One of the features that I got used to on my Thinkpad is hibernation (saving and restoring the state of the machine to disk). It helps to preserve your working state so that you can reconstruct your mental environment quickly. Mac OS X is wonderful about going to sleep quickly and waking up from sleep quickly, but it can't hibernate. We were travelling all over Seattle today, and it would have been nice to hibernate to prolong the life of the Powerbook battery. Put that down for the requested features list.

There's something messed up with the battery calibration system in the Powerbooks. Yesterday, yanking the cord on a fully charged / calibrated battery give 3:12 remaining. I was up on battery power late last night, and when I recharged today, I got 2:41. That's definitely not right, and a far cry from the 4-4.5 hrs advertised. Apple really needs to get going on this, since the new Centrino laptops easily go for 5 hours on a charge, and some go longer (not to mention the fact that they are faster and cooler). I hope that they are doing some serious talking to IBM about power efficient 970's. Either that or Mac OS X on Intel. In the meantime, if there is anybody out there who knows how to whack Powerbook batteries, well, the comment form is below.

Well, lots of people have written comments offering help with Mac OS X. In fact, I think that this is the largest number of comments that I've gotten on any topic. Here are today's lessons and discoveries:

The good

It looks like I'm getting fairly decent battery life on the machine, somewhere between 2 and 3 hours depending how hard I'm using it. I found XBattery 1.1 and I've been using it to watch the behavior of the battery. When I yank the power cord, the machine says 3:12 remaining.

Gentoo's keychain for SSH is working fine.

One way around the scroll mouse "problem" is to use SideTrack, a replacement driver for the PowerBook touchpad which allows you to use the edges of the trackpad to scroll. This feature has been around on PC laptops with trackpads (did I mention that I hate them), and SideTrack brings that to the Mac. The only thing is that I keep dragging parts of my hand across the trackpad surface and moving the cursor where I don't want it to go.

Fire has turned out to be pretty unstable. It periodically quits for no apparent reason, so I downloaded Proteus and I'm going to give that a try. It costs a little money, but it also seems better integrated with Mac OS X.

The bad

The meta key doesn't seem to work right in iTerm, which is resulting in menus popping up at inconvenient times. This is really annoying, and I may have to go back to Terminal.app, which would be disappointing because iTerm is otherwise excellent.

In additin to SideTrack, there uControl, which can swap around keys on your keyboard, like turning caps lock into control and turning shift-delete into forward delete. Only problem is that it seems to be disabled for some reason that I don't understand.

I've been porting over my Emacs setups today, cleaning up and modernizing as I go. So far the only real problem child has been gnuserv, which is refusing connections. I think that there's a security thing that I need to do, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Keep those suggestions coming. I haven't really gotten to the hardcore UNIX hacking yet.

Well, here its, my first blog post from Mac OS X. I succeeded in repaving the machine, and most things appear to be working just fine. I've gotten on the wired Ethernet, and the WPA protected 802.11g wireless net. I've successfully connected to the OSAF and ASF machines, and to my own Linux and Windows boxes inside the house.

The biggest hardware glitch so far is that the 3rd party memory that was ordered for the machine causes it to lock up hard as rock. So I've yanked the RAM andOther World Computing is cross shipping me a replacement, which might arrive by Friday, in time to be useful for my trip to OSAF next week. The funky lighted keyboard also seems to be misbehaving, but I've read some reports on this and am unsurprised. I've succeeded in hooking up my 21" display as a secondary monitor, although the resolutions provided by the PowerBook are weird (at least to my PC adjusted senses).

Overall, I'm pleased with the construction of the machine. I don't have white spots, and the machine seems otherwise solidly built. The keyboard is taking a bit of getting used to, because I'm used to the unbeatable IBM Thinkpad keyboards, and I've been using Windows layouts for the last 8 years. But old Macintosh keybindings are buried somewhere in muscle memory, so I'm hoping that some of that will kick in soon. I'm using a low quality scroll mouse that I got at ApacheCon -- I don't want to unplug my Intellimouse from my Windows box just yet. Unfortunately, Mac OS X doesn't seem to be making good use of the center button. Are there drivers that I'm not aware of? At 5+ lbs its a little heavier than I would like, but I think it's probably still going to be manageable for me.

Software wise, things are going slowly -- I had to repave because X11 wasn't installed, and I couldn't find the installation packages for it. It seems that if you want to be a UNIX hackerboy, you have to do some things yourself. I installed Fink, but something is not quite right because dselect won't show me the list of available packages. I can apt-get install whatever I like, so I'm not hobbled, but it would be nice to have the list working in dselect. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Apple is shipping the bleeding edge version of zsh, 4.1.1. I'm going to slowly build up my .zsh* files, since the last time I seriouslly hacked on them was zsh 3.x and since then a whole new completion system has been added.

Apple includes a console mode version of Emacs 21.2, and Fink's version is 21.2, and I'm not sure it's Carbonized. Andi at OSAF says that building Emacs from CVS is the way to go, so I checked out emacs 21.3?? and am building it while I'm typing this. Earlier tonight I copied my checked out copy of the Chandler sources to see how it would build on Panther, but I've run into a bunch of hardhat problems so I need to check with Morgen Sagen our build wizard in the morning.

I have iChat and Fire up and running, but I still need a good IRC program for Mac OS X. Ideally, I'm looking for something that doesn't tab all the windows -- I'm on Panther, so I can Expose, can open up a bunch of channels at startup/wakeup without prompting, can notify me when my nick is mentioned, and can log each channel in a separate file, preferably with a new file each day. So if you have recommendations, let me know.

I'm using Apple Mail to handle my OSAF mail, and Thunderbird to handle the rest. It wasn't too painful to get my settings from the Windows version of Thunderbird, but it wasn't a no brainer. We definitely need to do a better job of this in Chandler.

So far the browser situation is painful. I've tried Safari and Firebird .7.1 and both seem sluggish (of course I'm comparing them on a laptop with a 4200RPM disk to a desktop with a 7200RPM disk). I'm holding off judgement until I can get a decent amount of RAM into the machine, but I am disappointed. Further, I can't seem to get the tabbed browsing behaviour that I want, namely "middle click on a link" opens a new background tab containing the link. If I just haven't dinked with the settings enough, just let me know.

It's probably going to take me a few more days to load this up to an approximation of a livable system, so I'll keep reporting as I go.

Questions I have:

1. When using Locations, how can I specify WPA logins for the Airport network? I can't figure out how to do this.
2. Can I configure firewalling differently for different interfaces, for different locations?
3. How do I make the most of an N button mouse?
4. Whats a good IRC client?
5. How do I get Fink's dselect working properly?

Well, Around 11AM Fedex came through and delivered the PowerBook. Chris Winters had left a comment earlier about his only coming with 1 CD, which made me nervous, since I need the developer tools to do my job. So when I opened up the box, sure enough, there was only 1 CD. First thing I did was call Apple, because I would have hopped the ferry to Seattle to visit an Apple Store. After talking to the support rep, I was a bit embarrassed. You see, that CD is is a DVD. For machines that have the right drives, Apple is doing the right thing and shipping 1 DVD instead of a pile of media. I'm in the middle of repaving the machine, so maybe the next post will be from OS X.

Or maybe it'll be two. Fedex didn't deliver my Powerbook today. I should have taken a hint from Ben Hyde's experience this summer. A call to an actual Fedex person revealed that the shipment was held up in Alaska due to "Regulatory Agency Clearance Delay". I'm definitely not going to hold my breath tomorrow morning.

The Gnome folks have come up with anunusual way of funding some features for Gnome. They've set a bounty for particular features. I'm curious about where the money came from, and how the features were deemed bounty worthy. I wonder if something like this can work as a way of funding open source developers.

Dan Shafer wonders if Doc was exaggerating when he said that half of ApacheCon was carrying OS X laptops. I don't know about the whole conference, although there were definitely a lot. But I can say that for the ASF committers hackathon it was indeed 50% OS X (maybe even higher). I also know a number of ASF folks who are slowly caving in to peer pressure to get on the bandwagon...

When I bought the headset for my telephone, the one thing that was missing was a mute button. I can't remember whether I couldn't find one or whether I didn't think of it. With my new job, I'll be on the phone quite a bit more. I may also be doing some video conferencing or VOIP, so I'd like to have a headset that hooks up to my computer.

So I googled around and discovered the GN Netcom 4150, which has a mute button, lets you use the same headset on a phone or computer (and switch between or mix them), and includes an amplifier. So far, it's already made a difference for the calls that I've used it on. I haven't hooked it up to the computer for sound yet, but maybe I'll find some time to do that this weekend, or maybe I'll just wait until the Powerbook comes. I did try to find one that didn't have the headset, but the one with the headset was actually cheaper than the one without the headset (the 8150). And at $50, it was cheaper than the original headset -- so now I have a backup.

I very rarely call tech support for a product, in fact, I can't even remember the last time that I did. Today I made an exception. I ordered an SMC 2804WBR 802.11b/g wireless router because of a deal I saw on More Stuff 4 Less blog. The router was working very well, with much better range than the Netgear 614MR that I helped a neighbor install early this year. If I leave the router in my office, which is in the back of our house, I get green bars in the master bedroom closet, which is at the opposite end of the house, one floor up. The signal carries onto the front porch (key for watching the kids and hacking in the summer), and will certainly carry onto the deck in the back. And that's without me moving it around to put the signal area where I want it.

So far, so good, until I turned on security. Once I started with WEP, I just couldn't get a connection. I tried 128 bit WEP, 64 bit WEP, I tried for too long. It was just a pain. So I broke down and called SMC tech support. Turns out I was only typing in 1 of the 4 WEP keys, and this was causing the problem, because after I typed 4 keys in, I got a connection just fine.

Unfortunately, the saga's not over yet, because I haven't gotten remote administration to work (where remote is the inside of my network, not the WAN -- I have a Linux firewall/router for that), and I still have to get WPA working once the PowerBook arrives. And then I'll have to hack the firewall rules on the wireless router and inside the firewall. No, it's not over yet.

Still, I've been eying one of these for years but have been too lazy, and you can't beat it for $50.

It looks like my PowerBook has shipped from Apple's facility in Taiwan, and it's scheduled to be delivered by noon on Monday. So you'll only have to put up with my whining for four more days. After that, you'll have to put up with my gloating and questions... Unless I get white spots.

One of the things that I tried to do this year was talk to attendees about how they were enjoying the conference, what they liked/didn't like, and so forth.

As I was doing this with one person, he mentioned the O'Reilly Safari Network Bookshelf. For a fixed monthly fee, you get access to a fixed number of book slots, which you can fill from a list of books in the network bookshelf. Books have to stay in the slot for 30 days, and after that, you can swap them for other books. Pretty cool idea.

I'm writing this entry on the ferry home from ApacheCon...

By Day 3, I am totally wiped out. I was up til 4 AM last night talking with various ASF'ers about various issues, and then I woke up at 9:30AM instead of 10 as planned. This did give me plenty of time to packup and checkout, but I think the sleep would have been better. I dislike travelling like this. You eat at weird times, you sleep at weird times, I don't drink enough water, and after 5 days of it, you've just had enough. So I'm looking forward to getting home.

The first event of the day was Doc Searl's excellent keynote address. At the beginning of the talk, Doc said that he had spent the last 3 days talking to people and trying to understand what he was seeing and experiencing. He gave me a lot to think about in terms of story construction (which I'm probably not applying in this post), and had some notable quotes such as, "information does not want to be free, information wants to be $6.95". After seeing his axes of open vs closed and proprietary vs public domain, somehow it dawned on me that what I really value about open source is the (underexploited) potential for innovation.

Afterwards I went up to the podium to tell Doc how much I appreciated the fact that he took the time to learn about us, and by crafting a talk that show that he had become one of us.

While I was standing around at the podium, I met Jennifer Machovec, from IBM, whose name I recognized from the new license@ mailing list, which is where we are discussing the Apache 2.0 license. Jennifer has been pretty active in helping with the new license. What was amazing to me was that she's been at the Con for three days, because she wanted to meet and become involved with the community. This is the kind of person (and attorney) that is perfect for communities. She instinctively knew that she needed to connect with the community in order to work with it. Hat's off to her insight, and willingness to act on it.

Ken Coar and I had lunch and talked about a project that we have brewing -- you'll just have to be in suspense for now. After that I went to the mod_pubsub talk. I've been getting more adept at IRC, so I remembered to login to the chat room when I got to the talk. When I did, I discovered that Jennifer Machovec was in the IRC -- turns out she figured out how to get in. JBMachovec++.

I've been hearing about mod_pubsub and wanted to learn more about it, especially since its the brain child of Rohit Khare, a friend of my friend Ernie Prabhakar. Rohit was there and remembered me but we didn't get to talk because I had to leave the talk early. Maybe there'll be another time.

The closing plenary was really a raffle session and the consensus in IRC was that the raffle needs to go. I finally got to met gnat, Nathan Torkington, in person, after a number of IRC exchanges during the course of the conference.

After a quick round of goodbyes, David Bau (one of the XMLBeans committers) and I caught a cab to the airport and had dinner while waiting for our flights. The conversation was so engaging that I lost track of time and dashed off to make the flight. It turns out that the flight was so empty that there was plenty of time. After being up till 4am, the only think I was capable of was sleep, although I did wake up and ask for some blankets because I was so cold. My flight arrived early, but not early enough to catch the 10:55pm ferry. Unfortunately, I got my hopes up by reading the Saturday/Sunday schedule instead of the weekday schedule, and thought that there was an 11:15pm boat when there was none. You'd think after a few times I'd stop making that mistake. Travel travails aside, I'm glad to finally be at home.

Tuesday my college friend Ernie Prabhakar came to ApacheCon to work in the Apple Booth. Ernie is working as Apple's liason with the various open source communities. It was good to see him and catch up with him in person.

Chris Pirillo gave a very animated and entertaining talk about using RSS to for e-mail marketing. There wasn't much that wasy new to me, but I liked his presentation. He actually said that "he can't wait until Chandler goes final". We'll have to be sure to send him a copy.

During lunch I hung around with the RTP bloggers (Sam, Mark, Joe) and got introduced to Scott Johnson, the man behind Feedster. I don't use Feedster as much as I should, especially since you can subscribe to a search as an RSS feed. During Chris Pirillo's keynote he did a Feedster search for ApacheCon, and I was gratified to see that there were a huge number of posts about ApacheCon.

I went to two sessions in the afternoon. The first one was on mod_rendezvous, which is using howl, which I've written about previously. I was the session chair for the second sesion, on ASP.Net and mod_mono. I would have liked this talk better if it had spent less time on the CLR and .NET and more time on the internals of mod_mono.

I ended up going to dinner with Ben Hyde, Andy Oliver, Cliff Schmidt, and Santiago Gala. We went for Vietnamese, which was very good, and then I spent the rest of the night talking to various combinations of ASF'ers until late in the night.

Last year at ApacheCon, Tina Greene, from Security Travel, took a bunch of us to Star Trek: The Experience. I know that Ken really got a charge out of it. This year, it looks like that experience influenced the conference planners quite a bit. The speaker gift is a free ticket to Star Trek: The Experience. At the reception last night, a bunch of Star Trek characters showed up, and Ken arrived in an ST:NG captain's uniform.

Following the reception was the PGP keysigning. Building up the ASF web of trust is important, so I'm glad that we did an official event this year. In the past, this has always been done informally at the hackathon. Unfortunately, some of the people who didn't sign up, and a bunch more people showed up unprepared. Next year, we need to have PGP tutorial session before the actual keysigning.

After the Atom BOF, which was relatively uneventful (lots of discussion), I went to dinner with Ben Hyde, Ben Laurie, and Cliff Skolnick, all httpd oldtimers. We had an interesting programming language discussion (among others) that covered APL, SL5, E, Snobol, and Lisp.

By the time we finished dinner, it was kind of late, but I still had some e-mail, etc to do, so I headed over to the online lounge to take care of that. A group of ASF'ers came back from their dinners, and I ended up staying in the lounge until about 2:30AM. Brian Behenldorf and Manoj Kasichainula educated me on BitTorrent and Tivo Hacking. Dirk-Willem van Gulik spent some time telling PowerBook hints -- I need more contact with the hardcore FreeBSD users who are on OS X.

Dirk is involved in a bunch of stuff. I've written before about the fiber optic backbone that is being installed on Bainbridge Island, with the potential of fiber drops to people's homes. The last mile process is moving more slowly than I would like, and Dirk shared some experiences that they've had with fiber in Leiden. More interesting is that Dirk's been involved with WirelessLeiden, which has installed a wireless network that provides coverage for a city of 80,000 -- 4 times larger than the city of Bainbridge Island. The most important thing that I learned from Dirk is that trees are big problem for wireless networks. Since we have a lot of trees on the island, I'm pretty pessimistic that a wireless solution is going to work effectively for Bainbridge Island.

After that, conversation turned to Chandler, and I discovered that Dirk's company is working on stuff in the semi-structured repository space. Now I have a few reasons to keep in better touch with Dirk...

Yesterday was a very full day at ApacheCon. Stefano Mazzochi did a great job with his keynote on "How the Apache Software Foundation Works". This was validated by a number of "stefano++"'s in the apachecon IRC.

The day was dominated by the fact that I did two sessions back to back -- well except for the lunch break in between. The first session, "XML at the ASF" is a new presentation that is an overview of all the XML related projects at the ASF. It's a brand new presentation based on the contents of my book, (which unfortunately didn't escape from the printer in time to be ready for ApacheCon). Doing a presentation the first time is always an adventure, so I was happy to end on time, and not get hecked to much. There was a glitch with my Thinkpad not finding the external video output, which resulted in the obligatory reboot. It seemed to go well, and people told me that it was good. Overview talks are hard, because you are basically saying not very much about a bunch of things, which just isn't my style -- I like to have the details.

After my talk, a bunch of people came up to test their laptops (having seen my troubles), and I got to meet Mark Pilgrim. I spent lunch talking with Mark, Joe Gregorio, and Stefano.

The second talk "Everything you ever wanted to know about XML parsing", is a standard tutorial on how to use Xerces. This presentation has appeared at the last 3 ApacheCon's, with different lengths each time, according to the duration of session. This year the sessions are 50 minutes long, which makes it hard to put a lot of detail into the talk. I had just finished the section on SAX, when Lars Eilebrecht, the session chair, held up the 20 minutes left sign. I started talking faster -- so I ended up rushing to finish. Someone later told me that I had already been talking fast, and that made it even faster. At least he told me that he got a lot of useful information out of the talk.

After I got down from the podium, David Bau, one of the XMLBeans committers got up and did a talk on XMLBeans. His presentation was a convincing demonstration of the utility of XMLBeans. In fact, it was so convicing that two people gave David a standing ovation! I was gratified to see that most of the conversation in the IRC channel was highly laudatory. Afterward, I know that Andy Oliver and Brian McAllister were convinced that XMLBeans was it.

Next up was the Mark and Joe show. Mark delivered a talk on the state of the Atom API (not the syndication format). His talk took the form of a history lesson and technical analysis of the various weblog APIs, followed by an explanation of the Atom API. This was really helpful to me, because I haven't been able to keep up with the progress on Atom. So now I know what the state of the API is.

Joe followed Mark and talked about the way that they've extended HTTP's authentication model to enable Atom to do authentication in the typical (hosted) environments where Atom API implementations are likely to run. He did this by explaining the various revs of the API and the mistakes that caused revisions to be made. It must have been a slightly intimidating experience for Joe, because Roy Fielding ws sitting in the middle of the room. At one point Roy interrupted Joe to point out a way that they were mis-using "X-" headers. But at the end, Roy basically told Joe and Mark that they were doing it the right way. Now that's what I call validation, and its the kind of wonderful face to face thing that happens at ApacheCon.

I'm sitting in the opening plenary session for ApacheCon. Last night I discovered that the battery in the Thinkpad only lasts for about 45 minutes, which makes attending a multiple day, all day long conference a real problem, at least if you want to use a computer in every session. My notebook envy was only increased yesterday, because Sam Ruby is toting one of the amaing Thinkpad T40's, which have a battery life that is long enough to go all day without plugging the machine in.

Yesterday was a very, very full day. I meet a few people in person for the first time: Geir Magnusson, who I've worked with on a few mailing lists, decided to come at the last minute, so many of us were meeting him in person for the first time. Also, Sam brought Joe Gregorio by and we had a very pleasant time getting to know each other. I'm looking forward to talking with him some more during the rest of the week.

Ben Hyde, Sam, and I had a conversation about blog comment spam, due to a bozo who comment spammed Sam yesterday. Afther that, I took Sam over to meet James Strachan in person. I wanted to Sam to see the stuff that James has been doing with Groovy. Sam seemed to be pretty interested, and he was asking questions about a CLR or ParrotVM version of Groovy.

Lots of people greeted me with congratulations on my new job at OSAF, which is very gratifying, and some people have started plying me with additional features for Chandler.

One other interesting conversation that I had was with James Howison, who is part of a group conducting a university research study on open source.

The Hackathon is in full swing this morning -- the room is full and noisy, and the 802.11 net is full and slow. But it's been a great morning to hook up with old friends, like Stefano Mazzochi, and Shane Curcuru.

The gadget freaks have unloaded as well. Pier and Shane are leading the charge with an AlBook, a tiny Samsung Palm Phone, a Canon Digital EOS, and an iSight.

In the middle of making this post, Andy Oliver IM'ed me, so we finally got to meet in person after a number of exchanges in blogspace.

Back to hacking and meeting..

The ASF hackathon is about face time, and I got plenty of it today: I spent some time talking with Cliff Schmidt about open source in general. Ben Laurie spent some time enlightening me on the his work on integrating capabilities into Python, Pierpaolo Fumigalli showed me his Aluminum Powerbook and made me wish (again) that Apple would hurry up and ship mine. James Strachan and I had a wide ranging dinner conversation that lasted until 11pm. The topics included Groovy, CodeHaus, the ASF, Java, and more.

I've arrived here in Las Vegas for ApacheCon...