Truer Words - A Journal

You Probably Already Read This

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:32:53 GMT

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.

First PMC Software Auction: Deluxe Mac Software Bundle for Business

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 21:59:40 GMT

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.

Jon Udell Using Flip's DesktopSweeper

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 14:25:36 GMT

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. :-)

Firefox (& BBEdit) Problems Due to Corrupt Fonts

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 21:30:03 GMT

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!

Xcode 2.3 is Ready

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 24 May 2006 15:22:58 GMT

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. ;-)

Apple's Screwy SMC Firmware Update for MacBook Pro

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 19 May 2006 15:51:19 GMT

Today I got the SMC firmware update from OS X's Software Updates system. After installing it, I thought I was going to have to send the laptop in for repairs!

After installing the firmware update and rebooting (and then clicking "OK" in the "Firmware Updated" window), every application locked up: Mailsmith, Frontier, Adium, Firefox/BonEcho, BBEdit, SpamSieve. Everything I was running, eventually even the Finder. Couldn't restart 'gently', couldn't even force-quit anything, so I had to force a shutdown with the power button. (I let the beach ball spin for about fifteen minutes before kicking it over.)

After restarting... well, no, I can't say that. The restart wouldn't complete. It stopped at the very first screen, the gray one with the spinning progress indicator. Wait another ten minutes, give up, force a restart. Same thing. Do it again. This time it runs quickly through the startup process like nothing was ever wrong, except…

The system freezes again with only the Spotlight icon in the menubar (in fact, there is no menubar at all other than the little section at the top right with the Spotlight icon). Wait a few minutes, nothing happens, restart again. Same problem. Do it again, this time I get Spotlight and my Airport signal-strength icon. Restart again, but this time I prevent all of my startup apps from running by holding down the shift key.

Finally, my Mac seems to be back in working order, though without any apps running. So I log out and back in again, and the problems are all gone. Everything is running fine.

I've seen lots of reports of problems with this firmware update, but nobody seems to know how to prevent them nor how to fix them once they've started. Complete waste of 90 minutes, but at least everything seems to be back in working order! (Fingers crossed, knock on veneer-resembling-wood.)

"Issues" with Conversion of Character Sets

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 00:50:16 GMT

(Is there any geekier topic..? Ahem.)

A couple people have been testing Frontier's new character set conversion features, as described here. One of the testers said that it works, but the conversion from "macintosh" to "iso-8859-1" has a problem: some single characters are replaced with multiple characters in the output.

Here's an easy example:

	- text is in "macintosh" encoding
	- text contains character 183: ∑
	- text is run through the new convertCharset verb
		string.convertCharset( "macintosh", "iso-8859-1", '∑' )
	- the result is: <sum>

I responded that the iso-8859-1 character set doesn't contain that particular character, so Apple had two options: they could put in a bogus character like Microsoft's converter does, or they could put in a series of characters which actually mean the same thing as the original character. They chose the latter: <sum> for ∑, >= for ≥, etc.

Yes, this sacrifices round-trip fidelity, which at first blush seems like a big mistake, a real issue. One can't convert mac->ansi->mac and end up with the original string.

But really… who cares? Is it that important, in the real world, that you be able to convert a string through a chain of character sets and end up back where you started? (Note that Frontier actually converts a *copy* of the original string… it's up to the scripter to replace it if so desired.)

Isn't it more likely that you're converting a string to another character set because you actually *need* the string in that other character set, probably because someone needs to be able to read the text on another platform?

New Character Set Features in Frontier (Done!)

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 00:46:07 GMT

As I've hinted at a few times, I spent a lot of time in the last few weeks working on text encoding issues. Specifically, in the Frontier kernel, I hooked up the OS API's for converting text between character sets (macintosh, iso-8859-1, utf-8, utf-16, shift_jis, etc., etc., etc.)

Thanks to some help from a few people — especially Jim Correia, someone with some Hard Core experience in this area — everything is working on both platforms. Excellent!

On Windows, I had to actually learn a little about COM programming. (Really, I'm not kidding.) Frontier is now a real COM client (at the kernel level), just so that it can ask the OS for a list of the character sets available on the machine.

I don't really enjoy windows programming, it makes me feel greasy and out of my element, but I must admit that I *did* enjoy seeing it work the first time. It's especially gratifying to see the feature working on both platforms. Also in this case I didn't really have a choice: we needed this for Conversant, and most of the Conversant servers run on Windows.

This Day is D O N E !!!

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 14:17:18 GMT

Oh, I am *so* not getting any work done today.

My brandy-spankin' new MacBook Pro just showed up. 2.16 Ghz.

This is my first new computer since the G4/450, which I bought as soon as the G4 was released. When was that... 2000? 1999?

This is awesome. I'm a little kid again!

A Better History of Apple

seth@macrobyte.net — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 02:37:32 GMT

This is the best and most amazing history of Apple I've ever read.

You could tell, just from looking at him, what the strain of trying to tame that beast for Steve had cost him. Others took up the challenge, but the RDF just wasn't the same, or as reliable.

And, of course, you know what that meant to Apple, and to Steve.

But a few years ago, I was working with Guy Kawasaki on...

Thanks for the link, Brent!

Wired's Apple Screenshot Gallery

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 20:31:37 GMT

Wired News: Apple GUI Gallery

On April 1, Apple celebrates its 30th birthday. Having created one of the first personal computers and the graphical mouse-and-menu interface most PCs now use, it is now reshaping the music industry with the iPod and iTunes. To celebrate the company's birthday, Wired News has a series of special features this week that can be viewed here.

Very nostalgic. There's a lot more in the gallery than just OS screenshots.

I used all of the pre-Mac operating systems in school, and seeing some of those early shots reminded me what it was like.

My parents bought me a mac in 1986: the Macintosh 512Ke. 512 K of RAM! Its best feature was its square pixels. Those little squares changed the world.

(Actually, my memory isn't real clear on the purchase of that Mac. I remember picking it out, and the need for financing because it was anything but cheap, but I don't actually think it was "my" mac. We always kept it somewhere that anybody could use it.)

I've owned dozens and dozens of macs over the years, worked for a dealer, been everything from a desktop publisher to a well paid mac-based consultant to a mac-first programmer. My parents' decision to buy "any computer I wanted" when I went into high school obviously had a huge impact on my life.

Check out the HyperCard shot. (My first programming job was in HyperCard, at New Edge Design in Peterborough, NH, while I was a sophomore in H.S.) It's too bad they left out OpenDoc and CyberDog... but maybe that's a wound best left untouched.

Wow, what a trip. :-)

(Don't miss the link to the very cute Web SE, either.)

AJAX Toolkit Framework for Eclipse!

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 21:08:33 GMT

Excellent!

IBM's AlphaWorks group has released the AJAX Toolkit Framework. It's an Eclipse plugin that provides DOM browsing, syntax checking during editing, javascript debugging... and an embedded Gecko (Mozilla/Firefox) browser. That's cool!

Requirements: Windows. (Cue audio: Wah wah waaaaaahhhhh.) That's a bummer. Guess I can't blame them. It's not like many of the creative types are on Mac or anything.

It's open source, though, so perhaps someone will put in the time to make it cross-platform.

I'm about to install it on my PC, and will report back later with my opinion and results.

Rich Siegel's Interview with Metamac

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 01:41:54 GMT

Rich Siegel was recently interviewed by Metamac, a German Mac magazine (eZine?). I've been too busy to notice until tonight, but I just read through the English version on Rich's site.

If you read it, please let me know if you get any sort of a hint that there's an application Rich might like you to try out. ;-)

Log Out! (Once Per Day)

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 21:54:24 GMT

By some odd coincidence, three times this week I've come across Mac OS X users who don't know the benefits of logging out. That is, they either leave the machine running at night (still logged into their user account), or they put the machine to sleep. They rarely -- if ever -- log out, and only reboot when "something is wrong" or after installing a system update.

My advice: log out once per day. You might just log out at night when you're done using the computer, leave the machine running, then log in again in the morning.

(It's ok to let the monitor/display/screen/whatever-you-call-it go to sleep.)

This accomplishes a couple of things, at least:

If you generally run the same software applications most of the time, it will clear out a lot of memory and give those apps a chance to "start over." This is a very good thing for nearly every modern program: most will run faster, and it will put a stop to some "weird behavior" (that's the technical term). This helps on Windows, too.
Leaving your Mac running (but logged off) at night allows the system (via a utility called cron that you'll never see) to run some system maintenance utilities: another minor performance boon, and it will save a little space on your hard drive. (I actually don't know if Windows does anything like this also.)

There may be other benefits I haven't thought of.

Update January 28, 2006: Please see this post for some clarification and more information.

Apple and Intel

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 18:55:46 GMT

Steve Jobs delivered his keynote at the WWDC this morning.

I'll summarize the summary I read at MacWorld.

Next OS X will be called Leopard, in late 2006
Marklar, the OS X for Intel, exists and has been maintained for five years
They're almost done with PowerPC-based macs
By this time next year, there will be Intel-based Macs
Jobs and Intel's president/CEO hugged on stage

Steve Jobs gives one mean presentation. Guess that's not news, since he's generally considered one of the best there is... but even that summary revealed some of his RDF power.

Buy Tiger, Help Raise Funds for Cancer Research

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 14:11:43 GMT

Planning to buy Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), the new Mac OS X, any time soon?

If so, here's an idea. Buy it through one of the links in this post. You'll get a $35 rebate (or a $50 rebate for the family pack). Plus, you'll be helping to sponsor my ride in the |PMC|.

You don't pay anything extra for buying it that way (and with the rebate, you'll probably pay less), so it's a win-win all the way around, right?

Amazon is shipping Tiger in a few days.

Quick Links: Single License and Family Pack (5 Licenses).

If you do this... thanks! I appreciate it.

(While you're there, why not pick up a copy of the book? ;-)

Safari and WebKit Support WYSIWYG Editing (contentEditable)

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 15:22:29 GMT

Good news! Dave Hyatt reports that they've added support for 'contentEditable' and 'designMode' to Safari version 1.3 (which was released with the update to Mac OS X 10.3.9) and Tiger's forthcoming version 2.0. (It's in WebKit, too, which is the rendering engine used by Safari and shared by many other apps.)

HTML Editing
Safari 1.3 supports HTML editing, both at the Objective-C WebKit API level and using contenteditable and designMode in a Web page. The new Mail app in Tiger uses WebKit for message composition. You can write apps that make use of WebKit's editing technology and deploy them on Panther and Tiger.

I had understood that Safari wouldn't have support for WYSIWYG HTML editing until 2.0 (as I've mentioned before).

This means, of course, that now we have to update Conversant's WYSIWYG plugin, which is based on a beta version of HTMLArea 3. HTMLArea doesn't yet support Safari (and I'm not sure if they're still updating it or not), so it looks like we're on our own here. It also means that WYSIWYG editing is supported by all three of the major browsers: IE, Mozilla/Firefox, and Safari.

I've kicked around the idea of updating our plugin to the latest beta of HTMLArea, but it's just too darn big! Some people might like all the extra features -- and some of them are very nice -- but 100 Kb?!

Anyway, this update to Safari and WebKit should also allow |Brent| to add support for WYSIWYG editing to MarsEdit, without requiring his users to upgrade to Tiger right away.

Lots of other nice features in there, too. Full support for DOM 2, wicked fast JavaScript, XSLT (perhaps the only feature Brian A. will care about!). I'm both impressed and surprised, I was really sure they were going to make us wait for Safari 2 for most of this.

Sam's Clipboard Watcher

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 14:25:34 GMT

I missed this when Sam (DeVore) first released it a few days ago. Better late than never, right?

Sam's random musings >> What Did I Clip:

What is it

ClipboardWatcher is intended to be a one-trick-pony, though like many applications I am sure it will grow into a bloated beast. It's one trick is this. It sits in the background and watches the clipboard for changes, if there is a new text item it will append the plain text (along with some optional information: timestamp and frontmost application name) to the AppendFile.

(Sam, why the grudge against question marks?)

Giles Turnbull has the full story behind Clipboard Watcher in The Birth of a New App.

From newbie request on a mailing list, to functioning release in one week. That's what anyone would call "getting things done".

Nice work, Sam!

I find that it's even useful for writing posts on my journal. As you can see, above, I like to include quotes from various, relevant pages. With Clipboard Watcher, I don't have to keep bouncing back to my editor to paste in another quote: I just turn on the watcher, copy the URL I want, then copy the text I want, then go to the next page I want to quote from and do the same thing. When I'm done, all of my quotes and URLs are together and ready to be used (as above).

Paul Graham's Advice to His Dad: Buy Apple

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 15:11:49 GMT

Paul Graham, in his latest essay, Return of the Mac:

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.

Later he explains that in the mid 80's he told his Dad why he should buy some stock in Sun Microsystems. He didn't listen. He ends this essay with some more advice for his Dad:

So Dad, there's this company called Apple. They make a new kind of computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and underneath is the best Unix machine you can buy. Yes, the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I think a lot of people are going to want these.

Good advice. Check out their stock chart.

Windows 2003 Server, Small Business Edition: Spontaneous Shut Down

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 17:36:56 GMT

The new server is great. Very fast.

The new operating system is not great. Windows 2003 Server Small Business Edition considers it a licensing violation if you do not set up the server as a Domain Controller in Active Directory.

I did not know that.

At first, it displayed dialogs on the other servers on the network, complaining that it (the new server) was not in compliance with the license. It didn't say why or how, nor did the system logs.

Last night, the machine shut down. Completely powered off. I had no way of knowing why, and assumed it had something to do with a bad UPS... yet it powered up again immediately upon request (the ISP hit the button for me). Then it shut down again a little later.

The system logs finally explained the problem:

The server was shut down because it did not comply with the EULA. For more information, contact Microsoft.

OK, Microsoft. Just as you knew you would... you win. I've reinstalled Active Directory and restored the domain forest and dns and all the other junk I didn't need on this server.

All I need is an operating system to run Conversant. None of the extra junk in this crazy platform. Grr.

Flip's IC-Switch Reviewed on MacWorld

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 23:02:26 GMT

Friend-and-former-employee Flip Martin produces a piece of software known as IC-Switch. It's designed to make it very easy to quickly switch the apps you use for certain protocols like http (switch your default browser), mailto (switch your default email program), nntp (default news reader), etc., etc., etc. Mostly useful for web developers and tech support, probably, and it's mac-only. I've mentioned it before.

(MacOS 9 used to include "Internet Config" for doing the same thing. When they didn't produce something similar for OS X, Flip did IC-Switch. Thus the name.)

I didn't notice it until just now, but Flip reported on Tuesday that MacWorld (actually, the MacGems weblog on MacWorld) reviewed it... way back in December.

The author understands why it behaves the way it does (designed for quick and frequent switching), and appreciated it. Very cool. Congratulations, Flip! (And I won't even tease you about the new word you invented. Much.)

DashBoard is NOT Konfabulator

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 09:30:19 GMT

Dave Hyatt, in his first post in the last three weeks, has calmed me down a little about the Dahsboard vs. Konfabulator issue. They're not as similar as Arlo Rose made it sound. (Still almost identical in concept, but not in implementation.)

I wanted to blog briefly to clear up what the widgets actually are written in. They are Web pages, plain and simple (with extra features thrown in for added measure). Apple's own web site says "build your own widgets using the JavaScript language", but that's sort of misleading. The widgets are HTML+CSS+JS. They are not some JS-only thing.

That's a relief. There were rumors posted *before* Dashboard was revealed (weeks before) that a small group in Apple had virtually cloned K in some mean-spirited way, and Apple's description of the widgets as being built with JavaScript seemed to confirm it. With a little hat-tip to Dave, apparently "it's not always worse than it appears." Still bad, but not quite sickening as I had thought.

(In fact, the only way it could have been "worse than it appeared" would have been an actual reverse engineering of K.)

"... how low Apple has sunk ..."

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 29 Jun 2004 12:11:03 GMT

I think you'll all be surprised how low Apple has sunk on Monday.
- Arlo Rose, Konfabulator Developer

That's an understatement. I'm disgusted.

Greg mentioned yesterday in IM, after Dashboard had been revealed, that Arlo is involved with Konfabulator. Since he surely still has lots of Apple connections, perhaps they licensed Konfabulator...?

I wish he had been right.

The Amazingly Prescient Mac OS X

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 19 Jun 2004 11:52:32 GMT

Ok, what is wrong with this picture?

If I had known from the beginning that my mac could index the content of my invoices years before I wrote them (years even before the invoices folder was created), would my business be any different than it is? You'd think that such precise foreknowledge might give me a leg up. The advantages of knowing everything your business will do years in advance would seem to be limitless... but really, that's not true at all. At least, it couldn't do anything to increase the actual invoices, because then the Mac's prescience would have been no better than your average fortune teller's.

In fact, finding the future secretly hidden away in my mac's content index seems to open the same can of logic worms as does travelling to the future (and back again) at any speed faster than one second at a time.

Really, why does Apple taunt us with this stuff? Do they have the key to unlocking paradox in there, too?

Clark's Solution to Virtual PC on a G5

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 27 May 2004 08:57:38 GMT

I guess it bugged Clark that he couldn't run Virtual PC on his G5. His solution is rather creative, and costs only a little more than the still-vaporous upgrade to VPC for which Microsoft's customers are still waiting.

One must own a G5 for this trick to matter. I still don't!

Mozilla and Gnome Consider Alliance, or even Marriage

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 19:03:48 GMT

MozillaZine is hosting a fascinating article about the possible futures of Mozilla (the browser and the organization) and Gnome (the Unix desktop, and the organization). They're talking marriage!

Also, don't miss the discussion in the feedback area, nor Marco Pessenti Gritti's comments on his own page.