dkocher.name

My workplace is now an aquarium, too.

Booting up Qloudstat.

Building two low cost large dimension tables (3m length each) out of roof battens with ~400 screws invisibly in between. A nice deviation in hardware building from daily software.

In collaboration with Mereo. Original concept by Lorenz Kocher.

Having worked a week with a new MacBook I have noted a few downsides over previous models:

• Yes, the display does have too much reflection. Way too much.
• Keyboard is missing the number keypad available accessible with fn key. Miss it a lot.
• Can no longer connect my Firewire drives. Missing Target Disk Mode.
• Yet another properietary display connector.
• Some DVD medias cannot be read at first and must be inserted several times until the volume is mounted.
• Update: Broken video signal to external display after display awakes from sleep is common. Also with an external display attached, the Macbook does sometimes not properly awake from sleep.
• Update: Command-Ctrl Power does no longer restart the Mac. Had already two complete freezes since upgrading to 4GB Kingston Memory. I have now replaced the memory kit and the machine is running smoothly since.

Sarah schreibt aus Tbilisi.

13949712720901ForOSX.

I just discovered the great new Google Patent Search. I hope I don’t get sued by IBM because of the “Method and system for a user interface for remote FTP hosts” patent.

I finally managed to merge the current trunk of Vienna into my prototype branch for some experiments with the user interface, especially moving away from the metal look. You can download a snapshot of this prototype build here. Please note that this build is not official at all, has had only very limited testing and is not meant for daily use!

I would buy one on the first day released to replace my current 12inch PB.

Apple made available the slides of WWDC 06 on iTunes. It works by authenticating you at developer.apple.com/adconitunes/ and then tells the web browser ot open a URL with a itmss scheme to be opened in iTunes. But if you want to access this content with a low bandwidth internet connection (as I usually have here in Pakistan) you often get timeouts and the downloads then fail to resume (See the nice error message below). It also opens the authentication web page in your web browser all over again. I know it is difficult to handle connections with a low latency properly, but then wouldn’t it be much easier to simply distribute these PDF slides at connect.apple.com (as in previous years). Why download PDF files in a proprietary audio player anyway? KISS please.