If you're a mac aficionado, then you've probably already read it. If you haven't, go read the ultimate Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) review by John Siracusa.

It's not an exhaustive review of everything new or different in 10.5, but it's still quite long. Worth the read if you use a mac every day. Some of it is quite technical, but the review is broken across a number of pages so you can skip the parts that don't interest you.

The first PMC Software Auction is FINALLY live!

There are twenty-one apps in the bundle (a few more than I listed last night). Very low opening price, and the reserve is a lot less than I'm hoping for, too.

It's hard to say for sure, but I would guess that this bundle would appeal to anyone who runs their own small business. Self-employed "contract" workers (people like me, for example).

As a reminder: all of these apps (and over 100 more) were donated by their authors for these auction. There's some award winning software in there, and lots of just generally-useful stuff.

As this is for charity, I tried to find a balance between promoting the bundle (on eBay) and saving money. The more I save, the more will go to the PMC. But if it doesn't sell for a good price, that will have been a mistake.

Psst. Spread the Word. Pass It Around

So, I need your help (dear reader). Please tell everybody about these auctions. You could send them to my home page, or to this weblog which only talks about the auctions (and will list each of them as they go live). If you use NetNewWire or GoogleReader, you could even subscribe to the news feed (RSS) for the auctions blog. Update: Send them here, please.

Now that the first one is up, it will be a lot easier for me to do the rest. I plan to run 3-4 auctions at once, with different software in each auction. The successful auctions will be repeated.

This will only work if people find out about it. If I have to put money into promoting the auctions, the charity gets less.

Flip says:

Jon Udell (yes, the famous writer and analyst) shares my taste for distraction-free desktops, and shows how he achieves it in this six minutes screencast. The only part of the method he presents that's not implemented directly in OS X is done using my DesktopSweeper. Indeed, I've always thought that such a feature should be part of the OS.

Hey, that's very cool. Congratulations, Flip!

Jon Udell's book, Practical Internet Groupware, was a big inspiration behind the design of Conversant. Which has nothing at all to do with the screencast or Flip's DesktopSweeper, except that Flip used to work for me at Macrobyte and was a major contributor to Conversant. :-)

I forgot to mention that I did eventually figure out what was wrong with Firefox.

The symptom was singular: Firefox would lock up shortly after I launched it. I have two different versions on my system, and use different profiles for each of them, but I keep their bookmarks in sync. Since both versions were crashing, I thought the problem must be the bookmarks file. (Yet, I hadn't changed the bookmarks at all.)

In fact, I opened the bookmarks.html file from my Firefox profile in BBEdit, to see if I could spot a problem. I scrolled down through the file... and BBEdit locked up, too!!! Repeatedly.

Finally, I edited the bookmarks file in Vim, deleting the "offending" line which contained — oh the horror — a UTF-8 character which was "above ASCII". Yet, that bookmark had been there for months, without changing. Why the problem now?

When I restarted Firefox with the fixed bookmarks.html file, it didn't lock up... until I tried to load my own home page!

The same thing happened with a brand new profile. And both SeaMonkey and the old Mozilla suite had the same problem. Clearly, the bookmarks.html file wasn't the real problem, it was just a trigger.

But wait... how did BBEdit fit into this mess?

While I was telling Greg about the problem, it hit me. This must be a corrupt font.

That was it. A few of the fonts in my ~/Library/Fonts folder were corrupt. (Apparently, some of that corruption was recent, which is still a concern.) I .zipped up the whole Fonts folder and removed the original, then logged out and back in again.

Problem solved!

Apple has released Xcode 2.3.

You may even be able to get it now if you're patient. It's freakin' huge. 915 Megabytes. (Those darn universal binaries!)

Version 2.3 includes two major changes and a bunch of little changes. The big ones are DWARF support for debugging, and Distributed Network Builds for those who have dedicated build farms. DWARF looks very promising... DNB not so much for my needs.

Xcode 2.3 introduces support for the DWARF debugging format in GCC and the Xcode debugger. Because the DWARF format eliminates duplication of debugging symbols, Xcode builds using DWARF often take up significantly less space on disk and in memory while providing even greater debugging fidelity. For the users of Xcode, this will mean lowered system requirements to build large projects, as well as noticeable improvements in the debugging experience itself.

Pretty cool. They cite some performance improvements, too. I wonder how fast I'll be able to build Frontier/Conversant now. ;-)