Here's a project all long-time Mac owners/users will like.

Iain Sharp probably has the fastest Mac SE/30 in the world. But he did it by stuffing an EPIA MII 12000 inside. It still runs Mac OS though, in glorious emulation courtesy of Basilisk II. Return of the Mac?

Beats throwing them out. And it would be a great first-computer for a child. Of course, with the small form factor of the older Macs, you could fit this baby in almost any corner of the house where you thought it might be useful.

Yesterday I went to Sapporo to watch the Kendo Exams for 6th dan. Two of the people at the dojo I attend were going for the exam. Soon I'll be going for 1st dan, so I wanted to see what the atomosphere at the examinations were like.

There were about 300 people going for 6th dan on the day. Those people, and their associated friends/relatives filled a large hall at a suburban gym.

The exam to get 6th dan consists of 1 minute and 20 seconds of keiko - which is like a unscored battle. The judges sit, watch and...judge. Every hour or so the results of who have passed and who haven't are released. It's a yes/no thing. You either pass of fail, with no explanation for why wither occurrs. If you pass the keiko, then you have to perform katta, which is like a style presentation of certain moves.

As always in Japan, a lot of people were taking photos and video of the event.

I was with the pack of snappers this time, but I had a bad camera day. I've recently been taking pictures of the moon and had my shutter speed too high. It took about 2 hours to get to the venue from my house and it started at 10am, so I was still a little sleepy and didn't notice or think about what I was doing.

The Guardian has a top 10 sci-fi movie article in which Blade Runner is nominated #1. Good to see...over the last few years most top 10 Sci-Fi rating articles nominate something silly like the Matrix [rated 9th - is the Matrix even Sci-Fi?] or Aliens [rated 4th]. I'm a long time fan of Blade Runner ever since I first saw it at age 11. Over the years and more re-viewings than I care to admit I've come to the conclusion that Blade Runner is the only Sci-Fi movie that was actually better than the original novel - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Of course that's not including movies where the novel was written after the screen-play [eg: Star wars], in which case the movie is the novel and therefore the novel sucks.

KDE 3.3 was released a while ago, but there's a nice review over at OSDir of the changes by a long time [5 years] developer.

Each KDE release tends to have a few major focal points. KDE 2.0 was a complete rearchitecture and brought us the underlying design that we still have today in KDE, including KParts, network transparency, and Konqueror. KDE 3.0 featured a port to Qt 3.0. KDE 3.1 gave us enhanced browsing support and many new applications, and KDE 3.2 had a focus on HTML rendering improvements, optimizations, and more new applications. KDE 3.3, on the other hand, shows us what can be done when we focus on improving what's already there in KDE. The highlights from KDE 3.3 include more optimizations, a giant leap forward in personal information management (PIM) tools such as KMail, KOrganizer, Kontact, and Kopete, and the closing of 7000 bugs and 2000 wishlist items. This is certainly an important step forward for Linux on the desktop! Let's have a closer look.

It goes on to describe more new features and applications. [imho] KDE the best option for Linux desktop users, especially newbies. While Gnome is a great project, it seems to lack the number of developers to keep it as stable as KDE, and it definitely lacks the out-of-the-box applications that newbies require to stay interested and functional [aka - keeps them from getting too frustrated and spitting the dummy].

I found this article via RootPrompt.

Good to see the Linux community is still engaged in getting Linux on more desktops. This guide from IOSN should help.

This user guide is meant as an introductory guide for a user to use a modern personal computer (PC) running the Linux operating system. The main aim is to provide a self-learning guide on how to use a modern Linux desktop system. It assumes that the user has no prior knowledge of Linux or PC usage.

It's directed at inexperienced PC users, but those are the people that need convincing the most [otherwise 95% of them will just make the default, wrong decision], 'cause most people these days who known anything about 'puters [& OSes, etc] either already use Linux or are switching to Macs [All my computer savy friends who still use Windows, please forgive me for saying that - nothing personal eh...but I think still it's true].

Actually, having said that, I still realise there are reasons for using Windows-based 'puters [non-Mac users you need Adobe & Macromedia apps for example]. And they tend to be cheaper than Macs and easier to setup than Linux, but I just think security is way more important that most people realise.

I still have 2 notebooks lying around that run Windows, but I never store important information on them, and only really use them for a few things; the odd image manipulation I've yet learn how to do using GIMP [I still don't have a copy of Photoshop for the Mac - maybe one day], ripping the odd DVD/CD, tesing web applications I write for work. Ahhh...it's a love / hate relationship if ever there was one.

The Web Standards Project has started a new campaign called Browse Happy.

Internet Explorer can make your computer unsafe. Why not switch to a browser that's more secure?

Many already have. Read their stories, and choose a browser that's right for you.

And from the posting on the Web Standards Project site.

Despite Microsoft’s efforts to keep a competitive browser on the market, problems with Internet Explorer for Windows continue to mount. Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced that broad changes to Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows will wait for the official release of the next-generation Microsoft operating system — scheduled for a date that is years away.

Standards compliant browsers are good. IE is bad. 'Nuf said.

I first found the link via compulsive.org, which I found via DrunkenBlog. At present the Browse Happy site seems to be undergoing a /.ing as it was also recently posted there.

I saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 last night. Refusing to pay money for it at the cinema after seeing KB1, I stubbornly waited until someone I knew had it on DVD. And what a disappointment it was. It's no better than the first and may even stoop to new lows. I was so bored during it I had to have a self-made intermission. What's with the meaningless ddrraawwnn oouutt sscceenneess?

Anyways, imho, miss it.

One of the [many] shitty things in KB1 was Lucy Liu playing a Japanese woman. To me it wasn't culturally insulting, although I'm sure a lot of Japanese people feel this way, but it just seemed...stupid. Why do that? Unless QT thought it was cool or something. It reminded me of white guys with face paint playing American Indians in bad cowboy movies.

In any case, it's happening again. The return on The Last Samurai must have given a few of the Hollywood accountants hard-ons, 'cause now they're going to make...

...Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden's 1997 bestseller about a naïve Japanese girl turned big-city working girl...

...and, as reported here, here & here, [NOTE: make sure you have FlashBlock active before visiting these avertainment sites] they're trying to sign up Ziyi Zhang [from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame] for the lead female role. I mean, she's a good actress, and she's good looking, but....she's not Japanese!!! Isn't that kind of important in a movie about a Geisha?

According to a quick search that turned up these pages, there are 42,196,835 full blooded Japanese females between the ages of 15-64. So maybe you want to half that figure to get rid of some of the older women. Out of 20 million people, there's got to be [at least] a couple of thousand women who fit the bill [acting skills, looks, whatever]. Believe me, they're here.

Anyways, it's late and I realised I don't really care much about the mistakes Hollywood producers make. I'd better stick to non-Hollywood films for a while.

• End of Rant -

btw I read Memoirs of a Geisha a few years ago, and it ain't that great.

I climbed Mt. Yotei again. Two days ago and my legs still hurt.

I took 3.5 hours to get to the summit, and 3 hours to get down. This is what most of the trail looked like.

Unfortunately, by the time we reached it, the peak was cloud covered so there's no great open landscape pics. This is the largest of the three calderas.

That's it. I've checked my email, posted to my blog, now I'm going back to bed.

Call me stupid, call me slow, tell me I'm out of touch and that I don't pay attention to what I read, because I just found out that you can download the Wikipedia database.

These are SQL dumps of the current and old article revision databases for each wiki. They can be read into a local database and directly used with the MediaWiki software (MySQL, PHP, Apache required).

The current version is 18882MB, which is a bit of a hit for the DSLless. Nevertheless, it beats an annoying visit from the encyclopedia salesman [does that happen anymore?]. And like it says in the quote above, you need the MediaWiki software and some sort of LAMP setup. Actually they only mention Apache, MySQL & PHP, so Windows and OSX 'puters are ok.

Wikipedia is only part of the Wikimedia Foundation's offerings. There's also Wiktionary

...a collaborative project to produce a free multilingual dictionary in every language, with definitions, etymologies, pronunciations and quotations.

WikiQuote

...a free online compendium of quotations in every language, including sources (where known), translations of non-English quotes, and links to Wikipedia for further information. Wikiquote has 1414 pages so far with thousands of quotations and proverbs.

and the Wikibooks Portal, which

...[is] developing and disseminating free open content textbooks, manuals and other texts.

In any case, the download may be worth it if you have a lot of fact finding to do and don't have the Internet connection to support it. The DB is split alphabetically, which reduces size of individual downloads and comes in revisions so updaing to the latest version doesn't require re-downloading the whole thing.

If you're into keeping a active calendar, like to share the places you go with friends, and interested in meeting others with similar schedules, check out Upcoming.org.

Upcoming.org is a collaborative event calendar, completely driven by people like you. Enter in the events you're attending, comment on events entered by others, and syndicate event listings to your own weblog. As Upcoming.org learns more about the events you enjoy, it will suggest new events you never would have heard about.

So long as you have the option to mark events as private [and/or private to a selected group of users], this could be a great calendar/scheduling solution for a small business. Beats forking out the cash for Exchange - most small companies don't have a IT person that could implement a better, cheaper [read *nix] solution for them and therefore head directly to MS for everything [with eyes closed and pockets open]. The number of small companies I seen that have a crappy email setup, which among other things, is openly allowing spammers to replay through it, would make you cry.

Ahhh...but I'm getting off the point of the post. If I think about it, Upcoming.org's appeal to me is in the potential size of the project. Having all that data to play with could produce some really useful services - and I'm sure the site's developers are doing this. The downside for me is that it's just a little to social, as in social software, and I'm still to be convinced that's there any real worth in social software apart from electronically patting each other on the back. Maybe I'm too cynical.

In the great tradition of porting [or re-front-ending in this case] *nix apps to OSX, comes OSXPlanet.

OSXplanet is a front-end to xplanet. It was written in Objective-C and Cocoa. You need Mac OS X 10.2.x or higher. At least a 500mhz G3 is recommended. This program is in its beta version and any questions, saggestions and help will be greatly appreciated. For more information go to the OSXplanet Documentation and the OSXplanet FAQ.

I don't run xplanet all the time, 'cause I prefer a plan desktop background, but every now an then it's really nice to watch...on the Powerbook, even more so.

Open-Media.org [which is still under development] is a new promising idea from the minds of JD Lascia and Marc Canter, who post about it respectively here and here.

Open Media: The Open Source Media Project

Coming soon: A site, affiliated with the Internet Archive, devoted to advancing the cause of personal media.

Open Media (the name is still under discussion) will let you upload and download video, audio, playlists, and other works of personal media and share them with a global audience. A development team is currently working on building this site.

If you'd like to get involved, contact us here.

Part of JD's draft mission statement details their ambitions for open-media.org.

Open Media is three things in one: • an open-source platform to bring personal media to the desktop; • a destination Web site, to launch soon at www.open-media.org; • eventually, it will evolve into a not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing amateur, hobbyist, and semi-professional visual works licensed under a Creative Commons license.

...

Over time, we expect Open-Media.org to grow into the world's largest repository of home-brew media.

Sounds interesting doesn't it. Well worth keeping an eye on...or maybe let your aggregator do it - JD's feed - Marc's feed.

Apple have release a new version of both Motion and Production Suite [which includes Motion, Final Cut Pro HD and DVD Studio Pro 3].

Apple’s high-performance motion graphic design and production application lets you explore new creative territory using self-propelled behavior animation, character-by-character title animation and a powerful new interface. Motion integrates seamlessly with Final Cut Pro HD and DVD Studio Pro 3, making it quicker and easier than ever to create motion graphics for film, video and DVDs.

Combining Apple’s industry-leading Final Cut Pro HD, DVD Studio Pro 3 and Motion, Production Suite offers the most comprehensive collection of professional graphics, video, audio and DVD authoring applications to deliver real-time interactivity on a desktop or notebook computer. With common user interface elements shared across all the applications, Production Suite provides a seamless, intuitive and integrated workflow for film and video production.

Motion is US$299 and Production Suite is US$1299. Not a bad price if it delivers a full film/video workflow[ed] solution.

The next closest town to where I live is called Kutchan [倶知安]. It's a great little place and the central point for a number of other little towns surrounding it. Kutchan is well known for, among other things of course, growing potatoes, and each yeah the town holds a potato festival. Last year I didn't have a camera with me, but this time I took some pics to share the experience.

The festival goes for two days, and peaks on the second night with lots of dancing and fireworks. Unfortunately I was out of town on the second day, and just arrived back as the fireworks were starting, however I went on day one for a while. The main street is where is all happens.

This is part of the process of making mochi [餅], which is a kind of rice cake popular in festivals and ceremonies.

Taiko [太鼓] players for all over Hokkaido turned up to show there stuff, and as always with taiko, it was impressive and a big crowd pleaser.

And you can't have a festival in Japan without some traditional dancing. IMHO these ladies with the funky hats are the coolest thing I've seen as far as traditional wears are concerned.

And a festival is a good excuse for the local girls to break out their favourite yukata [浴衣] and strut their stuff.

Being born in Australia, somewhere that's [in]famous for it's beer drinkers, at first I dismissed the Japanese as novice beer lovers, but after living here for over a year I'm almost ready to concede that the Japanese are the most experienced beer drinkers in the world. In any case they're definitely in with the front runners [Australians, English, Irish, German, etc.]. These beer girls were walking around all day with this pack, and were constantly busy. I only ever saw the girl in the blue shirt carrying the beer, which is probably why she looks so tired, while her friend can afford a sideways glance and smile.

Japan is well known as a country that keeps traditional values and practices alive, while also being the in forefront of embracing new ways and technology. It really is a culture than practices 'The Middle Way'.

After due respect has been shown to the individual crews that show up and do their thing [whether it be dancing, playing music, making food, etc], it's time for everyone to get together and share some personal space. I actually got pulled into this group dance by one of my kendo masters and was systematically shown how to do the proper dance steps by several strangers, and overcome with general well wishes and smiles.

I'm really starting to love this country =).

Ethereal is used by network professionals around the world for troubleshooting, analysis, software and protocol development, and education. It has all of the standard features you would expect in a protocol analyzer, and several features not seen in any other product. Its open source license allows talented experts in the networking community to add enhancements. It runs on all popular computing platforms, including Unix, Linux, and Windows.

It's saved my sanity more than once. Worth adding to the toolbox if you set up networks of any size.

The VideoLAN Client [VLC] seems to be working fine in OSX. I just installed it as I've only 2 chances left to set my drives region code using the default DVD player that comes with OSX. Seeing as I'm and Australian, living in Japan, and I have both a father and sister living in the US, I get DVDs from all over, and having a region locked DVD drive is a real @#$%&*! hassle.

I suggest whomever is responsible for region locking read this.

Just finished watching Lady Snowblood. It's a classic female samurai film from the early seventies. And as discussed here, a major inspiration for QT's Kill Bill. Not only Lucy Liu's character, but the whole revenge plot of the story. I don't think QT is trying to hide this fact because Meiko Kaji, the star of Ladt Snowblood, sings one of the songs on the Kill Bill soundtrack.

I haven't seen Kill Bill Vol. 2 yet, but I hope it is better than Vol. 1 [Lady Snowblood was much better than Vol. 1]

I just finished readin Chindi by Jack McDevitt.

Most science fiction seeks to excite and gratify the reader's sense of wonder. Jack McDevitt's hard SF novel Chindi both satisfies and examines this sense of wonder, which inspires not only SF readers and writers, but every explorer and scientist who seeks to understand the universe.

It was a good read. And a reasonably interesting story. One thing that bugs me is that the characters in the novel where a little stupid. I understand that sometimes an author has to direct the storyline by having the characters making mistakes, but it just happened too frequently and became a little frustrating.

The techinical side of the novel was good, and for all you closet astronomers, it'll be interesting. There's a Stephen King quote on the front cover - 'The logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Aurther C. Clarke'. While that may be true, IMHO the novel still lacks something for it to be considered a SF classic.

If I find more of his books, I'll give them a go, but he's no Iain M. Banks, so I won't be anxiously awaiting the next.

A while ago I started using Kotoba to help me memorise Japanese words. It's really usful for learning not only the meaning of words, but the associated kanji as well. Currently I'm doing the Japanese For Busy People course and I've been building dictionaries in Kotoba with the course's vocabulary lists. I'll upload them to his site for public download once I've added all the words.

The guy who wrote Kotoba [Adriaan Tijsseling] is somewhat famous in the blog community for ecto.

ecto is a feature-rich desktop blogging client for MacOSX and Windows, supporting a wide range of weblog systems, such as TypePad, MovableType, WordPress, Drupal, Nucleus, Blogger, and more. ecto is the successor of the wildly popular Kung-Log, which has been in use by thousands of Mac users and which earned a 4.5 mice in the MacWorld July 2003 issue. ecto earned high ratings at VersionTracker.com, and at MacUpdate.com.

I don't use ecto because the blog software I use, which I'm developing myself, doesn't yet support the XML-RPC APIs required. Plus, it's not free software, which is kiind of a bummer, but I understand the guy has got to eat. There's other reasons I can think of, but they're really not important.

Apart from writng a few great apps, Adriaan also has a page devoted to 'Setting up your OS X from scratch', which is an interesting little read. I always like see how people set up their 'puters 'cause there's always something else you can learn.

I've had my Powerbook just over a month now, and I'm loving it, but I just went with the default install due to me lack of experience with OSX. As I've been using it more and more I'm getting use to the similarilies and differences it has with *nix, and after reading this tips page, I'm thinking of re-installing so I can get some partitions happening. Maybe next time I get a break from work. At present I don't have to time for it.

Syllable was born in July 2002 as a fork of the AtheOS Operating System. Several AtheOS developers, concerned about the long-term development of AtheOS, created Syllable to ensure that development would continue.

The goal of Syllable is to create a reliable and easy-to-use open source operating system for the home and small office user. We also want to encourage developers to create an operating system that is intuitive, easy to use, and powerful.

Syllable is currently under development, but it is stable and relatively mature, and a number of useful applications are already available. Syllable supports a wide range of common hardware devices, including video, network and sound cards from manufacturers such as Intel, AMD, 3Com, nVidia and Creative.

From the screenshots it looks to be in the early stages if they're planning on home and small office use. But it still looks nice.

I'm starting to get sick of typing 'exit' in the OSX Terminal application and then having to go to the menu and close it actual app. There are a few alternatives out there. I'm going to give iTerm a try and see how it goes.

iTerm is a full featured terminal emulation program written for OS X using Cocoa. We are aiming at providing users with best command line experience under OS X. The letter i represents a native Apple look and feel of the program interface, and an emphasis on complete international support. iTerm was merged from two projects, CTerminal and TerminalX, both of which were based on JTerminal project. The current version is still in beta stage. It is however very much functional and usable.

I'm downloading it now. After looking at the screenshots I'm just hoping I can get rid of the menu bar in the window. I like my terminals plan.

SIDE NOTE: When it's daytime in the US, Sourceforge is soooo slow and often unreliable for downloads, which just hang there. I think I'm going to have to get it tomorrow morning.

There's a switch page up at the Mozilla Firefox Project. There's even a getfirefox.com domain now, which just redirects to the product page. The intro is pretty cool as well.

The following describes how to switch to Mozilla Firefox from Microsoft Internet Explorer. We are providing these instructions due to the recent exploits in Internet Explorer and the recommendation to switch to an alternative browser, such as Firefox, by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

I wonder if this means it 'Un-American' to use IE. After all, if you're not with them, you're against them...or something like that.

Always on the look out for some good image viewing software? Check out XnView.

XnView is a utility for viewing and converting graphic files.

It has these features :

Import about 400 graphic file formats
Export about 50 graphic file formats
Multipage TIFF, Animated GIF, Animated ICO support
IPTC, EXIF
Resize
Copy/Cut/Crop
Adjust brigthness, contrast...
Modify number of colors
Apply filters (blur, average, emboss, ...)
Apply effects (lens, wave, ...)
Fullscreen mode
Slide show
Picture browser
Batch convert
Thumbnail create
Screen capture
Contact Sheet create
Multi-page file create (TIFF, DCX, LDF)
TWAIN support (Windows only)
Print support (Windows only)
Drag & Drop support (Windows only)
44 languages support (Windows only)
And many many other things...
XnView is provided as FREEWARE for private non-commercial or educational use (including non-profit organization).

Note : For commercial use, it is necessary to register. It is a help for the development of future versions. XnView for Linux, FreeBSD are FREE also for commercial use.

Gotta love that. Wonder why Linux and FreeBSD score a free commercial release. 400 graphic file formats. Who would guessed there where that many. But here's the list to prove it.