If you’re into rotating green wireframes of the world, you can download the Defcon screensaver.
Archive for June, 2007
Defcon screensaver
Friday, June 15th, 2007Safari 3 examined
Thursday, June 14th, 2007Ars Technica finds Safari 3 wanting, both from a UI and a security perspective.Joel (On Software) looks at Font smoothing, anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rendering across the Mac and Windows platforms.Also on the text rendering front, codinghorror. Personally, looking at it on the dodgy PC CRT monitor at work it definitely looks fuzzy all over (almost to the point of being unusable), although I haven’t yet tried the preferences to tone down the aliasing.
1 terabyte drive on DealMac
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007Want to pick up a 1Tb drive? Yum!
WWDC 2007 keynote summary
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007via the MacRumors feed:Electronic Arts (EA) are returning to the Mac, coming in July are:Command and Conquer 3Battlefield 2142Need For Speed CarbonHarry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (an immersive 3D Hogwarts environment :)Madden 08 and Tiger Woods 08 are also coming.id games have a game with 20GB of textures (I’m guessing it ships on Blu-Ray :)22 million active OS X users, 67% using Tiger 10.4 (23% Panther, 10% older than that)Now moving beyond Leopard (which ships in October :)21 Months between Tiger and Leopard. 300 new features, of which 10 are:Narrower Dock with new transparent lookStacks! (as have been thought about since System 7 days?)Prominent active window (ooh, are we going back to a document based metaphor, ala Lisa OS or OpenDoc? :)No more brushed metal!Leopard will have a consistent look…Dock icons reflect on windows behind them :)Sidebar lets you search other macs and Server with spotlight, browse shared computers”Back to my Mac” share even when not on same LAN, via .Mac knowing your machines’ IP numbers.#2 Cover flow for
- the Finder (including browsing remote machines)
- PDFs (Woohoo!)
- Keynote
- Videos (whilst playing?
- Excel spreadsheets!
.Mac “Start” tab (borrowed from Windows?) lets you find your other Macs. Click the “Shared” button to search on other Macs.#3 Quick LookPDF viewing without a viewer.Full screen movie preview#4 64 bit#5 Core Animation#6 Boot Camp built-in#7 SpacesAudio is local to the currently viewed space#8 DashboardMovie Times widget for finding times, viewing previews and buying tickets via Fandango.Web clippings as seen at WWDC 2006.Borders and shading can be customisedWidgets are live, you can switch between tabs#9 iChatAs seen at WWDC 2006Photobooth featuresAAC-Low Delay codecTabbed chatsPhoto booth effectsiChat theatrebackdropsPhil!Share iPhoto slideshow in iChatShare video in iChat by dragging it inFlip through Excel spreadsheet!#10 Time MachineBack up automatically, even multiple computers to networked drives (ie attached to an Airport base station)Safari 3 for Windows!iPhone goes live June 29th at 6pm. Develop for it with Web 2.0 + AJAX.iPhone apps are running within SafariSteve demos corporate addressbook with LDAPLink to Google MapsThe End
Safari 3 for Leopard, and Windows XP/Vista
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007Steve Jobs has announced during the WWDC 2007 keynote that Safari 3 will run on Leopard, and Windows XP/Vista. Faster than IE or Firefox (with iBench HTML test).Includes Google and Yahoo! search. Draggable tabs (including off into their own windows).500,000 downloads of Firefox a day. 1,000,000 downloads of iTunes a day. Over 500 million downloads of iTunes to Windows machines.Beta available from http://www.apple.com/safari
Live WWDC 2007 coverage
Monday, June 11th, 2007Looks like MacRumors are running live text coverage of the WWDC 2007 keynote at http://www.macrumorslive.com/. Keynote kickoff is at 10am PDT June 11th 2007.
WWDC 2007 coverage
Monday, June 11th, 2007Ars Technica have photos from the independent developers’ party. Wow, random people I ran into at parties last year are actually known entities :)MacSlash reports that there’s a new keynote Bingo form available for download. Or you could repurpose this drinking game from the Macworld SF Keynote.
Defcon - Everybody Dies
Sunday, June 10th, 2007Perhaps you’re a fan of Professor Falken in Wargames, or you miss playing Global Thermonuclear War over AppleTalk with GameMaster. Defcon from Ambrosia Software is like that, but updated with modern graphic, soundtrack and network play.
Unfortunately real nuclear war is probably a lot faster.
MySQLdb lays an egg
Saturday, June 9th, 2007If you’ve got a Python CGI that uses MySQLdb and it mysteriously fails to display, you may want to check /var/log/httpd/error_log where you might find something like:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/test2.cgi", line 12, in
import MySQLdb
File “build/bdist.macosx-10.4-i386/egg/MySQLdb/__init__.py”, line 19, in
File “build/bdist.macosx-10.4-i386/egg/_mysql.py”, line 7, in
File “build/bdist.macosx-10.4-i386/egg/_mysql.py”, line 4, in __bootstrap__
File “/sw/lib/python2.5/site-packages/pkg_resources.py”, line 800, in resource_filename
self, resource_name
File “/sw/lib/python2.5/site-packages/pkg_resources.py”, line 1228, in get_resource_filename
self._extract_resource(manager, self._eager_to_zip(name))
File “/sw/lib/python2.5/site-packages/pkg_resources.py”, line 1250, in _extract_resource
self.egg_name, self._parts(zip_path)
File “/sw/lib/python2.5/site-packages/pkg_resources.py”, line 880, in get_cache_path
self.extraction_error()
File “/sw/lib/python2.5/site-packages/pkg_resources.py”, line 846, in extraction_error
raise err
pkg_resources.ExtractionError: Can’t extract file(s) to egg cache
The following error occurred while trying to extract file(s) to the Python egg
cache:
[Errno 13] Permission denied: ‘/Library/WebServer/.python-eggs/MySQL_python-1.2.2-py2.5-macosx-10.4-i386.egg-tmp’
The Python egg cache directory is currently set to:
/Library/WebServer/.python-eggs
Perhaps your account does not have write access to this directory? You can
change the cache directory by setting the PYTHON_EGG_CACHE environment
variable to point to an accessible directory.
As it says, you need to either create the directory and set the privileges (chown -R www:www /Library/WebServer/.python-eggs) or set the PYTHON_EGG_CACHE environment variable to a directory that’s writable by the user executing the cgi (probably www).
Sun CEO announces ZFS to be Leopard default filesystem
Friday, June 8th, 2007According to an article on MacNN, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has announced that ZFS will be the default Leopard filesystem. Assuming that an angered Steve Jobs doesn’t pull it now that his thunder has been stolen of course
