Richard Hammond

If you're a fan of the BBC Top Gear programme, you probably already know this:

TV host 'improving' after crash. Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond is improving but remains seriously ill in hospital after he crashed a jet-powered car during filming for the BBC show.The 36-year-old was thought to be driving at about 300mph on an airfield near York when he crashed on Wednesday.

BBC NEWS | UK | England | North Yorkshire | TV host 'improving' after crash

If you're not a fan - you really should have a look at this program. These guys (Richard is one of three) make some of the most entertaining TV out there. Not particularly "politically correct" and most probably therefore the better for it.

Get well Richard, there's a whole bunch of fans on this side of the world who want to see you back on the screen!

Blogged with Flock

New MacBook Pro

It had become time to upgrade. My old favourite PowerBook was slowing down - mainly due to lack of memory. It seemed time to pass it on to someone else in the company (we have a policy of rotating good gear from "power users", down to "medium users" as it seems that they get a better run of it with older good gear, than with newer "not so good" gear) and getting something that will do the job for longer.

So, it's here. It's rather interesting. Not quite what I expected.

As is often the case, some things are quicker/easier than others - and as is even more often the case, predicting which will be faster can be difficult. My biggest worry of course was dealing with the issues of changing from Power PC Mac OS X and Applications, to the newer Universal or Intel binaries. Whilst Apple provide "Rosetta" a emulator for the older binaries, I was aware that problems can come from more complex applications where any dynamic linking or "plugin" architecture is used.

The first surprise was how quick it was to install the OS, migrate my Home directory, settings and Applications. This took around 2-3 hours. Add another hour to do the typical OS upgrades (only one reboot) and basically I'm ready to go within 3-4 hours of unpacking the box! Very impressive - I can't ever remember doing anything that major, that quickly before, on any previous operating system.

The second surprise, was just how much Apple have changed their concept of the hardware. No modem, no PC-Card socket, no Firewire-800 (not that I ever found a use for that), no S-Video or TV Out. The things that mattered for me out of these missing bits; were not being able to use my PCMCIA<->Compact flash reader, not having dial-up capability (Broadband or WiFi is just not quite so universally available everywhere here in New Zealand), not being able to play video files through the TV with a cable that came with the machine. All of this is simply fixed with extra adaptors, however it's a little disappointing to have to go and pay extra for the functionality that was just there on the PowerBook.

It's when you start exploring the software a little bit more, that you find a few more surprises - all of them to do with third party software. Surprisingly it wasn't MS Office that caused the problems (I've had issues with that on a previous temporary migration from a restore). The most annoying was that my Thunderbird setup ended up crashing. Now before anyone starts blaming Thunderbird, you have to understand that I had Thunderbird with around 20 extensions and a history of running various other extensions in the past - i.e. a history of severe change in my Thunderbird profile. I suspect that somewhere in one of the extensions, was some piece Power PC binary code that didn't work inside Thunderbird. The solution was to start a fresh profile, download new versions of the Extensions I was using and migrate my address-book across. This solution of course, was only after I had tried unsuccesfully to remove them one by one.

Other things just worked well. I have been looking at most of the apps I have installed (a worrying amount when I look at my Applications folder) and updating those that have updated versions to capture Universal Binary version. Some of this, has taken a lot more time than I would normally have recommended, as in each case I want to look at the apps concerned and figure out exactly what compatibility issues they may or may-not have. There are still a few bis of shareware I've bought, that haven't been updated and won't run properly - nothing major or show stopping though.

It also triggered a look around at my Web browser situation, as it has become quite clear where the drawbacks of each browser that I sometimes use (Safari, Firefox, Flock, Opera and occasionally Shiira) are. Basically, I seem to be using Flock at the moment (mainly because of it's nice UI and News Reader) with Safari as a more than creditable backup that actually runs faster with a way lower "hit" on the memory usage. Firefox seems to run a little bit faster than Flock, however suffers in the UI space as it's default theme whilst usable is a litte less "mac like" than I would like, and also it's extensions do not always work so well in the Mac space. Also it's built in RSS "Live Bookmarks" support is insufficient and Sage whilst functionally OK - is not quite as straightforward to use as the Flock newsreader.

Most other apps are just fine. AdiumX is just superb as always. Quicksilver the same. ITunes now finally has some of the features I had been wanting (have a look at some of my back posts) and most of the rest "just work" a one would expect on a Mac.

All in all, a rather nice upgrade.

Guitar amplification ... My History. Part 1

I've been spending some time recently looking at the options for updating my guitar amplification system.

I've played electric guitar now for around 15 years, having picked it up in my 20's as a hobby/antidote to the professional classical music career that I was pursuing then. At the time I was playing Violin with a Semi-professional Symphony Orchestra, while doing post-graduate Music at University.

Since then, the guitar has had a varied place in my life, initially being something I could do that was more improvised, through to something I was using as part of the Electro-Acoustic composition work I was creating. Having left University with a Masters degree, I ended up teaching music in various schools; initially teaching Violin. However there ended up more people wanting to learn Guitar! So for around 5 years the Guitar ended up providing a reasonable chunk of my income, such that it was.

Having picked up more of an Internet/Network Engineering career in the last 10+ years, initially I found less time for the Guitar. It's more recently in the last 3-4 years that I have picked it up again, started jamming with a couple of friends and done the odd small gig.

Which leads me to where I am at, which is attempting to update equipment in a usable manner for someone who has been a professional muso, but isn't currently in earning money from this side of my interests.

Initially when I started in 1985, I bought the best moderately playable instrument that I could find that offered as much flexibility that I could get. For amplification, I initially practised at home through an old Stereo (I wouldn't really want to use the term Hi-Fi as that implies something a bit better), that I had previously assembled as a kitset a few years earlier. To get something approaching any sort of "guitar sound" I bought an Ibanez ST9 Super Tubescreamer, which along with a Stereo Chorus pedal managed to tame the bland sound of an electric through a very ordinary amp. So, Stage 1 - very bad semi HiFi amp!

When I got to be able to afford an amp, I ended up buying a Peavey Triumph 60 combo, for the time a really cheap 3 channel tube amp. Well there's a reason that it was cheap, it really isn't that flexible. The Clean channel is rather nice, however it seems a little light on the bass end of things by today's standards. The Crunch and Ultra channels are voiced identically, with Ultra having more gain. They are a sort of 80's super-saturated distortion channels with very little bottom end at all. Additionally the tone controls on the amp are shared between all channels, with only the Treble and Presence controls having an effect on the Crunch and Ultra channels. Basically you get two sounds; clean and distorted with a different gain and level setting for the Crunch channel from the Ultra channel. Not the most flexible.

Some good Torrent material

From Slashdot, a link to a useful list of Linux torrents.

Find Linux Torrents Quickly: "torrentnerd writes 'If you're on the hunt for Linux ISO Torrents you might want to check out the long list of recently released distro torrents over at LinuxISOtorrent.com. They've got frequently updated torrents from A (Arch) to Z (Zen). The site only does one thing, but does it well - helps you get the latest Linux distros downloaded via BitTorrent, quickly.'

(Via Slashdot.)

Playing with Mac OS X

So I've been playing around with Mac OS X. Things are beginning to fall into place now. A lot of things are really cool - however there is one big disappointment: Media players and management.

So I have a reasonably large collection of mainly mp3s that I have ripped off my collection of CDs. Nothing that unusual. The main thing is that in the Mac OS X universe, everyone seems to think that iTunes is a great media player - when actually it seems to suck quite badly. I've been running with the J. River Media Center on windows which seems to be way better than iTunes. Major areas where iTunes sucks in comparison to Media Center:

1. Gapless playback. I've seen comments about this for the last 2 or so years - but still it has not been fixed.

2. Ability to easily and simply manage a very large number of albums with simple multiple at a time, tag editing.

3. Offering more than one way of browsing media - i.e. more than "Genre-Artist-Album"

4. Offering more than a flat-list of playlists.

5. Ability to browse the file system and edit, import, manage files inside the application.

6. Importing and managing other than mp3 or aac media - including ogg, ape etc. file formats.

7. Customisable display modes for track information, including lyrics and other info.

8. Completely extensible meta-data tracking against tracks.

9. Multiple zone playback for Home Media installations

etc. etc. etc.

Anyone with some reasonable alternatives in Mac OS X land - please let me know.

New Hardware

So in the last couple of weeks I've been playing/testing/working with new hardware - specifically a new Apple PowerBook G4 17-inch.

For me this has been interesting. I haven't had the opportunity/experience of getting used to a brand new OS or system "from scratch" since the release of Windows 95. Back then (1995) I had already got my hands dirty with Unix boxes and was working as a System Administrator for an ISP working with SunOS 4.1 while my home machine was an old Atari 1040 ST. Since then I guess everything I have done has involved getting familiar with an OS before actually using it in anger as it were. However this time, there isn't much one can do except, buy the machine and immediately start using it!

So my initial reaction was "why have I waited so long?". The combination of cool sexy hardware, easy to handle GUI with a Unix under the hood is really quite extraordinary. The thing I wasn't expecting (jaded long time sys-admin/developer I guess) was how much it just works out of the box!! So for me, there are things that I am really quite fussy about. One particular areas is email - the result of having worked with so many different email systems in the last 18 years - a lot of which just don't cut it. So to find that the default Mac OS X Mail client "just worked" seems really cool. I have an IMAP setup here, that often a lot of clients wont get right - however the Mac seems to be handling it as good as any. Not perfect - however damned good, predictable and reliable.

The predictability bit is so often not what one finds in clients that have just "bolted on" IMAP functionality. Often email clients, assume that you are only going to use email "their way" what ever that is. When IMAP is added to the fray, they simply extend things by just carrying over the assumptions. So for a new user without any previous email this may indeed be reasonable. HOWEVER! this is now 2004. Most people on the Internet using email will have already been using email previously. If they are using IMAP they will most probably already have been using the server and therefore have a folder structure, way of using it and a collection of email already there. Therefore just assuming that the client can go ahead and create new folders, for Drafts, Sent mail, Junk-mail etc. is not necessarily helpful. Neither is immediately assuming that all folders in the namespace need to be checked for new incoming email and immediately synchronised with the offline cache on the workstation. For me both of these habits are so annoying that I will probably remove any prospective client software that I am testing immediately! Why? because I have a mail-folder collection of around 288 folders, containing somewhere around 6-7 Gigs of email.
Not something I want downloaded (possibly on a dial-up) just because I ran up a new client!!

Enough for now. More ramblings to come about mail and Mac OS X I'm sure!