ArsTechnica on Panther

The guys have a nice review of Panther, covering a fair amount of UI but (sadly) little of the new underpinnings. It's currently being slashdotted, so please be patient.

It's all over the place: Go into Software Update and get the 1.3MB download, which fixes Firewire, FileVault and a few other things.

I've been reviewing the ToDo list for this site and the Projects page, and I must say I'm appalled at my own progress (or lack thereof). The fact that not a single CVS check-in was made since September 30 shows how little time I've had to pursue either (apart from the occasional fix to the site and some photo album tweaks), but has also prompted me to prune useless efforts.

First off, my attempt to install RedHat on a Qube was moved here. I hope this becomes feasible in a few months as stuff like cobalt-rom progresses (if it does so at all), but I'm going to take the brain-dead approach and install the RAQ550 distro on it - at least I get a 2.4 kernel and, after stripping off the Cobalt UI, a very stable and smooth box. Should take all of 30 minutes.

Next up, I definetly need to kick the RSS habit (which means drastically reducing the number of feeds I follow) and get rss2mail finished - I end up spending more than an hour every day thumbing through previously read news items across my three boxes, and since this happens when I'm supposed to be "relaxing" and enjoying my free time, it means I'm wasting it. So I have to centralize my news feeds once and for all, and then I'll get back to considering Bayesian filtering to prioritize items somehow.

Getting rid of a lot of cruft on my machines is next. My iBook now sports a squeaky clean Panther install and my essential list of apps, and it's going to stay that way. My iMac and my XP box, however, are filled to the brim with "Unsorted" folders, which means every piece of electronic junk I downloaded, brought home or saved as "Untitled 24" is lurking in there, waiting to snare my already dwindling attention span just enough for me to forget I am supposed to be actually doing things (like picking my post-grad, doing the Xmas shopping list and other real life stuff I've been postponing).

Shutting down non-essential services on a couple of boxes is next, as well as setting up a permanent Rendezvous responder to advertise my internal LAN services (web sites, fixed SMB shares, etc.) and getting a DVD recorder to make a static snapshot of my photo archive - dual disks are OK, but human error can screw up just about any read-write storage system you can think of with a single keypress, and I don't want to take any chances.

Less is More. Gotta keep repeating that.