Hooray! The Blinkenlights Toolkit is now almost completely available for Mac OS X via the DarwinPorts system. So now it‘s a lot easier to get everything installed properly without going through the lengthy process I described earlier.

To make it work for you, you have install DarwinPorts first. After having fetched everything, there should be four ports available that relate to Blinkenlights:

• blib – the Blinkenlights Library, foundation of the whole Toolkit
• blinkentools – the Blinkenlights Command Line Tools for converting and sending Blinkenlights movies
• blinkensim – the Blinkenlights Simulator allowing to visualize Blinkenlights Movies send via the Blinkenlights Protocol
• blinkenthemes – companion theme files for the Blinkenlights Simulator

After having completed the DarwinPorts installation, you can simply install everything by typing:

  $ sudo port install blib
  $ sudo port install blinkentools
  $ sudo port install blinkenthemes
  $ sudo port install blinkensim

This is it. After installing everything, all the programs should be available in /opt/local/bin. Keep in mind that there are several dependencies, especially the simulator needs access to X Windows so you should have X11 (which is included in the Mac OS X 10.3 Install CD 3) and the X11 SDK installed (which is included in the Developer Tools CD) both of which are not enabled by default.

Furthermore, there are several other options how to build blib. For instance, there is an experimental option for having the blinkensim output via aalib to the terminal instead of using X11. It‘s sort of nice, but the (non-existent) performance of Terminal.app makes it even more experimental. However, if you want to build it that way, you have to install blib with sudo port install blib +aa instead.

I will explain more about using the Blinkenlights Toolkit here soon. For those who know the DarwinPorts integration it should be much easier to track changes. Please note that DarwinPorts itself is under heavy development and that minor issues might come up now and then.

The latest bluetooth software and firmware updates finally enable bluetooth headsets on Mac OS X. What this means is that you can use a bluetooth headset as a regular sound input and output device selectable in the Sound Preference Pane.

I hooked up my Sony Ericsson HBH-35 headset and it worked immediately as expected. While listening to your Music with a headset is not really recommendable, it works great with iChat audio conferences. Now telephony is truely wireless, really cool.

I remember and old saying:

On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog

Well, with Orkut and similar services, this might chance fast. Being confronted with a global and pretty virtual community (given that you might know many people just by email or via weblogs) it is very difficult to say who is your friend and who isn‘t. I am not sure about the general use of the word „friend“ in english-speaking societies, but for me it makes a difference to talk about friends, people-i-know and people-i-ike. Being a fan of somebody is yet another case.

So playing around with a online social network I have to reconsider how I will build up my social neighbourhood. Is it just friends only? Or is it everybody I know? Or should it be everybody I like?

In the end it might not matter because nobody cares anyway. But I think I‘ll go for the people-i-know-in-person approach as friendships comes and go (or last forever anyway) and that‘s probably what other people are more interested in anyway. I define knowing as being a mutual relationship: it‘s not enough being known or knowing somebody, both has come together. In the end, we want to be sure what we are talking about, eh?

It comes to my mind that Orkut might be helpful in remembering names which is not one of my strengths.

An article at The Register correctly points to a problematic part in Orkut‘s privacy policy:

„By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials.“

While I was aware of that when joining it is understandable that this is one of the more specific reasons for a couple of my friends not to join that network (apart from more general reasons that also apply not to provide any private details to databases at all – especially if they are located in the US of A). As I consider my participation experimental and do not belong to the strong paranoia camp that much, I joined nevertheless to play with semantic webs.

But it is important to stress that all dating services and social network systems are going to present a license of this kind or the other. I am not too much into legal issues to say what could or should be done in a different way. But at least Orkut could be much more open on this issue and explain more the motivation behind its moves.

On the other hand, if there wasn‘t such a license, Orkut could be a target for every lawyer trying to shut down the service for any legal issue. Complicated issue nevertheless. So I sold my picture to them already. As it is really public anyway, I don‘t care. But people who might care should have a second thought on what they do publish within that site and what not.

Have been invited to Orkut a couple of days ago and decided to go for a ride. Since then I have been annoying my social environment with unexpected invitations.

Orkut is a relatively new service that has been acquired by Google recently. It is named after its inventor Orkut Buyukkokten and we can be happy he chose his first name instead of the last one. So what actually is Orkut? Here is what they say about themselves:

Orkut is an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends. We are committed to providing an online meeting place where people can socialize, make new acquaintances and find others who share their interests.

I haven‘t tested any of the alternatives but so far Orkut is at least interesting. It seems to be in good use in the open source scene (and my social environment in particular) making my list of friends growing at a constant rate. In addition to defining „friend“ relationships one can declare oneself being a „fan“ of somebody as well. Maybe other relationships expressing other relations should be added. But on the other hand it‘s much too early for me to know what should be next.

What‘s pretty annoying is the apparent instability of the system. It seems as if it is unable to deal with the load at present. Regularly I get error messages of all kinds but usually the service returns within minutes. Well, Orkut still has the „beta“ tag so maybe I should not complain. Not acceptable is that the login procedure does not use encrypted http essentially offering your password to the net.

Other omissions:

• You can‘t state the languages you speak
• You can‘t enter your nickname in addition to your real name (some people are better known under their nicknames)

So much for now. Let‘s see how this works out after using it for a while

Basecamp is a new and very promising online service offering web-based project management for everybody. The service relies on open standards like RSS and iCalendar to allow progress tracking with a RSS reader and an iCalendar compatible calendar application like iCal. The user interface is very clean and slim (CSS-based formatting only) and makes clever use of JavaScript to enhance the user experience (did I say that?).

While the service is not free in general, everybody can set up accounts for free and run a single project with multiple partners at no cost. If you want to have more than one project at the same time means paying a monthly fee.

Given the current state of glorious absence of anything that could be called an acceptable solution for project management on the Mac this approach is really refreshing. I like the combination of web-based modification of project data and the option of having customized tools for tracking the progress (like using NetNewsWire and iCal on the Mac). Hopefully, posting to the weblogs will come with a XML-RPC interface for weblog clients soon.

The World Wide Web Consortium has released the third edition for XML 1.0 and the brand new specification for XML 1.1 and it‘s close friend XML namespaces for XML 1.1.

While the third edition of XML 1.0 simply focuses on bug fixes and clarifications, XML 1.1 actually updates the universal data standard significantly. Most important, XML 1.1 incorporates the recent developments of the Unicode standardization, allowing a lot more characters in XML element names. The way naming is defined has changed fundamentally:

The overall philosophy of names has changed since XML 1.0. Whereas XML 1.0 provided a rigid definition of names, wherein everything that was not permitted was forbidden, XML 1.1 names are designed so that everything that is not forbidden (for a specific reason) is permitted.

XML 1.1 also adds more line-ending options, spefically the NEL (#x85) character of the IBM mainframe world and the Unicode line-separator character (#x2028). While the standard ASCII control characters (#x1 through #x1F, except white-space) can now be included in documents by using character references. The control characters in the range of #x7F through #x9F, which were allowed to be included directly in XML 1.0, have to be addressed with character references as well. This means, that some XML 1.0 documents are not immediately compatible with XML 1.0 but I agree with the spec that this won‘t be a big of a problem. A set of conventions called „full normalization“ should ensure easy identical behaviour when searching documents and comparing element and attribute names and values

A new XML version, rather than a set of errata to XML 1.0, is being created because the changes affect the definition of well-formed documents. XML 1.0 processors must continue to reject documents that contain new characters in XML names, new line-end conventions, and references to control characters. The distinction between XML 1.0 and XML 1.1 documents is indicated by the version number information in the XML declaration at the start of each document.

XML 1.1 won‘t have a big impact on development right now although I have no doubts some XML parsers will soon include support for it. But the new version addresses some questions that have come in recent years and have prevented some applications from using XML.

The namespace update for XML 1.1 changes the format for namespaces from URIs to IRIs and provides a means of undeclaring namespace prefixes (although I couldn‘t find the part explaining exactly how to do that).

An article on perl.com introduces Mac::Glue, an elegant approach glueing the Mac OS X Open Scripting Architecture with Perl. With it you can easily write perl scripts to control Mac applications like iCal or iTunes to do everything you can do with AppleScript – without using AppleScript at all.

Haven‘t spent much time at transmediale this year although there seem to be quite some interesting things here. However, primarily this event is the annual meeting point for all kinds of artists and weirdos. Guess that‘s why I have to show up here finally as well :)

The transmediale provides a public wireless network. It seems to be well-accepted as the download speeds are low. Enjoying the backlit keyboard of my Powerbook and suffering from Safari 1.2 and NetNewsWire 1.08 eating 100% of my CPU I prepare for the transmediale.

Actually, I am here to attend the lecture on the BIX installation in Graz which is a very Blinkenlights-esque project done by realities:united.

The installation uses f*cking expensive fluorescent circular lamps that can be dimmed at 18fps with no visible afterglow and the capability to dim down to zero with no delay. It‘s a hacker‘s dream to have but it‘s not very achievable.

A main difference to Blinkenlights is that the artists no longer have control over the content of the installation. So it is used for commercials as well which might make money for the owners but somehow despises the fact that this shouldn‘t be a screen. Jan and Tim of realities:united were not that happy about that either.

BIX has a resolution of 56×25 pixels although some pixels are left out due to the structure of the building. The matrix is also not strictly rectangular as the skin of the building is heavily curved. But that doesn‘t mean the images are not working. Actually, it looks realy great.

At the start of the project, the group created a 3D simulator (Mac only) which allows viewing the installation from any point of view. This is something really helpful and should be a must for our next target (whatever it will be). Hopefully, blinkensim will gain OpenGL support soon.

Some good articles on the project can be found at arcspace.com and Architecture Week.

Nervous? Tired? Tense?

Or just bored?

Go pierce a fish.