Thoughts and Ramblings

Well, my old Powerbook failed a few days ago, so I got a new Intel Powerbook (no, I will not use the stupid name). It is nice and fast. I may give a better review later, but for now, the biggest gripe I had so far was the fact that I couldn’t play videos with AC-3 audio anymore. So, I took the A52 Codec and modified its source so that it would work on Intel. While I was at it, I corrected numerous mistakes in the code (some even caused crashes), and made it work with the audio in AVI files. Anyway, if anyone needs it before the developer merges in my fixes, they can find it here.

I have now set up the subversion repository for a project I wish to start. The basics of the project is to get the server side part of iSync working on a server other than Apple’s. If this is completed, I can fully drop my .Mac subscription, and lose nothing that I care about. I guess this should be a lesson on not to over charge for poor services. If you persist in such action, someone will come along and replace you. It may be an inferior product in some respects, but the price is hard to beat in this case (free). So far very little is there: http://trac.cod3r.com/mySync

OK, I was listening to the MacCast and heard a review of iWeb which is part of iLife ‘06. This reminded me that I need to go on .mac rant, as I promised before:

Introduction I have had my .mac account for quite some time now. I had it back when it was free (and called iTools), and continued to use it when it was no longer free. I was content to pay for it at the time since I was reluctant to lose my mac.com email address.

Some things to note: The address above is www.cod3r.com. I have actually owned this domain for more than a year now, but just didn’t do anything with it. I finally decided that if I wanted to really use it, I needed it to be hosted somewhere. I decided to buy what is known as a virtual private server. Basically, I am sharing resources on a real computer out in the world somewhere, but I have full privileges to my little piece of the server. I get 5G of disk storage and 500G of data transfer per month. One other advantage of running this server is I can do whatever I want with it. Basically pretend it is a slow server (by today’s standards, but still faster than my 5 year old linux box under my desk), with only 5G of HD space. For the curious, it is running Debian/Linux - Stable.

I had someone ask me a few days ago if I was responsible for the Kyocera Ring tone generator for the mac. I had to let him know that I was guilty as charged. Anyway, I have put up a website for the thing. Hopefully this means that people actually use it. I changed the license of the software so I am basically giving it away now without the restrictions of the GPL. We will see if anything comes of it.