Solipsism Gradient

(Um resumo, em português, deste post está na minha página principal)

It’s that time of the year again when the Brazilian government decides, by decree, when and where Daylight Savings Time begins. Last year Mac OS X users in Brazil had serious problems with that, as Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) had the wrong dates inside the Unix tables that most of the system uses, and another (different!) wrong date inside a legacy table embedded into one of the frameworks, which was used by the Finder and some other applications.

In 2002 I published a patch to fix the Unix tables but couldn’t change the framework table. In addition, some – though not all – users reported a problem with their system snapping back to normal time on New Year’s eve. So this year, I’m waiting until someone else publishes the correction…

At this time, I haven’t got a system running Jaguar in order to test what will happen this year. The legacy table was finally removed in Mac OS 10.3 (Panther), so at least it will act consistently for all system calls and applications. However, it seems that Panther is considering DST as starting on Oct. 12 instead of the decreed date of Oct. 19.

Mac OS 9 users will have no problems, as there is a convenient double checkbox in the Date & Time Control Panel to allow the user to set DST manually. I’ve filed an enhancement request with Apple to put a similar checkbox into Mac OS X, but there’s little or no hope of this being done anytime soon (if ever).

The problem in Brazil is even more complicated, as DST is observed only by certain states in a manner not consistent with the timezones used when DST is not in effect. Additionally, the government may decide to extend or abbreviate the DST period at any time. So a manual checkbox would certainly be the easiest way around the problem.

…or perhaps a GUI viewer/editor for the timezone files… if only I had the time…

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
The past two days were quite exhausting, and today doesn’t promise any letup… this tourism thing isn’t as easy as it looks. Between our delegation of four we’ve took a little less than 800 pictures so far…

Steve Jobs’ keynote was short as such things usually go. it’s exhaustively covered on the news sites, so I won’t repeat anything here.

I gave in to temptation and bought one of the new 40GB iPods. Preliminary tests are very positive; the only bug I’ve been able to find so far it that it seems impossible to have your home folder on the iPod, unless you boot from it. Let’s see if that is fixed in Panther.

More later in the day, if possible… we ‘re leaving tomorrow morning. I’ll try to write up some general comments on the Expo and Paris at home over the weekend.

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
Live from Paris, rather to my own surprise.

I should have arrived today instead of Friday, but circumstances conspired to make us skip Amsterdam completely. Not only were there no hotels available within 100 Kms. of the city, but my companions neglected to mention our Amsterdam stopover to the lady at the KLM counter; as their luggage was going to go to Paris directly anyway, we decided to go with it.

Fortunately our hotel had rooms available and we took the opportunity to see Paris. I’d been here previously in 1995, but two of my companions were new to the city. So yesterday we had a day-long walk from the Île de la Cité to the Tour Eiffel. Today we spent some time in the Louvre and then I walked to the Place de la Republique, where I’m posting this.

Internet Cafés are not very common in Paris, although people tell me more are opening; we also saw some signs advertising WiFi hotspots, although it wasn’t clear whether access was free or not.

I’m typing (or rather, hunting and pecking) this on a venerable Pentium II, running Windows 98, with a French AZERTY keyboard. Grrh. I had less trouble in Budapest and Prague; only the centermost keys are at the usuql plqce (oops, “usual place”). The ambience is rather unusual… the place seems to cater mostly to Asian youths intent on playing net games and/or downloading p0rn. Cables are strewn all over the place and there is no sign advertising its presence; I walked past it twice, in fact, until a helpful pedestrian set me straight.

Fortunately, on Tuesday the Apple Expo starts with the anxiously expected Stevenote (sorry, typing URLs is too exhausting with this keyboard) and I hope to able to use my Airport-equipped iBook inside the Press center. So expect more detailed updates in a couple of days. Au bientôt…

Looks like I’ll be attending the Apple Expo in Paris in two weeks, much to my surprise. The nice folks at Macmania magazine are sponsoring part of the trip. I’m going with my “Press” hat, so expect to see some updates from the press room during the expo.

Time to brush up on my French… I had 3 years of French in school and actually did quite well, but then English moved in and occupied (it seems) more or less the same neurons. I still can read and pronounce it, and understand about 50% of French movies .

It’s been at least 5 or 6 years since my last non-developer Mac-related conference/expo. I must admit I grew disillusioned with the marketeering aspects of the old MacWorld expos. Let’s see if the French do it any better. The published list of exhibitors isn’t all that inspiring, but hopefully Steve Jobs will announce something interesting at the keynote.

Regarding the keynote, informed guessers say we’ll see a new 15″ PowerBook (aluminum), a speed boost for the 12″ and 17″ models, and some music-related stuff: music store for Europe and/or Windows, and possibly some iPod news.

More later…

Well, I’m sitting here downloading Apple’s latest Mac OS X Panther beta (7B21). I’m under the standard developer NDA, so after reading the release docs I can’t say much more beyond 1) it’ll take at least two more days to get it all (5 CDs!), 2) I’m very enthusiastic about it. Seems like a great excuse to get back into full-time development work – I’ve got a couple of good ideas already, about which I’ll post more info later.

There’s nothing like a larger screen and more memory! While downloading I’m reading the documentation, backing up some stuff, checking e-mail, chatting with friends, and listening to some great new music I found on my São Paulo trip. My current favorite is John Zorn‘s “The Circle Maker“, a double album with some amazing Jewish jazz. Highly recommended.

I wrote:

I’m leaving for São Paulo to pick up my new laptop, put up the old iBook for sale…

Well, I’m pleased to report that I’m back, and have the PowerBook up and running, after some initial hitches.

As usual with most of Apple’s products, it’s difficult to estimate size and beauty from photographs. I saw the recently introduced iSight camera, and it was much smaller than it appears on the photos. In contrast, the 17″ PowerBook is even larger than I thought. It’s thinner than my old iBook, though, and the weight increase isn’t apparent. The screen is larger and better, the loudspeakers sound much better, and of course the speed and storage increases are noticeable.

I had some difficulty in getting the built-in Airport Extreme (802.11g) card to interoperate with my SMC Barricade 7004AWBR wireless router. I tried several things – setting the MTU to 1492, changing from fixed IP to DHCP, downgrading the Airport software from 3.1 to 3.04, and trying out different WEP encryption options. I’ve had no time to regress some of these things to see which specific one was the culprit, but it’s working now. And I also now recommend xwepgen, a program that calculates the various hexadecimal WEP keys from a password – invaluable for using Airport with non-Apple base stations.

The built-in trackpad somehow doesn’t feel as good as the iBook’s; the surface is rougher and my fingertip keeps sticking. As I normally use a mouse, this isn’t an issue. The first days I kept hitting the wrong keys, since I had apparently been using the laptop’s edges for gauging key locations. Other than that I’ve no complaints…

I’m leaving for São Paulo to pick up my new laptop, put up the old iBook for sale, and make some business contacts. The new machine will have space and speed to handle the new Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) and I’ve been wanting a G4 for doing some AltiVec stuff, anyway.

By a coincidence, yesterday I found a new owner for my DayStar Genesis MP528, a PowerMac 9500 clone which I bought about 8 years ago. Originally it had 4 PowerPC604 processors running at 132 MHz, with a 40 MHz bus; after two processors burned out, I bought one of the first G3 boards (300MHz) for it, and upgraded it over the years. I stopped using it after Mac OS X came out.

John Gruber posts a follow-up about clickthrough. He puts the ball into Apple’s court:

Only Apple can fix this. Where by “fixing it”, I mean three things, all essential:

Mandate correct click-through behavior in the HIG.

Make Apple’s Cocoa frameworks do the right thing by default. Supply sufficient API hooks so that it’s easy for third-party frameworks to do the right thing.

All of Apple’s own software needs to follow these guidelines.

Hmm… I need an “applause” smiley here…

Here’s an additional interesting tip from Sven-S. Porst:

One thing I’d like to add on the topic of click-through is that while it had been possible for ages in MacOS to drag background windows without activating them by holding the command-key while doing so, support for this background manipulation has improved in OSX. In Cocoa applications you can command-click most controls and use them without activating the window first. I like that. Click-through for the people who want and it and can handle it. It’s far from perfect, though, as it doesn’t work uniformly through all applications and doesn’t work for toolbar items either as the command-Key is used for moving items there.