njr 3.0

Thanks to my always-useful referer listing, I found out about Brian Jepson's Radio Weblog and the book he recently cowrote for O'Reilly, Mac OS X for Unix Geeks. It appears to collect some of the technical, power user-focused documentation that has been largely the realm of folklore, mailing lists and Web sites such as macosxhints.com. I haven't seen the book mentioned elsewhere, but on the basis of the sample Directory Services chapter, I'll be picking up a copy.

If you're still opening Acrobat Reader or Preview.app to view PDFs in OS X, the new PDF Browser Plugin should be your next download. It's tiny (46K), because it just uses OS X's native PDF rendering. It exhibits a few visual anomalies, but appears to be stable and

3:52 PM | Radio
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I don't understand how I missed this Kuro5hin article on pecan pancakes. Read the comments for full effect.

11:38 AM | Radio
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Slava Karpenko discusses the failings of the kludgy OS X Mach-O ABI. I wonder if the move to OS X on 64-bit PowerPC will permit Apple to fix the ABI brokenness reasonably seamlessly?

11:03 AM | Radio
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Daniel Berlinger released Archipelago 2.0 today. So far, so good. It connected immediately to Radio running on the local machine, and it's extremely responsive compared to Radio's Web interface. So nice to write in a real desktop app instead of a text field inside a Web browser. I'll definitely be doing my writing in Archipelago from now on—unless something better comes along.

On OS X there are a large number of cosmetic anomalies, but the functionality works, and that's a good thing. Archipelago doesn't let you create a post with an empty title, and if your weblog doesn't use titles like mine does, that's a bad thing. If I try to remove the title, I end up with a period at the beginning of the post. Boo.

Is there no way from the MetaWeblog or Radio APIs to get a list of posts? I went through a lot of trial and error to figure out that my last weblog post was number 529.

9:00 PM | Radio
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The PowerPC 970 is happening, due in Macs by this time next year. After seeing the initial announcement, Tuesday I spent some time going through IBM's history of making RISC chips from 1990 onwards. Until the two lines were integrated with the POWER4, the high-end chips were split along lines of commercial (AS/400 or iSeries, some RS/6000 or pSeries) versus technical (RS6K/pSeries) workloads.

I've posted this a couple of other places, sorry if you've seen it before. To complete the timeline of IBM RISC chips:

1990 – POWER (32-bit POWER, multichip)

1992 – POWER (32-bit POWER)

1993 – PowerPC 601, 602? (modified 32-bit PowerPC)

1994-5? – A30/Muskie (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit PowerPC, multichip)

1994 – A10/Cobra (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit PowerPC)

1995 – POWER2 (32-bit POWER, multichip)

1995 – PowerPC 603, 604 (32-bit PowerPC)

1996 – PowerPC 603e/604e (32-bit PowerPC)

1996 – POWER2 SC (32-bit POWER)

1997 – RS64 (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)

1998 – PowerPC 750 (32-bit PowerPC)

1998 – RS64-II (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)

1999 – POWER3 (64-bit POWER, 32-bit POWER, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)

1999 – RS64-III (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)

2000 – POWER3-II (64-bit POWER, 32-bit POWER, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)

2000 – RS64-IV (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)

2001 – POWER4 (64-bit Amazon, 64-bit POWER, 32-bit POWER, 64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC)

2002 – POWER4-II [expected]

2003 – PowerPC 970 (64-bit PowerPC, 32-bit PowerPC, AltiVec)

Wes pointed to an interesting article about the PowerPC's use in AS/400 and iSeries machines. There's some good history (more AIX-centric) here, and some more on the early AS/400 RISC processors here.

8:37 PM | Radio
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