Special thanks to Mario for featuring one of my pictures on page 14 of the magazine; you can see it on his post, it’s the first top left picture after the cover.

It’s in Portuguese, so here’s a translated-by-Google sort-of-English version. Rafael has hunted down some good pictures of an early prototype; I regret not having taken any myself.

It should be good to unwind a little from 2008, and I plan to bring back some good pictures. For the first time in several years, I won’t take a laptop; there’s supposed to be very little infrastructure at the campground. Hopefully the withdrawal symptoms will be mild…

Unfortunately, this means I’ll be unable to answer email, do product support, or even approve new users here at the forum. All will back to normal on the 16th, so please bear with me.

A couple of recent documentation and sample code releases by Apple have finally offered me the opportunity to implement a significant portion of everybody’s wishlist for Quay. In particular, I now have code running that does an exact imitation of the Tiger clicking behavior – open on left-click, pop up menu on right-click – with the option of inverting it. Early tests of allowing dragging files onto the Quay icons also are positive. Several other frequent requests from users are also being implemented, and I have some significant new functionality waiting in the wings, so to speak.

So what’s the downside, and when will it come out?

The past week has seen a sudden peak in non-related problems that had to be solved offline; also my ADSL connection has been hit by some instability. I haven’t been able to log onto AIM with any reliability, and I’ve even had to resort to dial-up now and then. No idea when this will normalize; if it’s due to the seriously unstable weather, it could go on for months.

In addition, I’ve had to return to do work, whenever at all possible, on my Objective-C 2.0 book which is now behind schedule. I’m grateful to my Gentle Editor for not emitting any too-drastical threats, but I agree with him that I need to seriously catch up. In addition to all these considerations we’re way overdue for a trip; there’s been no opportunity for any significant travel this year, and now we’ll be finally off this coming Sunday.

It’s going to be a short working vacation though: a week-long Amazon Cruise on the Iberostar. And I’ll be taking my old iBook G3 to work on the book… as usual I expect to make excellent progress. We’ve been to the Amazon twice before, so we won’t feel obliged to do all the excursions.

Coming back to Quay. The new schemes implied yet another significant recoding effort. Most everything has changed, including installation procedures. So I’ll be extra-careful with testing after I return, and I hope to have the new version ready around Christmas.

During my trip I’ll probably be offline most of the time, too – (it’s the Amazon, remember?) – so please be patient if you e-mail me.

Had less time to work underway than I anticipated but I made progress on the Leopard version of RBSplitView – including the Interface Builder plugin – and had some new ideas about other things too.

The new iMacs look very nice. Wonder if the lower prices will be reflected here, though.

The iPhone update makes me almost sure Apple isn’t using the TrustZone at all. Deliberately, of course. Makes one wonder what is behind that…

…more as I catch up.

Of course, as usual, Brazil is among the worst countries for business. Specifically, it’s #106 for starting a business, #101 for emplying workers, and #149 for paying taxes and closing the business after it folds (which is very probable). New Zealand and Singapore have the best ratings.

In the last year I’ve been getting an unusual number of queries from people wanting to open some sort of business in Brazil; even more unusual, a Mac-related business. My answer is always “don’t”. Yes, ratings for investing money here have been seen very positive increases lately, but it’s better to do so indirectly, via the stock market for instance. (For US investors, funds like iShares MSCI Brazil (EWZ) have had excellent returns.)

I used to have a one-man consulting company – opened during a period where the usual requirement to have at least two partners had lapsed – but I shut it down due to several factors, many of which related to taxes and bureaucratic inconveniences. While the company is dormant, I haven’t dissolved it; it takes 9 to 12 months to do so, and is expensive. Bankruptcy proceedings are known to take 2 to 15 years. Many reports are available; check the latest one about Brazil (PDF) for details.

We leave in a few minutes on a bus to Rio de Janeiro. The package includes an overnight stay in a hotel, a few meals and a post-show barbecue – then it’s back home during Sunday night. We’re really looking forward to this. Normal life resumes on Monday; I’ll probably be offline until then.

But I myself simply love living in these interesting times. For instance, when I started out in this business, I worked with an IBM1401 with the huge amount of 4000 memory positions… and I say huge, because every bit (a ferrite core) was visible to the naked eye! Today, only 34 years later, my laptop has exactly 268435.5 times as much memory, takes up a much smaller space, for about 1/1000 the cost… and besides, it’s just mine. I won’t even mention speed! But of course, I’d like it to be even smaller… and faster… and cheaper… who knows, even an implant?

A decade after my dinosaur wrangler days, the first microcomputers appeared – my first, in 1977, was an Apple II – together with Byte Magazine, where the latest industy news were published. Soon after, the first Brazilian manufacturers came on the scene, and I promptly went to work for one of them – probably the first outside São Paulo (Brazil’s largest city and industrial hub), a company called Quartzil Informática. The queer name came from the company’s beginnings as a quartz oscillator manufacturer, in Montes Claros (MG), inside an area subsidized by the government.

The company’s first product was the QI-800, an 8-bit computer based on the Zilog Z80A (which still is the world’s best-selling microprocessor), running Digital Research’s CP/M-80 operating system, the standard of that time. It came on the market around the end of 1982, if I recall correctly.

To the right of the screen it had an 8-inch (eight!) Shugart SA800 diskette drive, and in the second cabinet, up to three more drives could be mounted. Every diskette could hold an amazing 243K, and the drive’s spindle motor was powered by 110 VAC! Internally, the system used the IMSAI‘s S-100 Bus, which later became the IEEE-696 Standard. As this bus used expensive 100-pin connectors, they used the kludge of buying two 44-pin connectors and cutting out, from the boards, the 12 central pins (which happily were not vitally important). The boards were large but specialized; one held the CPU, another one the video controller, another one the RAM, and so forth… there were 6 or 7 boards altogether.

The remaining specs were not impressive. The QI-800 had 64K of RAM and an 8K EPROM. There were dozens of other companies building almost exactly the same equipment. One advantage would have been the recently-launched hard drive (or Winchester, as they were called at the time); a Brazilian factory was beginning to assemble 5 and 10 MB (yes, megabytes!) hard drives, but so far as I remember, none was ever sold with this system. The price was astronomical, something like US$4,000.

Sales of the QI-800 were not very satisfactory, and they decided to develop a splashy and revolutionary (but at the same time economical and flexible) system. This new system, the QI-900, will be discussed in the next installment; it was the first Brazilian computer with movable windows, menus, preemptive multitasking, and operating system in EPROM.

(clique aqui para ler este artigo em português)

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at vega.planetarium.com.br.

I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.

This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

<somebody@rsandk.com>:

Connected to 24.196.135.162 but sender was rejected.

Remote host said: 550 5.7.1 mail from spam friendly countries with admins who overwhelmingly ignore or bounce complaints not welcome here

In the past, I’ve seen various concise wordings of the “550 5.7.1″ message; usually something to the effect that my address was on some blacklist or another. A polite request to the provider’s postmaster address usually worked.

But from this one I gather that they’re now unconditionally rejecting all e-mails from Brazil. Isn’t that rather excessive…? Should I sue about restraint of trade, or whatever?

So if you’re a user of one of my products, and I don’t answer your e-mail, you may want to switch providers – or post here on the support boards. Sorry about that.

Tony and his brother Caio received their prize in the Linotype International Type Design Contest 2003, where they placed 3rd in the display category with the Samba Font, inspired by the work of early 20th-century Brazilian illustrator J. Carlos. Here’s a sample:

Congratulations!

• You drive on the right side of the road. You stop at red lights if someone is around; otherwise you slow down. If you’re a pedestrian and cars are anywhere around, you better watch out carefully before crossing the street.
• You think of Argentina as a pleasant country with two cities: charming, cosmopolitan Buenos Aires, and beautiful Bariloche (where the Brazilian ski championship takes place). You think Argentinians as a people are arrogant and conceited, but you often like individual Argentinians.
• When you were younger, you considered the Volkswagen Beetle a dream car.
• The police are armed, sometimes with submachine guns. You are afraid all police are violent and crooked, but at the same time you would rather have them around.

If you’re interested in cultural differences, this is fascinating reading. If I find the time, I may write some comments for the Brazil page.