Thursday, January 17, 2002

Wow, when you're not paying attention, time goes by fast. The new B5 movie (and potential series pilot) is on Saturday. Need to find a friend with a TV, including cable and SciFi. This time last year, I was working my way through the entire B5 series on Video CD, which a friend loaned me (he's from Singapore, where they sold the series like that long before it was sold here.) I got Quicken 2002 for Mac yesterday on CD. It wasn't for me, I'm still using Quicken 98 on my PowerBook, but for my father. I used Disk Copy to make an image of it, SSH'ed into my father's PowerBook G4 with OS X, copied the file over, installed it via Timbuktu (as well as an update to Watson which I noticed he was using), and copied his data files off my mom's PowerBook, all while he was in the shower. I love the Internet. 6:11:14 AM | reply [] I didn't mention the conclusion to my Eudora-crashing story of yesterday, while I was desperately trying to get my research proposal finished. The short-term solution was to use Entourage, which I really do like, but the idea of my email being stored in a none-too-robust database is not one I'm happy with. In fact, as a reminder, my MacSOUP article database got somewhat corrupted today. Like the wonderful piece of software it is, MacSOUP stepped me through rebuilding it, but I did lose a few old articles. (Not worth it to restore from backup the contents of uiuc.test.) Through Mac OS X's fs_usage tool, I found the strange software conflict that caused Eudora to start crashing. It wasn't Eudora's fault by any means. I posted my experiences as a reply to this thread on comp.mail.eudora.mac if you're interested. My eventual solution to this whole mail situation will be to set up a good, fast and reliable IMAP server, probably Courier, since I can use Mutt to access its mailboxes locally as well. Last week I was at a bookstore and saw O'Reilly's Managing IMAP, which covers the UW imapd (which I will not use under any circumstances because of the number of lurking security holes there); and CMU's Cyrus (uses a proprietary format, and is really designed for huge installations). With my mail stored in safe Maildirs, I can use Entourage, Eudora, or both, and know that my mail will be safe. 3:58:46 AM | reply [] The Mac SIG of our university's ACM chapter, MacWarriors, is having a Game Day (thinly disguised demo) this Friday at the Illini Union. I hear that they're going to be showing off the new iMac. Since I'm still thinking about getting one for home to replace my poor old broken PowerBook, I'm there. On Web browsers OmniWeb's CSS support is improving: in version 4.1sp28, released today, it finally displays the background color and border of the heading in my bookmarks page. Previously it only recognized the foreground the color, which happened to be white, so I saw a white block at the top of the page. I have to admit that I used OmniWeb as my primary Web browser in Mac OS X 10.0.x (and bought a copy), but I switched to Internet Explorer in OS X 10.1, and aside from checking out each new version of OmniWeb, I don't use it any more. MacIE's speed was not usable in 10.0.x, but is usable (not great) on my machine in 10.1. Also, the interface of IE is still better designed than OmniWeb's, and its page compatibility with respect to CSS and JavaScript is much higher. However, since MacIE is essentially on life support these days, Mozilla is our best hope for a free, standards-compliant web browser. Mike Pinkerton, Simon Fraser, Steve Dagley, and others are doing their best to make Mozilla into a decent browser, and I totally support them in that. Right now, pink and Dave Hyatt are working on getting nsITheme support into Mac Mozilla (it's already there for Windows XP), so the Mac OS X Classic theme can use Appearance for drawing controls. The upshot is that Mozilla will look and feel more like a real Mac application. This builds on some earlier work Patrick Beard did for the 'theme' protocol—speaking of that, I have been having lots of success with Patrick's Java plugin for Mozilla. OmniWeb is definitely my favorite Mac web browser to write in, because it does on-the-fly spelling checking, "smart" editing (removes extraneous spaces when you cut and paste) and has text drag-and-drop and Undo. All of these come free with Cocoa's NSTextView). When I'm at home, in a hurry or on low-bandwidth connections, I use a text-based web browser called w3m. If all you've used is Lynx, and don't find the idea of browsing the Web without graphics abhorrent, I'd suggest taking a look at w3m. It handles frames and tables, has color and mouse support, and is very fast. I especially like the way you can navigate around the page without being restricted to the link structure (the way Lynx and Links do it), and search within the page to find something. The latter is a lot like MacIE 5.1's type-ahead feature for links. Until Tantek posted a list of the new IE 5.1 Classic features, I had forgotten, since the feature had been added at MacHack several years ago. One very interesting feature of w3m is the use of an external editor for text areas. That means, when I navigate to a text area and click on it, or type return, Emacs starts up! A real text editor for writing on the Web. Ugh. One thing I definitely want is for this text box to be bigger. Or maybe it's a hint that my weblog posts are too long. 2:13:28 AM | reply []