Tuesday was my birthday (I drank a large quantity of Champagne before finally getting to bed at 6am). My birthday present from Apple was the launch of iTMS in the UK (which seems not to have been covered on /.). While it's more expensive than the US one (79p, while Apple's calculator informs me that 99 is equal to just under 55p), it is still cheaper than buying CDs (about 5 pounds cheaper on one of the albums I bought. I didn't check any of the others) and a whole lot more convenient.

The new terms of the DRM mean that I can listen to the music I buy on up to 5 computers (completely useless now I've decommissioned all of the computers I used to use except my PowerBook and the FreeBSD box that runs my web, mail and subversion servers), burn it to CD (also not useful, since the only CD players I own are inside computers) and put it on my iPod (very useful, since my iPod is either on my belt or plugged into my stereo 99% of the time). All in all, I am very impressed with the service.

Over Christmas I played a lot of Scrabble. It seems that everyone does this. No one quite knows why, it's just the Done Thing(TM). Having a lot of time on my hands, and no broadband, I wrote 90% of a Scrabble game in PHP. Yesterday, I wrote the remaining 10% and started testing it today.

I had been testing it in Safari, and it looked great. Once it was working, I tried it in a few other browsers (Konqueror 3.1.4, Mac IE, Opera 7.23, Amaya, and Camino). I was surprised to find that it didn't render correctly in any of them. According to w3.org, it is 100% valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS2. I was not surprised that IE didn't render it correctly, but I expected more from Opera and Gecko. Opera and Amaya come closest.

Hopefully, the changes Apple made to KHTML will have made it into Konqueror 3.2, and so there will be two browsers capable of viewing the game, although none on Windows.

When I got Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), one of the new things it added were `folder actions'. In any folder, I could enable these `folder actions', and then (as far as I could see) nothing happened. This week, I finally got around to reading the documentation and finding out exactly what they were.

A folder action is basically an AppleScript attached to a folder, which is triggered when one of the following happens:

• the attached folder is opened
• the window of the attached folder is closed
• the window of the attached folder is moved or resized
• items are placed into the attached folder

Using this, I can now have a folder on my desktop that will automatically zip anything dropped in it. The most useful script I've found so far takes advantage of the way OS X deals with removable drives. Any connected network drive, or external drive, is mounted in /Volumes/, a hidden folder. Since it is a folder, it can have folder actions attached to it. The Apple web site provides an example script which, when a new drive is mounted will:

1. Look in ~/Auto Backup for an alias to this drive, and if it finds on:
2. Prompt the user to ask if they wish to backup to this drive (or do so automatically if they don't respond for 30 seconds)
3. Backup everything which has an alias in ~/Auto Backup (excluding aliases to drives) to the new disk.
4. unmount the removable drive.

Since OS X can treat iPods as removable drives, this script runs whenever I plug in my 'pod. It can also work with SMB/NFS shares etc.

I'm not sure when it appeared, but I've just noticed that Safari now has the ability to check spelling in text boxes, such as the one I'm typing in now. This feature is in the edit menu, under `Spelling' (oddly enough). This is quite a short entry, and is just here because that was the one feature I had so far found lacking in Safari.

I am typing this from my new PowerBook, via 802.11b. A while ago, I bought a PCI 802.11b card from eBay, with the aim of doing something with it once I'd got a laptop. Today, I popped it in Slave (the FreeBSD box of mine that sits on the landing).

Configuring WiFi on FreeBSD was so trivial it barely rated a section in the handbook. First of all, I needed to load the bridging kernel module (since I had not compiled bridging into my kernel).

# kldload bridge

Next, I had to tell the bridging module which interfaces to connect together. This was done with a pair of sysctls:

# sysctl net.link.ether.bridge=1
# sysctl net.link.ether.bridge_cfg="wi0 fxpl0"

Where, wi0 was my WiFi card, and fxp0 was the on board Intel NIC. Finally I had to bring the WiFi interface up. To do this, I wrote a simple init script, which I dumped in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/. Here it is, if anyone wants to copy it:

#!/bin/sh
case $1 in
start)
ifconfig wi0 ssid RavenNet wepmode on wepkey x0123456789 channel 11 media DS/11MBps mediaopt hostap up stationname "Slave"
;;
stop)
ifconfig wi0 down
;;
restart)
ifconfig wi0 down
ifconfig wi0 ssid RavenNet wepmode on wepkey 0x0123456789 channel 11 media DS/11MBps mediaopt hostap up stationname "Slave"
;;
*)
echo "Usage WiFi [start|stop]"
exit
;;
esac

echo WiFi

Slashdot seems to have munched my indenting, but you get the idea.

Slave is now acting as a bridge between my PowerBook and the rest of the network. The only drawback is that I can't access slave directly from the wireless portion of the network. There are two solutions that I can see to this problem; I can either configure the interface as a router, rather than a bridge, or I can just pop in a spare network card (I probably have a load of rtl8139's spare), put that on a different address and tell it to bridge from the wireless card to this address. I will implement one of these once I have worked out which is less effort.

Dell debuts iPod killer, is the headline on El Reg. I recently purchased a (20GB) iPod, and was surprised by this (not least because I've used Dell kit in the past, and `dead', rather than `killer' is the adjective I would have chosen). The device is cheaper than the iPod, although since I paid the education price and qualify for a rebate having bought a PoweBook at the same time, it still works out as being more than I paid. It also has a longer battery life. The battery life has not really been much of an issue for me. It lasts 9 hours, which is more than enough, as long as I drop it back in the dock overnight. If I'm away from the home for a long time, I can recharge it from my PowerBook's FireWire 400 port.

I've seen the older generation iPods, and yesterday I had a chance to compare the two (mine, and one of the first generation 5GB devices). The difference is noticable. I am happy walking around with mine strapped to my belt (in fact I can forget it's there), but I would not want to do the same thing with the older model. The 5GB version is around 50% thicker, and around 50% heavier.

The reason I have been talking about the 5GB iPod, is that the Dell device is about the same size and weight as the older iPod. Personally, I would rather have a lighter device with a battery that lasts the best part of a day, than a heavier device that lasts longer.

The iPod comes with a dock that can charge it, and incorporates a line-out. I have this connected to some speakers at home, and when I get in I drop the 'Pod in the dock and continue listening to my music. The Dell does not have a dock.

One of the best things about the iPod, however, is nothing to do with the music playing ability. When I plug it into my Mac, it automatically syncs with my calendar and my contacts, so wherever I am, I can find out what I'm meant to be doing, and access contacts simply. Oh, I can also store notes. And it appears on my desktop like any other disk, so I can also store a backup copy of my home directory on it.

The Dell DJ seems to me to be in as different a market to the iPod as a Dell computer is to a Mac. The Dell is cheaper, but you get what you pay for. Oh, and they seem to be marketing the lack of support for AAC, in favour of the inferior WMA, as a feature. I have no doubt that Dell will sell a lot of units to people concerned about the price of the iPod, but higher sales volumes are not the same as a better product.

I downloaded a copy of iTunes for Windows yesterday. It seems that Apple released a public beta and called it version 1. This is not a good way of persuading Windows users to switch. The two bugs I found within a minute of installing it were:

1. It can't cope with multiple monitors. If you have a multiple monitor set-up, give focus to something that isn't iTunes, and then click on the iTunes title bar then it will resize itself (to about 80% of my desktop width, i.e. spread right across both monitors).
2. It can't handle SMB shares. All of my music lives on a file server, so I can listen to it whatever OS I am using on my desktop. If I try to play this music (or I rip CDs to that folder, and then play them) it will stutter and then crash.

There are also a few UI glitches, where it fails to redraw things correctly, and some threading issues, such as the fact that importing a large amount of music locks the UI until it's done.

Apart from those problems, I like it (mainly because I know that none of these things will worry me when I get the Mac version in a few days). I love the way I can just pop a CD in the drive and have it look up the CDDB entry, rip it and add it to my music library. The play list management features are very nice, and AAC sounds very nice. Currently most of my music is encoded as 256kbps Ogg Vorbis, and when I recently listened to a few of my CDs I found that I could hear things that I had got used to being absent in the Ogg Vorbis encoding. The 256kbps AAC is noticeably better. I would be interested to see (hear?) what the 128kbps AACs from iTMS sound like.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that it doesn't support the multimedia keys on my Logitech keyboard, so if I press the play / pause button I end up launching a copy of the Windows CD player.

I ordered a 15" Powerbook the week before they launched the new models, timing my order so that I would be upgraded to the new one but still pay the stock-clearing price. In the last two days, I have received three emails from Apple, saying that they would not be shipping it until the second, then the first and now the third week of this month. They site stock constraint as the reason for this, but I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that they installed 10.2.8, then had to uninstall it and the re-install it on all of the machines awaiting shipping. Hopefully, 10.3 (panther) will have been released by the time they do ship it (it went gold last week), and so I won't have to pay for the upgrade to a version supporting lots of `important acronyms', as it says in the sneak preview...

I don't have anything specific to rant about this week, so I thought I'd write some random words and see what happens.

We had Freshers' Fair this week. I'm not a student at the moment and so I didn't have to queue for ages to register. I get that joy in January, but the queues should be shorter then. The SUCS exec are completely incompetent. I provided them with a laptop, a pair of Wi-Fi base stations, a switch and a really long length of cat-5, and they failed to connect them together in a line. Over the two days they recruited 4 people.

I was on the drinking Wine Society Stand, and we did far better. I persuaded Alan to join on the second day (well, I say persuaded, it was more a case of `You drink wine. I've seen you do it.', `Yes.', `You should join then.', `Okay.'). He had his Red Hat back, so it seems that Crystal didn't put it on eBay, as she threatened she might.

I still have no Mac, despite the fact that it has been in the `being assembled' stage for a week. For more updates on this, drop into the Jabber conference room TheVillage@conference.sucs.org.

I have a pseudo-job at the moment. My PhD doesn't start until January, so the department has made me a research assistent until then (which seems to involve playing with expensive toys and buying new ones with someone else's money). Unfortunately this means that I have to get up in the mornings, which I don't consider entirely sensible, since I never do any work until 2pm whenever I get up.

I'm running FreeBSD on my workstation, and it is not even remotely stable. The reason for this, is that the fan on the northbridge died, and ASUS don't fit heat sinks to their northbridges, just heat spreaders. The chip gets to around 100 degrees C, and then the machine dies. This takes about 10 minutes. I have balanced a large fan over it, which seems to be working, and should do so until I can steal a replacement from another machine...

Abiword, Gnumeric and their DB friend have been branded as Gnome Office. This is the funniest thing I have read all week.

I like Abiword. It's exactly what a wordprocessor should be, i.e. an application for creating documents with more presentation information than content (for serious documents I use LaTeX).

Gnumeric also seems competent. I rarely use more functionality in a spreadsheet than the sum function, so Gnumeric is ample for my needs. Oh, appart from the fact that the printed output, the print preview and the print-to-postscript-file output don't even look similar. And the print-to-pdf creates files that Acrobat Reader 5 thinks are corrupt.

One of the key features in an office suite, is how well components interact with each other. Claris Works did this very well (I used version 1 on my 386. The entire suite was under 5MB). AppleWorks (Apple bought ClarisWorks) should be even better, and I will be able to test this when my new Mac arrives. Abiword doesn't even let you insert a Gnumeric spread-sheet. Not only that, but it can't competently open any of the formats Gnumeric can save. Without this functionality, there is no way you can claim that Abiword and Gnumeric are part of the same office suite. Good stand-alone applications, yes. An office suite, no.

One day a disciple of another OS came to visit a Mac using Zen master.

`Why should I use a Mac?' he enquired.

Silently, the master removed a Powerbook from his case, and allowed the acolyte to marvel at the aesthetics. Not to be outdone, the acolyte produced a Sony Vaio, with similar sleek lines and metallic finish.

The master smiled gently, and opened the lid. Instantly the OS X desktop appeared. The acolyte frowned briefly, then recompiled his kernel with ACPI support, configured X, installed an Aqua theme and showed the master.

The master again smiled, a soft yet slightly condescending expression, and launched Microsoft Office X. The acolyte compiled the Wine, edited the config file then installed and ran Office. The master produced his mobile phone, and synced the built in calendar with iCal, and checked his email using his GPRS connection. The acolyte patched and recompiled his kernel to support bluetooth. Next he hacked support into Mozilla calendar. At this point, his batteries failed, but the master graciously allowed him to make use of a mains socket. Finally, he was able to show the master his phone syncing correctly.

The master nodded respectfully, and printed a copy of the discourse he had written while the acolyte had been installing and configuring his system.

At this point the acolyte was enlightened.

I went away for a week, and everything crashed. My Jabber server went down the day after I went away (and I didn't check it until I came back. Ho hum.) My BSD box also crashed.

That's right, after only a couple of weeks my FreeBSD box went down. This proves one of two things. Either:

1. Linux is more stable than FreeBSD, or
2. Disabling both case fans to reduce noise is not entirely sensible

Personally, I consider the second to be more likely.

On an unrelated note, my IP is still blocked by slashdot. Actually, it's not my IP, it's the transparent proxy run by my ISP. When I pointed this out, I recieved an email stating that someone had used that proxy to flood slashdot (which may be the case, or they may just have had a lot of requests from the proxy, since it does have several thousand cable modems behind it) and they are not going to unblock it until the person who attacked them owns up. Nice to see that slashdot isn't run by primary school children. Anyway, I am now stuck bouncing my connection through a proxy server outside my ISP's network.

Recently, I got a new (meaning second hand) SMP box to play with. As I mentioned, my first act with this box was to boot it, look at Windows XP, say `eeew' and replace it with FreeBSD. This box now sits in the corner (the corner of the hall, not my room, so it can be on 24 hours a day and not irritate anyone).

The reason I got this box was (mainly) so I could move all of my files onto a server, allowing me to access them from whatever OS I was using on my desktop. My desktop currently dual boots Win2K (NTFS) and FreeBSD (UFS) and neither of these operating systems is capable of both reading from and writing to the partition of the other (FreeBSD can read NTFS, and may be able to write to it but doesn't really trust itself to). This could be solved by converting one of the file systems to FAT, but that would leave me without proper file permissions. The other alternative was to use SMB and NFS sharing from another box. This seems to work better (and was increadibly easy to set up on FreeBSD). This has now been done.

Next, I was intending to stop using Windows on my desktop. This I have completely failed to do. The reason for this is that Windows is actually not a bad Desktop OS. On the other hand, it is not a very good workstation or server OS. FreeBSD, on the other hand, is a superb server / workstation OS, but not quite there as a desktop OS. Most of the time, this would not be a problem, since my desktop is often used as a workstation. And it is here that X enters the picture.

X was originally designed to allow graphical workstations, powered by a single computer, over what would now be regarded as quite low bandwidth links. Over 100Mbps, it is as if I am using a local machine. The version of XFree86 which ships with the cygwin distribution performs admirably, and I am in fact typing this from within Opera 7 (Linux edition) running on a FreeBSD box, posting the display to a windows machine. This allows me to do anything that is better done on a *NIX box (i.e. real work. The gnome postscript viewer is much nicer than the windows one, and most of the time I am using (g)vim and a postscript viewer) as well as everything better done on a windows box (games, for example, and I still haven't found a *NIX Jabber client that is as good as JAJC). As a result, I now have no real incentive to move from Windows (although I do plan on getting a powerbook or iBook at some point in the future). Although I do sometimes feel a little silly using a 1.33GHz box as (more or less) a dumb graphical terminal.

One question though:

Does anyone know how to make gnome2 either not start nautilus, or not use the root window?

I use the X server in rootless mode, but since nautilus still then creates a root window, this is less than ideal. In multiwindow mode it is not fast enough to be usable (not sure why this should be. I may have a go at hacking it at some point). As a result, whenever I give focus to the X server, it eclipses everything on my screen, with the exception of windows set to `always-on-top' mode (which is trivial with my graphics card drivers), so I end up making any Windows windows float over my X desktop. Not a huge problem, but not a particularly good solution either.

Well, my SMP box arrived. It turned out to be an Electronics for Imaging Fiery EX2000 (The eBay description wasn't very good, which explains why no one else bid on it). FreeBSD 4.8 seems to like dual CPUs, although I expect I will get a performance boost when I upgrade to 5-STABLE (September, hopefully) which has finer grained locking in the kernel.

The box came with 4 full length PCI cards I have been unable to identify, as well as an LCD display on the front, with a PCI controller. At some point I will see if there is any documentation available for it and, if so, write some control software for it.

The only headache so far is that I had planned to put my second hard drive in the machine (the one on which I store my music, as well as the collection of drivers, updates and utils I've downloaded). Unfortunately the machine tries to boot from IDE before it boots SCSI, and when it fails to boot from the IDE disk it fails and gives up. Usually this would be trivial to fix, but the machine displays a splash-screen on boot, and I have no idea how to enter the BIOS. Any suggestions would be welcome... If all else fails I'll have to install a bootloader on the second disk pointing at the first one. It would work, but it would be an ugly solution.

O'Really were kind enough to send me a free copy of The Complete FreeBSD (4th Edition), so I have reviewed it. Free stuff is nice. In related new, I have just bought a dual PIII 700 box off eBay, and am going to use it to play with FreeBSD more. At the moment I am dual booting my desktop with FreeBSD (4.8) and Windows 2000. I plan to gradually ditch 2000, but the first step to that is to remove my mail spool and home directory to a server, so I can access them from whatever OS I'm using. Putting them on a FAT32 partition is not an option, since FAT32 does not support Windows NT or UNIX style file permissions. Putting them on a UFS partition accessed over NFS or SMB should.