End the War on Freedom

Yesterday, I received a shiny new Apple Airport™ Express wifi modem. It took ten minutes from unboxing to network working again, including the holes in the firewall for the ports I let through. Works good, so far. Time will tell about reliability. Unboxing pr0n at imacpr0n.com/airport. The photo below shows the white Airport below the DSL modem the phone company gave me, with a nest of cables and power cords and the view from my house in the background.

PGP Desktop 9.7 has been released. I've been without PGP since I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard"), using a command line version of GnuPG when I need to encrypt or decrypt something. 9.7 works in Leopard. Release notes here. Trial version available for download here, after giving them your full contact info. One day, when I have a spare $100, I'll buy a copy, but for now, I'll keep using the free trial. It works for what I need.

Alexis Madrigal at Wired - a team led by Michael Kozicki, at Arizona State's Center for Applied Nanoionics, has developed a new type of solid-state memory, able to store a terabyte on a thumb drive, with much lower power than current flash memory. Expect the first prototypes in 18 months. [wired]

When I tried to run Skype today on my Macintosh, nothing happenned. Looking in the Console log, I found this cryptic message:

Check 1 failed. Can't run Skype

Only found one Google hit, and it wasn't helpful. Tried renaming Google preferences out of the way (in Mac OS X, those are the "~/Library/Preferences/com.skype.skype.plist" file and the "~/Library/Application Support/Skype" directory). Same thing. Reinstalled Skype by dragging from the distribution DMG to my Applications folder and clicking "Yes" on the overwrite query dialog. Back in business. Don't know why it happenned, but that fixed it.

billstclair.com/calc.html is a Reverse Polish calculator for the iPhone. I found the code for this with a Google search, and reformatted it for the small screen. Looks funny in a regular browser, but is just the right size on my iPhone. Scroll down for trig functions, the rest of the machine state, and a calculation record.

ifiMob.org introduces an idea prompted by the iPhone. Any iPhone owner who wanted to could be the disk jockey of his own radio channel. He could play music, talk, sing, whatever. Anybody with the ifiMob software could see all the channels within wifi range, and tune in to any one. Channels that enable it would allow listeners to talk, too. You could squelch talkers you don't like, from just your soundscape. The channel list could show its music's pulsing beat, so that you could pick a channel by the rhythm of its dancers.

I hope Apple opens up the iPhone enough to make this idea possible. I hope somebody writes the software. I want to use it.

Michael Calore at Wired - uTorrent is my favorite BitTorrent client, by a mile, but since I've been using Linux, and now OSX, as my daily computing environment, I can't use it. They're saying that they're going to port it to both. Yay! Slashdot discussion. Slyck News story. The announcement at uTorrent's forum was met with much derision from current uTorrent users. Just fear, I think. Hopefully unfounded. [/.]

Tim Bray - Every time I've looked at an XSD for describing an XML schema, I've felt repelled, as if by a millimeter wave weapon. Tim Bray, and Eliotte Rusty Harold, and others linked from Mr. Bray's post, agree, that RELAX NG is a better schema description language. Slashdot discussion. [/.]

iMacPr0n.com is my new web site for collecting pictures of my new iMac (that's eye, em, ay, see, pee, are, zero, en). Hopefully, it will eventually contain pictures of other people's iMacs, too. I don't actually have my new iMac yet, but I ordered it today, and expect to receive it next week or the week after. Right now, the site contains some text, a screen shot of my invoice, and pictures of the iLugger carrying case I got for the iMac. I'll make another post here after I post the iMac photos.

MacWindows.com has a list of emulators for running Windoze and Linux on OSX and running OSX on Windoze. Last night, I bought iEmulator, an OSX repackaging of Fabrice Bellard's Qemu, which I've gotten to know and love in Windows and Puppy Linux. It ran Puppy Linux 2.12 beta without a hitch on my son's MacBook, though it was no speed daemon. They probably didn't convert kqemu, which makes a big speed difference. I'll probably eventually buy Parallels Desktop. I'll certainly download it and get a free 15-day evaluation key, as soon as I get my new iMac, which will be soon.

Jeremy Ruston has created a new (to me) way to maintain a web site. It brings wikis and weblogs into the Ajax / Web 2.0 world. It stores an entire web site in a single HTML file, using JavaScript for navigation and editing. Trés cool! My description doesn't do it justice. Play with it yourself: TiddlyWiki.com.

tiddlyspot provides free TiddlyWiki hosting. I started a site there: The Frontierist.

Though it's really neat to store an entire web site in one file, the problem is that that file starts out pretty big (over 200K), and gets bigger as you add content. There is discussion on separating the code from the data, and BidiX has created a DownloadService which does just this, with a web backend to allow saving directly to the web (tiddlyspot uses an earlier version of that backend, which saves the whole-thing-in-one-file to the web).

Wiki on a Stick is a minimalist implementation of this idea, with only 50K of script in the initial file. I found TiddlyWiki in the Wiki on a Stick source. Thanks to Kenneth Hensley (klhrevolutionist) for the link.

David S. Joachim at The New York Times - those manufacturers extended warranties that give you three years of coverage instead of the usual one year aren't worth it, says Mr. Joachim. [cafe]

Ubuntu 6.10, EdgyEft, has shipped. Downloaded it overnight, via Bittorrent. Burned a CD, booted it from my laptop, and am typing this with it. Recognized my wireless networking hardware, and connected to my wifi router. Booting was, of course, much slower than Puppy, but it's very responsive now that it's up. Sound works, but the music player doesn't grok MP4 audio, which is the format of most of my ripped CDs. It doesn't even do MP3s. So only one song, in OGG format, from my 128 albums was recognized. EasyUbuntu fixed the problem, though I had to copy packagelist-dapper.dop and packagelist-dapper.xml to packagelist-edgy.dop and packagelist-edgy.xml. I'm sure the EasyUbuntu folks will fix that soon. Emacs isn't on the CD, but this is Debian, so installation was a simple matter of "sudo apt-get install emacs". I could get to like this.

I was playing with my son's MacBook last night, playing some music in iTunes, when I discovered a feature I didn't know about before. There's a display mode that shows you the album covers as it plays songs, with a nice animated turning of the album if you point at one or when the song changes. As usual, Apple goes out of their way to create a beautiful user experience. Click on the photo for full resolution version (985x657, 212KB).

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. - the author of The Mythical Man Month, which was required reading in my introductory college computer class, explains why software development is inherently complex, and why, though we can make incremental improvements with better tools and better design methodologies, there is no silver bullet. Nurture good designers. They are the key to better software. Old (1987), so ignorant of the advances of the last 20 years, but still spot on. [joel]

Patrick J. Volkerding at Slackware.com - I spent a few hours this evening upgrading my Slackware machine from version 10.2 to 11.0, after waiting most of the day for the 1.2 gig download of the two installer CDs. There were MD5 checksum errors, but only in a couple of the included installer files, so I copied them all from the CD image to my hard drive, and replaced the two bad ones from the Slackware FTP site. The UPGRADE.TXT directions worked like a charm, and my new version came up quickly. There was only one glitch. My Grub "menu.lst" file, which worked fine for 10.2, caused 11.0 to complain about the root volume being mounted read-write. Still booted, but only after pausing to let me read that warning. Turns out I had to add "ro" to the end of the "kernel" line:

mozilla.com - I'm typing this with Firefox 2.0 RC2, the second release candidate of the new version of the browser I've been using since Firefox won me over from Opera a few years back. Works good in Puppy Linux. Easy to install. Seems a little faster than 1.5.7. Won't know about subtle bugs until I've used it for a while, but I'm pleased for now. Don't like the close boxes on individual tabs as much as a single close box for them all, but not a big deal. The other new features are so far invisible to me. Though I DO notice the spell-checker's red dotted underlines.

I couldn't get the VPN software I need for my new job to work in Puppy Linux, and I wanted the machine to be multi-user anyway, so I installed Slackware, a perennial favorite of mine. Doesn't boot quite as fast as Puppy, but KDE is definitely more full-featured, and no speed slouch, even on my old 800 MHz machine with 384 megs of RAM. I just did the default full install.

I had one problem, though. When I logged in to KDE as non-root I received the following dialog box:

I google'd without much luck, but finally found the solution. The sound device is only readable by root and the "audio" group. So I used "System/KUser" to add my users to the "audio" group. Presto! Sound!

Amazon.com - I got an invitation to the beta of Amazon's new service the other day, but ignored it since I didn't have a use for a virtual computer. This page describes the service, and has links to detailed documentation. $0.10 / hour of computer run-time. That's $72 / month. Plus S3 charges for storage and bandwidth. Kule. [wes]

There's an EC2 Forum. Here's a simple Ruby-on-rails site running on a virtual computer.

Scroogle Scraper is Google as it was originally. No cookies, no history retention, no ads. Based in San Antonio, Scroogle is a product of Public Information Research, Inc. From the home page: [jomama]