Just got notified my last talk in Switzerland gained some documentation.

Close after Safari 1.0 has seen the light of day the new WebCore framework (or WebKit) that is part of the release independent developers embrace the new tool to replace the old HTML renderers. It comes as no surprise that two weblog utilities are the among the first to push out new versions recompiled for the new framework.

Shrook was released as a „Technology Preview“ a couple of days ago and does its HTML preview pane now with WebKit. And today, Kung-Log also advanced one number behind the point to embrace WebKit for its preview pane.

Always a bit ahead of the pack, the OmniGroup had released a beta version of their alternative browser OmniWeb that also uses the new rendering toolkit.

The good thing is: more and more applications are about to go one step further and make use of new web standards.

After having had a first look at Panther‘s new features I can‘t get rid of the feeling that Apple is about to launch Mac OS 9.3 instead of 10.3. Why?

First, the overall look of the new UI is closing the gap to X‘s ancestor: the window title become solid grey, the menus regain the old school divider line and the Finder reintroduces color labels for files. Hooray. Have I waited for this for a long time? No. Well, I agree that this face-lifting is the right thing to do as it is obvious that Apple was mislead when going for the greyish striped look in critical user interface elements. However, this can be considered a bug fix, not a feature.

Then there is the „all-new“ Finder. It is actually only slightly changed. It makes use of the obscure „Network“ entry point for the first time. The technology behind is old: automount. This has been used by OS X for quite a while now (for mounting home directories from OS X Server). So for the first time we can use something in a way it was conceived from the beginning.

The Open/Save file dialog has been changed once again. This time it seems as if Apple has finally understood: it is the same interface like the finder. But halt, so far there is only the column and list view. No icon view. Why? And the list view does not feature triangles. Why? Argh. Apple, please. Add the icon view, get it finally right and please don‘t call it a new feature. Another bug fix.

Ah yes, and then there is Exposé. I admit it might be useful although it tries to steal another three function keys from me (but this can be changed). But Exposé is not really a revolution as it is just a workaround for the basic shortcomings of window-based user interface albeit a welcome one.

Fast User Switching: we have seen this on Windows. Bug fix. Faxing? Windows users do it for years now. FontBook? It‘s about time. FileVault? Still no details but crypto file systems are nothing new for UNIX users. Fast PDF rendering? I wondered why it was slow in the first place. Faster Mail.app with thread support? As long as it also stops crashing all the time, it is appreciated.

So far, I find nothing special that might be worth paying for. Okay, there are some other improvements in the Windows sharing and VPN area, there is explicit support for IPsec and so on. But this could be added to Jaguar as well. This is not a point release.

The FTP protocol has been around since the of the Internet. Together with the TELNET protocol it formed the basis of interaction on the net these days. Today, FTP is still in wide use as so many people are used to the protocol and there are so many clients and servers available and installed.

But FTP lacks a certain feature: security. The passwords used are transmitted unencrypted and therefore FTP should be avoided instead for public servers with anonymous access enabled. But there is help: the SFTP protocol is a FTP-like protocol run via SSH (Secure Shell) that can be considered „secure enough“ these days. With Mac OS X, ssh use is becoming ubiquitous as the SSH server is not only preinstalled but can be switched on with a single click on the Sharig preference pane. With SSH enabled, you gain SFTP access immediately. The only thing you need is a proper SFTP client.

There are two excellent contenders in this area: Transmit and Fugu. Eventually, both programs received honors at WWDC this week. Fugu won the „Best Mac OS X Use of Open Source“ award and Transmit scored second place for „Best Mac OS X User Experience“. I can basically agree.

Transmit is a really, really fast program. Use it for FTP transfer and it rocks. But what‘s best is there is seamless support for SFTP as well. It might be your first choice for general SFTP but it is non-free and it lacks an important feature: support for public key authentication and SSH agents. Fugu on the other hand is a dedicated SFTP/SCP/SSH client (so it has no FTP support at all) and has a comparably easy interface. And it‘s free. And, best of all, it does support public key authentication and SSH agents. What is an SSH agent, you ask?

A SSH agent is the „keychain“ for ssh. It stores secret keys and allows repeated access to them for multiple ssh sessions. As SSH is a command line UNIX application, integration with the Mac OS X Keychain is not that easy. But there is another helpful tool called SSH Agent actually does this integration and makes working with SSH on Mac OS X a breeze.

When you install it, you can store your SSH passphrases in your keychain. Okay, you might consider this a security risk as the login password might be a bit easier to guess and opens up access to a multitude of accounts that are actually key based. But you are choosing your passwords carefully and change them regularly, don‘t you? So there is not a problem (except that nobody knows which encryption Apple chooses for the keychain, but I guess it‘s AES). But once you have installed SSH Agent you know what you have been missing.

The Mac is finally becoming a viable platform for UNIX system administration. And this is good.

Apple‘s iChat AV right now seems to be the number one toy in the Mac community. I already went throught a couple of tests and it is obvious there are some problems with connecting from behind a NAT router. But in general it is possible, but it seem to depend heavily on the NAT being used.

I am in fact behind two (!) cascaded NAT routers before my packets leave off to the Internet. The first one is a Linux box, the second one is running NetBSD. But it works in both video and audio mode with all machines with a public IP address and even other computers behind yet another NAT router. So let‘s dig up some dirt. How do they do it?

Apple‘s own documentation is quite sparse on this topic. There is a TechNote explaining the ports that need to be open behind firewalls. But this does not explain how it works. So I was digging deeper and I discovered a page on NAT checking by Bryan Ford. He actually has prepared a Internet-Draft on this topic.

He explains a model for doing UDP to UDP communication behind NAT using a third computer telling each of the peers about the IP addresses that are actually used when sending out UDP packets. I don‘t know if this is the method Apple uses but they have both the central computer (the AIM system) and are in fact using UDP to communicate. And I don‘t see any other chance to do this anyway.

He provides a small NATCHECK program with precompiled versions for Linux and FreeBSD. The source does not compile out of the box on Mac OS X, but I patched it to make it work. It is just a single line of code that was missing, so there is no big deal here. You find the compiled program and the patched source code in this disk image (if you are not technically inclined: download the image, wait for it to open, then open „Terminal“ and drag the „natcheck-darwin“ file to the window and hit return).

The program detects if your router is suited to peer-to-peer communication or not. For my setup it reports:

RESULTS:
Address translation:           NAPT (Network Address and Port Translation)
Consistent translation:        YES (GOOD for peer-to-peer)
Unsolicited messages filtered: YES (GOOD for security)

The important point seems to be to have NAPT and consistent translation. Routers that had a NO on consistent translation were not able to communicate with me so far.

I am still not sure if this is the key to solve the iChat problems, feel free to comment on this issue here. I‘ll keep you updated on my progress.

UPDATE: There is a thread on Mac OS X Hints covering the same topic. On first look no real news however.

UPDATE: For people using the AirPort Extreme base station via DSL (PPP over Ethernet) the V5.1 firmware update (also included in the 3.1 update for the whole AirPort software suite) improves the situation.

UPDATE: I have compiled natcheck with the „verbose“ flag set so it reports the IP address and port number that is detected by the outside host. natcheck itself always uses port 9857 and connects to port 9856.

Let‘s talk about Germany. There is a certain predictablity about Germans that seems to be unique to this ethnic group. It is a specific behaviour exposed when a basic, well-spread question is being asked when people meet: how are you?. The same applies for latin-american verbalisations like „¿Qué tal?“.

Did you know that? Germans tend to react quite confused when you ask them these simple, standard and probably mostly meaningless questions. The reason is that in German conversation superflous things are better left away completely so any other question that is actually asked is considered to be of some sincerity.

This is where the trouble starts. German logic demands that if „how are you?“ is actually a serious question it demands a serious answer. But what should you say? Well, there is the physical aspect: how do I feel now? What does my stomach say? Is this slight hardening in my shoulder muscle worth considering? Then the psychological aspect: am I happy now? Could I feel better? What is the relevance of all of this in this specific moment? Aaaaargh!

All these questions come together in a split second. Because Germans are so busy evaluating all this in a single moment it takes a while for them to react and even that adds to the overall confusion as the asking person would have expected nothing but a simple „fine“ or something like that (we can never be sure). And the answer was never considered to be important anyway. But now he looks into the eyes of the insecured Teuton that tries to react as correct as possible but is simply not capable of deciding on what to say. It is a desaster, everytime. In short: we hate it.

The only comparable construct in German is called „na?“ and means basically nothing. It just matters how you say it. It is generally ok to simply answer with another „Na?“ (also being put as a question) and you‘re done.

Football is by far the most popular sport in Europe. And yes, dear visitors from abroad, we call it football and not soccer, although the word was born in London once (ask the Word Detective or Wordorigines.org to get more information on this).

Germans are surely among the most passionate devotees in this area. But for a long time, being interested in football was not really considered to be hip amoung the k3wl people. This has changed in recent years and now there are new magazines popping up complementing the old ones and during the last world championships a real craze was going on.

Root of all devotion in Germany was the winning of the world championships 1954 in Bern, Switzerland known as „Das Wunder von Bern“ (the wonder of Bern). The Germans were total mavericks but defeated the favorites, the Hungarians in a suspenseful game which gained cult status in Germany last but not least because of the now famous live radio coverage by Herbert Zimmermann.

This year, the craze seems to culminate. There is movie in the works telling a (probably boring) family drama situated around the match and – best of all – some film students have created an excellent remake of the game called „Die Helden von Bern“ (the heroes of Bern) using LEGO figures. This is great, check out the animation even if you have no clue of german of all. It‘s worth it.

If you like LEGO-style animations, Brickfilms provides a lot more of that stuff.

It‘s party time again. Like every year, the Nation Of Gondwana is scheduled to take place at July 12th/13th. This time it is going to be at Schloss Dammsmühle, close to Berlin. You find an interactive route description starting at Berlin Alexanderplatz here.

Nation Of Gondwana has a track record of being the alternative party event at Love Parade weekend. It is an outstanding open-air event with an interesting line-up of DJs (most notably: Sven Dohse and Der Dritte Raum) and is renowned for its outstanding and very funny performances at the event.

There is photo archive of Nation Of Gondwana 2002. Project Blinkenlights was doing its experimental Bushfire installation there as well.

On my last trip I have photographed some objects that you might want to use as a desktop picture.

Rome Airport