crafterm's weblog

Back in Boston!

Arrived back in Boston last night after the 7.5 hour flight from Frankfurt. The flight was interesting from the moment I got to the airport, but after a bit of what almost seemed like a ticket lottery I was able to get a seat on the flight - and then shortly afterwards a free business class upgrade which was awesome (imagine how cool it felt to be in business class with all that space, and a 17" Powerbook :) ).

This trip to Boston marks the first leg of many. I'll be in Boston till thursday for work, then I'll make the long journey back to Adelaide, Australia. Adelaide will be a short visit, only a few days upfront to see my folks, get my car and drive it across to Melbourne.

Once I'm in Melbourne, there's a weeks trip to Couran Cove (an island resort in south of Queensland) and Byron Bay on the agenda. Then I'll be back in our Melbourne office for a further two weeks, before heading back over to Adelaide again to spend some more time with the family, and to make another trip with them and my girlfriend Kristin to northern Queensland.

Certainly lots of travel, but I'm really looking forward to it, in particular being able to see all of my family, friends and work colleagues back in Australia.

Australia and sharks

Australia is a really popular place for sharks, particularly those that can on occasion eat people (!) like the White Pointer shark (now an officially protected species of shark).

My parents live in Adelaide which is in the south of Australia, and the last major shark attack there occurred just before Christmas, where two 5-6m (yes, six meter long) White Pointer sharks took a surfer who was tow-surfing behind a boat, 300m offshore from West Beach, one of the cities swimming beaches. I'm currently living in Germany and the news about this attack even made it over here.

Around the same time, a spear-fisherman was taken by a shark off the coast of Queensland in the north of Australia.

Margaret River, near Perth, also seems to get a bit of the action as well, where another surfer was taken by two White pointer sharks, one 5 meters long, and the other 3, a few years ago. One of these sharks even launched itself out of the water during the attack (!)

Just this weekend, there was another attack at Bronte Beach, in Sydney, where a surfer fended off a shark attack by using his surfboard as protection (he was seen 30 minutes later back in the water with a new board :) )

All in all, only a handful of people are killed by shark attacks each year, so the chance of being attacked considering the size of the country and the amount of water out there is very very low. For example, in the year 2000 there were only 10 fatal attacks worldwide, of which 3 were in Australia.

As a surfer, and general water sportsman the potential presence of a shark nearby is something you have to acknowledge, but until something happens it's like acknowledging you may be hit by a drunk driver next time you cross the road, or you may be in a plane crash next time you fly. In fact, more people are probably killed by electric toasters each year than by sharks.

During my surfing times, I've only had one encounter with a shark which was in 2001, while surfing with my Dad at our local surf spot Browns beach, near Mount Gambier. The shark (unknown type, but of about 2 meters in size) appeared about 30 meters in front of us with it's fin popping out of the water. In a bit of a scramble both of us turned our boards around and started to paddle to shore with nothing but our fingertips.

While paddling, looking for a wave to ride into shore, and trying to what where the shark was, it closed in on us and actually swam underneath my board - close enough that I could have touched it (!).

I presume it was just curious, as then simply veered off left of my board's nose tip and we never saw it again. My Dad actually went back out into the water 20 minutes later for another surf.

Still, whenever I'm at home in Australia I can't wait to get out into the ocean for another surf as soon as I can! :)

Delicious Library!

Tonight I've been playing around with the Delicious Library, it's pretty cool software for organising your books, DVD, video and CD collection. The GUI is nice, it presents you a "bookshelf" style view of all your books, etc, graphically with their covers, etc.

The searching is all done via Amazon (US, UK, Germany or Japan), and it retrieves all the usual data such as publisher, release date, region code, genres, retail prices, and Amazon user ratings. You can also right click on any book, etc, and view, buy or sell it on Amazon.

The ingenious part is that it can use your iSight as a bar code scanner, which makes data entry really fast. You simply hold up the book, etc, to your iSight camera and it will read the bar code off the item and automatically find it on Amazon.

Delicious Library will also let you define a group of "borrowers" from your addressbook who are people you lend your books, DVD's, etc to. You can then drag and drop items onto their icons and it automatically manages who has what, and puts a reminder in your iCal calendar so you don't forget to get everything back.

In addition to this, you can synchronize all the data to your iPod so you have a list of your belongings when you go shopping, etc.

Once the data is all entered into your library you can then search any of the data fields via a search dialog similar to most others in Apple applications. It's also possible to arrange items into shelfs of particular kinds (eg. Computer books, Action DVD's, etc), however I didn't find any smart capability to do this like smart iTunes playlists - so far it's a manual process.

All in all, it's a pretty nice package for managing your digital and printed media.

Update: You can also export your Delicious Library to HTML for web publishing using DeliciWeb.

200+ features for Tiger!

Apple has just released a page describing in detail the new features that will be available in OSX Tiger, which will be available at the end of the month.

All of the new major features such as automator, spotlight, quicktime 7, dashboard, etc, are mentioned. There's also a few smaller features that I haven't heard about yet which include:

• Certificate support in addressbook for displaying public key information
• Smart groups/folders/mailboxes in addressbook/finder/mail that auto update based on predefined rules
• Flight tracker, stock tracker, translation and weather widgets for dashboard
• iChat and iTunes integration to show your currently playing tune in iChat's status :)
• New mail interface (interesting to see how it compares to Thunderbird)
• gcc 4.0 including 64bit support and XCode 2
• Xgrid "...turns a group of Macs into a supercomputer..." (!)
• Korn shell inclusion
• ... and more

Google Video!

Google has recently released it's video upload program. Anyone can upload videos for free, and they are searchable online.

I made a few searches (eg. for Australia), and noticed that they've actually indexed the video feed including it's dialog (!)

63 different operating systems on a Powerbook 17"!

Amit Singh has published the details about to get at least 63 different operating systems up and running on a 17" Powerbook, using tools like Virtual PC and the like!

Some of the details about how to get the systems to run are quite interesting. For example, Solaris x86 doesn't boot by default under Virtual PC due to differing CPU vendor strings, the fix:

Awesome.

There's some nostalgic operating systems there like BeOS, OS2 Warp, and the most modern operating systems like BSD, Linux, Unix and Windows.

Still looking for a PPC virtualizer though, in fact it was even brought up a few days ago on TheAppleBlog in this article :)

Google Satellite Maps!

A while back Google released Google Maps, which provided a great way to visually see addresses, locations and to get directions within the US.

Today I came across the Satellite feature of Google Maps, which was released just at the beginning of the month. It integrates satellite imagery from Keyhole into Google Maps, and is awesome! There's so much detail and navigation is amazingly fast and easy to use (use the slider or just click on the map and drag!)

Here's some examples of some of my favourite places in the US:

• Miami, downtown, South Beach (art deco district)
• Bellagio Casino, Las Vegas
• New York City (Statue of Liberty)
• Boston
• San Fransisco (Golden Gate Bridge)
• Hawaii, Honolulu (Diamond Head)

Also check out Google Sightseeing, which is a blog dedicated to showing pictures of various sights via Google satellite maps.

Awaiting Tiger

Tiger should be out in the next few weeks, there's quite a few changes in the next upcoming release of OSX from Apple.

In particular I'm keen to see Spotlight and it's integration in all of the Mac applications. Hopefully the non-Apple applications a lot of use like Thunderbird can also taken advantage of it soon. It will also be interesting to see what happens with Quicksilver, Launchbar, etc, that offer similar functionality. I've come to depend on Quicksilver almost daily, very cool tool and makes application/data navigation very efficient indeed! :)

Dashboard also looks quite cool, and seems to be an area Konfabulator is also in. I like the ability of using html/css as the frontend and javascript as a connector to backend components (is also kind of like XUL in Mozilla). The quicktime demo at Apple shows some really nice looking widgets out there. Looks like more eye candy to come.

Automator also looks interesting - being able to automate the process or flow of doing some action. Rather than writing script one visusally constructs the flow using the automator GUI.

In addition to the new features above (plus all the others Apple is raving about), I hope there's some improvements to the current functionality.

In particular, Java 5 availability. enhanced Bluetooth support so that the Mac can act as a voice headset for a mobile phone (essentialy acting as a speaker phone), and a fix for iChat so that it doesn't always send HTML to non-iChat clients, amongst others.

Safari is also an interesting one - it reminds me about one of the Engadget podcasts towards the end of last year where Phillip and Len were talking about the success of Firefox and whether commercial software companies like Microsoft and Apple should spend money to compete against it (or perhaps more to the truth, catch up to it) rather than embracing it. Since Microsoft gives IE away for free it's only a cost -> is it a cost shareholders wish to endure? Some may want the company to focus on more profitable parts of the business... anyway, it was an interesting discussion.

MacRumours mentions April 15th so the countdown is on :)

Currently Reading

Currently reading the following titles from Oreilly:

Both are quite interesting reads, James and Rael have done a great job on Panther Hacks, there's quite a few tips and tricks there that can give you that butterfly feeling when using your Mac :)

I particularly enjoyed reading about the household mp3 & digital photo server (rendezvous rocks!), the bluetooth hacks, and have enjoyed many of the applications that have been recommended in various chapters.

Modding Mac OSX is also cool, but comes from the perspective of someone who wants to get in and mess around with the system, ie. change graphics, icons, redesign dialogs, etc. It also explains the packaging format that Mac applications are distributed in which is also interesting, particularly how it facilitates a drag & drop approach to installation.

Virtual PC for the Mac

The past few days I've been building up a test installation of our product under Virtual PC for the Mac. I'm quite impressed with the speed of Windodws and Linux images running under Virtual PC on my Powerbook, considering the difference in architecture and processor type.

Like VMware, Virtual PC allows you to create a "virtual" machine that can house another operating system installation entirely, however Virtual PC is emulating an x86 system rather than a PowerPC system.

I've got one image with Windows 2003 Server installed, running SQL server, Active Directory, IIS and a bunch of other services and it still is reasonably snappy. Another image is SuSE Professional 9.2 with a build environment installed on it.

I'm wondering if there's a similar product to VMware for the Mac, that will let you run multiple virtual machines of the same processor/architecture type for the Mac? (eg. to run a Panther VM on a Tiger host?) Something kind of like PearPC but taking advantage of the local system rather than emulating everything in software?

Travel, travel, travel!

This year has been one of travel by far, in January I was in Cancun, Mexico and in Riga, Latvia. In February is was in Boston, USA, and in March I was back in Frankfurt and also in Garmisch (southern Germany) skiing. Next week I'll be in Madrid in Spain, the week after in Fuertuventura on a surfing trip, and then in May I'll be back home in Australia for a few weeks as well.

I love travelling so this has all been great, looking forward to more opportunities on the horizon!