BlogCensus.net is another project attempting to map the blogsphere in a couple of ways.

The NITLE weblog census is an attempt to find as many active weblogs as possible, across all languages

There's a blog location map, a market share profile broken up by standalone tools and hosted sites, a list of most popular websites by language and an API for direct access to the data. Part of the database is also downloadable.

I'm downloading the data as I type this. Wonder what use I can put a list of 1,510,000 blog urls to =)

While trying to find a dsescription of a User Agent in my apache log files, I came across this list at 50 by 50. It doesn't include browsers, but that's a good thing 'cause browsers are easy to identify.

Another nice Firefox extension - User Agent Switcher.

This extension adds a menu to switch the user agent of the browser. It is designed to provide functionality similar to the "Browser Identification" feature of Opera and allows you to configure the list of user agents to display in the menu.

Why would you want to change your browser's User-Agent string? The short answer is deception, but don't let the negative tone of the word put you off, usually deception is done for innocent reasons. This is one of the comments from the User Agent Switcher page.

Lovely work - this has solved my issue of not being able to use internet banking under Mozilla!

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040122 Debian/1.6-1

...and this is what happens when you change things to work for a good ol' IE page... (thanks again)

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

Sounds like a bad bank to me. Anyways, if you want to cheak out more Firefox extensions [currently there are 201 of them], go to the Extensions Room.

Need some information on how your software project is going? Which developer is contributing the most lines of code? If you use CVS, then now you can with StatCVS.

StatCvs retrieves information from a CVS repository and generates various tables and charts describing the project development, e.g. timeline for the lines of code, contribution of each developer etc. The current version of StatCvs generates a static suite of HTML documents containing tables and chart images. StatCvs is opens source software, released under the terms oft the LGPL.

Here's an example of the stats taken from the Blender 3D CVS repository.

I just set up Apache, MySQL & PHP on my Powerbook. Took less than 5 minutes and was a breeze.

I'd previously downloaded MySQL for OSX from Server Logistics. They call there install/build Complete MySQL. It comes as a OSX install pkg and installs in a few seconds. Also included is a prefPane file so you can start & stop the server via System Preferences [you can also initialize MySQL and set the root user's password].

I also installed CocoaMySQL which is a open source GUI for MySQL/OSX.

Apache and PHP are installed on OSX by default, so all you have to do is start them up. In System Preferences, goto Sharing, then start the Personal Web Sharing service and that's Apache up and running. To activate PHP, all you have to do is edit the Apache config file [/etc/httpd/httpd.conf] and uncomment 2 lines.

LoadModule php4module lib/apache/1.3/libphp4.so AddModule modphp4.c

You might also want to check that the following lines exist and are uncommented.

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

They both existed and were already uncommented on my version of OSX [10.3.4].

NOTE: You'll have to restart Apache after editing the .conf file for the changes to take effect. Just go back to 'System Preferences -> Sharing' and stop, then start the Personal Web Sharing service.

ALSO NOTE: By default the Apache document root is set to /Library/WebServer/Documents

Shuttle have a new version of the XPC. As this review will tell you, they've done a pretty good job of it. Mounting the hard disks in the top portion of the chassy was a good idea, because now you can fit two drives in there, and if you don't need a floppy [I get by with a USB floppy these days] you can fix 3 hard drives in there. Nice.

While I was reading Lessig's post Mr. O'Reilly, just please stop, I noticed on the menu of his blog two links I followed that took me to:

Public Library of Science

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

and Public Knowledge

Public Knowledge is a new public-interest advocacy organization dedicated to fortifying and defending a vibrant information commons. This Washington, D.C. based group works with wide spectrum of stakeholders—libraries, educators, scientists, artists, musicians, journalists, consumers, software programmers, civic groups and enlightened businesses—to promote the core conviction that some fundamental democratic principles and cultural values—openness, access, and the capacity to create and compete—must be given new embodiment in the digital age.

Public Knowledge will seek to fulfill four broad goals:

* Ensuring that U.S. intellectual property law and policy reflect the "cultural bargain" intended by the framers of the constitution: providing an incentive to creators and innovators while benefiting the public through the free flow of information and ideas.

* Preserving an Internet that is built upon open standards and protocols and "end-to-end" architecture, thereby fostering innovation and user control.

* Protecting consumers of digital technology from market practices designed to erode competition, choice and fairness.

* Ensuring that international intellectual property policies are adopted through democratic processes and with public interest participation.

Doesn't sound too bad eh?

Seems the Browsers Wars are turning into a classic case of The Tortoise and the Hare. While MS thought they were so far out in front that they could stop [development] and rest, the team at mozilla has been creating - to put it simply - a better browser. As proof of IE failing popularity, have a looksee at this post. This Sun employee was at BlogOn2004 listening to a MS presentation, and...

Anyway, the presenter was doing his pitch in a polished way and at one point he said he wanted to show us a "really cool" feature and he looked up into the audience and said "Show of hands...How many of you use Internet Explorer?". Probably 99 times out of 100 when he asks that question all the hands go up, right? Well first there was a pause and then a giggle and then a whoop of laughter as the audience looked around and realized that NO ONE had raised a hand. The presenter was thrown off his mark, but he recovered and said, "Wow! Okay how many of you wish we'd fix IE so you could use it?"

Still no hands....

Slow and steady wins the race.

Here's a good little project I found via Freshmeat.

Enigmail is an extension to the mail client of Mozilla / Netscape 7.x and Thunderbird which allows users to access the authentication and encryption features provided by the popular GnuPG software (see screenshots)...

Enigmail can encrypt/sign mail when sending, and also decrypt/authenticate received mail. It can also import/export public keys. Enigmail supports both the inline PGP format, and the PGP/MIME format (RFC 3156), which can be used to encrypt attachments.

Enigmail is cross-platform like Mozilla, although binaries are supplied only for selected platforms on this website. Enigmail uses inter-process communication to execute command-line versions of GnuPG to carry out encryption/authentication.

I'm using Thundebird as an email client now days and the install was easy. Now I just have to try and get all my friends / relatives who I email to use encryption - doh!!!

Being always on the lookout for good, open source, software [especially on the Mac now] I happened to fine a good chat client for OSX via DrunkenBlog called AdiumX.

The Adium Team is proud to present to you Adium X 0.63, a multiple protocol instant messaging client. This is a culmination of a year long rewrite of adium, which now utilizes libgaim (the core part of gaim) to connect to multiple protocols, and is also based on a new plugin architecture. Partial address book integration, cool looking tabs, multiple protocols for instant messaging, and a compact contact list are some of the many features of the new Adium X. Give it a try; we're sure you will like it.

Adium X is under active development. We have a lot planned, and we appreciate your support :)

Multi-protocol, space saving tabbed chat windows, based on libgaim, it's all sounding pretty good.

This time is was Annupuri. Here's a photo of Mt. Yotei from the peak of Annupuri. The top of Annupuri looks way different when there's no snow on it. We walked up from the Goshikionsenkyo side, which takes just over an hour.

The top third of the path is damn rocky. And by the time you get up there, your feeling a little tired and light headed. I remember thinking how I could easily break my ankle or leg if I got my foot caught in a gap and fell over.

Damn nice up there though. One of the many good things about living in Niseko.

Element Computers looks to have re-invented themselves, and in not such a bad way either. Originally they offered hardware that ran Linux. Now they offer Linux + Hardware = Solutions.

Put simply, an Element Solution gives you the ability to Point-Click-Deploy Linux-based, Windows compatible, information technology in small and medium enterprise. Element Solutions blend the best aspects of PC hardware and software plus appliance and Macintosh-like integration, with the power, TCO and freedom of Linux.

Well said. And they've got someone in to work the graphics. Pretty icons everywhere. Anyways, now they offer 3 main products. ION - Universal Business Devices, Fusion - Universal Business Applicance, Neutron - Universal Terminal Server.

What is an ION Universal Business Device? Simply put, an ION device is powered by the world's first OS to run Linux and Windows programs side by side on pre-tested hardware giving businesses a Macintosh-like experience, with Linux TCO and PC compatibility all on the same computer. On the technical side, ION is Debian GNU/Linux plus KDE combined with an integrated Windows software stack running as a separate process. Non-technically, that means you get the best of the best from Linux, with simple menus, a clean look and feel and crisp performance, along with 100% binary compatibilty with ALL Windows 95/98/Me executables.

I notice they don't mention 2000/XP, but it's still impressive. They use Win4Lin to run the Windows apps.

ION devices finally make mass movement away from Windows on the desktop a reality, by giving organizations a stable, simple, pre-configured Linux platform on which to run "must have" Windows applications such as Macromedia DreamWeaver MX and Flash MX, ACT!, GoldMine, Quickbooks, Quicken, TurboTax, Adobe Illustrator, Acrobat, and InDesign, Quark Express, and Microsoft Office out of the box.

Specifically mentions Illustrator and Acrobat, but not Photoshop or the other Adobe products. Hmmmm? I'm still impressed though. Let's have a looksee at their other Universal products.

Element has the answer to your small business server appliance needs with a simple solution offering a file server, print server, web server, ftp server, user management, software management and a wireless access point all in one: it's called Fusion. Fusion, handles up to 100 users in the base configuration. Turn on your Fusion an you instantly have a full small business server plus anti-spam engine, stateful firewall, VPN, web server, email server, and intrusion detection that exceeds the features of Microsoft Small Business Server with hardware included for less than the Microsoft license alone.

Nice. It's starting to smell like a reinvention of Cobalt. And ever since Sun bought and systematically dismantled Cobalt [not their only mistake lately] there's a big gap in the market for serious appliances like Fusion.

Neutron - The World's First Universal Application Terminal Server.

Introducing Neutron, the world's first turn-key server appliance capable of running Windows and Linux applications side-by-side on a single desktop and serve them up to thin clients across the enterprise. Neutron, comes in professionally sized and pre-tunned configurations for 5, 10, 25+ users. The Neutron series can serve up either Linux-only, Windows-only, or combination desktops to thin clients for up to a 50% cost savings over Citrix®, and ease migration to a Linux-only environment.

Another great appliance that small-growing-businesses are screaming for...and paying way too much for.

There are big things in store for Element Computers. I hope they don't sell themselves to Sun, cause this is a good example of a business taking Linux seriously on both the Server and the Desktop.

PHP 5.0 has been released. You can download it here. The change log explains all the updates to the language.

Muse 0.7.0 has been released.

MusE is a MIDI/Audio sequencer with recording and editing capabilities written by Werner Schweer. MusE aims to be a complete multitrack virtual studio for Linux, it is published under the GNU General Public License.

All I want for Xmas is a good open source music program from Linux. Oh...and a good open source video editing suite =)

Just found a link to EA GAMES product called Def jam Fight for NY.

Survive the gritty reality of the urban underworld in Def Jam® Fight For NY™, the only fighting game featuring five intense fighting styles, hardcore hip hop music, more than 40 hip hop artists and celebrities, and seedy urban venues. Develop your fighting skills, get down with a crew, and battle for control of the underworld.

Key Features

# New Fighting Engine : A new fighting engine challenges you to master multiple fighting disciplines, take advantage of interactive environments, and utilize dozens of weapons to make a name for yourself.

# Three Times the Length of the Original Def Jam VENDETTA™: It's going to take more than 90 fights in 20-plus venues to win control of the streets.

# 40 of the Biggest Hip Hop Artists and Celebrites: Starring and music by the hottest names in hip hop from Def Jam and beyond -- look for appearances by Busta Rhymes, Carmen Electra, Fat Joe, Flava Flav, Freeway, Ghostface, Ice T, Joe Budden, Kimora Lee Simmons, Lil' Kim, Ludacris, Method Man, Redman, Sean Paul, Slick Rick, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit, and many more.

# Five Brutal Fighting Styles: Master each fighting style: street fighting, kickboxing, martial arts, wrestling, and submission fighting. Combine up to three styles to create devastating hybrid-styles, complete with new "blazin' moves" to finish off your opponent.

# 22 Interactive Venues : From destructible environmental objects to rowdy spectators who like to "get involved," the 22 venues are the ultimate weapon.

# Create-A-Street Fighter: Build your own street-ready fighter and outfit him with thousands of pieces of unlockable licensed gear, tattoos, and even bling from the Jeweler to the stars, Jacob the Jeweler.

It's got some big names included in there, and obviously the Def Jam management is supporting it, but I just can help but thinking 'that's cheap' when viewing the site. Standards must have dropped somewhere. Having said that, and not really being into fighting games, it still looks like fun.

While doing my daily browse I came across this ./ post. It points to another article at PC Magazine about eMachineShop and Pad2Pad.

eMachineShop:

eMachineShop is the remarkable new way to get the custom parts you need. Download our free software, draw your part, and click to order - it's that easy! Your part will be machined and delivered. Even better, your cost is low due to the Internet, software, and automated machines.

Why waste time traveling, calling, faxing or emailing to conventional machine shops? Reduce your total time up to 90% and open doors to new products and projects. Intelligent design software gives instant exact pricing, expert feedback, and unrivaled convenience. Here's how it works:

Pad2Pad:

Pad2Pad is the remarkable new way to get the custom boards you need. Download our free software, design your board, and click to order - it's that easy! Your board will be manufactured, assembled and delivered. Even better, your cost is low due to the Internet and free software. Why waste time with the cumbersome process of conventional PCB manufacturers or online services that don't offer component assembly? Reduce your total time up to 80% and open doors to new products and projects. Intelligent design software gives instant exact pricing, expert feedback, and unrivaled convenience.

Those two descriptions read very similar don't they? That's because both sites where created by the same guy.

...Jim Lewis created a DOS program, Tornado Notes, which evolved into the Windows-based personal information manager and freeform database Info Select...His goal is to be a one-stop product development facility. "As Amazon is to books I want to be to manufacturing"...

Go ahead and build.

Yet another attempt at trying to beat google.

blinkx changes the way you find and access all kinds of information, from anywhere in the world, without having to search endlessly. blinkx rapidly links you with the information you need from the web, from online news sources and files on your own PC.

And you have to do nothing! Whenever you browse a website, read a news story, check your e-mail or write a document, blinkx automatically delivers suggestions from the Web, news or your local files; which you can view by simply clicking the links or rolling over to get a summary of the information found.

However, I'm already sceptical, because;

blinkx is not currently available for Macintosh or Mozilla, but due to your requests, we're working on it!

If you want to take over the world, you gotta appease both the Mac and Mozilla people.

Actually, this first one is of the coast near Otaru. Taken during the trip to Furano. Furano is near the middle of Hokkaido [the locals like to think of Furano as the belly button of Hokkaido], so there's no coast anywhere near it.

There's no way that this woman's mobile phone picture would show any clear detail of the shot she's taking. But I guess when you're on vacation, you have to send a snap of your current location to your relatives or friends. It's a social must these days.

I like how the elderly couple is respectfully and patiently waiting for her to complete the shot.

Furano is well known for it's hills of lavenda. It's really something to see. Complete hill-sides of purple.

I really like the Lavenda plant, the colour, the smell...it's got everything.

I stayed on that mountain during the night. In a dorm room of an onsen hotel. Very similar to the capsule hotel in Osaka where I spent a drunken night during last year's Kishiwada matsuri.

To follow up after the last post...another quick search and I found WHAMB.

Whamb is a Digital Audio Player for Mac OS X. For now, it supports Audio CDs, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files and Internet streams.

Share now your music on your local area network! Whamb is the first to use Rendezvous technology to offer you a easy way to share your playlists and songs, without any configuration requiered.

And it plays .ogg files just fine.

Just went to play an .ogg file on my Mac and realized it doesn't support it. It never even occurred to me. Anyways, after a quick search I came up with a solution - Ogg Drop.

.ogg is a free audio format alternative. It features sound quality that is generally higher than MP3, and has no licensing fees. Ogg Drop will encode audio tracks and CD's into .oggs. Ogg Drop is entirely free.

Ogg Drop now includes the QuickTime component from Steve Nicolai in the installer. This component allows iTunes, Apple's popular music player, to play .ogg files. It will even read the tags created by Ogg Drop, such as author's name, album information, etc. Armed with an encoder and Apple's iTunes for a player, .oggs are the perfect alternative to the closed MP3 format. And wait 'til you hear how good they sound.

We also include a CDDB lookup of the FreeDB music database. Stick an audio CD into Ogg Drop, and it should be able to identify the songs automatically, and tag the songs for you.

Ogg Drop is an open beta application. We haven't declared it final yet because there are still features being added, but we felt it is stable enough to be available to the public as-is.

Nice.

UPDATE: Well...it doesn't seem to play OGGs, or give iTunes the ability to play them, but it does rip them ok. Maybe I'm missing something...I still don't really have a handle on this Mac thing =)

Firstly, DragonFlyBSD 1.0 has been released. What is DragonFlyBSD?...

DragonFly is an operating system and environment designed to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x OS series. These operating systems belong in the same class as Linux in that they are based on UNIX ideals and APIs. DragonFly is a fork in the path, so to speak, giving the BSD base an opportunity to grow in an entirely new direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD-5 series.

You can download it here. And you may want to check out the team of people working on this project.

Secondly, the Progeny Debian 2.0 Developer Edition Beat 1 is out. Progeny is a company started by the founders of Debian.

Progeny Componentized Linux (CL) is a new way of constructing Linux distributions, built bottom-up as a set of interchangeable parts that closely track upstream open-source projects, rather than top-down as a monolithic whole. The core component is an LSB 1.3-certified Linux runtime.

Hmmmm....debian.

The Jackito is...

1) The first PDA screen that is 100% Fingertouch-sensitive. Designed for all fingertips (leading-edge technology and user interface). The most reliable touchscreen technology: no need for recalibration.

2) The first screen to support two simultaneous touch points. While holding Jackito in your hands, you can easily move both your thumbs, either separately or together. This lets you operate the Touchscreen as fast as your brain thinks (you can touch two points simultaneously).

3) The first screen featuring three multimedia layers. Touchscreen (top) + Display (center) + Sound (bottom).

But do we really need another style of PDA?

I actually witnessed someone reading my blog the other day. It was kind of weird. It was a friend of mine that lives in the same village. Apparently he found it a few months back while searching for something Niseko related.

Anyways, it made me wonder about people out there actually reading this. I started this site for a couple of reasons, the two main ones being that 1) in my spare time I'm developing blog software 2) I wanted something that would help me write more - following the 'practice makes perfect' theory, so the more I wrote the better I would [should] become at it.

Until I saw The Reading, I was fairly non-plused about what I wrote here. Now however, I've been thinking more and more about it. But nothing clear is forming out of my thoughts. Best to just keep writing and see what happens eh?

I've been blessed by the w3 validators. Both xhtml 1.0 and css.

I've been spending a lot of free time working on Blender lately. After you get past the initial frustrations with the unconventional UI, and controlling the app really starts to sink in, it becomes an amazingly powerful tool for 3D.

What follows are some links to Blender-related sites that display some of the amazing visuals that can be achieved using this open source software.

Elysiun is probably the biggest site devoted to Blender. It has a large community of Blender users that discuss all aspect of Blender. The forum is a friendly place to ask questions, the gallery contains some really nice artwork and the turtorials are a must for any new Blender user.

Blenderman.org is a relatively new site, but it's well organised. They have started producing a magazine, which at present is available in PDF format [The articles are also available on the site]. These guys have gone about this very professionally. The articles and tuturials contained on the site [and in the magazine] cover some advanced aspects to 3D production. Soon this site will be implementing a model archive which is set to be the biggest archive of Blender models on the web.

BlenderWars is a place for freeware powered fan films and all things Blender. They have a model archive that contains mostly SciFi related objects, a few important tutorials, and a movie page. The download page offered at this site is very comprehensive. One download well worth checking out is MoviePlanner which, as the title says, helps you with all aspects of planning a movie.

Blender Art is a gallery site, and it's here where you can get a good perspective of the wide range of styles out there in the Blender community. Current stats from the site: 235 pictures in 13 categories with 350 comments viewed 259648 times.

There's more, which I'll write about after I had a good look at them.

A while ago I wrote a quick review of a software package called Stellarium. Which, in short, renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real time. A great program for anyone with the slightest interest in Astronomy, or even if you just like looking at the stars.

This time I'm going to talk about Celestia. Well, there's not really much for me to say except that this software is really, REALLY, good.

Celestia is a free real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All travel in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.

Where Stellarium was virtually like looking at the sky from anywhere on earth [except with perfect clarity - no light polution], Celestia is like being in space. This is some serious software.

One of the menu options is 'Go To Object...' - you type in the object name, choose what distance you want to view the object from and then you're taken for a fly through space to the object's position. But adjusting the time properties I followed Halley's Comets for a 1000 years [all in under 5 RT minutes] =)

There are a lot of display options and you can make and record flight paths to any number of objects. I remember loading this on one of my Linux boxen about a year ago, but unfortunately the experience [due to the graphics card] wasn't that great. This time I'm running it on the Powerbook, and it's smoooooth.

Celestia runs on Windows, OSX and *nix and the download just over 100MB. There are addon components for Celestia, including one that contains data for 51 named small moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Another provides some great models of the Gemini and Mercury spacecraft. Celestia also allow you to add on your own planets, solar systems. etc.

Something of a side note but worth keeping an eye on, a project has been started at sourceforge to create a space game based on Celestia. And it's called Mostly Harmless.

Paul Boutin from Slate Magazine, which is owned by Microsoft Corp., tells his readers, in and article titled Are the Browser Wars Back?, how he changed from using Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox because of security concerns.

"...it was enough to make me ditch Explorer in favor of the much less vulnerable Firefox browser."

"...Firefox development and testing are mostly done by about a dozen Mozilla employees, plus a few dozen others at companies like IBM, Sun, and Red Hat. I've been using it for a week now, and I've all but forgotten about Explorer."

"...The problem is that hackers continue to find and exploit security holes in Explorer. Many of them take advantage of Explorer's ActiveX system, which lets Web sites download and install software onto visitors' computers, sometimes without users' knowledge. ActiveX was meant to make it easy to add the latest interactive multimedia and other features to sites, but instead it's become a tool for sneaking spyware onto unsuspecting PCs."

If that doesn't interest you, how about The International Hot Dog Eating contest in New York, where Takeru Kobayashi from Japan ate 53 1/2 hotdogs in 12 minutes. Ouch.

About 2 weeks ago I ordered a 15" Powerbook G4, and last Friday it arrived in the mail. I've been in the market for a new notebook for a while now [and saving for it as well]. About a year and a half ago I got myself a Compaq TC1000 Tablet PC, and although I like it and have used it extensively, the best thing about it is it's size and the fact that you can write in the screen. All in all, that's not really saying much for a computer. Apart from the fact that Windows XP runs like a dead dog, the screen is a little small for me. There's more issue I could go on with, but it's too frustrating to think about, and for now I really just want to talk about the Powerbook.

I never owned an Apple before, although I have used them from time to time. I remember using one of the original Macintoshes when I worked in San Francisco, almost 15 years ago. It wasn't really for work, because at the time my job was installing Unix machines in law firms, but there were a few Macs at the company I worked for and [back then] it was a treat to use a graphical user interface.

There were a few reasons I decided to buy a Mac, but the two that really stand out are that 1) Apple makes really nice hardware, and 2) OSX is based on BSD, which is a flavor of Unix. I've been using Linux more and more for the past 6 years and the choices when thinking about getting a new notebook where either buying a nice x86-based notebook and running Linux on it, or buying a Mac. The Mac won in the end because even now I still have problems getting everything on Linux boxen to run in harmony. Because Apple makes both the hardware and the OS for their notebooks, I assumed I would be buying a notebook where all the hardware worked effortlessly with the OS. Thankfully, I wasn't wrong this time.

I did have some reservations about moving to OSX. I've always had some pet hates for Apple's operating systems, but I figured that not only could I deal with it, but that it may actually end up being an enjoyable experience to learn something new in an industry I've spent most of my working life in. I'm currently learning how to speak Japanese, and although it gets frustrating a lot of the time, the rewards when you actually remember something and can understand someone speaking to you in a different language, are great. I figured it would probably work the same way when learning this weird os.

Here are some of my first impressions of the Powerbook G4 and OSX. I guess I should first tell you a little about the actual notebook I got, because there are a few to choose from. I chose the 15" model, because the 17" model, while very nice, would be too big to lug around with you [more suited to a small home theatre setup], and the 12" was just too small [the screen resolution is only 1024x768].

I have an old 15" DELL laptop with a screen resolution of 1400x1050, and thought the 15" Powerbook would provided something similar, but it turns out the resolution is 1280x854. This is something I decided I could live with, and after having a look at one in the Sapporo Bic Camera, I was sold. It turns out the screen resolution is 96dpi, instead of the usual 72dpi. This has the effect of making the screen look amazingly crisp.

The chip is a 1.5GHz G4, and while I don't pretend to know the exact speed differences between the x86 class processors and the PowerPC chips [which is also a fairly difficult thing to find on the net], I figured with all the animation, video editing, etc. that goes on in the Mac world, I'd be ok. I also beefed the RAM up to 1GB and got the fastest 80GB ATA drive Apple offered.

Anyways, on with the first impressions. There's only a few at present, because I'm on using the Mac periodically at the moment, but I'll post more as I think o them.

I guess the actual first thing I really noticed was how 'beautiful' everything was. Graphics are everywhere, and a lot of real estate in the various application windows are dedicated to icons in one form or another. I'm a bit of a minimalist when it comes to user interfaces. I'm always tweaking UI preferences so that no toolbars are showing [if I can get away with it] and window borders are at their lowest value, etc. But I guess that's just Apple for you. In any case, you kind of get use to it.

Dialog boxes are a little weird. A lot of them assign changes on the fly, so there's no 'Apply' button that Window users will be use to, and very few of them even have some variation of the OK/Cancel buttons. Dialogs for Open and Save As... are a little frustrating because you can't just type in the path/filename, you have to choose the location from combo boxes. Not really all that useful coming from a pure *nix environment.

The major keyboard changes are fairly easy to get use to. I haven't found out to DEL characters yet, so I have to move to the end of whatever I want removed and then BACKSPACE. Most standard keyboard shortcuts I'm use to [CTRL+C, CTRL+V, CTRL+X, etc] seem to be there, but instead of using the CTRL button you use the Apple button. There doesn't seem to be any PgUp or PgDn buttons. Don't know what they were thinking with that one.

Sleep/Hibernation or whatever you want to call it, actually works in OSX. You can safely leave your computer with the knowledge that when you come back all your work will still be there and the OS will be back in a few short moments after you touch a key or move the mouse. This has never worked for me in Windows. You'd think they would have had it sorted by XP, but no. I guess that one of the benefits of knowing exactly what hardware your OS is running on.

Firefox doesn't seem work as well as on Linux or Windows. Changing themes tends to stall it for some reason. Speaking of themes, I really don't know what everyone if going on about. The default theme for Firefox OSX is as ugly as sin. Compared to the rest of the OSX UI it's really bulky and down right painful to the eyes. The Safari browser looks really nice. I wonder if Apple are stopping the Mozilla crew from making a theme that looks like OSX. I'm going to try and find one, and if all else fails I might just make one myself. Yes...it's that painful.

Blender appears as a windowed app, which is pretty cool. And it works fine, although I think that due more to the fact than Blender is a great product, rather than OSX adding any benefit to it.

I installed joe using the OSX installer application and it didn't tell me where it put the executable. Turns out it was in /usr/local/bin, which is ok I suppose, even logical now I think of it, but it would have been nice to have been asked, of even told afterwards.

And of course there's the great one-button-mouse debate. Until I work out and memorize all the keyboard shortcuts, this is going to be a nightmare for productivity. Not that I'm a big track pad user, but when you're somewhere you can't setup [like an airport, train, someone's living room floor] it's a must use. To tell you the truth, I haven't found it that annoying. I'll tell you what is annoying though. I have a spare USB mouse that I'm using with the Mac and for some reason it periodically jumps to random corners of the screen. This is almost unusable, and I can't seem to find anyone with similar problems on the web. Might have to join a newsgroup or something to solve this one. I've been thinking about getting a Bluetooth mouse, but I don't want to spend $100 odd bucks if it's going to behave the same way.

One other bummer, that I'm really not pleased about, is that after a few days of use, a dead pixel appeared in the screen. It's not that noticeable [well...I still notice it every time I turn the computer on], but after spending the $$$ to buy this thing, you'd expect better. I even dished out for the 3 year warranty. But you know what Apple's policy on this is? It's acceptable. They will only replace the LCD if there are 4 or more dead pixels. Unfortunately this seems to be the norm when it comes to LCD displays. The companies that produce the display all seem to think that it's too expensive to produce perfect LCDs, so they are willing to make them cheaper, but with a greater percentage of dead pixels. #@$%!!! I'm beginning to think that dead pixels are karma from a past life or something. Every LCD I own [4 of them at present] has one dead pixel on them.

That's it so far. Like I said I haven't really used it that much, but when I think of something note-worthy, I'll post it.

UPDATE: Ok, so I changed the usb mouse around with other computers at home, and now there's no problem. The defective mouse that was jumping all over OSX is working perfectly on a Linux box. The mouse from the Linux box is working perfectly [so far] connected to the Powerbook.

While I'm on the subject of updates, last week I installed Mandrake 10 on one of my Linux boxen at home [it use to have Fedora Core 1]. While I was kind of impressed with Fedora Core 1 as a desktop OS, it was just a little bit behind the times. It still used one of the 2.4 kernels and KDE 3.1. While it had a lot of extra software included with it, it's support for USB, Firewire was pretty bad.

Mandrake 10 on the other hand has great support for USB [including USB 2.0] and firewire. And it includes the 2.6 kernel and KDE 3.2, both of which are major updates to their predecessors.

Mandrake 10 comes in three categories, Discovery, PowerPack and PowerPack+. I got my version in the form of a DVD from the cover of a Linux Formant Magazine issue and I think it was Discovery. Still, anything it doesn't include on the CD you can just download from the net.

So far it's been as stable as a earthquake proof building. And KDE 3.2 is a really nice GUI.

Also, Mandrake 10's support for ATI and nVidia graphics cards is excellent.

I've just had the OS on my virtual server updated from RH7.3 to Fedora Core 1. Due to the time difference between Japan [where I live] and the US [where my server lives] it happened during the middle of the night for me, so I was a little slow setting everything up. Down-time was about 10 hours [whooops]. There's still a small issue with sending emails, but that should be sorted out by tomorrow.

The design of the site has changed. I'm pretty sure it's not going to stay like this - just a temporary thing. It's based on my fondness for landmates. The little characters at the top are toys you can buy here in Japan, based on models of landmates I use to build as a kid.

You can now syndicate this site using RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom. You can also leave comments to posts if your so inclined.

There may be some layout problems with certain browsers. If you notice any, please leave a comment and let me know. I'm in the process of moving from HTML to XHTML and...you know...#$%@ happens.

Of course, saying that's it's only a temporary design, and actually getting around to redesigning it again, are two very separate things. There's still alot to do without thinking about designing it again. So it'll probably stay for a while, unless I get death threats from close friends.