This year’s line up included local acts Dubmarine and Chocolate Strings (both bands always manage to put up a great show). Dan Sultan was particularly animated on stage and a definite favourite with the female punters who enjoyed watching him move as much as they enjoyed listening to him.

Dan Sultan

Chocolate Strings

Comedians Shake-A-Speare, Kevin Kropinyeri and Sean Choolburra made the Dingo Shed rock with laughter, while Mark Sheppard continuously cracked up both young and old in the Black Dramatics venue with his “Chasing The Lollyman”.

It has almost become a tradition now for musicians to jam together on the last night of the festival. They are then joined by both traditional and contemporary dancers and makes for quite a show which is not to be missed.

All in all, another great festival, and I’m already looking forward to being back there next year. A big warm thank you to all who performed, danced and organised the event.

An Apple store employee advised me that he considered there to be little noticeable difference between the two versions. I came to a very different conclusion having compared them side by side in store for nearly an hour.

While the menus probably would have been alright, a lot of text is already hard to read due to small font sizes used on many websites. As I didn’t feel like constantly squinting or getting rather close to the screen to read articles on these websites (interestingly enough, the Apple online store was one of the websites I found really hard to read) I opted for a regular screen instead.

So, if you need the extra real estate, by all means, knock yourself out with a 15″ hi-res screen. Otherwise, think very carefully about getting this. If at all possible try before you buy.

Wanting to make a near complete switch from desktop to laptop for all of my work, I decided to wait for the faster and relatively cheaper machines to come out.

After buying and swapping a new hard drive, my machine now is a 15″ 2.66 Ghz i7/8gb RAM/7200 rpm (16mb cache) beauty that deals with virtualisation just fine while running every other application that I throw at it.

Suppose you have set up a virtual host for a site called sample.dev. This virtual host allows you to use URLs such as http://sample.dev/about-us/our-team.html

Now you want to be able to use that same virtual host in your virtualised environment (=guest environment). You’re just a few simple steps away from making this work for you.

1. Unique Loopback Address

   To make all this a little easier, I prefer to use a different loopback address than the standard 127.0.0.1. My preferred address is: 10.0.0.101. I’ll explain why I use this address later on.

2. Hosts file: Mac

   Ensure your sample.dev site is configured in your local hosts using the 10.0.0.101 address file as follows:

   
10.0.0.101 sample.dev
10.0.0.101 another-site.dev
10.0.0.101 yet-another-site.dev


   We’ll use the local IP address to bridge the guest and host environments. Please note that you can use any local IP address available to you (ie, not yet in use or assigned).

3. Host file: Windows

   Next, we’ll add the same lines to the host file of the guest environment: locate the file (windows/system32/drivers/etc on XP) and duplicate the Mac host file entries:

   
10.0.0.101 sample.dev
10.0.0.101 another-site.dev
10.0.0.101 yet-another-site.dev


4. Applying the Glue

   Now that we have configured the host(s) files on both the guest and host environments all we have left to do is create the actual bridge for these environments. We do this by adding an ifconfig directive to our system by using launchd or rc.local

   • launchd

     Introduced in OS X 10.4, launchd is a flexible way to start/stop/edit processes. To put it to our use, we’d create a plist entry in /Library/LaunchDemons/

     We do this by opening a terminal window and typing:

     sudo touch /Library/LaunchDemons/ifconfig.plist

     Next, open the file we just created in a text editor and add the following:

     <plist version="1.0">
         <dict>
             <key>Label</key>
                 <string>ifconfig</string>
             <key>ProgramArguments</key>
             <array>
                 <string>/sbin/ifconfig</string>
                 <string>lo0</string>
                 <string>alias</string>
                 <string>10.0.0.101</string>
                 <string>netmask</string>
                 <string>255.255.255.0</string>
             </array>
             <key>RunAtLoad</key>
             <true/>
         </dict>
     </plist>
     

     Finally, save and close the file.

   • rc.local

     The rc.local file runs in the background at system start up. While deprecated and essentially replaced in Leopard by the more flexible launchd, it still can be used to launch processes.

     rc.local can be found at /etc/rc.local. If you’re running a more recent system installation, chances are that you’ll have to create this file as OS X has not created this file by default since version 10.4.

     You can create the file by typing the following in your terminal window:

     sudo touch /etc/rc.local

     Now, open the file we just created in a text editor and add the following:

     ifconfig lo0 inet 10.0.0.101 netmask 255.255.255.0 alias

5. Almost done

   You may need to reboot both the hosted and the hosting environment in order to have these changes come into effect.

   Thanks to Rob Sanheim for his tips on the subject.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain, a non profit organisation at Duke Law School, has made available a worthwhile read in the form of a comic. It examines the legal & ethical boundaries of copyright and intellectual property versus public domain, and the impact that these boundaries have on our society. How far should we go in protecting property? When should people be allowed to use material for their creative pursuits?

The public domain is the realm of material—ideas, images, sounds, discoveries, facts, texts—that is unprotected by intellectual property rights and free for all to use or build upon. Our economy, culture and technology depend on a delicate balance between that which is, and is not, protected by exclusive intellectual property rights. Both the incentives provided by intellectual property and the freedom provided by the public domain are crucial to the balance. But most contemporary attention has gone to the realm of the protected.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain

So, if this issue is of concern to you, make sure you check out the comic.

Al Franken may still win his seat in the US senate as Minnesota representative. If he does, will he still be allowed to tell the truth (with jokes) ?

As a comedian, former Saturday Night Live writer and political commentator as well as radio host, Al Franken can already look back on a long and at times controversial career.

• Franken up 225 votes (Star Tribune article)
• Official Al Franken site.
• Al Franken on Wikipedia

He performed in bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and collaborated with many more.

Roach has been one of the most innovative musicians around, always changing his style — one of the things I really liked about him. He was not interested in revisiting covered ground, instead preferring to challenge his artistic abilities.

He was also among the most politically active jazz musicians. For instance, he refused to play in front of a segregated audience. This resulted in him being blacklisted by the American Recording Association for some time during the 1960s.

Among musicians who identified with black consciousness, Roach was most frequently involved in direct action. Together with Charles Mingus — with whom he had set up the short-lived Debut label in 1952 — he organised the Newport Rebels concert, featuring musicians allegedly ignored by the main Newport festival. Roach even interrupted a Miles Davis Carnegie Hall charity performance because he disapproved of the beneficiary. The Village Vanguard club’s owner once pleaded with him to just play music and stop lecturing the audience.

Ronald Atkins, The Guardian

Godspeed, Max — may your legacy engage people for many years to come.

PHP 4 has served the web developer community for seven years now, and served it well. However, it also shows its age. Most of PHP 4′s shortcomings have been addressed by PHP 5, released three years ago, but the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5 has been slow for a number of reasons.

PHP developers cannot leverage PHP 5′s full potential without dropping support for PHP 4, but PHP 4 is still installed on a majority of shared web hosts and users would then be forced to switch to a different application. Web hosts cannot upgrade their servers to PHP 5 without making it impossible for their users to run PHP 4-targeted web apps, and have no incentive to go to the effort of testing and deploying PHP 5 while most web apps are still compatible with PHP 4 and the PHP development team still provides maintenance support for PHP 4. The PHP development team, of course, can’t drop maintenance support for PHP 4 while most web hosts still run PHP 4.

It is a dangerous cycle, and one that needs to be broken. The PHP developer community has decided that it is indeed now time to move forward, together. Therefore, the listed software projects have all agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, any new feature releases will have a minimum version requirement of at least PHP 5.2.0. Furthermore, the listed web hosts have agreed that effective February 5th, 2008, they will include PHP 5.2 (or a more recent version) in their service offer.

It is our belief that this will provide web hosts reason to upgrade and the PHP development team the ability to retire PHP 4 and focus efforts on PHP 5 and the forthcoming PHP 6, all without penalizing any existing project for being “first out of the gate”.

http://gophp5.org/

It seems a timely decision, since PHP 4 will no longer be supported after Dec 31, 2007. As per announcement on the PHP website:

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.
http://www.php.net/archive/2007

After having been an early adopter of Google, as well as one of its loyal subjects, I’m starting to think it is time to look at alternatives. Don’t get me wrong: I think that Google provides a very good service (maybe too good), and I have always thought highly of Google’s creators, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, enjoyed reading “The Google Story” but as stated before: competition is a healty thing.

I shall be looking for viable alternatives, if any still exist these days. Perhaps we should wait for the creator of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, to come up with his implementation of web search…