Part 31 of elf's Apple PowerBook G4 Journal
Anniversaries
sputnik "think different"
Thu Oct 04 21:50:25 2007
Today was the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik.
Last Saturday was the 10th anniversary of Apple's "Think
Different" campaign. thinking back, I remember seeing the campaign
posters in a store window on Yonge street. It must have been an Apple
reseller at the time; it's now a mattress store. I don't remember
seeing the “Here's
to the Crazy Ones” TV ad, though.
Mac Chick: Mandy Amano
mmm
Fri Oct 05 21:51:54 2007
I don't know how I missed this— Macenstein's June 2007 Mac Chick
of the Month was Mandy Amano. Her claim to celebrity is that she
starred in a Pepsi/iTunes TV ad during the Superbowl broadcast. I
don't remember seeing the ad and she looks rather ordinary in the
screencaps. The photography, however, is a different matter
entirely... Her literary and cinema choices are sadly disappointing,
bordering on the unforgivable.
Macenstein has a new feature called "The
6 degrees of Steve" where Steve Jobs is linked to another
person— I originally wrote "another celebrity", before seeing today's
post— by the fewest degrees possible.
Parity III
apple dollar
Fri Oct 05 22:25:33 2007
Today's Globe and Mail had a letter to the editors about
an article in yesterday's paper about cross-border shoppers and the
Canadian dollar achieving parity with the U.S. dollar:
I just bought an iPod Nano in Buffalo, N.Y. By the time I paid
N.Y. sales tax, a currency charge, and GST/PST at the border, I'd
spent $189.29 versus $193.80 in Canada. Surely,the more accurate
conclusion, if Canadian shoppers aren't crossing the border in
droves, is that they are not suckers but honest.
—Marcus Macrae, Toronto
Ad: Olivetti
design calculator
Sun Oct 07 12:50:29 2007
Design is the art that is hidden in plain
sight.
—Philip Nobel
I was browsing through the 1974 issues of the New Yorker
magazine and I came across this ad for an Olivetti calculator, the
Divisumma 18; the keypad certainly looked futuristic 33 years ago
when comparing it to the other products advertised. Using a
sans-serif font keeps the ad timeless.
Despite the paper tape dispenser, it looks futuristic even today
(it certainly does not resemble an ordinary calculator). I think if
it was re-designed today, the look should remain identical but it
could be made more compact.
Touch Pads
olpc touch pad
Sun Oct 07 19:39:01 2007
When I read that the OLPC touchpad could also be used with a
stylus, I tried using my Sony Clié stylus on my Powerbook
touchpad. But it didn't work; the Macbook and Powerbook touchpads
only work with fingers and not with an inanimate object like a
stylus.
AppleInsider is reporting on an Apple patent for
pressure-sensitive touchpads (it is important to note that all the
figures in the image are labeled, "FORCE DETECTOR TOUCH PAD" and make
no mention of "TOUCH SCREENS"; I don't see how this technology could
be used on a touch-screen). If I were to make an educated guess, I
would guess that future Macs notebooks would have large tablet-like
touchpads that could be used with styli.
This is an Ex-Emacs
emacs carbon
Sun Oct 07 20:03:43 2007
No, no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'!
—M. Python
But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out
into outer darkness:
there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
—Matthew 8:12
In response to a bug report about Carbon Emacs to the
emacs-devel mailing list, I was surprised to read this statement
by Dan Nicolaescu:
The Carbon port on CVS trunk has been abandoned by its maintainers
and it is known to be broken. If you don't intend to work on fixing
it, it is better to avoid it. The X11 port should still work ...
Does this mean that it's being ported to Cocoa? Or does it mean no
more native Emacs for OS X? Doesn't anyone at Apple use Carbon Emacs?
I'm sorry, but X11 under OS X is a second-class citizen and I would
use the console version of Emacs running in a Terminal before I use
the X11 version.
Nobel Prize: Medicine
nobel
Mon Oct 08 08:09:58 2007
The 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine has been awarded to Mario
Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies for helping discover "the
roles of numerous genes in embryonic development, adult physiology,
aging and disease".
Faro
bergman
Tue Oct 09 05:28:05 2007
An excerpt from a travel article
by Danielle Pergament about Faro, Ingmar Bergman's island home and
the setting for some of his movies, from last Sunday's NY Times:
"When people would come to the island to find Mr. Bergman,
residents would pretend they didn't know where he lived," said Majvor
Ostergren, an archaeology professor at Visby University in Gotland
and a native of Faro. "He had a sign on his gate, 'Beware of Killer
Dog,' but he only had a tiny little dog. People wanted to protect his
privacy."
When Bergman died, the details of his funeral were also kept under
wraps. "People kept the secret from the press until the grave was dug
the night before," said Mr. Soderlund, who provided the wood that was
used to make Bergman's coffin. "These were his instructions. He
directed his own funeral."
Nobel Prize: Physics
nobel
Tue Oct 09 14:03:03 2007
Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg won the 2007 Nobel Prize for
physics, for independantly discovering magnetoelectronics
(spintronics)— the use of electron spin,
rather than charge to store magnetic data— more than 20 years ago.
IPv4 Address Space
internet
Tue Oct 09 21:57:55 2007
A recent article
mentioned that a new census of the Internet is being undertaken with
inspiration from an xkcd cartoon.
Looking at the cartoon, I noticed that Apple was assigned a class
A address space (17) before MIT (18). Then I noticed that Xerox has
13. Next I needed to know when these addresses were actually
assigned. A bit of Googling led me to a page
at the IANA site that lists both the addresses and dates.
13/8 | Sep 91 | Xerox Corporation |
17/8 | Jul 92 | Apple Computer Inc. |
Hmmm... within a year... it could be related, but then it could
just be a coincidence.
Mobile Mozilla
software
Wed Oct 10 23:55:52 2007
The user demand for a full browsing experience on
mobile devices is clear. If you weren't sure about this before, you
should be after the launch of the iPhone.
The Mozilla foundation has announced that it will start
development on a mobile version of the web browser. Google and the
GooglePhone is conspicuous in its absence.
If Flash and Java are available on this mobile Mozilla, then the
iPhone with Safari will look crippled in comparison.
Peter Ahé: Software Delivery
microsoft apple
Fri Oct 12 00:02:27 2007
Microsoft Windows Installer is an installation
and configuration service that reduces the total cost of
ownership.
—Microsoft
This document describes the process of packaging
and delivering a software product so that it can be installed on a
user’s computer.
—Apple
Peter Ahé compares
Microsoft's documentation for software installers, to that of Apple's
documentation.
Installing software for Unix mostly involves shaving the yak,
flogging the gnu, pkgsrc, yum, rpm, apt-get, deb, etc. etc. etc., oh,
and I almost forgot "dependancy hell" or "libc hell".
Catch-phrase
Fri Oct 12 00:24:30 2007
After writing the "Software Delivery" entry, I thought I'd Google
to see if "flogging the gnu" had gained popularity. I was surprised
to discover that there was one
other mention of it, and even more astonished that it was ranked
above mine!
<mwolson>, a regular on #emacs, is famous for writing and
maintaining ERC (the Emacs IRC client). He runs Ubuntu on his Mac
Mini and I sympathize with his disdain completely.
Now I'm wondering if RMS is familiar with the phrase.
Nobel Prizes: Chemistry, Literature, Peace
nobel
Fri Oct 12 07:48:15 2007
The Nobel prize for chemistry was awarded to Gerhard Ertl, for his
work that led to the development of catalytic converters.
The prize for literature was awarded to Doris Lessing.
Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were
co-winners of 2007 Peace Prize. It is surprising that an American
would be awarded this prize.
(I'm missing the prize for economics.)
Message in a Cup
gosling mac solaris
Sat Oct 13 08:10:47 2007
David sent me a link to Gosling's latest blog entry
where he mentions that he no longer uses a Mac for development,
instead he uses a laptop (brand unnamed) running Solaris (I wonder
how Solaris x86 runs on a Mac). When he had a Mac, he performed his
compiles remotely on Linux and Solaris servers because the JDK
releases for OS X lagged behind so much. Apple and Jobs have never
been a fans of Java (iPhone doesn't run it because Jobs dismissed it
by basically saying, "No one uses Java").
I have always contended that Solaris is the best environment for
doing Unix development work, especially for Java. However, if your
work involves multimedia (movies, photos, images), then OS X (or
Windows) is your only other choice— you cannot get Photoshop
(or iTunes) for Linux or Solaris— and the so-called substitutes
are very frustrating to use, as they lack usability.
Mac vs. PC c. 1996
Sat Oct 13 09:05:33 2007
The two solitudes of the Mac and the PC user illustrated circa 1996.
Songbird
software
Sun Oct 14 09:02:48 2007
Songbird™ is a
desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. It
supports extensions and skins feathers. It is built from
Mozilla, it is cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux, but ironically
not Solaris) and is open source.
I stumbled on the link from a Sun alumni's blog entry;
he recently quit Sun and went to work for Songbird.
Missouri Macs
apple macs
Thu Oct 18 23:37:30 2007
A "non-random, small demographic, lecture hall" at the University
of Missouri has a rather extraordinarily large bushel of Macs.
Excepting Macworld and an Applestore, this is by far the largest
collection of Macs in a single place; I wonder what the class is
about.
Update Fri Oct 19 23:27:15 2007: walking into the
engineering building this morning, I saw one Macbook and seven PC
laptops. The Macbook was a surprise— typically it's all
PCs.
Firefox 2.0.0.8
software firefox
Fri Oct 19 12:32:35 2007
Firefox 2.0.0.8 has been released. In addition to security fixes,
it's compatible Leopard (which will be released on the 26th).
Minsky MIT AI Lecture
ai mit minsky
Mon Oct 22 13:03:43 2007
The objective is to make a machine that does the
things that we admire in people...
We don't know how the mind works. My conjecture
is that until we make a good theory of it, the neurologists won't
find out...
I'm not interested in how the human brain
works...
Marvin Minsky (using a Mac) gives a lecture on
AI (Realplayer or mplayer required). It's surprising he didn't use
Keynote; it looks like he used Word. The question and answer period
is the most interesting.
Apropos his first anecdote of manufacturing automation, I was
talking to a member of the OLPC project last week, who mentioned that
he would be in Shanghai this week, to supervise a batch of 100,000
laptops, which will be going on sale (the give1get1 program) to North
Americans by next month. A total of 75 people will be supervising the
robot plant (Quanta) during the production run.
Sun Ultra 24 Workstation
hardware sun u24
Wed Oct 24 00:00:17 2007
The Sun Ultra 24
workstation is the first Intel-based workstation in 20 years. The
U24 is also a seriously ugly looking workstation.
I remember using the i386 "roadrunner" running SunOS 4.0, SunView
windowing environment and a virtual DOS box wherein I often passed
the time playing Falcon 2.0.
There are those that argue that Sun is no longer relevant (I
love his blog's splash image) today. The follow-up comments
(esp. Mike Rundle on Sun's relevance and Java on the iPhone) to one
of Scoble's posts are more interesting than the post itself. I agree
with one of the comments that Java apps would look really ugly on the
iPhone.
Update Thu Oct 25 08:18:55 2007 linked to Scoble's
post.
Still no iPhone in Canada
hardware iphone
Fri Oct 26 18:42:58 2007
The delay of the iPhone release in Canada is possibly due to a legal
dispute over the use of the term 'iPhone'.
According to a CBC
report, a Canadian company called Comwave has a VOIP telephony
product called iPhone Mobile which they claim has been in service
since June 2004; Apple applied for an 'iPhone' trademark in
October 2004.
Photo: Toronto Skyline at Night
photo
Sat Oct 27 09:28:00 2007
Panoramic photograph, looking south-west, of the School of
Interior Design building and the Toronto skyline, from the nearly
completed Centre for Computing and Engineering building's outdoor
"rock garden" taken at about 9:00PM on August 12, 2004 with my Canon
S30 in Program mode; I leaned the camera against a door frame and
took 2 photos.
Details: on the far left is one of the iconic silhouette Apple ad
for the iPod. The CN tower is barely visible in the far darkness, to
the left of center. The two bright towers on the right and center are
the Cadillac Fairview towers flanking the Eaton (now Sears)
Centre. The tower with the red "S" is the Scotia Bank building; the
tower with the greenish cap is the Canada Trust (now Toronto Dominion)
building.
The Electrical Engineering Dept. technical support staff were
working 12-hour days that entire month, moving and setting-up 18
undergraduate labs from their old home at Eric Palin Hall, to the new
building, in time for the upcoming school year which began
Sept. 4th. Each lab took to 2 days to set up (not including the
actual moving which succumbed to delays as the brand new freight
elevator was constantly breaking down). Note that 18 labs times
2 days-per-lab is 36 days— August only has 31 days.
It wasn't so much the Apple ad as the overtime pay for that month
which compelled me to buy my first Mac, six months later.
Extreme Closeup: The Last Supper
photo
Mon Oct 29 17:38:56 2007
Truly I tell you, one of you will betray
me.
—Mark 14:18
A Flash application that allows one to zoom-in
down to the cracks in the wall (not plaster) and pan around Da
Vinci's Last Supper in a 16 giga-pixel photo.
Lineup for Leopard in Toronto
photo
Mon Oct 29 18:09:53 2007
Whilst browsing the blogTO Flickr pool, I came across a photo of
Friday's lineup
for Leopard in the Toronto AppleStore.
The pool
has some beautiful photographs of the city and its people—
Toronto has some amazing photographers. There are even some photos of
the runway fashions from the L'Oreal Fashion Week— which I
looked forward to, hoping that the streets (at least around
City Hall) would be teeming with beautiful models, but no such
luck— just the everyday uglies.
Unixersal Translator
unix
Wed Oct 31 18:25:07 2007
The Rosetta Stone for
Unix is a universal command translator for performing specific tasks
on each of the various flavours of Unix: AIX, BSD, HPUX, IRIX,
Solaris, etc.