we finally got our copy of the MacOS X public beta today. in general, playing with a brand spanking new operating system is geek nirvana. OS X did not disappoint. all sorts of fancy tricks and neat toys to play with. haven’t had time to really rip it apart and see exactly what it’s capable of, but here’s my initial analysis:

if you haven’t been paying attention, X is really freebsd with a candy coating. it must be a really cold day in hell now that macOS has a commandline. naturally, the first thing i did when i got my hands on an iBook with X loaded onto it was to figure out how to get a terminal window. they buried it down a few folders deep, but it’s there right from the start. my first beef with X is that it only has tcsh, sh, and zsh. no bash or ksh. otherwise though, all the standard unix commandline tools are there and work pretty much as expected. i was also pleasantly surprised to find ssh preinstalled and zero network deamons running by default. it makes me very happy to see that Apple has resisted the temptation that microsoft and most linux distributions seem to have fallen prey to of loading a billion things onto the default install like ftpd, webservers, named, fingerd, etc, etc. the standard rationale seems to be that the more stuff they have installed and running by default, the more users can do without having to read manuals or call support. unfortunately, the way it works in the real world is that 90% of the services go completely unused and after a few months a security hole shows up in one of them. since no normal users patch their systems on a regular basis, the script kiddiez get to run wild. hopefully, with future releases, apple will be smart and keep the default setup simple and tight.

i was also surprised to see that the Aqua interface is much less annoying to actually use than i figured it would be from the screenshots i’d seen. out of the box, it looks like some sort of child’s toy with buttons and window decorations that look like hard candy and all sorts of annoying animations that happen whenever you so much as look at it funny. fortunately, it took about 30 seconds to figure out how to change it to the “Graphite” theme, which changed all the candy buttons to a nice greyscale that wasn’t too painful to look at and another minute to figure out how to turn off all the silly animations. at that point, it became a fairly usable interface. seriously though, the animations and other pointless eye-candy were so distracting and annoying that anyone who uses it for more than 15 minutes will (if they are at least computer literate enough to figure out how) turn it off. it really makes me wonder why apple spent any time and money developing it all in the first place. the NeXT-style directory listing was a nice feature that i really liked and would love to see in some of the linux file managers that i use. i was also really amazed at how responsive the GUI was. MacOS 9 was built up of so many layers of emulators and hacks and workarounds that it really didn’t do the G3 and G4 chips it ran on justice. G3/4’s are significantly faster than their intel equivalents but OS9 is so grossly inefficient that you would never know it.

OS X has the potential of being a very Good Thing ™ as well as the potential to be damaging though. from what i’ve seen, it beats the older versions of macOS hands down. it will take a while for me just to get over the fact that i can now get a unix prompt on a mac. for me, that makes it a viable operating system. the mac people can have their fancy GUIs but if i need to i can still get work done on the machine. joy. what worries me is how Apple is/will be playing with the open-source and free software communities. traditionally, apple has been an extremely closed company. despite the underdog image that people tend to associate with apple, when it comes to cooperating and sharing with others, their tactics make microsoft look like angels. windows2000 is a closed, proprietary OS, but MacOS is a closed proprietary OS running on closed, proprietary hardware. they’ve inserted themselves directly into the middle of the free software community, using (arguably) the free-est of the free OSes. i’m curious to see how, or even, if, they give anything back to the community which has provided them with a large portion of their new OS.

the unix command of the day is: merge.

merge will save your ass when the inevitable happens on a team project and multiple people unknowingly spend an entire day making changes to different copies of the same document. say, for example, you have an entire book that has been painstakingly converted to html. one of the people on your research team spent the entire day going through and fixing typos in the text. one of the people on your technical team spent the day inserting image code and futzing with various formatting stuff in a different copy of the same book. without merge, the little managerial slip that let multiple people work on the same document at once would mean that one person or the other wasted the day and will have to redo all their work, or at the very least, they’ve got some tedious copy-and-paste work to do. luckily though, we can just grab an older copy of the file (emacs backup files are handy for this if you don’t religiously back up everything) and do a quick:

merge foo1.html foo.html~ foo.html

where foo.html~ is the aforementioned emacs backup file, and foo.html and foo1.html are the two different copies. merge simply combines the changes between foo1.html and foo.html~ with the changes between foo.html~ and foo.html. 99% of the time, it’s just that simple. occasionally, some of the changes will overlap and merge will have to prompt you to manually decide how to combine a line or two. but in general, it’s pretty straightforward.

of course, if the project were in CVS in the first place, none of this would be necessary, but that’s a whole other story…

today, as it turned to pouring rain outside, i learned two valuable pieces of information: 1) that although kozmo.com does deliver umbrellas, they were currently sold out. and 2) urbanfetch.com delivers umbrellas for $30. important stuff to know.

playing with animated gifs a little lately. just screwing around really. my first experiment (224k) and a smaller version (74k) of the same thing.

the network here has been seriously screwed up lately. last night i missed a deadline because of it. i was supposed to electronically submit some homework by midnight. so, of course, promptly at 23:00, the network goes down and doesn’t come back until some time after i give up and go to bed.

today it’s working in some places and completely screwed up in others. i can connect to columbia’s main server from my machine in my dorm no problem. from the main server, i can connect anywhere else pretty quickly. but trying to connect to another machine outside columbia (or even on a different subnet on campus) barely works. it does work, so i know it’s not just a problem with my routing tables; but it works with like 1byte/second rates. so right now i’m using lynx on the main server to make this entry.

last night, 6 or 7 of us went over to the east side for authentic cheap indian food at this little restaurant mimi’s punjabi friend Rich introduced us to. afterwards, a couple of us were going to split and go to the foetus (aka: foetus Under glass, you’ve got foetus on your breath, phillip and his foetus vibrations, foetus over frisco, foetus on the beach, scraping foetus off the wheel, foetus über frisco, wiseblood, the foetus of excellence, the foetus all-nude revue, the flesh volcano, clint ruin, foetus interruptus, foetus inc, garage monsters, steroid maximus, foetus in excelsis corruptus deluxe, etc) show at the Knitting Factory. the others were going to go to a movie but couldn’t decide what to see. somehow, they ended up all just coming to the foetus show (the dynamics of decision making in large groups of people is fascinating). when we got to the Knitting Factory, there was a line around the corner and down the block of people waiting to get in. what happened next, i don’t entirely understand, but i strongly suspect the intervention of the Ancient Bavarian Illuminati, or the Freemasons, or some other even more secret secret society. Rich noticed a necklace the bouncer was wearing. the bouncer recognized a bracelet Rich was wearing. a nod and a secret handshake later, we were all escorted past the line into the club and given the run of the place.

the people i was with seemed to enjoy the show despite not even knowing who foetus was. i was a little disappointed though. the sound was awful; you couldn’t hear the vocals at all (and Thirlwell’s voice is a really important part of the Foetus sound) and the guitars were feeding back painfully every few seconds. foetus albums are almost symphonic in their complex arrangements and layering of hundreds of instruments. live, there were only 5 people playing (including, i think Todd from Cop Shoot Cop on bass) so they just didn’t play a lot of the more complex songs and stripped down the arrangements on a lot of other songs. and they never played my favorite song “Verklemmt” :( aside from the sound though, it wasn’t a bad show.

the stereo I won now says “satan loves you” and then a little fishy comes and erases it as it swims by.

if I’d paid for it, no way it’d be doing something this cool.

don the armor of christ.

”Audio files you can listen to AND GET DELIVERANCE – in MP3 format”

from an article on Björk i was reading:

“Björk is something of a reluctant fashion icon; she claims to have ‘no memory’ of the glossy new look she sported for our photo session, preferring to sing the praises of Cannibal Corpse, the death-metal band she went to see the night before the interview.”

i knew that she was a death metal fan (she did have Carcass remix Isobel after all), but it’s still neat to see that she is willing to admit it in public. now i just wish i hadn’t been too busy to go to that show… how cool would it be to just run into Björk at a Cannibal Corpse concert…

while having a few drinks with my friend julintip in a local bar this evening, we noticed that one guy sitting up at the bar had a large green duffel bag on the floor next to him. then the bag started moving. there was definately something small and alive inside the bag. julintip assumed that it must be a small dog and thought that that was still a pretty weird thing to have in a bag. naturally, my hopeful mind figured that maybe it was a small child. i can see the adds now: “A revolutionary breakthrough in babysitting technology!”

he got up and left before we ever got a chance to figure out exactly what he had in the bag.