• The Dick and Jane Reader for Advanced Students – great, great stuff
• About With and For Part 3: Students Say The Darnedest Things! – great stuff on technology/product design, peterme’s been on a roll (except that epinions social software thing, I mean seriously)
• Digital rights management and the breakdown of social norms – long but insightful article from this month’s First Monday; yes, ultimately this is a political question, which is why I’m pessimistic
• CodeCon – Feb 20-22 @ Club NV, SF CA; I won’t have code ready by then, but will probalby be worth going to, wonder if I can fit that in right before ETCON?
• 15 Trends Taking Shape In Logo Design
• meet the makers: A Conversation With John Witchel – creator of BrowserCam
• Man vs Machine, in VR! – Kasperov is at it again, but this time, wearing ridiculous 3d glasses
• Fundrace 2004 – money contributions by county. Cool
• Linus Fields Dev Questions On the Future of Linux – fun interview

Since this whole CPU issue seems to be blowing up, I decided to follow up on where my friend got the original information, which is from this MacNN thread. While he swears that this isn’t a reporting error, but a noticeable speed difference, an email exchange led me to try to double-check Xbench CPU scores. It appears, at least in my case, that there’s no difference pre or post PMU reset. Also, some people have mentioned this is only happening w/ 12″ AlBooks, but I do have at least one report of a 1GHz TiBook being affected. So, real problem? Reporting error? I’ll keep an eye out, but my own tests seem to point to the former, but your experience might be different.

Update: second report of the 867MHz being significantly faster than the 533MHz

• Audiopad – 2 friends mentioned this over the past two days, weird coincidink
• There: Impressions and Analysis – interesting review, when I get a chance (Dec probably, I’ll do my own writeup after testing out There and Second Life)
  

  I believe There is a pure representation of a white middle class consumer society, the type that corporations wet themselves dreaming about. Everything costs money, and the only contribution players can make is to add to the amount of preexisting goods other users can buy. The game is completely static, with no innovation happening that isn’t controlled completely by the developers, and all profits from everything flowing into their pockets.

• Giving E-mail back to the users: Using digital signatures to solve the spam problem – OK, glad I’m not the only one thinking along these lines
• JAM LOG – an interesting looking blog. Too bad it’s in Japanese
• Llorca – downtempo, jazz-house
• Panther defaults to bash, not tcsh. Hoo-ray for COMMON SENSE. Also, chsh now directly syncs to the NetInfo db. cool

I got an email that apparently the processor speed issue isn’t restricted to 10.2.8, as someone who was running 10.2.6 had the same problem. Also, I checked today, and it looks like my processor speed has gone down to 533MHz again. I double-checked my power settings to make sure I wasn’t going crazy (I’m not, it’s supposed to be running at highest performance). I’ll be upgrading to Panther tonight. Here’s hoping it’ll go away. Did I miss something? It seems like half of the people I’ve talked to are affected by this problem, but no one I’ve talked to has ever heard of the issue before.

I have VLC and MPlayer OS X, so I haven’t bothered with playing DIVX in QT Player (also, X-Lab article), but last night it occurred to me that it might be useful (say, if you’re trying to burn an SVCD or DVD that uses QT to encode).

• DivX for Mac
• 3ivx Delta 4
• DivX Doctor II – links also WMA and AC3 codecs
• MacMPEG2Decoder – tangent, but good fun

So, apparently I missed this, and I was more or less oblivious to it over the past couple of weeks until a friend filled me in tonight, but since the 10.2.8 upgrade, my laptop’s been running at 2/3 speed. And I thought it was just me. How do you tell for yourself? In the terminal, type:

sysctl hw.cpufrequency

If this isn’t the right clockspeed (mine was running at 533 when it should have been at 866), curse Apple, and then shutdown. Once shut down, hold the CTRL-SHIFT-OPTION keys and the power button for 5 seconds to reset the PMU. Boot up and check the frequency again. If successful, it’ll be back up to full speed. Then upgrade to Panther before it resets the speed again. Be sure not to get drives wiped while upgrading.

(Resetting you PMU will also reset your clock, so be sure to network time-sync afterwards)

Also, resetting your PMU is different for different models, here’s the Apple KB article on it: PowerBook and iBook: Resetting Power Management Unit (PMU)

• Maxim should be Ashamed – damn, that’s some lazy ass liquifying
• Ten years of therapy in one night – hmm, ibogain, from an African rootbark
• Your 99c belong to the RIAA – Steve Jobs claims they’re making bupkiss on iTMS; see also CNET’s breakdown – wasn’t there a Fortune or Forbes breakdown that was quite different?
• The Grinch who stole Linux, see also well, all the stuff at GROKLAW. It doesn’t end. SCO vs Hollywood, IBM’s motion to compel discovery, etc. etc.
• Private Jessica Lynch says “The military used me!” – no shit?
• Neuroprocess – James Cui’s (VJ Fader)
• The the impotence of proofreading
  

  This is a problem that affects manly, manly students.
  I myself was such a bed spiller once upon a term
  that my English teacher in my sophomoric year,
  Mrs. Myth, said I would never get into a good colleague.

• Using encryption and digital signatures in Mail – how convoluted
• Suckerfish Dropdowns – ALA article on another implementation of standards compliant drop down menus
• Some Mac/Win stuff: Ian Lloyd: Switching to Mac, Still Twitchy, Doug Bowman: Confessions of a Designer, SwitchBack

I’ve probably posted this before, I’m always forgetting how to chmod against only folders (directories):

find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod g+s

Using the 0 character delimiter fixes newline and ending-with-space corner cases; that’s something new, would have saved me some trouble last time.

A friend had a spare ticket for an afternoon screening of Matrix Revolutions at Mann’s Chinese. Hmm, well, I’m glad I didn’t have to pay $10 to see it, I guess. Not as bad as Reloaded, but man, what happened? These sequels happen in a completely different world from the original. Anyway, no spoilers here, you might even really like it. Some comments:

• better integrated, but still a lot of talky scenes, but again, so much dead time with surprisingly little character development
• most of the scenes that are supposed to make you care about these people… don’t
• head. hitting. over and over. – well except for most of the important stuff, that’s left a bit too vague
• for example: where’s the resolution? i just didn’t buy the whole ending sequence
• Random thought: Morpheus’ character as metaphor for the movies

Ahh well, it is what it is (and for the most part, it works as a spectacular spectacular sci-fi actioner). Totally different note, on the way, I caught a snippet of today’s Bookworm show w/ Chuck Palahniuk. I really enjoyed the parts that I caught.