tkh’s blog

QuickTime Player

After I removed 3ivx component from ~/Library/QuickTime, I was able to see the keynote streaming. It was long, but it’s worth watching it. I got how Exposé works and It’s pretty impressive. Preview.app’s PDF rendering is very fast, so I think I can throw away the heavy beast Acrobat Reader 6. I can’t wait for the release of Panther.

WWDC Keynote

Delayed streaming of Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote was made available today, but I can’t see the video. When I click on the ‘Watch Now’ button, QuickTime player launches and plays video for few seconds, then the beach ball icon just spins forever. I don’t know if this is QuickTime player’s fault or because server is too busy. Apple should have Akamai provide the streaming.

Panther

Today Apple unveiled the new version of Mac OS called Panther and other software. I think I will really appreciate the new features of Panther, but the $130 for upgrade sucks. I haven’t used the current operating system even for an year and by the end of this year, I have to pay for the new one. The odd versions should be available for free.

Besides the announcement of Panther, Apple released Safari 1.0. So far it seems to be really good. I don’t see malformed Japanese text (a.k.a Mojibake) anymore and several JavaScript bugs I encountered have been fixed. I also downloaded WebCore framework, so I can integrate Safari rendering engine into my applications. Update to Developer Tools is also avaliable. Now I can use GCC 3.3 to build binaries.

Telemarketing

We get four to five telemarketing calls a day. It’s very annoying and destructing our relaxed life at home. Phone is not functioning anymore. We don’t get calls and answering machine is always turned on. But last month, I saw the slashdot article saying that FTC will initiate the country-wide “Do Not Call” list. If your phone number is registered to FTC, any telemarketing calls are considered illegal and they will be punished. I don’t know how it would work, but I hope it would work pretty well. The registration starts on July 1st. I can’t wait…

O’Caml

I’ve just started learning O’Caml. Its object oriented features are really att, ractive. Except for OO, its syntax is not far from SML one, so I hope I can learn and start writing code in O’Caml quickly.

2.4.21

Finally, linux kernel 2.4.21 is out! I was waiting for SGI people to update the XFS patch for 2.4.21, and this evening they did it. I just applied the patch, compiled the kernel, and rebooted. Hope this kernel is the most stable one. I had been using the ck patch for 2.4.20, but I had lockups under heavy load. So I’m not going to use it for 2.4.21.

Upgrading Samba

I’ve upgraded home server’s samba to 2.999+3.0alpha version available in debian sid. The main reason for this upgrade is that the performance of samba-2.2 is not good when MacOS X client connects to it. Samba-2.2 doen’t handle CUPS well, so the upgrade was really desired. There are few caveats when you use samba-3.0. First, if you want to use Japanese filenames, files on the server must be encoded in EUC-JP. Otherwise, you will not able to see folders containing Japanese filenames. The following configuration will correctly sotres Japanese filenames in EUC-JP on the server:

  unix charset = EUC-JP
  dos charset = CP932
  display charset = CP932

Second, you’d better use smbpasswd as password encoding scheme. The default is tdbsum, but password will expire in a couple of weeks and I don’t know how to change the expiration date.
After setting up the basic shared volumes, I tried to configure CUPS. As I knew that windows 2000 supports IPP (Internet Printing Protocol), which CUPS uses for client-server communication, I tried to add an internet printer on windows 2000, but it always failed with some weird error message and I couldn’t proceed further. After checking CUPS logs on the server, I noticed that windows client tries to send POST command to the server, instead of sending GET command. Then I came to the conclusion that the IPP only works with IIS and about to set up the printer via samba. When I added another printer on windows, I noticed that the IPP printer had been registered as a local port. I simply checked it and IPP finally worked! When all of these were done, I was very tired.

KDE

I’ve switched to KDE, because I couldn’t stand the slowness of gnome-terminal. I used to like gnome-terminal since it supports transparent background and the popup menu to launch another window. However, with the recent switch to use libvte for terminal emulation caused a big performance problem. When I use vim to edit a text file and scroll up and down, gnome-terminal uses most of the CPU time and can’t keep up with the keyboard repeat speed. It’s very annoying. I tried to use rxvt to replace gnome-terminal, but it doesn’t save the session when I logout. So I switched to KDE. Gnome people know this issue, but I don’t think it will be fixed sometime in the near future. Performance issue is most noticeable when you increase the keyboard repeat rate. I use ‘xset r rate 200 60′.