Lillesvin Networks

At a recent press event Apple presented a lot of “new” stuff, and as usual Steve Jobs gave the presentation. As I was looking through Engadget’s liveblog from the event, I stumbled upon a quote that pretty much sums up why I’m looking into getting a non-Apple computer the next time around.

Steve Jobs: “Home sharing: we‘re going to let you copy songs, TV shows, etc. with up to 5 computers in your house.” (Emphasis mine.)

Well, thanks a lot. Are you really going to let me do that? Gee, Steve! I don’t know what to say. I can play my DVDs on pretty much any device with a DVD drive without being limited to 5. I can even let friends borrow them without being worried that I won’t be able to see them myself when I buy a new DVD player because it would just happen to be the 6th device to play back that particular DVD. And don’t get me started on my vinyl collection.^[1]

I’m not sure I want an OS riddled with antifeatures, where I’m at the mercy of what Steve Jobs and Co. will let me do with my data.

^[1]: Irony would have it that in this recent press event, Apple announced the iTunes LP, which is basically nothing like a vinyl, but more like the many failed attempts at releasing extra material in a data track on a regular CD album. So get ready for craploads of cheesy DVD-like animated menus and metric tonnes of completely useless and indifferent bonus material.

Yup — it’s here, I’m sure. Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 now supports ODF out of the box and has the option of using ODF as the default format. And just to add to that hell-freezes-over feeling, Office 2007 SP2 finally has a “Save as PDF” option. (Slashdot article with further links.)

So in this post-apocalyptic wasteland of a world it is now possible to actually use OpenOffice.org and send your ODF document to a Word user and expect them to be able to open it! While this is somewhat unexpected coming from Microsoft, it’s really a huge benefit to all word processor users of the world and a nice move from the people in Redmond. Of course, they’re not just doing it to be nice — there are certainly financial aspects to it — but still it shows that they are “getting it” even though it’s taken them some time.

Now, let’s sit back and watch how long it takes for Apple to implement native ODF support in Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc. My guess is that it’ll be a while. Actually, I’m getting more and more tired of being held hostage by Apple’s ideas of what I want — and am allowed — to use my computer/OS for, while Microsoft seems to be heading in a more sensible and  Open direction. Of course, first and foremost I’m a Linux-user, but with Windows 7 getting rave reviews and these nice additions in Office 2007 SP2 (not that I do, or ever will, use Microsoft Office or any other office suite for that matter) I might just give Microsoft another chance after ditching Windows back in 2001. Kudos to the Redmond crew for going with what the users want instead of what they want the users to have.

During my recent contact with an English company, I’ve had to use the pound sign (£) a lot, which has uncovered a bug in Firefox 3 — at least I think it is… Using the danish keyboard layout the pound sign has to be made by pressing alt-4, but doing so in Firefox 3 will just result in switching to tab no. 4 if a such exists. If not, the shortcut will merely do nothing. Either way, no pound sign for me.

Effectively this means that all combinations from alt-1 – alt-9 are useless, which means that the following characters can’t be written in Firefox 3 on OS X with a danish keyboard layout: ¡, “, §, £, ∞, ™, ¶, [ and ]. I find it especially troublesome that the hard brackets doesn’t work, since they’re extensibly used in BBTags, as replacements for < and > when writing HTML examples in a place that doesn’t handle < and > well, it’s used as scope delimiter in Functional Grammar notation and in a ton of other places.

I’ve scoured the web for a solution (as well as about:config) but to no avail.

For my birthday, my dad got me a USB MIDI keyboard, which is awesome — especially if I want to use it with GarageBand, because MIDI on the Mac is soooo easy. One thing, though, is that I’d actually rather use it with LMMS and MuSe on my Ubuntu installation, but that seems to be rather difficult. It actually works fine with LMMS, but alas, LMMS does not seem to support SoundFonts and neither can I make (and play) an entire drum kit at once. I have to record each different sound individually — i.e. I have to record the tracks separatly, which is a pain, in my opinion.

So, MuSe and MIDI… It may just be me, but it seems I’ve tried every possible combination of settings and soft-synths, but still no cigar. I know that the keyboard is recognized, because — as I said — I can use it with LMMS, but MuSe just seems to make using MIDI really, really complicated, which is too bad. If anyone knows of any up-to-date documentation on the subject, please let me know, because what I’ve been digging up on google is ancient.

Anyways, I hope I don’t get too carried away with MIDI and totally lose the ability to keep it simple — don’t hesitate to let me know, if that happens. For now you’ll have to settle with my old tracks, until I’ve figured out how to work MIDI on Linux — or at least until I figure out how to make GarageBand obey my every command (hehe, yeah right… Like Apple would let me do that.) Alternatively, if Ardour make that native OS X port available soon and it has (some) MIDI editing capabilities, I might actually use that, because it absolutely rocks my boat.

Finally, if you have any tips or tricks (anything!) regarding MIDI on either Linux or OS X, please comment away (or email me). It’ll be greatly appreciated!

First of all when I boot, I get an message telling me that “No Updatable Devices Found”. I guess it happened after a system update, where the firmware for the device was to be updated, accurding to the Software Update program. I don’t use the drive that often, and I wouldn’t know if it did update it or not anyway. But this almost meaning less message annoys me, since it kind of shouts to my facethat the Playmoile OS doesn’t work as “Boom” as it says in the glitter adds.

While the first problem properly is a minor issue easy to solve, did I know how. This one is really odd. It concerns Firefox (Ff) and the OS X window manager, and is here parted in two issues. First; the Ff window reaches into top menu bar area. Either on top or underneath. In the picture it’s underneath. It was dragged into that area, but afterwards I can’t drag or click the bits of the Ff window that is in the menu bar area. Say it was on top and in a similar position as in this picture, then clicking the green radio-button to max the Ff window would instead unfold the Edit menu.

The other odd part is that Ff occupies the dashboard area. So when I enter the dashboard, it’s like Ff didn’t care and stay on top. Both of these two odd issues don’t happen all the time, I have to add, which makes it even more odd.