Get your free Mac upgrade!!

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Pretty compelling title, eh? And in this case, it’s all true. I just found the best Mac speed tip ever on Ars Technica.
On page 2 of that article, you find out that Apple has made some
terrific performance enhancements to the graphics rendering code of Mac
OS 10.4 (Tiger), but they are disabled by default! I guess this is
because “…It requires an ATI Radeon 9600 or NVIDIA GeForce FX or
better…”

So check your system profile, and if you’ve got the
equipment, install Apple’s Developer Tools and run this little program
called Quartz Debugger to enable all kinds of graphics acceleration
goodness. I’ve put the program in my startup list and I’ve never been
happier.

Update: OS 10.4.3 disables Quartz 2D Extreme! Apple notes this here. I don’t know why–I haven’t had any problems, but I guess some people must be finding it unstable.

Greetings from Jakarta

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Out the hotel window looking at Plaza Senayan

So I find myself in Jakarta this week for MapAsia 2005.
Well, I don’t know if you could really call where I’ve been Jakarta.
The low-level specter of violence–security guards and metal detectors
at the hotel and mall–has kept me from wandering too much. Here are
some first impressions:

  • I must look a little bit Indonesian because people keep speaking to me in a funny language. Maybe I should be a spy.
  • I have yet to run across anyone my size. Maybe I should play pro basketball here.
  • The
    local fancy mall, Plaza Senayan, is useless. The same old American
    stores along with their prices. I hoped to maybe pick up a cheap cell
    phone or something, but one I’ve been craving, the Nokia 8800, was 9,750,000 Rupiah (about $1,000)–just as much as online.
  • A Starbucks coffee (yes they’re here) costs just as much as in Boston too.
  • The buffet at Hotel Mulia Seneyan is awesome.

Cambridge events getting better

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I updated my Cambridge events geoblog recently. This is a thingy that reads the event listings on Cambridge’s official city web site,
and reformats it into a blog feed. In the process it also attempts to
figure out where the event is happening so you can map it all.

Here’s the raw “geoblog” feed for the last week, and here’s a map
of those events. Please feel free to play with this data stream and
build cool stuff with it. I’d love to see someone build a phone app
that would tell someone what events are going on within a mile of their
location.

June OSGeo05

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June was a busy month. It began with a graduation, starting a new job, and another graduation. Then moved into three business trips, the most fun of which was the open source geospatial conference, where I caught up with a bunch of old friends and compatriots and ranted mostly about the future of GIS and the aging of our persons.

chillin at osgeo
jo, schuyler and sonny

chillin at osgeo
rich, mikel and jo