Zoetrope

It's sad to see Apple using double-standards for the App Store and iTunes store: they banned the Murderdrome digital-comic application while in iTunes they just tag content as explicit. I hope they'll wise-up and start some kind of rating system to solve this.

I'm curious to see how digital-comics will evolve in devices like the iPhone since we're not there yet

Here's how to get your Focusrite LiquidMix running again if you're on a Mac OS X Tiger install that was upgraded to Leopard:

Create textfile /private/etc/sysctl.conf and reboot:

kern.sysv.shmmax=536870912
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=128
kern.sysv.shmseg=128
kern.sysv.shmall=131072

My Focusrite would only work on a virgin Leopard install, now it works without a problem on my Tiger→Leopard upgrades too. Courtesy of a very quick support email to Focusrite.

Maybe I'll be doing some twittering about my trip to the USA, so I've added my twitter updates in my sidebar or you can just follow the whole thing at https://twitter.com/nickyp

a.k.a. 'cheating a little using a nice .ssh/config file' :

http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/11/27/advanced-ssh-configuration-and-tunneling-we-dont-need-no-stinking-vpn-software/

The coolest new feature on the block I think: http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/11/07/i-am-fedora-and-so-can-you/.

And with the Fedora Spins feature you can create you own custom Fedora to suit your needs. They've got a Gnome/KDE desktop oriented spin, a spin especially built for developers etc.

If you're feisty and want to upgrade your Fedora 7 using yum, check out http://www.ioncannon.net/system-administration/133/upgrading-from-fedora-7-to-fedora-8-with-yum/.

a.k.a. Told you so nr. 2: the Mac Pro performs just as it looks on paper, amazing

I completely agree, having a Mac Pro on your desk is a really good feeling. The thing handles everything I throw at it and then some. I almost always feels much snappier than my MacBook Pro, which is no slouch either compared to the Powerbooks that came before it.

A pitty almost all my audio equipment is flaky on the new Intel architecture. My Focusrite Saffire Pro has some issues, and my Line6 equipment (podXT, podXT Pro) is unusable because it will start to stutter after my Mac Pro returns from sleep.

Don't forget to order a nice Cinema Display to go with it, those Dell displays make your tower look ugly ;-)

Comic Sans was NOT designed as a typeface from the designer. Enough said.

To accompany a pristine Mac Pro tower I purchased the Iomega UltraMax 640Gb USB/FW400/FW800 external harddrive.

This drive features two disks in RAID 0 and should quench the thurst for IO Logic Pro has when recording 10 tracks at once.

It looks nice, but unfortunately it's not really quiet. I can hear it purring over the fans of the Mac Pro, and sometimes it gets stuck in a 'too-hot, fans on, temp okay, fans off, too-hot, fans on' cycle. Luckily this thing is only for recording and transporting Logic sessions between the 'soundlab' and my desk-top.

Check out the TechcastNetwork review with nice pictures or the MacUser review.

Read more for some benchmarks (using QuickBench 2.1) compared to the internal drive and another FW800 enclosure.

There's a nice discussion going on about the future for using hardware RAID controllers to build your server infrastructure in the blogosphere.

I'm a bit divided on the issue currently. I'd like to see the whole RAID concept flourish in a software capacity so you don't need to buy and maintain special hardware just to get your data safe when disks fail. I like the idea that in the future the actual hardware doesn't matter. It's certainly looking that way with the uprise of all things virtualized - but even that is currently very SAN/NAS dependent for larger, fully redundant set-ups.

On the other hand I like not having to worry while performing a 30-second disk hot-swap in a time of crisis. I guess the hot-swap issue will continue to be an issue even if hardware RAID *is* dying.

To be continued?

If you can spare the time (56 minutes) view this nice screencast by James Ward on Flash, Flex and Apollo he gave at Google.

He talks about the new Tamarin virtual machine for ECMAScript4 and its upcoming integration in Mozilla Firefox, the webkit integration into Apollo and showcases some of proof-of-concept Flex and Apollo applications.

Discovered this nice quota dialog in Mail.app:

Just right-click and select Get Info on an IMAP mailbox

A post by livinginfirstlife titled Paul Graham and Y Combinator - True Lies and Damn Lies really cracks down on Paul Graham and YCombinator. It offers commentary on the recent Newsweek article Meet the Next Billionaires about YCombinator.

Opinionated on the amount of funding Ycombinator provides (only avg. 20.000$ for a 2 man corp.), the startup lifestyle they promote (a.k.a. sleep under your kitchen table and don't spend anything) among other things, the post smells quite sour to me.

I think it's always good to be critical - especially when something is hyped a lot - and I agree that requiring that a YCombinator applicatant decides within 5 minutes if he accepts their funding or not seems a bit despotic.

But I still think that the YCombinator approach for funding these companies is a good thing. Just consider this: how many people (especially between 20 and 30) do you know who are working fulltime on their own idea's or companies? I think the main problem in doing so if you're already consuming a monthly income is that income. Someone giving you a couple of months worth of income for you to pursue your idea fulltime is a good thing.

Sure, Ycombinator could fork over more cash so the applicants should not need to live on each others couches, but I think they like to see their 'flock' give it their all. A 9 to 5 mentality isn't going to cut it when only execution matters in this 'Web 2.0' culture.

Which brings me to the title my own post: Just Do It. YCombinator enables a lot of people to build it, live it and actually produce something. Even if the revenue model stinks or you're eating only pizza's (which I'm doing anyway) ; you're doing it, and learning a lot in the progress. And that's something a lot of us can't even pretend to be doing. Idea's are plentifull, well executed idea's - not so much.

I've only learned stuff by actually doing it, wether it was building a web application in Lisp or Rails or setting up networks and servers to host them. If you don't quit procrastinating and do it and pursue things with all you've got, you're not going to learn something, let alone accomplish anything.

And that's something that's true to a lot of things in life, including starting up a company. So kudos to YCombinator and their flock for just doing it!