djst's nest

Thanks x2

I got a Firefox t-shirt and mug this week. Coffee has never tasted this good. :) Maybe I should let Sofie pose in the t-shirt as the first official Mozilla Camgirl... Anyway, thanks Marcia!

While I'm on a thanking spree, I'd like to publicly thank Brian Ewins for sending me the "Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools" book for free last year. I really appreciate it and it saved me around SEK 700.

Building Firefox from CVS for the first time

Thanks to some initial help from Gavin, I'm currently building Firefox from CVS for the first time. I spent some time in the Synaptic Package Manager, trying to figure out what packages I should install in order to successfully compile Firefox. After lots of trial and error, I found a package called mozilla-firefox-dev.

So this is a tip for Ubuntu users who want to build Firefox: don't spend too much time reading the prerequisites for building Mozilla, just install the mozilla-firefox-dev package. That's right, I said Ubuntu, not VidaLinux. More on that later. :)

This is actually a first step in a long-term personal goal of becoming a Firefox hacker. I've always been interested in getting to know more about the inner workings of Firefox. Also, I view it as an opportunity to become more familiar with JavaScript, Venkman, DOM Inspector, and Mozilla development in general. So regardless of where this takes me in the end, I'll be a thousand experiences richer.

London was great

I'm back from our trip to London! Actually, we came home on Tuesday, but I haven't had time to upload the photos to the computer until now. (I got to borrow my mom's soon-to-be husband's camera, haven't bought my own yet.)

We had a great time, although we really didn't do much. Shopping, drinking, walking (lots of walking), and more drinking. London is a nice city to visit. In a way, it feels like you're travelling back in time when comparing to Sweden. Everything just looks older! Buildings, taxis, buses, even toilets look like they were made 30-60 years ago. The people in London are really nice, helpful and polite. I wish I got more time to talk to them, most of the time we were just asking for directions. :)

We stayed at a hotel called Rhodes Hotel at Sussex Gardens and shared the room with Björn and Linda, co-workers of mine, who also went to London this weekend (which is why Sofie and I decided to take this trip on such a short notice).

I promised I would put up some pictures here on the blog. Actually, I didn't use the camera as much as I'd want to, so this is basically all the pictures that were taken. I also filmed some pointless video clips from the mobile phone, but the quality of them is so poor, it's not worth putting them up.

London

Sofie and I are going to London tonight! It's actually the first time in London for both of us, but not the first time in the UK for me. We arrive at Luton Airport at 23:25 local time and will stay at a one of Sofie's friend's house somewhere near Marble Arch. I'll be sure to put up some pictures here once I get back on Tuesday. Alex, thanks for the info, I won't buy my laptop in the UK. :)

I'm living in the wrong country for a laptop

Laptops in Sweden are expensive. A Dell Inspiron 6000 costs $739 in the US, and the same system costs SEK 7237 in Sweden, which is $1048. That's a 42% price difference!

Me, a Mac user?

I started out as a Macintosh user. It's been ten years since I first used a Mac to discover the Internet, which I first thought was just the Netscape portal with that interesting search feature. This was not only my first experience with the Internet, but also my first real experience with computers in general, if you exclude Commodore 64 and Amiga 500 (and an old friend's 286 with Prince of Persia on it).

So why am I not a Mac user today? Well, there are several reasons. First of all, when my mom borrowed a computer from work during a summer, it was a 486 IBM PC running Windows 3.1. At that time, I was used to the PowerPC computers at the local newspaper where I worked, which were much more powerful (hence the name) and much more pretty to look at. For me, Windows 3.1 was like jumping back in time, but there was really no choice for us, since it wasn't our computer and we couldn't afford an own computer. One year later, however, we finally got ourselves our first computer. It was a 133 Mhz Pentium PC running Windows 95. This was the machine where my computer knowledge really took off, mostly by trial-and-error. After just a few months, I felt comfortable using Windows, although I still thought the Mac interface was better looking.

Progressing from Windows 95 to 98, to Me, 2000 and finally XP has made me so comfortable with Windows that I'm having a hard time learning how to be productive in other operating systems like Linux. So the answer to the question why I'm not a Mac user is simply because the more I used Windows, the more comfortable I got with it. I even learned to master Visual Basic and earned a respectable amount of money selling shareware. Macintosh simply wasn't an option anymore, but I've always had a sincere interest in the Mac platform and software, because they're often much more thought out and carefully designed.

Anyway, this year I'm looking to buy a cheap, light and small laptop with built-in wireless Ethernet (802.11g). Looking at the alternatives on the PC market (the only one I've considered until today), small and cheap seems to be mutually exclusive. The cheapest PC I've found so far is a Centrino (Celeron M 1.3 GHz) with a 14" screen for SEK 9635 (approx. USD 1390). It weighs 2.3 kilograms (approx. 5 lbs). That's still too expensive, considering 1) this will just be a secondary computer and 2) I'm a student on loans.

I don't remember what or who made me think of it, but today I visited apple.com and realized they were selling exactly the kind of things I'm looking for: small, truly portable laptops with just the things I need. What caught my attention is the iBook G4 1.2 GHz with 12" screen for SEK 8925. The weight is either 2.2 or 2.3 kg (the Swedish site says 2.3), so it's basically the same weight as the PC laptop above. I actually just discovered the PC variant with the same weight; before that, the iBook was superior in most respects. Now it's close to a tie.

I'm not sure if it's worth switching to a Mac just to save SEK 700. The screen is smaller (12"), which means the dimensions of the computer is also smaller. That's a plus, but not really if the weight is the same as the 14" PC screen. An advantage of the PC is that it has a nVidia™ GeForce™ FX Go5200, 8 x AGP 64MB, whereas the iBook has an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 32 MB graphics card. The PC also has a system bus of 400 Mhz, whereas the iBook only has 266. I'm not sure how much that matters though.

I should note that I will dual boot with Linux, regardless of what hardware platform I choose. Anyone with experience converting a pre-installed Mac OS X 10.3 system to a dual boot system? Does it require proprietary 3rd party partition resize tools or can the partitions just be wiped and then reinstall Mac OS X from the bundled CDs? I also know that a Celeron M processor can be set to a slower clock frequency, allowing to save power. In Linux, it's even possible to decrease the frequency even more, compared to Windows XP. Does the PowerPC G4 has this capability too? Is 256 MB of RAM enough on Mac OS X?

Mac Pros

• Smaller
• Cheaper
• Sexier

Mac Cons

• Not the familiar x86 platform (no Windows support, etc.)
• Slower CPU/system bus
• As heavyweight as the PC, despite 2" smaller screen
• Only 32 MB graphics card memory (PC has 64 MB)

So, which one is the best buy, the iBook or the PC? I not trying to start a flamewar between Mac and Windows users, I'm just curious to know if it's worth paying a bit more for the PC hardware or if I'm actually going to enjoy the Mac experience more.

Update: Thanks everyone for your comments. First of all, now that I know there are no drivers for AirPort in Linux, I simply can't choose the iBook under any circumstances. I really need Linux installed on the laptop as it's supposed to connect to my server and also run graphical programs from there. Also, Linux is often used in the university.

About Mac OS X. I got many comments from users of Mac OS X who said it's superior to Windows XP and that I wouldn't regret switching to it. While I'm sure that's true, part of me is not thrilled about the idea of switching to yet another commercial OS. After all, the main reason why I'm now using Linux is because it's free and legal to use anywhere. I'm simply afraid of becoming so impressed with Mac OS X that I would never want to use Linux again. Judging from the screenshots and sample videos of Mac OS, it's miles ahead of Gnome/KDE in terms of UI.

Anyway, this was not a question of which operating system I should switch to and why, because I've already made my decision to use an open source OS. It's about which hardware to choose, and whether or not it would be worth buying an iBook to get smaller and cheaper hardware. Apple Broadcom are fools not to make the source code to the AirPort device driver available. The inability to use wireless LAN in Linux is really a showstopper for me.