Rui CarmoFinally, after a week or so, I sat down and fired up my iMac for some quality computer time, following one of the most active Mondays I've had in a while (my calendar for this week seems to consist almost entirely of early morning and late afternoon meetings, with a crunchy midday).
My Mac mini is now safely ensconced in the server closet (replacing my dead PC) and I will be investing in more RAM for it in a couple of months (I have a strong suspicion that it will be around for a while yet, so I might as well make it a bit faster). Expect a few notes on remote monitoring of Mac OS X systems in a few days (Davi has a few starting points, but interpreting temperature readings seems to be a dark art).
Incidentally, I've found that OSXvnc is amazingly better than the built-in Apple Remote Desktop client (which includes a VNC server of rather limited abilities). The usual tune-ups (such as tweaking color depth and font smoothing) apply, but using a standard VNC against OSXvnc seems to be a viable proposition at 3G rates - it's not as fast as RealVNC on Fedora (lots of extra eye candy), but it's certainly usable.
(Dashboard, to my amazement, worked pretty well over VNC, at least on the LAN).
Sadly, the keyboard mappings are completely shot, which makes it impossible to use as a "roaming" desktop - I can type any accented character that strikes my fancy using VNC against Fedora, but OSXvnc's handling of accented characters in this day and age is just sad - and reminds me of my February challenge.
As a sidenote, following my "network computing" phase, I've been considering going fully mobile and simply running everything off my office desktop (which is still running 2003 Server, easily the most stable desktop OS I've used these past few years - yeah, you can quote me on that, provided you take into account I don't have Macs at the office - yet).
Some News
A few interesting things I've come across:
- Engadget (which has a new, extremely irritating RSS footer) has a rumor about new iBooks - apparently there's a 14" widescreen one on the way - I'm taking this one, as all Apple hardware rumors, with a fairly large grain of salt - about pebble-sized.
- iFill has got to be the most original iPod software I've seen in a while - but for some reason it doesn't work for me over Netcabo (I can't even preview stations). Switching to my ADSL connection solved the problem (despite the odd crash now and then), which points to yet another "opaque proxy" issue. Way to go, guys.
- script.aculo.us is up, which is a good sign of progress on this Prototype extension.
- TiddlyWiki has been revamped with tags and a few other improvements - and, while reading the release notes, I found ZiddlyWiki, which uses a much cleaner technique to add server-side storage.
- Steven's dog "dances" with the Roomba - a must see.
- Flickr is moving to the USA. I can't wait to see what sort of content restrictions will start popping up...
- Via Vitor, a minor piece of "I sure as hell told you they'd get around to do it": PT.com licensed Xten.