In a week that featured the Boston Red Sox ending decades of frustration by winning the World Series, a blood red lunar eclipse hanging in the evening sky, and Steve Jobs making his first public appearance since cancer surgery, I was reminded of the real reason why I prefer the Mac community.

Those of you who attended our Mac OS X Conference will know where I’m going here. But I think everyone in the Mac community will catch on right away.

On Wednesday night I was hanging out on the Mezzanine before Sean and Vikki’s presentation on Real-Time Filmmaking. I saw Adam Goldstein’s mom, Risa, keeping a hawk’s eye on the front door. Her son, the Mac whiz kid, was out having dinner with David Pogue. I went over to help her pass the time and started up a conversation.

Risa told me that the conference had been an incredible experience for her. She had accompanied Adam so he could lead his first session at an O’Reilly event. But once they fell into the flow of energy, things took a turn beyond her expectations.

“I can’t believe how kind everyone has been to Adam and me,” she said. I watch all of you support each other in ways I haven’t seen for so long. I’m a professional in NYC and have to deal with people constantly walking over others as they climb up the ladder. This is amazing.”

I told her that the people here understand that any one person’s success equates to the betterment of the platform, and by ripple effect, the entire community. Nobody preaches this. They just get it.

Risa smiled and had to take a couple of deep breaths. She then spotted her son emerging through the front door with David. I wished her safe travels home, she smiled and left.

There’s no other event that I can think of where people seek out conference staff to say good bye before returning home. But that’s what happened time and time again all day Thursday. Any community whose luminaries — such as Andy Hertzfeld, David Pogue, Andy Ihnatko, Sal Soghoian, Dan Wood, Brent Simmons, James Duncan Davidson, Ted Landau, Scott Anguish, Aaron Hillegass, Tom Negrino, Dori Smith, and on and on, — hang out, engage, and give of themselves long after their session or keynote has passed, is a community that’s going to thrive.

In a way, this week wasn’t as much about hardware and software as it was about the people who use these tools. Risa isn’t the only one who feels that way. I know this for a fact.

No doubt that Stewart Copeland really touched a lot of folks today at the O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference. I’ve had countless people walk up to me just to talk about the experience. But my favorite Stewart story happened the night before today’s big event.

He arrived here at the Westin late Tuesday. We spotted him at the front desk, and as I approached to greet him, I could tell things weren’t going well. I found out later he had a terrible night. After a dinner engagement in the Bay area, he missed his turnoff coming south to Santa Clara and ended up lost in San Jose. He then had a Starbuck’s Frappuccino explode inside his car. To make matters worse, his reservations at this hotel were not in order. He was screwed.

Fortunately, I was able to authorize his suite and get him out of the lobby and on to the elevator. I had borrowed a 17″ PowerBook and had it stashed in case he needed it during his time with us. I said, “Stewart, let’s stop by my room. I have something there that will keep you busy tonight.” His mood improved when I handed him the PowerBook. (He’s really a geek like the rest of us.) And off he went with it under his arm.

The next day, when we had a few moments to talk, I asked him what he thought of the laptop. Stewart was in a great mood. He said that since he didn’t have any of his stuff on it, he just nosed around, and quickly discovered GarageBand. Stewart is more of a ProTools kind of guy, so he’s never taken the time to check out GB.

“I saw this cool looking guitar on the dock,” he said. “So I clicked on it. It seemed like about 20 minutes had passed, but it was more like a couple hours. Next thing I knew, I had some pretty sweet tracks put together. And that was without a USB keyboard (as in the musical type). I was just tapping on the computer itself.”

I wish I could have been the fly on the wall that watched Stewart Copeland discover GarageBand. Handing him that Mac laptop was like handing Babe Ruth his first baseball bat. Here’s a guy who was one of the most innovative rock drummers of all time, who has composed many successful scores for movies, including Wall Street, and who is truly a gifted musician — recovering from a bad day in a Santa Clara hotel room with a 17″ PowerBook, laying down tracks with the music program “for the rest of us.”

I’d give up my bluetooth to have an export of that composition…

In Smart Home Hacks, Hack #31 Broadcast Messages On Your Home Network, describes how to use the Mac OS X program LanOSD to send animated, overlaid onscreen messages to every computer on your network. For example, you might want to pop-up a message with the latest outdoor temperature, or when the motion detector at your front door has been triggered, as shown below.

LanOSD, which is free, works great for this. There’s hardly anything to configure, just run the application and messages sent from any computer will simultaneously appear on the screens of all of the computers on your local network. You can send messages using AppleScript, which is what I do in conjunction with XTension, or via a nifty command line program that’s included with the download. It’s perfect for integrating with your shell, perl, or python scripts.

I recently came across a similar program, Growl, that also provides beautiful onscreen notifications. It’s supported by a (growing) number of applications, but it doesn’t broadcast messages on your network. It can still be pretty handy, and perhaps some enterprising developer will create a growl-compatible notifier that allows distributed messaging.

Related link: https://www.amug.org/~jthomas/watch.html

This guy challenged himself to make a wristwatch using 1968 vintage Nixie Tubes as the display. And he succeeded. It is truly a work of art. He sold it for $500.

Google has announced the acquisition of Keyhole, makers of a product that lets you browse the planet.

This program is amazing–you can click and drag, zip, zoom, and fly all over the world. Browse the planet with satellite maps superimposed on the globe in topographic glory. I’ve tried the trial a couple of times and I’ve been waffling on whether to buy it. The huge news is that the price has dropped from $70 to $30. This will get me to open my wallet.

Keyhole is one of the few computer programs that people will crowd around a computer to play around with. “Go here!” “No, go here!” “Don’t make me come over there!”

My only complaint is that there’s no Mac version. I hope that changes soon. I do have a desktop PC, but my PC laptop is way too weak for this application. I’d love to be able to take Keyhole with me on-the-go.

BTW, NASA has a free application World Wind, that does a lot of what Keyhole does. When I first checked it out, the site was Slashdotted, so I didn’t have a pleasant out-of-the-box experience since maps and the like are fed to World Wind over the network.

During the Browser Wars, Microsoft was trying to protect its Windows franchise; at the time, they weren’t ready for the Internet, and the Browser-As-Platform threatened to marginalize Windows like nothing else could.

Microsoft won those wars, and things have changed a lot since then. Microsoft has been successful in getting new development to happen with .NET, a Win32 replacement for the networked generation. And .NET supports the Browser-As-Platform paradigm quite well. The dominance of Internet Explorer protected Win32 until its replacement was ready. Does Microsoft still need it to dominate?

Maybe they are happy to let Internet Explorer fade into the woodwork of Windows. After all, they haven’t kept up with innovations like tagged browsing, RSS support, and other nice things you find in the latest and greatest browsers. Plus, Microsoft put up no struggle on Mac OS X when Safari plowed right over IE (good riddance there). So would Microsoft care if Firefox kept gaining? I don’t think it weakens Windows to let it keep growing. In fact, it neatly solves a big problem Microsoft has: how to cope with browser vulnerabilities (and where to shift the blame when they do appear).

Do you think Microsoft will put up a fight against Firefox?

Continuing on with my adventures in microcontrollers, I spent the evening running through a couple more of the “What’s a Microcontroller” [PDF] workbook exercises. I finally reached the one I’d just been itching to get to: the 7-segment LED display.

The evening started out with lighting up individual segments by sending a HIGH to the appropriate pin and ended with a sweet bit of code making use of a LOOKUP table holding 8-bit representations of 0-9A-F:

LOOKUP index, [	%11100111, %10000100, %11010011,
                %11010110, %10110100, %01110110,
                %01110111, %11000100, %11110111,
                %11110110, %11110101, %00110111,
                %01100011, %10010111, %01110011,
                %01110001 ], OUTH

A friend, more fascinated by my fascination than the whole counting in hex thing asked: “So, why do you find this all so interesting?” The closest I could come was likening it to someone who followed cooking recipes to the letter stepping back one day, trying something simple, and building back up over time to something akin to the recipes they started out with.

It’s grokking the distance between bits and browser, pins and pixels that gets me going.

That and I’m just that much closer to recreating Mattel’s Battlestar Galactica SPACE ALERT LED-based handheld from 1978 ;-).

In a day that had so many high points for Mac fans, the surprise hit at the O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference was Derrick Donnelly’s Open Source Digital Forensic Acquisition and Analysis on Mac OS X, Tuesday morning after the feature presentations on Tiger.

I was making my usual rounds to all of the session rooms making sure that everything was running smoothly, when lo and behold, they were standing in the aisles for Derrick’s session on how to compile and run open source Forensic tools such as SleuthKit, Autopsy, Foremost, Fatback, and DCFLDD on Mac OS X.

It was CSI meets the Mac. When I saw this proposal in the field of submissions we reviewed months ago, I was instantly attracted to it. But I had no idea that so many others here would share my fascination with digital sleuthing. In fact, I was told many times today that I should have given Derrick a double time slot. I agree.

Stay tuned for more highlights in my next report…

Related link: https://www.apple.com/ipodphoto/

Apple announced their iPod Photo today. I think they missed the mark by centering its functionality around making it a digital version of wallet photos instead of giving it a good way to get photos off of a camera and into the iPod in the field. It does have some neat functionality like connecting to TVs (4:3 & 16:9) and displaying slideshows with music, showing album art when playing music, and a 15 hour battery (while playing music).

I’d be more interested if it had a good way of getting photos off of my camera and into the Ipod (and from there onto my computer) — my Belkin unit doesn’t cover it. It’d also be nice if it and iPhoto supported Adobe’s new DNG format and used Adobe’s DNG converter when pulling raw photos off of a camera.

But, if I didn’t already have an iPod, I’d probably get an iPod Photo.

What do you think of the iPod Photo?

Apple made a bunch of Podtastic music-related announcements today. The U2 iPod (U2pod, anyone?), the iPod Photo, iTunes 4.7, and (less headline-grabbing) expansion of the iTunes Music Store to nine more European countries.

No doubt when analysts at Merrill Lynch predicted new iPods soon, they didn’t anticipate their words becoming reality the same day (or maybe they were tipped off ;). Anyway, there’s been the usual flow of drooling coverage from gadget sites and weblogs, many of which reported the rumors about these devices in recent days and weeks.

If there’s anything that’s a surprise, it’s the choice to make the U2 iPod the lead story on the apple.com front page (see screenshot below).

apple.com, today. Can you see iPod Photo promo?

The iPod Photo is surely going to appeal to far more people than the U2 iPod, which will be a niche product even among keen U2 fans. The decision to make it the lead item on the company web site reflects, perhaps, the model’s reason for being. It’s a stunt, one designed to reflect good things on both parties. U2 gets to show that despite being in a position to offer a box set of 400 songs, it remains on the cutting edge of music and technology. Apple gets to show that despite the “Rip. Mix. Burn.” strategy when iTunes first appeared, it has the hearts and ears of smarter individuals within the music industry clamouring to join the digital music revolution.

So what’s there to notice about this overshadowed iPod Photo? The screen resolution is 220×176 pixels. That’s this big:

The size your pictures will appear on an iPod Photo — well, roughly, depending on your screen resolution. But you get the idea

Big enough to be useful? Possibly. As friends pointed out to me today, some users might decide that their money would be better spent on good quality framed prints of their best photos. Others might worry about sustaining decent battery life.

In the long term, though, there are far more important things that Apple needs to worry about. The new generation of pocket media devices, most of which play video as well as music, store photos, and lots more besides - these are the things likely to be competing with the iPod in buyers’ minds in the next 12 months or so.

Perhaps I’m being overly cynical. I can’t deny that if I had the spare cash, I’d probably be buying an iPod Photo and smiling about it.

Like the sound of the new iPods?

Related link: https://www.bleacheatingfreaks.com/science/OB/micromine/

The fine folks at Bleach Eating Freaks have published instructions om making a miniature claymore mine out of ordinary office supplies. It reminds me of the stuff you’d find in the old Anarchists Cookbook. I wouldn’t recommend making this, as it looks like it could cause damage to someone’s eyes. Nevertheless, the design is quite beautiful.

The thing I find interesting about the first day of an O’Reilly conference is watching it take shape. Typically, we run tutorials at the start, which means attendees spend more time in class and are seen less in the common areas. This relaxed pace makes it easier to have sustained conversations with those just arriving and preparing for the fireworks that begin on Tuesday morning.

Many of the speakers I visited with today are still fiddling with their presentations. You might think this is due to procrastination. But actually their talks were ready some time ago because of our materials deadline. This is more refinement. It’s a byproduct of being totally “in to” their subjects.

And that’s what I like about the first day — spending time with people who are passionate about their interests, and who want to share that passion with others. I can’t wait to see these sessions and feature presentations. The standards have been set by today’s tutorials. I can tell already that this conference is shaping up to be what so many of us had hoped — smart, vibrant, and very enjoyable.

I’ve been spending some wee bit of my evening time lately getting back to basics–PBASIC, to be exact. I picked up a one of Parallax’s nifty little Basic Stamp Discover Kits on a recent visit to that geek supermarket, Fry’s electronics. (The “never shop when you’re hungry” addage doesn’t only apply to food, you know.)

I’m not quite sure what on earth posessed me to do so. Perhaps I’m ever so slightly caught up in this retro trend. Or taking a stroll down amenesia lane to the simpler days of BASIC and sub-16K hacking. Or was it triggered by this year being BASIC’s 40th (and nearing mine)?

Parallax does a nice job of packaging up a BASIC Stamp 2 module, programming board, manual, “What’s a Microcontroller” [PDF] gentle instruction/project book, and bag o’ components (LEDs, resisters, capacitors, buttons, potentiometers, jumper wires–all the stuff I pulled willy-nilly from various radios and such before I knew better).

The packaged software is Windows- or DOS-only, but I found MacBS2, a nice Mac OS X Stamp programming application based on a Parallax’s Mac PBasic tokenizer library. I bridged the serial connector to USB using a Keyspan USA19 USB serial adapter I had lying about from my now-disused Handspring.

I’ve not had a tremendous amount of time to sink my teeth in, so for now I’m just working my way through the simple examples in the “What’s a Microcontroller” book. I’ve caused LEDs to blink at my very command, built a reaction-timer game that’s oddly satisfying, and am on to servos next.

It’s rather satisfying, I must admit, to spend time with something so incredibly simple (send HIGH to P3 and the light goes on) yet engrossing. I’ve no particular purpose in mind at this time, although I find myself noodling on the necessary schematic and source for recreating some of those LED-based hand-held games of the 70s. Or that bizarre calculator watch game where you pick off scrolling numbers before they reach the left-hand side of the LCD.

I’ll keep posting my adventures here in the hopes that there are others of you taking a break from the complex systems you build by day to get back to BASICs.

Are you too taken in by the simplicity of yesterday’s programming?

Reports over the weekend that a new malware application had been found on Mac computers caused quite a stir.

Subsequent investigation has shown that, in itself, the Opener script does not present too much danger to most Mac users. As Macintouch readers pointed out, the malicious hacker would have to have root access to your computer, or physical access to a disk it was connected to in order to get the thing installed.

That’s not to say that we Mac users should resume our customary smug expressions and pretend there’s nothing to worry about.

Modern Macs are designed for connectivity. The new iBooks are unwired for Airport as soon as you unpack the box; the presence of a network, and therefore access to the internet, is not questioned. And connected computers are exposed computers.

While Opener certainly could cause some pretty nasty damage to any disk it infected, it lacks the crucial element that makes a virus a virus: a means to propagate itself from one machine to the next.

Nonetheless, this could be an ideal opportunity to learn something useful from our Windows-using friends. The smart ones among them get hold of anti-virus software before they even connect their WinXP boxes to a phone socket. Is there any reason why Mac users shouldn’t do the same?

It’s funny. No matter how many lists of essential Mac OS X software you see, none of them ever seem include anti-virus applications. That says something — partly about how safe this system has been to date, and partly about the smug complacency a lot of us could be reasonably accused of.

Yes, Mac OS X has built-in firewall software. Yes, no-one writes viruses for the Mac platform because there’s just no (obvious) point. Why bother trying to infect such a tiny proportion of the global computer-using community? But despite it failing to qualify as a virus in the traditional sense, someone did make the effort to write Opener. And if one person thought it was worthwhile for their mysterious purposes, what’s to say that someone else might not think it worthwhile doing something similar to you, and your computer?

If any of this makes you feel even a tiny bit uneasy, perhaps you’ll consider downloading ClamXav, a GUI implementation of the Clam antivirus for Unix. Heck, if the scare about Opener is as low a threat as most people are now saying it is, you’ve nothing much to worry about. But it’s free, and it’s simple, so why not?

Should Mac users take more of an interest in security?

A few months ago, one of the instructors I serve while wearing my webmaster hat asked me to attach a wiki to his class’ website. I’d been meaning to start testing various wiki systems for a while, and this was the perfect opportunity to dig in.

The only wiki I had previously installed anywhere was Wakka. The experience had gone very well - easy to set up, did most of the things I needed it to do, was fairly easy to customize. But when I went looking for it again, was disappointed to find it had become open-source roadkill - an abandoned project without so much as a homepage remaining to memorialize it.

Being partial to PHP/MySQL solutions, I headed for phpWiki. At first blush, phpWiki seemed like a great replacement with a solid development community behind it. A few installation glitches, and some confusion over whether to use a provided wizard for installation configuration or to edit the configuration text file, but once up and running, I was fairly satisfied, even though it didn’t support linking of Chinese characters to full Chinese URLs (yes, this is possible! However, it is not possible to paste such URLs into the O’Reilly weblog back-end without them breaking, so you’ll have to click a link from within the Chinese wikipidia once there to see what I mean).

Months passed before the class was ready to rock with their wiki. Meanwhile, I worked on other projects, including an upgrade to PHP5 (required by a CMS I’m testing for another project). Finally, the time came to prepare for launch. Checked back in with the wiki, only to find it completely broken - turns out the current version of phpWiki is incompatible with PHP5. Worse, there were rumblings in the phpWiki user forums that the project was starting to lose momentum and direction. No new downloads had appeared on the SourceForge site since last March. Another great open source project left to rust by lack of direction/enthusiasm.

That left me scrambling, with a week to find a replacement. Checked out MoinMoin (obscure installation procedure left a bad taste in my mouth) and TikiWiki (everything-including-the-kitchen-sink portal software that just happens to include a wiki module — I want a streamlined, dedicated app). And today TikiWiki’s homepage is inaccessible.

Finally, the light went on. Since we were using WikiPedia as an inspiration for the class project, why not use what they were using? Duh. MediaWiki is the platform on which the incredible and vast WikiPedia is built. Found most of the links to the download broken at the SourceForge mirrors, but eventually found one that worked. Installation, unlike many of the wikis I sampled, was a breeze.

MediaWiki is a great platform, and does support full Chinese URLs, but its documentation is scattered and obtuse. Even simple things like figuring out where the administrative access page for the system is, or which files need to be edited to customize the system (the “templates” directory contains only one file, which does not appear to be template related) were stupidly difficult. The problem wasn’t confined to administrative documentation - the system didn’t come with any user-level documentation either — I had to copy/paste help pages out of WikiPedia’s wiki into our own just to provide assistance for our users. Ridiculous.

Yes, I know - if I don’t like the state of an open source project, I can help fix it. And I’d love to. But I just. Don’t. Have. Time. I don’t mean to look a gift horse in the mouth here, I’m just saying that the public distribution didn’t feel quite ready for prime time.

Overall, I was left with the overwhelming impression that the wiki world desperately needs its own Movable Type - a system that’s cleanly designed, clearly and logically documented, easy to customize, has momentum and traction, an expansive and supportive user community… I’m predisposed to open source solutions, but would certainly pay a small/reasonable sum for a commercially supported, high-quality wiki (our .edu budget doesn’t leave us piles of money to throw around - I’m talking $100 here, not thousands).

On a side note, I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that wikis aren’t necessarily the best place to provide documentation — yes, they’re easy to contribute to, but they tend towards meandering, non-hierarchical layouts and can be rough for end-users to follow.

Yes, there are wiki services out there we could take advantage of, such as SocialText and SeedWiki, but I’m committed to keeping all school content hosted on school servers - I’ve been burned going down that road before when services went belly up.

It seems that the wiki universe is being built by extreme geeks. Which is great - that’s where all the good stuff comes from. But at a certain point, a good software project needs the kind of vision that will make the product more accessible, more polished, less prone to abandonment or neglect. The blogging world got there a while ago. It’s time for the wiki world to catch up.

What great wiki opportunities am I missing here?

Related link: https://www.x10.com/home/offer.cgi?AHPROSDK,../ahprosdk.htm

While there are several great home automation software packages available, nothing beats the feeling of rolling your own code and creating exactly the software you need. Whether it’s for a custom purpose, or just for the satification of doing it yourself, writing your own home control software may have just gotten easier.

X10 Corporation has released a free SDK for their new USB-based ActiveHome Pro automation controller. As I wrote about just a few weeks ago, the ActiveHome Pro is a brand-new update to the venerable CM11 computer-to-X10 interface that is, by far, the most commonly used controller by home automators everywhere. It’s great to see X10 release the SDK in a relatively short time frame.

I’m looking forward to giving it a whirl myself, as well as seeing what others create with it. The ActiveHome Pro’s support for wireless devices is quite intriguing. If you’re working on a project, feel free to get in touch.

What will you create with it?

Related link: https://blue-beach-systems.com/Products/Software/TAO/

A few days ago, prompted by Matt Neuberg’s rave review of TAO in TidBITS, I decided to download it and have a play.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I fired up the app, started typing, and saw a feature I have been dreaming about in a text editor for ages now - live word count. Not only that, a live word count that only counts the number of words in the item currently being edited. This, to me, is gold dust.

Let me explain why. I write various things for various clients. All sorts of articles, columns and miscellaneous bits of copy. Keeping half-finished bits of text organised and sorted problem is the biggest problem of my working life.

But what TAO offers is the chance to store all these works-in-progress in one file — ok, at times it might be a particularly large and ungainly sort of file, but it will still be one place where I can keep all my stuff.

Not only that, but this live word count shows me just how much work I need to do on each piece of unfinished stuff. I can see at a glance whether I’ve gathered together enough content for this week’s 700-word column, and if I need to set about gathering more for future columns, or have spare words in hand.

The crucial test for TAO is the one I apply to all editors I use: can it type as fast as I can? If the letters take longer to appear on screen than it takes my fingers to hit them on the keyboard, the editor is no good to me. I can’t stand having to wait for software to catch up. So far, after a couple of days of use, TAO is doing adequately, but is not as fast as I would like. Saving takes just a second or so too long; and the larger this file gets, the slower the app responds to commands and new text input. I can see this is going to need a little more exploration.

Trying out TAO like this has encouraged me to really look into other outliners properly. I’ve spent much of today downloading and trying out all sorts of outliner tools, making some interesting discoveries along the way.

The most interesting of these is that TAO remains the best, for my needs. I need a tool that helps me write; of the apps I’ve tried out, only TAO operates as I’d like, combining the roles of text editor and outliner.

For anyone wishing to conduct their own outliner comparison tests, there’s few better starting points than About This Particular Outliner’s The Future of Outlining, an excellent article that includes links to pretty much every current outliner available for OS X.

Outliners: love ‘em or hate ‘em? What do you think of this one?

Related link: https://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,714129,00.html

What if someone threw a browser war and nobody showed up? Om Malik’s “Microsoft’s Worst Nightmare” in Business 2.0 is a nicely written chronicle of the current odd chapter in the now-outmoded “browser wars.” This feels more like a browser hand-over, with Internet Explorer offering no resistance as home and business users download the Mozilla-based Firefox browser and (to borrow the Firefox slogan) “take back the Web.”

Related link: https://www.macminute.com/2004/10/19/powerbooks/

MacMinute is reporting that Apple does not intend to release a new PowerBook before the holidays… yeah, so much for the PowerBook G4 update is imminent talk, huh? It’s also an interesting side to the “Apple does not comment on unannounced products” company line… they do comment on an absence of products, especially if potential customers might be waiting for products that are not actually in the pipeline.

Well, all that said, I’m in a quandary. See, I just finished writing QuickTime for Java: A Developer’s Notebook (yay!), and with a little free time, I’m itching to really get into Core Image / Core Video. However, my sad little 900 MHz G3 iBook doesn’t have the GPU chops to handle CI/CV. I had been waiting for a new PowerBook, and the current line can handle CI/CV, but it’s getting a little long in the tooth. Why Apple won’t throw us a bone with a minor update - 7200 RPM drives would be nice - is probably immaterial.

With the “no new PowerBooks” announcement, I wondered “hey, they just released new G4 iBooks, maybe those can do CoreImage. I mean, Apple’s not going to put out hardware that can’t handle the cool features of the next OS X release, right?” Actually yes… yes they would. A quick check of the specs shows the iBooks with 32 MB Radeon 9200’s… not among the cards supported by CI/CV.

So now I’m thinking… my home office is going to be done in a couple of weeks, and I don’t travel that much, usually three conferences a year - O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference (yay!), ADHOC (yay!), and JavaOne (arguably more pleasant than elective dental surgery!) - so I could stop paying the portability premium and get into a G5 today.

Assuming I will need some kind of portable when I do travel, even if it means I can’t code CI/CV on the road (well, can’t test it anyways), let’s tally up the options with street prices (yes, I’m in ADC, but let’s leave the hardware discount out of the equation for now). We’ll assume the cheapest desktop and iBook, and compare that to the mid-range PowerBook (my rationale being that I can stand a small screen on the road, but not as my primary development environment).

I think it’s surprising that for $300 more, I get two computers - each optimized for its environment (desktop vs. mobility) - and that the desktop G5 iMac is way ahead of where the PowerBook is going to be anytime soon in terms of CPU, bus speed, etc. As much as we’ve heard about how great the PowerBook line is and how appealing it is to junk the desktop in favor of having a laptop for everything, it comes up somewhat short against the rest of the Mac line right now.

What do you think? G5 iMac and (later) iBook, or G4 PowerBook today?

As widely predicted, Apple today announced some hardware updates.

The new iBook G4 models come with AirPort Extreme built-in, a welcome upgrade for many users, and something Apple was criticised for not including in the flat panel iMac G5 earlier this year.

The small 12″ screen version runs at 1.2GHz, with a 30GB hard disk and Combo optical drive. There are two 14″ models, both running at 1.33GHz and with 60GB disks. One has a Combo drive, one a Superdrive.

A reasonable set of new specs, in all. Nothing too striking, but enough to keep the machines competitive. The inclusion of wireless connectivity is probably going to be one of the most popular new features for buyers, especially those choosing between Apple and Wintel for the first time. Bringing the bottom-end price tag below $1,000 once again also makes a difference to consumers, conscious that they are paying a premium for Apple hardware.

In another announcement, there’s a new Power Mac G5 model, boasting a single 1.8GHz processor; it is being offered alongside the dual processor model for the time being.

Looking good? Will you splash out for a new iBook, or hang on for the next round of PowerBook updates?

Mac audio fans will enjoy an exciting one-two punch next week. First, Apple’s special announcement on Tuesday morning at the California Theatre in San Jose with Steve Jobs and U2. Then, the O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference, right next door in Santa Clara, launches its ground breaking digital audio track featuring Stewart Copeland on Wednesday. Northern California is definitely the place to be for digital music the last week of October.

The much-linked audioblogging manifesto is dead right; people should think twice and hard about inflicting their thoughts on the world in an audio format.

But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be space somewhere for well-thought-out audio stuff.

Say you write a book. Not a professional, get-paid-for-it book, but a little work of art that’s been loitering in your head for years. You publish it yourself, online. (You might be Lion Kimbro, whose How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think has become something of a cult work of non-fiction, at least among del.icio.us users.)

Say you want to produce an audio version of your book, maybe releasing a chapter at a time as an mp3 or an ogg file.

Rather than post it on your blog, wouldn’t it be nice if you could post it on the iTunes Music Store?

I’m imagining a future version of the Store that lets people upload content as well as download it; or at least add details of audio material they have available, and can host for themselves.

Take it a step further: a cross between this personal iTunes store and the Amazon Honor Scheme. I’ll upload interesting things in audio format, and you can download them and pay me a small sum for them, via the Store.

Or how about an Open version of the Music Store, one in which all the content, be it music or speech, has to meet one criteria: that it is free. A central place to put all those Creative Commons-licensed songs and verbal scribbles.

Sing your praises. Or curse my foolishness. Text-only, please.

Lenn Pryor, of Engadget.com fame, is going to lead a session at the upcoming Mac OS X conference titled, Podcasting: Consuming, Producing, and Distributing DIY Radio.

I saw this technique of do-it-yourself radio production being used at the Web 2.0 Conference, and I think it definitely fits in nicely with our Insanely Great Mac Track along with Smart Home Hacks, the Life Hacks and 43 Folders Super Session, and Utterly Simple Webcasting Hacks with QuickTime Streaming Server… just to name a few other sessions in this track.

The Mac OS X Conference runs Oct. 25 - 28 in Santa Clara, CA.

I was sifting through my mail the other day and discovered a fascinating event. The RoboNexus conference will be underway at the Santa Clara Convention Center the weekend before our own Mac OS X Conference opens its doors. Hmmm.

I checked out the robotics site, and you can get an Expo pass for Saturday for only $15 if you register online before Oct. 18th. I’m thinking that this could shape up to be a wild trip for those attending the Mac show.

Blow into town on Saturday, check out the Robotics Conference, take Sunday off to ride a few roller coasters at Paramount’s Great America (right next door), then attend your favorite tutorial at Mac OS X Con on Monday. The real fireworks begin on Tuesday with the feature presentations on Tiger and sessions galore.

Robotics, roller coasters, and Macintosh O’Reilly style — the end of October could be really, really good…

Much excitement heralds the sudden arrival on the scene of Cherry OS, a Mac emulation system for Windows machines.

Unfortunately (but hardly unexpectedly), the Cherry OS site is being somewhat slow right now. A lot of people want to know what the fuss is all about.

It’s even more unfortunate that, instead of offer up a simple one-page briefing comprising text and perhaps a single screenshot, the Cherry OS folks are offering bandwidth-hungry movies (contained within Java applets) as the only official source of information.

After watching an applet telling me it was “Buffering…” for longer than I cared to count, I decided to look for information elsewhere. Thankfully, a story at Apple-X.net has a lot more detail, and some (mostly unofficial) screenshots. The creators of Cherry OS maintain that it offers reasonable performance, and is not connected in any way to the PearPC emulation project.

Until the fuss dies down a bit, and the official Cherry OS site is usable once more, those of us wanting to test it for ourselves will just have to sit tight and wait.

Did you manage to download and try out Cherry OS before the fuss started up?

When I started this weblog, I was determind to avoid the rumors. Let’s face it, it’s easy to write news stories about nonexistent, mythical products that may or may never appear, and may well be completely different to what Apple eventually comes out with. Especially when Apple’s policy of remainly steadfastly mute about such products provides a license for anyone to write pretty much whatever they please.

You can hear the ‘But -’ coming, can’t you?

But - since Think Secret posted a story about the possibility of a new iPod, resplendent with color screen and the ability to display photos, everyone has been jumping on with their own rumors, counter-rumors, and jovial linky-lurve.

Like:
Colour screen iPod rumblings - T3
Colour screen iPod by Christmas - Digital.Lifestyles
Color iPod on the horizon? - extremeipod.com

A photoPod sounds exciting to some, if this kind and amount of coverage is anything to go by.

But I can’t get excited about it. The iPod has worked because it does its job extremely well. It lets you carry your music collection around in your pocket, and listen to it. But a device that lets you carry your music collection and your photo collection around in your pocket? Um, why? I can see why some people (duh, photographers) would love such a device, but for me, it’s something that sounds cool only in the technical sense, not in the practical sense.

Why? Because when I’m looking at photos, I want to see them properly. Squinting down at a tiny 2-inch screen, or worse still, trying to share a tiny 2-inch screen with a bunch of friends, just doesn’t sound like much fun.

I agree with Christopher Breen; tiny little screens of the size you see on phones, or are likely to see on an iPod, just don’t do photos justice. A cheaper, smaller, Flash-memory iPod would pull in a lot more new customers than a more expensive, more complicated photoPod.

I have no doubt that Apple will announce new products soon, and some of them may even be iPods. But on average, Apple renews its computer product line every 173 days, and its a little more than that since the last announcement (the launch of the G5). So I think new computers (an eMac update? better spec laptops?) are very close.

PhotoPod? PicPod? Whatever it might be called, what good reasons can you think of for buying one?

Software developers can get into the business of publishing their own creations without needing to raise millions of dollars of venture capital.

Dan Wood, president of Karelia Software, LLC (and of Watson fame) has put together an all star panel including Brent Simmons and Will Shipley on Tuesday at Mac OS X Con to show you the inside secrets of a successful business. Later that same day, you can attend Messaging & Branding; After the Product is Developed, What Next? with Sam Levin and Scott Sheppard. Tuesday also features Chris Bourdon and Wiley Hodges of Apple talking about Tiger, and an evening event with Andy Ihnatko. Oh my!

Related link: https://www.wired.com/news/roadtrip/riverroad/0,2704,65137,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_…

From Wired News: “The Walker Art Center is sponsoring Radio Re-Volt workshops all over
Minneapolis through the month of October. At the workshops, people are given free radio-transmitter kits and are taught how to build their own mobile
radio station and how to broadcast with it.

“The kits, which cost about $20, include a transmitter and circuit board
about the size of a credit card, a built-in microphone and a jack to plug in
a CD or MP3 player. Music from the device can be transmitted over the radio,
or a broadcaster can talk, whistle, hum, sing or whatever into the
microphone. The transmitters are powered by four AA batteries, and the
entire setup can fit into a pocket or the palm of someone’s hand.”

I had an interesting situation the other day. My old 300MHz Celeron based IBM ThinkPad 240 notebook (a great little 2.2 lbs. sub-notebook) spends most of its time just lying around. I have newer notebooks in the home and office. But, none of them are in the size/weight class of the old ThinkPad. So, I still carry it for personal trips just to offload digital photos on the hard disk. The problem was I split it into 2GB and 4GB partitions and the 2GB partition for Windows had gotten full. So, I reformated it as a single 6GB partition. I gave some thought to installing Ubuntu Linux or some other interesting Linux distro but the 240 can’t boot from a USB CD-ROM drive. I could have carved a small DOS partition to load a distro into and then boot from a Linux boot floppy. But, that seemed like a waste of the already small hard drive’s space. Windows 2000 and Windows XP won’t install from a simple DOS prompt (following a floppy disk DOS boot). Windows 98 SE, however, can be installed from the DOS prompt. And, I had an old external CD-RW drive that had MS-DOS drivers that could be loaded from a floppy. So, I decided to install Windows 98SE since it had some nice advantages compared to Windows 98 (1st edition). I installed Firefox 1.0pre and some other freeware and Open Source applications and the box is humming nicely again. The now ancient 300 MHz CPU with a mere 128MB RAM actually runs pretty responsively. Even my old 802.11b WiFi card runs fine on it since it has drivers for Windows 98 SE. And, my old Sony USB Spressa CD-RW drive runs on it too (though it doesn’t have DOS drivers like the EXP drive I used to revive the 240).

I am aware of the ReactOS project. But, wouldn’t it be nice to start with the relatively lightweight and stable Microsoft Windows 98 SE codebase to build a freely available Open Source OS that is compatible with lots and lots of drivers, applications, and utilities? Microsoft has already released WiX (Windows Installer XML), WTL (Windows Template Library), and FlexWiki under an Open Source compliant license. They sunset support for Windows 98 SE. It is not part of their revenue stream anymore (as far as I can tell). There are probably thousands of old but functional PCs that are too resource light to run Windows 2000, Windows XP, or even some current Linux distros. Why not Open Source Windows 98 SE to keep these old boxes productive with the thousands of old software and even new Open Source products that run on Windows 98 SE?

OK, I know this will never happen. But, wouldn’t it be nice if it did?

I think old PCs can be made productive again using lightweight Linux distros and Windows 98 SE. What do you think?

When I wrote my RSS aggregators round-up some weeks ago, I hadn’t heard of NewsFire.

But since trying it out a week or so ago, I’ve been using it more and more. What I like is the simplicity. This is an app for reading feeds, and only reading feeds. But it does that job extremely well. The GUI uses all the cleverness of Cocoa but isn’t overdone.

Best of all, it’s a little app, my favorite kind. Only a 600KB disk image to download. Developer David Watanabe has made something not just useful and functional, but unobtrusive and a pleasure to use.

Hey, try it out. You might like it!