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KDE, unfortunately, seems to be trying to look like XP.

KDE has looked like XP since long before XP saw the light of day.

IMHO, all of them (KDE, Gnome, and XP) look like ass when compared to BlackBox.

Here's an alternate link:

http://homepage.mac.com/monickels/techjob.html

And the full text:

By Grant Barrett @ World New York

This article by the New York Times suggests that people are becoming technically adept by necessity, and that, as happened with radios and automobiles, eventually all technology will take care of itself and be as mindless to operate as toasters are today.

I see that day as decades off. Computers are still complex to make, complex to learn, complex to integrate with other gadgets. More importantly, they still have more than one knob or lever. Until that day of machine self-reliance, I see a golden opportunity: an under-served market waiting for the ambitious to step in.

The following is a small excerpt of a manuscript, modified to suit this topic.

...

Technical Self-Employment Is A Fat Paycheck Waiting to Be PocketedBy Grant Barrett @ World New York

This article by the New York Times suggests that people are becoming technically adept by necessity, and that, as happened with radios and automobiles, eventually all technology will take care of itself and be as mindless to operate as toasters are today.

I see that day as decades off. Computers are still complex to make, complex to learn, complex to integrate with other gadgets. More importantly, they still have more than one knob or lever. Until that day of machine self-reliance, I see a golden opportunity: an under-served market waiting for the ambitious to step in.

The following is a small excerpt of a manuscript, modified to suit this topic.

...

Technical Self-Employment Is A Fat Paycheck Waiting to Be Pocketed

Last year, at a Christmas party held by a client of mine at a very nice restaurant in Manhattan, I ran into a friend of a friend. I don't know him well, but we've socialized once or twice, and have had solid geek conversations in the past. He does Active Directory management for big corporations.

I should say, he used to do that. He's been unemployed now for more than a year.

After we shook hands I could see his face change from a friendly howdy-do. He dropped down into commiseration mode: the corners of his mouth drooped, his head ducked, he took a Hapsburg stance--his feet angled, his left foot perpendicular to his right, heel against arch, his torso yawed a few degrees off center, his hands lightly on his hips--and waited expectantly.

I knew what he wanted. I make my living with private computer consulting: client-site tech support, mostly, but pretty much any of the little computer-related tasks small businesses have. I knew he wanted to talk about the tech business. And he wanted me to start, so I complied. "How's business?" I asked.

He jumped in according to the script. "Oh, it's not been going well at all. Awful. I've been out of work. I can't find anything. How're you doing?" He anticipated a long bitch session of headhunter mistreatment, interview mishaps, finicky clients, resume failure. He relished the chance.

"It's great," I said. "I've got more business than I can handle. I'm giving it away. I've probably handed off or turned down enough business in the last six months to employ another person full-time. In fact, I've just turned over a second $30,000-a-year piece of business to another tech so I could concentrate on other clients."

He looked at me in amazement. His eyes bugged out. I saw doubt, then self-doubt, there, and eventually he just walked away.

My theory: If you are reasonably adept at using or setting up a computer, there's no good reason to be unemployed.

Forget the boom-time Nineties. They're gone. I'm sorry.

flightgear runs under linux.

Flightgear runs under Linux, Windows, OS X, IRIX and Solaris. BTW, there is a binary of 0.92 for OS X - follow the link to the master location for OS X.

It's absolutly amazing that Austin could achieve this, but the project is getting at it's limits. Why?

Even the 4th release candidate still has quality issues, or, with a less friendly word: bugs. The user interface is really, really bad. Not only does it use custom widgets, but the widgets do not follow the usual expectations. The dialogs behave strangely (exit buttons), and, for example, if you increase the rendering quality, the system drops you down to the nearest airport, which comes handy if you're flying a 747 and you end up on a helipad.

People also develop flight models and (photo)realistic landscapes (e.g. the Global Scenery Project or, e.g., Cormac Shaw's high-detail scenery for Ireland and his Aer Lingus Jets at the Irish Hub.) Stuff like that generally works much better, and there is a great variety to choose from!

I also tried to evaluate FlightGear. This project is not anywhere near X-Plane. If I'm not mistaken, they only accurately simulate piston engines (other engines are a weak approximation). Besides, FlightGear doesn't compile if you don't have certain libraries installed, which turned out to be a pain on OS X...

That said, I believe that FlightGear may outperform X-Plane in a couple of years. Until then, I'll stick with X-Plane...

My girlfriend and I recently took a three week cross-country road trip (pictures here), and visited the following destinations (they aren't entirely geeky, but there are some geeky spots along the way):

Tallahassee, FL -> Madisonville, LA -> Austin, TX -> Elephant Butte, NM (silly name, cool place!) -> Williams, AZ (stopped to see the Very Large Array (VLA) on the way, near Magdalena, NM -> Grand Canyon, AZ -> Las Vegas, NV -> Yosemite National Park, CA -> San Francisco, CA (lotsa fun geeky stuff here) -> Lake Tahoe, CA -> Elko, NV -> Denver, CO -> Oklahoma City, OK -> Tallahassee, FL

I highly recommend this trip, as you get to see a lot of things in a fairly short amount of time. Some tips (in no particular order):

- Buy a national parks pass. See my other post for more information.
- In desolate areas, keep spare gas with you. Five gallons should do nicely, unless you have an SUV.
- Bring a camera. A digital camera is preferred, and a 128 MB picture card (or more) is highly recommended if you are using a digital camera.
- Go camping. All motels, regardless of location, are pretty much exactly the same -- four walls, a bed and a shower. Camping is different wherever you go.
- Carry a AAA membership. They can get you out of many hairy situations.
- Ride with two or more people. This makes the trip that much more fun, because you can share the experiences for a lifetime. It's also much safer to travel this way.
- Many of my other recommendations are here -- they are equally important to having a good trip.

Happy travels!

Screenshots located here.

glad you like your iPod, but I'm also glad you aren't this guy

Its commonly beleived that users won't upgrade their browsers; but its not true. MacOSX has mostly shipped with IE; the most common browser now is Safari. See here and here. The change happened too fast to be thru new installs.

Unfortunately metaprogramming is a pain in C++. One of the biggest problems is the lack of reflection in C++ that would allow template metaprograms to easily determine type information. Some of the new proposals would remedy that issue. Also the use of local classes in templates, that is sorely lacking in the current standard, would be a great boon for such techniques.

And maybe one day there will be many more C++ textbooks that don't just relegate templates to half a paragraph in the "advanced techniques" section. Templates are fundamental to C++. If you don't use the benefits of C++ then C++ really isn't that interesting a language. No wonder so many people propose using C rather than C++. It's like programming in Lisp but refusing to use list datastructures.

Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie has a song called "Every OS Sucks". (mp3.com -- FRRYYY) (Or, if you've got QuickTime, you can try their video)

spanish what ringtone?

... was in the same situation. On pricewatch, he found a notebook from MicroPro, with a 2500+ (socketed no less), a 333Mhz fsb, Mobile Radeon 9000 64DDR, 60gig HD, and a really nice 15 inch screen. And if you go to pricewatch, and search for "MicroNote Professional 530", you can get it for under $1,200 dollars. It doesn't get the best battery life (around 2 hours and 10 minutes under normal use), and it's feels almost twice as heavy as my ibook, but it's a very cool machine.

There are some things I don't like about it though. Of course this machine has some very hot components. At the bottom, there is a large intake just under the CPU, with a solid copper heat sink and heat pipes that bring it to the left side of the notebook, with a turbine to help it along. For this reason, you can't keep it on your lap (both legs) without blocking the airflow. This doesn't seem like a big deal, but if you put your hand next to the vent on the left, you can feel that the air is really hot.

I wouldn't recommend it if you are looking for an extremely mobile notebook, but if you want one of the most powerful notebooks in production for under $1,200, click here for details. Remember, you get a special deal if you buy it through pricewatch (about $222 I think). If you want any more details, ask me, or him.

I much prefer AppKiDo since it allows searching and it shows you a list of all methods of a class (including those from super classes) as well as a list of just those provided by the class itself.

I'f I'm not mistaken, you have a homepage at mac.com .

I'f I'm not mistaken, you have a homepage at mac.com .

Oh, yes. I've found what I consider to be my favorite OS X theme in Milk. It's white. It's elegant. It's simple. It reminds me of the iHardware color schemes. Very, very sexy. And, it gets rid of Aqua's most loathed, in my view, feature - Pin Stripes. Anyhow, Milk can be found here. Assuming one has duality, which I believe the site provides a link, it makes for a very attractive UI.

XShelf allows one to break a move or copy in two steps by giving you a temporary holding pallete to which you can drag an icon or group of icons; but as others have mentioned, the copy/paste "hack" works, too.

Because we are manly computer users and therefore need a mouse with balls (or at least one of them).

On the most basic level, some of these ideas exist in tangible forms today.

Salling Software's Clicker is a pretty cool piece of software that does some nifty remote control things with Bluetooth-enabled Sony Ericsson phones. But the really nifty stuff are its "proximity sensor" features. When it senses the phone leaves the computer's general area, it pauses iTunes; when you return, it resumes playing. It can also be AppleScript-enabled, letting you do any number of other proximity-to-computer related tasks.

Just a thought. (No, I don't work for Salling Software.)

Something like Minority Report's smart advertising based on a retina scan comes to mind. Basing this off of wireless phones, it seems very much like this idea might be widespread within a few years.

Interesting technology. That's all.

justen

Or, should the site get /.'d, the relavent bit is:

How did you approach the extreme violence in the book- and were there ever any points where you thought you might have gone too far?

You can't ever go too far with violence. You either write it or you dont. If you choose to avoid it, that's fine, but if not, you've got to do it justice. I've taken some stick for passages in Altered Carbon which people complained had sickened them, but then violence should be sickening. I have no time for the sanitised approach you find in so much contemporary literature and film - the gun battles where bullets make neat red holes and bad guys fall conveniently and quietly dead, the interrogations where people get slapped about a bit and then rescued. Or worse still the Lock, Stock brand of violence where it's all seen as a bit of a giggle and as long as you're enough of a cheeky geezer, it all comes out OK. Its precisely because of this "light" approach that we misunderstand the subject of violence so badly. Im not interested in pursuing that line. Where violence arises in my books, it is intended to shock, to horrify and to some extent to get the reader to face up to their own ambiguity on the subject. Because we all like seeing the bad guys taken down, but we dont usually like it so much when the flesh and blood reality of that act is rubbed in our faces. That ambiguity is exactly what Im after.

That's not in fact true. I'm even a "dot mac" subscriber. Heck, here's my "dot mac homepage" if you want to see pictures of my iPod, taken with iPhoto, published to dotmac, for example.

Original (.mac site, bandwidth will be exceeded soon probably). Mirror on my machine. Another one (side view) here.

http://homepage.mac.com/owlboy/wwdc56.jpg

Good? Bad? Ugly?

See it here

picture available here

You're trying to tell me that Jonathan Ive designed that? Pic

Here's a picture of the new G5 tower...

Kinda ugly if you ask me... :)

Here Crazy Lookin

Power Mac G5

Some OSX Books in pdf format here

Thanks to SYSTRAN and Sherlock:

Panther iDisk Preview:

With Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Mac online storage service and the use of iDisk furthermore become simple and convenient. Mac OS X Panther*, using completely new architecture, in order to access iDisk, brings ultimate performance and convenience to automatic operation synchronizing of information in regard to offline access and the desktop and Internet.

The Advanced Capability of iDisk which can be used with Panther is introduced.

• Preeminent performance and file operation at of speed iDisk, speedy it is not different from the operation with the local computer with it is possible to do. Retain there are no times when lag occurs the case such that the contents of iDisk because it is retained in local hard drive the file, browse the directory, are opened.
• As for ultimate convenience iDisk when you use with Panther, because it is displayed in Finder, there is no access and the what change to normal hard drive. To that, the file is opened, because it edits on iDisk it is possible, to retain, it is not necessary to upload and/or to download the file.
• Being automatic, with the iDisk architecture whose synchronizing Panther is completely new, as for the file it is copied to the local hard disk first. Because it is reflected on the server of the apple periodically and automatically, always it can access the modification which does in the desktop the up-to-date file from with any computer. In addition, when multiple Mac are used, it is possible to access the up-to-date file directly from with Finder of which computer.
• When being connected to offline access Internet to iDisk even, it is possible to open the file, to edit, to retain in iDisk. After that when you connect to Internet, all modification contents synchronization are done in iDisk.
• *Mac OS X 10.3 Panther is the difference sale.

They either pulled the content, or they are dealing with the slashdot effect. I did find it in Japanese though.

.Mac has a preview of panther and it contains a finder that looks exactly like those in the leaked screenshots!

Give GyazMail a try. http://homepage.mac.com/gooichi/GyazMail/. It's a really nice, fast, Cocoa email client. Best of all, it doesn't display inline HTML!

Mirror: here

Reality Distortion Field Enabled

Java was a bicycle peddled by a 300 fat man before Sun added SCO technology to it - and now, well, it's still a bicycle powered by the same fat man.

McDonald's is always hiring.

I mean, if this kid can get a job there, Linus might have a shot...

I just took a cross-country U.S. road trip, and the lack of water out west was one of the most noticeable things we encountered. Many campsites didn't have running water at all -- flush toilets were a luxury. It's a true challenge to stay clean, knowing that you can't take a shower. :^)

(For the overly curious, we did have a few stops at normal places where we were able to do laundry and take showers. Life wasn't bad at all on the road... A great trip indeed. Pictures are here for anyone who is interested)

...scary-looking skin/theme mod for OSX...

This page has a nice selection of themes for Mac OS X. The Rhapsodized and QNX themes are the best of them, IMHO.

bacchusrx.

I'm much more interested in having a google search available over my harddisk.

I thought I remember Google having a product like this, but I can't find it now.

MS Win2k and WinXP have an indexing service that's supposed to do just what you want. It's not enabled by default in 2k; not sure about XP. I've been afraid to try it for various paranoia and stability reasons.

HTdig was my next thought. It's designed for web pages, but I bet you could restrict it to your hard disk. However, the site says they don't index non-text files yet.

For some reason I felt like searching Freshmeat and came up with SWISH++. It says it can index hard drives and non-text files "such as Microsoft Office documents", although the method they describe they use is not one I'm sure would work since Office docs can be in Unicode.

Both HTdig and SWISH++ are GPL. There were other possibilities on Freshmeat, too.

I've posted the smaller movie [14MB] on the .Mac servers: the cockroach robot movie.

Who sold them their weapons?

Diplomacy failed with Iraq. They were given every opportunity. Now, after decades of state sponsored rape and torture, children imprisoned and buried alive, whole villages nerve gassed, etc., etc., ad nauseum; someone finally says "enough" and does something about it (thank you U.K., Australia, Poland, and the rest). And the socialist asshats all over the world spring to the defense of poor old Saddam, citing such luminary and level-headed allies as France and Russia as the "Voice of Peace."

It boggles the mind. It really does. Look, German, they (the Muslim extremists) hate you. They want to kill you. They are your sworn enemies. To them you are a beer-swilling, porn-corrupted, BMW driving Christian who must die or submit to Allah. The USA is not your enemy. Just because we have the firepower doesn't make us Imperialistic. We give the countries back after we conquer (in case you haven't noticed, you're still speaking German; and no offense intended, your people were extremely difficult opponents and almost had us whipped) We don't need Iraq's oil, we don't want everyone to have a McDonald's unless they fucking well want one. We want to drink beer, grill steaks, watch the kids play... maybe play a little baseball. With all of you. We want peace. But we damn sure ain't gonna stand around while innocents get slaughtered and call it peace.

Some OSX Books in pdf format here.

P.S. I just bought a new Power Mac(1.25GHX x 2) and I love it! Install an X windows server and you can run just about any existing X app. Really impressive.

Terminal.app also emulates DEC's tres-cool dtterm. Just set your TERM variable to dtterm. It's a superset of xterm-color functionality, as near as I can tell. As it happens, you can make Terminal.app do all kinds of wacky things with escapes. For instance:

alias dock='echo -n "[2t"'
alias lower='echo -n "[6t"'
alias raise 'echo -n "[5t"'

Here're some more.

'jfb

Before fussing with importing QuickBooks accounting data into the Quicken personal checkbook product, I would buy a copy of QuickBooks for OS X (Click the "Products" tab and then "Pro 5.0 for Mac" on the left side).

As for importing mail, the best thing to do is use an IMAP (not POP) mail solution, like .Mac and then you can access the mail from any computer and where, via IMAP or the Website.

Buy Macs for the Karma

So what would you replace the UN with - I suppose we all just should do whatever the US says? Bow down before Caesar? Pax Americana indeed. The US has been trying to undermine the UN since the UN was founded. It has withheld money, bugged delegations, bribed weaker nations, bullied stronger ones. The UN should be fixed - not abandoned. The USA needs to recognise that it is just one country out of hundreds and each country has certain soverign rights. Until you do even the Dutch can scare the pants off your chicken-shit gangster government.