Twitter Account
Joining the trend of twittering I created my own [twitter account](http://twitter.com/simonboots). 
Openfire and Net::XMPP
I was writing a perl script the other day which connects to my [Openfire XMPP server](http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp) and does some stuff (listening for incoming messages, etc.).
When I started my perl script it always failed with the error message:
ERROR: Authorization failed: error - not-authorized
After re-checking the password and username it still didn't want to work.
In the end [I found out](http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/thread/20551) that the the perl [Net::XMPP](http://search.cpan.org/~hacker/Net-XMPP-1.02/lib/Net/XMPP.pm) SASL authorization doesn't want to play with the SASL implementation in Openfire.
Modifying the Protocol.pm of Net::XMPP can help to solve this problem.
Open this file and comment out these lines (at line ~1800):
if($self->{STREAM}->GetStreamFeature($self->GetStreamID(),"xmpp-sasl"))
{
return $self->AuthSASL(%args);
}
After this little tweak Net::XMPP should talk to Openfire without grumbling.
Starcraft and Mac OS X 10.5.3/4
[Starcraft 2](http://starcraft2.com/) has been announced for a while now and as I watched the in-game movies I got the urge to play the good old Starcraft again.
Starcraft is over 10 years old but Blizzard did a good job and released an installer for Mac OS X a long time ago.
The installation did not make any problems but the game didn't start. The app quit itself shortly after I started it.
After looking for a solution for this problem I found out that Apple removed the support for 256 color mode from the nVidia graphics drivers in 10.5.3. (Ok, its 2008 and who really needs a 256 color mode??).
Fortunately there is an easy way to get the [old 10.5.2 graphics drivers back](http://70.181.80.166:82/blog/archives/2008/07/mac-os-10531054-nvidia-256-colors.html).
Starcraft now runs without any problems and looks gorgeous even with only 256 colors.
Trip to Vegas
For the long 4th of July weekend [Thilo](http://www.lemming.name) and I have planned to do a nice little road trip from Cupertino to Las Vegas.
With our rented Pontiac convertible we headed east on Thursday short after noon and of course we hit the first traffic jam just one hour later. Fortunately, that was the only traffic jam on our tour before we arrived in Las Vegas ten hours later.
As we drove through the Death Valley we had about 106°F in the middle of the night and during the day it was hardly possible to walk around in Vegas without a hat, enough water and a strong belief in survival.
Driving through the Strip at night is very impressive and is unimaginable how much money all these swanky hotels and casinos must have been cost.
And indeed, everything is very expensive. If you don't want to live on fast food a lunch or a nice dinner could eat up your budget for the slot machines.
Visiting Las Vegas for three days was great but I wouldn't want to stay there much longer. If you don't have the money for seeing shows or do other fun (and therefore expensive) things you'd probably stay in the hotel or casino (not gambling) for most of the time which becomes pretty boring sooner or later.
Thanks to [Thilo](http://www.lemming.name) for that amazing road trip and an awesome time in Vegas!
[Here](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrtentacle/sets/72157606065581701/) are a few pictures.
Indoor Skydiving
[Thilo](http://www.lemming.name), a friend from Germany arrived on Saturday in San Francisco. After cruising around the Bay Area with a rented convertible we were on the watch for some more fun.
We stumbled across the [website of iFly](http://www.iflysfbay.com/), a indoor skydiving facility. That looks great!
Unfortunately, they are booked up until Wednesday. I'll let you know how fun this is!
**Update:** Although it was kind of expensive (2 mins for $49) it was awesome! And it is harder than it looks. 
Moving from Subversion to Git
I started using version control management systems with [CVS](http://ximbiot.com/cvs/cvshome/dev/) several years ago.
But soon it was clear that using Subversion instead of CVS would make version control a lot less cumbersome and error prone process. And for the last years Subversion was the system of my choice.
But then I saw [Linus Torvalds' Tech Talk speak at Google](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8) about his new version control system called [Git](http://www.git-scm.com).
Although Linus' talk was a little bit offensive on other version control systems I liked the idea of Git being a distributed system. Other features like the true ease of branching/merging or its speed made it even more attractive.
So I played around with it for a while and I started to like it. This weekend I decided to switch all my Subversion managed projects to Git.
There are some good tools that come with Git which make this process very easy. I don't want to give another tutorial how to move your Subversion to Git. There are a lot of websites that do that.
But here are some links which helped me doing the transition:
* [Git for SVN Users](http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html)
* [Git User's Manual](http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual.html)
* [Git Internals](http://peepcode.com/products/git-internals-pdf) (Recommended!)
* [Git Screencast](http://peepcode.com/products/git)
* [Git SVN Workflow](http://andy.delcambre.com/2008/3/4/git-svn-workflow)
* [Git Installer for Mac OS X Leopard](http://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer/)
* [Installing Git on Mac OS X Leopard](http://dysinger.net/2007/12/30/installing-git-on-mac-os-x-105-leopard/)
iPhone SDK Beta Out!
Today Apple released a beta version of the iPhone/iPod touch SDK for developers to create their own applications for these devices. The final SDK is about to be released in June this year.
Unfortunately Apple's [ADC website](http://developer.apple.com) seems to be overstrained at the moment with all the developers trying to download the SDK.
My First Geocache
After I bought a Garmin outdoor GPS device last week I was looking around the web for some additional information about GPS.
What I found was a website about [geocaching](http://www.geocaching.com ). I didn't know what geocaching is before so here are a few words about it:
PostgreSQL 8.3 Released
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today [announced](http://www.postgresql.org/about/news.918) the release of version 8.3 of the high-performance object-relational database management system. This release includes a record number of [new and improved features](http://www.postgresql.org/about/press/features83) which will greatly enhance PostgreSQL for application designers, database administrators, and users, with more than 280 patches by dozens of PostgreSQL contributors from 18 countries.
Cocoa Dev House Munich
On March 8, 2008 the [Cocoa Dev House Munich](http://cocoadevhouse.org/wiki/index.php/Main/CocoaDevHouseMunich) will take place at [equinux AG](http://www.equinux.de/) in Munich. There are already nearly 30 attendees on the list and I hope that I can write my name on that list soon, too.
