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One of the things I find entertaining about Tennis is the historically icey relationship between the player and umpire; when the put downs and the accusatory insults meet the ‘talk to the hand’ nonchalance of the person in charge. I watched Rusedski launch his tirade of expletives at the umpire on live television coverage of this years Wimbledon Tournament as snickers could be heard from the commentary team. Someone in the crowd had apparently called a shot Roddick had played ‘out!’ when it was most certainly on the line (chalk flew up!). When play stopped, everyone assumed that a ‘let’ would be called and the point would have to be played again. When it wasn’t and the umpire gave the point to Roddick, Rusedski proceeded to lose the plot completely and as a result, lost the game.

While Rusedski will never be a Wimbledon winner if he can’t control his anger in order to raise his game, at least he shows human characteristics during high-tension televised sport. While those sportspeople who play with absolute efficiency and calmness are the ones who tend to win (with the exception of McEnroe), they aren’t half boring to watch. Rusedski has been criticised and heavily fined for his outburst, but at least he has added a bit of spark to this years tournament.

Related Reading:

• h2g2 > How to Throw the Perfect Tennis Tantrum

• iChat AV – The ability to audio / video chat as easily as this is a major advancement in the way we communicate using the internet. Disappointingly however, video conferencing only works on G4 machines and faster, meaning those using iBooks and older iMacs with G3 processors will miss out on this feature. If anyone wants to try out the audio chat, my username is systemattic. Although as I just found out when chatting to Rik, I don’t think the internal mic on my iMac is working too well, so you’ll probably just hear me shouting.
• Panther (most notably, the new Finder, Fast User Switching and Exposé) – I’ll wait until get to use it before I write about it, but from what I can tell, the new features look great. Still not convinced about the new Finder, but I guess I’ll have to wait and see.
• G5 – “The fastest personal computer in world”. So, no more Wintel users going on about how the fastest Macs are sluggish compared to their machines. Still it hasn’t stopped Jack Schofield from having an axe to grind.

Macrumors.com are offering a customised IRC client for updates during the Apple Keynote at WWDC. For those missing the usual live Quicktime stream (a stream is being broadcast after the Keynote ends), it’s the second best option for live information from the event.

After downloading the client, simply type a username and you will be automatically connected to the #macrumors channel. My username is ‘mattj’.

I picked up (as in ‘picked up’ and not ‘bought’) a copy of the new Harry Potter book whilst browsing round Woolworths this afternoon. It took me a while to get my hands on it because just as my hand approached, the book would just fly off the shelf leaving me grasping at air. Having finally caught one, I must say, it is a weighty tome.

Spymac have posted some screenshots of Panther, the new version of Mac OS X to be released later in the year. Judging by this screenshot, Finder will have a Safari-like navigation system as well as have Apple’s controversial Metal theme. While this change may be superficial, it could indicate the beginnings of a combined file and web browser; after all, the web is simply, as Ted Nelson puts it, “decorated directories”. If this does happen – and this is just wild speculation here – then it would see Apple go a similar route as Microsoft by tightly integrating the web browser into the operating system. While this maybe bad news for third-party browser developers, at least we can expect the future of Apple browsing to support web standards thanks to Apple’s open-source Webcore. Unfortunately, the Web is at the mercy of Microsoft, and no-one really knows where they are going to take the browser with their next major version of Windows in 2005.

Update: Looks like the Panther images at Spymac have been taken offline. Ah well, Panther will be unveiled on Monday.

Another Update: The screenshots are mirrored here though.

If looking at weird biological specimens suspended in jars is your idea of a good afternoon out, then I can recommend a visit to the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum in London. When I was in the capital a few weeks ago, I met up with Stu and we decided to pay a visit.

Containing a staggering 22 million specimens, the Centre is a valuable resource for scientists as well as a place for laypeople to learn about bioscience. As well as a program of talks and events, there is also a free tour of the laboratories and storage rooms; so, donning the supplied lab coats, Stu and I went in to see what biological oddities we could find. In chilled rooms, pervaded by the smell of Formaldehyde, row after row of metal lockers contain specimens collected, categorised and indexed, some of them by Darwin himself. The final room on the tour was a larger laboratory around which were specimens too big for the storage lockers; Sharks, Octopi, even a Hairy Angler Fish upside-down in its jar, looking even more annoyed.

While some may argue that the best place for these animals is in their natural habitat and not in a jar, it’s important to remember that the purpose of this place is not just for people like to me come and look at these creatures; the Darwin Centre plays an important role as a place of research and study of life on our planet. By studying these animals in their preserved form, we develop a greater understanding of them and how they evolved and with this understanding comes a greater respect for the natural world.

Perhaps symptomatic of living in the post 911 world, when I see the ‘breaking news’ graphic on BBC News Online I experience a momentary shudder of fear that it might be another terrorist attack. While I’m relieved when I discover that it isn’t, I do expect that striking red graphic to be assigned to news that is worthy of such urgency and not to news that some Harry Potter books have been stolen (again). Might I suggest that the BBC vary the look of their ‘breaking news’ graphics so that less important news is broken slightly more calmly? Maybe something like this…

Judging by the mid-seventies distaster that was The Song Remains the Same (when Punk made Led Zep not cool anymore), I must admit to being skeptical when I read that another album of live Led Zep material from the 70s had been released. Now though, having read Meg’s review and seen all those 5 star reviews at Amazon, I really need to buy How The West Was Won.

OS X has, inbuilt, a piece of software called Sendmail. It’s one of these powerful programs that reside within the inner gubbins of OS X which can be made to do all sorts of powerful things using nothing else but the command line… if you’re a UNIX wizard that is (and I most certainly am not).

As its name implies, Sendmail is a tool for working with email. If you open a terminal window, you can type ‘mail matt@frownland.com’ followed by a subject and body text (adding a line-break and ’.’ at the end) and your email will be sent. Well that’s how it should work anyway, because Apple – apparently, for reasons of security – have stopped Sendmail from working in Jaguar (it works up to 10.1.4). Now why is this a problem? Why can’t I leave the UNIX nerds to worry about how they’re going to send their emails and get on with using good old Mail.app? Well, it’s a problem if, like me, you’re using your Mac to learn about PHP.

Mail() is a function used to send email from within a PHP application. On machines running UNIX or its derivatives (OS X included), this function uses Sendmail to handle any emails that are sent from a PHP script. This is configured in the php.ini file with the line:

sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t

However, even with this path properly set, the mail() function will not work because of the problem with Sendmail. What’s most annoying is that no error messages accompany the problem, so you’re left completely in the dark when the test email fails to appear in your Inbox.

The solution lies in doing a bit of reconfiguring of Sendmail and the instructions to do this can be found in this O’Reilly article.

If you’re wondering why I’ve written this technical – admittedly dull – post, it’s because I’ve spent all day trying to find the solution to this problem and if I can make someones life easier by publishing this information for Google to index, then I’m glad to have posted it.

Now… chimps.

Here’s the video I made for the BA Fashion Marketing course (on which I teach) and displayed at Graduate Fashion Week in London. My brief was to showcase the students work in a short piece to be shown at the front of the exhibition space. The music, by Goldfrapp, skillfully mixes Donna Summer-like vocals with Kraftwerk-like instrumentals and seems to sum up the 80s influence on this years work perfectly. The footage that isn’t studio based is video work created by the students themselves. The video requires Quicktime and is 9 MB in size.

The pub was quiet apart from the beeping of a fruit machine being played by an elderly woman in the corner. She must have been inserting coins into the machine for upwards of half an hour without a payout. I’m not a gambler, but I can’t say I wasn’t tempted to have a go myself when she left, remembering what someone said about being much more likely to win if the person before you had played for a while without winning. I’m glad I didn’t, a group calling themselves The Fairplay Campaign have discovered that while these machines give the impression that the player is gambling their money, the results are actually pre-determined and the player is being defrauded. The site has links to emulation software so you can see how the machines work without losing your money.

crazyapplerumours.com:

”A 3.0.1 release of iDVD will include the ability to clone store-purchased DVDs. This will be followed 15 minutes later by a 3.0.2 release that will remove that ability.”

It’s not the removal of the iTunes Internet Sharing feature that bothers me so much as the fact that they couldn’t predict that people would abuse it.

I watched BBC Breakfast as the winning city in the European Capital of Culture bid was announced by Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell. I assumed Newcastle and Gateshead would win it; an assumption based on public opinion polls coupled with a definite sense that the North East deserved a break. Unfortunately for those in the North East, it is not the selection panels job to pander to public opinion and while Newcastle and Gateshead may have been the favourites to win, this does not account for the preference of the handful of people making the final decision.

So what were they looking for in the competing cities? What were they measuring when they were deciding between them? The problem in answering these questions is that ‘culture’ is a big word with many usages. One such usage would be something like “Let’s experience some culture, let’s go to an art gallery”, implying that culture is to be experienced in a specific place. Newcastle and Gateshead has these cultural centres; BALTIC and The Sage being perhaps the most significant developments. But maybe this was the problem with the Newcastle Gateshead bid; a reliance on these specific developments rather than taking a more holistic view of the culture of the city. It’s a real shame for the people of Newcastle and Gateshead as I think everyones hopes were up. Congratulations to Liverpool then, it will be exciting to see how the city develops over the next 5 years.