Al Jazeera launches an international broadcast channel in english. YouTube has the opening sequence. If anybody knows of a video stream on the Internet, please let me know.

As I already reported: I am going to speak at foss.in in Bangalore, India the end of this month. I just bumped into this really nice poster for the event. I am really looking forward to this conference. It’s my first time in India.

I am a happy traveller this year. Next stop is Aarhus where I join the International Digital Art Festvail this weekend that runs from 23. October to 2. December 2006 in the city.

I am going to give a talk in the context of the „Crime and political aspects in Digital Art“ seminar presenting CCC culture, some general thoughts and of course a little bit of Blinkenlights.

End of November I will be heading to Bangalore to join FOSS.IN – India’s premier conference on free and open source technology – to give two extra presentations, including the closing keynote. FOSS.IN is organized by Atul Chitnis, who will also be a speaker at 23C3. This is my first trip to India at all so there is a lot to learn for me.

Oh yes, and India has voting computers too.

One more candidate than Communism.

The great video podcast series Chasing Windmills is starting a new season
This time it is pretty interactive and experimental. Each of the characters runs a blog and collects feedback from readers. The feedback itself might provide input for future stories as the series are produced just a few episodes ahead. Chasing Windmills intrigued me with its down-to-earth approach, black-and-white photography and the simplicity of production. I am really looking forward what the team has thought out for the upcoming plot.

I should have written about my most desired feature in Mac OS X and I could have been celebrated as the only person on the Internet that had foreseen the Time Machine feature. I can only hope that they will not build it on top of HFS+ but go for ZFS instead. Without snapshots I doubt this will ever work. Even more important, a storage pool system would be a really great addition for both Mac OS X client and server versions so I assume this is one of the big secrets that they refuse to talk about until next January I guess.

However, that they address backup as a primary feature shows how far ahead Apple is when thinking about their stuff. And it really shows they care about users and think from the top to bottom. That’s what I like about their work.

One thing I didn’t like was that Apple stopped distributing the kernel source code with the introduction of the Intel platform (for the Intel platform – the PPC version was still available). But surprise, surprise: it’s back! The xnu kernel is now hosted on the new Mac OS Forge site that acts as a replacement to the recently deceased OpenDarwin project site. And they have added new source code for Bonjour, the incredible launchd and the new Darwin Calendar collaboration server (this looks like a real opportunity for project work).

Update: Apple does not use ZFS. It is still all HFS Plus. From what I was able to find out, Time Machine does use Hard Links for storing incremental backups. Surprise, surprise. Why hasn’t anybody thought of this before? What a cool way to do it! I wonder how they are determining the „changed“ items. If they just walk through the file system they might be prone to race conditions (what if I move a file from folder B to A while A has already been processed but not B?). I still think they might have quietly introduced snapshots to HFS, but I have no confirmation for that.

I don’t know how many e-mails I sent and how much hope I had for this tool to emerge but it seems as if it is only a few days away: OmniPlan is coming. I am so fucking excited, you can’t believe it.

So it is out now. The price is disappointing: 149 US$. Let’s see how it turns out.

Having been a quiet Alphatester of the upcoming Übercaster podcasting solution on the Mac I want to point you to the new screencasts that have been posted on the Übercaster website. And in two days the public beta will arrive and I can only recommend checking it out.

The programmers have been very responsive and hard at work at the same time in the recent weeks and I think they can be proud of their new tool. It is a very elegant approach to the problems of a private podcaster and I think they will be rather successful with it.

Here’s why I think Übercaster is cool: it works along the lines of the typical workflow: prepare, record, cut and release. This is a very intelligent approach. Also, it it integrates really well into Mac OS X and makes use of the latest and greatest features of both the UI and the Core Audio subsystem. It also makes recording of Skype, Gizmo Project and iChat conversations really easy. There is also an „insert mode“ for recording which makes „adding stuff later“ a breeze.