I’ll skip the detailed Panther observations — plenty of excellent overviews and reviews out there. A few scattered notes after working with it for a few days:

- Move over sliced bread - Expose’ is even cooler.

- Finally, Cmd-Tab works exactly like Windows Alt-Tab, not just kinda.

- Everything is snappier. Boots faster. Probably a result of the fact that journaling is now on by default.

- The new Finder took a bit of getting used to, but I’m down with it. Glad it’s finally switched from aqua to metal. The layout is great, and improves with tweaking. But I have no idea what they’re thinking with network vols accessed via browse not mounting on the desktop (they still do when accessed via Connect to Server). Inconsistent, weird, not helpful. There must have been some logic there, but I’m not sure what it is. And I still can’t get links to network vols to work across boots without breaking, so I still have to mount shares manually after each boot. Not sure what I expected when they bragged about improved networking. There’s more compatibility, but less usability. Feh. I’ll live.

- Something no one seems to mention in reviews is the addition of a “Create Archive” option on context menus - zip anything in place, no need for 3rd party stuff. I’ve missed this from BeOS.

- Open/Save panels are just dynamite now. Switching today between Mac and PC, doing a task that required a lot of open/save operations, and the difference was almost painful.

- Dedicated panel for keyboard shortcuts. Set any shortcut for any system-wide or application specific action. A world of possibilities here.

A lot of cool stuff I’ll seldom use, but will be glad for when I need them: Built-in faxing. Fast user switching (apps aren’t quit when logging out); cool rotating cube effect while switching users. Color labels in the Finder. iChat AV (still gotta clear time to play with that one).

All told, totally worth it.

Mary Hodder posted an entry in the J-School’s bIPlog on the leak of certain internal Diebold memos. Diebold is sending cease and desist letters to universities whose students link to said leaks, and Swarthmore is falling for it. What’s really amazing about the memos is what they reveal about the attitude of the company to which our government has given millions of dollars to build voting machines. Choice quote: “If voting could really change things, it would be illegal .” Mary’s story was slashdotted, and we’re at 20x traffic today. The XServe’s handling it without a blip.

Next version of Windows previewed to developers. Executive summary: Copy Apple, copy Apple. Copy Be, copy Apple. Easy peasy!

Completed the new backup system last Friday. Now have a perfect daily mirror of half a dozen backup locations, as well as incrementals rewinding every day for a month. The cool thing about rsync is that it doesn’t need to copy GBs of data to make a mirror - uses checksums to send diffs, so a day’s changes are updated into the reservoir in seconds. Any files destined for deletion or change are copied into a folder named for that day of the month. My script steps through an arbitrary number of backup locations, and maintains separate mirrors and incremental sets for each. Fun to be shell scripting again, rather than PHP. It’s been a while. Running as a crontab, trouble-free so far. So much sweeter than the DVD backup system we had on the old Win2K server, which required my physical presence.

Mystery envelope arrived today, padded, manila. Addressed to me. No return address. No card, no note, no clues as to origin. Only that the order was fulfilled by King’s Books in Tacoma, WA. Inside, a book titled So Crazy Japanese Toys! — lovely close-up photo pictorials of the most outrageous Japanese heroes and monsters. (”Monsters! Monsters! Monsters! So bothersome, yet so essential!”). I have absolutely no idea who sent me this book. Whoever you are, wherever you are, I am enjoying this immensely. Thank you and goodnight.

Oops, Dave Barry’s finger slipped and he ended up accidentally publishing the phone number of the American Telemarketers Association. Hope that didn’t inconvenience anyone there who, I dunno, maybe didn’t want to be called?

Oops, looks like the ATA got a bunch of unwanted phone calls. Thanks Jeff C.

My new favorite anti-telemarketer tactic: Feign interest and get caller hooked, then ask them to please hold. Put phone down and walk away. Waste someone’s time? Never!

Andrea “hawksmoor” Scatena interviewed me a bit ago for Beyond Magazine : “BeOS, AmigaOS, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD.” He wanted to know my thoughts about the various BeOS variants floating around today. Pulled no punches in my answers. In fact, I was so candid I half-expected them not to run it, but they did. Current issue is downloadable now (PDF).

Be had more than 100 employees and $25 million in the bank at one point. Full-time engineers and a bunch of committed commercial developers (Adamation, BeatWare, Gobe…). With all of that, BeOS barely stood a snowball’s chance in hell. Without any of that, without any hope of developing momentum — EVER — it’s all so much less than zero. It’s very hard for me to understand why there are still people hanging out in the ghost town.

and:

Look, sometimes we do things in this life for irrational reasons, for love. If you love BeOS and don’t care about the apps or the practicality, then by all means use it, be happy, it’s “all part of life’s rich pageant.” Just don’t start to think BeOS is going to have some kind of renaissance, or take over the world, or provide a means for developers or users to make money. Love is the only remaining reason to use the system. And maybe that’s reason enough.

Andrea is a good guy. His commitment and love is shining - exactly the kind of vibe that made the BeOS community unlike any technology sphere I’ve experienced before or since.

Spent the weekend with an old friend of Amy’s from Mass Art — Michael Lewy and fiancee’ Erica. Michael is a painter and photographer (samples) and… a PowerPoint artist. The app everyone loves to hate, the source of all meetings boring and tedious, the clip art of presentation software, turned on its head. I love these. Inverting the bullet-point approach of the typical business presentation and transforming it into a means of representation for the convolutions of life. Michael also paints charts, in a similar vein (one hangs in our dining room). PowerPoint, paintbrushes, whatever.

J&L books is publishing a book of Michael’s PowerPoint charts this December. Michael was kind enough to let me post five teasers here.

Two weeks after installing lawn, it’s being sabotaged by gophers. Little piles and big holes dotted all over the place. Looks like I’ve blanketed over a serious warren. Caddyshack seems a bit less funny than it once did. Brother John said his sonic gopher stake did the trick, so we got one. 18″ long stake with 4 “C” batteries, emits an annoying high-pitched buzz into the earth every 28 seconds, lasts six months. Earth is denser than air, so signal should travel well (claims 6000 sq. feet coverage). Can be inserted so cap is flush with soil, for easy mow-over. Put your ear to the earth and you can actually hear it, though faintly. Allegedly the gophers will be curious about it for first 2-3 weeks, and hole activity may increase. Then they’ll realize the annoying neighbor is here to stay, and clear out. We’ll see. Better than dredging corpses out of the lawn. Another friend reported success attaching a hose to exhaust pipe and gassing them out. Would rather not resort to such dramatics, but listen up, gophers: we will prevail!

As if we didn’t have enough Linux distros floating around, now there’s one tailored to 4-11 year-old girls, allegedly the most user-friendly distribution ever made.

BarbieOS 1.0 is the result of almost a year’s worth of marketing research into what pre-adolescent girls want in a mobile Linux solution aimed at being a desktop replacement.

From what I hear of Barbie’s new technopolitics, I like her a lot more than I used to:

… If Barbie were a career-focused woman working in the IT industry in 2003, she would support open standards,” he says.  ”She would be seeking out free and open-source alternatives to current proprietary solutions, saving her company tens of thousands of dollars on management headaches associated with tracking software licenses and preparing for BSA audits.  

Interesting that Mattel hasn’t yet shut this site down; the company was once extremely vigorous about threatening ISPs with customers hosting Barbie trademark violations. I did follow a Google link to another BarbieOS site that apparently had been shut down.

For years, Birdhouse has hosted Mark Napier’s Distorted Barbie, with built-in mirror (so that if necessary, I could cease and desist and the meme would live on). I have yet to receive anything from Mattel regarding the site, so they may have pulled back on their campaign a bit. Perhaps they realized they would never get the cat back in the bag, or that they were actually damaging their corporate image more than improving it, or that the line between satire and slander can be too blurry to define consistently, or…

Currently involved in a mondo thread regarding the question of whether QuickTime sucks or not, which by necessity also asks whether Real Media and/or Windows Media suck, and if so, how much? As with operating systems, I think all of them have strengths and weakness, but there are no secrets about my leanings: I think QuickTime is more flexible, has better (or at least equal) quality per bitrate, has a cleaner UI, is less big-brother-ish, and is less invasive (is less brash about stealing associations). QuickTime is also, unfortunately, the only one that nags the user till they cough up $30 — something I’m more than willing to do, though I know many/most people are not.

Not everyone shares my opinion. Thought I’d take a straw poll here on birdhouse, where the air is slightly less rarified than on the mailing list. What do you think? If all audio/video media on the web had to be in a single format, which should it be?

Gorgeous example of QuickTime in action.

Working on new backup systems based on the tremendously flexible rsync, which ships with OS X and Server. Clever details here on utilizing hard links for incremental backups. The trick is shifting gears between contexts all the time; nose buried in man pages one moment, then helping a student discover the magic of File | Open (no kidding) the next, then lugging projectors and plugging in cables ten minutes later. Such a schizo job. Seldom build enough momentum to really sync into a task.

Amy and I had our first real date in over a year — babysitter and everything. Went to see Ravi Coltrane at Yoshi’s. Ravi is the son of the great John Coltrane, though his father died when he was only two, so he didn’t grow up under the influence (though certainly under the shadow). Modern bop, pulsing rhythm section, very moving but not quite mind blowing. It must be incredibly difficult to be on stage with everyone looking for your father in you. Especially when you’ve chosen to take up the same instrument.

Yoshi’s is so genteel — “jazz under glass.” No smoking allowed. Nobody talks, glasses don’t clink, everyone totally attentive. There’s a lot to be said for that, and the sound system there is unparalleled — truly marvelous cahoustics. But it also feels a bit sterile; you find yourself wishing someone would fall drunk over your table, or knock an ashtray onto the floor or something.

Started with sushi dinner. Used to see music so often, felt great to be out at a club; even greater to date my wife again!

Any Ace Hardware has a dozen or so lawn sprinklers to choose from, from dirt simple plastic rings on up to precision oscillating drums with variable scope, built-in clog pick, and snap-on hose attachment. But none are as elegant as the simple anodized aluminum head. Red for rectangular lawns, blue for squares, green for circular (I think). Just like when I was five. How long has this sprinkler been manufactured without alteration? Seems to have looked like this forever. Simple, works, beautiful, why change? Finished final stage of lawn this weekend, installing bender board. Ready to plant the beds.

The problem isn’t downloading, it’s making sure the artists get paid. The EFF has produced a swell silent short to illustrate the point (and to solicitate your support).

Speaking of making sure the artist gets paid… iTunes for Windows is out (Apple’s homepage read “Hell Froze Over” and introduced “The best Windows app ever”).

At work I use an OS X (primary) and Win2K machines side by side. Installed the Win version of iTunes and was impressed at how the two mirrored each other pretty much feature-for-feature. The Rendezvous sharing is awesome - enable music sharing on the Mac and the Win machine sees and plays the entire library and all playlists.

Of course the only reason Apple does this is the runaway financial success of the iTunes Music Store, which is now available to a vastly larger audience. For a while, the sexy integration of iPod and iTunes was the draw so compelling people would supposedly quit Windows for the Mac. Then it was the draw of the amazing music store. Suddenly the strategy changes - people aren’t going to come to church, so why not bring the collection plate to their doorsteps?

Start with a zebra fish. Extract the magical glowing gene from a jellyfish. Insert glowing gene into fish DNA. “Wallah,” beautiful glowing zebra fish. Now these Night Pearls have become a hit as pets in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia. Meanwhile, Europe and the U.S. fear contamination of the gene pool and have disallowed them, despite promises that all exported samples would be fully sterilized.

Just went to register domains for the China and the Internet class, who wanted both .org and .cn domains. To my amazement, the totals showed dotster charging 2.5x more for .cn domains than for “standard” TLDs. Well blow me down. Bopped over to the well-loathed Verisign, and found they won’t even sell you a .cn. Checked several other registrars and found the same — either they won’t do it or they charge a wad. Wonder what the hang is. It’s a line in a database, how can one take more effort than another?

We’re finally getting The Great Firewall of China off the ground - set to launch later this month. It was up to me to install the Chinese Language Pack for Movable Type on our server. Installation itself was fairly easy. Somewhat more tricky for a non-Chinese speaker is using the back-end in Chinese mode. Only via intimacy with the UI was I able to negotiate my way around. Let’s see… the Rebuild button is second from the bottom, and the Rebuild Category Indexes option is the third item in the picklist. If you switch languages without either knowing the language or having the muscle memory, you won’t be able to get back to the language selector to return to English mode - you’d have to wander around the labyrinth pecking half-random ’til you got it right.

The key is not just to get menu items to display in Chinese, but to have proper encodings on both the back-end and on your public site. Learned something interesting: If you’re in charset=iso-8859-1 and paste Chinese characters into a form, then save the record and look back at what you just entered, the characters will all be HTML entities (i.e. they’ll render okay for readers, but will be virtually uneditable). The browser does this, not MT. On the other hand, if you’re in charset=UTF-8, the characters are retained properly.

If you set the default encoding to UTF-8 in the MT config file, you’ll affect all blogs under the installation, which is probably not what you want to do. If you just want to affect one blog, leave the config file alone and hard-wire the encoding into the templates for that blog. That covers the public pages. The back-end language is selected per-user, and form encodings are switched automagically.

If you’ve been asking yourself: “What the hell is going on North Korea?,” look no further than this North Korean Physical Education Dance Video, which makes your junior high’s pep squad look sober by comparison. More sobering: North Korean anti-USA propaganda. Chilling, in more way than one.

I have presta valves on my bicycle tires. This morning went to put some air in the rear. When I removed the adapter, it took the core of the valve stem out with it. The little brass stem went rocketing across the garage and hit the back wall, scary projectile. Heard it, couldn’t see it. Tire deflated in two seconds flat, no pun intended. Walked to work. Over lunch discovered that the one bike shop within walking distance of UC Berkeley has closed down.

I never thought there were corners in time
‘Till I was told to stand in one.
— Grace Slick

The repair permissions trick ultimately didn’t work (I knew it wouldn’t), so back to the Apple Store to drop off the box for repair. Irks me no end that Apple will not give you a SuperDrive to install yourself. Ten minutes and problem could be solved, but no, they want the whole machine, want to ship it to Infinite Loop or wherever their repair monkeys live, and ship it back. I can appreciate that they want to “control the experience,” top to bottom, reduce injection of foreign objects into the hardware, but shoot, I’d be willing to sign a waiver. It’s both insulting and a waste of time.

Anyway. Took Miles with me. When he was there a week ago, we showed him the Curious George game on one of the eMacs, and he seemed to enjoy, even though he’s too young even for the preschool levels. This time he started pointing and grunting as soon as we got in the store. Persisted until I put him down. He ran across the store and plopped himself down in front of Curious George. Started whacking at the keyboard, smiling ear to ear, squealing. Uh-oh.

And I’m computerless for a week, stealing time on Amy’s machine after hours.

I’ve complained about comment spam before, but the problem has really swollen out of all proportion over the past two weeks. Because the phenomenon is relatively new, Movable Type has no simple mechanism for handling it, other than to ban IPs (or entire triplets). Deleting comments and rebuilding posts is cumbersome.

This weekend, one of the J-School’s blogs, bIPlog, got hit hard, and a student spent hours deleting Lolita comments. In the nick of time, Jay Allen released MT-Blacklist, which totally supersedes his previous MTMacro solution. Comes with a database of 450 known evil URLs and ability to post your updated blacklist to a known location for automated sharing. Also modifies the comment emails that MT generates to include an additional “de-spam” link - clicking it lets you delete the comment, rebuild the page, and add the spammer to your blacklist all at once. If you’re running multiple blogs from one installation, you can turn MT-Blacklist on or off for any arbitrary subset of them.

Installing MT-Blacklist on birdhouse and on the J-School today felt triumphant — as if the whole episode had been a battle between good and evil, and evil was winning… until the Megatron DDT Squirtation Assembly arrived to vaporize all the cock-a-roaches.

xian says:

I would like to have Jay Allen’s baby. He is a god.

On the normal spam front, I like this idea: Filter That Fight Back. Short version: create client-side spam filters that purposely follow/spider every link in a spam. Spammer sends out a million emails an hour, they get in return with a million hits an hour. “The branch snaps back in their face.” Punish them with the traffic they’re looking for. Crush them with it. Very Tae Kwon Do.

Last weekend started crunching away at the back yard, which has looked like a lunar landscape, preparing to lay sod. Saturday a.m. spent a couple more hours tweaking, then broke the cycle of infinite revision and added topsoil, fertilizer, rolled, and layed down 96 chunks of sod (images). By 3:30 we had a whole new back yard, amazing. In two weeks it’ll be usable, won’t be a mud factory, erosion center, eyesore.

Rarely does a project at home or work take less effort or time than expected. I thought this one would go all weekend, but the work went like buttah.

Let the “sod” jokes begin.

Hard to believe Miles is one year old already. Actually his birthday was back in September, but he was sick on the big day. We had a small party a week later. Now he’s on the brink of talking, is eating solid food and feeding himself (with hands, and working on spoons) and is into everything (everything). In this set, Miles goes hiking, takes a trip to Minnesota and meets all his cousins, sweeps like crazy, learns sign language, plays with hoses, wears Chinese silk, and toilet papers the house.

Also: Miles loves to push toys through the cat door. One day he decided he could follow his things right on through, but misjudged his hip girth by a couple of sizes and… No child labor laws were violated in the making of this short. Miles Stuck in the Cat Door (1.8 MB QuickTime).

Smart/curly quotes have been a thorn in the side for a while. When users of some browsers paste out of Word and into Movable Type (eg. for NGNO), the smart and curly quotes would come out as question marks (i.e. unrecognized characters). I had taught them to either turn off Smart Quotes or save as text, open in SimpleText or NotePad, and paste from there. They hated me for it.

Just found Brad Choate’s regex plugin, which lets your MT templates do search/replace on-the-fly. Configured it to replace curlies with straights, problem solved.

Of course, working with PHP would have been easier in a case like this — would not have needed a plugin to churn text; but the benefits of using a prefab publishing platform outweigh these occasional downsides.