as /etc/httpd/httpd.conf will tell you in
DocumentRoot “/Library/WebServer/Documents”
the Document Root under OS X is under /Library/WebServer/Documents.
Of course you need to enable the oddly named “Personal Web Sharing”
in the system preferences under network.
The SE was great. 2,500 Deutsche Mark, even after buying it via a student friend of mine, was allot of money. But it was a computer that you could buy books about. It was actually documented. That I had only seen like this for a Sun.
The LC and Newton I bought in an impulse. I lived 400 Meters from a Mac dealer back in the day. Which there were like 5 or so in the whole god damn country. Played a little bit of Myst on it. Started to develop for the Newton. But it was so odd and different from any API I cared about that I declared it a waste or time. And money I might add.
Power Macintosh I got a work. Slow like hell.
Powerbook Titanium I got at work as well. My boss brought it in one day. And I was very very very happy. Then, after the while, the hinge just snapped off. Apple pretended that that would never happen. Machine got hot, but was nice otherwise. Miss it.
iBook I got for my wife. Old CPU rev, real cheap. Worked great. I think she made the mistake of opening and
closing it though: the backlight display failed
iPod 1st Gen. Failed by now. Was ok though.
PowerBook Al 12″. Nice. But hot.
PowerBook Al 15″. Smoothest Mac I owned. Had to leave it when I left that job. Which was a shame.
iPod 3rd Gen: Broken. Those 4 buttons in the row are such a bad idea!
iBook G4. Mac I bought in 1995 working on my own in the US again. (I had in Germany before 1997). Nice machine. Real nice. Would still use it, would it’s keyboard not have failed.
iPod Shuffle: refurb, started to listen to podcasts on that one. Not ideal.
iPod Nano: Nice. Refurb, which made it an awesome deal. Left the connection cable in Germany last week though. So I will probably pay alsmost as much for that then I paid for the nice.
MacBook Pro: Tis ok. First Gen. Get’s hot like hell. Disabled spotlight and it helped somewhat.
MacBook: For the wife. Unusable with 512MB or memory. With 1.5GB I have not have heard any complaints. About the computer. (joke that is not true, but was unavoidable in a way)
iPod Hifi: emberrassing. Only used it one day, scaring kids with it during Halloween. Expensive for what it is. Can not even find a tuner for it, which would make it a decent looking kitchen radio. Seing it in the store the other day I was shocked how much I had paid for it.
NTX: First laser I owned. And loved. Got it as part of payment in a job back in the day. Still runs and makes ozone. Is entirely yellow by now.
How odd that I can recount my life by Apple products I used / owned.
Will I buy an iPhone? Certainly not. I am looking forward to it’s release. So that I go publish with the Interdubs-iPhone features, and since Razr prices will go down. It’s an ok phone, that works and that I am used to. If I want more I use a computer. There is no room for an intbetween. I never used a PDA or Blackberry. And UMPCs still make me laugh.
My life in Apple. How weird.
When there is no wifi the iPhone is depending on AT&Ts EDGE technology to get data over the cell phone network. Bandwidth for that is supposed to be 70Kbps to 135Kbps. In other words. It is 11 to 22 times slower than a T1 line. Download wise many consumer DSLs are around T1 speed. So people that are used to ‘high speed internet’ and expecting the same from an iPhone everywhere are in for a surprise.
Since a couple of happy months I have been using EVDO on my laptop. In the rare cases that the Bandwidth dropped below 200Kbps I stopped using the Internet. It was just too painful.
youTube player on iPhone
This was the 12th icon, missing so far.
While on wifi through connect via local internet connection the iPhone might be a cute little viewer. Much like the Sony PSP was back in the day: 480 x 272 is the resolution on Sony’s device, while it is 480 x 320 on the iPhone. Somewhat tragic, that the actual hardware path (internet->wifi->device) was already available on the PSP. Two year head start. Wasted. Well, they sold 10 million PSPs in the US.
The real innovation would have been GPS. I think that devices should be fucking aware where they are. I would like the next MacBook Pro have EVDO
built in. Including GPS support. I am sure there are ample applications one could think of, once devices are location aware. It takes only 2 floats to store this precisly. Without any compression applied it would take a mere 10GB to store my location since I was born. One record for each second that I was alive.
This brief intro to zfs I had linked to in the last entry already. As it turns out, I was a bit naive in thinking that Apple would just implement zfs in leopard. If I understand this clarification correctly then ZFS will be READ ONLY in Leopard. Which makes it pointless for all real life uses I had in mind. Or that most people ever would have had in mind. Why bother? Apple is an odd company, certainly not one that behaves logical in some areas of it’s efforts. Sometimes it just behaves like a spoiled Trust-a-fari. Who needs reason if the iPod sales just keep the ATM filled up for you?
In the meantime Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz invites Linus Torwalds to dinner in response to his post about Sun.
What I do like about this story is how much of it happens in the open for everybody to see. In a more upbeat perspective there seems to be one big global “Forum Romanum” these days.
Abusing the own blog as a boomarking tool again, here a list of ten OS X Application Some even be worth trying. Just that every new Application I need to kick one to the curb. Appl-Clutter is horrible.
Clutter is horrible. Period. Just writing this while Final Cut thinks it needs a re-render. Of course it’s not needed. But those bugs that you can survive that ‘only’ waste time and disk space get fixed last.
Developing a new public site for interdubs. I am almost done. I needed a png file. Of course they looked different in Safari and Firefox. Actually, to be precise, they looked wrong in Safari. There is problem some academic reason why safari displays them with all that fancy color information rendered in. I don’t care, they are still wrong to me: I want all people to see the same image. this describes the problem I think; as I said, I am making a new site for Interdubs, I don’t have time for another science project. That site however recommends pngcrush. Problem is, that one is a real bitch to compile or install on OS X and linux. Again, I am just trying to have the same image look the same in the two most popular browsers under OS X. I can figure out which libraries to install etc etc. Just that I don’t want to. Finally I found the solutions, and it works awesom: Gamma Slamma might have an odd name, it might have a trendy logo, but it certainly works like a charm.
Somebody managed to send an email out that the iPhone would be delayed. In the following hours that it took the official Apple PR machine to react and ‘catch the bad meme’ the Aaple did go down by a couple of dollars. Then it rebound. Somebody could have made 3% in a couple of hours.
update 5/17/07:
techcrunch says that the false engadget news wiped of four billion dollars in market cap in six minutes. New travels fast it seems.
My sister needs a new computer. These days I would recommend the cheapest MacBook with 1GB memory and 80 GB harddrive upgrades and -of course- Apple Care. Which comes down to 1473 US$. Which is not a bad price for a powerful and reliable machine.
In Germany the very same machine does cost 1518 Euros. That’s looks similar. However with todays rate this comes down to 2126 dollars. In 2000, before Bush started to dabble in economics, you only had to pay 1395 dollars for the same amount of Euros.
Old and rotten APIs should be politely guided to the graveyard of history. And freaking shot! But, no, some clueless public prodcasting people still enjoy the merits of using ‘real player’. Now Microsoft and Adobe get into a fight over movie playback systems. At least that’s what the tech journalists tell us. Very same people that speculated for years wether Microsoft or Sony would take the next gen crown of gaming. Until there was the Wii. Microsoft vs Adobe during NAB was one of these non stories that became one, since Journalists could write so easily about it.
The reality of quicktime is actually pretty grim: People are able to make movie files that are plain insane. Client of mine likes to produce anamorphic qt’s. Don’t ask. Displaying them on a website, you kinda need to know about that, otherwise they look squeezed. Only problem is: The quicktime player magically knows. But nothing else does. Probing the transformation matrix via javascript returns the most innocent matrix there is: 1.0, 0.0, 0.0 0.0, 1.0, 0.0 0.0, 0.0, 1.0.
ffmpeg, usually so brave in dealing with all this, has no clue. Apple documentation acknowledges the existence of matrices and even teases on this page with the existence of some documentation about matrix functions. But of course the link maybe having some answers goes nowhere. Which is pretty common in Apples online quicktime documentation. It’s huge, it’s old, in many cases examples require OS9 to compile. There are actually very very few working and helpful examples on Apples sites. Whenever the quicktime API gets extended again by some mostly unwanted function there are some files in the development environment du jour. But after years of operating systems and development environments moving on they mostly become a joke or grim reminder of times when Mac’s where beige. Yes, it really is that horrible. And then some.
Quicktime was a good idea. One that got out of hand. Fueled by the success of Apple and it’s other products, it could survive the total failure in gaining any consumer traction. Youtube is flash based. Looks bad, but nobody cares. Unfortunately there are not any alternatives to quicktime. Which is a shame:
It should not be that hard to just have a simple working container format for audio and video. xml works, all these modern things. And quicktime?
Moov containers. nested in each other. Trying to hide their shameful kludgyness. Only thing that Apple did that is worse than quicktime is AppleScript. But we don’t go there. Oh, no. We will not. Sal, oh, Sal, why don’t you go where people wear the had that you do??
Quicktime VR? Who gives a shit? Sprites? Excucse me? You can write actually lots of things in quicktime. Too many. We don’t need an interactive system that would run of a CDROM. Really not. Anymore.
I will have to deal with quicktime in the next five years. And I am seriously not looking forward to all those oddities that will creep up. Not at all.
Apple should define a simple, fast, well documented (examples!) ‘core-qucktime’ subset that actually gets used and that all application should
and can support.
