iPhone & Flash

Nice article (RoughlyDrafted) why Apple might have waived Adobe's Flash.
And also Gruber's (Darin Fireball) side glance onto it.

iPhone SDK

So the SDK is out in the wild - that's the good news.
The bad news are the " Technical Requirement: Intel processor-based Mac running Mac OS X Leopard"
So no official iPhone software from me, Patrick, b/c I'm still on 10.4 using my ol' PPC PowerBook (Yeah baby!).
I wonder why, since it is a cross-compiler anyway (ARM)? Maybe the Simulator ... well there is still the unoffical GNU based (GCC, etc.) kit.

YouTube Hijacking

A lot of YouTube requests were routed to an AS in Parkistan on Feb. 24 because they announced a more specific prefix. Now RIPE - one of the registries - created a nice technical explanation including an animation what exactly happend:
RIPE NCC RIS case study

In case that you don't understand everything, I recommend you to look up some information on "BGP" (e.g. BGP4.AS).

HOWTO make /usr/bin/mail use an arbitrary From: address

it can be quite helpful to send the output of shell commands per mail, without going through the whole |pbcopy, CMD-TAB-TAB-TAB, CMD-N, CMD-V thing. unfortunately, this only works out of the box in Mac OS X if a] your hostname is in the global DNS, and b] your (short) Mac OS X username matches the username in your email adress. both are not true for my setup :)

however, it's quite easy to make the preinstalled postfix MTA work around this:

• edit /etc/postfix/main.cf and add the line:
  smtp_generic_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/rewrite_local_from


• create an empty file /etc/postfix/rewrite_local_from and add one line per local user:
  
  folkert@DIANNAO.localhost folkert@feedface.com
patrick@DIANNAO.localhost patrick@feedface.com
  
  The first column should be the address as it appears in the From: field of mails you send via /usr/bin/mail. The second column should be the address you want in the From: field instead.


• then run the command postmap /etc/postfix/rewrite_local_from
  note, this needs to be done everytime after making changes to the file.

this propably breaks in all sort of ways, eg when your hostname gets changed by DHCP or similar.

a good starting point to learn more about that is the manpage for generic(5).

Happy Chinese New Year

(农历新年). This year it is the year of the rat.

Edward Tufte & iPhone

Watch the Video.
Via iphoneskinning.com

Perl 6

"I was a Perl guy for 15 years, used to love it, now Perl and Ruby both look like line noise that's been encrypted -- compared to my new girlfriend, Python."
-synthesizerpatel

"I've been a fan of Perl ever since the 3.x era. A couple years ago I got a job at a place where the scripting language of choice is Python. My take on it is that Python is that cute, quirky goth chick you met at the bar. She's fun for a while, but once you get to know her you realize that she's got some pretty deep emotional issues that drive you absolutely nuts. And she's really, really obsessive about her appearance.
No, I'm more than happy to stick with Perl. She may be a little older and not quite as attractive, but she has a wonderful personality. Plus, there's more than one way to do her."
-Chelloveck

Slashdot - perl6 and Parrot 0.5.2 Released

metric

"If God had meant Humans to use the metric system, he'd have given us ten fingers!" (Um ...)
From: Gumbopage (yummy Gumbo recipes).