I am sorry for this, but even if it might surprise some people, sometimes there are more important things in life than keeping your blog updated.

Anyways here a quick overview of things that changed or matter before I get bugged at writing again:

• GNOME3 has been released. Congratulations!

• Removed my evolution-status-icon work, there is now evolution-tray which does the job (authors didn’t knew I had this done, too).
• openSUSE 11.4 is released and along with compiz 0.9.4, GNOME 2.32, NVIDIA drivers and subpixel hinting enabled it is just awesomely freaking nice.
• Bought a Vertex-2 64GB SSD to use as a system drive. Superb to speedup a system dramatically.
• Loads of changes on the libimobiledevice front:
  • Released 1.0.6 stable for iOS 4.3+ compatibility. iOS 4.3 has a bug we needed to add a workaround for…
  • libplist fixes a few serious bugs, so be sure to grab the latest 1.4.
  • New idevicedate tool now allows to sync the iDevice time with your computer. Simply run “idevicedate -c” and that’s it.
  • Christoph Fergeau (libgpod maintainer) created the first non-iTunes tool to push contacts on an iDevice using native protocols!
  • “iTunes File Sharing” is now supported. It means that you can add port 3 to the URI (e.g.: afc://<uuid>:3/) in nautilus and with the latest GVFS you get a list of apps supporting file sharing and you can access the documents folders directly. Of course this works with ifuse using the new “–appid” command line argument aswell.
• libimobiledevice 1.2.0 is in the works:
  • New Cython Python bindings are being merged now.
  • idevicebackup4, the backup and restore tool for iOS 4+ is working. Needs some polish though before being merged.
• Wrote a Python plugin for Totem to act as an AirPlay receiver. Just pushed changes to make it work for iOS 4.3+ devices, too.
• Want to view thumbnails of Photoshop PSD files in nautilus and previews in eog, gthumb or whatever else uses “GDK Pixbufs“? I updated the loader written by Jan Dudek as he basically stopped maintaining it and added a proper build system and tagged a 0.1.0 release to get this into distros. I’ll try to package it soon.
• Also changes in my openSUSE repositories:
  • Removed a lot of old cruft and obsolete packages.
  • Added an ideviceinstaller package to my iPhone support repositories.
  • Added openSUSE 11.4 build targets which you should update to as those fix a serious bug connecting to iDevices.
• Successfully compiled and tested the Cherokee Webserver on an Apple TV 2 running PHP. Heck, it’s fast. Plenty of ideas spawn in my head how to make use of this tiny $99 low-energy gem now. I’ll try to write up some howto on this once I got WordPress and other Web 2.0 animals running.

• mod_macro for Apache is very helpful if you are used to a load of copy/paste <VirtualHost/> entries.
• Was mentioned in the German c’t Magazin Issue 2/2011 in an article about libimobiledevice, nice!
• Turned 30. No comment on that.
• Loads of work and business projects right now.

More happened but I simply forgot to mention it now.

In the recent months most sites talking about the development of browser technology, made us look into a series of graphs to beat each other in performance of the browser’s engine.

Now, this performance race which usually left IE far far far far behind the competition, is obviously not as “ignored” by Microsoft as some people expected.

In the latest post we see graphs of somekind of IE9 development build closing up on the SunSpider Javascript test.

The post also features a stunning mention of the Acid3 standards test where that IE9 version passes with a 32/100 score next to announcing CSS support for rounded corners and plans to use DirectX for hardware accelerated website rendering.

While this in itself looks like “some hope”, IE9 still has to play quite a lot of catch-up as latest trends like HTML5 video/audio/canvas tags apparently not have made it into the development builds.

Let the next browser wars finally begin!

At least they keep auctions where people advertise their PSP having “the super duper” M33 firmware installed…

Bah! Well, what’s left for me is a shameless plug to the new auction…

Update 28/05/09: Unbelievable, the new auction which I carefully checked to not contain any freaking reference to anything copyright violating has also been removed… Also no clue why as I only received the typical standard “don’t sell illegal copies/backups” E-Mail. Contacted eBay support, let’s see…

It appears though that I am not alone. There are a couple of people having trouble selling their PSP on eBay. However in contrast to my case where I list the original unmodified 1.50 firmware, they had used rather problematic “wording” like “Pandora Battery” or “Custom Firmware/M33″ and alike.

Reply and solution 28/05/09: Great, I have received a polite and exact explaination from the eBay security team. The problem for eBay really was the installed 1.50 firmware on my PSP which is considered “open/hackable to circumvent technical protections” (like copy protection). They recommend installing the latest PSP firmware before selling first.

They are past ASCII Viagra already, ain’t they?

Some kind of “movement” formed out of this and other sites attempt to do the same or even block IE6 (for reference; Facebook did show a warning about IE6 since quite a while already).

On top of this it looks like finally not only web developers rant about Internet Explorer.

After Apple released a new beta of Safari 4 few days ago with loads of new bling bling, the usual “my Javascript Engine > *” arguments and exclusively stating the browser is “up to 30 times faster than IE7” things have started to get worse for Microsoft and web developer’s “favorite” browser.

Google is joining the EU antitrust case alongside Opera and Mozilla which appears to give Microsoft a major headache and should change what we’ll see coming bundled along the Windows 7 operating system.

In a some kind of of “last minute emergency” in the web development world, Microsoft really targets their new Internet Explorer 8 to comply to web standards (and thus effectively breaking site rendering for users in favor of a better web).

They have even created a blog which covers the development of it’s next generation browser however the comments are heavily moderated and many are removed.

Despite that, one can see a lot of rant in the remaining comments indicating that people are still not happy, even with the new standards compliant IE8…

Hopefully this will turn Microsoft to even try harder. We’ll see how far it goes but the web business would definitely benefit.
Hard times for IE, but hope for web developers…

What do you do though when you download it in Linux and want to look into it?

Yes, you put on your googlz and find that most people refer that you can mount that stuff using the loop device thing.

# mount -t hfsplus -o loop iphone_sdk_final.dmg /mnt
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/loop0,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail  or so

Bah, doesn’t work.

# file iphone_sdk_final.dmg
iphone_sdk_final.dmg: VAX COFF executable not stripped

This appears to be a new kind of “.dmg” format which is probably compressed and in order to access it we have to process it a bit…

Let’s check the web for some nice tools, one is dmg2img a converter to create a general hfsplus image out of this file, the other is xar an archiver which Mac OS X is using a lot to extract further files within the bundles.

I have added those tools to my openSUSE 11 repository which is now split into a generic one and a GNOME specific one. Update your sources!

Unfortunately dmg2img did process and create an img file, however it could not be mounted and seemed corrupted…

Anyone with further advice on this?

Of course I have Macs and am able to open it, but I want to be able to do it in Linux.

In other news today, Firefox 3.1+ is gaining native support for the free and open OGG audio/video format! Could this be the final turnover that the OGG format needs to gain wide user margin? Let’s hope so…

Just a quick note that we are running WordPress 2.6 now. Upgrade was painless as usual and I recommend taking the time (took me around 30 minutes to migrate everything including custom theme/plugins/code etc.)…

It is a brilliant move and what I have been telling regarding Flash’s future since years.

I am pretty sure this is the result of some pushing by avid heads from Adobe’s ActionScript guru department who have had given hints at the need for this step in various blogs and ActionScript sources quite a while ago…

At least now, Adobe might now totally gain world domination for Flash.

Waiting for more moves like this…

150 Apps running on Mac OS X

100 Apps running on Vista

165 Apps running on Linux

… ?

Can there be anything more important than this in life?

By the way, “Die Bank“, which was a full fledged bank for over 100 years, is a pretty nice place with good music for either chilling with the laptop, signing a contract or having some delicious snack with drinks in the heart of Hamburg.

Make sure to check it out if you are around there and take the stairs to the right.

Also had a late business meeting for a new webapp project which I can not talk about here. If done right it will be 2-3 months before Facebook goes down! No, wait, I mean StudiVZ. That german pixel perfect clone of the social giant is enforcing a new commercial-friendly privacy agreement many users don’t like.

Additionally Facebook is soon heading for the one only missing feature before world domination: localization, which will give StudiVZ a hard time. Similar what can be seen with “invest-VC-in-me-coz-I-copy-that-US-site” MyVideo (I won’t even link to those freaks here, sorry!) and their loss/move of the userbase to the recently germanized YouTube. It seems not very likely that two social sites with the same service/application survive in the web 2.0 market.

Anyways, time to fix the promised music thing while we are waiting for Apple to release details about the iPhone/iPod Touch developer SDK. Judging from that blown Macworld Expo drama this Tuesday and charging iPod Touch users $20 for the iPhone apps (Google Maps, Mail, Stocks, Weather, …) means they have not left the best lookout for next month on this topic. Expecting extreme vendor lock-in ala Symbian Signed. Nevertheless below an exclusive video of the new Thinkpad Air, awesome stuff.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHs9AZbumKc[/youtube]