Happy tethering!

With the new 3.0 iPhoneOS a new carrier bundle is needed so as to enable a few new features. So I’ve uploaded a new Vodafone NL Carrier bundle, in IPCC format. Because this is the format Apple uses for their carrier updates, a jailbroken phone is not needed.

Simply download the IPCC, here, and put it on your desktop. Download that file such that it does not get processed after the download finishes. In Safari this can be accomplished by option-clicking the link. Note: IPCC files are really renamed zip files. Browsers try to be clever so the file might be renamed to end in .zip or .ipcc.zip. Make sure the file name ends in .ipcc or iTunes won’t recognise it.

You’ll need iTunes 8.2 with carrier testing enabled. On a Mac, this is done by typing:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE

in a Terminal window, and restarting iTunes. Then, connect your phone to your computer, option-click the ‘Check for Update’ button and select the ipcc file. It should apply immediately.

This IPCC file does the following:

• Sets a carrier logo to eliminate scrolling ‘Voda…’
• Disables ‘call forwarded’ notification when calling
• Enables editing of data settings (APN, etc.)
• Enables internet tethering
• Enables MMS (settings preinserted)

Note: I had to restart my phone to get the MMS settings recognised.

• I detest SIM-locked phones.
• A two-year contract is even worse.
• T-Mobile is shit.

Luckily, all these problems could be solved thanks to the nice people just south of us. Except they’re completely out of stock. Italy to the rescue: Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) has shitlots of them and are willing to sell you just the phone, without SIM-locks and without a contract. Excellent. Off we are. (In reality it’s just coincidence that I happened to be going there, but let’s pretend we’re decadent.)

In Italy, all was fine. I bought the phone, stuck my SIM-card in and activated it. It took a few seconds to recognise it wasn’t anywhere near my home network so it looked for other interesting ones. Vodafone happens to also have an Italian presence, so of course my SIM instructs the phone to use that network. ‘Voda IT’. Good. We’re all set.

And then we got back to the Netherlands. Vodafone doesn’t sell iPhones here, so my phone has no idea of this network, unlike in Italy. The carrier name here, therefore, is ‘Voda…’ most of the time. That I can live with, but due to the phone not having any settings for this network it would also pop up a notice every time I initiated a call: “Call-forwarding activated”.

This is because Vodafone will redirect any callers to Voicemail for you if they call while you’re on the phone. Even if you don’t have voicemail: in that case, they’ll get a recording saying you’re unavailable. Fine, but the popup is annoying.

There is only One Way to fix this: Carrier Bundles.

iPhone uses Carrier bundles to set carrier-specific information, such as the APNs for data services, whether or not to use the network for Time info, if you can edit the APNs, the carrier logos, etc., and among those settings is a ‘Display Call Forwarding’ setting. This we need to turn off. There are two ways:

• Edit the ‘Unknown Carrier’ bundle, which will apply the settings to all unknown networks, or
• Create a ‘Vodafone NL’ bundle.

The former will always fix the popup, but will also apply to other SIMs inserted into your phone which you may not want. And if you edit a logo here, it’ll always show up even if you’re on another country’s unknown network. Bad.

So instead I made a Vodafone NL bundle that contains logos in the same style as the other Vodafone carrier bundles (so it says ‘Voda NL’) and with the right internet settings and such.

I feel this may be useful to more people than just me, so here it is:

Download Vodafone NL carrier bundle.
Note: a newer version of this file exists, for iPhoneOS 3.0. Find it here.

Currently, you need a jailbroken phone and some SSH skills to get it installed. The process is as follows:

• Copy the bundle (it’s a directory, technically) to your phone’s “/System/Library/Carrier Bundles” directory. This can be done using scp -r or some other tool that is capable of transferring entire directories.
• Create a Symlink in the same directory, pointing to the bundle, called “20404″. This is the network identification number (204 for The Netherlands, 04 for Vodafone Libertel N.V.) This you can do by cd’ing into the directory and typing “ln -s Vodafone_nl.bundle 20404″).
• Reboot the phone. Killing Springboard does not appear to suffice.

As of now, you should have ‘Voda NL’ in your status bar, and not be bothered by the Call Forwarding popup.

However after a day, I noticed something: Time Machine had stopped backing up and wouldn’t show my old backups in its whiz-bang interface. Telling it to back up to my existing drive would just make it start all over again. Problem!

As it turns out, this happens only because not only did I switch drives (this, of course, is the normal use case for a full-system backup app), I also switched machines. And Time Machine keeps track of what machine it was backing up from, possibly to avoid issues with two different machines backing up to the same drive that also happen to have the same name.

It wasn’t immediately obvious where it saves this info, though. None of the files in the backup directory seemed to contain any machine-specific information. Some digging revealed that the computer’s MAC-address is stored as an Extended Attribute in the backup’s top-level folder. This information can be revealed with the ‘xattr’ command (-l for listing, -w for writing):

bash-3.2# xattr -l *
Portia: com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress:
0000   30 30 3A 31 36 3A 63 62 3A 39 30 3A 66 65 3A 34    00:16:cb:90:fe:4
0010   31 00                                              1.

Ok, so in theory I can just change that and be on my way again. Wrong! The backup folders are protected by ACLs so strong even the root user can’t break through them. Trying to change anything about these folders (including the permissions, deleting them, etc.) just results in an ‘Operation not permitted’ error:

bash-3.2# chmod -N Portia
chmod: Failed to clear ACL on file Portia: Operation not permitted

bash-3.2# xattr -w com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress 00:16:cb:90:62:0d Portia
[Errno 1] Operation not permitted: 'Portia'

Luckily, there’s a way around this problem: simply disable the ACLs on the drive. This is done using fsaclctl, like so (my backup volume is called ‘Thingz’):

fsaclctl -p /Volumes/Thingz -d

-p for the path to the drive, -d to disable.

After executing that, OSX will simply ignore any ACLs present. They’re still there, just not used.

So to get to the point, here’s how to change a Time Machine backup so it’ll work from another machine, given a known MAC-address (as can be extracted from ‘ifconfig’). In the example below, the drive is at ‘/Volumes/Thingz’, the MAC-address of the new machine is 00:16:cb:90:62:0d and the machine’s name is ‘Portia’.

First, disable Time Machine (unselect the backup drive and turn it off), then, adapt the following to your needs:

cd /Volumes/Thingz
fsaclctl -p /Volumes/Thingz -d
xattr -w com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress 00:16:cb:90:62:0d Portia
fsaclctl -p /Volumes/Thingz -e

Tell Time Machine to use the drive as a backup drive again, and it should continue right where it left off, with all the backups available again in the flying interface.

Small print, at regular size
I can not guarantee that this will work for everyone. It seems to work just fine for me, however. I am not responsible if you wipe all your backups because you tried this. Thanks.

Obviously the internet has lost its cool.

So now I have one of those lamps (which, by the way, are really nice) and all I can do with it so far is use the remote to make it change colour.

Requisite. Lucrative. Tantamount. Unintrusively. Flagrant.

There you go.

You’ll have to compile it yourself. Install libpng into /usr/local and type ‘make’ in a shell.

Convert the PNGs into readable files by running fixpng input.png output.png. Then if you feel so inclined to make them pretty, you can flip the R and B channels around by running something along the lines of flipchannels input.png output.png.

Update: Also tested using a PowerPC Mac, so the Makefile in svn compiles to Universal Binaries now.

And Michael Rothwell was nice enough to add it to Mail.app by way of this plugin. Essentially what it does on supporting mail servers is open up a second connection, select your INBOX and then just ‘IDLE’. If new mail arrives in that mail box, the server will tell you about it.

Quite a bit less elaborate than my applescript version, but so much more reliable.

Anyway, thumbs up.

Actually that’s not entirely truthful. My friend Nadya and I had tried Wednesday afternoon at Schiphol after a store clerk said on the phone that they had Wiis in stock, only to return empty-handed and one of us somewhat depressed. I suppose trying to get one two days before the launch was pushing our luck.

Skip to thursday, one day before the release. I’m buying a bluetooth headset in Haarlem to try out for a project at work, and on my way back to the bus I pass the Vroom en Dreesmann. I figure ‘Hey, may as well try’ and go inside. After asking the clerk if he had any Wiis he said ‘yep’, and opened the box he had received them in, which was right in front of him. He must have just gotten them himself. Unfortunately he could only sell me one of them as the rest were reserved. Better than none, I figure, so I buy it. Of course that still leaves one to find for Nadya, who would have been very very depressed if I had managed to find myself a Wii while she would have to wait. So I try Van Leest, the closest store that might have them. “We’re getting them only this afternoon”. Ok, crap. Next. Free Record Shop, 10 meters onwards (even though it’s the one shop I never go to because they overcharge on CDs). They have four on display at the counter. I ask the clerk for one, he packs it up and I leave the store with a second Wii.

No waiting lines involved, no pre-orders, no angry crowds trying to start a fight and no robbing of goods. I have m4d shopping sk1llz.

Next I’ll try my luck at getting some actual games. I’m ogling Wii Play at least, which appears to be fairly popular. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that it comes with a free Wiimote.

Oh, and it’s really fun to play with. The Wii may not stack up to the raw processing power of the PS3 and XBOX360, but the Wiimote makes it a lot more fun to play with. The PS3 and the 360 are pretty much the same as the previous models, except they can do better graphics and such. The same goes for the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS. (Though granted, I prefer the PSP). It’s innovation versus brute force. In this case, innovation wins for me. As a plus side to this lesser processing power: the Wii is much cheaper, at EUR 249,- here in .nl.

It’s a fairly dull, flashed, slightly out-of-focus photo, but such is life:

Gah.

The most refreshing part of it all, though, is NASA’s apparent general attitude to openness: they will let you see everything the astronauts and ground crew are doing, hear everything they radio to eachother, and will tell you in detail what’s up if you happen to be in the position of being able to ask. They also provide high-resolution imagery (highest they can generate, in fact) of pretty much everything there is to see. And while that alone is a very nice thing to do, it gets even better: all NASA’s images are explicitly not protected by copyright. Only exceptions are NASA logos and such, but if you make a toy space shuttle and want to slap a logo on it, they’ll usually give permission for that.

In today’s world, most of this doesn’t happen too much. I’m glad to see some people still get it right.

So for some non-copyright-protected images from and about space exploration, now and in the past, have a browse at Great Images in NASA (GRIN). All in good humour, too:

Photo Booth cannot open because no camera is attached or the camera is in use by another application.

Eh? I just booted! I knew it wasn’t a hardware error because of two reasons: a) it showed up fine in the System Profiler (whereas an actually broken iSight in a MacBook I had seen earlier did not show up properly) and more importantly: it worked perfectly fine a few minutes earlier, the only difference between the two times being that before, I had been using Leopard. And when I rebooted back into leopard, voila: it worked again.

So, I thought. Must be a software issue. So I did an archive and install of Tiger. No dice. But it had also kept some non-user settings so I figured some other crap must have been left behind. So I backed up all my stuff and did an Erase and Install, figuring it would then pretty much have to work. Nope. Not even during the OSX setup and registration screens.

Not a hardware problem, and not a software problem. What the hell?

I did some digging into how the iSight works, software-wise and eventually found my way to a forum topic on the Parallels forums about Parallels possibly supporting the iSight now that Bootcamp did. There, a post detailed the contents of the new Bootcamp installer, and there being an updated iSight driver that apparently also updated the iSight’s firmware:

System Profiler reports:
before Boot Camp 1.1: Built-in iSight Version 1.55
after Boot Camp 1.1: Built-in iSight Version 1.82

So, this mean Boot Camp 1.1 updates the iSight’s firmware to version 1.82 in order to bring support for the Windows iSight driver.

Ah. I had installed Bootcamp 1.1 to partition my internal drive for Leopard. I had a look at my System Profile and sure enough, Built-in iSight version 1.82. Apparently this newly firmware-updated iSight does not work with the pre-update drivers, as installed by MacOS X versions 10.4.7 and earlier. I didn’t need all of bootcamp again, so I opened up the bootcamp installer package, installed the iSight Driver.pkg package, rebooted and whammo, my photobooth hair checking mirror was fully functional again.

This will most likely not be so much trouble anymore once 10.4.8 gets released, but right now if you have installed Bootcamp 1.1 and then reinstall your mac, be sure to reinstall bootcamp again so your iSight will continue to work.

Update: Apparently I just did something very right when reinstalling in preparation of bringing Portia to the doctor (also known as Apple Centre) for an issue with the screen because not only did the iSight work during the install assistant, its firmware version is now back to 1.49. All I did was repartition and do a minimal (deselect everything there is to deselect) installation so I’m not sure what kind of dark magic is causing this…

Spaces

Very nice. I’ve been waiting for a proper implementation of Virtual Desktops on OSX and this seems to be it. There are still a few quirks to work out (like the order of apps in the cmd-tab switcher, the app you selected in the cmd-tab switcher not necessarily coming out in front if you need to switch desktops, etc.) but I’m sure that’ll all be fine. I’m hooked already. And this wasn’t mentioned in the keynote, but exposé still works if you have the ’spaces-exposé’ (for lack of a better word) open: it’ll do exposé on all your virtual desktops at once. Oh, and for those wondering what happens with multiple monitors: nothing special. You just get a virtual desktop shaped like the combined desktops of your screens, like so:

Time Machine

Also nice. The restore-interface is the supreme of weird right now, and while it looks very flashy (and slightly sluggish on my 2GHz core duo!) I do hope they do something better with this. Lots of people have been coming up with lots of theories on how Time Machine works, but it appears to just be a periodic incremental backup that appears as a snapshot on disk. That is, you get an entire filesystem that you can restore, but it only takes up the space of a full backup + the changed data. Not sure how this is done yet, as leopard will only show me real files but I suppose some symlink-like trick is pulled.

Mail

The two big things here were Stationeries and Notes (and related, todos). I can’t get excited about stationeries at all. I don’t like HTML e-mail and I never will, and that is just what stationeries are. I suppose for corporate communication of companies that don’t mind bloaty HTML in their e-mail, this will make adding the company style to e-mail a lot easier though. Notes/Todos I do see becoming useful. However, the aesthetics need to be rethought. I’ve managed to change the font but not the background colour.

Help

Not mentioned but very nice in my opinion is the new Help system. The old Help menu was just that: a menu with some pointers to where you might find help. It got a bit of an overhaul. The new menu includes a search field that you type a term or phrase in. If that term or phrase happens to result in a menu, the help system will open that menu for you and point you at the relevant item. So we know what I’m talking about here, a screenshot:

Yes, it’s purple. I’m sure (well, I hope) that’ll change.

iChat

The photobooth effects were included but aren’t really anything new. Unfortunately, backdrops and iChat Theater weren’t included in this preview. Would’ve been fun but it can wait.
Update: iChat Theater is included, at least for sharing quicktime movies. It’s activated by choosing ‘Share with iChat’ in the quicktime player’s View menu, rather than doing something in iChat itself.

The Small Things

Apple improved on a lot of small things that aren’t really worth mentioning in any sort of keynote, but that do make life in OSX a lot easier. In no particular order, I’ve found so far:

• Safari has incorporated Taboo. That is, it’ll warn you if you try to close a window with multiple tabs. (Finally!)
• Safari has gained find-as-you-type. Gone is the search window, it has made place for something a bit more like the Firefox search bar.
• Sort of mentioned, but Spotlight no longer highlights ’show all’, instead opting for the Top Hit. Makes it much faster for app-launching.
• Mail’s address auto-complete now also works with the ‘Nickname’ field of Address Book contacts.
• For those who like it, Exposé (all windows) and Spotlight can be added to the dock with a launcher app, like dashboard in Tiger.
• Safari can now undo tab-closes. Closed a tab by accident? Cmd-z and it’s right back where it was.
• Preview now allows annotating (ovals and text) images and pdfs, as opposed to just pdfs.
• Mail now allows you to set the dock icon’s Unread badge to either just the inbox or all mailboxes.
• There is now a dedicated Guest account, the contents of which’s home directory get deleted on logging out.

Background technologies

Tiger set the road for some UI stuff that Leopard expands on. For one, the resolution-independent UI. While, at least in this preview, it isn’t finished yet, you can see progress being made. Some widgets will now scale up if you set the scaling factor (it can’t scale down anymore, it seems). The Dock immediately knows about this when you change it, and some icons (like Time Machine, iChat and Safari) will scale to insane sizes. Quartz 2D Extreme seems to have been renamed QuartzGL. It isn’t enabled by default yet, but Quartz Debug does allow you to turn it on and save that setting.

Daily use?

Is it ready for daily use yet? No. Well, not if you don’t mind losing whatever data you were working on a lot or saving every five sentences. Safari crashed twice as I wrote this post, and I’ve seen the crashreporter dialog pop up a few times in other apps, too. It’s still preview software, though, so I guess I can’t complain. If only I could port Spaces to Tiger…

So now that I have one, how am I going to get around this? The answer is quite simple. You see, the G3, G4 and G5 don’t really exist. They’re just marketing-friendly names for the PowerPC 750, 74xx and 970 respectively. The G standing for ‘Generation’ and the number having an obvious use in that classification.

So I want you to meet Portia, my Macintosh PowerBook G6:

She has a 2.0GHz G6 (Also known as Intel Core Duo) processor, with 2 gigs of memory and an 80 gig hard drive. And so far she’s been wonderful.

So the past few days I’ve been lugging a MacBook Pro around, and I’ve noticed it’s very good at sniffing out wireless beacons. My TiBook will usually only show only one or two networks where the macbook will pick up on 6 or 7.

I’ve described two dots. Now let’s connect them.

I figured it was time to run KisMAC on the macbook while on the train from Amsterdam to Haarlem. I’ve actually done this before when I was still using a PowerBook G3 with a PCMCIA wifi card, but didn’t really pick up on anything. I think I found about 5 networks that day. This time was a little different.

Some stats:
Between Amsterdam Central Station and Haarlem, there are at least 110 wireless networks, reachable from inside a moving train. Of those, 33 are on channel 1, and 38 are on channel 11. 17 are on channel 6, 8 are on channel 13, 7 on channel 7, 6 on channel 3 and one on channel 8. The other channels don’t see any action. 17 networks use WPA encryption. 37 use WEP. The remainder is unencrypted. 30 seem to be set to their defaults.

This was with an active scan, as KisMAC does not yet support passive scanning on intel macs. That means hidden networks do not show. I think I might repeat this experiment later with a non-pro MacBook. It has even better wifi reception thanks to its entirely non-metal case.

Scan results as a Netstumbler text file.

Update:

Tried it on a MacBook non-pro too. As I thought, it does slightly better: it comes up with 286 networks. Contrast that to my TiBook which picks up on a whopping 15 networks.

• The keyboard: not that bad. The flat keys feel a bit strange at first and the vertical return key seems to be a bit thinner, but overall it’s ok.
• The screen: not as bad as some PC versions of glossy screens, but still crap. I work with a lot of terminals which happen to have a dark background, and that makes the gloss show up badly even in fairly dim lighting. I can see myself move around, and anyone who might happen to be behind me. When the screen is mostly bright that disappears for a large part, but stuff like ceiling lighting will still show up. Not a good idea for an office environment with the fluorescent lights that go with it.

Picture to illustrate the screen problem:

Also note how the remote handily sticks to the screen bezel.

The rest is pretty nice. I absolutely adore the magnetic features: the MagSafe connector obviously and the new, entirely brilliant magnetic latch. No more buttons to press to open the laptop, yet it stays shut well-enough to make you think the the little hook that popped out before is still there. The speakers sound fairly ok considering their size, and overall it’s been pretty speedy.

And don’t worry, I’m still against this Intel thing. That will take time.

I intended to code somewhat on a DNS based remote Growl Notification Thingo I’m working on. In practise, that never actually happened. Between running around with my camera and talking to other people, there was just no time.

I did meet some interesting people, among which were Matt Biddulph and Deb Bassett. They both brought Canon 350Ds, which I also happen to own, so we had this little unphotoclub thing going on. Matt instantly handed over his newly acquired (same morning, in fact) Canon EF-S 10-22 lens when I, at that point a total stranger, asked for it. That’s the kind of trustingness that I like in people. I think at this point I’ve used his new lens more than he has. (Sorry about that.) Deb has a sixth sense for cameras. She is able to tell if any camera in a fifty meter radius is pointed at her and will break out a big smile (barely contained, here). We tried to see what would happen if we overloaded it by pointing 5 cameras at her, but she’s pretty resistant to that. I gave them my lensbaby to try. There was ‘oooh’-ing.

I also had a quick go at iRex’s e-ink device, the iLiad, handily brought by Edwin Mons. At first I thought the device was just an empty fake one, as seen with cellphones and PDAs in stores because the display looked like it was just printed plastic. But then it changed. This is what it looks like. Look at the screen, it’s beautiful. If it weren’t glossy, it could have been actual paper. (iRex: hint, hint.)

Anyway, of course the usual suspects were there, as were lots of other
interesting people. The list is at the BarCampAmsterdamII wiki and above-mentioned Matt has one too, so I’m not going to duplicate those.

I think everything went rather well. Some initial trouble with the WiFi on friday night after a thinko on my side causing everyone on the second Base Station I added not to be able to get DHCP going. Got an epiphany after the second Mac user complained and fixed it. No more complaints after that, except for Gijs Kruitbosch, who was reinstalling his laptop and was having trouble even getting Ethernet going, most probably due to something Ubuntu did wrong. Oh well.

So I had a good time at least, hope we’ll do this again soonish.

• The name. iBook versus MacBook. iBook definitely wins. (Of course this also goes for PowerBook versus MacBook Pro, but I suppose not wanting Power in the name for non-PowerPC machines makes some sense).
• The keyboard. Since the beginning of time, Mac keyboards (actually, all keyboards I’ve ever touched save a rubber one) have been slightly hollow. The MacBook does away with all that. I predict lots of typos for future MacBook-owners.
• The colour. Now, this doesn’t hold true for the white one of course but the black makes it look like a generic PC laptop. The white colour was the single most differentiating feature of the iBooks (until PC laptop manufactureres started making iBookalikes, anyway). And indeed: when the white colour is replaced, iBooks no longer look like iBooks. They look just like any other laptop, just done right (i.e., without two million lights and buttons and stickers and whatever).
• The processor. I still don’t like this Intel deal.
• The screen. Biggest letdown for me. Glossy screens are just unacceptable. If I wanted to buy a mirror, I’d visit IKEA. Not the Apple store. This is another reason the black one looks like a generic PC laptop: all those things come with piece-of-shit glossy screens, too. They’re unworkable as soon as you’re in any kind of light, at any angle that isn’t a dead-on 90º. Of course the good thing is you can tell immediately after opening your laptop that you forgot to do your hair in the morning.

So far, I’m not even so much as considering buying one until that final point gets fixed. No glossy screens for me, please, thankyouverymuch.

On a happier note, I finally found the artist I had been trying to find for a while now, who has some snazzy cool covers of such songs as Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. His name is Paul Anka, and he has been sitting right under my nose for half a year now, in the shape of Gilmore Girl Lorelai’s cool new dog. iTunes Link.

A dead frog could have known I’d go out and get one.

I figured I wouldn’t max it out– I’d get the 8GB version with 8 cores. First application was denied, but the second went through amazingly quickly. I’ve heard about people having to wait weeks. It took about two days for the application to be accepted, and three more for delivery. I was definitely impressed at the speed of that.

So anyway, it came:

Pretty, isn’t it? I think it rivals Apple’s Xserve. The inside is clean as a clean thing, too. No picture of that, unfortunately, but again it rivals Apple’s Xserve.

Of course I had to try it out as soon as I had the chance. It came very well-wrapped. The unwrapping process took about 10 minutes, I think. Great care was given to even the simplest of parts. For instance, the two power cords (the thing has redundant powersupplies) came in two separate boxes, packed together in another box, shipped separately from the server itself.

Then the time came to plug it in. That’s where the trouble started: the machine doesn’t do any video-output at all. I know it’s not really necessary for a server box to have the latest and greatest in video acceleration hardware, but a most servers come with a MACH64 of some kind onboard so you can at least get up a text console without hassle. Not the Sun– it requires that you have a computer available with a serial connection. That’s all fine with me, I have such stuff anyway. But the serial connection for this uses an RJ-45 connector instead of the standard DB-9 one. And the only adapter I had for that didn’t seem to be the right one. Luckily I was able to fabricate my own:

Tip to Sun: for just that extra bit of customer satisfaction, send along this sort of adapter.

Once I had that going, setting up was a breeze. Solaris 10 came preinstalled, so all I had to do was answer some questions about the setup through the insanely slow serial connection (maybe I should have set up the network management before booting…) and it was up and running. Loudly, I might add. It makes more noise than a redundant array of vaccuum cleaners.

I’ll be running some benches on it, notably in serving anyMeta pages and doing database serving. Maybe I’ll try to get Linux going on it. It’ll also be interesting to see what the 2.5″ 10K rpm drives can do, speed-wise.

Even with just a pianist and (excellent, I might add) violinist accompanying her, she rocked.

Seats Smack-dab in the middle on row 6. Very nice. (Well actually smack-dab in the middle was an aisle of stairs, but the seat next to that? Mine.)

Also apparently neither pepsi stage nor heather’s management mind people bringing their large cameras, at least not to seated events, so I capitalised on that and took some proper pictures.

Nicely condensed, I’d say.

Actually I’m also after cyberhq.int. Anyone out there who can make that happen?

Oh and Akismet rocks.

Luckily, Wordpress comes with an anti-spam plugin that I have now enabled. It sends all comments to a central server that checks them for spamminess and returns a ‘good to go’ or ‘low-life spammer’ rating. The only downside is that you need a wordpress.com account for it, which means you get a wordpress.com blog (wordpress.com: boo! fix!). At least it doesn’t require any action on the commenting-side, like those annoying ‘type the characters in this image’ things.

Ugh.

I’d like to add that I believe there are actually automator actions for uploading to flickr.com, and the watching of photos being taken can probably be done with Folder actions.

If only I had an iMac G5 to try it out with…

Somehow, three of my libraries and a lot of System Frameworks got zeroed out. (Tip: when that dialog comes up warning you of your almost full hard drive, do something about it.) Usually I’d just grab an OSX install dvd, do the brilliant Archive and Install and be done in 15 minutes. But of course the thing is nowhere to be found. So I had to fix it The Hard Way.

Scp stopped working because Kerberos was hosed, but luckily ftp did still work (even though libresolv was out, too). So I tediously ftped over a few files from another box such that scp would work again (the paths to the Frameworks are very long). After that I could copy over the rest with scp (with $(pwd) and proper tabbing available) for a couple of hours. Ugh. Some of my applications are still b0rked.

Look no more.

Apple Mail allows you to set Rules on incoming mail. It has the standard action stuff of course — move to folder, mark as junk, trash-because-I-don’t-like-this-person, etc. But also one action that allows for some really interesting stuff: Run Applescript.

So I figured I could use that for some simple remote Todo-ing, via e-mail. I can send those from my phone if need be.

Now, there are a few scripts out there that will do similar things. I found, however, that they’re all closed. No sources. For an applescript. They could be doing <i>anything</i> to your system, and you wouldn’t know it. You might find your entire home directory empty after sending three todos. So here’s an open one instead. It’s fairly small so I’ll just paste it:

tell application "Mail"
	-- What must the subject start with? This gets trimmed.
	set thePrefix to "TODO: "
	-- What calendar will we add the todo to?
	set theCalendar to "Home"

	set theMessages to (messages of inbox whose read status is false)

	repeat with mail in theMessages
		if the subject of the mail begins with thePrefix then
			set theSummary to trim_line(the subject of the mail, thePrefix) of me
			set theDescription to the content of the mail

			tell application "iCal"
				make new todo at the end of todos of (every calendar whose title = theCalendar) with properties {summary:theSummary, description:theDescription}
			end tell

			-- can't delete unread messages?
			set read status of the mail to true
			delete the mail
		end if
	end repeat
end tell

-- taken from apple.com and modified
on trim_line(this_text, trim_chars)
	set x to the length of the trim_chars
	repeat while this_text begins with the trim_chars
		try
			set this_text to characters (x + 1) thru -1 of this_text as string
		on error
			-- the text contains nothing but the trim characters
			return ""
		end try
	end repeat
	return this_text
end trim_line

Don’t you love how Applescript looks? Anyway, paste in Script Editor, compile, notice it looks even better with colour and indenting, save the resulting script somewhere sane, and make a new Rule in Mail to process e-mails. The minimum I would recommend is a subject check on it beginning with ‘TODO: ‘. Add other checks as you see fit. Last, set the action to ‘Run Applescript’ and point to the script (really? yes.)

Try it out and have fun.

Now, these people definitely have a couple of good points. For instance, Apple’s engineers apparently didn’t think that being able to set curves was a necessity. I can tell you that it is. The levels tool (while more advanced than Photoshop’s) just doesn’t cut it. Also, its noise reduction is sort of weak and the sharpening needs more detailed control.

A lot of people have also complained about how ‘Aperture has a crappy raw importer’. This is where they’re just plain wrong: Aperture doesn’t have a raw (not an acro, no caps) importer. It uses a system library called ImageIO to do all the work of making the raw file into something aperture can use. ImageIO’s engine is by no means perfect. Reportedly, Apple is working that for OSX 10.4.4. I do hope they get it up to par because it doesn’t compare to my current favorite raw converter (Capture One). In other words: yes, it can be sub-par (it seems to depend heavily on the camera), but please don’t attribute it to Aperture, because it’s a flaw in the OSX libraries.

Next complaint: the Library. Again, some valid points. Not being able to use multiple drives is going to be a pain in the ass pretty quickly for professional photographers. But another often-heard complaint about it is how it’s a ‘proprietary format’. Those people need to get a clue about how Mac OS works. Since Mac OS 9, it has supported a concept called ‘Bundles’. Essentially just a folder with a bit flipped so that the finder will show it as a file. Meant to lessen file system clutter. Bundles weren’t used much in OS9, but they’re very common in OSX. Every (non-carbon) application you can find is actually a folder. Just like the Aperture Library. Control-click on it, select ‘Show package contents’, and you can browse it like any other.

My biggest gripe about the complaints is that damn near all of them fail to see that Aperture, in it’s version 1.0, has some very good ideas that aren’t available in any other application. Stacking is brilliant. So is the loupe. Granted, some other applications have something similar for the image you’re working on, but none will let the loupe work on the thumbnail in your file browser, except aperture. Full screen mode isn’t just a slide show like most other applications. It’s entirely possible to switch to full-screen mode and do all of your edits. Versioning is a concept previously unheard of in this type of application, yet apps working with raw files can be very easily architected to have such a feature, because the non-destructive editing is always required when working with raw files. And what other raw converter will allow you to make a book of your photos and have it professionally printed, without having to learn how to use applications like Quark XPress or Adobe Indesign?

All in all, people are forgetting the most important thing about Aperture: it’s only the first version. It hasn’t been (ab)used by the general public yet. I’m entirely sure most, if not all, of the common complaints will be fixed in the next version. I’ve heard say that Apple is already working on fixing the single-volume-library thing. Unfortunately, Aperture is too slow on my Mac mini, without support for CoreImage. But I do like how it works a lot, and I see a great future for it.

Yes. Not a product, but the commercial for a product. For the Sony Bravia LCD TV to be exact.

What’s so special? Well, they took 250.000 bouncy balls, and launched them off a hill in San Francisco. They could have done it with Computer Graphics, but they did it for real instead. Add some nice music to it and film it with high speed cameras, and the result is stunningly beautiful. I think it’s also the first television advertisement with a website dedicated to it, including behind-the-scenes footage.

You need Quicktime (or something compatible) to play the videos. Be sure to check out the 2.5-minute extended version in its h.264 high quality version.

I was, unfortunately, disappointed.

Well, the list of supported cameras says that Aperture would support the Digital Rebel XT. It’s essentially the same camera as the 350D, but named for an american market. So in most cases, 350D == Rebel XT. Not in this case, though.

I found this webpage, explaining how to make OSX like the 350D. Apparently, OSX determines support for CR2 files by the model name of the camera that it contains. So it now supports the Digital Rebel XT, but not the 350D (or the Kiss Digital N, the Japanese name for the same camera). This means support is easily added by editing the Property List file containing the definitions.

The page shows you how to fix it by duplicating the 300D’s info in a Raw.plist file, but doing it just like that causes images to be mostly very green. An addition was made to the page that is supposed to fix it by multiplying pixel values, but I find it’s too yellow because the multiplication values were taken from the info for a Compact Camera. They are very sensor-dependent, and there is absolutely no comparison between the 350D’s sensor (or any digital SLR’s, for that matter) and a compact camera. The real fix, making the images look just like they should, is to just multiply the Red and Blue pixel values by two.

So after you paste in the XML-snipped from the webpage referenced above, change the three lines that read ‘premul’ like so:

                <key>premul0</key> <real>2.00</real>
                <key>premul1</key> <real>1.00</real>
                <key>premul2</key> <real>2.00</real>

The technical background for this is that the sensor in the 350D (and other DSLRs) contain twice as many green pixels as they do red and blue ones. Apparently the sensors in compact cameras are different.

Update: yes, this makes Aperture work with the 350D, too.
Update again: MacOS X 10.4.4 includes built-in support for the Canon 350D and KISS Digital n.

Marti Guixé and Mediamatic invite you to FOOD FACILITY, conTEMPORARY eatery for those dining in restaurant comfort with living room mentality. Based on digital search engines Food Facility is symptomatic of the change in analogue thinking and acting after the emergence of internet.

We do fun stuff at work in our Groundflood exposition space. For instance, we did the Flickr Peepshow there. Now it’s time to turn it into a restaurant. Of course we’re not about to employ a full staff of waiters, cooks, hosts, etc. So we’ll just skip all that and order take-out food for the customers instead. The image above is a sketch of how it’ll work.

I think it’s brilliant.

In slightly different form than before (cinnamon icecream vs. vanilla icecream with real cinnamon mixed in), but still. Woo!

Some funny things happened on the way back, though. First, I ran in to this:

This is a promotional thing from NS, to be used during SAIL ‘05. I knew it existed, though I hadn’t seen it up close before.

After getting on the boat (took some time, because there were too many people so I had to wait for the next one) we went on our way. About five minutes later, the captain asked all the people in the front part of the boat (12, including me) if we could please move to the back of the thing because it couldn’t get the nose upwards (it was one of those flying boats, for lack of knowing the real name). It made some speed, got the nose up and we could all move back. People applauded.

Some ten to fifteen minutes later, we cross a submarine. Didn’t see that coming (snigger). Complete with 30-or-so marines waving at us.

And about that waving– what is it with boats and people on them? Damn near every boat we crossed or passed got waved at by the people with me. And it’s not just that those people were imbiciles, the people on the other boats all returned the favour. I just found that really odd.

Back in the days of Classic MacOS, Apple was nice enough to introduce Remote Applescripting. This meant that you could execute an applescript on machine A, and it would do stuff with machine B. The problem was that this only worked with AppleTalk, so not over the internet. Then came MacOS 9, which added support for remote apple-events over TCP/IP. This allowed people to do their applescripting not only with machines on the local network, but also with machines half the world away. Great, I can use that. MacOS X added another nicety to it: it supported all this not only over IPv4, but also with the next generation of the Internet Protocol, IPv6. I happen to be IPv6-enabled, so that was of great use to me.

So what did I set up? Well. My mail server is in Amsterdam, and it runs Communigate on Linux. That means no direct applescripting because, well, it’s just not available for anything other than OSX. Luckily, about 40cm higher up in the cabinet, there’s an Xserve. The Xserve, of course, runs OSX. But not the mail server. But that’s ok, because the Xserve is still a UNIX box so I can easily get to that from the Linux box. So on the XServe, I created an applescript application that does this:

tell application "Mail" of machine
               "eppc://marco:password@despina.v6.cyberhq.nl/"
        check for new mail
end tell

It’s simple, and it works. I’d use the keychain to store the password, except that doesn’t work if you aren’t logged in graphically. (Apple: fix that!). I saved this as a runnable application.

Then on the linux box, an equally simple shell script connects to the xserve and runs the applescript:

#!/bin/bash

ssh marco@xserve.mediamatic.nl 'sudo open /Users/marco/CheckMail.app'

You want to use RSA/DSA keys so it doesn’t ask for a password to get in. You also want to add yourself to /etc/sudoers to avoid that password-prompt too. All that’s left now is to instruct the mail server to execute that shell script whenever mail arrives. I did that by setting up a rule that matches anything except a certain mailing list.

Yes, ssh also works fine over IPv6 and I could have set the shell script to ssh to my machine and locally run the applescript. I didn’t because the xserve is more available (pretty much always) and I don’t want the mail server to get stuck up on a shell script waiting to time out.

Not that ‘I want my MTV’ stuff at the beginning, skip to where the drums kick in.

Congratulations! You’ve won a free caribbean cruise. To reclaim your prize, press 9. That’s the nine-key on your telephone.

In English, yes. Note that I live in the Netherlands. I wonder if they were calling from the US. If so, I suppose I should have just let the thing talk while I continued watching television. Unfortunately I only thought of that after hanging up immediately.

I want one. This is so much cooler than the (already infinitely cool) black one. Shame they aren’t officially available in europe yet, at least as far as I know. Sony needs to get with the program and release these things at the same time, or nearly so, worldwide.

(Via Engadget.)

Would the cookies be any good?

Luckily, we can forward ports. You can only forward a single port once though, so take into consideration what machine you’re forwarding to. You can’t have two forwards for port 25, for instance, unless they are on different IP addresses. (On a side note, if you’re forwarding webservers, use apache’s reverse proxy feature for that to allow multiple servers based on the URL).

In Linux, I would use iptables for this. Unfortunately the machine I want to forward a port on doesn’t run linux. It runs Mac OS X server. Given my knowledge of how this is done with the same tool as setting up a firewall in linux, I set out to do the same on osx and found that ipfw (the tool that manipulates firewall rules in BSDs and OSX) knows an action called ‘forward’. Hold it, that’s not it. That does forward, like it says. But it doesn’t do NAT. Which we want, because otherwise.. Well it just won’t work properly.

Connection sharing in BSD is handled using a userland process called ‘natd’. Incidentally, natd is also capable of properly forwarding ports to other machines. Great. Now let’s find out how. There isn’t much documentation on this, but I did figure it out eventually. This is OSX-specific, I must add.

Apple stores the configuration for natd in /etc/nat/natd.conf.apple. Don’t change that though, it’s generated every time natd starts. The basis for the generated file is in /etc/natd/natd.plist. Open that up. It’s a fairly standard XML file with some settings in it. Add the following to the end of it, just before the two last closing tags:

        <key>redirect_port</key>
        <array>
                <dict>
                        <key>aliasIP</key>
                        <string>INCOMING IP</string>
                        <key>aliasPortRange</key>
                        <string>INCOMING PORT</string>
                        <key>proto</key>
                        <string>tcp</string>
                        <key>targetIP</key>
                        <string>OUTGOING IP</string>
                        <key>targetPortRange</key>
                        <string>OUTGOING PORT</string>
                </dict>
        </array>

Replace the incoming and outgoing ips and ports with whatever your network requires. Incoming is the ip address on your server, target is the ip address of the machine you’re forwarding to.

You can now restart natd, for example by stopping and starting internet sharing. If all went well, your machine now forwards the port(s) you listed. Don’t forget to allow it in your firewall!

As a last note: this was tested and verified to work on MacOS X Server 10.3. It should also work on MacOS X Server 10.4. However, the configuration files do not seem to exist on the non-server version.

Getting to work for me involves getting on a bus, then switching to a train, and lastly I get on a tram. The bus isn’t from Amsterdam. That makes it easy: you wait for it to appear and get on. If you’re still approaching the bus stop when that bus is appearing, you run at it and it’ll stay there so you can still get on. The trains go at regular intervals (or are delayed, but never too early) so you shouldn’t have any trouble making it there in time.

Now the public transport in Amsterdam. They will not wait. At all. Not even a single second. Just this morning, I was approaching the tram. I was literally less than 50cm away from the door when it closed and the tram rode away.

Well, at least I had some time to get something to drink.

‘Huh? What? But that’s not in theatres yet, in the Netherlands!’

Indeed it isn’t. Except it’s the closing film for the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival. So I get to see it nearly 2 months early. Yay!

Now, I’ve archived all the old stuff of course. Most links should still work. I have no clue how I’m going to make google like all this, but who cares. It’s still the old (table-based, ack!) layout, too. Either way, find it in the archive. (Some links to files and images are broken. Should you need one of them, just poke me).

I hope this will stick for a while. I might tweak the layout a bit more but the general idea should remain the same. Or at least similar. Or maybe not.