Colin Charles Agenda

• Hubert, I don’t know where you’ve heard/seen that Apple will ship the Intel C/C++ compiler, but they’re definitely backing XCode and GCC. In fact, they encourage gcc usage, as it will provide smooth transitions, and one of their new Intel Macs already had gcc -arch compiled to handle ppc and i386. This probably quenches the rumors that Intel will build PowerPC processors.
• Boolean searches in Spotlight enhances it with NOT/OR searches – useful. I haven’t tried Beagle yet, but this shouldn’t be a hidden feature but really pimped up.
• Wah, Delicious Library is seriously being pimped at WWDC. I think they’d be winning some design awards sometime soon. For those of us using Linux, there’s mCatalog (requires Mono). All this uses the exposed Amazon Web Services API.
• Popped Mono on OS X. To use gtk#, I need X11? Eh, it isn’t native, but it works right. Well, here’s news, Mono is not cross-platform, either. Mac users hate X11 apps. Why do you think we have NeoOffice/J being more popular than OpenOffice.org/X11? So besides wxWindows, we may never have a true cross-platform GUI out there (and its not even a pretty solution).
• Been playing with Dashboard widgets a lot. Its highly impressive. CSS, JavaScript, and basic HTML, and you get some really useful features. Also mining Apple’s Web Kit. There’s a lot of potential here, and with some good CSS-fu, lots of cool widgets can happen. XCode is something I’ve used a bit more, and I’m rather impressed – jump around .js file functions too. It even edits HTML! Its very cool.
• Tried Abiword. Its kinda nice. Lightweight, doesn’t require X11, I’m kind of impressed. I wonder if gnumeric is also available on OS X and if it’s as good (I mean, I keep on reading about abiword at planet gnome…).
• Quartz Composer is cool. If this is what the programming future is going to be, we’re going to get a lot of cool, high-end apps. The toy RSS screensaver is completely easy to build! However, it performs shitless on my iBook G3 with the Radeon 7500. Looks like I really need to get some power… erps, PowerBook thing at some stage.

So, the venerable Steve Jobs said Apple is switching to Intel from PowerPC, which he summed up nicely: “Remember, you all develop on this platform not because of the underlying architecture, but because OS X is just so good”. Okay, that might’ve just been a little paraphrased, but the audience in general were all very gusto.

He confirmed that OS X has always been running on x86 without any issue. It was designed to be cross platform from the start (this can more or less be viewed as the case thanks to Darwin x86). But of core importance is that folk need to use XCode if they want to get their OS X working on both PPC and Intel; otherwise this wonderful Universal Binary support will not exist. And then, for apps that still require PPC to run (and are not Universal Binaries), there’s Rosetta, which will translate the PPC instructions to x86, on the fly without performance drop.

Reasoning is units for performance per watt, for the future roadmap. In 2006, Intel is poised to give 70 units/watt, while PowerPC will give only 15 units/watt. Turns out he mentions nothing about cooling, the use of fans, etc. What about Altivec? Or even how the ads and performance benchmarks constantly used to berate similar software running on x86 (Photoshop performance comes to mind – at least 50% faster on a Mac and what not). A lot remain unanswered currently, but I guess more will unfold over the week.

Where does this leave Linux PPC? Besides IBM or Pegasos hardware, Apple wants the transition to happen by 2007; it however should launch its first Intel-based computer by next year. Does this also mean that I can buy the next version of OS X and run it on any run-off-the-mill x86? Mmrm

Groan. The 20050526 rawhide PPC tree is misbehaving. iBook g3 doesn’t seem to want to get installed – parted keeps on whinging at me (#159047). Which really seems to have been the 2nd time such an issue appeared – dkl encountered one about two weeks back too. On the Mac mini, I’m faced with the screen just going blank a little after yaboot gets kernel parameters (#159050. Coming so close to release time, I’m worried… Paul’s taken a stab at the inclusion for PPC release notes – all looking good.

So, Trinity College dumped Debian for a bunch of G5’s and Tiger. And the part that saddens me is that they won’t be using OpenOffice.org on OS X.

I have taken an affinity to financial software, and Linux offerings. Xinvest will not compile with GCC4 (it could do with some cleanups). Currency_Converter is a useful shell script, that needs to be patched to remove annoying IRC relation, and it becomes a nice console app afterward. Couldn’t get getquotes to work as Finance::YahooQuote seemed to fail a test with my rawhide snapshot. phpfin and essential budget seem like candidates for review; next up is mastering GNUCash.

So here’s my dilemma. I’m downloaded the DVD image for OS X Tiger (because my mailing still hasn’t arrived). I do not have a DVD burner. Anywhere. Now, how can I install this over the network? Target disk mode will not be useful for me, but NetRestore might help, except I need a generic OS X installation around somewhere (it seems to suggest 10.4, Tiger, which I don’t have!). If this was Fedora, I could just burn the boot.iso, and loopback mount the image! Any Mac heads know a solution? I don’t mind an ugly OF based solution either; except I can’t boot the dmg via tftpboot? Update: The mailing arrived. Of course, I decided to do a nice clean reinstallation, so I repartitioned. Guess what? No sight of 10.3 on disk means 10.4 won’t install. Urgh, nowhere on the DVD does it say “upgrade”.

Looked at some Extras failures, after Jeremy kicked off a rebuild. Most of the PPC related ones have attached logs to them now, and some made it to a post-it note as “solving hopefuls”. Low hanging fruit might best be ExclusiveArch’ed. Also noticing a lot of PPC related inquiries going to fedora-test-list, rather than fedora-ppc list – this needs to change! In other news, I’m playing around with the wiki for Supported Power PCs – i.e. whatever we support well, or we don’t support, should be listed here on a colloborative wiki page.

Was looking into buying a PDA – either a Tungsten E2 or some other offering from Palm. Now it looks like I’ll just wait, save up, and buy the Nokia 770, and get on with maemo. Its so nice to make sure you have something that always “just works” – not to say that Familiar isn’t just working at the moment (the upgrade from 0.72 was so welcome).

Bought a firewire cable today – the iBook G3 got Tiger installed via Firewire target disk mode. X11 can get installed that way too, but XCode2 wouldn’t. Weirdness. Got nice e-mail from the asiasource folk, and there’s the AsiaSource booklet, written by Frederick Noronha thats a worthy read as well.

Yay, LCA has started. Yesterday was dinner at the (in)famous Woodstock in Canberra. Russell agreed that it was the worst pizza ever… Internet at the accomodation was down, so I got lots of reading done instead.

OpenOffice.org
Today was Day #1 of the OpenOffice.org MiniConf. Simon Phipps, Chief Technology Evangelist at Sun sort of wrapped around a talk, and not agreeing with him at many stages happened I guess. Silly talk about licensing and software patents, and beating up of the “Even Red Hat recommends Windows for desktops”.

Marc Englaro, from Si2 mentioned challenges faced within organisation. His quick approach to desktop migration:

1. Preliminary Business Case – Desktop Usage Survey and user requirements analysis, SOE analysis, Review of current cost structure, TCO analysis, Business case
2. Proof of Concept – Design of proposed SOE, development of acceptance tests, workshop-based test of SOE by users, review results
3. Pilot – similar to POC, small group of users running in production for fixed period, review results
4. Staged rollout

Also good to know the common objections business face with OOo (and not with MSO): Pivot Tables, OOo Calc’s 32,000 row limit, macros requiring conversion, Access databases, Outlook, Visio, Project. Now, in Linux land, we have Evolution to replace Outlook, but neither Dia or OOo Draw comes close to Visio. Planner and MS Project are worlds apart as well. For document revision control tracking, it was mentioned that Xena, from the Australian National Archives would be cool to use, otherwise Propylon has something similar, in a commercial fashion.

Ian Laurenson had a good presentation about OOo Macro Development. His website has some of his macro resources. He heartily recommended the X-Ray Tool. And he’s also starting a OpenOffice.org Extensions Wiki, all really useful resources if you’re into OOo Macro stuff. I ended up buying Andrew Pitonyak’s book on OpenOffice.org Macros.

Ditesh had a great talk on document templating, and how he used the file format (go OASIS XML) and PHP to get things going. And afterward, Ken Foskey talked lots about developing on OpenOffice.org… then it was time for the pub, and Sun was footing the bill :)

GNOME
So, with the 2.10 release, libwnck (metacity) sort of behaves funny in the sense that my GAIM windows don’t pop-up anymore. Its true, the current method of not stealing focus is a good one, but I felt it was important for IM. Havoc made an interesting post with options that we could work around, and reading back, the adding “URGENT” flashing to tasklist is a solution (that requires some coding effort). Otherwise, for IM purposes Guifications works really well. nosnilmot packaged them for review at his site, and if you’re lazy to rebuild rpm’s, I’ve got them built against a rawhide snapshot from post-test2 here.

Fedora
Fighting with QEMU. Its broken in Extras with GCC4 (log) and its also broken when I attempt a “export GCC=gcc32” (log). All on a stock QEMU 0.6.1, which I’d really like to get going before Wednesday, for the LCA kernel hacking tute. Paul Brook pointed me to missing FORCE_RET on store ops, and figures this is what I need to do for i386.

MyOSS Magazine
Remember the days of LinMagAu? Now defunct, but while it was around, every month it got Slashdotted. Ow Mun Heng got enterprising and created Malaysian Open Source Software Magazine, now affectionaly known as MyOSS Magazine. Good first attempt, and hope it continues this way. Pay it a visit, contribute an article or two. Better still, print it for the next install fest or something (there are pretty pictures).

Handhelds
Loaded Familiar 0.8.2 onto the iPaq. Delved into using minicom again, and boy did that bring back old memories. With GPE of course. My Dlink DCF-650W used to work with the slim sleeve, however, no drivers are being loaded now, so I’m sort of wireless impaired at the moment. Even a manual modprobe orinoco_cs seems to not work. However, my full-sized PCMCIA card seems to work nowadays; only catch is using the dual-sleeve, with battery thing, thats huge. Gotta love the new GPE Package Manager (though I think it lacks dependency resolution capabilities). Command line ipkg search seems broken, but listing works. Minimo, vim, and python are on it now. Online screenshot application (scap) works well from the command line and the menu, but via the command line, you get a direct URL to your shots.

Life
Boringness. Its just mad rush before LCA. Plenty to do, not enough time. Went for cell yesterday after a hiatus, and it was surprsingly good. Last day to see S. for a week, till next Saturday. I’m actually going to be missing her.