June 2002

Today my girlfriend and I took a ride with our bikes. We were supposed to visit my grandmother and help her mow her lawn. The weather wasn't that good but at least it wasn't raining. Not until we had left anyway.

With the rain still pouring down after completing about two thirds of the distance the two of us were soaking wet. Then my rear tire went flat. We had to walk the last kilometer.

Somewhat wetter, colder and later than first anticipated we finally arrived at my grandmother's house. Because of the rain there really was no reason to mow the lawn. We had some coffe and cakes, tried to dry our clothes and left our bikes in the garage.

The first thing I'll do tomorrow is to go down town and pick up a nice set of waterproof biking gear. Then I'll borrow my friends car so I can get my bike to a bicycle repairman.

I decided to switch from Blosxom to Burger. RSS support isn't complete yet but what the heck, this feels a lot better.

Burger is a ruby program that Peter put together. It's similar to Blosxom in that it takes a couple of text files and generates HTML, XML or what have you. The difference is that this is done locally on your computer. I upload the resulting files to the server using rsync. The server doesn't need to process anything.

Last night I experimented a bit with Apple's System Configuration Framework. I've uploaded the code.

One thing I did was wrapping some of the Core Foundation-like ``objects" in Objective-C classes. This made it a lot simpler to use.

I still think it would be a good idea for Apple to provide these kinds of wrappers around the various CF frameworks they produce. The Objective-C interfaces would in every case be a lot smaller, so to speak, and easier to read than their talkative CF counterparts.

Our Stepwise hero Scott Anguish has written a more elaborate instruction for installing OpenSSH 3.4p1 in this stepwise article.

I learned something new when reading the article. Apple provides a darwintools.pkg.tar (32 MB) that contains a lot of headers missing in a standard OS install. I haven't looked at this package yet myself.

To all Mac OS X users out there, I recommend you follow Scott's instructions instead of mine.

You have probably heard of the OpenSSH Remote Challenge Vulnerability. It's a serious bug and should be dealt with. There's an article on advogato that might be of interest.

Anyway, I've compiled OpenSSH 3.4p1 on Mac OS X 10.1.5. Here's basically what I had to do:

• Download openssh-3.4p1.tar.gz
• Download openssl-0.9.6b.tar.gz
• After unpacking the two archives I ran env CPPFLAGS="-I/full/path/to/openssl-0.9.6b/include" ./configure, followed by make.

The ssl library (version 0.9.6b) is included in Mac OS X, but I couldn't find the headers anywhere on my system so I downloaded the source.

OpenSSH is installed in /usr/local by default so you'll have to update the SSH startup item, found in /System/Library/StartupItems, to make use of the new version. That is, if you don't mind messin' with configure's --prefix and --sysconfdir options.

Don't forget to add the group and user sshd. It's all in the INSTALL file.

It gladens me that The Omni Group's browser OmniWeb is still hanging on. I just downloaded the latest version, 4.1 released last night, and I recommend you do the same. Users of the last public beta will experience a speed boost, especially when it comes to table-intensive pages (not to mention the huge difference it must be for those of you who never tried the betas).

I hardly ever use IE anymore and what a relief that is. There's still things missing in this version, but I have high hopes for the comming version 5 where for example the java script engine will be much improved.

Great job Omni!

I've been thinking of doing it for a very long time and yesterday I finally got around to doing it: I bought myself a new, shining bike. Wonderful!

If you have similar plans and live in Gothenburg I can recommend Cykelstället. They were nice and helpful.

Take a look at this comic strip. This is exactely how absurd the situation is today with the major players in the music and entertainment industry, misleadingly, trying to prevent ``piracy". How stupid can you get?

There's a long thread about licensing and cracking on the Apple cocoa-dev mailinglist right now. It's a very interesting discussion.

Personally I don't like the kind of licensing where a program is tied to a specific machine, or a single instance of the program running on the local network.

One reason I don't like it is that it really doesn't stop someone who wants to crack the program, so the only effect is annoying the user who has bought the program and is rightfully using it to edit her documents. Like, when switching to another machine just to have look at that document you forgot to move to the file server. Oops, forgot to quit the app on the workstation!

Licensing issues really should be handled through other channels and/or in other ways. A guess this can be rather difficult for a small company, especially considering the vast market such a small company can be targeting (read world wide). It's a complex issue...

The best solution I can think of, or, the solution that I like the most is where being a registered customer gives you more value, or at least the feeling of more value. I can't give an example of this, unluckily, so feel free to yell at me. What's also unlucky, I guess, is that not all programs can utilize or implement a model of such "added value".

As I said, it's a complex issue.

Peter quotes Gail Sher in this weblog entry. Did Gail figure that out by herself, writing at least one haiku a day with no exceptions? It sounds very "budo" to me.

An anecdote from my time as an Aikido practitioner at Göteborgs Aikidoklubb says that to master the bokken (wooden-sword), performing one concentrated cut a day would be enough. That's one cut, not two, not zero.

Anyway, referring to Peter's blog, I've always had the feeling that writing down something that you've just learned would dramatically raise your chances of remembering it, as well as improve your understanding of it. Unluckily, I've never been a good practitioner of this art.

I've just ordered a new machine. It will replace my very old PC at home, serving as a firewall, local DNS server and cache etc for my home network.

The old server is running OpenBSD, but I'm thinking of installing FreeBSD on the new machine. FreeBSD has more in common with Mac OS X than OpenBSD (or perhaps it's the other way around :-) and has better support for java, so I've been told.

One thing that struck me when ordering this machine is the huge difference in price if compared to Apple hardware. The new machine comes with an AMD processor at 1300-1600 MHz (not decided on yet), 256 MB of memory, a 40 to 60 GB disk, two network cards, a medium size tower chassis etc. The prize? Somewhere between 4000 and 6000 SEK. That's not much compared to an Apple computer of the same caliber.