Newton’s Lore

Just as there was a world before the influence of the iMac’s design, and a world before everywhere you looked you could see people wearing the distinctive white iPod headphones, so too there is a world before the iPhone, and it ends today.

(Hmmm… Just watched a Doctor Who episode much like that

Roughly drafted has an interesting article about the iPhone and some responses to it from various critics, including (”fear-based think tank”) Gartner.

Conveniently my phone is showing signs of dying, now if only I could get my hands on one before they are released in Australia.

Meanwhile, JoyOfTech thinks the iPhone may be more popular than (thinking about) sex

Constructed at south park studio. For some reason I couldn’t grab the screen using command-shift-4 or -3, but had to use Preview’s File menu –>Grab –>Window command

…and if the machine has authorisation to play it is detailed in the Apple Developer Technical note “Using the kQTPropertyClass_DRM properties with QuickTime”

Bare feats has speed tests of the new Santa Rosa Macs.

Here are the Developer Notes for the dual-core Xeon Intel Xserve.
And here are the notes for the Mac Pro.

One of my workmates’ laptops started freaking out today, apparently hosing her iPod (ie no more songs). I suggested trying iPodRip, which managed to recover all her tracks. Failing that the next option I was going to suggest was PodSalvage.

After a recent transfer of our server, ownership (and thus access) of newly created files was being assigned to the creator. Old files could still be accessed by members of the group. It seems the solution to this was to use Workgroup Administrator to change the AFP sharepoint so that it used “Inherit permissions from parent” rather than the “Standard POSIX behaviour” (which in standard UNIX style is probably more secure but less useful
Fortunately this seemed to work so I didn’t have to enable and implement appropriate ACL’s

Woohoo, I’ve been invited to give a 3 hour workshop (and a repeat) on our lecture capture solution at X World 2007.

Fabulous article in MacJournals Mac Weekly Journal about ZFS (it’s worth the subscription), and why it won’t be the default Mac filesystem. Namely

• Even Sun don’t have it bootable yet
• CPU load for scrubbing the filesystem isn’t going to appeal to users who already complain about Spotlight indexing
• It chews up much more disk space.
• FATZAP object headers chew up 128K each. Theres one of these for every chunk of metadata that doesn’t fit in a microzap block. Think resource forks, even if they’re empty. With 600,000 files or so it’s likely to chew up around 15Gb of space.
• Metadata attributes can only have up to 50 character names
• It’s case sensitive
• You currently can’t remove drives from a ZFS storage pool
• ZFS filenames are 255 bytes. HFS Plus supports up to 255 UTF-16 characters

Of course if you happen to have a server with tons of storage, it might be appropriate as it does some very cool things such as guaranteeing data integrity, snapshots (which chew up disk space as they preserve all the blocks from the time the snapshot is taken).
Meanwhile Apple has now stated that ZFS will only be available as a read-only option from the commandline.