During the same period that I thought I’d be playing a lot with an old Dell laptop running Ubuntu Linux (but haven’t), several notable Apple fans have made, or are seriously and publicly considering making, the jump from OS X to open-source operating systems like Ubuntu.
Mark Pilgrim led the way. (He does work for IBM, though he’s gotten remarkably few snide remarks about that in the comments.)
Cory Doctorow is talking like he’s about to do it as well.
Late last year the Xiph QuickTime Components project took up where the moribund qtcomponents.sourceforge.net had left off – great news for lovers of open audio formats like Ogg Vorbis. (Vorbis encodes music at higher quality than MP3 at equivalent bitrates, and is unencumbered by patents and licensing.) The latest release of the components, earlier this month, features Intel compatability and preliminary support for FLAC (a lossless encoding).
The thing that makes this project so useful is that QuickTime components can transparently provide services to any OS X application relying on QuickTime – such as iTunes.
So the other day I downloaded a talk from Google Video for offline viewing/listening. (It’s by Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of the lead developers of Django.)
I have a Mac, and Macs are great at video and stuff! Not like those dumb old Windows computers!
Hm.
No go. QuickTime (version 7.0.4, the latest) can’t do it. Twice it gives me an error dialog saying it doesn’t recognize the file type, forwarding me to a stupendously useless codecs page on the Apple site; twice it ignores the video track but manages to play a squeaky, choppy version of the audio.
Two and a half years ago I wrote a review-like essay on six weeks spent using FreeBSD and KDE as my primary desktop system – when I was between PowerBooks.
As hinted at in a recent post, I now have a second machine alongside my 15" PowerBook. It’s an old Dell Inspiron 4000 running bleeding-edge Ubuntu 6.06. This includes GNOME 2.14 with the Deskbar – which gets compared to Quicksilver but is more like a hybrid of Spotlight and LaunchBar.
Last year a client asked for help moving his website to a new host from XO.com. The tricky part was that his 200 pages of content were locked into an obsolescent proprietary tool called “Site Builder” that offered no exporting options. The file format was a flatfile that looked like this:
#Page-Type "html"
#UID "1000"
#Access-PublicRead "on"
#Access-PublicWrite "off"
#Page-Links-Style "links_outline.nhtml"
#addbrs "off"
#hidenav "off"
#HTML ...
The file structure went like this: a parent directory named nss-objects; child directories bearing page names (or slugs, really); and inside each, an empty directory named !
When I came across Distro of the Month I started thinking that maybe there’s a problem with the number of Linux distributions.
Distrowatch.com tracks approximately 372 different Linux distributions. At one per month, it would take 31 years to make it through the list – assuming that no new distributions arrive during that time, which I’m afraid is wishful thinking.
Distrowatch’s How Independent Is Your Distribution page boils the numbers down some – 129 of those 372 are based on Debian, for instance.
Here’s a very cool little open source module for Cocoa application developers: Sparkle by Andy Matuschak. It allows applications to detect, download, and install new versions automatically. It apparently can be added to a project without any glue code at all. It supports Appcast feeds. It’s got handy features like Skip This Version and Remind Me Later. It can work with .dmg files or .zip archives.
During my brief stint with Cocoa programming I really wanted something like this.
