Overall, I like the new Apple MacOS 10.5 aka Leopard. I used various virtual desktop solutions with older versions, but the new Spaces provides everything I need – almost. On a typical workday, I have various terminal windows opened – but not on one workspace! Spaces changes the screen to one that has a terminal currently running, which is a stupid behavior. There is also no way to change this. But a workaround…

If you have a terminal on space one and you’re on space three, clicking the terminal icon moves you to terminal one. What I would like to have is a new terminal on space three. You can do this with the following (trivial) applescript:


tell application "Terminal"
do script ""
end tell


So, basically the Terminal is asked to execute an empty script – which results in a new window without changing the current desktop.

Either you use the script editor to build your own applescript implementation, or you download a precompiled version below. I dropped the script into the dock for easy access. Now I have only two remaining questions:

1. How can I change the icon of the applescript?
2. How can I assign a keyboard shortcut to it?

Hopefully, Spaces allows you to deactivate the switching behavior in future revisions.

• openterminal applescript download

The leopard pic was released under a CC-Attribution-No Derivative Works license by Matt McGee.

During the upgrade of my Arduino, I used the mySmartUSB programmer – initially on my Windows box, but since it’s USB and it mimics the AVR910 protocol, you can use it with avrdude on your Mac. Here’s how.

Note: This currently only works for PowerPC-based Macs. Silicon Laboratories is not able to get a Intel Mac driver out – see http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1161916754/4

First of all, you need to install the USB driver for the chipset used in the programmer – it’s a CP2102 from Silicon Laboratories. You can download a driver from chip45. So go ahead and download it. Once it is installed, plug in the programmer. A file

/dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART

shows up – this is the USB-to-UART device that you can use with avrdude.I installed the latter using Macports, if you install it from another source, please make sure it is at least v5.3 – older versions do AFAIK not support the ATMega168.

By default, the avrdude.conf does not contain the right device code for the AVR910 protocol. Open /opt/local/etc/avrdude.conf and make sure the following line is in the ATMega168 definition:

avr910_devcode = 0x06;

When everything is set, you can use the command

avrdude -p m168 -P /dev/cu.SLAB_USBtoUART -c avr910 -t -u

to get to avrdude’s terminal mode – you can use e.g. ‘sig’ to print the signature of your ATMega chip.

You can buy the mySmartUSB programmer from myAVR – currently, it costs EUR 28,-.

Den Livestream gibt gab es hier:

Alternativ ist war der Stream auch unter rtsp://media.gonium.net/webmontag-live.sdp zu erreichen.

Der Stream ist über Quicktime codiert, kann aber auch z.B. mit VLC auf allen Plattformen angeguckt werden.

Feedback live zum Webmontag via IRC: Channel #webmontag-kl auf IRCnet, ich werde einkommende Fragen an den Vortragenden weiterleiten.

Nur die Vorträge werden übertragen, das Socializing findet im Foyer vor dem Raum statt.

We will stream the upcoming Webmontag in Kaiserslautern live. I work hard on it – here are the lessons I’ve learned so far.

1. There are lots of streaming servers available – but if you want to avoid the WMV file format and still want to have professional tools, you end up with the Quicktime Streaming Server. There is an open source version called Darwin Streaming Server which I use now.
2. It is easy to create a video and upload it to Youtube or whatever service you like. But streaming live video requires a lot more hard- and software. We will use a DV camera and the Quicktime Broadcaster (free download) in order to stream the Webmontag.
3. If you go for live streaming, you’ll have to use the RTSP protocol. Beware: You definitely need a server running over HTTP. The default UDP crap doesn’t work in usual settings. This is a big thing since you need to have a public IP with port 80 free. I am lucky to have some spare IPs with our shiny new rootserver.
4. Don’t use Quicktime for movie encoding – you end up with trouble if someone doesn’t use Quicktime (e.g. Linux people). Instead, stick to plain MP4. You can use Quicktime for playback, but VLC also works.
5. You need to hint the movie – add some tags to it to allow jumping around in the movie. Your Mac tooling will do that if you check the options.
6. If you want to embed your movie into a web page, use the javascript provided by Apple to create the HTML. Otherwise, you’ll be in browser compatibility hell.
7. If you embed the movie in a wordpress blog: make sure to install the TextControl plugin and disable the text mangling functionality of wordpress. Otherwise, the script tags will get destroyed and you see nothing.
8. This is my first experiment with video streaming – anything may go wrong. Stay tuned.