All this time of owning cons.org.nz and none was able to think of pros and cons. Today someone finally did, and the results of a quick hack are somewhat amusing. Anyone can make new topics (just change the url) and anyone can add to them. Hopefully I can add some more features to it later.
A huge thanks to fibonacci for coming up with it.
It all started so innocently, there was a domain i wanted to register as it had been discarded. It turns out some registrar picked it up with dubious intent. I’ll see if they bother to register it again next year. That’s beside the point.
I was ready to buy a name so I checked what was out there. I liked the idea of something short and quickly found n.gen.nz, but that wasn’t the end of it. After using it as a bookmark system another learned of it, shocked by the abundance of single letter domain names he poked around and gathered a list.
Then to the interface meeting. Many domains were registered, including h.ac.nz, m.ac.nz and t.ac.nz.
Names like blu.t.ac.nz, tic.t.ac.nz and rocket.n.gen.nz come to mind. Creative suggestions welcome.
There has been a brilliant show of lightning recently, enough to make me panic and switch off everything not on a surge protector. Everything has been converted over now but it was a somewhat nice feeling having a backup server in another country to take care of essential services while moving things around.
My laptop was failing. Badly. It had a very sensitive screen what would only work if you hit it just the right way. The battery was used, not wasted, just used. Physically it was very large and appeared to have had a hard life. Alas with the screen as it was i couldn’t rely on it if I needed it. It was time for a new laptop.
I looked at what I wanted in a laptop. I concluded it must not run windows, be portable, have wifi built in and have decent powersaving and/or battery life. Where does this leave me? The 12″ iBook G4. It reads just like that description.
I accept I won’t be able to run Linux on it and have wireless networking but Mac OS X, being based on BSD, is very Unix-like. There’s both a debian and gentoo based package manager for it, as well as a provided set of developer utilities and even an X11 server.
Running Mac OS X surely is an experience. You cannot talk about Mac OS X without mentioning how it looks. So I’ll simply say it looks good. Applications are typically distributed in a self contained directory. (Which reminds me of rox). Applications appear to store data in ~/Library. I’m running with all the normal (free and cross platform) tools I’d use for doing my assignments. bash, subversion, emacs, latex, xdvi, xfig and so on. The dock (as I believe it is called) does do a decent job of task switching and launching. The keyboard controls are at some level based on readline/emacs and the general windowing controls are much like I was getting used to with firefox. Just walking out of Linux and into Mac OS X is quite a comfortable step even if the ctrl key is in the wrong place.
Hardware support is decent. I plugged in a fairly generic USB BlueTooth adapter and it automagically set it all up for me. Plugging in a digital camera had roughly the same effect. My GPS is supported by the USB serial bridge manufacturer. I haven’t yet tried the irda adapter but I’m not hopeful. A neat feature is iScroll2, an addon that lets you scroll in 2D just by using two fingers on the trackpad.
So far it has been much what I expected. I’m happy with what I have and will enjoy using it even more so when I’m back to studying after these holidays. While transcoding a dvd I was told iBooks do have fans, however I’m not sure I’d call myself a full blooded fan just yet.
Due to preformance issues, the earlier NetBSD server has been dropped and replaced with Gentoo/Linux. All web applications running on this server seem to be much more responsive. It’s unfortunate that NetBSD/Xen and Xen in general aren’t a bit more polished.
In other news the iBook is seeming more and more interesting, given it appears to meet my needs nearly exactly. Portability, not Windows and battery life. Through my experiences with swsusp and from what I have read, I’m not overly trusting of Linux ACPI support. The lack of cardbus, ir and bluetooth would make it somewhat difficult to use GPRS. However with a bluetooth phone or an usb irda adaptor there would not be much trouble in the long term.