Just ordered a free OpenSolaris kit (just sign up, give your address and in 2-4 weeks you’ll get a nice pack full of OpenSolaris goodies, including a selection of distributions on CD).

I’m actually quite interested in the OpenSolaris project – once the OpenSolaris distributions mature a bit more, I’m actually think of trying it out as a server operating system. So far, things are early, and as yet not all of the OpenSolaris code has been opened, but Sun are doing a very good job.

In fact, Sun are just great. They’re by far the company contributing most to free software/open source projects and they just seem like a ‘good’ company (at the moment that’s true anyway). It’s nice to have a few Suns to balance out Microsoft’s behaviour and the ‘bad bits’ of other companies (*cough* Apple *cough* FairPlay). I’m not even going to talk about Novell.

There are some really killer features in the commercial Solaris product for the server space, things like Zones and DTrace. A lot of it’s been ported to Linux and BSD, but my ‘unexplored operating system’ radar is going off again. 🙂

Actually, it’s nice to use a Unix which does things differently from Linux occasionally. Not only is it fun to do some exploring, it sharpens your general Unix skills, which can only be a good thing.

In fact, I once got FreeBSD (4.x) onto the oldest computer in this house, which is an IBM-compatible PC with a 75 MHz Pentium processor and 16 MB of RAM. I actually got Apache to compile (after roughly 4 hours) and I installed PHP and MySQL too (thank goodness MySQL is a binary package or it would have been there for days!). It worked reasonably well as a web server, except for the fact that most pages incurred a 10 second delay and PHPMyAdmin would take about 20 minutes to load. 😀

I’ve since tried messing with FreeBSD (and NetBSD as well), but I always tend to get mixed up in the installation process. I guess I need some more practice.

While it’s pretty much done, there are a few things left I need to address:

• Get WPGet’s Ajax comment preview re-enabled (I need to restyle it for the new look first!)
• Fix the weird WebKit rendering bugs
• ‘Block the links’ on the navbar instead of using JavaScript (teach me how!! 😛 )
• Find somewhere to put my Google Reader shared items (you might have noticed, they disappeared because I now have only one sidebar!).
• Rid the world of Internet Explorer. Oops – no, that’s next year. Hey – for the most part, the new design works in IE, so don’t complain.

UPDATE: forgot this one – make a proper secondary navbar for the projects page. 🙂

Hello everyone. In case you’re reading in a feed reader, click through now.

You’ve probably just noticed that there’s been a bit of a change. “What, where’s the orange?”. Let me tell you a story.

This morning, I woke up and I had an idea. I knew what I wanted my site to look like in the future. So I rushed onto the computer, launched The GIMP and did a quick mock-up of how the header image for a future revision of the site might look. I decided it looked awesome, so I saved it.

Then I wondered “hmmm – I wonder what this header image looks like if I put it in a veryplaintxt theme?”. So I got the local copy of my blog on my MacBook, installed veryplaintxt and put in my header image.

I then got really inspired and started a marathon CSS hacking session (the style kind, not the DVD kind), so I whipped through veryplaintxt’s CSS and designing my new blog style.

Interrupted between a random 16-mile, 2 hour cycle ride, I worked on the CSS all day (bearing in mind I’m not all that good at CSS) and finally, I integrated my static pages with the new style too.

By that time, I liked it so much I wanted to put it on the site, make it go live, today. Actually, it came close to not going live today, due to an incident involving Mac OS X’s Finder overwriting and not merging directories, but I don’t want to relive that moment.

If you visited the site in the last hour or so, you will have been greeted by a nice page telling you a new design is coming. Well, here it is.

I’m really happy with how it’s come out. The Blogger-era orange from those days is now long gone, and has been replaced with a nice white/red/blue look. The design looks and feels cleaner (and is – the code is now a lot better than it used to be). I just hope my readers like it as much as I do!

Thanks to veryplaintxt, which was the base style that I worked from to make my theme and of course two of the best operating systems in the world. 😛 And the Konqueror, Cyberduck and Smultron projects for allowing me to upload, erm – upload, and code my new theme.

By the way, what do you think? Please do let me know your suggestions, praise, complaints and all other feedback via the comments.

At the current time, I’m aware of a few minor issues with the design, including strange navbar rendering under WebKit (but not KHTML) and a couple of pixels being off here and there, as well as some minor IE bugs. I’ll keep you posted as to when I have ironed these out. If you see any other rendering bugs, let me know please!

If you downloaded WP 2.1.1 in the last few days, you could have nasty code in your WP install (result of a cracker who got into wordpress.org).

Read more here.

Since I upgraded only hours after the inital announcement of WP 2.1.1 and not in the last few days, I don’t think I’m affected.

Nevertheless, this blog is updated already, and all the other WP blogs I’m responsible for (FW, GB and YMM) are down temporarily and are being updated right now.

If you are running WP 2.1.1, upgrade asap.

UPDATE: every site I’m involved with is updated to 2.1.2 and back online. Now I’m off to bed – it’s already past midnight…

Sorry, another Mac post. Please skip over this if you’re not interested – things will return to a normal level once the novelty has worn off, I promise. 🙂

On OS X, make a file. Doesn’t matter what, just type some random stuff into TextEdit and save it as test.rtf in your home folder. Now load the terminal up:

$ mv test.rtf test:file.rtf

Now look in the Finder. It will be called test/file.rtf. But that’s not what we called it!!

HFS+ (the filesystem) uses colons (:) as directory separators, but Unix uses the forward slash (/). The Unix underneath OS X can’t handle a file with a / in the name, but HFS+ can’t handle a file with a : in the name.

So Mac OS X swaps them around when necessary.

Clever, huh?

W00t.

Apparently, as a response to this petition:

The Government remains committed to its policy that no patents should exist for inventions which make advances lying solely in the field of software. Although certain jurisdictions, such as the US, allow more liberal patenting of software-based inventions, these patents cannot be enforced in the UK.

Now we just need the rest of the world to follow suit, as just the UK won’t make much difference.

Under Mac OS X, fonts everywhere look much crisper, cleaner and more refined I’ve found than on any other platform – even when it’s the same font. I don’t know what Apple are doing, but it’s good.

The one exception to that is Terminal. For some reason, out of the box, the fonts are configured without anti-aliasing, so for someone like me that spends a lot of time with the BSD underneath all the Aqua, it’s a bit annoying.

You won’t find the option when looking in Terminal’s Fonts panel (Command-T), but the functionality is still there, it’s just rather hidden.

From the Terminal menu, choose Window Settings. Pick Display in the pop-up menu and tick Anti-aliasing. Click Use Settings As Defaults and you should from now on have a nice, smoothed, Terminal experience.

Ah, that’s better. Now everything is just fine. 🙂

Universal binary applications on Mac OS X are great, because it means they run natively on both older PowerPC Macs and newer Intel Macs natively.

The bad thing about them is that they take up a lot of disc space, because they contain both the PowerPC code and the Intel code.

There’s actually a shareware app called Xslimmer that will strip the PPC binary out of your applications and slim them down, but I just discovered that you don’t need it. The functionality to do this is built right in to Mac OS X.

First of all, make a backup copy of any application you want to mess around with here. Just in case. 🙂

Now head to the Terminal and do the following (in this example, I use Camino, so substitute in the name of the app you’re using):

$ lipo -thin i386 /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino -output temp
$ rm /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino
$ mv temp /Applications/Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino

If you now do a Get Info on the app, you should see the kind will be Application (Intel). It should run fine and save you a bit of disc space!

In theory this also works the other way round, by using -thin ppc, but I haven’t tried it.

Not very practical given the size difference (13″ vs 19″), but still awesomely cool to do.

Dual monitor Hosted on Zooomr

Just installed KDE on my brand, shiny new MacBook. I got 2 GB worth of KDE goodness (the ‘everything’ torrent) from here and simply opened up the disk image and launched kde4.mpkg.

Konqueror runs and works reasonably well as a web browser – but sadly crashes when trying to use it as a file manager (and I’m not after the web browsing portion).

Installing…

Running…

And crashing… 🙂

I do have a whole host of other KDE apps on Mac OS X to play with and of course much more stuff to do natively too!

OS X is awesome. All the marketing stuff about ‘working out of the box’ is actually surprisingly true. After running the initial “I’m going to ask you millions of questions” setup assistant, you fly straight into a ready-to-run system. Maybe it’s just I’ve never had a decent Windows OEM setup before (is there such a thing?), but Apple get the OOBE right.