Avian’s Blog

English Wikipedia says this about Slovenian writer Ivan Cankar:

The son of a village tailor, he studied electrical engineering in Vienna, and lived there for some time as a freelance writer.

Is it possible that in four years of Slovenian literature courses in high school nobody cared to mention that? I'm sure I would remember that one interesting fact from lectures that were otherwise filled with (to me at least) uninteresting interpretations of his works.

Slovenian and German Wikipedias seem to disagree though. They say that he studied architecture for a while before switching to literature.

... one speedy delete at a time.

I noticed some weird aliases today that seemed to be polluting Zemanta's semantic database. After making sure these terms actually exist on Wikipedia, Jure and I got on #wikipedia IRC channel and started bugging people. A few minutes later the world became a better place and the following redirects linking to Apple's iPhone were speedy deleted:

• Jesus Phone
• Jesus-Phone
• Uphone
• Ophone
• Eye phone

Now the only questionable alias for iPhone remains the God Machine, which actually has a citation behind it.

Remember Advanced Lawnmower Simulator? It was a simple and boring game for the Sinclair Spectrum where you had to push your lawnmower over a field. It was also an elaborate hoax performed by the editors of the Your Spectrum magazine.

This is what it used to look like in the 80s.

Now it seems that some people did have some fun with it after all. There appears to be a remake built into a £30 50-games-in-one hand-held console called Gamespower 50. They also enhanced the graphics a bit:

However it still appears to be as simple and boring as the original. There's a review you can see at YouTube (Dr. Ashen talks about the Grass Cutter around 4:00 into the video).

Two days ago, Apple users at Zemanta got a shiny box with the new version of Mac OS X inside. Since I was still running OS X 10.3 on my PowerBook I made a backup and upgraded without hesitation.

On the first glance Leopard looked much too shiny for my taste. The second look revealed just how much of a resource hog it is. My 60 GB disk is now 30% occupied just with the operating system itself (upgrade took approximately 11 GB of additional disk space). 768 MB of RAM seems to be just enough to keep the system ticking.

The default system also looks much to shiny for my taste. One of the first things I did is to turn the dock back to it's previous, non-3D non-shiny look (so much for not having to use command line on a Mac). Fortunately I was somehow spared the transparent menu bar (it seems that is much harder to disable). Perhaps it's the old hardware I'm using. On the other hand I still get blurred background behind menus. It's really a minimal visual change, but I'm sure they did that only to show that a Mac can do that just as easily as Vista.

Since I never used 10.4 this is also the first time I've seen Spotlight and Dashboard. The first one is great - starting applications for example. Not so much for finding documents in my experience because I always get a ton of search results from various C and Python source files I have on the disk (the same problem I had with Beagle on Linux). For the dashboard on the other hand I can't see any good use. I currently only have iStat Pro there. I still use sticky notes and calculator as standalone applications.

For some new features I have the feeling that they are there just so that Apple's marketing department could say that they added more than 300 new features. Quick look is one such example - isn't it easier to double click a file and open it than Control-clicking it and selecting Quick look (which takes about as long to load up as Preview anyway)? Or that flip-through-the-album mode that finder has now. Just more shiny things with no useful value.

Spaces is nice. I missed virtual desktops on Macs. It still has bugs though. If I have for example terminal windows on two desktops and switch to Terminal from some other application with Ctrl-Tab the system will take me to some random desktop with a terminal on it. Ctrl-` will also just cycle between windows on the current desktop, not all desktops.

Regarding application compatibility: Leopard's X11 is terribly broken. I installed Tiger's X11 but problems remain. Gimp isn't working for example and OpenOffice sometimes gives me "Command timed out" error and sometimes crashes after I type in a couple of words. Also Vi for OS X works worse on Leopard (for example Ctrl-6 shortcut stopped working). MacVim works perfectly (and has a nicer icon). Other things appear to be working, although Jure says that upgrade broke his MacPorts and MySql installations.

A big surprise was that the ssh client they ship with Leopard now pops-up a graphical window asking for a password / passphrase (probably through ssh-agent). I'm not sure I like this - command line utilities should stay in the command line.

A couple of new features also strongly reminded me of Vista. For example the new Mac OS X is constantly asking me to allow or cancel some actions. I don't know how Apple can make fun of the Microsoft in their commercials about this when they aren't any better. For example, in the first day of using Leopard I had to allow application to run for the first time, application downloaded from the Internet to run, application to access the Internet and application to accept connections from the Internet ...

Both Jure and I also noticed a strange side-effect of the upgrade: we both seem to be making more typing mistakes than before. I'm guessing that Leopard has some new system of filtering keystrokes and that it no longer registers very short key presses or something. Also I have the feeling that the keyboard repeat rate is lower that before. I have no benchmarks to prove it though.

How long is the average title of an article on the web? Jure needed this information yesterday when he was designing some part of Zemanta's web interface.

The nice thing when you have half of the web¹ cleaned-up and stored in your database is that you can get answers to questions like this with a simple SQL query. A gnuplot one-liner later, we came up with this:

It's interesting how the histogram has a sharp spike at around 30 characters in an otherwise smooth bell-like curve.

¹ Ok, maybe half of the web that's not porn.

Yesterday Boštjan and I went to see Dorkbot London. The place (called "01" in Soho) reminded us of Kiberpipa and the event was surprisingly like a couple of POT talks in a row. There were somewhere around 50 or 60 people in the audience, more than there were chairs available.

The event consisted of three talks: first was James Larsson who presented a scary modification of the original Pong video game: he replaced two joystick controllers with a pair of pressure sensitive leather boots on a table. The players controlled their pads by squeezing the boots and a motorized whip hit the unfortunate looser.

The part of his contraption I found the most interesting was how he controlled the whip. The AY 3 8500 chip on which the Pong game runs doesn't have any digital outputs that would indicate which player lost. So in order for his machine to know which player to punish he made a circuit that figured out the last position of the ball from the analogue video signal produced by the chip. This seemed very impressive to me at first (especially since only a couple of simple logic chips seemed to be enough - see picture above). However if you read the description of the chip you see that the chip produces separate video signals for each object - ball, pads, background, etc. This makes this feat much more credible.

The second talk was by Matthew Garrett about the OLPC project. Nothing new here, I only got the impression that maybe they set the goals of the project a bit too optimistically. It's been 2 years since the announcement of the project and according to the presentation they still have a lot of problems with software.

The final talk was by Tim Hunkin, creator of some very interesting arcade machines. Judging by video presentations of his machines he has shown us his creations are incredibly low tech (he said they are controlled by nothing more complicated than some industrial PLCs) and incredibly funny / interesting. For example Mobility Masterclass game uses a camera moving on a robotic arm through a model of a street to produce the video that the player sees on her screen. There's also Rent-a-dog where he recorded the video on a scale replica of the nearby street he constructed out of photographs, glued to cardboard.

His machines are great examples how games can immersive even if the technical background is simple and display isn't pixel-perfect. I would love to go see his arcade (most machines are on display in a pier pavillion over the sea), but as far as I know it's not very easy to get there with public transportation.

There's an interesting article with some pictures about facilities at nVidia headquarters at FiringSquad.

It's surprising what extensive equipment they have even though they do not manufacture chips themselves. Granted they are one of the leading specialized integrated circuit design companies but I didn't know that companies that outsource their chip fabrication do chip testing at the level that is claimed by this article - chemical composition analysis, checking transistor level failures, etc.

They also say they are doing some things that I didn't even know are possible. Like changing on chip connections with gallium ion beam to diagnose a chip failure. Considering that a completely manufactured chip is probably impossible to get undamaged from its package I guess they are only doing this for diagnosing and fixing problems with prototypes they get on a bare die from the fab. However even this is impressive. Does this mean that transistor level simulation tools aren't accurate enough to model some failures on their chips?

I also wonder where they get their failed chips from to analyze. I doubt they do this kind of in-depth checking on every failed card they get in their mail. My guess would be only from trusted sources like other graphic card manufactures that use their chips.

I bought a couple of coasters like this yesterday at Science Museum. They claim that they are made from recycled printed circuit boards.

From a close look they appear to be made out of a double-sided 6-layer PCB. I doubt that it is recycled though. You can see the gold colored metallization on SMD pads that would be covered if the pads ever had any solder on them. It is more likely that the material came from some stock of obsolete boards that were never assembled.

I took a break today from natural language processing and visited London's Science Museum.

I visited Science Museum several years ago and one thing I remember the most from that visit is the big running steam engine you see right beyond the entrance. Well, there are still some steam engines in the first hall (right after you go through mandatory backpack search), but I got the feeling that they're there simply because they're too large to move away. The focus of the museum seems now to be more recent technology.

Right after the first hall you go through the space flight exhibition.

That's a full size replica of the Apollo LEM and the authentic Apollo 10 command module (that was the last lunar orbit mission before the first landing). What amazed me was the size of this thing. From the pictures I never got the impression just how much larger the landing module is compared to a human. The complete Saturn V stack must really have looked incredible.

On to the computing and electronics section. I didn't know that Ferranti was a known name in electronics well before integrated circuits. Judging from Google results you get today I had the feeling that they were mostly known by their innovative ASIC technology that made Sinclair Spectrum's ULA possible.

This is a mechanical analogue computer that was used to research and predict economic changes. It uses water as an analogue for monetary value.

One of the first experiments with artificial intelligence. According to the looks and age of this device it probably uses some analogue electronic circuit to model human reactions.

The replica of Babbage's Difference engine is one of the highlights of Science museum's collection. They are building another replica for display in an American museum.

There were also some art installations on display. This particular one caught everybody's eye because of the big "DO NOT TOUCH" sign. Of course, who can resist touching a shiny unusual object, especially if there are no obvious obstacles? In the end it turns out that it will only give you a slight electric shock and emit a loud "Bzzzt" sound.

Ok, according to some screams maybe it's not so slight.

The English have some weird priorities regarding household safety.

On one side they seem absolutely paranoid about everything dealing with electricity. I've seen this last year in Lancaster as well as now in London. Every wall plug has a dedicated switch. Larger electrical appliances, like our electric oven for example, have an additional big switch on the wall with a red warning light. Everything, from extension cords to simple continental-to-UK plug adapters has its own fuse. At Lancaster University everything that had even a remote connection with electricity, from computers, toasters to extension cords and cables, had to be periodically checked, sealed and signed by an authorized electrician.

On the other side gas stove in our house in London doesn't have safety valves that turn off automatically if the flame goes off to prevent gas building up in the room. I also don't see anywhere a clearly marked gas shut-off valve (the kind you usually see in Slovenia where houses are connected to city gas lines). Quite unbelievable. You definitely don't want to get electrocuted, but a gas explosion can take down the house.

I have this feeling that electricity is still regarded as something new, unknown and dangerous while domestic gas has been used for centuries and is a well known, tamed beast.

Guess what I got today...

I visited the Future of web applications conference today. Zemanta has a little booth there right behind the registration desk. It's funny to think that it's in as exposed place as Adobe booth next door, which is one of the main sponsors of the conference.

After listening to talks about such and such planned social networking sites I have mixed feelings. I myself would just not be comfortable with giving away that much personal information (or even ability to track my location at any moment!) to some business.

It's interesting that people get really angry when some government wants to introduce some technology that would in theory enable tracking of people, but on the other hand they happily volunteer to be tracked by some commercial web site.

One notable project that caught my eye was wakoopa.com. It's a site that tracks what software you use and what software people you know use and then recommends you what software may be useful to you. Again you're sending scary personal information somewhere on the net but seeing how many useful little applications I found in these 3 days working with other guys from Zemanta I see why it could be useful.

For the next three months I'll be working for Zemanta on some advanced natural language processing algorithms. Not exactly my profession, but it's always interesting to try something new.

These are Zemanta's famous secret London headquarters where I'm staying. It's a typical English house with two floors and four little bedrooms like this:

Internet access is unfortunately quite problematic here. Currently we have a Vodafone UMTS modem connection that is shared with all our computers through wireless LAN. Certainly not an ideal solution, but it works (sometimes). On the other hand it's nice to know just how much better Slovenian ISPs are compared to this one. This is the first time I see an ISP transparently replacing JPEG images with lower quality ones, inserting Javascript into HTML pages and even blocking some domains completely.

Yesterday I successfully defended my diploma thesis about designing and building a replica of Galaksija microcomputer. I'm now officially an electrical engineer.

Now I can actually break those "no user serviceable parts inside" and "only to be opened by qualified personnel" stickers on electronic devices without the feeling that I'm doing something against the rules. Where's any fun in that?

I guess my mail server is still a pretty quiet corner of the internet. Comparing to some scary statistics I saw recently on planet.debian.org this amount of spam is pretty tolerable. Unfortunately there is this rising trend that worries me.

Bogofilter works great by the way. I occasionally get one or two spam mails in my inbox and I haven't seen a false positive in almost a year.

Sometime ago I mounted the disk drive in my server on Cooltek rubber mounts. The hard disk was the loudest part after I installed a silent power supply and my CPU fan regulator.

Previously the heat was conducted away from the disk through contact with the metal case but that isn't possible now since there are two centimeters of rubber separating them. So the only way left is by air convection which is less efficient. To see just how much effect this would have on the drive temperature, I started monitoring drive temperature with SMART a few days before I installed the rubber mounts.

This is the temperature graph before:

and after the modification:

The spike on both graphs is when I stressed the disk for 3 hours using a tar command in an infinite loop.

You can see that the rubber mounts caused at least 4°C temperature increase. I believe 44°C is already a bit high (at least according to this Google paper) and it's was quite cold these days. According to SMART this disk already got as hot as 43°C sometime in the past when it was still screwed directly to the case.

I'll keep monitoring the temperature but I'm afraid this isn't going to work well in the summer.

Yesterday I went to Frisk, a "festival of computer science and modern communication" in Murska Sobota. Here are a few impressions:

This is the main hall - it was raining outside so people were gathering here instead of the open atrium that seemed to be prepared as a center of the event. Plus you could play some more and some less modern games here (there was one old PC and one Commodore 64 available).

At the back wall there was one Wii (left, surrounded by a loud crowd that was obviously having lots of fun) and one Playstation (right, with two guys nervously playing a FPS). The situation reminded me of a certain xkcd comic.

There was a talk about Apple on the schedule with an interesting title but boring contents (item by item description of their product line). Never thought I would see a room of people watching Apple "Hi, I'm a Mac" commercials on the big screen.

Last but not least there was an exhibition of old computers (some of which were from Cyberpipe's computer museum). It was the best part of the festival in my opinion, but not much I haven't seen before.

In the end I can say that it wasn't worth spending 8 hours on a train to get there (average speed was an amazing 40 km/h - hey at least nothing broke down). I did plan to make a short trip around Murska Sobota besides visiting Frisk, but the weather made that more or less impossible.

Yesterday I watched the BBC documentary Tetris: from Russia with love.

It was the first documentary in a long time that I enjoyed watching on TV. In constract with things that are called documentaries today it has more than 5 minutes of actual content, tells an interesting story and the narrator doesn't sound like he's commenting on a football game. Seriously, I don't know how anyone can stand watching an entire 1 hour show on Discovery or National Geographic channels when you see all original footage in the first 5 minutes and the narrator just repeats over and over again how this or that is awesome and/or extremely dangerous.

There are two things though that I missed though: I don't know if that was the fault of Slovenian broadcaster removing the original overlays, but when someone is talking to the camera I'm used to seeing his name printed somewhere on the screen. Only at the middle of the movie I connected all the faces with their names.

They could also be a bit more specific about technical details... What was that russian computer called on which the first version of Tetris ran? I'm quite sure I saw a screenshot of Sinclair Spectrum version of Tetris for a moment there, but all hardware was described only as "computers" or "consoles", not with specific names (except for Gameboy I guess).

Guess which operating system handles your cash?

(seen today in Ljubljana)

I found a video demonstrating how to use a glowing graphite pencil lead as an emergency light source. It seemed like a fun experiment to try. Unfortunately I didn't have a charged 12V car battery at hand. I started charging one and meanwhile tried the same thing with a 5V lab power supply.

The original video uses an ordinary pencil lead which has a diameter of something like 2mm. Since the power supply I was using wasn't rated for the current that would flow through such a thick rod of graphite I used a 0.7 mm pencil lead instead.

In the video you can see that even with 5V the lead glows nicely. You can also see the way it degrades: the middle of the lead is hottest because heat is conducted away from the ends by the metal clips. Since graphite will oxidize/ablate faster at higher temperatures the center part gets thinner with time. This increases the resistance of the center which means that 1) less current will flow through the lead and 2) the center starts to heat more than the ends. It takes around 40s for the center part to become so thin that it heats so much that the graphite vaporizes and breaks the circuit.

The instrument on the left shows current in Amperes (actually it shows a voltage drop across a 1mΩ resistor hence the mV mark at the top of the display). You can see that the current is decreasing as the lead degrades. Interestingly, it does not seem to fall significantly while the lead is heating up as is the case with a metal filament in an ordinary light bulb. Electrical power with a fresh lead is around 30W.

The spent lead is shaped into a cone.

Grep Linux kernel source for Klingon if you don't believe me. This is from 2.6.18 (I just found it yesterday when I was browsing kernel documentation):

Klingon language support
------------------------

In 1996, Linux was the first operating system in the world to add
support for the artificial language Klingon, created by Marc Okrand
for the "Star Trek" television series.

...

Some nice photographs of a circuit I have on my bench right now:

Google's bot did more than a gigabyte of traffic on tablix.org in a couple of days. What the hell is going on here?

From the logs it appears that it has been downloading and re-downloading my Galaksija demonstration video. I'm moving it away for now.

I usually recommend using Wikipedia. However today I found an example why you should still be skeptical when reading its articles:

While Gasoline-powered ICE cars have a fuel efficiency of 30%, steam engines are capable of 90% efficiency.

Well, I guess that's why all cars today are powered by steam engines, right?

Here's another gem from the talk page (some people there expressed doubt in the these figures on grounds of laws of thermodynamics):

I won't enter into this arcane "efficiency" debate, a time-honoured red herring that does not begin to explain why steam cars have always given a very good account of themselves when compared with internal combustion as regards fuel consumption, and emissions-wise have generally proved far superior. Surely this begs more searching questions as to why this should be in spite of all this "received theory"

There's also this British steam powered car that requires a 4 MW engine to reach 320 km/h. I think that says enough about efficiency of steam engines.

The new version of GNU General Public License is getting close (final draft was released by the FSF one week ago). There is quite a lot of discussion going on, so here are my two cents:

Since I read the first draft I've put all free software I released specifically under the GPL v2 (without that "or any later version" sentence - I hold the copyright so I can change the version later anyway if I change my mind). The reason for this is quite simple: I don't want to use a license if my understanding of it is based only on other people's interpretation. I want to read it and understand it myself.

Now, maybe my reading comprehension of legal documents is below average, but at around 5600 words the GPL v3 draft is too heavy for me. I understand some parts but I don't see the whole picture. On the other hand I have a feeling that I understand 2900 words of GPL v2 and that I know exactly under what set of conditions I allow redistribution of my code.

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.

--- Alice Kahn

(via WikiQuote)

Telephone plugs in Belgium are weird. First, they are gigantic compared to the RJ connectors. Second, the socket will happily accommodate a standard European mains plug if you plug it in at an angle.

Hint: there's something wrong with this picture (and no, my laptop's battery wouldn't charge that way).

I can't stand people (like surprisingly many people from IT departments I've met) calling free software "freeware".

Call it free software, FLOSS, FOSS, open source, linux (yeah, I know) or whatever.

In my dictionary freeware is windows-only binary-only software that:

• Dies after one or two releases and no-one even knows it existed or...
• gets really popular after which it's no longer free (people loose interest) after which it gets adware supported (people start to hate it) after which it either gets free again or dies which disappoints both remaining users or...
• it is a part of some greater evil plan for world domination.

Click

Pros:

• Getting to see DefCon

Cons:

• Having my photo and personal information permanently added to some US database (and considering the nature of such a visit, I'm quite sure that would not be the good guys column)
• Having to trade in my normal paper passport for an evil biometric RFID steal-my-data-from-a-distance one
• Getting to see only DefCon. Why spend a fortune on transatlantic airline tickets and stay there just a couple of days?
• Considering this offer (and the fact that it is cheaper for people from US to come to Europe), there will probably be some people from DefCon at CCCamp. So even CCCamp will probably be more interesting than usual.

Here are some pictures from 13th MFRU (or IFCA in English, International Festival of Computer Arts) in Maribor.

I've been there yesterday evening to do a short presentation of my redesigned Galaksija. It felt a bit strange to present my work at an art festival, since I didn't thought of Galaksija as a work of art. In the end I think that my talk about Galaksija didn't quite reach the audience (although I tried to leave out as many boring technicalities as possible).

On the other hand I saw a number of interesting projects, but I think posting by blurry photos wouldn't do them justice.

This little figure made out a RJ-45 connector and a piece of UTP cable was the first exhibit I saw.

Amazon noir exhibit was one of the more interesting ones. Authors managed to copy a number of complete books using some feature of the amazon.com web site that allows you to read small parts of some books in the shop. The details of how they managed to do that are pretty well hidden on their web page.

Galaksija's corner.

Looking back, the best exhibit of the festival I saw was the "My name is Urška" project. A photo of it would really be pointless here since the whole point of the exhibit was to see a photo of a girl smoothly morphing from a healthy look to how she would look if she had one of genetic disorders while a display showed a statistical frequency of this disorder.

Someone dug through a telecom cable for my neighborhood or so my ISP tells me. It cut my server off the net (together with all telephones and ADSL lines in sight) for nearly a day and a half.

In semi-related news, secondary DNS for tablix.org is also currently down (so much for redundancy).

And since bad things tend to happen together, a glitch in my dovecot IMAP server deleted half my mailbox. As expected, I was just going to make a backup for this month, meaning I lost a lot of mail I received since April. If I don't answer, you now know the reason.

I'm still investigating this by the way. It seems to be related to this issue. "nobody sane has that many messages in one mailbox" they say? Uhm...

Update: I've been told that I can expect more down time the following week as they will be repairing the damaged cable.

I'm going to VCFE, München tommorow.

I was going to write something here about Galaksija's shiny new Acrylic glass case and new Galaksija tools, but I still have too many things to prepare so it'll have to wait.

So, I if you want to see my redesigned Galaksija in real life and you'll be near München this weekend, drop by. Look for Cyberpipe's computer museum.

While I use a terminal to do most of my work I do often use Nautilus to move files around and sort things into directories. It's quite annoying when I get just a lot of default "foot" icons when I'm working with files made with gEDA (which is a lot these days).

So, here's my second try at making icons:

(These icons are derived from the text-x-generic icon of the Tango base icon theme and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license)

Update: Added icons for PCB layouts and Gerber files. SVG versions.

On Saturday I went to see Sunshine. I've read the review in the NewScientist last week and didn't expect much from it. Now, I'm surprised NewScientist even bothered to review a movie like this.

The science part of this science-fiction story is just unbelievably bad. I don't have a problem with the fact that the basic plot was impossible (there isn't nearly enough mass on the whole earth to make a device that could produce any kind of power output comparable to the sun, stars don't stop just like that, etc, etc), that is also true for many good sci-fi stories. It's the little details that really annoy me:

• They equate vacuum and weightlessness. As soon as air pressure is restored in the airlock, things fall down (I would think that anyone who passed elementary school physics should get this right).
• Mariner 10 flew by Mercury in 1973 (without any futuristic heat shielding) and didn't vaporize in an instant.
• Low temperature is the least of your problems when you are going to explosively decompress an airlock without a wearing a space suit.
• Come on, you have immersive three-dimensional displays for therapy, but the astronauts must peek through a narrow slit in their helmet?

Interestingly the basic theme of the movie (people getting obsessed with exposing themselves to the light and stuff like that) strongly reminded me of a short sci-fi story Flying toward the light by Herbert W. Franke (I only have Slovenian translation here, so the title may be a bit off). It talks about a fleet of ships from Pluto that are going toward the inner solar system in search of planets that are warmer (and trying to figure out what happened to the previous expedition). It turns out that they get so addicted to the light and warmth that they can't get enough of it and they get closer and closer to the sun until everyone looses perception and is too late to avoid crashing into the sun.

I found this two pages long story much more enjoyable and thought provoking than the whole Sunshine movie - and in the end it also doesn't turn into a cheap horror movie with rotating scalpels (??) and other sickening stuff.

This a picture of the packaging of a Manhattan USB-to-parallel port adapter...

...and this is from their website:

At least they acknowledge that the information on the packaging is incorrect.

A couple of people pointed me to this "amusing" web page about Mac users. Now while I usually ignore individuals using language like this, I am guilty of answering "it just works" when people ask me why I use an Apple laptop. So I feel like I ought to explain this a bit.

My Powerbook certainly doesn't always "just work". As any other software I know Mac OS X has its share of bugs and I can even say that when something does go wrong, OS X is the worst of all operating systems at giving you a clue about what went wrong (to give a recent example I encountered: Connection error: -5. See also my previous post about iPod problems). In that case your only hope of finding out the cause of the problem is a Google search turning up some insider information that was leaked by an Apple developer.

However from my experience if any system deserves the label "it just works" it is definitely a Mac. To give some examples why I think so:

• My mobile phone connected via Bluetooth to my Powerbook and synchronized contacts, shared GPRS connection and sent SMSes without needing one bit of tweaking configuration or installing drivers. On a windows computer a similar trick involves spending several hours installing gigabytes of software, setting up network connections, "My Bluetooth places" and I don't know what else, including reinstalling everything once every three months because the installation mysteriously broke.
• I have connected and printed to numerous printers from HP to Xerox again without installing drivers or configuring anything. A lot of times it was far easier to connect a printer to my laptop to print something than to convert a document to a format that can be read by some other computer that was already connected to a printer.
• OS X is the only operating system with a usable sleep mode I saw. You close the lid, and the computer goes to sleep. You open the lid, computer is ready almost instantly. Compare this to you usual (Windows-running) laptop for example where a) suspend-to-disk takes longer to restore than a fresh boot (I can quote a number of examples of this, mostly from Compaq/HP) or b) suspend-to-RAM drains the battery in a couple of days. I have also not yet seen it crash when you connect or disconnect some device while it is in sleep.
• Installation of native OS X applications doesn't require clicking through wizards or similar nonsense. If you no longer need an application just drag it to the trash can and its gone. Of course this one-file-per-application principle has its (not-so-short) list technical problems, but so far I haven't come across a single one. Majority of apps will work correctly 10 seconds after you drag them to the Applications folder. A lot of free software will also work without problems.
• Another thing about software installation is that (again, from my perspective) I needed so little extra applications beyond what OS X provided by default. My Powerbook was useful from the moment I unpacked it from the box. I'm perfectly happy with the built-in address book, mail reader, web browser, calendar and music player. With vanilla OS X I access files on Windows shares, NFS exports, SSH servers, etc. and I can give others access to my files via a Windows share or a HTTP server.

Again, I don't want to give the impression that I'm making a commercial for Macs. In most cases I prefer to use free software. For example all my desktop computers have Debian GNU/Linux installed. Debian usually requires me to spend more time to set up a specific feature (for example a new piece of hardware, a new network configuration, etc.) but the flexibility provided by free software far outweighs this problem. Desktop computers also don't move much and their software and hardware configuration is quite stable and time I spend on maintaining them is minimal. On the other hand, when I'm traveling I usually don't have time to tinker with some configuration until the feature I need at that moment works correctly. I just want my laptop to be always ready.

Microsoft's web page that promotes Slovenian version of Vista says that it requires Internet Explorer or Firefox to display "advanced dynamic graphic content". They even link to getfirefox.com!

On the other hand they seem to ignore Mac users, since the site misidentifies Safari as Netscape 5.

Perhaps they meant Microsoft Firefox?

Today I saw this advertisement for Microsoft in the newspaper:

It says that the high school I used to attend switched completely from a "heterogeneous system" that used Linux and OpenOffice to a "rich and stable environment" of Windows Vista.

That's sad. When I left that school five years ago things looked like they were slowly moving away from a Microsoft monoculture (at that time that meant Windows95 and friends). School's mail and web servers were already running on some flavor of Unix and publicly accessible computers in the library had Red Hat installed on them. In fact I had my first experience with Free software while attending that school.

Thanks to everybody who sent me advice on how to solve the flipped-character problem. I was pleasantly surprised at how many of you are following my Galaksija project - especially people from outside former Yugoslavia.

It turned out that flipped characters were the least of my problems. I figured out the cause after some 15 minutes and I only had to reprogram the character generator EPROM with the bit order reversed.

Poor video quality, power supply overheating and audio interface insensitivity were a bit harder to solve. I'll post some details (and hopefully a screencast) tomorrow.

Because I feel like ranting today, here's a list of technical things that have recently been bothering me:

• Noisy operational amplifiers and the faculty not teaching us enough about how to deal with (or even accurately calculate) amplifier noise in real-life cases.
• An analog electronic circuit (involving said opamps) which works on the protoboard and for which I'm not able to show analytically why it works (anyone who knows his or her way around trigonometric functions and Fourier analysis wants to help? It all boils down to a simple looking mathematical problem I don't know how to solve)
• iTunes suddenly forcing me to delete 1/4 of my music collection because there is not enough space on my ipod even though this same collection was stored on this same ipod for a year or so with 100 MB to spare.
• Ugly Iceweasel thing replacing Firefox in Debian Testing. Suddenly I have three icons in my applications menu that all look like a green blob - one for a mail client, one for a web browser and one for some kind of a profile manager I never bothered to start. Now that kills usability.
• Having to fix a mail loop on Friday evening at half-past midnight to prevent millions of email messages from being automatically sent across the net by stupid software that was chasing its own tail.

Somebody obviously did the hard work of porting Tablix and G-Tablix to Windows Vista instead of Boštjan and me :)

This is from nixbit.com, one of the hundreds of "free software directories" that popped up recently on the net and that are disgustingly full of adds. The funny thing is that the download link doesn't even point to the Windows port of Tablix...

This is printed circuit board for Galaksija's motherboard. I've made it this weekend out of a Bungard presensitized board (the black areas on the photo below are parts where I tried to fix damaged photoresist with a marker).

Unfortunately this material had different properties than the board I used for the keyboard. I should have figured out something was wrong when I saw that the photoresist was brown, not purple and smelled differently.

It seems that 4 minutes exposure under my 500W halogen lamp wasn't enough and after developing there was still some photoresist on the exposed parts of the board. I tried to compensate for this by leaving the board in the etching solution for some more time.

The results aren't encouraging. While the quality of the exposure (sharpness of lines and alignment of solder and component masks) is pretty good there are a lot of holes in the copper that shouldn't be there. It looks like the photoresist got scratched.

This pretty much makes this board useless. I can't make a prototype with a PCB for which I can't be reasonably sure that it is flawless.

I guess it's time for plan B.

Note: I was writing this in very early morning on 30 December.

I'm currently on train to Munchen. Unfortunately I haven't been able to stay in Berlin for the whole duration of the Congress (this year it's also one day longer - the closing talk will be later today). So far I've mostly posted photographs and didn't write much about my general impressions of 23C3. Now I have several hours to waste on the train and I intend correct that.

Comparing with 21C3 I can say that there were fewer really interesting talks. From the titles and abstracts in the Fahrplan I must say that I expected more. However this may be just because 21C3 was my first visit of such an event and I was mostly amazed at everything I saw then. Anyway, here are some of the most interesting talks I've attended:

Detecting temperature through clock skew by Tobias Gruetzmach was a quite impressive demonstration of how the minute effect of the temperature on the resonant frequency of quartz oscillators can be exploited to track machines on the internet, detect honeypots and even communicate between machines in a rack (defeating the so-called air-gap security).

In the talk How to build a complete FPGA-based DVB-T transmitter Tobias Gruetzmach and Thomas Kleffel also presented a DVB-T (terrestrial digital video broadcasting) system they designed. It was a very interesting introduction into how DVB works and they also showed how relatively simple transmitting equipment can be made for much less money than the cost of professional equipment.

I've already mentioned the Sputnik project in one of my previous posts.

In Console Hacking 2006 Thomas Kleffel presented the state of the art in game console hacking. It's an interesting topic because consoles like XBox are systems that are designed specifically to prevent any tampering and employ a number of intriguing hardware features to achieve that. The talk unfortunately left an impression that the manufacturers are beginning to get more successful - none of the last generation of consoles can currently be modified in a convenient way to run home-brew code.

Finally, Functional body modification by Quinn Norton also deserves to be mentioned. Although not exactly my field of interest, it was impressive to listen about her first-hand experience with a magnet implanted in a tip of one of her fingers. Although I'm a bit skeptical whether this will become a normal thing for people working with electronic circuits in the near future I can certainly agree that it would be quite useful if you could sense electromagnetic fields with your bare hands.

Some notes on the hardware I saw around the conference: two years ago I was surprised at how many people had Apple laptops. This year I believe other brands of (x86) laptops were again more common, however I would estimate that approximately one quarter were still Macs. On the other hand I was surprised at how often I saw Nokias 770. Obviously all that excitement of Gnome developers over this little Linux-running computer had some results.

The theme of the Conference was Who can you trust? remember? Well, at least one participant had some advice to share on that topic. He had the following text written on the back of his T-shirt: Who can you trust? Trust us!