Mark Gilbert’s Blog

The website issues are finally resolved. The reasons for the problems are detailed below.

Well as some of you may or may not know I recently moved house. Since I was hosting the site myself for financial reasons it meant there would be a certain period of downtime while the phone line and Internet connection was sorted out. I was aware of this and could live with it.

What I could not have foreseen was that at the same time I would have an Install issue with my little MacMini server and would be forced to reinstall the only copy of OS X I have, 10.5 onto it for web serving purposes. On it’s own this was not a problem, obviously I have backups of the site and the database so just restore them and away I go. Simple. Except up until very recently MySQL AB did not produce a compiled version of MySQL for 10.5 on PPC, only on x86. I did attempt a few times to compile the database from source but with no luck. I was seemingly stuck. As a stop gap I used the drop in solution MAMP which worked for the most part other than a few little quirks, like sometimes the web server would stop running for no reason and MAMp would not be able to start it again as it still thought it was running. This created a problem where I had no control over whether the server was up or down, with no serious monitoring effort the server may fall over and I would be non the wiser.

That is what had been happening for the last few weeks, but now MySQL AB have pulled their collective fingers out and delivered a build of MySQL for 10.5 PPC, a quick install and it’s up and running.

Fingers crossed it will be ok now, time will tell though.

Cheers

The most popular alternative browser on the web has just hit half a billion downloads. Internet Exploder is still the most common browser by a fairly long margin, but Firefox is gaining all the time.

Cheers

Windows Vista SP1 has been RTM earlier this week, but reports are now coming out that SP1 could cause more issues for users than it solves. Microsoft have admitted that there are some new driver issues in SP1, drivers that worked on the original Vista build may not work in SP1. Mike Nash who is charge of Vista product management was quoted as saying;

“Our beta testing identified an issue with a small set of device drivers, these drivers do not follow our guidelines for driver installation and as a result, some beta participants who were using Windows Vista and updated to Service Pack 1 reported issues with these devices.”

Basically with the changes to the core of Vista being brought about in SP1 drivers may cease to function correctly. Before SP1 is installed it will check for the drivers that have known issues and not offer SP1 to those users with the offending drivers, although Nash remained tight lipped at present as to what those drivers were.

This would not be the first time a major SP release has caused problems for Windows users, think back to the XP SP2 release a few years ago.

Cheers

Also quietly out of the door today was Microsoft Office 2008 for OS X. Updates to all the usual suspects are included however Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications is not supported in Office 2008, which some have suggested in Microsoft’s way of not fully supporting Office under OS X without explicitly having to announce that they are ceasing support.

Personally I think there is very little that MS Office 2008 can offer that current alternatives such as NeoOffice and Pages cannot.

Cheers

The lovely Transmission Bittorrent client available for OS X, Linux, Unix and Solaris has now reached version 1.0. I have been using Transmission for a while now on OS X and it really is great, small lightweight, everything a BT client should be, unlike the increasingly bloated Azereus.

Just like most OS X apps it just works, drag a torrent to the windows or double click it and the download starts. No fancy bits, just simple effective torrent handling.

I suggest you check it out if your on one of the supported OS’s

Cheers

Shawn Blanc has an extensive review of Panic’s Transmit FTP application. Have a read over on his blog at shawnblanc.net.

There are many/ things that make Transmit stand out as my Mac FTP application of choice, mainly I have never had it crash, unlike Cyberduck which crashes on a very regular basic when uploading stuff to my webserver. It also is much much faster than Cyberduck for large numbers of small files and just generally a lot nicer to use.

I suggest you check it out.

Cheers

I had reason to create a spreadsheet today, for reasons which i wont go into, and having no suitable application at my disposal I decided to get Open Office, or at least it’s OS X counterpart, Neo Office.  Now I have used Open Office before, back sometime around the 1.0 release, but not  much after that.  I spent a whole year in a particular job using it because the company couldn’t afford MS Office.  I found it rather well featured if a little ugly back then.  Boy, how times change.

 The 2.2 release which I had the pleasure of using is a joy.  The interface on my Mac was very nice and well laid out with all the right buttons in very intuitive places.  I found everything I wanted very quickly and with minimal fuss.

I cant fault the ease of use.  Anyone who says that MS Office is better simply hasn’t really used Open Office.  The help files are very useful, covering everything you could need, including more advanced features like functions and formulae.   I am not intimately familiar with spreadsheet functions, so for me the help file was invaluable.  I am normally very sceptical of how useful a help file can be, but in this case after some time Googling for the answer I thought I may as well try the help file.  My God.  It gave me what I wanted quickly and with enough syntax and examples to get me where I wanted to be very quickly.

 As for getting what I wanted done, it all took less time than I had expected.  I really cannot recommend Open Office an Neo Office highly enough.  These two applications are yet another example of what can be done with FOSS.  Admittedly I only used the Calc application this time, but I have used writer at work and found it o be of the same high standard.  People who are thinking about buying MS Office 2007 Basic, Student & Teacher or Standard should really give this a go.  It doesn’t cost anything so you’ve got nothing to lose really.  If you don’t like Open Office then you can go and spend your money anyway, but please, at least give it a try.

 Cheers 

Last week I decided that I was fed up with Safari. It annoyed me, and it bothered me so much that I decided the time was now to find a new browser. So off I went, first of all stopping to check out the latest beta of Camino. Now dont get me wrong, I do like the Mozilla based browsers on Windows but on my Mac it just didn’t feel right. Somehow it just didn’t give the Mac experience which I’ve now become accustomed to.

When using Camino I missed some of the features I loved about Safari, such as the ability to type in the address bar and have my bookmarks searched as well as my recent history. It’s a feature I find sorely lacking when using IE7 or even Firefox at work.

Firefox on OS X simply doesn’t do it for me. Back when I used Windows Firefox was my browser of choice, I liked the extensions, I much prefered it over IE and had been using it since roughly 0.6, just after the name change to Firebird, which was sometime in the middle of 2003. Somehow though on OS X I couldn’t get on with it. The PPC build I found slow and just generally didn’t like it, so I changed to Safari at that point, leaving me knowing two years on that I wouldn’t enjoy Firefox now either.

So with Safari, Camino and Firefox out, I went to see the Opera in Norway, or should I say i went to use the browser called Opera from Norway. I liked Opera when I first used it, I had dabbled with it under Windows but it never really replaced Firefox for me although it was a very capable browser. Coming back to it under OS X was not such a big change. I used the latest 9.2 version and immediately found it likeable, it was fast and had the ability to search bookmarks from the address bar. The speed dial feature was nice, and I did use it quite a lot, however there were a few things I didn’t like so much. The first one is really petty, but I was seemingly unable to alter the default behaviour so that a command + left clicked link is opened in a new background tab. Command + shift + left click does it, but I don’t want to have to hold shift too. I know middle click does it but I don’t like middle clicking, see I told you it was petty. It didn’t integrate with the OS X Keychain, which Safari does and as you can imagine has a lot of details stored for me. So I found myself constantly opening keychain utility to retrieve passwords to use in Opera. While this is a workable solution, it’s less than ideal.

I should add at this point I have completely forgot what it was I didn’t like about Safari, so i now have no idea why I was looking for another browser anyway, but I pressed on regardless.

I was now very short of options, which is when I remembered OmniWeb.

OmniWeb is a browser developed by the Omni Group. It uses WebCore as it’s rendering engine, the same rendering engine Apple’s Safari browser uses, therefore you get the same high levels of standards compliance seen in Safari. Omni Group then make significant alterations to WebCore, as well as adding their own javascript rendering engine to the mix, instead of using the standard Webkit JavaScriptCore. All this leads to a very fast browser.

Omni Group also have more time to work on the browser UI since they don’t have to work on the HTML rendering aspect of the package. As a result of this you get a very nice package, all the best aspects of Safari but with more user orientated features such as better control over tabs and easier and more fully featured bookmark management, as well as a rather odd tab implimentation. There is no tab bar, but a slide out drawer which contains thumbnails of all open pages. This approach has several advantages over a standard tab bar method, the first being that you can actually see the pages that are not currently being viewed in the main window, the second is that a more visible green tick appears on a thumbnail when it is done loading. This is more visible than the spinning wheel that stops spinning when a page is loaded.

The one area where OmniWeb does lag behind Safari is in the Adblocking stakes. Safari out of the box is worse than OmniWeb, however safari can fall back on PithHelmet to cover its arse. Having used this combination it is most effective, and OmniWeb simply does not have a plugin that I am aware of which offers the same standard of blocking. OmniWeb has the ability to perform blocking based on known URLs but these have to be added manually one at a time, or as I discovered can be done as a job lot with a little tweaking. After this blocking does work very well with the Filterset.G rules, but I have to admit, it’s a far from perfect solution.

A feature I do like a lot is the ability to configure individual site preferences. Certain webites simply do not like to be so tightly controlled in terms of how they display and what elements of the page are blocked, so site preferences are a nice touch.

Overall I am really enjoying my time with OmniWeb and will continue to use it for a while to come. I may never know why I wanted to find another browser in the first place, but I am most pleased I did find OmniWeb.

Cheers

Apple today released Boot Camp 1.2 which adds, among other things, Vista support. Boot Camp 1.2 also updates some drivers for trackpads, AppleTime, audio, graphics, modems, iSight camera
Support, and the Apple Remote which now works with iTunes and Windows Media Player. A Windows system tray icon for easy access to Boot Camp information and actions has also been added. The list of changes does not stop here, but more can be found at he above link.

Cheers

Yes it is indeed true, Apple have advised people to wait off on upgrading to Vista. Not because there’s really nothing new in Vista, but because iTunes 7.02, the most current version of the software doesn’t work correctly under Vista. Users are reporting that they cannot play some purchased music and are having problems synchronising with their iPod’s.

I must say I’m a little disappointed in Apple on this one. They have had a lot of time to prepare a Vista compatable version of iTunes and it makes me really wonder why they haven’t got one ready. Seems sloppy on their part.

Cheers

AOL just released a new version of it’s software for OS X. This new software called Chesire and is an Alpha version of a Universal Binary AOL client. Why on earth you would still be using AOL I have no idea. There are so many great alternatives it really would be silly if you couldn’t find a better ISP.

Cheers

I missed this somehow, but found out today, IE7 has now been pushed out by Microsoft as a high priority update over the Windows Update Service. This will probably mean a lot of users who were totally unaware of the existance of IE7 will now be using it, no doubt with some scratching their heads asking “why has the internet changed?” Personally I dont like IE7, I’ve been using the betas on a machine at work for some time now and I simply dont like it. I think the UI is a backwards sep as far as I’m concerned, but maybe that’s just me. Anyone else have any opinions on this?

Cheers

Just recently VMware announced that they would soon release a virtualisation client for OS X. This new product codenamed Fusion is their latest product that will allows Intel based OS X machines to run other x86 opperating systems. The product is still currently in beta but you can sign up for the trial and be one of the lucky few to beta test the new app.

It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against parallels. I already put my money behind Parallels and so have signed up for the Fusion beta for a comparison. I may write a review of it on here if I get to play with the app.

Cheers

Apple have released iTunes 7.0.2 tonight. It is available from their website or via software update. This is supposed to improve stability and performance issues found in iTunes 7.0 and 7.0.1, as well as adding support for the new iPod Shuffles due in shops next week.

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Mozilla have now released Firefox 2.0. It is available to download from the Mozilla Website. Get it now and enjoy it while it’s still hot.

Cheers

The Seatlle PI is reporting that Firefox will be released on Tuesday of this week. I have been using 2.0 on an off since it was in Alpha and it does look good. Stability is impressive, much improved from some of the early betas and the latest RC3 is very nice indeed. Looking forward to this and how the Spread Firefox team get behind it.

Cheers

As if DRM wasn’t bad enough already, Windows Media Player 11 takes the errosion of your rights even further.

Welcome to WMP11, where backing up your music licences, or “media usage rights” as they are now called, is a thing of the past.
WMP11 will make your life better by making sure that recorded programs from premium channels in Windows Media Center expire after 3 days. Going away on holiday? Tough shit. You can’t watch the content you record when you get back.
WMP11 adds new features to ripping your music. Rip your CD’s with the copy protection turned and and you need to restore the licence you might be able to do this. You have to connect to a Micro$oft website and ask permission to play your music that you payed for. Tracking your ripping to take away rights if you rip more than once of course not, your not treated like a common criminal. Oh wait, yes you are, you are a common criminal in the eyes of the media industry.

You really should get used to this feeling of criminality. Whenever you buy DRM infected media this is going to happen more and more. None of this is a word of a lie, it’s all taken from the Micro$oft Windows Media Player 11 release notes which can be read through at your leisure on Microsoft’s website.

You can no longer move content from one PC to a different one, so when it comes to be time to get a new PC, forget easily transfering those music files you payed for. You have to sign all sorts of agreements and use the tools provided by the content industry. If you want to do it in any other way then you’re breaking the law.

When you buy DRM infected media all you really get is a hollow promise. The promise not to sue you for listening to the music you thought you bought. The media industry will really do anything it can to protect what they say they own. They will even go as far as buying government officials and put rootkits on people’s computers to protect it. Whether they own it or not is a good question though, when money changes hands, more often than not the purchaser gets ownership rights transfered to them, not so anymore with DRM and “media usage rights”. Users being able to backup media was a loophole in the whole DRM system, but it protected consumers rights. Windows can and frequently does arse up, backing up your media ensured that you wouldn’t lose it when the worst happens. Well this loophole has well and truely been closed in WMP11.

If you read the release notes about backing up media, it passes the book and says that it’s down to the store you bought it from. It says, “Windows Media Player 11 does not permit you to back up your media usage rights (previously known as licenses). The store might limit the number of times that you can restore your rights or limit the number of computers on which can use the songs or videos that you obtain from them. Some stores do not permit you to restore media usage rights at all”
So Microsoft who provides the DRm for these stores to use will take no responsibility if they do not allow you to restore your licences. They have your money, why should they give a toss about you the consumer?

Ripping from CD’s gets better, “If the file is a song you ripped from a CD with the Copy protect music option turned on, you might be able to restore your usage rights by playing the file. You will be prompted to connect to a Microsoft Web page that explains how to restore your rights a limited number of times.” So if you rip a CD with copy protect turned on, which it will no doubt be by default, you have to beg for the right to play your music. While the copy protect is optional now, whenever they feel like taking the option away they can do, you agree to updates in the WMP licence you accept when you install the thing. What then, you have to go to M$ to get permission to play the music you have on CD. Block it with Windows firewall, oh yes of course the Windows firewall isn’t full of M$ backdoors. They waited to see how WMP10 went down calling home, no big stink was raised so that gives the go ahead to this.

TV recordings from premium channels will die after 3 days. Why? because the media industry says so, that’s why. You’re lucky you don’t get locked up for questioning the notion. So record a program from what they deem a premium channel and it expires after 3 days. Tough hist if you go on holiday that media PC you payed for is useless, back to VHS tapes it is for you if you want to record that program. Your rights are simply standing in the way of them making obscene profits. How long before “premium channels” is removed and simply extended to cover all channels? That wouldn’t be the first time the rules have changed while the game is in progress.

WMP10 was the ice breaker, test the water and see how things go. WMP11 is the first of many ball breakers. Anything that gets in he way of their profits is insignificant. Your rights are have been taken away. Why? So the content industry can make even more money than the silly ammounts they already do. How can they get away with this? Because you let it happen.

I had to revise this piece so many times to remove most of the swearing, this issue just gets me so furious.

Cheers

A piece of software was released on the forums over at doom9.org claims it can strip the DRM from Windows Media Audio files. The software called Fairuse4WM kills off the DRM and removes any kind of usage restriction. The author claims that it should not be used for illegal purposes and that it should simply be used to enable users to excercise their right to use their music where they want to.

Microsoft is quickly tackling the problem and they hope to have a patch ready very soon. Any DRM system will be cracked. It’s as inevitable as the sun coming up. If there’s a will there’s a way. Nice to see that the DMCA hasn’t totally stiffled inovation of this kind though.

Cheers

Well I took the plunge and got hold of Parallels Desktop For OS X. First impressions are that it is a very polished and professional product. Creating a new virtual machine is easy thanks to the built in wizard. Simply select the type of OS you wish to work with and the specific version you are working with and the default options are already set for you. Obviously more customisation is available but as a VM virgin I thought the defaults would do for now. The only thing I did change was increasing the memory allocation for my guest OS to 512Mb from 256Mb.

So I click to start my new VM which is my case was a Linux 2.6 generic VM since Ubuntu is not one of the listed Linux OS’s, however all the big players are there, Red Hat, SUSE, Mandriva, Fedora and others. I wanted to do a non-destructive test for now, so I popped in a Live Ubuntu CD I had laying about and set off booting from it. This all went without a hitch, very soon Ubuntu was booted just as you would expect it to and was fully functional. I was impressed.

So at this point I decided I would be a little more adventurous and install Windows XP in Parallels. So I set off, I created a new VM with Windows as the guest OS and started it up. I inserted my Windows XP install CD and booted from it, and as expected off went the Windows installer. The next few mintues were the standard Windows XP install kind of minutes, boring as hell. However when it came to wanting my CD key I realised since I had to roll SP2 and some SATA drivers into my install I wrote the key on the CD, which was in the drive. So now I had chance to try suspending a VM. I must say it worked flawlessly, the Windows XP installer was suspended to my hard drive and I could then eject the CD and make a copy of the key on a Post-It. I then put the CD back in, resumed the Vm and after a few minutes I was just where I left off in the Windows installer. Fabulous. It couldn’t have gone better. I was expecting some horrible nightmare for pausing the VM during a Windows install, but no, all was well.

I set off with the install again and just waited to see if it all worked as planned.
Well it did, my Windows install was well and truly working inside OS X, with only a qick key combo to switch control back to OS X this really is the way forward, it sure as hell beats BootCamp for convinience, but how it fares on what I call the Quake 3 test remains to be sen. Since this is my game of choice at LAN parties I hope it performs well, becuase then I have no need to dual boot anymore and can simply run Windows inside OS X.

But first I need to get all my Windows updates together. I will report back as soon as I manage to get Quake 3 installed and get the FPS test done. I’ll also report how that compares to my Mac booted in Windows using BootCamp. I have run Super Pi Mod 1.5XS and it looses 2 seconds to Windows running under BootCamp, so I’m expecting fairly good performance from Quake 3.

Cheers

The Firefox 2.0 Beta1 release candidate ahs been put out onto the Mozilla FTP servers and is now available for Windows, OS X and Linux. Major changes I can see include the Firefox branding and some general stability improvements. The previous release, Alpha3 had no Firefox branding to lessen consumer confusion and was instead branded under it’s internal name, Bon Echo.

Most web stat companies are showing Firefox’s market share to be up, OneStat.com puts it as high as 13%. TheCounter.com is reporting 10% while my own web stats show it at 28%, with Safari at 16% and Internet Explorer at 51%.

With the 2.0 release of Firefox coming very soon, things are still looking good for the browser that everyone loves to love.

Cheers