Category: the value of X

http://webglimpse.net/developers/macos-notes.txt

I was working on building Mozilla on OS X and kept getting jammed on this error:

ld: can’t locate file for: -ldl

The libdl.dylib and libdl.a libraries can be downloaded as a package from
http://star.mfn.unipmn.it/osxgnu/Libraries/dlcompat-10505X.pkg.sit
Double-click on the icon and the libraries will install in /usr/local/lib
Glimpse then installs and runs without incident.

That solved it. I thought dlcompat was part of fink’s base files, but evidently something else is wrong.

Searchling v1.0

Searchling is a free, quick and unobtrusive way to access your favorite search sites in MacOS X. Once running, Searchling appears as a small icon (the ‘G’, for Google) in your menu bar alongside your other menulings. Click the icon and a small text field and two pop-up buttons will appear. Enter your search and hit return…poof, you’ve got results in your favorite web browser.

Thanks, Wade.

Yahoo! News – Blueprint for an Apple Xserve Rollout

“Xserve is like a BMW engine. It’s fast, safe and reliable,” Toker noted, adding that the company researched white papers and tested the Xserve against competitors, such as Dell and IBM. In the long run, especially from clients’ perspectives, the Xserve made more sense.

One of the most surprising things I read in this article was this: “a strong selling point is the tightly coupled integration between the Xserve’s OS and its hardware platform.”

So the open hardware standard we’ve heard touted for so long may not be as strong as the integrated approach used by Sun and Apple, the two companies most often cited as not offering a compelling reason to buy their products over their “open” rivals.

Perhaps the value of time spent debugging and devising workarounds for mismatched components is better understood these days.

Apple – iCal

I have been doing more stuff with iCal and keep finding more to like about it. What really makes it work for me is phpiCalendar (look for in on SourceForge). I can publish calendars and share them in an interface that looks and works a lot like the iCal desktop application.

I have high hopes for the Mozilla calendar module to allow platform-neutral editing, but it’s not there quite yet (it’s still in beta, I realize). In fact, I had to open a bug against one problem I am having.

I do wish the date files were more easily readable (unlike so much of the other prefs files in OS X, there are not human-parsable XML, but some other format that doesn’t immediately make sense to me). But then again, the phpiCalendar parser is available as open source, so I can work out the logic from that, if need be.

Have I mentioned how cool I think this is?

MSFT and Innovation

Beyond Windows and Office, when has Microsoft become the dominant player in a market it covets? It’s either a distant second-place player or a complete loser in palmtops, digital music formats, online services, set top boxes, game consoles, phones, and other areas it’s set out to conquer, no matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars it spends. If Microsoft were truly the quality-driven innovator it claims to be, surely it would have claimed the #1 spot in some of these other categories.

Instead, according to an article this week in The Financial Times, the numbers tell the real story: Microsoft’s Xbox game division lost $177 million last quarter, its MSN online service lost $97 million, its application-software division lost $68 million, and its palmtop division lost $33 million. The only profits at Microsoft, in fact, came form its Windows monopoly money: $2.84 billion. (If there’s any doubt that Microsoft is abusing its monopoly, that’s an 85 percent profit margin.)

There’s more good stuff in this one column. Many people have questioned MSFT’s claim to innovation, but no one has laid out all the pieces for me as clearly as this. This of course underscores why breaking the company into Baby Bills is so frightening: most of them would die quickly.

Working with CSS – CSS Hints for Internet Explorer 5

the Windows and Macintosh builds of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5 are based on different rendering engines and therefore react differently to the same HTML or CSS.

So let me see if I understand this: MSFT supports two rendering engines for the two browsers it ships. And the one that *isn’t* integrated into their OS does a better job.

Have I mentioned the big ball of mud lately?

Nicest of the Damned

Frank notes that OS X 10.2.2 is available.

Following the discussion on these pages on patches and their significance, what does it say that Apple releases these regular updates, which are almost always billed as improvements? And it’s a lengthy list of improvements too . . . . .

Nicest of the Damned

Frank has been doing more market research/product development for Apple.

Apple has built an interesting product line, where you can (or have to) choose between the consumer models — the iMacs and iBooks — and the pro lines — PowerMacs and PowerBooks. Why not extend that model to the Xserve, introducing a consumer-oriented iServe?
[ . . . . ]
Such a product would bring the server to the consumer market, and could naturally be the mail server, backup server, firewall, file and print server, and web and domain server for a household.

This is an interesting concept and one I think Apple can pull off, through a combination of a household friendly form factor (cooler running PowerPCs are quieter and can fit into places where boxes with fans can’t) and a well-designed UI to manage all the services. They could easily use webmin as a basis for most of that and it would be a great showcase for Rendezvous and slp.

I think iServe is a great idea: rather than TiVO capability, I’d rather see Internet radio/satellite radio capability. The built-in video displays some of the crazy modders have added would be a requirement as well.

I think it would need to possibly include an Airport base station’s functionality with wireless and two network interfaces: ideally, you want it to replace an existing system that isn’t as useful or fill a need for multiple devices with this one.

Form factors? How about a wall-mount to be near the DSL or cable connection? Something the height of a hardcover book (remember the old IIci/cx machines?) to fit on a shelf would also work.

And since it would be a server with minimal graphics/UI needs, it wouldn’t have to be the fastest box: my gateway/webserver/print server is the slowest I have at 233 MHz. But lots o’ disk and a combo drive would be essential.

Think they can get it out by Christmas?

Following Frank’s lead, I grabbed the latest NNW Light client and check out the NetNewsWireLight bandwidth stats which are now available.

I’m not sure what to make of them. Obviously some sites are responding properly and are always sending a full feed, but I haven’t collected enough data to really understand it.


pkg pine version ###
pkg pine version 4.44-2
The following package will be installed or updated:
pine
curl -f -L -O ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/old/pine4.44.tar.gz
curl: (19) pine4.44.tar.gz: No such file or directory.
### execution of curl failed, exit code 19
Downloading the file “pine4.44.tar.gz” failed.

(1) Give up
(2) Retry the same mirror
(3) Retry another mirror

How do you want to proceed? [2] 3
curl -f -L -O ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/pine4.44.tar.gz
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Curr.
Dload Upload Total Current Left Speed
100 3396k 100 3396k 0 0 176k 0 0:00:19 0:00:19 0:00:00 169k


Any reason why we don’t just try a different mirror without asking?