Archive 27. May 2005

Agfa-Photo GmbH goes into insolvency - oh man

Basso again! - takes the second stage win in a row at the Giro. Wow. This gives hope for the Tour.

Please do not rub

Here's what's written on the letter with the secret number for the MasterCard. Strange. It's not a scratch card after all...

Blechtrommeln machen Lärm and like Heiko, I'll keep banging on my little drum. Even if I'm just one Oskar Matzerat among many.

Digibux - Digital Library Bets on Open Source - cool. Maybe this will finally create an open format for eBooks. So far, many book contents have been distributed as HTML collections (only laboriously searchable with grep) or PDF (more focused on form than content). The software of the digital library, on the other hand, is specifically designed for research and use of the contents. What else comes to mind: how about a Spotlight plugin for the software?

LispWorks Personal 4.4.5

LispWorks Personal - the free (free beer-free) LispWorks version is available in the new 4.4 release and also runs with Tiger. LispWorks is currently the most interesting Lisp environment for the Mac, as it integrates relatively well into the system. And the Personal version is quite sufficient for playing around.

Processor Fan for Powerbook 12"

Well, a story that naturally hits me now is the change by Apple to the processor fan's response threshold - something was changed with 10.3.3 and since then, the fan is basically always on in a 12" PowerBook (at least in the older ones - mine is still one with 867MHz). Annoying, that. Before, it was a nice quiet device, now it's noisy - especially when operating on the power grid. And this even when there is absolutely no activity on the box (MenuMeters shows absolutely low-level activity).

There used to be a software called Silent Night, which replaced two kernel extensions (AppleADM103x.kext and AppleADT746x.kext) with older versions and thus reset this control to old values (which, after all, did work). There is also a description of this available. But somehow, you can't find anything there anymore - the links are dead. Does anyone have a useful idea of what could be done? The 12" PowerBook unfortunately doesn't have the processor setting "automatic" (for some reason), but only "maximum" and "minimum" - and a castrated processor wouldn't be any better than a noisy fan. If it were automatically regulated, it would be okay, but as it is ...

Somehow, I find it pathetic that Apple doesn't offer a usable solution. Simply imposing fan noise on the user is quite harsh - especially since I couldn't find any documentation about it at Apple. Normally, you would at least expect a knowledge base article on this ...

X.4 Dashboard (Quarter Life Crisis) is a text about the worst usability blunders Apple made in Dashboard. Among other things, it also dissects the Weather Widget. What particularly annoys me about this part: Münster is not to be found. Not as Münster and not as Muenster. We have an airport here, so the data should be available (such tools usually access airport weather data, as it is free and available worldwide) - but nothing of the sort.