch campaign has been fun, at least for Mac users. But what if we widened the concept to include all platforms, and tell humorous stories about our own crazy computer experiences? Yeah, let’s do it! So here’s the concept for this contest that begins immediately and closes on Wednesday evening, Sept. 18, at 5 pm PST.

We’ve all had embarrassing computer moments over the years. If you have a good personal computing anecdote that you can distill into 200 words or less, then you could win a full conference pass, including tutorials, to the upcoming Mac OS X Conference in Santa Clara, CA. We’ll also award two runner-up day passes for honorable mention. The rules are simple:

• You must be the subject of the anecdote. The embarrassing moment had to happen to you.
• Your anecdote can be no longer than 200 words. So some writing skill is needed control the length.
• The story can be Mac, PC, or Linux related, but the central theme must be embarrassing moments with computers.
• Keep it clean. If the embarrassing moment involves things such as bodily functions, then find a way to make your point and not disgust the viewing audience. Entries deemed “over the top” by me will be pulled from the site and will be ineligible for prizes. If you want a pre-ruling on a particular story, then send it to: derrick@oreilly.com for a no-penalty evaluation.
• Post your anecdote as a talkback at the end of this weblog. Please do not post questions or other non-entries. Send questions to me directly. The talkbacks should consist only of contest entries.
• Only one entry per person.
• The deadline for entries is Wednesday evening, Sept. 18, at 5 pm PST.
• All decisions by the judges here at O’Reilly are final.

I’ll post the winners on Friday, Sept. 20th. They will receive instructions via email on how to sign up for their free admission to the Mac OS X Conference.

The point of this contest is to have fun and to tell good stories. Please participate in the spirit of the event. And good luck!

– Derrick Story

Post your 200-word or less computer-related embarrassing anecdote here.

Related link: https://www.disobey.com/dnn/2002/09/index.shtml#001373

Everyone knows that Apple’s free calendar application, iCal has been released. One of the niftiest features is subscriptions: you can subscribe to someone else’s calendar, much like you can subscribe to a mailing list or someone’s RSS feed. Welp, here’s a spiffy idea proposed by Jim Roepcke: I want to make a … page that generates an iCal file so people can subscribe to the blog in iCal… It would be a nice groupware feature, wouldn’t it?

So, I’ve thrown together a simplistic Movable Type blog-to-iCal implementation.

There are a couple of things not-so-perfect (and any ignorance of my own is due to not reading the vCalendar spec, instead merely mimicking a sample calendar I created for this purpose. For one, timezones must be correctly set (my template defaults to US/Eastern, since I’m over in New Hampshire). Then, certain characters, like commas and colons (and probably others) need to be escaped with a backslash, else iCal will stop reading the event at the point of unescaped character. In Movable Type, you can sorta accomplish this by using <MTEntryTitle dirify=”">, which will turn your event name into something like “ical_and_blogging”, which isn’t ideal. Finally, and perhaps most annoying: URLs aren’t clickable, so I can’t easily jump off to read the complete entry.

UPDATE, 2002-09-12: Solved the encoding issues with a Movable Type plugin, added a DESCRIPTION (to supplement the SUMMARY) and customized the name of the calendar when loaded into iCal. See more and the latest template here. Been chatting with some other people as well - some movement in this area, it seems. Good, good. Sidenote: Thanks go out to redmonk who gave patient and helpful comments whilst I rapidly barked out “Refresh! RefressHH!” over and over again from the dark dungeons of a Windows 2000 machine (Gasp! I know. Hey, I multi-task).

UPDATE, 2002-09-12 (later): Huh. iCal chokes if your calendar has Mac linefeeds. Also, Slashdot has been converted by Mike Krus of NewsIsFree.com. More information about both is available in my last update of the night. Also, how to make clickable URLs as per one of the Talk Back comments (below).

Done anything neat with iCal and subscriptions? Let me know!

Sept. 10 was Digital Rights Management Day at the Seybold Conference in San Francisco, CA. Two panel sessions in particular, “The Anti-Piracy Wars” Parts 1 and 2, moderated by Bill Rosenblatt, tangled with the thorney bush of digital rights management, fair use, and personal computing.

I thought you might enjoying reading a few of the sound bites from these sessions. Remember, these statements are out of context and part of an ongoing discussion. That being said, I think you’ll find them fascinating.

“People confuse ‘fair use’ with ‘personal use.’ They are not the same. Fair use is a set of guidelines used by judges in a courtroom. Personal use is your activity on your computers at home,” Ted Cohen, Vice President of New Media for EMI Recorded Music.

“Fair use is important to innovators as well as consumers. It’s fair use that allowed the VCR to innovate on top of the television,” Joe Krauss, head of DigitalConsumer.org

“Media companies, under the guise of piracy, are asking congress to give them more control over fair use. Hollywood wants to control innovation.” Joe Krauss.

“Fight piracy; don’t squash innovation,” Joe Krauss.

“The copyright bargain: a balance between protection for the artist and rights for the consumer,” Robin Gross, Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“We’re on the path of creating monopoly business practices out of copyright law,” Robin Gross.

“The marketers can compete with free; it just has to be better. Look at bottled water if you don’t believe me,” Jonathan Potter, Digital Media Association.

“The record industry is still pissed off that other people are making money off their business, even if it promotes their products and increases their sales. I think they’re still mad about radio,” Jonathan Potter.

“Fair use is always going to be a gray area, and it should be. We need to allow for things we can’t see yet,” Robin Gross.

“Just let me use the technology I want at a fair price,” Jonathan Potter.

These are just a few snips from over three hours of compelling conversation by people who really understand these issues. And that’s the key, understanding the issues. We already know that consumers aren’t going to take the time to learn and comment about DRM, fair use, and copyright law. And we also know that the entertainment industry is willing to throw lots of money at persuading congress to write bad law.

So my friend, whether we like it or not, it’s the technology sector that has to bring common sense to this issue. And that means you and me.

I’m open to comments about fair use, DRM, and copyright law.

Fairly impressed with the first release of iCal, but disappointed that you can’t publish to a single calendar from more than one location. I would have expected a calendar to be attached to a single .Mac account - instead it’s attached to the computer you’re on. This means you have to, say, publish your work calendar from work and subscribe to it from home, and vice versa. Since you can’t edit a subscribed calendar, this means you have to wait until you get home before you can modify your personal calendar. That’s why I’m paying $100 / year for .Mac services?

Meanwhile, Amy and I are both publishing our own calendars and subscribing to each others’, even though we’d rather just have a shared calendar, and I’ve got an office full of disappointed attorneys who had hoped to move off of phpWebCal and onto iCal when it became available. At this point, it would actually be a step backwards in functionality for them.

Hopefully Apple will take the needs of people with multiple computers, and the needs of small groups, into account soon. Other than that, I’m impressed so far.

Related link: https://www.seyboldseminars.com/sf2002/

Seybold San Francisco seemed a bit subdued this year, as might be expected, but it was still easy to pack in a very full day. Some highlights for me:

• The Adobe keynote by Shantanu Narayen, Executive VP of Worldwide Product Marketing and Development, was fun and interesting. Narayen presented Adobe’s vision for the next generation of “network publishing”, with an appealing demonstration of the new Adobe Graphics Server 2.0, used to automate image production tasks. At the conclusion of the keynote, attendees were treated to one of the best conference give-aways I’ve seen in a long time — a copy of Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story by Pamela Pfiffner.

• In the afternoon I attended a great panel discussion, “Do-It-Yourself Usability Testing”. Moderator Leanne Waldal and panelists Ann Lasko-Harvill, Jared Braiterman, and Nate Bolt gave examples of live usability testing, using volunteers from the audience as testers. You might want to check out the presentation notes available here. Don’t miss Nate Bolt’s QuickTime movie, Usability Hightlights, especially if you’ve never had the pleasure of listening to users talk aloud while they use your web site. I need to do more of this…no matter how much it hurts…

If you live in the Bay Area, it’s not too late to attend, and there are some great deals to be had with free expo passes and one-day “Expo Plus” pass.

Do you have any conference highlights of your own to share?

iCal is here. And while you im^h^hpatiently await iSync, here’s an iManual way to get those iCal calendars over on to your iPod.

1. Plug in your iPod, being sure you’ve enabled iPod Firewire Disk support in iTunes so that it mounts on your desktop.
2. In iCal, choose the calendar you wish to export by clicking on it in the upper-left-hand pane.
3. Select File > Export… and save the .ics file to the Calendars directory on your iPod drive.
4. Unmount and unplug your iPod.
5. Browse your iPod to Extras > Calendars and, if all went to plan, you should be offered the choice of viewing a particular calendar (the one you exported) or All, if you exported more than one.

That should hold nicely until iSync sometime later this month.

Related link: https://journalism.berkeley.edu/events/weblogs.html

I’m currently participating in (doing tech support for and advising) a class at Berkeley on intellectual property, using the weblog as a vehicle. As part of the class, we’re hosting a panel discussion titled “Weblogs: Challenging Mass Media and Society,” featuring a handful of prominent webloggers, including Dan Gilmore, Scott Rosenberg, Meg Hourihan, J.D. Lasica, and Rebecca Blood. The panel, to be held at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, is open to the public — please join us.

Related link: https://maconlinux.net/news.html

The latest from Mac-on-Linux
now runs Jaguar in addition to — and, indeed, alongside — OS X 10.1 and OS 9. And if that weren’t enough, here’s a screenshot of Virtual PC on Mac on Linux (whew!). This is massive!

Related link: https://research.microsoft.com/projects/clrgen/

Microsoft Research has just posted Gyro, which is a set of files you can unpack over a Shared Source CLI installation to add support for generics. For a good explanation of generics (from a Java perspective), see William Grosso’s Generics and Method Objects.