arnekolja’s current stuff

Snow Leopard is out and I'm wondering a bit how few articles are being posted about it these days. Before it came out the web was full of it, but now that it's been released there are just a few notes about Wake On Demand or some benchmarks, but it seems like everybody's having it, using it, but only few are talking about it.

 Sure, Snow Leopard is not a feature update. It is all about optimization... in speed, in size, in polish. But I'm still missing posts about the list of enhancements and changes, because I for myself have discovered many more things than I was able to find talked about on the internet.

 How do you feel about this about, what did you already discover? In my case... I am feeling a way more responsive system, everything's speedier, every app is loading faster, quitting faster. You know, this speed thing that you cannot really show in benchmarks. Yeah, about benchmarks: I don't think CPU, RAM or GPU benchmarks are a good way to measure the speed improvements. What do you expect from a benchmark when you don't feel any lag in computing time? I don't feel my CPU was too slow and it had to be optimized, no. I felt my system was working on my hard disk too much, needing too long to load applications, too long to switch applications and such and that's not a CPU peak problem. And I don't know if Snow Leopard is better at these things, I just feel it right now, right after a fresh installation, and I hope that this feeling will stay forever now. When this comes true, I can tell that Snow Leopard is a way faster operating system. But this is not benchmarkable, this is just about responsiveness and such.

 So for now I'm glad about this new OS. I like to discover those little changes... like the new little fade effect when hovering spaces and how it's zooming smoother, the possiblity to quickly upload a movie snippet for my friends, the fact that "dock expose" is much more than we've been told (just take the previews for minimized windows)... and where the heck does that "Insert screenshot" function that's enabled for all text entry fields now? Does it come from Leopard?

 Anyway... just my 2 cents, think I wanted to enrich the base of Snow Leopard posts a bit, still waiting for new input, lol.

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... that you should tidy your desktop.

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Hey Apple!

 I know you read my previous post about buying a new iMac. So if you're still following, please consider updating your iMac line from 20 and 24 inch displays to 22 and 26 inch. It makes more sense in consideration of the current market situation for displays. And I want a 26 inch model very badly, of course, think that's the most important reason ;-) So please, surprise your customers with that lineup change. August 28th is a good day to announce it. It's also my birthday, so... think you still have my address, don't you?

 Sincerely

 Arne

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Please, everybody: If you're offering an RSS feed, show the actual info in its content section. I absolutely hate to not find the offered information in what you're actually reading. Hopping from your reader to your browser (or internal web view, of course) and back takes so much time and effort, it just sucks!

 I know some of you must live by your writing, but there are enough feeds that actually have ads in it, so it's not more than a lame excuse. Especially if you're actually showing ads in your feed and leave away the info, yuck!

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I just made a decision: I'll sell my iMac as soon as a new one gets released this autumn. I don't need a new one and I'm not suffering of any performance issues or something... I just think it's the more economical way to buy iLife and Snow Leopard. This way I get both and new hardware and renewed warranty for only 200 or maybe 300 bucks.
 
Mac2Sell just gave me the info that my iMac's still worth 1140 Euros without consideration of my updated graphics chip. A new 24 inch iMac will cost only 1399,- and I wouldn't have to buy the standalone versions of the software. Wouldn't you take a major update for that little surcharge, too?

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I am currently writing a lifestreaming webapp like Sweetcron, but in Ruby on Rails. It works very well so far, but when looking at it there is a major problem showing up:

 A lifestream puts together multiple feeds to provide a timeline of everything you're publishing online. But what if it includes one service, that is uses in a way more frequently than the others? The important posts will fall behind in the list very quickly. Twitter is a very good example for this. There are days that a Twitter user posts ten, twenty, maybe even thirty tweets or more a day. Every other feed your collecting with your lifestream runs in danger to fall back to page two or three of your lifestream even on the same day it is posted.

 I thought a long time about this and came up with a few solutions, but nothing of it would really work out.

 I thought about having multiple columns in my lifestream, so you could put your blog into the left column, Twitter and your tumblelog into a second one and maybe Flickr and other media feeds into a third one. This could work, but somewhat erases the basic idea of having a lifestream - a consequent timeline. Plus it would "feel" like having just another blog with different blocks placed where you want it to be.

 Another idea was to show only the first three out of a long list of similar posts. So if you have for example twenty tweets in a row it would show "17 more, click to expand". This would be the best solution I can think about, but I totally fail at inventing the needed database query for it, especially when I want to use only Rails methods for it - and pagination should be included too!

 Well, now that I'm writing about it - maybe the best solution could be to not actually paginate it, but to implement this trendy "load 20 more" button that's used by different services recently.

 What do you think? How could this problem be avoided at the presentation level? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts!

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Now something in German. There was a guy on my buddy list (Instant Messenger) that I didn't really know, so after some years (lol) I removed him from my buddy list because we never talked to each other. Then I changed my profile and he sent me a message to ask who I am and for some reason it feels like he's hitting on me... and now I'm wondering if my name sounds so female or if he's gay. Ulf ordered my to post it here, so I'm just doing it:

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I would totally like to see a payment model just for TV series. We got the technical base for it (BitTorrent), a payment model that every TV series junkie like me would try (a flat rate) and enough people who are pirating the content just for lack of better ways to get it done, so why doesn't anyone take the chance to make money of it and at the same time content the customers? There are so many different approaches for that, but why doesn't anyone in the motion picture industry understand that they could really fight piracy by establishing something everyone can live with? I assume there are thousands, millions of people like me, who are willing to pay, but don't see the options here.
 
So here's my idea: A flat rate of about 20 bucks per month and therefore you get access to a private, commercial BitTorrent tracker that has _it all_. And I mean _everything_. I don't want to consider five different trackers for finding my stuff, I want one that is used by all publishers. And it has to be integrated with every software that's on the market: iTunes (okay, Apple won't do that, but let's dream a bit, it would be so nice...), Xbox Live, Windows Media Player, VLC - a plugin for every single app so you can make use of your content flat rate from every machine in your house.
 
Why I'm suggesting to use BitTorrent here? Well, one pleaded reason for expensive content is its infrastructure. With a flat rate it can easily come to a point that one user causes 50 or even 100 gigabytes of traffic a month and to avoid this, BitTorrent is the best way for all. It's mainstream, private trackers are nothing new and it's easily integratable into every architecture.

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Very nice... this july is great sale at Hertie's in Wolfenbüttel. Sometimes 20, mostly 50 percent off for electronics, including things like Nintendo Points and such. Just bought a second Xbox 360 controller, a Play And Charge Kit for it, an Xbox 360 game and Anno for Nintendo DS (in three days it's my son's birthday) for just 65 Euros or something like that in total. Yay!

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