Earlier this morning Stevie fired up his RDF for the unveiling of Mac OS X 10.4, Tiger, as well as several obscenely large displays. Of notable absence in the keynote was an update to the iMac line of products. This is going to delay my planned upgrade to iMacs as they currently represent piss poor value for money.
On the other hand, the keynote revealed some gems for the open source hippie/standards junkie inside all of us. They're supporting Jabber as a protocol in iChat. They're using H.264 as a video codec (not sure if it's royalty/patent free though). They're supporting RSS feeds in Safari. And, of most importance to me (at this particular point of time), they're including libxslt in their standard unix base. Why should I care about that simple library? I'm guessing they're including it (and developing for it I think), because it's used in Safari - which means that I can finally dump the dodgy script for converting XML to XHTML. This means that this site will have support from all recent web browsers. Please note, this is not a web browser.
Edit - 4/7/04: They sent a new case. The postage probably cost more than the case.
Parallel importing of CDs has worked its magic again. I've just received my copy of Best Kept Secrets, the best of CD/DVD combo from Lamb. Due to record company madness, the CD isn't available with the special edition DVD in Australia, but it is available in Hong Kong. After dooing a bit of a Froogle search, I stumbled upon Cd Wow, a budget CD exporter. The CD with the special edition DVD was actually cheaper than Sanity here, and only a little more expensive than HMV. Apart from the cd case being a little broken (which I think CD WOW replace for free), it was quite a find. I'm going to go back to watching the (apparently region free) DVD now.
Edit - 22/06/04: Pictures now linked
A big thanks to everyone who rocked up to my birthday party at Teppanyaki. I had an absolute ball, and got covered in omelette and fried rice to boot. You can take a look at the photos (and movies!) by clicking on either the photos link, or by going straight to the Teppanyaki page. Note, you'll need a username and password to look at the pictures and movies. Let me know if you want one.
Update: 20/06/04 - A picture of the MK225C which I picked up on Thursday night
The Evolution MK225C
Oooer, what an exciting half hour!
Earlier this week I had decided that I want to be an amateur electronic muso, and that I needed a midi keyboard with which I can make tunes. After using Froogle, I tracked down the Evolution MK425, which was going for about $280. Deciding that the price was a bit much to pay for the instrument, I continued my search for a cheap keyboard. eBay came to my salvation, with the Evolution MK225. I have no idea what the difference is between the MK225 and MK425, but I figured that the differences wouldn't be that obvious to a musical luddite like me.
I had an account handy for eBay (as a left-over of my aborted attempt to auction off scavenger hunt items in a work competition), and I proceeded to place bids on this bit of gadgetry. Being the first eBay item which I had bid on, I had no idea what the process was behind it. Not knowing how bidding worked, I unwittingly engaged in a tactic known as bid nibbling, which is unsuprisingly used by ebay newbies. I managed to get the highest bid at about $172 (up from $150), with my maximum at $180. Feeling quite pleased with myself, I left the auction alone for the evening. I returned to the auction the next morning to find that the original bidder had bid up to $180, but hadn't passed my bid. I was still in the race! At this point of time, I started reading up more on ebay, and came to learn of snipers, who would come in at the last minute with a ridiculous bid amount to win the auction. I was determined not to be a victim of the ebay snipers.
At about 15 minutes to go before the end of the auction, I start religiously refreshing the page, hoping to catch out the ebay sniper before he/she had a chance to outbid me. After 13 minutes of this, I felt I was pretty safe in my bid, but just to be sure I refreshed the page one more time. I had been outbid! I quickly entered another bid at $190, but that was again not high enough. 1 minute left to go until the end of the auction. I place another bid in at $200 - it was time to get serious. After entering the bid, I had to re-enter my login information (You're kidding me!), and confirm my bid. All periods of frantic clicking. My final bid went through at 22:27:28 AEST. The auction ended at 22:27:55 AEST. Safe by about half a minute! Final price: $199.50. I'm sorting out payment now, but I conceivably could have my new keyboard by the weekend.
It's always amusing to see the French hurt themselves.
There are some times in life where you just decide to do something completely moronic, with full knowledge of how moronic it is. My activities this morning qualify as one of those times.
My activities this morning center around a game of football, played between the English and French national teams, as part of the Euro 2004 championship. Normally, exhibition of such dedication as to be up obscenely early is reserved for the pointy end of the championship, where all the exciting games are meant to be played. This game is the fourth game to be played in this championship, right at the start of the first round of the competition - so no-one is even fighting to stay in the competition. Coupled with being up at 3:30, we had to make a trip into the city to actually watch the game, as no-one has Foxtel. Our destination was originally Scruffy Murphys, but we ended up at Cheers sports bar when we were too lazy to walk any further.
Cheers seemed to be populated by a large number of impartial spectators, with a small smattering of French supporters, offset by a slightly larger smattering of English supporters. The French were the most vocal supporters, showing a great deal of contempt for the pretty boy Beckham. Of course, the non-vocal supporters became very vocal for all the goals. I was torn on who to support for this match, as I would normally support England, but France's coach (Santini) is coming to Tottenham Hotspurs. Ideally, I would have wanted to see a stunning French team, losing on a freak technicality to England.
The most amusing moment of the match came from a shot at the French goals, which bounced to Fabien Barthez, the goalie. Hilarity ensued when the ball bounced up and hit Barthez in the middle of the face. Apart from the funny stuff, the best bit of the match was at the end, with England squandering their lead to concede two goals. The winning goal was the result of a shocking back pass by Gerrard. I'm pretty sure Gerrard would have considered his back pass one of the more moronic decisions he's made. I guess it's not too fun when you don't mean to be moronic.
The new album from those hippie, tibetan-hugging New Yorkers, the Beastie Boys is out. Under normal circumstances I would never listen to cRap, due in large part to the wonderful work that Gangsta rap has done to kill a genre.
Thankfully, there are artists like the Beastie boys who know how to put out a killer album. I'm pretty damn impressed by this album, highlights being "It takes time to build", "Triple trouble", "That's it, That's all" (This one is doubleplus good), and "An Open Letter to NYC". I can just listen to this album over and over again - it doesn't get old quickly at all. Definitely an album worth having in a collection.
iTunes 4.6 came out, and added absolutely nothing in terms of functionality for me. Luckily it didn't break mt-daaapd, so that almost makes up for the fact it wasn't a very interesting update. I guess more interesting stuff will happen once the AirTunes devices are out in the market, and they get hacked.
The new G5 Powermacs also came out yesterday, no more affordable at AU$3600 at the bottom end, but sporting dual cpu lineups. Maybe the WWDC later this month will yield some better value propositions.
On the other hand, plenty of things became broken when all outgoing connections were blocked at work. Of particular annoyance is the lack of ports 110,5050,5190 and 18somethingsomething. For someone who works a fair bit on the internet, it's not too fun to be boxed into the oh-so-fun world of HTTP only. This basically means I can just browse the web now. Oh, and send internal emails. All this because of a) Windows machines getting regularly owned by viruses, and b) schmucks who decide that a work connection is their one-stop leeching station.
bjork It makes all the children happy
space ghost Those aren't children, they're packets of cream cheese
Apple have continued in their tried and true business model of selling digital crack with the release of AirTunes.
This is a pretty cool little device, if only for the fact that it's tiny and it can play back streamed mp3s with no need for a computer near your stereo (Hooray for light-weight clients). The real fun will start once the smart cookies get a hold of these devices and reverse engineer the protocols. A whole world of possibilities can be opened up for controlling the playback of mp3s. Combine this with mt-daapd, and you could have quite a comprehensive solution for playback of music that is only reliant on Apple for the hardware and firmware.
On the flipside of this announcement is the new iTunes (4.6) which is slated to be released any time now™. This is probably going to break everyone's daap server code, so it will be a little while before I can upgrade, and see if they've added better support for Shared libraries
Thanks to various bits of perl magic, Internet Explorer and Safari can now display pages from all over this site - and you won't even know that it happened.
Via Slashdot via Appleinsider via Macrumors by Nemesis.
Here's hoping that the product refresh by Apple due for later this June will bring new imacs.
It's been a long time coming, but it is finally here! I've finally managed to figure out how to maintain a text-based log on a website, without ripping my hair out trying to update files through a clunky ftp interface.
My salvation has arrived in the way of Blogger, which gives me a multitude of ways to add updates to this site. The best part of all of this, however, is that I can spit out valid XML, which can then get styled up using my XSLT and CSS.
Apart from the presence of the blogger component, I've been waiting on Camino project to land XSLT support in the browser. This leaves Safari as the only browser which cannot natively display XSLT-ed XML files. With any luck, I can get the web-host here to install XML::LibXSLT, and I can add a small bit of perl-magic to handle any similarly feature-retarded browsers.