Tiger review like you've never seen
Nobody reviews like Ars Technica. They've just posted an in-depth Tiger review here - just to give you an idea of how thorough this is, the pdf version is 106 pages! 
Upgrade to Tiger, PHP and MySQL broken
I quickly noticed after upgrading to OS X 10.4 that PHP includes were not executing and MySQL queries were once again producing the dreaded 'cannot connect' error message which 10.3.9 had introduced:
Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2)
Fixing the broken PHP was easy. I simply installed Mark Liyange's PHP 5.0.4 package. Tiger ships with 4.3.10.For the MySQL error, for reasons I have not yet looked into the previous solution (repairing the ownership of the
/usr/local/mysql/data folder) did not fix the problem. And trying to load mysqld in the Terminal showed that it not have permission to access the /usr/local/mysql/data folder. Since changing its ownership to the 'mysql' user did not help, I tried changing to it my user account instead (in my case the command was sudo chown -R thoughton data/.) Bingo, that did the trick! Everything works again. :) A word of caution, this is just a quick fix while learning the ins and outs of Tiger, I wouldn't be surprised if doing this has opened up some huge security hole - so do it at your own risk and always keep a backup.
Mac Mini essential extra
MicroNet have announced a particularly drool-worthy Mac Mini accessory, essentially an extra hard drive and a port replicator in a Mini-like case. The device comes in flavours ranging from a US$149 80Gb model to a US$499 400Gb model, with the US$249 250GB model having the best gigabyte-to-dollar ratio.
1 gigabit internet, but I no longer live there
Wouldn't you know it. Just when I'm feeling quite pleased about upgrading to a 2 megabit connection, a company in my home town named Hong Kong Broadband Network has announced a 1 gigabit connection. Essentially they are installing gigabit ethernet in apartment blocks, so it's currently only about a third of the total households in Hong Kong. Discussion on Slashdot here, and although some of it is pure ignorance Slashdot reader xstein astutely noted that the 1 gigabit speed only applies to local traffic within Hong Kong, overseas bandwidth is capped at 20 megabit (warning: Chinese language page, plus humongous flash advert).
MySQL broken by 10.3.9?
I noticed today that my MySQL install seemed to have broken. I was getting an error when I tried to post a new entry via Ecto, and after poking around a bit I discovered that any query involving the mysql database (such as a site search) produced the same error:
Further investigation seemed to indicate this was a permissions problem. The only thing I've installed recently has been the OS X 10.3.9 update, so I'm guessing it happened then. After much googling I found the fix.
Change directory to your mysql directory:
And enter this change ownership command:
And voila! Everything works again.
P800 as a photo viewer
What a coincidence! I've had this entry on the back burner for a few days, when this hint appeared today at MacOSXHints, describing how to view your iPhoto albums on your internet-enabled mobile phone. Essentially the hint is having iPhoto generate a web page which you then view on your mobile phone. Not what I've been doing, but the end result is similar.
P800 as an iPod photo?
Rather than try to view my iPhoto albums online I've loaded several albums onto my P800 phone. Since the whole point is to view them on the phone, we can dramatically reduce the size of the image. I've found that reducing them to the size of my phone screen (320x208 ) and saving them as JPEG quality 20 results in perfectly acceptable photos for casual phone viewing (see the example at the end of this entry). And the file size drops from 1MB+ down to 15-25K! Taking 20K to be the average, that's over 6000 photos on a 128MB memory card. My entire photo library is only around 2500 photos so I could carry the whole thing around with me and still only take up 50MB of my 128MB card. I've actually chosen to carry around an album of around 200 of my best photos which only takes up 4MB.
The Mechanics
I've been using Adobe's ImageReady to resize and save my photos. ImageReady comes with a ready-made droplet (Constrain, Make JPEG 30) which only needs minor adjustment to do what I want. I just changed the Constrain to 320 pixels in each dimension and changed the Make JPEG to quality 20 instead of 30. Batch processing my 200 photos took about 10 minutes. If you don't already have ImageReady the well-regarded shareware application GraphicConverter can do all this as well.
Once you have your mini images you just need to transfer them over to the phone. You can bluetooth them all (although saving each one to the correct location is a pain), or do what I did and use a USB memory card reader to copy them all in one fell swoop. (I can't recommend these readers enough, especially since they can be had for as little as £9).
The final ingredient is an image viewer on your phone. The P800 comes with an image viewer (creatively titled Pictures), but it is a pile of crap pretty mediocre (it used to be a pile of crap that couldn't even display full screen images, but that got fixed in a firmware update). The interface is the main drawback, it requires several steps to display full screen images and cannot rotate images (which means you should rotate landscape photos prior to resizing). If that annoys you like it did me, I'd suggest using Resco Photo Viewer for UIQ, a more full-featured replacement. For non P800 users, Resco make this software for virtually every mobile platform there is.
And that's it! My P800 is now a fun little photo viewer I can bore friends and family with!
Comment
What are the pros and cons of each method?
Firstly it should be mentioned that contrary to first impressions, the MacOSXHints method doesn't provide 'live' updating of the photos, so new changes to the iPhoto album will only be available to the phone user when someone sitting at the Mac re-exports the album. That's still better than no updating at all, which is what happens with my method :)
Secondly the MacOSXHints method will give you the ability to scroll around a large version of the photo (provided your phone browser supports side scrolling) while my method only shows the photo at my phone's screen resolution. Luckily for me my phone has a large screen - the image to the right is a photo resized to fit my phone shown at actual size (the photo is a 320x220 JPEG quality 20, and is 12KB in size). Meet Pilipus from the island of Siberut :D
Tiger benchmarks
There's plenty of news out there about the forthcoming Tiger release on 29th April 2005 so I wasn't planning on mentioning it here, but the French site MacTouch has an article comparing Jaguar and Tiger (English Google translation here) with a particularly interesting graph of speed benchmarks for both systems running on a variety of Macs.
Mail.app inline image annoyance
I've noticed for a while that Mail.app seems to insist on displaying image attachments inline. This is fine for small web-optimised images, but becomes intensely annoying when you are trying to read several emails in succession, all of which have one or more large (1MB+) image attachments, because Mail takes several seconds to open each email due to the huge image that it insists on displaying inline.
I had always intended to figure out a solution, but today when I actually sat down and looked for one, I had nasty surprise. There is no solution. Apple really needs to sort this out, it's enough to make me consider ditching Mail.app.
That's Not a Picture, it's a work of art!
Utterly useless, but great fun! Even the webpage is amusing! 
Reading the comments on VersionTracker and MacUpdate is also entertaining.
Googlemaps - one more time
I first saw this in an excellent Creative Bits post yesterday and have since been playing with it. It is truly jaw-dropping! Here's one I whipped up myself. The service isn't quite perfect, for one thing it's very hard to bring up information bubbles for buildings you recognise, and the search function itself is pretty flakey. Also after 20 minutes of fooling around with it caused Safari to start behaving strangely (clicking in the search box wouldn't make a cursor appear). But considering the satellite firm Keyhole was only acquired by Google in October, it's still pretty impressive!
Update: this site uses a similar technique, but on a 2.5 gigapixel landscape photo instead of satellite imagery.
Heinlein estate - evil moneygrubbers or benevolent patrons?
I read this Boing Boing article today with mixed feelings. On the one hand I have been a huge fan of late Robert Heinlein for over 20 years and have read and enjoyed every one of his books. On the other hand I think since his wife Virginia died there have been some questionable decisions motived by nothing more than a quick buck. Anyone who's seen Starship Troopers 2 will attest to that! 
Back to the point - it appears that a relatively small publisher (their biggest names appear to be George R R Martin and Janny Wurts) is printing a 46 title collection of Heinlein's work entitled "The Virginia Collection". The price for this gem? A mere US$2,500. :shock: With a limited print run of 5000 we're looking at gross sales of US$12,500,000.
So ... is someone making money hand over fist here? Or is there something else going on? The obvious question is "where is the money going?" It appears to be (and I fervently hope it is) funding The Heinlein Prize - a trust fund that is dedicated to advancing "commercial space activity" (in light of Heinlein's sympathies this likely means 'non-governmental space activity' rather than 'for-profit space activity'). The trust has announced a US$500,000 prize to the first winner, but somewhat suspiciously there are as yet no nominees. Have the trustees not heard of SpaceShipOne's success in the X-Prize?
I will accordingly reserve judgment until they do actually hand out some money, although it does look authentic - there is even a Russian version of the site which makes sense if you have read any of Heinlein's non-fiction.
2 megabit
Despite the fact that it took British Telecom 3 weeks instead of 1 to reconnect me, and despite the fact that they are giving out speed upgrades to everyone (so no matter what they say it isn't really 'compensation'), I'm still smilin' 
Pausing DVD2OneX
I recently discovered, quite by accident, that DVD2OneX will pause its processing if you put the Mac to sleep! This may be old news to some people, but until these last few weeks I had virtually never put my laptop to sleep before, so discovering this was a real bonus. I've been wishing the program had this ability every since I started using it! That said, the ability to pause processing without sleeping (so the user can do something else in another CPU intensive program) would still be useful!
Back online, sort of
I'm back on broadband, so this site should usually be accessible again. The usually is because I do not yet have a desk, so the laptop sometimes gets put to sleep and put behind the couch! Until I find a safe place to leave it running overnight I'm afraid this sorry state of affairs will continue...
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