I’ve had a very expensive evening yesterday. My macbook pro locked up (well dead samba shares stalled Finder) and Linda was impatient to watch a DVD, so I pushed the power button for 5 seconds like I do from time to time. That was the last time the machine booted.

I have so much junk harware, but nooo, the fastest machine has to kick the bucket. I spent like an hour trying to find a purchase proof. Epic Fail.

After some googling it looks like the most expensive bit is hosed, the whole logic board. And since the repair is going to cost a like a US mbp, I may just use it as a table for 4 years until some broken screen machines show up on ebay. He died too young. I will miss him.

Update! Luckily thanks to the remaining week of my world-wide guarantee, the nice folks at MacServis have replaced the faulty logic board and I have a breathing machine again.

I’ve been struggling to get Linux installed on my macbook pro running 10.4. OpenSUSE installed fine, but rEFIt wouldn’t boot it from either USB or Firewire drive. So I shrunk my HFS+ partition using diskutil patched by the expired beta of Apple Bootcamp. Installed openSUSE, with the rescueCD workaround to get MBR updated and booted. Thinking I am done I ejected the DVD, but then I realized I’ll probably need something installed without grabbing it off the net, I put it back in. Well I though I have, but instead I put in the damn PowerPC DVDRW I failed with on the iMac. It is cursed. Like seriously cursed.

The mac wouldn’t boot. If I let it boot, it showed the rEFIt logo and spin the drive and that’s it. Woudln’t even dim the screen if I closed it. Took about 10seconds holding the power button to actually shut down. I couldn’t eject it holding eject button. It was just a grey screen waiting for the drive before I could do anything useful. Time to disassemble, I thought. Luckily I still had my miniscule Phillips and Torx screwdrivers from my PSP experiments.

So I opened the machine up and disconnected the drive. Booted to OSX. Removed rEFIt. Power down. Attached connector. Booted to OSX. System info shows that no drive connected. Powered off. Made sure the connector is really attached properly. Rebooted. No drive. Wha? Rebooted using the option key to ‘Windows’ (insert MS&Novell deal jokes here). No CD drive under Linux either. Wow. That DVD is really damn cursed. It makes whole drives disappear. Turned off and continued disassembly. Finally got the DVD out and put the machine back together.

How does that make me feel about slot loading drives, Apple? Gah. Now I need to find a way to ritually destroy the damned DVDRW. Suggestions welcome.

A long time ago I was asked to define what czechnology meant. I didn’t really give any convincing examples. Here’s a perfect one.

Phew. Back from Guadec. Now that I finally have a reliable connection, time to wrap up. I obviously enjoyed meeting everybody and loved most of the talks I went to. I wish I’d see younger faces too though. Perhaps the UK being too expensive was the reason. I’m also happy about the decision to not bring my camera this year.

Maybe having all the old farts in the audience was the reason for the rather lukewarm reception of Alex new pet project, Pyro desktop. If nothing else, this thing is going to rock for our UI prototypes to test on people. Having real apps running in the environment is a great plus.

Apart from Pyro, I’m hyped up to look at Clutter (Opened Hand has the best visual identity among everyone on Guadec btw). Nokia guys rolled out the new gecko based browser on the n800, hotness.

M??ir?­n presented a nice talk on interaction design. Perhaps getting designers interested in free software is harder than educating hackers about design? The interest was there, examples why top down approach to software design ends up in better products too (some iphones were admired on site .

Demo

Things went really bad during my demo. I made the mistake of running a semi-recent openSUSE Factory with Compiz on an aging thinkpad x40. Lesson learned. The talk wasn’t a disaster, I’m just sad I couldn’t have shown F-Spot and GIMP in perfect spotlight they deserve. Thanks Larry, Gabriel and Stephane for the cool things to demo.

Frederic asked about some cheat sheet for the things I did during the demo, I’ll put something together soon.

When demoing spinning cubes to your 14 months old daughter^*, don’t forget to release Ctrl and Alt quickly. She will come to you with an angel expression on her face an push backspace before you can blink.

* – Ok that sounds more geeky that it really was.

I’m no expert in security, but the master password dialog in Firefox is calling for problems. There are tons of websites that require you to create an account, the password manager helps you cope with it. If you use Firefox you are likely to be a person with ADD, err use tabs to browse multiple sites at the same time. A generic query dialog from any random javascript looks exactly the same as the master password query. I sense a huge potential for phishing.

It did happen to me. A friend was wondering why I’ve sent him a password-looking message over last.fm messaging service. Typing that password took less time than to figure out I’m making a fool of myself (last.fm does need you to authorize to send the recommendation message and I really had a Homer’s D’OH
moment).

There appears to be a bug on this filed in 2001.

There is an intersting and very scary presentation on phishing techniques I was pointed to recently that presents studies showing that a majority of tested users disregard hints such as the protocol (https://), the colored URL widget and the lock key completely. But I still believe that presenting this dialog in a distinct way that’s outside the possibilities of document scripts/css is long overdue.

Be careful about trusting user feedback.

Operation successful. The patient is alive and well.

I managed to break my PSP on Saturday. I dropped it onto a concrete floor when it fell off my jacket pocket as I was dressing up. The battery popped out, the drive shot the media out. It was quite a pectacular crash. My friend noted “if it survived this, I’m getting one”. So I put the battery on and power it on. Smile on my face. “Look”. But then the UMD drive went reading on and on …

After not getting any specific date from a local SONY Service and the need to ship the PSP to Prague, I decided to order the drive and apply czechnology. If you’re not in a hurry, these guys have the drive fairly cheap. I wasn’t sure to trust the $8 shipping either.

The process went fairly well, except it took a lot longer than I expected. I did manage to screw things up in the process. When trying to open the outer drive bay door, my screwdriver went a little too deep and broke the knob on the side. Superglue saved the day. Also when putting back the controller buttons I didn’t position the pad precisely (it fits into the LCD frame) and the right button didn’t work properly. Apart from that it went fine. So now I can compare the insides of the PSP and the gp2x too as I broke the gp2x’ headphone connector as soon as I got the console. It’s like comparing a macbook pro to a didaktik M (my first computer). A milimeter is a lot of space inside the PSP. Being inside the gp2x is like being inside a rintimpin.

Now I need to start looking for a decent case.

Time flies faster than you think. Proof? The instant soup you thought you bought last week and are about to finally enjoy expired in march 2002.