Older blog entries for xach (starting at number 73)

I guess the people who have fallen in love with MacOS X use their computers for different reasons than me. And maybe they have better hardware.

Hardware: I have a 600Mhz iBook, and MacOS X is often slow. The screen real-estate is pretty inadequate. Remapping capslock to control introduces annoying bugs (sticky control) because the laptop uses an ADB keyboard that is easily confused. I got an Apple Pro Mouse. It's cute, but the cord is barely enough to go from the USB port on the left of the laptop to the right side of the laptop (I'm right handed).

Software: I use Terminal.app (which sucks) and Mozilla (which sucks less, slowly). I dont use iTunes; though I like the interface, it's rarely convenient to hook headphones up to the laptop, and the built-in speakers are a sad joke. And all my MP3s are on a samba share that OS X can't consistently connect to. I ssh to my desktop and use mpg123 when I want to listen to music. I tried iPhoto, but the laptop is too small and slow to view even moderately sized images. And using the trackpad is painful. Oh yeah, there is no consistent way to cycle through windows on your screen; the default cycling switches applications, and each application is free to implement its own window cycling scheme. Some, like Mozilla, don't seem to bother, necessitating using the trackpad to swap between browser windows.

Some applications ignore the very useful "esc means cancel" option for dialog boxes. Argh.

It has changed how I use computers. I haven't sat at my desktop in several weeks, but I also haven't done any serious work at home in several weeks either. The wireless is nice, but I'm thinking I should have gone with a cheaper, faster Intel-based laptop.

The iBook and MacOS X just haven't increased my quality of computing life enough to make me rave.

Watched Donnie Darko and Topsy-Turvy recently. Really liked them both, for different reasons. The slice-of-life style of Topsy-Turvy was fascinating, from the expanding influence of technology to the casual and pervasive racism and sexism to the strained but always maintained gentility of the upper class.

Donnie Darko was bizarre and ambiguous, but I enjoyed it.

Argh. My Netflix queue has 91 items. It will take me years to watch everything.

21 Mar 2002 (updated 21 Mar 2002 at 17:41 UTC) »

Never make an RDF/RSS file available unless you're prepared to maintain it forever. I stopped maintaining GIMP News quite some time ago, but it will probably be impossible to get people to stop requesting the RDF file. Most of the hits are from Konqueror; I wonder if there's a way to get the maintainers to remove it from the list of news sources.

I got the iBook working as though it were on the wired network. This involved reading the online instruction manual for the Airport. (I thought I had set and forgotten the Airport access password; turns out I had never set it, and it was still the default password "public." Scary.) I changed the Airport from doing NAT for hosts behind it to bridging to the ethernet network, and that worked well. I can now mount SMB shares (with the weird, obscurely-documented "Connect to Computer..." URL) and play StarCraft.

Got the Empeg installed in my car on Saturday. It's pretty cool. The command-line tools for synchronizing are not very intelligent and they segfault frequently, but they are serviceable. I like it when the playlist says "Playing song 1 of 2037."

14 Mar 2002 (updated 15 Mar 2002 at 01:11 UTC) »

After wrestling with a Java-based Scheme website system, I went back to AOLserver. It's nice. Jetty is insanely fast and not too terribly hard to set up, but I prefer to have a more comprehensive system.

With Jetty+Kawa+BRL, there is a language for Web server configuration (Java), another language for dynamic pages (Scheme, but you can also call Java), and another language to do utility operations that have to run periodically (it can't run within the webserver).

With AOLserver, you can do it all with Tcl. Since I don't greatly dislike Tcl, I consider this a feature.

hub: As far as I can tell, there is no color cast on any of those slides. They accurately represent the lighting of the environment at the time of exposure. I used Fuji Sensia for several seconds for many of the sunrise photos.

I got a new body, an N80. It's very nice. I'm glad I never got an N70; the N80 is less expensive and has more features and better ergonomics. The biggest downside is its inability to meter when using manual focus lenses. Since I don't have any MF lenses, I don't count that against it too much.

I took a few rolls over the weekend, but it was somewhat discouraging. Maine is covered with a thick layer of blah. The evergreens are looking drab, the exposed grass is brown, the little patches of remaining snow are grubby. There are no saturated colors anywhere. For quite a while I thought it was a personal failing not to get interesting photos out of such shabby surroundings. It reminds me of the kid digging through a huge pile of horseshit because "there has to be a pony in here somewhere!"

I also forgot my tripod quick-release plate, so I couldn't take any long exposures. Blah.

I recently processed some film that was in my camera bag for about a year. Some of the slides were very beautiful; I particularly like this one. It was taken in purple pre-dawn light in coastal Maine. The nice results made me wish for a new camera, so I got a Nikon N80 from ebay.

Here is a great lighthouse site. It lists a few Portland lighthouses I wasn't aware of. They're in the middle of industrial areas. I'd like to photograph them.

XachBot will be going away soon. So will irc.xach.com. If you use either, be sure to look for alternatives.

1 Mar 2002 (updated 1 Mar 2002 at 15:04 UTC) »

raph: I like Peter Norvig's essay Python for Lisp Programmers. Lurking in comp.lang.lisp for links is always enlightening.

Today I briefly convinced someone I worked in a mustard mine. "We ship mustard ore to factories all over the east coast."

Still getting used to MacOS X on the iBook. Likes:

  • Wireless
  • Plays DVDs and Quicktimes
  • Reasonably pretty, for the most part

Dislikes:

  • Terrible terminal
    • When it has to beep, the "Busy" cursor flashes for a full second before it plays a beep tone. Come on!
    • Can't find a font I like (can you move X fonts to MacOS X? My kingdom for 7x14)
  • Window management sucks
    • Cycling is a pain; it's in Dock order instead of MRU
    • It cycles between applications and not windows, and each application implements its own notion of window cycling. In Terminal it's Apple-backtick, in Mozilla you can't cycle at all (you have to pull down the Tasks menu)
  • No equivalent to Galeon, i.e. a Mozilla (or equivalent) HTML renderer with a framework support around it. Mozilla is still pretty slow.

I should probably look into running an X server so I can actually use ported X apps instead of the native apps. But then I have to ask "Why bother even running OS X at all?" DVDs. (And the shame of admitting that I could have gotten a much, much beefier x86 laptop that would run Linux just fine.)

I'm also having trouble figuring out how the AirPort system works. I have an NFS and Samba shared filesystem on the wired network, but the iBook can't seem to connect to it, probably due to how the AirPort works.

I wish I could find a nice forum to pose MacOS X questions.

...

I got a new LaserJet 4M printer from eBay. It has a PostScript module built in. Cool!

I'm also hacking on a BetaBrite LED sign. It's weird.

Since I recently got a Rio Car MP3 player (before they sold out of stock), I've been working on a system to use my computer record interesting radio programs to MP3 for drive-time listening. I picked up a WinTV FM tuner card to start the project. I was really peeved that you can't read audio data directly from the tuner; you have to connect (externally) the line-out of the tuner card to the line-in on your sound card! How bogus is that? I want to read directly from the tuner, damn it. Plus, it creates a problem: I want to record from line-in without it going through the speakers. That's easy, just mute the speakers. Ahh, but I also want to listen to unrelated music. Basically, I don't want to care that my system is recording a radio program.

I don't know how the OSS mixer works. Maybe it can do what I need. But I'm thinking I may have to get multiple soundcards. Are there cheap PCI soundcards that play well in pairs under Linux?

...

On comp.lang.scheme, I wrote about being reluctant to look like a moron on a mailing list. Bruce Lewis replied:

"In my experience, people are esteemed more on the presence of accomplishments than on the absence of 'dumb' questions."

That's quite a motivator.

64 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!