I just checked out Googles Picasa Web and finally managed to put my MacBook Core 2 Duo unboxing pictures online.
Since Picasa (the application) is not available for Mac OS X – well, we have iPhoto – Google provides a standalone Application, the Picasa Web Albums Uploader, and a Plugin to iPhoto, download both from Google. I used the latter to upload my first gallery and it is easy to use and provides good feedback.
So, I guess this is what .mac members got a long time ago, and I must say this is a good approach to easily share photos. This first web album won't be my last one. =)

I just read a good 17 pages article over at cio.com, where John Halamka, MD and CIO of the Harvard Medical School and CareGroup, was kind of disappointed by his XP-Laptop and decided to take a one-month-switch ot the Mac, then Linux and then a new XP machine. It's a long article with very good points and quite impartial, be sure to read it!
His conclusion is not really surprising to us long-time Mac users, it sums up what we've known for decades:
"I used to think that the Macintosh was something used by free spirits just to be different," he says. "Now I realize the Mac has such superior human factor engineering that it's used by people because they can be more productive."

It`s now a week since I have my brand new MacBook Pro, and despite the fact that I`m absolutely happy with it, I tamper it with Installations of various kinds. So, one of the things I – as a spare time webdesigner – had to try was installing the dirty old Internet Explorer 6 through wine. I first did a test install with the 60-day trial of CrossOver Mac, a commercial wine-implementation, and this went just fine. If I could do that myself using wine, I`d get the same, but for free; so read on.

While working on one of our widgets, I decided to split up the CSS code into two separate CSS Stylesheets and include both with their own <link>-tag. This is common practice on websites and shouldn`t pose any problems.
I thought so.
Then I headed on and tested the layout within Safari and – what? Everything scrambled. It turned out that the widget/"webpage" only recognized one stylesheet, whichever came first.
After very much digging and trying and uncommenting code (I did change one of the Stylesheets through JavaScript and first thought that was the cause), it finally worked: I had a title-attribute in every link-tag, and although those were different titles, it didn`t work as long as both had a title-attribute. So I removed the title-attributes and everything is fine now.
As a sidenote, even Gecko-Browsers show this behaviour. I didn`t bother testing other browsers since I`m glad I resolved this issue and can continue to work on interesting stuff. :)

Just stumbled upon a website where two guys etched their MacBook (black) and MacBook Pro. I really like the monkey on the MacBook, looks darn great! Be sure to check the video out, but maybe turn the volume down – they obviously like Scooter... :P
I was just inserting a preview image here when I noticed the copyright. So, no image here. =)

Sebastian and me just released a new and much improved version of Übertragen, our FTP- and Bonjour-widget. Major new feature are the spring loaded folders for FTP-accounts which let you navigate your FTP-servers with ease. There are many other improvements; be sure to check it out!

I must admit, I never owned a GameBoy. Nevertheless, I enjoyed playing Mario on a friends'. That's now quite a long time ago; today I discovered this:
Super Mario Synthesizer
All those sounds... Great! I guess I'll have to find an old GameBoy and a Super Mario disk and start it all over.

After waiting a full month after ordering, my Sony MicroVault™ Tiny 2 GB memory stick today finally arrived. Since I've seen quite some pictures of it during the last month, I did only realize how sma... err, tiny the thing is when I held in in my own hands. Incredible tiny. I tried to illustrate its tininess with a few pics, see later down.

The times they are a changing. And that seems to be a good thing.
For a too long time, Mac- and Linux-users in General and website-developers in Particular told as many people as they could to not use the MS Internet Explorer. The rise of Firefox finally ate a good piece of marketshare away from the IE, and now – after the first ideas of putting a warning on the home page for IE users through notes about PNG-images not being displayed correctly up to the latest too cool for IE campaign – Windows-gurus join the resistance.
Paul Thurrot, journalist for the WindowsITPro-magazine and webmaster of the WinSuperSite, advises in his IE 7.0 review: (a good read btw) Thank you, Paul! Even if Apple today announced OS 10.5 Leopard, you made my day!

So, after silently enabling the Atom-feed some weeks ago, I today decided to go live with the AJAX-powered comments.
I did some thorough testing in Camino/FF and Safari, other browsers should work if they handle JavaScript standard-compliant; IE surely will not work, support for this "browser" will be added after I finished my exams, that means October at the earliest. Browsers that do not currently understand my AJAX-stuff will work nevertheless, but the old-fashioned reload-way. ;)
I'd be glad about feedback/wishes/reports about the AJAX-comments (and the whole blog-thing).

So, since 10.4.7, Mac OS X phones home, too. While at the moment, no suspicious data is sent, this fact may render some people nervous.
Simple solution: turn the responsible daemon off.
This article shows you how to do this.

Every adult these days has heard of atoms and maybe even protons and electrons. It's actually simple, protons (and neutrons) form the core of an atom and electrons float around this core on their orbits – or shells, if you want to be precise. So, there must be some space between the core and the electrons, which consists of – nothing. While this is hard for me to imagine, at least I'm not the only one having problems imagining this; on this website, someone has scaled a hydrogen-atom so that the electron has the size of 1 pixel, which makes the proton as big as 1000 pixels in diameter. But wait, here comes the impressive part: That means the radius of the scaled atom becomes 50 million pixels, that is 12.8 km on a 100ppi-screen!.

Since I succeeded in building Apache 2 on my Mac, I decided it's time to finally install the GD Perl Module to generate nice images using Perl. I downloaded the source, configured it as usual with $ perl ./Makefile.PL, ran the test with $ make test as documented everywhere and got the following errors, which turned out you can easily ignore...

I've spent some time on Google Video, looking for some funny videos. And I discovered some good ones, especially from provider JezUK1, like this one which suits the exam-season =).

The Widgetschmie.de, Sebastian and me, has just released a third Beta (and the first RC) of our Übertragen widget. It includes many improvements for Bonjour-transfers, including the possibility to reject transmissions and a better "files received" dialog.

When a friend of mine upgraded to Ubuntu 6.06 and along with that (unwillingly) to Apache 2.2.x, I decided to compile the latest Apache-version from source on my PowerBook G4 running the Tiger. Read the article for full instruction including compiling PHP 5 from source and creating a launchd-item to start the new Apache on boot.

So this is it. I finally put up my own blog - running on my own blogscript. So

welcome!

It is still _very_ basic, but it works okay so far and given the imminent exams I should not invest too much time in this blog, be it the script or the contents...