Part 5 of elf's Apple PowerBook G4 Journal

PART 5

Canada Day

Fri Jul 01 14:44:15 2005

Today being Canada Day, I have spent most of the day watching DVDs: Thin Red Line, Fawlty Towers (again), To Catch a Thief (ah, the exquisite Grace Kelly and the wonderful script dripping in innuendo).

IMDB Power-search

I am a bit ashamed to admit this, I only discovered the IMDB power-search page yesterday. It allows one, for example, to list all war movies rated between 7 and 8 by more than 100 people, that are available on DVD (Dambusters is not on DVD, unfortunately).

DVD Player Substitute

Macworld's June 30 Mac Gems column featured Robert Chin's Active Timer. I happened to visit his site and discovered that he's working on a really Nice DVD Player.

Preview for Tiger has bookmarks

Anne Moroney emailed me to say that in Tiger, Preview has the ability to bookmark a page-- this was a minor gripe I mentioned earlier.

Really Nice Player

Sat Jul 02 10:06:52 2005

I downloaded and tried Nice Player by watching, For a Few Dollars More, a classic Spaghetti Western.

A sequence of images showing a frame from For a Few Dollars More in 1) DVD Player (note the borders around all sides), 2) Nice Player in "Full Screen" and "Fit Width" modes, and 3) Nice Player, scaled manually to fill the screen (arbitrarily chosen amount for demonstration).

I really like the player, but until subtitles and closed-captioning work, I will use it occasionally. Also, one cannot eject the DVD until it's first stopped; I filed a bug-report.

3-D Filesystem Viewer

David sent me a url to 3-D Space VFS. It remains to be seen whether applications promoting the 3rd dimension (like Looking Glass from Sun) are essentially eye candy or whether they provide useful functionality (Dashboard widgets with settings on the back of the window were copied by Apple from the Looking Glass project).

QuickSilver Upgrade

Installed the latest (13c9) version of QuickSilver— quit the old version (click on it then on the small white triangle in the upper-right); drag the old QuickSilver.app to the Trash; drag the new QuickSilver.app into Applications and run it; upgrade complete.

In a contest between QuickSilver and 3-D Space VFS, I predict QuickSilver wins handily; the contest between QuickSilver and Spotlight, however, will be close.

Panavision

The Wikipedia has a great article on Panavision.

Episode III Pre-Viz

Sun Jul 03 07:06:59 2005

The American Cinematographer magazine has put up an on-line archive of all the Star Wars articles. The latest article is about the Pre-Viz for Episode III:

The previsualization work was done exclusively with off-the-shelf software, primarily Alias|Wavefront Maya and Mayas built-in renderer for 3-D and Adobe After Effects for compositing... The computers used for the 3-D work were Windows-based PCs with AMD processors, and while JAK Films started the show using Macs for 2-D, by the end it was basically an all-PC shop. Our PCs were just blazingly faster, says Gregoire.

DoubleCommand

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
—Wizard of Oz

Sun Jul 03 11:29:02 2005

I've just installed DoubleCommand, a key re-mapper for those who prefer their modifier keys in just the right places.

HOORAY!!! Command is now Meta

DoubleCommand has finally allowed me to map the key next to the space-bar to be Meta everywhere (especially in Terminal):

I have essentially swapped Option and Command.

I have also set the "enter" key (on the right-hand-side) to be "fn" so I can Page Up/Down (fn+ Up/Dn) with a single hand. I also set "Shift+Backspace as forward-delete", but it does nothing; i.e. it still acts as Backspace. Checking-off, "backslash (\) acts as forward delete", works fine however, but do I really want this? No i don't.

If you are coming from a PC to a Mac, I highly recommend installing DoubleCommand.

The only problem now is that I have to get used to the new bindings.

2005 IDEA Awards for Apple

In the last century, Braun led the design world ... Today Apple is the leader, continuing to hammer away at both bad design and fluffy design. Their design philosophy is getting close the ultimate "less is more."
—Tucker Viemeister

Mon Jul 04 09:27:19 2005

The Mac Mini won a Gold IDEA (Industrial Design Excellence Awards) in the Computer Equipment category; the iPod Shuffle won a Gold Award in the Consumer Products category and the Airport Express won a Silver Award in the Computer Equipment category.

FedEx Logo

Mon Jul 04 18:59:58 2005

Staying with the design-theme, there's an interview with Lindon Leader, who designed the brilliant and yet subtle FedEx logo. Both my Powerbook and the Photobooks shipped via FedEx and I kept the packaging.

Terrorist Attack in London

Four bombs (3 in subway trains and 1 on a bus) explode during the morning rush-hour in London killing 38 people and injuring about 700.

IBM Announces New G5 Chips

Fri Jul 08 08:35:33 2005

IBM announced a low-power 1.2-1.6 GHz G5 with power consumption that is half that of the maximum power-consumptoin of the Pentium M. Also announced was a dual-core 1.4 - 2.5 GHz G5; one of the cores can be off-lined to save power. New desktops and laptops will ship with these CPUs because of earlier contracts between Apple and IBM.

Cult Movies

I found the Eccentric Cinema site with cult movie reviews while searching for reviews of Blue Max, a WWI film with excellent aerial combat footage.

otool

Sun Jul 10 10:20:41 2005

<Ilgaz> wanted to know whether Adium linked to zlib, as there was a vulnerability recently posted. I suggested running ldd on the binary, adding that I didn't know if ldd worked on .app binaries. Well, it seems that ldd is not a OS X tool.

Quoting from Porting Command Line UNIX Tools to Mac OS X:

The ldd command is not available in Mac OS X; however, you can use the command otool -L to get the same functionality that ldd does. The otool command displays specified parts of object files or libraries. The option -L displays the name and version numbers of the shared libraries that the object file uses. To see all the existing options, see the manual page for otool.

I don't seem to have otool on my system. Perhaps I need to install some of the developer tools.

(So-called) iPod Battery Replacement

Sun Jul 10 15:18:04 2005

My brother emailed me saying that according to an AppleStore person he spoke with in Cambridge, the $59 iPod battery replacement is in fact a complete unit swap— you give them your old iPod and they give you another one back. They recommend that the HD be backed-up as the contents "may be lost". The only problem is that my brother's iPod is personalized with his name on the back.

DIY Battery Replacement

Sun Jul 10 15:55:34 2005

<FenrisUlf> suggested the do-it-yourself approach by buying a battery from Macsales and using the handy accompanying pry-tool and installation guide. If that's not enough, there are movies showing the procedure.

Continued in Battery Exchange in Personalized iPods.

Widget Manager

Tue Jul 12 21:45:56 2005

Tiger Widget Manager?

I have had this image of the Tiger Widget Manager in the upcoming 10.4.2 for a few days now, but have not had the chance to update the Journal due to work deadlines.

Tiger 10.4.2 Released

Wed Jul 13 07:49:29 2005

My posting of the Widget Manager picture must have forced Apple to release the latest Tiger update. I can't think of any other reason...other than a complete coincidence.

iPhoto Catalog

Thu Jul 14 21:55:36 2005

An article on Macworld about iPhoto some good tips for making archival catalogs of the photos via Share < Export (as Web Page).

iPhoto 5.0.3 Update Released

Fri Jul 15 08:38:26 2005

I will download the latest iPhoto update.

Windows Airport

I was quite surprised to see an Airport base station update for Windows/XP on the update site.

Best Quarter Ever

Fri Jul 15 11:50:07 2005

Apple reported a $320 million profit in its last quarter, shipping nearly 1.2 million computers and 6.2 million iPods.

Uptime

12:01  up 88 days, 14:24, 4 users, load averages: 1.96 1.65 1.35
USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@  IDLE WHAT
elf      console  -                28May05 47days -

I See iPods Everyday

Fri Jul 15 14:16:53 2005

I see at least one iPod or a pair of white headphones everyday now. The most popular model with young women seems to be the teal Mini; the next popular model, in general, is white. I have never seen the black U2 model.

Ernest Lehman, RIP

Sat Jul 16 08:26:39 2005

Ernest Lehman, who wrote the screenplay to my second-favourite Hitchcock movie, North by Northwest, passed away.

DNS Strangeness

Sat Jul 16 09:39:26 2005

In the last couple of days, I've noticed that right after connecting via PPP, there are DNS failures in resolving hostnames. The first time this happened (last night), I logged out and logged back in and everything was fine. It happened again this morning and I started investigating by trying IP numbers (ping and ssh) instead of hostnames and was unsuccessful. I tried nslookup and was able to resolve hosts successfully. And then suddenly I could ping IPs and when I tried a hostname, it worked too. Hm.

Maybe it's time to upgrade to 10.3.9.

10.3.9

Sat Jul 16 10:19:17 2005

I have downloaded:

I will probably patch sometime next week.

Fear and Intimidation

Sat Jul 16 20:35:51 2005

No more DNS strangeness; the threat of upgrading to 10.3.9 seems to have convinced mathilde to behave.

Realplayer 10 Gold

I installed the Realplayer from the BBC website as it doesn't have annoying registration and the rest of the crap that is typically bundled with Realplayer. Need I say that installation was just a matter of copying the .dmg to the Applications folder?

Shift

Sun Jul 17 09:33:07 2005

In 1962, Daniel Fuchs, quoted in “The Golden West: Hollywood” (reviewed in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review) wrote:

Generations to come, looking back over the years, are bound to find that the best, most solid creative effort of our decades was spent in the movies.

American Gothic, Grant Wood, 1930, oil on beaverboard.

I immediately agreed with it (as I have a fondness for Hollywood movies) until I read the subsequent review— “American Gothic: The Life of America's Most Famous Painting”, by Steven Biel, about Grant Wood's eponymous painting (painted in 1930; the man with the pitchfork was the painter's dentist and the woman was his sister; the house in the background still stands today),

The painting endures, Biel concludes, because it is both itself and a parody of itself. Its meaning has more to do with the viewer's perception than Wood's intention. In this, Biel is identifying something common to all visual material. Paintings (like movies) never change, but they are subject to differing responses and interpretations as times change. Those that survive cultural, aesthetic and historical shifts share the characteristic that can be seen in "American Gothic".

When I read "Paintings (like movies) never change...", I immediately thought of George Lucas constantly fiddling with his Star Wars movies. Not just his CGI revisions but also his "Han Solo shoots first" revision. Is he modifying his movies just so they can survive cultural, aesthetic and historical shifts? Certainly Episodes IV and V would survive unchanged. But I'm not so sure about the others.

Applying that same idea to technology, one sees that the look of computers, both in the movies (“Forbidden Planet”), televison (“Star Trek”) and in reality (the Apple ][, the Commodore 64, the original IBM PC, the Osborne), has changed radically (“2001: A Space Odyssey” being the sole exception— technology still hasn't caught-up to that particular vision).

The original Powerbooks with the lumpy trackballs look absolutely ridiculous compared to sleekness of the latest models. I cannot imagine how outdated today's models will look in a decade. It seems that today, it is technology that drives cultural, aesthetic and historical shifts (blogging, podcasting, Moore's Law). I wonder whether later generations will look back and see that the most creative effort of these decades was in technology.

Cisco 6513 Power-supply, RIP

Mon Jul 18 12:18:41 2005

Smoking crater: The other power-supply suffered a wee bit of damage in the brown-out/massive voltage spike incident.

Network problems over the weekend were, in fact caused by a power brown-out that tripped a UPS which discharged, powered down when it ran out of juice, and which was configured to stay down (until manually reset) after it charged up.

Mon Jul 18 21:52:21 2005

The switch had redundant power-supplies and one of them suffered a blown fuse (literally). APC is replacing the UPS and paying for the power-supply. We still don't know what really happened because we have no explanation for the intermittent DNS problems I was experiencing.

Video iPod

Tue Jul 19 15:44:22 2005

It was inevitable that Apple would release an iPod capable of playing videos ever since iTunes started being used for trailers and videos. There is no doubt a prototype ViPod exists, that already does this. The Rumours say that an announcement is expected by September— just in time for the Christmas season.

Kubricks

Tue Jul 19 17:13:32 2005

Kubricks are character block figures about two inches tall, resembling a cross between LEGO and Playmobil figures. I'm waiting for a Kubrick Kubrick.

The Eagle has Landed

Tue Jul 20 00:01:22 2005

Although it is commonly said that the first words spoken on the Moon were Armstrong's announcement that "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed", they were in fact "Contact Light" said, by Aldrin as the landing probes on the Lunar Modules feet touched the surface.
—Wikipedia

The anniversary of the Moon landing.

The Google Has Landed

Wed Jul 20 07:21:52 2005

Google maps the moon landings.

James Doohan, RIP

The actor who played Scotty on Star Trek passed away.

BaCKStep

Wed Jul 20 09:21:43 2005

David sent me a link to movie of Steve Jobs demoing NeXTStep 3.0 in 1992; it demonstrates:

I sometimes wonder whether computers and operating systems are specifically designed with features that make for impressive demos.

Today, it would be difficult for me to burn a CD using OS X that I could read on a Sun, and then a PC running GNU/Linux and another PC running Windows/XP, then append a few files to the CD on each of the 3 computers and bring it back to the Mac and be able to read the contents.

The only reason I constantly gripe about CD interoperability, is because (when I need large format prints of my paintings) all the print-shops in my neighbourhood run only PCs and CD made on Macs (especially iPhoto archival CDs), if not made properly, are completely unreadable by a PC.

The Birth of Doom 3

Wed Jul 20 12:10:28 2005

I found John Carmack's old blog yesterday when searching for information on NeXTStep (the entry was about decommissioning the last NeXT workstation at id). There's also an entry about the birth of Doom 3.

DVD Player Bug Fixed (in Tiger)

In March 2005, I reported Bug ID# 4055945: No response from trackpad after waking Powerbook from sleep with a paused DVD.

I received the following courtesy email:

Engineering can no longer reproduce with the latest version of Mac OS X 10.4. Please verify with this release, and update this report with your results.

iBook and Mini Upgrades

Thu Jul 21 17:50:03 2005

Think Secret is reporting that new part numbers appearing in Apple's product database indicate new configurations (upgrades) of apple products likely to be announced next Tuesday.

Register's OQO Review

Fri Jul 22 08:57:47 2005

The Register has a very positive review of the OQO with the only gripes being the keyboard (keys are too small) and the cradle needing cables rather than a connector.

Plasma Tunnel Screensaver

Fri Jul 22 19:54:47 2005

iBall concept.

I have replaced the Noof screensaver with Plasma Tunnel. Fruitz of Dojo also has several other OS X downloads available.

What If...

Some of these design concepts are thoughtful while others are, well, a bit far fetched. All of them, however, are beautifully rendered.

Battery Exchange in Personalized iPods

Sat Jul 23 10:34:57 2005

It was brought to my attention by <tanuki> that personalized iPods sent in for battery replacement will be exchanged with iPods with the same engraving.

Upgraded to Firefox 1.0.6

Sun Jul 24 13:24:27 2005

  1. Download Firefox DMG.
  2. Double-click the DMG.
  3. Drag the icon to your Applications folder.
  4. Answer "Replace" when the dialog asks whether to replace the previous version.

It's pretty easy (for me, but I wonder if my Mom would know to do this if someone told her that she needed to update Firefox), but it could be easier— perhaps a button or menu entry that reads: "Update Firefox". Looking through the preferences there is "Software Update" under the Advanced tab.

Why Firefox?

I'm frequently asked why I prefer Firefox to Safari. There are a few reasons:

Konfabulator is Now Free

"There is a move at Yahoo! -- in addition to Konfabulator -- to move more onto the Mac", said Schneider. "We want to make sure we find a way to be more cross-platform."

Mon Jul 25 08:05:54 2005

Yahoo! has purchased Konfabulator and will be giving away the software for free. Now Panther users finally catch-up to Tiger users without upgrading.

It's Google's turn to play catch-up to Yahoo! regarding cross-platform applications. I always wished Google's Virtual Earth program was available for OS X.

iPhoto Upgraded to 5.0.3 (262)

Mon Jul 25 21:40:26 2005

A successful upgrade of iPhoto. I'm always slightly worried about patching software and OS X because there is no mechanism to back-out of the patches if they fail.

Konfabulator Widgets

Tue Jul 26 15:28:40 2005

This entry was recorded into the Journal on Wed. July 27, 2005.

Power Outage

When I got to Toronto this morning, I first stopped and the Dominion to pick up some fruit for lunch and found it dark with the last few remaining shoppers leaving. So I then headed to work and found a few people along with the front-office staff milling about outside the building. The signs on the doors to the building read "Building is closed due to Hydro outage".

My 24-hour emergency-access card got me into the building and the Departmental Assistant vouched for me to the security droid in charge and I climbed the four flights of stairs up to my office and found the rest of the network operations staff trying to find out when the power was going to be coming back up. The power had gone out (blocks from Bay St. to DVP and Gerrard to Lakeshore were affected) due to a lightning strike just an hour before I got there (11pm) and the best ETA for restoration was 3 hours (it's still not back at 4pm). Most of the servers had been shutdown as had two of the three core switches.

The building had been evacuated because only half of the Life-Safety systems were operating (according to security). I went home as there was nothing for me to do.

I got home, had some lunch and decided to install and play with Konfabulator, which I had downloaded the day before. I really liked the Konfabulator installation procedure, it told me what it was doing, where it installed the Widgets and what I had to do to edit preferences.

I spent about an hour trying out all the pre-installed widgets and some contributed ones I had downloaded earlier. Currently, I have the following (useful) widgets running:

The top-left corner of the desktop is occupied by Stickies. After having used Konfabulator, I feel even more strongly that all applications should support transparency.

I also wish that the widgets were resizable.

Finder UI Anomaly

Wed Jul 27 21:48:56 2005

Why does the delete button in the toolbar of the Finder look like "a red circle with a line through it" and not a picture of the trash?

iBook and Mac Mini Upgraded

Thu Jul 28 08:26:50 2005

Last Tuesday, Apple announced some upgrades: Mac Mini ships with 512MB and Wifi standard. There are only 2 iBook models now instead of 3.

NSWindow and .nib

Fri Jul 29 11:28:31 2005

Shows the Calendar and Weather Widgets; note the Ladybug next to the Stickies in the Dock (1280x854).

I recently finished reading the Objective-C tutorial for developing OS X apps. I was baffled about a couple of things: why were the window objects called NSWindow (the NS prefix was not explained anywhere and since this was Cocoa so I expected a CWindow object) and what did the NIB extension stand for?

After having watched the NeXTStep demo by Jobs, it all makes sense now— "NSWindow" is a NeXTStep Window and a "NIB"-file is a file generated by the NeXTStep Interface Builder (this is a guess).

Konfabulator Weather

Fri Jul 29 12:20:42 2005

I have replaced the Digital Clock widget with the Weather widget. I liked having the digital clock on top of all apps and the transparency avoided any problems obscuring other apps. However, this posed a problem when I went to watch DVDs— I had to explicitly lower the widget below the Player. So, I've gone back to using the digital clock in the menu-bar.

I also don't need the Moon-phase widget as the Weather widget includes this feature.

Controlling the Weather

Fri Jul 29 17:12:58 2005

The Weather widget has an annoying habit of writing to the System Console (which I have configured to pop-up when written to) whenever it cannot connect to the network— extremely annoying when watching a DVD! 

2005-07-29 14:24:16.624 Konfabulator[19444] [The Weather.widget]
Global/onLoad: ReferenceError: globalLinks is not defined (The
Weather.kon: Line 754)

I have deleted the if{...} statement begining on line 754 in: ~/Documents/Widgets/The Weather.widget/Contents/The Weather.kon:

if (globalLinks == "") {
    alert("There was a problem connecting to Yahoo! Weather.\n\nPlease
        check your network connection or try this Widget again later.");
    closeWidget();
}

Ensure that you save the file as UTF-8-MAC (in Emacs you can choose the file encoding as follows: C-x RET-f utf-8-mac RET) or Konfabulator will refuse to load the widget.

It seems to start fine; now to see if it still complains when I disconnect.

Night Weather

Sun Jul 31 00:02:48 2005

Something in your eyes was so inviting,
Something in you smile was so exciting,
Something in my heart,
Told me I must have you.
—"Strangers in the Night"

The Weather Widget has a night-face.

The Konfabulator Weather Widget changes appearance at night; not only does the moon appear but the transparent background dims accordingly— this widget is so beautifully thought out.

I assure you that if the Widget didn't look as beautiful as it does, I wouldn't have invited it onto the Desktop.

Key Replacement

Sun Jul 31 10:39:01 2005

If you ever have to replace a key on the Powerbook keyboard, hire a professional. It doesn't really have to be this complicated, does it?

Mactel DevKit DVD leaked

It's supposedly available on the net. The README mentions:

* What is this?

This is the Developer Kit install DVD for Intel-based Macintosh machines. It is part of a hardware and software kit delivered to developers who need to test and develop for future Intel-based Macs.

* Why does it refuse to install on any PC?

As far as we know, there are several limitations which prevent this DVD from installing on any PC other than the Developer Kit.

First, this version of Tiger appears to have been compiled for SSE+SSE2+SSE3 machines. It might be necessary to have a SSE3 supporting CPU.

Secondly, the developer hardware kits feature a TPM (Trusted Plataform Module) chip. This is a TCPA/Palladium implementation that uses a Infineon 1.1 chip which will prevent certain parts of the OS from working unless authorized, efectively working in a similar way to a hardware dongle. You can see pictures of the chip in the Developer Kit here, right next to the BIOS:

http://www.appleinsider.com/image.php?i=appledevkit1&id=1146

These are only the limitations others have suggested - there may be more, there may be less.

* Why do you release this if it doesn't work?

Because we want to let whomever is interested study and work on the files in this DVD.

Cheers and good luck!

There seems to be some dispute as to whether Apple is in fact using TPM chips.

Gnome 2.12

Sun Jul 31 13:01:31 2005

Gnome 2.12 borrows a few features from Apple: the Finder side-bar, search-tool, Preview, spatial tree-view, etc.

Improve PhotoBook DPI

Mon Aug 01 09:25:40 2005

David sent me a link to this MacOSXHints article suggests how one can improve the print quality of medium and large PhotoBooks.

Edit ~/Library->Preferences->com.apple.iPhoto.plist and change both BookTargetImageDPI and BookTargetMediumImageDPI to 300.000000. This will dramatically increase the size of the file sent to Apple, but should make the results look a lot better.

There's an unility called PrefSetter that may be used to edit preferences with less risk of an error corrupting the plist file.

Wing Commander: Privateer Gemini Gold

Wing Commander screen-shot.

Mon Aug 01 15:09:23 2005

Today, being a holiday, we look at new games. First, a free re-make of the original game— looks awesome! I will have to download and play.

Update Wed Aug 03 18:14:24 2005: Tried it for about 5 minutes (it took 2 minutes to load) and was instantly un-impressed with the low-rez graphics. It requires extensive manual-reading (the manual is included) and I just couldn't be bothered.

Go

Goban: play Go against GNU Go or other players on the Internet Go servers.

iPhoto Utilities

iPhoto Buddy is a small utility that allows you to use more than one iPhoto Library (split a single Library into multiple smaller libraries, for improved performance).

iPhoto Keyword Assistant is an iPhoto plug-in that improves keyword management, allowing for a large number of keywords per picture.

Cory Doctorow Weighs in on Apple TCM

Mon Aug 01 21:03:07 2005

<johnsu01> pointed me to a commentary on a possible future where Apple users will only be able to do what Apple allows them to do.

I really expected Microsoft to do this first, not Apple. So, where does it go from here? What if Intel sells a CPU that only runs Windows/XP and OS/X and any other OS that has to support TPM, what do the rabid GNU/Linux run their free OS on?

The counter-argument is that Apple has TPM in the DevKits to prevent OS X from booting on a generic PC. But according to the OSX86 FAQ, the DevKit does something very clever:

OS X should run fine without Rosetta, as long as you do not want to run applications that are only available as PowerPC versions, like MS Office and Adobe Photoshop, because Apple has compiled the complete operating system including iLife and iWork for x86.

But it seems that Apple deliberately left ATSServer (the daemon responsible for GUI fonts) compiled for PPC, so it relies on Rosetta. And as the GUI will not run without ATSServer, it depends on Rosetta and the TPM module as well.

All we can say now is that the future remains uncertain. As David keeps saying, there's always Sun SPARC.

Mighty Mouse

I'm of the opinion that Apple's success is primarily based on their ability to evoke an emotional reaction with their products. Their goal is to have you walk in a room, see their product on the table, and say, "Holy sh*t, what is that?"
—RandsInRepose, Apple Luxury Tax entry

Tue Aug 02 12:18:54 2005

The humble mouse, re-invented and reviewed.

Air France Accident at Pearson

Tue Aug 02 18:29:16 2005

Got a heads-up about it from <deego> and I immediately raced for the traffic cameras that line Highway 401 near Pearson (Nos. 37 and 38) and got to see the fire being extinguished. I saved the images (updated every 5 minutes) over the period of an hour while we discussed the accident on #macosx.

PackageMaker

Tue Aug 02 23:34:26 2005

How-to on making installer Packages.

Think Secret Court Documents

Wed Aug 03 07:37:15 2005

Court documents filed in the case where Apple is suing Think Secret, are available. They include statements by Dan Gillmor and Thomas Goldstein supporting Think Secret as a journalistic organization rather than one that illegally obtained and published trade secrets.

Transparency

Wed Aug 03 15:43:37 2005

Any Cocoa application can be made transparent with InvisRay; Tiger only. Another wish comes true.

DiscBlaze

DiscBlaze is another application I will investigate to see if it overcomes the shortcomings of CD/RW support in OS X. This is mis-labeled as Freeware on Apple.com; it's shareware as it expires after 10 burns. Alas, it looked promising.

Hire the Best

Thu Aug 04 00:06:11 2005

JoelOnSoftware makes some very excellent points on his latest essay, Hitting the High Notes— to summarize, there is no substitute for talent.

UPS Troubles

Thu Aug 04 21:19:41 2005

Not much time to update the Journal or do anything else as the dead Cisco power-supply had to be packed for shipping back to APC, the new replacement UPS had to be installed and the old UPS packaged for shipping.

Beginning yesterday, the server-room UPS started complaining of a system-fault which only revealed itself after Ontario Hydro started dropping the voltage across the power-grid to accomodate power-demands across the province, without resorting to power-black0uts.

The UPS-fault investigation took nearly the entire day and the solution required the UPS to be shutdown. That meant, of course, that the entire server-room, that depended on the UPS, had to be shutdown before maintenance could be performed on the UPS. The emergency shutdown was scheduled for 5pm. Everything went according to plan.

Continued in Part 6...

luis fernandes / G4 PowerBook Journal, Part 5 / Last Modified: Sun Sep 04 17:10:08 2005