Torsten Curdt’s weblog

Dear Apple – this is getting ridiculous! It can’t be so hard to make a release out of the java6 beta.

This has been brought to my attention on the Cocoa dev list lately. Apple says…

The installation package based mechanism is the preferred method for delivering products in Mac OS X. This model is a change for experienced Mac OS X developers and packagers. Before Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard), the preferred software delivery mechanism was the manual install, where users drag the product from its container, a disk image, onto their file system. However, managed installs (which are steered by the Installer application after the user opens an installation package) on Leopard clients make possible advanced installation-management features, such as better package management through the Installer package database, downloadable packages, and certificate-based signing. Leopard leverages these features to provide users an improved install experience.

IMO that’s a terrible terrible move. I personally loved the simplicity and beauty of dragging a new application into the applications folder. Drag and Done! I was so happy to get away from this installer madness from Windows. Granted – upgrading apps was a pain until AppFresh appeared on the scene. But now installers are coming back to hunt us down on OSX? What about uninstalls? IMO they should have integrated AppZapper / AppDelete into the OS instead. Or go with a proper package management systems we know from Linux distributions so well. “apt-get dist-upgrade” *sigh*

Oh, well! Using unpkg might come handy more and more often then.

This Saturday I’ve attended the barcamp here in Berlin. 400 people signed up to get together and talk in open environment about ideas, projects and new technologies. Session ranged from technical topics to legal hints about trademarks. Even just informal gettogethers about more general topics. I signed up for the camp a bit last minute. Would have been great to prepare something myself. But at least I’ve joined sessions about

1. openid
2. IPTV
3. open social
4. yahoo pipes
5. bot nets
6. mobile tagging
7. p2p storage

Clearly the main focus of the event was social networks though. Be it the online aspect of building communities or the real world networking. Open social from google was what everyone was talking about. The session itself was packed. No big surprise I found the IPTV session very interesting. Many good questions have been brought up. The session about bot nets drew a scary picture of internet crime as it exists today already. The guy from wuala gave an interesting presentation about their new (still closed alpha) p2p storage platform. I think the interface has still a long way to go and I am not so sure about their business plan …but from the technology side of things it sounded encouraging.

I was amazed how much they got organized as a free event. A good venue, free drinks, free food …just the wifi could have been a bit better. (a proxy? yuck!) I am looking forward to next one. Some pictures are available on flickr.

Just recently I got myself a new lens to play with. I have always been fascinated by macro photography. Word of mouth said the Canon 100/2.8 is a good lens to start with. Nice for portraits and gives a 1:1 scale for macro shots. I am quite happy with the pictures but a little disappointed with the autofocus. In macro mode it feels really slow and often seems to fail even when there are high contrasts. Another thing that I did not anticipate is the small depth of field. With an object distance of 30cm you end up with a DOF of 6mm at an aperture of 2.8. (I found a nice calculator!) As a result you often might want a smaller aperture – which either requires a lot more light or a longer exposure time. So it seems like tripods are king for macro shots. Still a good lens. I hope to get a bit more into macro shots. It’s a whole different world in the small.

In Berlin I am online with Alice. Well, I can’t say I am too impressed about the Alice customer care. (May I say I hate these hotlines where you just cannot reach anyone but a computer?) But they got the connection arranged within about 2 weeks. Not top notch – but OK. What I found most compelling is that you can cancel within 4 weeks. A flatrate of 4-16 Mbit/s for 25 EUR a month is quite cool. And you don’t even need the usual Telekom phone line. Nice. What I really don’t get though is why they provide “crippled” routers.

The so called “AliceBox” is a Siemens C20-010-I router. When I tried to get online I was utterly confused as the router wasn’t giving out any IPs via DHCP. Took me quite a bit to realize that you have to connect via PPPoE. Which essentially declassifies it as a simple DSL modem. Well, as I wanted to use my Airport Express anyway it doesn’t really matter too much for me. Unfortunately for me the password didn’t work, but as this guy shows you can actually get the AliceBox to behave as a proper router.