A preliminary conference program has been posted to the What The Hack website. It shows a lot of promise and will definitely grow to an even more impressive line-up soon.

You might notice the visual similarity to the 21C3 schedule which has its cause: the WTH program committee is using our freshly developed software Pentabarf which is still in its infancy but is about to evolve to a full-blown web-based open source conference planning tool.

Also, the WTH crew managed to set up a public wiki for the participants. There had been a Plone-based wiki before, but now they’re using MediaWiki which is a much more mature system and much easier to use.

I fell in love with MediaWiki last year and since then it has been our primary tool for internal and public communication and documentation. For events addressing numerous participants a public wiki is just plain cool. So I am glad the WTH crew is following the same path we took for 21C3.

Captain! Incoming message: What The Hack Is Going On!

See you all in The Netherlands the end of July. This is going to be the party of the summer.

Does anybody now how to prevent Mac OS X of creating .DS_Store files (at least for selected directories)? It’s so annoying as it comes in my so many times – especially when working with command line based version control systems like CVS or SVN.

I don’t understand why Mac OS X 10.4 still retains this “feature” as the new meta-data storage methods should provide an alternative. *Sigh*.

“Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives”

Jörg pointed me to an interesting spin. Maybe they just do it with their servers. Performance is an issue there and the market is totally different and wouldn’t affect the home user where the PowerPC still makes sense.

In the end, we’re all clueless. At least, these events start to radiate suspense again.

Here’s my bet: it’s not going to happen.

If you don’t know what I am talking about: don’t care. Then it’s not important to you anyway.

Oh Mr. Helliferocious is so right on the button thing but it gets even worse. Have a look what the Preview.app application in Mac OS X 10.4 has in store for us:

One word: dis-gus-ting.

Background: on the Mac, the default button is on the right. The cancel button has to go to the left of it. This is probably the first Apple branded program doing this kind of thing since the invention of Macintosh. And now, the “greatest” release of Mac OS X brings us this silly Windows-convention that never made sense (and as you can see even the GNOME people convverted to this model while KDE made it at least configurable).

Maybe Apple is hiring its programmers from Microsoft right now. Or the QA department. I don’t know. However, this has to go away.