crafterm's weblog

European OSCON 2005 underway!

This years European Open Source Convention is undeway in Amsterdam, check the Flickr Euro OSCON 2005 group for more photos such as this one - Jarkko Laine during his Ruby on Rails tutorial.

Aircaft stream sunset over Frankfurt

Sunset over Frankfurt on friday night, lots of action over the airport!

Updated Apple Hardware!

After hitting refresh far too many times on the Apple store, finally the new offerings from Apple became available last night, during the special media event Steve Jobs held in the US.

3 updated products were outlined, including a new iPod that supports video, an updated iMac that includes an inbuilt iSight, remote control and media center software, and an updated version of iTunes that includes music videos on the iTunes store, amongst other things.

The new iPod looks really great with a 2.5" screen for showing video at 320x240. It can decode H264 and MPEG 4 in real time. I've been quite impressed with the H264 codec - just recently I got a copy of the Australian Football Grand Final which was 1.92 GB, H264 encoded (around 2.5 hours footage in HDTV) and the quality was excellent, even when lots of fast moving action was on.

The iPod is also thinner than previous editions (not as thin as the nano naturally), but still only holds 60 GB of storage. I'd be expecting an update as soon as Apple can source some 80 and 100 GB disks, as video will take up much more room than audio.

Apparently you can also play the video on your TV, from the iPod - I'm interested to see what this looks like and whether you can play higher resolution video from the iPod when it's connected to a larger display - or whether it's always limited to 320x240.

Browsing the technical specs for the new iPods, I noticed that Firewire is not mentioned at all, USB2 only. Looks like Firewire has been removed from the iPods all together now. Also the U2 iPod has also dropped off the Apple online store - no mention of that either (although Steve Jobs did use a U2 video to demo the new video iPod during yesterday's media event).

The also mention a "new apple remote control" that works in combination with the universal iPod dock that looks like it might replace the navipod (and similar accessories).

The new iMac looks really sweet, I've been looking at these for a while now and with the inbuilt iSight and new remote control they're even more enticing. Interestingly it's an updated PowerPC system (2.1 GHz at the high end) - I haven't actually heard anything from Apple about their plans for retiring their PowerPC systems when they start introducing Intel based machines (ie. the order in which they will replace them, and also the lifetime of PowerPC machines after they've all been replaced - when will they be EOL'd? anyone heard anything at all?).

"Front Row" is the media software that's activated when you use the new remote control and it gives you access to your DVD drive, photos, music and videos on your machine. Will be great to combine this with an external 50" plasma TV for example, so we can act like real couch potatoes :)

I guess the question we will all be asking now is, will Front Row (and the capture utility PhotoBooth they also announced), and the new remote control be available for the other Mac machines Apple offers so we can all enjoy them?

The iMacs are all shipped with a Mighty Mouse as well now.

iTunes updates look good to me, although I've never really used the iTunes music store before, only recently for podcasts. The new "video" menu item next to the playlists is cool, as it shows all video you have in your iTunes library (didn't even realize that I had some already!). It will be a nice way to manage my video snippet/etc, collection alongside my music.

The other iTunes updates include the ability to write reviews for items available on the online iTunes music store, etc, and the ability to give others music, etc, as a gift.

Everything is all explained in detail at the event, which can be seen online from Apple's streaming media servers.

What's missing now? Well, larger storage iPods would be great now that we'll be able to store video on them alongside photos, podcasts, audiobooks and music (not to mention just using them as external disks).

Firewire 800 support for the iPods would be great with all that space, but since it looks like Firewire has been dropped all together, we probably won't be expecting that soon, if at all.

There was no mention of the unofficial updates to the Mac mini - and seeing the latest Mac mini's are almost as fast (1.5GHz) as my 17" Powerbook (1.67GHz) an update to them would be warmly welcomed.

The Airport Express is really cool, but it would be great to be able to use the inbuilt USB port to host an external disk via wireless in addition to (or rather than) a printer.

Many other updates would be cool too - let's see what else is updated/released in the near future!

Update: looks like the eMac's have also been removed from the Apple store as well.

Update 2: Gizmodo has some close up photos of the new iPod and iMac - the video quality in the photos looks quite nice, as does the new black colour scheme!

Update 3: AppleInsider is reporting imminent updates to the Powerbook and PowerMac line.

Update 4: Makezine has reported that the new iPod's also do high quality stereo voice recording. The technical specifications indicate that two settings are available, low (22.05KHz, mono) and high (44.1 KHz, stereo). While browsing the technical specifications, I also noticed that some of the photo slideshow transitions are similar to what's available in Keynote, including the beloved cube transition. Awesome!

Waiting waiting waiting.... :)

hmmmm... :)

iChat and MSN?

Instant Messaging is one of those interesting services that's proliferated with multiple protocols, features and vendors over the past couple of years. While some services have merged or offered compatibility (eg. AIM/ICQ, etc), most of them are largely incompatible.

On the Mac, iChat is the default pre-installed chat client, which supports AIM/.Mac and Jabber accounts. The unfortunate thing is that iChat doesn't natively support MSN - which if you're like me, blocks out a whole bunch of people, etc, that use only this type of IM client.

The problem with iChat is even worse though, because if you have an iSight or want to use iChat's Mac->Mac SIP VoIP client, you must use iChat. So usually this leads to us running multiple chat clients at the same time with different accounts (and then Skype on top of this), or abandoning iChat (and those features) completely in favour of something like Adium - both solutions aren't optimal, and generally speaking also a waste of resources.

The situation has changed though in OS X Tiger which now supports Jabber. Jabber servers (if so configured) allow connectivity to other IM services such as MSN (yippi!), so if your Jabber server supports it, it's possible to import your MSN/etc contacts into Jabber and communicate with them via iChat as if they were normal iChat citizens.

For example, take a look at the Australian Jabber server's iChat site. Under the section "Gateways and Transports" they mention support for other protocols. Using this form, you can submit your Jabber account details, and your MSN account details and import your MSN contacts into Jabber. For simple end to end IM it seems to work fine.

The only caveat is that iChat only lets you connect to one Jabber server at a time (why I'm not sure?), so if you're using Google Talk, unfortunately you have to decide between Jabber or GTalk, as again unfortunately, Google Talk is currently an island. The Google Talk website does mention that they're working on opening connectivity so hopefully this changes in the near future.

Cocoon GetTogether 2005 Finished!

Well, after one big week, we all arrived back in Frankfurt from Amsterdam last night.

After another awesome GetTogether, I think I need another week to recover! ;)

What stood out the most, as does every year, is how close the Cocoon community is with each other, and how the people are more important than the technology.

I was also amazed at how far Cocoon has progressed over the years with the invention/innovation of new ways at solving problems that plauge us in the web development world.

I remember back in 2000 when we were developing our first Cocoon application and faced the most common implementation problems - web application flow, form/dialog validation, dynamic guis.

Back then (ie. Cocoon 2.0 alpha) the solutions were actions, javascript (either home grown or with one of many forms libraries) and javascript.

Now, it's flowscript (javascript or javabased), CForms, and AJAX.

Interestingly the underlying concepts of Cocoon have remained the same, ie. a pipeline model of processing data in separate parts to provide a solid separation of concerns between processing, presentation and so forth.

With such a bright and talented team, we can only imagine where the future will take us :)

Cocoon GetTogether 2005 Underway!

The Cocoon GetTogether 2005 is now underway, in the Nemo museum/building in Amsterdam, Holland.

So far Sylvain, Bertrand, and Andrew have spoken about the Cocoon project in general, a complete Cocoon application overview, and the simplication of Cocoon - into a new concept Raccoon.

Daniel is currently speaking about the implementation Cocoon blocks.

All of the talks have been really great so far and there's more to come - really nice material and presented by some of the most qualified and active contributors to the community.

This year a podcast is also being made available of the talks, and there's live commentary on the #cocoon IRC channel as well if you want to join in right now.

More as the day progresses!

200gb iPod Nano!

Philipp just pointed me to these instructions about how to extend your iPod Nano to have 200gb of storage! :)

Amsterdam!

Amsterdam is quite a cool and interesting place, with lots of water canals threaded throughout the city, and many bridges, alleys, walkways and biketracks.

Lots of the houses also have some kind of lean in them, or look like they're almost about to fall over completely, eg, this one, but it gives a nice cosey feeling to the city.

All of the water is great, there's boats everywhere. If only we could get some kind of standing wave built :)

Cocoon GetTogether Hackathon Day 1 Underway!

Day 1 of the Cocoon GetTogether Hackathon is underway! We're all here in Amsterdam at the "Felix Meritis" hacking and talking about all things Cocoon!

Steven took this great shot of everyone lined up with their notebooks!

We've also got a Flickr group open with other photos that people are sharing, check it out for more.

ICE fast trains!

It's been a few weeks of travel recently, down to Munich for some fun at the Octoberfest (twice!) and yesterday on the train to Amsterdam for the Apache Cocoon GetTogether 2005!

Germany has some pretty quick trains, known as the ICE (Inter City Express) trains. They hook along quite quickly on certain tracks. One of the fastest routes is between Frankfurt and Cologne, around 300 kms, done in 1 hour, 15 minutes, including 2 stops along the way!

All of the trains have speedometers available so you can see how fast you're going such as this one photographed!