Feelin' Fine

In a 3 hour iChat AV session with a friend yesterday, I got the idea of obtaining a cheap, old PowerMac that would allow me to run a small server here at home without having my power-eating Dual G5 running all the time. So, I went to check out eBay... Read More

So I bought an iSight today. Yeah, it's pretty expensive but it is a fun little toy that works fine with my iLife apps and iChat AV, so why go for something cheaper? After playing around with it for a while and trying some video chats, I decided to try and record something with iMovie HD - with weird results. Read More

Last night (at least for me in Germany it was night), Apple released it's seventh security update for Mac OS X this year. Affected versions are 10.3.9 and 10.4.2, both client and server. The download is available both through Software Update and at Apple Downloads.
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This blog has been around for too long without a good name. I simply didn't find one. Last night though while watching some Simpsons, it hit me. I was going to name the blog "Feelin' Fine". Can you guess which episode of the Simpsons this comes from and why I chose it? ;-)

This is rather old (well, nowadays two months is old), but Emily Hambidge described what Dating an Apple Developer is like. It seems being a nerd is pretty tough on your (in)significant other...

Damn, I need a woman like that. Any volunteers? :P

One month ago, the Mozilla project released the second alpha version of Deer Park, their next generation Firefox browser.

Deer Park Alpha 2 is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, the download for Mac OS X is a 9.1 MB DMG file, available at Mozilla's FTP site.

Since I had some time on my hands (I've got two weeks off - woohoo!), needed something to write about and even more important, something to play with I decided to download this release and play around with it. After all, they promised better Mac OS X integration compared to the previous alpha version (which was basically unusable on Mac OS X). Read More

So I decided to completely rewrite SMSolutionX, partially because of Apple dropping the support for their Java-Cocoa integration, but also because with Objective-C I have more possibilities, like integration of Address Book. Also, I think using Objective-C instead of Java for Cocoa projects, I will be able to receive more help and feedback from other Cocoa-developers. Read More

Alright, so yesterday I became addicted to the iTunes Music Store (iTMS), and since then I already purchased three albums in the store, leaving 29.97 € there and receiving 166.6 MB of protected music files in exchange. Was it worth it? I don't know yet, but I know for sure that I already spent quite a deal of time listening to these albums and I don't regret having bought them yet. A review of Catch Without Arms by Dredg will follow soon, I just didn't have enough time to listen to it yet.
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As you may know, Mac OS X comes with quite a lot of applications commonly used in various other unixoid environments, such as PHP, Perl and Python. In fact, in my 10.4.2 installation of Mac OS X, Apple included the following versions of the interpreters:

Python 2.3.5 (#1, Mar 20 2005, 20:38:20)
PHP 4.3.11 (cli) (built: May 31 2005 23:41:02)
This is perl, v5.8.6 built for darwin-thread-multi-2level

Apple was also wise enough to include a wide choice of shells:

[arepty@zoidberg:/]% ls -lha /bin | grep sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 568K Mar 21 00:39 bash
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 338K Mar 21 01:04 csh
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 875K Mar 21 00:34 ksh
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 568K Mar 21 00:39 sh
-r-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 338K Mar 21 01:04 tcsh
-rwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 479K Mar 21 00:39 zsh
-rwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 479K Mar 21 00:39 zsh-4.2.3

However, Apple did not commonly praise these applications as much as they praised new innovative GUI featurses like Spotlight or Dashboard. Until now, they did not even include good tutorials on how to harness the power of these scripting languages / interpreters. Read More

I've been pretty skeptical about legal music downloads on the Internet ever since they came up. I don't know what it is, it's probably just that I need to hold something in my hand when I spend 9.99 € on it (Yes, 9.99 €, not 0.99 € - I'd never buy a single track, only complete albums). Today I was feeling like listening to some Nine Inch Nails, especially the second track on their new album "With Teeth", the amazing song "You know what you are?". The background is that I got to see NIN live on this year's Hurricane festival and it was one of the best damn concerts I've ever seen. But I'm drifting off... Read More

The osx86 inside project which focus on the x86 build of Mac OS X which is given to developers as part of the "Mac OS X on Intel" transition kit reports that Apple apparently uses a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) by Infineon in its Intel-based Macs to prevent the operating system from running on other PCs. This has caused quite some controversy among Mac fans. Read More

It really did. Take a look at apple.com and you will see what I mean, if you haven't already seen this. Now let me explain to you PC users why a simple new mouse means the end of the world as we know it to Mac users. Read More