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Blogging from OSCON. Watch this space, link to presentation notes / MP3s should be going up shortly. I’ll be running noise reduction cleaning on those when I get back probably, as I don’t have anything to do that with on my TiBook.

All the Macs at the Apple Expo area (about 40 systems of all stripes) are running Jaguar Pre-Release. XDarwin has been thoughtfully installed to please the nerds, although Mozilla is conspicuously absent (yeah, I threw a copy of 1.1b on the machine I’m sitting on). I came down to check these out, and they run pretty damn fast. As well they should, considering I’m sitting on a top of the line dual-G4/1GHz (GF4MX, so it’s running Quartz Extreme). Some neat things I noticed: the Terminal.app is reworked, much better. It also includes a “delete key as backspace” in the emulation options (Apple-I). Thank goodness.

I drove down to San Diego yesterday (damn the 5 sucks). Sitting in Harbor Island I waiting for the PostgreSQL Performance Tuning tutorial to start.

FinkCommander – a GUI for fink. I thought fink already had a GUI – dselect, right? 😉

When a Crop Becomes King – this short opinion piece on corn dovetails w/ NYT’s previous diet and beef articles.

Jaron Lanier points out a few interesting tidbits and asks some good questsions in an article in 21C entitled A Minority within the Minority. (He was one of the futurists consulted for Minority Report)

Going into the DOM Inspector and manually changing the form height to make the input usable in Mozilla (Blogger Pro defaults to a 13px tall textarea) loses its novelty very quickly. It’d be nice if there was a way to customize Mozilla your own custom per-site preferences in Mozilla. Just let me attach URI-based pre/post loading CSS of JavaScript and I’d be happy as a clam. If someone added an interface where people could start centralizing / swapping these customizations. Well, you’d really have something there. Just imagine the possibilities here. (No, not the cross-site scripting attacks, I’m talking about the good things, not the bad)… Hmm, the Mozilla Evangelism Sidebars do some neat things by enalbing css (user_pref("signed.applets.codebase_principal_support", true);) in the prefs.

Related tangent, people bitch about MS all the time, but they often forget that MS won huge amounts of popularity and mindshare because they were really developer friendly. Oftentimes I find myself wishing that Mozilla had documentation as complete as the DHTML Reference at MSDN.

Photoshop filters, no waiting – I hadn’t thought about it, but it does follow pretty logically. Once you can do floating point pixel shading (like the new ATI card can), you’re opening up a whole new world of real time image manipulation. And not just real-time photoshop filters, but all kinds of real-time video editing features… That’s really really exciting. Alas, I’m hopelessly addicted to multi-monitor, and only Matrox does this properly on a PC in Windows 2000.

open [filename] in the terminal works on both applications and data files (launching the associated program). That’s very cool. (Something that I was missing from the W2K prompt) It’s sort of a weird feeling just to be constantly discovering new stuff about the basic functionality of an Operating System. I think relatively speaking, I’m still an OS X noob.

I’m going down to San Diego (probably driving down Sunday) for OSCON and am bringing the ol’ TiBook so I can get some work done and all that (if I had one wish for Mac laptops it’d be for a right click button.)

In preparation for the conference, I thought I’d try to see if I could do audio recording with this thing. There’s a suprisingly decent microphone built into the left speaker, but I was hoping to get something better. Unfortunately, there’s no audio in / mic input so I’d have to buy one somewhere. Griffin Technology’s iMic seems like the best option, but unfortunately the site doesn’t list anywhere locally where I can pick it up. I’ll probably give fries a ring and see what they have before I take off I suppose.

I also started looking around for software. AudioX is a nice little free application that will record Quicktime .mov audio files, but unfortunately seems to only support recording at 16-bit 44.1KHz. That’s a large bitstream. A shareware application called Audiocorder is better in this regard, it allows 11 and 22 KHz and 8 bit recording. Unfortunately, encoding is either AIFF or WAV. I believe this is due to what’s built into the QT/OS X, but really you’d think there’d be an easy way to add extra filters or something. I’m sure there’s some way to do it, but quite a bit of googling turned up nothing. It’s actually sort of sad when comparing this to the number of audio codecs built into Windows, and how easy it is to add an ACM / DirectShow filters as extra filters. So much for Apple’s vaunted ease of use.

While Audiocorder has some neat features (voice activation, a cool levels display being among them) I believe I will be going the command line route. esound was a cinch to install with fink. I downloaded a LAME binary (not before first downloading the 231MB Dev Tools package only to find the image corrupted), and was off an running. File size is about 1/4 of a 11KHz/8bit mono AIFF from Audiocorder, with better much better quality. An hour of audio is about 14MB at 32kbps (22KHz mono) which sounds great. I originally started out with a 64kbps stream, but it’s really not necessary. There’s no visual levels, but well worth giving up for the performance/quality (only takes about 15% cpu on this tired old G4/400). I’m wrote this into a shell script to do some neat stuff (takes the input, does some file renaming if necessary) , but the gist of it is this:

esdrec | lame -b 32 -m m -a - output.mp3

Pretty easy breezy.