Musings

My MacMini arrived yesterday and I was playing the better part of the evening and a small part of the night (yawn) with it. First impressions: It’s small It’s quiet (unless it get’s really busy, at which point the fan kicks in - and that’s one noisy fan) Setup was very, very painless. I let my wife do it, and she went through the whole experience in a couple of minutes. the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) is immensely high the kids loved the included games (which led to tears when it was bed-time) connecting to sauron was a breeze iTunes was about 5 times faster re-importing my 12000 tracks on a Samba fileserver, than the Windows version on my Dell Laptop Connecting my iPod just worked - now I have to redo my smart playlists Fast User Switching (or whatever it’s called on OS X) works very well Installing / Deinstalling Software is easy a 1024*768, 15" screen is just a tad too small. A 17" wide screen would be nice - why doesn’t Apple have one? the “dead-slow”, “braindead”, “old piece of junk” graphic in the Mac Mini is absolutely fast enough Amazing that the whole thing cost just 20 swiss francs more, than my 30GB iPod about a year ago OS X is - just nice thanks to byteborg, rsz and vowe for initial support Open Questions: feel free to comment, I haven’t done much research on those yet ...

This is quite an up / down week, with all kinds of – let’s call them – interesting things happening. On the negative side: The air is so dry, that I wake up every night with a mouth so dry that my tongue feels like rasping through death valley At the same time my nose is regularly clogged too, so the open mouth is a necessity to survive the night My laptop died while trying to go from standby to hibernat mode. It managed to screw up it’s registry and boots immediately to a blue screen. Luckily the also installed Ubuntu Linux booted fine, and I was able to copy all of my files to an external firewire harddisk. (Note to self: Try to figure out why Ubuntu treats the harddisk of the Dell Inspiron as a VERY slow hard disk. The ususal hdparm tunings (-c1 -d1 …) didn’t increase the speed above 3 MB / s, which is just almost unbearable slow) My Linux server had a fit yesterday and crawled along with a load of 9000. A mercyful turning of the BRS brought it back to life. On the positive side ...

No - this is not a political statment - although it could be construed as one… via rsz by mail

Mixing ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8 characters on a webpage, encoding Umlauts 16-byte ISO representation and declaring them to be UTF-8 - no wonder, some pages with Umlauts look like shit, or make the rendering application throw exception (complaining about malformed UTF-8). Such is the joy of i18n development. And a joy, if the people doing the development have no real clue of what they are doing in the first place. So - with a swing of the clue-stick: Here’s a Unicode Table that contains the UTF-8 table, the ASCII, the HEX and a descriptive text. ...

The comments on this blog are turned off, due to various major problems with the comment script sending out spam. I’m not sure if my vintage MoveableType installation has a problem, but I want to play this safe. Also, I don’t have time for redoing all the layouts at the momen, so I have just renamed the mt-comments.cgi script and removed the executable bit. You’ll see 404’s if you click on Comments or if you try to post one. ...

You know that you should get some more sleep if you instead of working on the train during the commute, you read the last 60 mails on the RubyOnRails mailinglist you fall asleep doing so, and give up with the computer, closing more or less sleep for 40 minutes during the train ride wake up to the announcment of arriving at the destination train station falling asleep again, just 1 minute before arriving waking up while the new passengers arrive and take their seats But then, I was awake very quick and got out of the train in record time… ...