Well, the not-all-that-long saga with my iPhone 3G came to a very happy ending last night with the release of yellowsn0w 0.9.4. Stumbling home from a local bar and still a little wobbly from too much beer, I did a quick refresh of the iPhone Dev-Team blog and saw the latest version of their crack and tried it out, to very quickly be rewarded with the sweet, sweet words “China Mobile” appearing at the top of my handset. After a little under a week of using a very lousy Sony phone, I’ve got all cell phone and EDGE data functionality back on the Apple, much to my great joy.

With the iPhone dev team advertising heavily that you should absolutely not upgrade to the 2.28.00 baseband (the modem firmware installed by the 2.2 iPhone update), I was expecting to have to go get another hardware fix for my iPhone. Since they were going to have to install the new hardware hack, I was just going to let them remove the old one as well.

But the story took an interesting turn this week when the dev-team suddenly announced that they wouldn’t be hacking the 2.11.07 baseband, and instead would only help you get around the 2.28.00. So, now I needed to get rid of the parasite hardware thing, and quickly. Not wanting to wait for a trip down to 女人街, the local hacked phone market, at 11pm on New Years day I did a little bit of research, took a deep breath, got out the little screwdriver set and started pulling it apart myself.

Gory iPhone internals photos follow :

In a reasonably recent article, I chronicled the purchase and subsequent untimely loss (via theft) of my first generation iPhone. While expensive and unfortunate, this had the nice side effect of giving me the chance to buy a second generation – 3G – iPhone to play around with some more.

Having had it for over two months now, I’ve been quite pleased with it, although the battery life leaves something to be desired. The 16G of storage and the better internationalisation support are huge enough sells on their own for me.

Given that the iPhone dev-team hasn’t cracked the 3G baseband yet and that I have been using such a non-cracked phone here in China for many weeks now, I was under the assumption that I was using an unlocked Hong Kong 3G iPhone, and could upgrade it as I wished to use it around the world.

It turns out I was wrong. Spectacularly so. Last night, after upgrading the phone to the 2.2 firmware (and therefore the 2.28.00 baseband), I now have an iPod Touch, with a permanent “No Signal” in the upper left corner. What happened? I do not, it seems, have an unlocked phone, but instead there’s a little shim SIM card inside the phone which does the unlocking for you, but only for specific basebands. While I can’t quite see which one I have, it clearly doesn’t like the 2.2 release’s new baseband, and stopped working entirely.

So, I have two choices:

1. Given that new 2.2-enabled shim SIM cards are coming out, I can go to the same place I purchased the phone sometime later this week hopefully and get a new shim card to re-enable my China Mobile SIM card.
2. I can otherwise wait for the dev-team to crack the 2.2 firmware’s 2.28.00 baseband, which will likely take a while, as they’ve only recently cracked the 2.11.07, and haven’t actually released that yet.

I could have avoided all of this by only updating the firmware and not the baseband, but that would have required understanding exactly what I had in my phone. Whoops.

PHP started 2008 out on a roaring positive note. With adoption of PHP 4 finally dropping off to barely perceptible levels (apart from the occasional user complaining about how great things were in the good ole’ days and why do we have to change and – hey, get off my lawn you punk kids), PHP 5 had truly joined the big leagues, and the main complaint about the language shifted from it being be a quirky language with horrific (potential) security holes like register globals and klunky HTTP_POST_VAR arrays to it being a quirky language with crappy Unicode support. Talk about PHP 6, already quite vocal in the second half of 2007, was reaching a fever pitch, and some overly zealous people even started publishing books based on only some white-papers and vague ideas of what it would look like.

Along came March, however, and PHP 6 was nowhere to be seen. At conferences, questions from attendees and developers about rough guestimates for a final release dates were met with awkward coughs, sideways glances, and the inevitable “it will ship when it’s ready” response. When asked what they were working on, many people pointed out how focused they were on PHP 5.3 and near-term releases.

In fact, the more you looked, the farther and farther PHP 6 seemed to get, and the community suddenly got very quiet. As summer rolled around, much of the mindshare and energy seemed to be switching to framework development, as companies such as Zend realised they weren’t going to make money selling PHP and related IDEs alone, and other big name developers found themselves having to work to make money. News on the PHP website was hard to come by and limited largely to conference announcements.

While the rest of the web development community started to get excited about developments in new and exciting languages such as Ruby, Erlang, or even Python, PHP was starting to feel decidedly stale and old. The blogosphere went on one of its periodic “PHP sucks” campaigns, and loyalists found themselves on the defensive, trying to explain the whole needle-haystack / haystack-needle thing again and again. Late in the summer, a pretty alert colleague with whom I develop sites even commented that “PHP’s dying. It might be time to look at other options.” Throw in a non-trivial amount of bad press that MySQL seemed to be receiving after its merger with Sun Microsystems along with the latter’s subsequent mismanagement of employees and community, and it was beginning to look like time to worry about people jumping off the PHP/MySQL platform ship.

As the year grew old, however, and PHP 6 looked like a depressing myth, something interesting happened: PHP 5.3 started to gel together and enter alpha-release. Many features that had originally been planned for version 6 had been pushed forward into this release, including namespaces (including the much-derieded \ syntax), some international support, and some better math functionality.

Indeed, many of the non-vague or extremely optimistic features of PHP 6 will be showing up in this release, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see PHP 6 completely rebooted as a new branch and new project based on the current 5.3 line. Looking more closely, you’ll see that there were many of the same people this year quietly working behind the scenes on the project, developing and adding new features, and advocating in favour of the platform. People are still developing for PHP in huge numbers, and the language’s sheer productivity and ease of use make a compelling argument even in the face of sexier or more innovative-seeming languages.

With the arrival of 2009, and the pending release of PHP 5.3, one can feel the excitement in the air. With namespaces, closures, and continually improving i18n support (which is already workable, if not optimal), there is no reason to doubt that PHP will continue to be a dominant platform for years to come. Rest assured the language isn’t dead or dying. It just took a breather for a few months.

Happy 2009 to everybody, whatever platform you use!

Not having particularly large numbers of Christians, for most of Asia Christmas is not an official holiday. Everybody trundles off to work at 8am in the morning like any other day, banks and government services remain fully operational (if completely unhelpful) and few – if any – people have trees or other decorations in their homes – gifts and the like are rare.

As such, it has been interesting to see how Christmas is becoming a bit of a “thing” here in Beijing, and entirely unlike what one would expect. Nearly every mall, shop, and restaurant has some sort of decoration, ranging from tinsel snowflakes to cutouts of Shèngdàn Lǎorén (Santa Claus), to big signs proclaiming 圣诞节快乐 (Merry Christmas). While old people tend to not care and are usually more than barely aware that the holiday is passing, the younger generations (and therefore the commercial enterprises who depend on their dollars) seem to be quite into the whole thing, with groups of coworkers sharing cakes at the office or going out for meals with little Reindeer antler hats on.

One aspect of it all is that Beijing becomes something of an expat ghost-town for the holidays. Many people leave to go back to their home countries, and those who live here tend to hunker down in their little expat enclaves such as Shunyi or Wangjing. What’s left are the (typically younger) foreigners who either couldn’t leave because of work, or decided simply not to bother. The expat restaurants and bars all begin the annual business “dry season” which usually lasts until the arrival of spring (and, coincidentally enough, actual rain).

Thus, it was with some surprise last night that, as a few of us went out for drinks at Q Bar, home to some of Beijing’s finest mixed drinks, traffic in the city was a complete mess. Any place that had bars and clubs was a complete madhouse, and even big shopping areas were all quite packed. Yet, only those places that catered to the locals were full – expat places such as Sanlitun and the like were still completely deserted.

What was going on was that all the locals were going out and partying. But instead of doing presents or any sort of family thing, it was more along the lines of New Years partying, with countdowns to Christmas tree lightings, party hats and streamers, and otherwise drunken revelry. No arguing here about how the holiday has lost its spiritual meaning and roots here – it never had any in the first place. For the Chinese, it’s just another way to participate in some of the things that Westerners like, but do it in their own unique way, and have a blast at the same time.

Here is a video from the local Chinese YouTube rip off (called YouKu):

In another uniquely Chinese way, many of those restaurants and shops will be sporting those same Christmas decorations until well into the summer. It is not unusual for me to be having Sweet and Sour Pork somewhere in July, with a big bearded Santa watching over me.

Over the years, I’ve been a number of different places, and generally taken far too many photos of them. I’ve kept a log of all these photos (partly to keep my family from worrying about me and partly to help me remember all the places I’ve been and people I’ve met) over that time. This site was first called europe.lanfear.com, then travel.lanfear.com, and now marcwan.com

The last time I updated the site was in mid-2000 to handle more than just the reports from the Europe trip I did in 1999. Since then, a single XML file has been suffering under the weight of about 100 trips and some 200 more sub-trip reports.

So, a few months ago, I started a little side project to rewrite the engine entirely from scratch, moving to PHP and MySQL, and handling some of the scalability issues by moving the image serving to Amazon’s S3 service. The result is a new site that, while superficially similar to the old one, is completely new and improved and more awesomer. By using MySQL’s FULLTEXT indexes, the site now has search capabilities, and I’ve also added support for panorama photos and YouTube-like videos that anybody can view in their browser.

The next time I get some spare time, I’ll go ahead and add in some support for comments, but for now, enjoy the new site, and the 20-odd new trip reports that just been added!

I bought an 8GB first generation iPhone 10 months ago, and have generally been thrilled with it, especially after it was jail-broken and I installed iCosta on it, which allowed me to enter Simplified Chinese characters for use here in mainland China. I had planned to, sometime after a full year of ownership, write up my experiences with the phone and general thoughts.

The theft of said iPhone in Delhi a week ago pretty much put an end to those plans. I had just taken a night train from Rishikesh in the Himalayas to the Nizamuddin station in Delhi, and was suffering from something not unlike dysentery. As I stood around in a daze at the pre-paid taxi stand trying to get a ride to the airport with my phone casually stuffed into a pocket, I must have been bumped by one of any number of people trying to get me into their taxis to who knows where and had it lifted. When I got to the Delhi airport, it was no longer in said pocket. I am sure it did not fall out of my pocket in the taxi because after I lost my camera that way in Mumbai, I started checking the back seats of cabs diligently!

So, I was without a cell phone for a week, and had some time to reflect on my unexpectedly short period of ownership. I was originally thinking I would wait until mid-late next year before looking at what the current offerings were, since the 3Gs didn’t appear to be that huge of an improvement over the first generation.

In short, my impressions of the iPhone were as follows:

• It is awesome. I’m maybe not as fan-boy as this guy , but right from the instant I was eating dinner in a Thai restaurant and saw a friend walk in with one of them in her hand, I was sold on the form factor and huge glass screen. I find myself constantly playing with my phone, whether it be to check the weather, re-read my SMSes for the hundredth time, or otherwise just play a quick game of backgammon (note: computers can play a perfect game every time. If you set the difficulty level to “high”, be prepared to be quite depressed). This feeling of awesomeness has never worn off.
• The glass keyboard is no substitute for a real tactile one. I owned a Treo in the past, and it doesn’t take long to develop fast, error-free typing skills on those. No matter how much practice I get typing on the iPhone, conversely, it’s a minor hassle, more so for Asian languages, where there is no room for error at all in terms of character guessing.
• The camera is pretty ghetto. I’ve taken some nice photos with the iPhone, but really, will always carry a real camera around with me.
• There are two missing applications, in my mind: MMS and video recording. I got around MMS by using SwirlyMMS, which has evolved into a truly excellent application over the year. This requires a jail-broken phone, but since I live in China, this was a requirement anyway. There are a couple of video recording applications that cost some money, but I haven’t bothered yet.
• Apart from the camera, the iPhone is replacing many devices in my electronics stable. I now no longer bother with watches or alarm clocks – the phone does both of these well – and I rarely carry around pen and paper now either. I just take notes in the “Notes” application (well, “备忘录”on mine) whenever necessary.
• The speaker is a bit quiet on the phone. I missed a huge number of calls and SMSes because I never heard them while the iPhone was in my pocket or bag.
• The iPhone has completely obsoleted the cool little red iPod nano I have. I feel quite bad for the little guy, because it’s really a wonderful little piece of electronics. The flipside to this is that when you add video to the equation, 8GB is simply not enough. I have maybe 90 minutes of some cartoons, a few episodes of “The Soup”, and some music, and my iPhone is stuffed.
• The device is generally quite sturdy. I have had a few heart stopping drops flat onto concrete from 3-4’, with no real damage at all. However, the phone got a huge scratch on the glass when I put it into one of those airport security plastic boxes for running through the X-Ray machine.

But really: given how much time I spend with the phone, the impressions are extremely positive. I constantly recommend it to anybody who asks.

After arriving in Beijing, I went out and purchased a new iPhone, this time opting for a 16GB 3G phone. I plugged it into my Mac, and iTunes (after upgrading to a new version grrr) offered to restore all my settings, which I accepted. The loss of my old phone was not a big deal in most regards—I had my contacts, calendars, and such things backed up to my laptop. The Notes application, however, supposedly did not do backups, and I was devastated at the loss of all the notes I had taken during my recent month of yoga in Mumbai. To my absolute joy, all of these notes were waiting for me upon restarting after the restore! My general impressions of this new iPhone:

• I don’t like the plastic case. It comes across as cheap, and the form factor of the aluminum one was both thinner and had a nicer feel. The new one does feel lighter, for some reason, however, despite only a 2g difference.
• The 3G data access is wicked. I struggled to use 10MB per month with the old iPhone, whereas I might see myself going to the unlimited plan with the new one.
• The speaker is much louder, so I miss a lot fewer calls and SMSes now. The downside to this is that I no longer miss the spam messages I get here in China. Fortunately, these are still reasonably few.
• My new phone, with its built-in Chinese translation and excellent Chinese Pinyin IME input mode, is the perfect worldwide phone. Except that on restarting it, it doesn’t seem to find any cell networks unless it’s in English mode. Go figure.
• The 2.1 software is nicer than the 1.1.4 I was running before, although probably not significantly. The improvements in locale and translation support are phenomenal, but those using the phone in English probably wouldn’t even notice. Other changes are nice, but really just minor tweaks.

If you’re the owner of a first-generation iPhone and thinking about upgrading to the 3G phones, is it worth it? Absolutely not. If you suddenly lose, destroy, or otherwise find yourself no longer in possession of your first-gen phone, should you upgrade? In a legitimate market scenario, you probably don’t have any choice, but in a place such as here in China, where markets still carry the older phones, the choice is a bit tougher: the older phones sell for a couple hundred dollars less than the 3G phones, and do look nicer. For me the space and newer software with better Chinese support were the key selling points. It might not be enough for others.

And so it came to pass that I was wandering around downtown Mumbai the other day, purchasing a new Canon snapshot camera, since mine had mysteriously gone missing upon my arrival in Mumbai (mysteriously = I left it on the seat of the taxi from the airport to the hostel). In this neighbourhood, near Victoria Terminus (or VT), I just so happened to run into a number of computer book stores. I made a point of popping in and seeing what sort of PHP books they had.

The answer was: not many. This country is mostly a Microsoft shop, with a few Java people here and there.

But in one store, I did manage to find they had a “low price edition” of my book, which I knew had been published. 30-50$ USD for a book in India is outragageously expensive, so publishers print copies of the exact same book on cheap newsprint paper, and sell them for 10-12$ USD (500 Rs or so) instead.

So, I asked the kind guy who runs the store to take a photo of me with my book, and he was more than happy to oblige, in return for an autograph. I’m famous, hahah!

Well, after a good six weeks of traveling to many different places (Singapore, Hong Kong, New York City, Maine, and finally Seattle), I’m back in Beijing now. I had originally planned to avoid coming here on account of how difficult the visa situation was supposed to be, but after some research, it turned out to be quite trivial to get a full year tourist visa (with the caveat that I have to leave every two months and then come back). But with all the pre-Olympic-hullabaloo, I was still nervous about coming back here during the middle of the games—what would things be like?

The short answer is that it’s a bit more annoying here, but not ultimately not all that different. Security measures that have been in place for years but were never seriously enforced before are suddenly being checked rigorously. I awoke in a panic this morning when I realised that I slept through most of yesterday and didn’t make it to the local gong an ju – public security office – to register. So I ran there this morning and started chatting with them and they were all smiles and then told me to come back later because they couldn’t get to the government website anyway.

Traffic definitely is better than it was before—Banning half the cars from the road is, it seems, an awesome way to improve traffic and air quality. There are dedicated lanes for the Olympics here and there which make the occasional mess of traffic still, but overall, the roads are deserted compared to what they were merely two months ago.

Air has been harder to measure. The first two days after I arrived were very cloudy, humid, and overcast, so it didn’t seem that nice out. A nice round of thunderstorms, yesterday, however, cleared nearly everything up, and today one can see the mountains surrounding the city (which I didn’t notice when I first moved to China until after nearly three weeks of living here!).

Oddly enough, compared to some of the DSL I was experiencing in the USA, the Internet here is stunningly fast and reliable. Sure, some sites are blocked, but that’s what SSH proxies were invented for, and I’ve pretty much got everything I want at my fingertips, with great speeds to boot.

My favourite thing about being back? The food. It’s awesome eating here. Lots of vegetables (even the meat dishes), lots of fruit, and the occasional ice cream here and there to help with the heat and humidity. I’ve already hit up the good Szechuan restaurants, and will keep working on all my regular smaller places before leaving again next week.

One thing I found interesting is that, despite the obvious pride at doing so well at the Olympic games and winning so many gold medals, many Chinese people I talk with are pretty sardonic about the whole thing, recognising that governments can pretty much buy as many gold medals as they’re willing to spend money on…

So, here’s to hoping that by the time I come back from India, China has returned to being the same old crazy and fun place that it’s been to live in. I can’t wait.

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 3.2. JustLooking is a program to view pictures and images on your Mac OS X (Tiger or Leopard) based computer. JustLooking is a Universal Binary, and can be run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. The program is and will always be very free.

• Download JustLooking-3.2.dmg now (HTTP – San Diego, CA)

JustLooking 3.2 contains a number of critical bug fixes and minor improvements on the 3.1 release.

• The Leopard CoreImage memory leak has been avoided
• Image blurring in regular view is fixed
• Image rotation and resizing saving is now fixed
• Finnish and German language translations are back (yay!)
• The Korean “File” menu is no longer translated as “Delete File”
• AppleRemote support is back in Leopard

JustLooking 3.0 pretty much contains more new features and code than all the previous versions of JustLooking combined! New features include:

If you’re like me, you used to think that your Intel Mac was a pretty powerful computer. With all of those super zippy cores and RAMs and caches and all that, everything does seem to go a lot faster on the newer machines. My JustLooking compiles went from nearly 4 minutes on my PowerBook G4 to about 35 seconds on my 2.33GHz laptop.

But then came all those 1080p MKV files, with their unbelievable (basically unwatchable) jerkiness, and you found yourself questioning the new religious order. Is the machine, perhaps, actually a piece of junk? Was it that hard disk upgrade you did? The new RAM you installed? Leopard? Some awful combination thereof?

There seem to be these periodic flare-ups in the blogosphere and community site circuit where some poor programming language ends up being skewered thoroughly by roving gangs of self-righteous programmers. One or two articles will suddenly receive wide circulation listing arguments why language X is clearly a horrible choice for any “real programmer”, and then examples to prove this will inevitably be given: "false" equals true, (++*p1)++[--x] is actually a valid expression, or Begin and End are used instead of { and }. The couple of articles defending the language that inevitably appear will receive long streams of comments vilifying the author for being an idiot, or even worse, a hack. The sad realty of all the hullabaloo, however, is that all of this is ultimately pointless, and typically based on some silly assumptions.

I am please to announce the release of SimpleDB 0.9.1, yet another SimpleDB client for PHP. It was designed with the following in mind:

• bulk query and attribute fetching operations
• bulk upload operations (PutAttributes)
• fast execution of as many queries as possible
• proper understandable return values
• proper and clean exception generation
• providing command line utilities to view and manipulate SimpleDB Domains, Items, and Attributes.
• the ability to set domain prefixes for site testing / development

This SimpleDB client requires the following:

• PHP 5.1.4 or greater (hmac_hash() must be defined)
• The Curl extension compiled in.

Please consult the README for installation instructions.

You must, of course, be a member of the SimpleDB Beta program to actually be able to use this.

• Download SimpleDB-0.9.1.tar.bz2 now.

It was with no small amount of dismay that I recently noticed JustLooking was leaking tonnes of memory on my Leopard machine here at home. When developing the program, I put enormous amounts of time an energy into ensuring the program behaved well and didn’t leak. And yet, browsing through 75 photos from a trip to Hong Kong ground my 2GB system into the dirt in a hurry.

Upon further investigation, this appears to be a bug in Leopard—my Tiger machine has absolutely no leaking at all. The bug occurs specifically when using CoreImage and NSImage interchangeably. In effect, CoreImage works entirely on video card RAM, and NSImage works entirely in system RAM. The resizing method I use causes the system to copy some of that memory from the VRAM to the system RAM, and that code leaks a tonne at a time.

The good news is that you can fix this by just having CoreImage do the rotation. The bad news is that this is 100% incompatible with the fade effect transitions I use. So, right now, I have the choice between transitions or memory leaks. Or just using Tiger (for which there are a number of other great arguments).

One of things I had been looking at for JustLooking 3.2 was reworking exactly how I use CoreImage, filters, and the system’s loading code. It looks as though this work has just taken on added urgency.

It is with some amusement that I have recently seen a number of PHP 6 books popping up for sale at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. A while back, I spent some time trying to figure out just how far behind the curve I was on PHP 6 since I hadn’t really been paying too much attention. As I started to investigate how things were coming along and when I should expect it to hit the street, I was honestly a bit surprised at how hard news was to come by.

In short, like most major software projects, it’s “a work in progress”. As a project developed by volunteers and people with other full time jobs, there are periods where it sees serious spurts of development, and other periods when there are lulls. It will be released basically when it’s done and properly tested by the community. Who knows when that will be, but I will wager money that it won’t occur at in 2008 at all.

So, with that and all those PHP 6 books in mind, I, as an author myself, have come up with the following list of other books I’d to see published or that I’ll consider starting to write:

My trip back from Montréal to Beijing was considerably less triumphant than I had hoped, as I was struck by a severe plague and ended up spending 9 very miserable days in bed with a high fever and nasty cough. One might think that being confined to bed for a week would be a nice thing, but the stunning boredom that sets in after a while is quite unbearable. You’re too tired to really work hard, focus on TV or movies, or even really read a book, but so sick of sleeping that you crave doing something.

And so, I updated the chipmunkninja.com website. I’ve long hated my initial design with forums and my crappy del.icio.us tagging scheme, so I finally fixed those up and now have a proper tagging system, some fun stats on the right side, and paging, so you don’t have to view every single article on one page now.

It’s still a rather ugly shade of red and contains the finest in 2005 style, but that’s a project another day ….

Bugs, comments, or suggestions, feel free to add a comment or drop me a line. Always glad to hear from readers.

This year, as part of my annual trip to Canada and the USA, I’ve been asked to give two talks at the annual PHP Québec conference in Montréal. I haven’t been back to that city since 1993 when I graduated from University, and it will be interesting to see how it goes. (Although I suspect that while Beijing basks in nearly 20C (nearly 70F) weather every day and even Seattle and New York were closer to 10C (50F), Montréal is still hanging below freezing most days and has over a metre of snow on the ground).

I will be giving talks on internationalisation (commonly just called i18n) and giving your database servers a break with memcached. If you’re anywhere in the neighbourhood, come on by for some good fun. I’ll be getting back to regular programming content this weekend.

TunnelerX is an application for Mac OS X to let you run a single SSH tunnel from your system menu bar, typically to securely re-route HTTP (web browsing) traffic to a remote proxy server. If you have ever had to run one of the following commands in a little Terminal window in the corner of your screen, then this application is for you:

ssh -N -L 8123:localhost:8123 bobo@theclown.com
ssh -N -D 8123:localhost bobo@theclown.com

Changes for 0.9.5:

• The application is now named TunnelerX instead of Tunneler
• A few bugs have been fixed related to sleeping and waking up the computer
• New graphics and icons for the application. It’s a bit less ghetto looking now.

For the 1.0 release (upcoming), I will add Growl notifications for those who wish them. The Growl website is currently down, so I can’t do much yet.

Downloading

• Download TunnelerX-0.9.5.dmg now (HTTP – San Diego, CA)

This is a bit of a geeky post, but then this is a geeky computer blog, so … so be it. Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a fan of Nethack, and have been playing it on and off for over fifteen years (mostly off, but recently I’ve rediscovered it again). Well, finally, after all this time, I can say the following:

Goodbye marcw the Demigod...

You went to your reward with 5941448 points,
The Book of the Dead (worth 10000 zorkmids and 25000 points)
Vorpal Blade (worth 4000 zorkmids and 10000 points)
The Heart of Ahriman (worth 2500 zorkmids and 6250 points)
The Bell of Opening (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
The Candelabrum of Invocation (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
       8 emeralds (worth 20000 zorkmids),
       2 diamonds (worth 8000 zorkmids),
       2 rubies (worth 7000 zorkmids),
       1 amulet of ESP (worth 150 zorkmids),
       1 amulet of unchanging (worth 150 zorkmids),
and 2497 pieces of gold, after 93897 moves.
You were level 22 with a maximum of 95 hit points when you ascended.

 No  Points     Name                                                   Hp [max]
  1    5941448  marcw-Bar-Hum-Mal-Neu ascended to demigod-hood.        95  [95]
  2    2623722  marcw-Val-Hum-Fem-Neu died on the Plane of Fire.
                Dissolved in molten lava (with the Amulet).           129 [287]
  3    1330849  marcw-Val-Hum-Fem-Neu choked on her food in Gehennom
                on level 33.  Choked on a disenchanter corpse.        248 [248]

Interestingly, I almost always play Valkyries, but decided to try Barbarians for a couple of games. The first game, I made it all the way down to level 24 without finding a single altar (except for a non-aligned one in the mines with a nasty priest next to it) before an Arch-Lich and Titan finished me off. The second game was this one. Most of the rest of the time, I do embarrassing things like choke on things or eat something I shouldn’t have. Need to be more careful, I suppose.

Well, that’s all there is to this post, but it’s exciting news for me. I’m still playing, and now trying other classes (read: dying a lot).

Tunneler is an application for Mac OS X to let you run a single SSH tunnel from your system menu bar, typically to securely re-route HTTP (web browsing) traffic to a remote proxy server. If you have ever had to run one of the following commands in a little Terminal window in the corner of your screen, then this application is for you:

ssh -N -L 8123:localhost:8123 bobo@theclown.com
ssh -N -D 8123:localhost bobo@theclown.com

Downloading

• Download Tunneler-0.9.dmg now (HTTP – San Diego, CA)

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 3.1. JustLooking is a program to view pictures and images on your Mac OS X (Tiger) based computer. JustLooking is a Universal Binary, and can be run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. The program is and will always be very free.

Please note that I pay for my own bandwidth, so please try to use the BitTorrent version of the download if you are able to—it’s about a 3.1MB file and takes about 60 seconds.

• Download JustLooking-3.1.dmg now (BitTorrent – TPB).
• Download JustLooking-3.1.dmg now (HTTP – San Diego, CA)

JustLooking 3.1 contains a number of bug fixes and minor improvements on the 3.0 release.

• The toolbar no longer takes keyboard focus.
• SPACE Advances images in the regular viewer.
• Cmd+I toggles Image Info visibility.
• You can copy images from the context menu of images.
• - and +/= keys can be used to control zoom levels.
• Cmd+Backspace now deletes images.
• New Korean and Catalan translations.

JustLooking 3.0 pretty much contains more new features and code than all the previous versions of JustLooking combined! New features include: