Oh, behave! Watch these sexy Camp dudes getting wet big time (MPEG-4, 16,5MB). Oh yes, honey! Directly into my face!

Free hugs included!

Dogville is a great movie. I can only recommend seeing it. Nicole Kidman is probably one of the best actors of our times and director Lars von Trier once more proves his outstanding position in the movie scene.

Cryptome is a web site dedicated to publishing information on all kind of sensible topics and is usually considered to be the next on the list when THEY need to tighten the screws once more. Cryptome publishes documents on things like the surveillance system Echelon, the NSA Tempest system, DVD decryption and so on. I can also recommend their Eyeball Series taking a closer look at things that are normally out of sight a bit like the US Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Yesterday, the FBI visited Cryptome, in order to „ask Cryptome to report to the FBI any information which Cryptome „had a gut feeling“ could be a threat to the nation“. Cryptome „did not agree to report anything to the FBI that is not available on the website“ and instead documented the incident including the names of the FBI agents on their website.

Cryptome has a RSS feed.

The new issue of the US hacker magazine 2600 is out and I am very pleased to see they have taken a picture of a german train on the cover of the magazine patched with photos of the Camp. Thanks guys. Guess you had a great time.

Falk Gärtner, also known as proto.beamaz, has released 26-pages PDF document on optimizing Mac OS X 10.3 for realtime performance. Falk is a VJ and uses his Powerbook for realtime VJing with VDMXX. Mixing multiple DV streams in realtime needs maximum performance and if you are operating your computer in a dedicated environment without there is enough slack you can cut from your default install freeing extra CPU cycles for increased performance.

But take care! The document‘s font might harm your vision!

You didn‘t follow the last years of UNIX wars? No problem. Here is a perfect abstract of what happened. IRC style, baby yeah!

Ever wondered who is behind this 64×64 pixels image on the net? Buttafly has the answer.

The BlinkenArea – a group of people dedicated to all things Blinkenlights – has completed its documentation of their space at the Camp. Complete with videos and data files. Check it out.

Having UNIX under the hood is a new thing to the traditional Macintosh user. In the early days, UNIX was considered being user-unfriendly with a „horrid“ user interface, complicated, something for programmers and nothing a Macintosh user can make use of. Well, this is mostly true but misses a significant point: UNIX is good for programmers and programmers are good for users because they write the programs users can use.

With the advent of Mac OS X, overall program quality has increased a lot. This can primarily attributed to the object-oriented, framework-based programming environment known as Cocoa. In contrast to the old-school programmers interface („Carbon„), Cocoa ensures that programmers make good reuse of what is there and this is good for users as it ensures more consistency in how things work. But what is the role of UNIX?

UNIX is important as it is a user interface for programmers, system administrators and power users. It attracts gifted people and they love having „everything“ under control. I consider this group of people to be one of the most important groups for Apple‘s current resurrection. The high acceptance the machines have recently found in environments like universities, high-end workstation users and scientists are a sign for this as Macs have often been blocked by the tech staff because of the lack of UNIX integration.

So how can you make use of UNIX for you? If you are not too familiar with the UNIX toolbox, the Terminal program might be a strange beast. But it is actually an elegant piece of work once you get accustomed to. The programs that are installed by default are sufficient to keep you busy for a couple of months. Try editors like emacs or vi and see how different things can be. Try using pipes on the command line to see how you can create powerful text filters out of a set of small programs each designed „to do one thing well“.

UNIX is actually a word for a family of operating systems. They are similar, but not exactly the same. Bringing an application that runs on one version to another can be quite tricky. This is nothing for the novice user. If you more interested in the UNIX application area and you want to install things like The GIMP or the KDE application suite, you should make use of a package manager. A package manager is a set of tools doing the hard part: downloading the source code of the program to your machine, unpacking it, adjusting compilation parameters, compiling it to machine code, installing it. Until now, two projects have been more or less visible trying to get things to work on the Mac.

The first and most active project is called fink. Fink is actually build around a well-established system: the Debian project‘s package management system known as Advanced Package Tool (APT). This is good in many respects: first, there is a proven set of tools (apt-get etc…) that are well known to many UNIX nerds (Debian is really a bare-bones Linux distribution that mainly attracts programmers and system administrators). Second, there is a working file format for distribution of compiled binary code („.deb“ files). Third, the Debian community somehow predefines what actually gets packaged under which name and dependencies do not have to be figured out from scratch. In addition, the fink command adds a couple of other options for the trained systems operator. Actually, quite a few of my friends complained a bit about fink in the recent months because this and that didn‘t work. While I can‘t rule out that a comprehensive tool can introduce problems to your system, it is my strong belief and experience that fink is quite stable and proven and basically works as expected. Many people are working on the ports and fink is the fastest way today to get your hands on up-to-date UNIX programs.

But there is another option although it covers itself in some kind of mysterious clouds: the Darwin Ports projects. This package manager is based on the also well-established FreeBSD Ports system. As you might know, Darwin (the „UNIX core“ of Mac OS X) borrows a lot from FreeBSD and the „Userland“ (the programs you use on the command line) are in line with the current FreeBSD 5 distribution. So bringing the Ports system to Darwin is straightforward and backed by the major FreeBSD hackers of Apple. You might want to read this interview with Jordan Hubbard, long-time FreeBSD developer and now an Apple employee, on the aims of Darwin Ports.

But Darwin Ports seems to be stuck a bit. There is not much visible activity and the list of ports is still very small compared to fink‘s progress. The home page is not up-to-date and it is even more confusing to see that various cooporations have been announced (as the metapkg initiative) but nothing seems to bear any fruits so far. Even more confusing, early beta versions of Mac OS X 10.3 contained the GUI ports installer of the Darwin Ports projects but it later vanished and was not included when Panther shipped. I am sure DarwinPorts are able to make a difference once available and probably supported by Apple but so far things are a bit dizzy and I would recommend sticking to fink until further notice.

If there is any interest by the readers of this weblog, I would add more blurb on how to make use of UNIX for Macintosh power users. Let me know.

Okay, I promised a review of my 15″ Powerbook and I was quite mum on this topic because I did not feel like I already knew enough of my machine to give you good feedback. But now is the time. Unfortunately, I must admit my machine suffers from what most owners suffer from. There are three major issues with this machine:

1. The White Spot Problem. Reported throughout the internet, this seems to be the the biggest trouble with this computer. White spots appear over time and my machine has them as well. It is quite annoying although you can still work with your computer. But you have them always and when looking at movies it is more than annoying. However, it seems as Apple has finally admitted this problem exists, after Powerbook users joined and brought up this Online Petition. I signed it, if you have the same problem, please sign it too.
2. Noise. The second problem is noise from the loudspeakers. If it is quiet in your room, you can hear crisp sounds coming out of the speakers. They tend to become much loader if any kind of ethernet activity is going on. I noticed something similar with the latest G5 machines where it is even louder. Obviously the machines lack some kind of shielding. Although this is not as annoying as the white spot problem, it should be fixed.
3. Battery Lifetime. I was quite disappointed to see that I never got more than 3 hours of power from the battery. Actually, it was more close to 2 hours depending on what I do, but the things I do seem to prevent independent work longer than 120 minutes. Apple should do something about this and offer a stronger battery for the machine as soon as possible.
4. Loose Lid. The lid does not close as it should. For reasons totally unclear to me, Apple chose to design the lid with some extra „air“ between the lid and the bottom. So when it is closed, it still moves when you press it. This is annoying, when wearing it around. I don‘t understand why it it just can‘t be done otherwise. Jobs tends to compare Apple to BMW quite often. This is not a good thing, Steve. Please try to stack up with MERCDEDES-BENZ. Their doors shut perfectly. I would expect the „door“ of my Powerbook to shut with the same feeling of preciseness and with no slackness.
5. Lid Angle. Due to the new lid construction style taken over from the iBook, the lid can‘t be pushed as far back as the Titanium G4 Powerbook. This usually not a problem but there are situations where you would just want to push it a bit further back if only to see it was already well-positioned. However, this is not a big issue, more a remark. The Titanium adopted to all kinds of situations where the Aluminum G4 just adopts to some less.
6. No Handle. There is no built-in handle and there seems to be no option to add one.

Okay. Now after having dropped my rants, I can turn to the pros of this computer: it is a wonderful machine in every other respect:

1. Performance. The performance is fine. Coupled with Panther, my workflow is more than sufficient. The machine is powerful enough to handle the usual DV to MPEG-4 encodings in acceptable time and the 3D acceleration makes the windows fly (not only with Exposé)
2. Keyboard Illumination. The keyboard illumination is pure beauty. More optimization could be done on making the funnction keys a bit more visible but in general everything is fine. There are however some bugs in Panther that keep the lighting from switching on automatically after wakeup. Putting the machine to sleep and waking it up once more usually helps, but the feature is sometimes stuck. Usually, when you want to demonstrate the feature to potential convert :-)
3. Sturdiness. Overall sturdiness has improved a lot over the former G4 model. While the old model was quite flexible, the new feels more like a piece of metal, which is good. If the lid wouldn‘t move, it would be perfect. There is still work to be done and if Apple sees room for improvement, they should go ahead and do it, but it is fine already.
4. Keyboard Feel. I know this is a very personal thing, but the keyboard is fine for me. Good they added another COMMAND-key and good they still have the ENTER key in addition to the RETURN key. This is one of the small things I like about Macs compared to PCs which have no notion of separate input confirmation keys.
5. Screen. Apart from the white spot problem, the screen is bright, clear and you can look at it from almost every angle without any distortion in color or brightness. Very good.
6. Interfaces. This machine has them all: an extra Firewire port makes working with a DV input source and external hard disks much easier. The Firewire 800 port is good for high-performance disks like RAID, which are not that important to me that much but to other people like VJs. USB 2.0 works and it is good to have this option although I dislike USB a lot in general. It is a clever move to have one USB port on each side as it is ideal for right-handers and lefties alike. The analog part of the DVI-I port not only connects to VGA devices but it decodes the display type and the supported resolutions. I forgot how this feature is named and found no mentioning in the Developer Note as well but I remember this being a feature added to VGA recently by an industry-wide agreement.
7. DVD. The built-in DVD drive is pretty silent and burns DVD-R at double speed, which is acceptable. Unfortunately, this drive does not yet support DVD+R media, but I am not really missing that.
8. Sound. The sound of the machine is so much better than the original Titanium G4. I know the speakers have already improved during the lifetime of the series but the Aluminium model adds a lot. Sound is still far away from HiFi, but it is much less annoying and louder (could be even a bit more louder).
9. WLAN Reception. WLAN was a catastrophe in the former model, not it is somewhere between okay and good. I have noticed even better signal numbers on PC laptops being connected to the same base station so this can still improve, but now I have good coverage in my whole flat where I could just use WLAN in a single room before.

So what should I say? Apart from the bugs, this machine is very recommendable. I heard, Apple has stopped production right now anyway so if you go ahead and order yours, you will probably receive a fixed version already. I am waiting for my old Powerbook to return from repair before I hand over this Powerbook to AppleCare to get rid of the display and noise bug. I can wait as it will make it much more likely to get every known issue fixed.