Wednesday, February 6, 2002

OK. Maybe I shouldn't find this so funny, but... here's a thread from the Boston BBS today. Anne Griffin writes: There is an Ant crawling around the inside of my TiBook screen! I'm serious, I can see him underneath the transluscent Apple on my cover! I have no idea how he got inside. The ant in your screen is a she. Males have a very limited role in ant societies. Yes, I knew that, somewhere back in my brain, but that wasn't exactly my first response. 10:28:10 PM | reply [] Wow, I show up on the site report ranking for today. #20. I was sick today (something I ate, I think), but seem to be getting better. Time to robustify that Finder selection code from Monday. 10:23:46 PM | reply [] There's now a Web page for Mozilla's XML-RPC support. 10:17:17 PM | reply [] Doug actually likes the new format of Dan Gillmor's weblog. I still don't, although my 'not a weblog' comment is probably too harsh. Regardless of the format (within reason...), I'll be coming back because I like the content. 6:12:14 PM | reply [] Gamasutra - Features - "Procedural Rendering on Playstation 2" [09.26.01] - This article is interesting, the best I've found about discussing what really programming for the Playstation 2 is like, especially in terms of tools deficiencies (some of which I plan to remedy...) 7:07:07 AM | reply [] This has to be the weirdest Mozilla bug I've ever seen. 2:23:26 AM | reply [] Many people seem to have not understood how text is rendered in Mac OS X, judging by the number of emails I received since I posted the font rendering story yesterday. I've made some changes to it. It's not exactly my best work stylistically, but I'm strapped for time and prefer technical accuracy to making it sound good. I still haven't started on the presentation I need to give at the research group meeting in the morning. I have a feeling I'm not going to be getting much sleep tonight. 2:10:11 AM | reply [] Trying to fix my template, add proper CSS support, etc. I opened up the 'www' folder in BBEdit's file browser. Nothing shows up. What's up with this? It seems to be the default way Radio outputs text files. So, some investigation with my launch tool (shameless plug) reveals: [p1:5] ~%launch -f '/Volumes/GrayExtra/Extra/Radio UserLand/www/2002/01/30.txt' /Volumes/GrayExtra/Extra/Radio UserLand/www/2002/01/30.txt: document type: ' ' creator: 'text' kind: Plain text document What is a creator of 'text'? It's not claimed by any application on my system (launch -nc 'text'). And a type of '    ' (four spaces) is not the same as an empty type; however a type of '????' is. (See Apple's docs.) Jake seems to think it's TextEdit's creator, but it's not: [p2:3] ~%launch -f `launch -ni com.apple.textedit` 12:22AM /Applications/TextEdit.app: Mac OS X application package type: 'APPL' creator: 'ttxt' bundle ID: com.apple.TextEdit kind: Application TextEdit's creator is actually the same as SimpleText's creator. The code in question is in file.writeTextFile. Here's a fun experiment: [p1:26] ~%touch blah 12:33AM [p1:27] ~%SetFile -t ' ' blah 12:33AM [p1:28] ~%launch -f blah 12:33AM blah: document type: ' ' creator: '' kind: Radio UserLand Document Radio actually registers four spaces as a file type! Definite bug. According to the File Extension Guidelines (which I don't 100% agree with, but...) Radio is best off setting the file type to 'TEXT', but setting no creator, instead of its own. "Applications that are not a primary editor for documents of a given type should not set a creator code for those documents." 12:35:02 AM | reply []