New weblog location

After extensive problems like these under Jaguar, and overall dissatisfaction with Radio's speed, I've moved my weblogging to a blosxom site at this URL: http://disco.ucsd.edu/blog. If you're subscribed to this weblog using RSS, please change the subscription to http://disco.ucsd.edu/blog/xml?flav=rss. I've already blogged more on that site than in some weeks using Radio, because it's just so much faster. I'll be setting up the categories there soon - there's already one at http://disco.ucsd.edu/blog/photos. See you there, I hope!
Update: I messed up the rss subscription url for my new blog. The links above should work better. The web page link was correct.
11:32:02 PM    ...comment? ()

A shot from the old days of the net - bookcrossing.com

What a cool idea - put a number in a book, leave it sitting somewhere, and have a website where you can add reviews of it and find out where it got to.

This feels like one of those early 'cool' sites that used to make the web so interesting to comb through all the time.
8:01:52 PM    ...comment? ()

BibDesk on Sourceforge.

I've made BibDesk open-source (BSD license). It's hosted on Sourceforge.net here.

Right now, the source is there in CVS, and I'll be adding file releases soon.

I've created three mailing lists: bibdesk-{announce,users,develop}@lists.sourceforge.net. You can subscribe, if you're interested, at the corresponding page: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bibdesk-{announce,users,develop}.

7:21:37 PM    ...comment? ()

Feature request for Radio

I'd like to see a link to the comments for a post from the locally-served desktop website in Radio. I don't like having to fire up a separate window to see if anyone responded to me.

I wish I could hack this onto Radio, since I have the feeling it'd be a quick hour of code if you knew what you were doing. But, I've spent too much time lately learning new environments. So I'll just post about it on the radio userland discussion lists.
6:55:58 PM    ...comment? ()

Opt-In for CodeSearch

This came up in the comments: How to "opt-in" for CodeSearch?

I'm guilty of using a fancy buzzword for a kludgy process. At the moment, your option for opting-in is to email me. Send me a link to your source, and please make it clear what license it is under. (If it's not obvious, a link to a public version of the license somewhere on the web is also recommended.)

Then it'll be added in the next scan (which isn't currently scheduled - I want to monitor things a little first.)

10:28:02 PM    ...comment? ()

Mode about CodeSearch

I went to all the trouble of learning php just so I could kill email addresses, but it turned out to be worthwhile for other reasons. Here's a few:

Features:

• If you're viewing a source file, it attempts to provide a 'see also' link to the source file's header. And vice versa.
• It tries to provide links to header files by looking for #import statements.
• Some rudimentary syntax highlighting to make everything prettier.

This is all very funky php regexp stuff - I'd so much rather be indexing fancy Doxygen-generated docs. (Or at least Headerdoc)

9:46:24 PM    ...comment? ()

CodeSearch makes it easier to find OS X code examples

Announced: CodeSearch, a search engine that indexes a subset* of Mac OS X open source projects' source code, to make finding examples easier than ever before.

* - it's opt-in, so only those projects who agree to it or volunteer their source are added.

9:38:53 PM    ...comment? ()

Check one off the list

From the list of things I never wanted to do before I died:

Learn PHP
Run with the bulls in Pamplona
Fight The Man
"Working vacation"

5:47:43 PM    ...comment? ()

UCSD Brings Shuttles to UTC!

UCSD has finally gotten the idea - nobody lives on campus, there's no parking, and the SDT buses are *infrequent*. (Twice an hour can make you LATE.)

Starting September 23rd, there's a UCSD shuttle through UTC - stops at Nobel & Lebon, and the UTC Mall, and drops off at the Mandeville Auditorium, every 15 minutes! It's like they made it just for me :)

Ahh, it brings back memories of the Loop back at dear old State.

As a side note, I discovered this thanks to ActiveCampus - they listed the shuttle sites as locations on their system, and it popped up as I located myself at my apartment... Just the kind of serendipity it was designed for!

12:58:27 PM    ...comment? ()

I just noticed this -- in my WWDC copy of Jaguar, the dock let you drag minimized windows out of their usual place by the trash can and leave them in mini-size anywhere on the screen... They just hung out there until you double clicked on them. I thought this was great (except that they didn't remember their position - if you minimized them again, they'd go back into the dock).

But now that's gone in the Jaguar release. Will it be back? Does anyone know what happened?

1:36:06 AM    ...comment? ()

BibDesk under Jaguar

BibDesk under Jaguar works about as well as I hoped (I won't have to rush out a Jaguar release!). It also looks nicer, for free, thanks to the UI improvements in the Cocoa Frameworks. Ahhh.

In other BibDesk news, I'm seriously considering now for the time to start a sourceforge project for it. I don't really know what I'm getting into, though :)

1:10:48 PM    ...comment? ()

Installed Jaguar

So I just installed Jaguar on my daily-use machine, an iBook 600 (no quartz extreme for me) - So far, no major interruptions or surprises. Smooth as broccoli.

It looks like the killer app for Jaguar will be the integrated Address book. Everything's on the same page with phone numbers now. Ahhh.

1:06:22 PM    ...comment? ()

Jaguar Dev tools have some nice improvements over previous betas

I just installed Jaguar on my Desktop, and since everyone has done the Jaguar review to death, I thought I'd mention something I was pretty impressed by: The new Project Builder 2.0.1 - Read the release notes! It has some pretty major improvements, almost all of which were unexpected (by me)...

Improvement #1 - It allows you to execute a shell script from within the text editor. C(ontrol)-r is bound to this by default, which upsets me, 'cause C-r should be reverse incremental search (like it is in my hack onto Mike Ferris' Text Extras, I suppose I'll have to change) - this functionality should be something like C-x C-e ...

Of course, that's just the Emacs talking :)
4:32:07 PM    ...comment? ()

Dan Gillmor wasn't *really* using OS X 10.1?

Dan Gillmor said: "And, in Finder windows, clicking a letter key now gets you to the file or directory starting with that letter."

Now that Jaguar is out, it probably doesn't matter to most people, but this worked just fine in OS X 10.1 also... I just tried it.

This is probably too nitpicky, but I'm curious if it's an indication of whether or not the writer actually explored OS X 10.1 before, or just didn't notice this feature until now, when he starts using Jaguar.
1:41:30 AM    ...comment? ()

Code Search, coming soon

So last month, I had an idea about a search engine for Cocoa open-source code. I posted it on the macosx-dev mailing list, and got a few interested replies, mainly along the lines of "if you build it, they will come." So, I've built it, but right now it's not available to the general public (I'm working to add more searchable code and make the templates look nicer.)

I have one main problem, however: code viewed as straight text in a browser is missing so much of the potential of HTML. If only doxygen worked for Obj-C...

Anyway, I'll probably announce it sometime after I upgrade that machine to Jaguar (it was running the WWDC version of Jaguar, and I'm not ready to rely on prerelease OS software for a server) Hopefully it turns into something people like enough to make it worth the (relatively small) effort. I set it up while waiting for dynaprof (really dyninst) to load executables.

Oh, just to make this post extra long, I used ht://dig for the search engine, and it compiles and runs nicely on OS X. Plays nice with Apache too. (Big surprise)

1:35:19 AM    ...comment? ()

Discreet Radio Blog not great for editing in Radio...?

I have had some trouble with switching to Bryan Bell's Discreet Radio Blog (green). I love how it looks, but when editing from Radio's desktop website homepage [127.0.0.1:5335], it overlaps things on small (read usable) window sizes. I can't remember if Radio did this with other themes, but I do know it's a pain to switch themes, and I'd rather fix this. But I have no idea how. I searched the Radio discussion boards to no avail. Argh. Here's what it looks like in OmniWeb 4.1, which at least covers the underlying text. Mac IE 5 just overlaps text, making it unreadable.

1:22:51 AM    ...comment? ()

Ken Bereskin starts a series on Jaguar features

Ken Bereskin from Apple starts what should be a pretty revealing series of weblog entries on Jaguar: (I think the live updates of currency conversion are pretty cool)

If you've been wondering, I've got the database with the 150+ features of Jaguar and will start posting a couple of them every day.

To kick things off....

Jaguar sports a totally new Calculator. After 18 years, it probably was time to offer something more than the basic bare bones 4 function calc. Anyways, there are two killer features of the new calculator. First, the paper tape is live - make a mistake in a previous calculation? Just go back and edit it and everything will be recalculated! The best feature though is the currency conversion that uses a web-service so you can be sure that your conversions are using up-to-date information. Another transparent use of the net in Jaguar.

[Ken Bereskin's Radio Weblog]
1:04:48 AM    ...comment? ()

Passwords on OS X, Solaris

I have a few pretty long passwords, and as discovered recently by Aaron Swartz, OS X has an 8-character limit on passwords. You can type more, but it won't care. Solaris did this too, and the first time I figured it out, I was very surprised. Essentially, I typed my password (let's say, "b4dp4ssword" - and then I accidentally typed a bunch more crap: "b4dp4sswordfoooooo", and Solaris let me in. Surprising, but not a huge deal. If you really care about password security, try something like this, also pointed to by Aaron Swartz. Or set up One-Time Passwords with pretty keychains: (Links to a Flash tour)
12:59:50 AM    ...comment? ()

Compatibility testing

Problem: I write something for Mac OS X that uses a UNIX utility or environment that only installs with the developer tools, or via fink, etc. (ie, python) Now, if you're a developer, you just have those things as a matter of course - but you can't ship it if it's for regular users. What's worse, is it's so easy to forget what you installed as a part of the usual system customization frenzy...

I just had this thought: If someone organized a service with stock macs (like a sourceforge build farm) for compatibility testing remotely, that'd be a really useful small-developer tool...

You could do it with Apple Remote Desktop, which should be free with every copy of OS X, in my opinion. (Its equivalent is free with Win XP Pro...)
12:34:15 PM    ...comment? ()

Holy moley, Nimoy.

I've been out of town for a while, so I thought the best way to catch up on the blog would be to share a truly wacky link, just like the old days of the web: The ballad of Bilbo Baggins [From widepipe.org].
11:57:59 AM    ...comment? ()