| 2007-12-31 My first Mactel |
 The game is over. Intel got it all. After nearly four years of loyal service, I replaced my beloved iBook with a MacBook.My iBook was the first of the 12" G4 line, clocked at 800 MHz. When I got it, it was already underclocked compared to the more common PC laptops. Even the Compaq I had before it was running at 1.3 GHz. But since Windows XP, once tuned properly, runs fine enough on an 800 MHz machine, why shouldn't Mac OS X? Everybody says that it is better than Windows, it uses the 3D accelerator to be even faster, and the PowerPC processors are better than Intel's. Some (some?) Mac zealots are going to hate me, but I have to say that those statements were quite bold. This computer was the first one that I felt slow in a long time. Read more... Add a comment |
| 2007-11-12 Introducing libwalter |
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You've already read it in Oliver's blog: we are working on a library that will finally fill some holes in the BeOS classes. Its name is libwalter, hopefully it will be integrated into Haiku R2. It still need a lot of development, but you can start to look at it and use it in your own programs. The most useful widget (and the largest) is the Toolbar which is, in fact, the one I designed for my AtomoCAD. Check it out at OSDrawer! Add a comment |
| 2007-07-30 Blog tweaks |
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I spent the last few days tweaking my site; the most obvious changes are the new pages for File-To-Resource and the Velleman K8055 library, but I also made several bugfixes and completely redesigned the navigation bar on the left. It looks like I found a missing feature in the HTML Specifications, maybe I'll write to the W3 Consortium... An important change is the removal of the links to the AtomoCAD site from the home page. I'll put them back when AtomoCAD will reach an useful shape. I've also tweaked my (simple but effective) spam protection for the comments to the news. I noticed a curious thing: I got some absolutely dumb comments. I think they're some sort of spammers who are testing my protection, thinking I've put up some seriusly advanced protection. But I didn't. My protection is really simple, and probably this is why they can't pass through it! I have a counter of rejected comments, it scores about 3,000 rejections per month! Update: I also found a bug in Gecko (the Firefox/Mozilla rendering engine), and the CSS Validator curiously complains that I'm using the same color for the text and background for different objects. Quite dumb. Add a comment |
| 2007-07-22 iBook surgery |
 I am the kind who makes (somewhat) regular backups of its files. I started over than fifteen years ago, with floppy disks (1.44 Mb), moved to Iomega ZIP disks (100 Mb), then to CD-RW disks (650 Mb), and lately to DVD-RW disks (4.7 Gb). Now I’ve crossed the 3 disks barrier: that is, almost 10 Gb of stuff, excluding MP3s, DIVXs, and alike. 10 Gb of personal files, source code, pictures, emails, collected in almost 20 years of using computers. Soon I got tired of swapping disks, preparing images, and so on, so I did a new step and bought an external USB hard disk: cheap, reliable, easy to use, and Mac OS X can even encrypt it. The cheapest I found was an 80 Gb 2.5" model (special offer at the same price of a 40 Gb model), almost three times bigger than my iBook’s original hard disk (30 Gb)! Why not swap the two disks then?Most notebooks have some sort of opening on the lower side that allows easy replacement of the hard disk, but the 12" iBook G4 doesn't. You actually have to dismantle the computer almost completely to replace the disk! I followed the guide at iFixit, which is clear and complete enough. In less than an hour I had my new disk installed and ready to use, and I thought the hardest part was done. I was wrong! The computer booted fine with the original Tiger DVD, but when it asked for the install destination, the new disk was not listed! Disk Utility did show it but didn't allow to partition it because it was already partitioned with Windows. I supposed that Mac OS X setup was smart enough to partition a new disk, but it isn’t! Actually, you don't need to be so much smart, and every OS I ever tried was able to do it. Even DOS is. But not OS X. I tried several tips from Google, but everything was unhelpful. I then gave up, dismantled the iBook again, rebooted with the original disk, partitioned and formatted the new hard disk in a USB box, mounted it back in the iBook, and finally I was able to install Tiger. All this from the "most advanced operating system of the world". Thank you Steve. 1 comment |
| 2007-07-01 After years, a virus! |
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Well, finally, after years, my Windows machine almost got infected by a virus. I say "almost" because it wasn't able to do much, since it was running in a low privileges account. And this is the strange part: I use that account only to play World of Warcraft (I set it up this way because I don't like how WoW uses a spyware-like program to detect cheating software). Seldomly, I also do some surfing with Mozilla SeaMonkey with that account, looking for solutions to WoW quests and such. This is the only way I could imagine I got this virus (a variant of Agent): it used some vulnerability in SeaMonkey or Flash. Apart from that, this is the first virus I get since 1996. Eleven years of surfing with Windows, no less. And most of the time without an antivirus running in the background. I really don't understand how some people get viruses on an almost daily basis. Probably the trick is to not use Internet Exploder. Update: the virus has popped up again, it seems I forgot a piece yesterday. No problem, I removed it again; the hardest part actually was recovering the XP Recovery Console which refused to start (some differences with the service packs). Add a comment |
| 2007-06-19 Haiku at 1680x1050 (BeOS and Zeta too) |
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Recently, my eyes got unsatisfied with cathode-ray tube monitors. I found myself using the tiny 12" display of my iBook instead of my glorious 19" Sony CRT. So I jumped the fence and landed on the dark side of LCD monitors. My beloved Sony E430 Multiscan Flat Trinitron is now collecting dust on a shelf, and the desk now holds a Samsung 225BW 22" Wide LCD monitor. I choose this big size because a 22" wide is about the same height as a standard 19" and I didn't want anything smaller! This panel works at 1680x1050 and sports a DVI connector with HDCP support (who knows when it'll become mandatory). I tried it with BeOS, Zeta, and of course Haiku. Setting it in Haiku was very easy, the pain came with BeOS and Zeta: none of them listed 1680x1050 in their screen preferences! In this case Haiku is much smarter than its closed source cousins because it gets the mode list from the video card driver (thanks Axel for having added it!), while BeOS and Zeta seems to have a fixed list. But not all is lost: you can just open the application server settings file, located in ~/config/settings/app_server_setting, and edit the workspace definitions for the workspaces you want at 1680x1050. Here is the correct definition: Workspace 0 {
timing 147100 1680 1784 1968 2256 1050 1051 1054 1087 0x60000000
colorspace 0x00000008
virtual 1680 1050
flags 0x8000001b
color 336698
}
This sets the workspace 0 at 1680x1050, 32 bit color, 60 Hz. Change the workspace number as desiderated; the color field is the background color of the desktop in RGB hexadecimal. I'm not sure about the flags, but this seems to work for me.After you're done, save and reboot. If something goes wrong and you see no picture, hit Shift+Ctrl+Alt+F12 to switch back to a safe resolution and check your settings file. How does this monitor compare with my former Sony? Gone are the days when a LCD picture quality was a lot inferior than any crappy CRT; today's panels compare pretty well. They are still inferior to a good CRT of the past (the CRT monitors on sale today are cheap models, much worse than my Sony), but they reached a very appreciable quality. I just miss the color fidelity; the feared low response time is not an issue for me, the 5ms is noticeable only with the mouse cursor. There's also an issue with poor vertical viewing angle and a noticeable backlight, but at overall I'm satisfied with my purchase. Also, playing World of Warcraft on a wide screen is an experience you can't miss! Add a comment |
| 2007-05-04 Stupid computers tale |
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When you have too many computers, the idea of connecting them in a network just sounds natural nowadays. Computer networks are so well estabilished that you expect things go smooth at the first try. Right? Wrong. Read my tale about my home network, including two PCs with Windows and Zeta, one Mac, one hard disk, and one printer. Sit down and be ready to read a long, long list of problems with adapters, operating systems, drivers, and even cables.
Read more...
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| 2007-04-28 Links page updated |
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After that Zeta's story, I knew that my links page needed an update, but when I looked at it, I couldn't believe how much outdated these links were! I ended up thrashing three quarters of them, they still pointed to YellowTab and BeUnited... Well, now everything is fixed. I also put some new links to sites I find interesting. In the meantime, I also fixed some bugs in my blog's code, now it should correctly handle quotes and international characters. Add a comment |
| 2007-04-09 AtomoCAD on Haiku on Dual Pentium III |
 Today, after some disk swaps, partinioning, and an almost burn (make sure your hard disk cooling fans are working before touching them), I run Haiku on the "bare hardware" of my Dual Pentium III, and I succesfully run AtomoCAD inside it!The machine specs are as follows. It is a rather old machine but funny to play with:
Haiku booted promptly. Both processor were recognized, as well as the video card. One of the first thing you notice is that Haiku seems slower than BeOS, but Tracker is quite faster than its Zeta counterpart: they done a damn good job with those vector icons. Haiku also recognized the network card, got its IP address from my DHCP server (my DSL router, a Zyxel Prestige 640R) and I was able to do some surfing from both the web and my iBook's Apache server, but I got no sound because my card is not supported; currently, Haiku can't use any ISA PnP card. It also didn't like any USB device I plugged into any port, including mice and keyboards, so copying the screenshot file required a reboot (not even the floppy drive is supported). As last step I tried some of my BeOS apps, including AtomoCAD. And it run flawlessy! There's only the problem of the poor performances due to the Haiku's anti-aliasing drawing (it is nice, but apps should be able to turn it off - or even better, leave it disabled by default) and the fact that it doesn't honour the B_NO_POINTER_HISTORY flag of SetMouseEventMask(). Keep up the good work, guys! 3 comments |
| 2007-04-07 Every Saga has an End |
 The last week has been the most frenzied of the whole BeOS history. In a few sentences:
Any way you look at this, this is the end of the commercial BeOS era. I don't believe that Bernd has done all this out of legality. He will fight hard, like he always did, and the epilogue has not been written yet. Personally, I have loved BeOS and I will always do. We still have Haiku after all, I will continue to use it and write software for it. But what about my master project, AtomoCAD? There's no future for any commercial application on Haiku for the time being, but I won't let AtomoCAD die. Since the beginnings, AtomoCAD has always been a multi-platform application; in fact, I wrote the very first lines on my iBook. Recently I scrapped the original Mac OS X version, which was written in Carbon in C/C++, in favor of a Cocoa version in Objective-C++. The AtomoCAD core is in C++ so it was quite easy. There's very little to show at the moment, just take this Xcode screenshot as good. Add a comment |
| 2007-03-11 Fixes and spam |
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I just noticed and fixed a bug in my blog's code that caused refusion of some valid e-mail addresses. In the meantime I also put in some more spam countermeasure, but, more importantly, a quicker way to delete it! Maybe you could be interested in some statistics: on (about) 200 comment, 197 were spam and 2 were off-topic. Add a comment |
| 2007-02-26 Velleman USB Experiment Interface Board driver for BeOS |
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A couple of weeks ago I published on BeBits another of those apps that were lying on my hard disk. It is a driver, library, and demo application for the Velleman K8055 USB Experiment Interface Board for BeOS and ZETA. It's pretty simple and misses some features, but it does the job. I would like to put more BeOS style in it (stuff like OO-classes, multiboard/multithreading support, and so on) but I think that having a basic support now is better than waiting forever for a deluxe edition. Add a comment |
| 2007-01-16 BeOS on very old computers |
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When the first version of BeOS for Intel came out, around 1997, we were in the Pentium I era. BeOS could run on most of these machines, but you can have very big problems because, believe it or not, computers were much less standardized than today; I recently tried to run BeOS R5 on a couple of such, not very standard, old machines, with poor results. The first is a notebook from IBM, the Thinkpad 365XD, and the second is a custom built Pentium Overdrive machine.
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| 2007-01-11 AtomoCAD Web site revamped |
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The AtomoCAD web site was in need of a revamp, so here it is. I did most of the work some months ago, but I was too lazy to put it online. It now uses my own blog engine!
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