I just uploaded my 1000th photo to flickr:

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

And then in the morning when you want to listen to one on the bus, you find out that all you brought with you were the earbuds.

Gah.

During the space shuttle Atlantis’ activities in orbit, I’ve been watching NASA tv a lot. Some very cool stuff to see and hear. In fact the whole concept of TV from outside this world is something I like a fair deal.

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:

Over the past few days I’d noticed my PowerBook G6’s built-in iSight had crapped out. Whenever I wanted to use an app like PhotoBooth to check my hair (because say what you want, it is a nice mirror) I would get an error:

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…

I’ve been toying with leopard for a bit, and mostly I’m liking where OSX is going. Let’s touch on the “big” things a bit, first.

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…

Not a good idea: taking the 06:40 train on Sunday from Amsterdam to Haarlem and then falling asleep and waking up just as you’re approaching Heemstede-Aerdenhout. Because the next train back (a 5-minute trip) will be 45 minutes later and at that time in the morning, in a place you don’t know with no stores in sight open there’s not really anything to do. Besides slamming your head into the wall for half an hour because the falling asleep part was stupid.

I’ve never made a secret of not liking the ‘MacBook Pro’ name. PowerBook just had a better ring to it. It said ‘This is a powerful machine, in book form’. And the ‘Power’ part never had anything to do with the PowerPC: they were called PowerBooks even when motorola m68k chips still made them spin.

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.

Every day, I have 30 minutes of time to waste on a train, going from Haarlem to Amsterdam or vice versa, a 15-minute trip. Sometimes, I open up a laptop to write a few more lines of code or play some gridwars or whatever. Most of the times, I’ll also have a look at the wireless networks around. It always surprises me how many there are these days.

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.

Ok, so just to address the two things that I thought would annoy me about the MacBook:

• 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.

Having not attended last year’s highly successful (or so I heard) BarCamp Amsterdam, I felt I had to make up. By being late every day. But anyway. It was an interesting experience.

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.