Yet another tour: Michael Moore is in Germany right now. Sunday he will be in Berlin.

Polvorosa is a group of three gifted musicians (some of you might know them as Niños Con Bombas from earlier days). They are singing in spanish and make great ElectroLatino music. Well hidden in their Flash site is the funny video of their new song „Behind De Mi House“ (QuickTime 5 format). Watch the Twin Towers dance and fall!

This is the prelude to their first CD coming out later next year (as far as I know). Congratulations to Daniel, Norman and (especially!) Trillian for this success. They have been doing great music for a long time and was time for them to be drawn before a wider audience. You deserve it, Trilly. Un beso!.

What the web site does not provide is the schedule for their upcoming tour through Germany and Austria, so I provide that here for you with links to the venues as well.

• 14.11.2003: „Bunker Ulmenwall“ (Bielefeld)
• 16.11.2003: „Tanzhalle St. Pauli“ (Hamburg)
• 20.11.2003: „Bastard“ (Berlin)
• 22.11.2003: „Stubnitz“ (Rostock)
• 27.11.2003: „Kulturbunker Mülheim“ (Köln)
• 28.11.2003: „Schlachthof“ (Kassel)
• 29.11.2003: „Motte“ (Siegen)
• 30.11.2003: „Rauch Club“ (Feldkirch)

I can only recommend going to one of these concerts if you can. I am sure you are going to have a great time with Polvorosa.

David Thomson has created a series of customized RSS feeds aptly named Tapestry that give you direct access to the most popular comic strips on the net on a daily basis. Now Dilbert is just a click away. Plain simple, really great.

In case you Powerbook users out there haven‘t bumped into uControl yet, you should. For me it does at least two invaluable things: first, it makes my trackpad act as a vertical and horizontal (!) scroll wheel. Second it gives me my function keys back as I can swap the behaviour: Apple‘s added functions (dimming the screen, controlling the volume and keyboard lighting) now are only accessible with the fn-key and I got 12 extra keys for my personal use without hitting any modifier keys.

Well, to find out if you are a geek, this test might help. It is a bit american and doesn‘t cover anything I could think of but it is fun. I scored over 25% and may now call me a Total Geek. And you?

First mentioned on the excellent Lambda The Ultimate weblog, Peter Norvig has created a Lisp To Dylan Translator. Actually, while the posting is brand new, the code seems to be already 8 years old and Peter „found it in the Attic“. This piece of software demonstrates the relatedness of these two programming languages. For those who have no clue what Dylan is, let me explain a bit more.

Dylan was once invented by Apple and was also brought forward by Carnegie Mellon University and Harlequin. While Harlequins commercial Dylan compiler for Windows has been taken over by Functional Objects, CMU‘s code was later the base of the Gwydion Dylan GNU project.

While GD lacks some of the sophisticated features of Fun-O‘s compiler (it is a Dylan-To-C-Compiler and is not yet feature complete), it is already a a lot more than just an interesting piece of software as Dylan is a wonderful programming language and beats every other language in it‘s unique combination of speed, flexibility and beauty.

Dylan is fully buzzword compliant. To cite the GD home page:

Dylan is an advanced, object-oriented, dynamic language which supports the rapid development of programs. When needed, the programmer can later optimize [his or her] programs for more efficient execution by supplying type information to the compiler. Nearly all entities in Dylan (including functions, classes, and basic data types such as integers) are first class objects. Additionally Dylan supports multiple inheritance, polymorphism, multiple dispatch, keyword arguments, object introspection, and many other advanced features.

Dylan unites the good stuff of many other successful programming languages: the legibility of Pascal, the everything-is-an-object-paradigm of Smalltalk, the performance of C, the reusability of Lisp. Technically, it is more related to the Common Lisp Object System. It‘s inventor, Andrew Shalit, said he „invented Dylan to free the world from C++“ and I think he has done a wonderful job in this respect.

In addition to just combine the best of other worlds, Dylan adds some significant features, most notably the multi-methods which helps getting rid of the stupid notion of considering methods being a part of classes. Dylan also has a very clean handling of namespaces, supporting modular development which can be especially useful when many developers work on the same code base. Dylan‘s macro system is prepared to let you easily produce your own simplified scripting languages on the foundation of the full Dylan feature set.

I could rave on for hours about Dylan which I consider the most excellent piece of of programming language design I have ever seen. I think it beats the shit out everything out there but unfortunately Dylan hasn‘t yet gained enough momentum to attract enough developers to bring it forward in a way to show its strengths to a broader public.

If you are interested to know more about Dylan you might want to get more insight in the Dylan WikiWikiWeb or just go ahead and give you a great time with the Dylan Reference Manual. The Dylan Programming book not only introduces Dylan step-by-step but also compares its features with C, C++ and Java as you go along. Also very interesting is the Literate Programming code of the Monday project of Peter Housel. And, of course, there is comp.lang.dylan.

Have you ever wondered who the bad guys really are and who is behind everything when things become real pushy? Oh no, it is not the big corporations and it‘s not the government. And it‘s not the oil industry as well. Neither the secret service. It‘s the lawyers.

So ever wondered why SCO is fighting its fierce war against the world (and the open source community in particular)? Here is why: the lawyers get 20% of it.

Last Friday, I attended an Apple Technology Briefing starring Simon Patience, head of „Core OS“ (aka Darwin) at Apple. He was about to give a talk on Darwin so I was prepared my questions. In addition, there was talk on Mac OS X Server by Armin Briegel of Apple Germany and André Aulich talked about Open Directory 2, the new OpenLDAP-based directory services subsystem of Mac OS X Server 10.3.

Actually, I missed the first talk on OS X Server because Apple decided to hold the at a lecture room at Freie Universität Berlin which is quite far away from the center of Berlin where I live and I got up late :-)

So my day started with Simon Patience (who is on tour in Europe these days as it seems). Simon is from Britain, is very polite and seems to know what he is talking about. He gave a quick overview on the main new features of Mac OS X 10.3 and never stopped explaining that Steve will kick him immediately if he is going to comment on „future products“. So we shouldn‘t ask. But apart from the standard blurb, Simon could actually shed some light on some issues. I am not going to note everything he said (unfortunately, the slides are not available)

Simon said Darwin 7.0 is based mainly on FreeBSD 4.8 with some extensions of FreeBSD 5. I forgot to ask which features these were, but I guess it is basically about userland applications. Darwin now comes with a Unified Buffer Cache (which means it makes use of all memory at doesn‘t reallocate memory when data gets transferred from Cache to executable memory) and it supports asynchronous I/O. This is all fine but somehow expected as Apple had to close that gap to other UNIX operating systems. Now they have.

After some time I started to drop my questions. I pointed to the backup problem as they are still pushing the resource-fork contaminated HFS+ file system and critical tools like rsync and other backup solutions do not support this. I also asked about file system meta data and what Apple‘s plans were in this respect. Well, trying to save his job he said that Apple is currently evaluating this heavily, looking at what everybody else in the market is doing but hasn‘t settled on any specific path yet. Hmm. This didn‘t make me that happy, but at least it shows that Apple is aware of this problem and is going to do something about it.

I also pushed the metadata issue once more and gave him a hard time that the „Tracker“ of BeOS running on my old Dual PPC 603/133MHz („G2“) BeBox machine still outperforms the Mac OS X Finder by 10:1 even when running on a Dual PPC G5/2000MHz machine. He noted that the original developer of the BeOS Tracker is working in his group and he is aware of this as well. Good answer.

Asked about Linux file system support (EXT2FS etc.) he said this would see this as a „great third party“ opportunity. I think he is right and I wonder why so far nothing has popped up. It would be cool to be able to mount EXT2 and EXT3 file systems on the Mac via Firewire to easily exchange large amounts of data with Linux systems. I know there is some HFS hacking going on in the Linux world but I wouldn‘t trust it as much as a EXT2 support created by the Linux community for the Mac. By the way, NTFS support is in Darwin 7 but only in read-only form. Simon said, this work was based on reverse-engineering. Hope they are not getting in trouble with the DMCA with this one.

I pushed a bit more why the graphics card device drivers were not open-source as well. He answered this is mainly a problem with the graphics cards manufacturers who were not willing to expose details of the inner workings of their hardware by giving out the controlling software. So it is not really Apple‘s problem in this respect and I guess they would change this if they could.

I also asked about DarwinPorts and why it hasn‘t been in the final version of Panther while it was in early betas. He said that they wanted to include it but found (unnamed) „security issues“ they considered to be a showstopper. I am not sure if he considers these issues to be general or if we are just talking about minor bugs. But it might also be that Apple has problems with a Package Manager that gets binaries from unauthenticated programs. I don‘t know what the consequences will be but maybe they are adding digital signatures to all this? Actually, I have no clue. We‘ll see what is coming. So far, fink has to serve our needs (and does this well).

The final talk on Open Directory 2 was very practical and focused a lot on integration with Windows‘ Active Directory but didn‘t leave out important features of OS X Server. The talk was a lot better than expected. André Aulich is also a translator for O‘Reilly.

The whole event very technical which was good as the whole audience looked like Geeks anyway. Some MacHackers were there, some were related to BeNG and BeLUG, others were from the university field I guess. All in all the event was a good thing as it was way beyond marketing blurb and gave food for some interesting discussions afterwards. Apple is on a good way providing events like this. Next step should be to create free (or at least: cheap) developer roadshows with experts giving insight in OS technologies. This on was more for system administrators but a Micro-WWDC could be help generate even more interest from developers.

I am really looking forward upgrading the OS X 10.2 Server installations at our university to 10.3. A thorough, while screenshot-less review of Joel Rennich at AFP548.com goes through the new features of the upgraded version and it all looks very promising. I am quite impressed how many open-source beasts have been tamed in the new black box: Kerberos, OpenLDAP, Postfix, Cyrus IMAP, Mailman, Squirrelmail, Samba. Add Apple‘s own improved AFP, NetBoot/NetInstall, Print Services and client/workgroup services and the basic UNIX services (like NFS, BIND, NAT, ipfw, PPTP) and you get a box full of up-to-date, tool-of-choice packages with a comprehensive administration interface. Not bad.

All this not only comes with a complete GUI for easy setup and control, it also brings on complete control via the command line for all these features as well. So you can do everything via ssh as well. Furthermore, full replication allows easy setup of backup servers. It is really impressive. Do these guys ever sleep?

However, my experiences with Mac OS X Server 10.2 has been mixed so far: many things just didn‘t work as expected and strange bugs were popping up here and there while basic functionality was usually stable and a lot better than the OS9-based predecessors. I will post my review here once I have tested the big cat.

Have a close look at this

And this.

Is it real?

Here is more.

Beans Magic looks interesting.

Update: This BBC article covers the same topic.