Posts tagged with mac

MacBook users have started to discover over the last few years that their batteries can take a total nosedive into uselessness in just a few months. The first battery on my 2008 MacBook Pro was dead by the end of 2009, flat dead, and out of warranty too. Damn. Cause of death? Lack of "battery conditioning" also known as "calibration".

If you want to know how to calibrate your battery, you can refer to this hard to find guide from Apple:

To calibrate the battery:

1. Plug in the MagSafe power adapter and fully charge the MacBook or MacBook Pro battery until the light on the MagSafe connector changes to green and the Battery icon in the menu bar indicates that the battery is fully charged.
2. Allow the battery to rest in the fully charged state for two hours or longer. You may use your computer during this time as long as the power adapter is plugged in.
3. Disconnect the power adapter with the computer on and start using it with battery power. When the battery's charge gets low, you’ll see the low battery warning dialog on the screen.
4. Continue to keep your computer turned on until it goes to sleep. Save your work and close all applications when the battery's charge gets low and before the computer goes to sleep.
5. Turn off the computer or allow it to sleep for five hours or longer.
6. Reconnect the power adapter and leave it connected until the battery is fully charged. You may use your computer during this time.

Pretty easy to understand, right? Yeah, the only problem is that even though you're supposed to this every month or two, there's no facility on the mac that actually, you know, prompts you to do it. Nothing, nada, zap diddly doo. You'd think that Apple with their vaunted usability standards would pop up a message at the right time saying "hey, now would be a good time to condition the old battery, here's how to do it".

Also, Apple's instructions are missing two other key pieces of information. The first is that you should immediately download a wonderful app called Coconut Battery. Go ahead, I'll wait. It will tell you how crap your battery is and you can save the data to get a history over time.

Second is that that condition is not something you can overdo. Don't just do it once. Do it twice, three times even. Keep doing it until you stop seeing  capacity gains in coconut battery. Most recently, my first condition went from 71% to 76%, and the second brought me up to 80%. I'm going to see how high I can get.

All in all this is a bit of a failure on Apple's part, and it makes you wonder if perhaps they are making a load of money from selling replacement batteries. It doesn't seem in character for the company. More likely, they just haven't put the time into designing a proper monitoring system that detects when you need to condition. Hopefully we'll get that soon.

Mac OS X 10.7—the OS that no one is talking about—should be the next major release of the venerable Mac OS X (since 1989!) So, what will it look like? Seems like nobody knows. All of the focus has been iPhone and iPad for so long that it seems like everyone has forgotten about the old desktop/laptop computers.

Frankly, although Mac OS X is easier to use than Windows or Linux, it's still not what I would call "easy to use". I see not only my parents but even programmers bumble around with trying the locate the right window, the invisible application with no windows open, and lots of UI fragmentation (for example, should you have a "start screen", or open a blank document, or open the last document, or what).

As far as things went in the past, Apple was stuck with that system. For example, if they had moved the menu bar from the top of the screen to the top of the window (like every other operating system ever) there would have been howls of protest from the Mac clan back when they introduced OS X. Believe it or not, OS X was actually a step backwards from OpenStep in many ways. Steve Jobs and the NextStep clan were forced to adopt many old Mac conventions even when they didn't work particularly well.

Remember that the Mac interface was designed for a strictly one-app-at-a time system. That's right, the first Macs did not have multi-tasking, not even fake "co-operative" multi-tasking. So the whole idea of having menu and windows separated wasn't so confusing at first. But then System 6 came along with the MultiFinder and things started to go a little wacky (and note, that was after Jobs left the company).

The iPhone was a blank slate, and so Jobs and the UX gurus at Apple could go back to square one and design an OS that was well and truly proper. Don't doubt that they spent many years on it prior to the public even hearing about the iPhone touch UI, probably since circa 2003, maybe sooner. There were always tablet dreams circulating in the company. I had conversations about it there in 2001.

The blank slate meant they could get rid of all the broken things in Mac OS X. And indeed in all window-based operating systems. Like, floating windows. The original "windows" designs at Xerox PARC didn't float, they were just arranged in a grid. Much simpler to understand. And that indeed is the paradigm used on the iPad, where they are called panels instead.

So... what comes next? I predict that the next step for Mac OS is going to be a major revamp of the UX for desktops and laptops to bring back the best ideas from the Touch UI. I would personally be glad to see the last of the Apple Menu, the File menu, all of the submenus. Most of the Finder I could scrap as well (keep the column view of course :-). No application should ever NOT have a window visible—that's just crazy. It would be nice if they could sort things out so that I don't have to care which applications are running vs. not running. Maybe they could even—somehow—eliminate floating windows. Maybe that's too much to ask.

Since they've been able to break with the past in the iPhone/iPad, I hope that they'll be able to find a way to bring the best parts of the new and integrate them with the old Mac OS X ... the user interface that hasn't changed in any major way in 20 years.

(PS: and I wouldn't count on it being called 10.7 either...)

Trying to encode URL parameters on Mac or iPhone? Frustrated because NSString stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding encodes non-URL characters but leaves the reserved characters (like slash / and ampersand &) alone? "Apparently" this is a "bug" apple is aware of, but they haven't done anything about it yet, and so, here is a solution that actually works.

Try this:

  NSString * encodedString = (NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(
    NULL,
    (CFStringRef)unencodedString,
    NULL,
    (CFStringRef)@"!*'();:@&=+$,/?%#[]",
    kCFStringEncodingUTF8 );

As an example, @"'Decoded data!'/foo.bar:baz" will become "%27Decoded%20data%21%27%2Ffoo.bar%3Abaz".

Obviously you would use this, not on the full URL, but just on the parameters.

How great is this. You can use any language you want in your MacRuby projects. Want to add in some code you already wrote in Objective-C++? No problemo!

Check out the cool screenshot below which shows everything in action! (You might have to click on the full post view to get the picture).

Also, you might be wondering how to get full bi-directional bridge going on between Ruby and Objective-C/Cocoa. In otherwords, how do you call/access/include/import/require your own Objective-C classes from Ruby and your Ruby objects from Objective-C? It's actually done sort of automagically. If you have a Ruby class Foo and a ObjC class Bar...

(You seem to have to use NSClassFromString(@"FooController") to avoid getting a linker error. Apparently the bridge is not yet running at compile/link time. Also, you (seem to) have to type your bridged objects to id in ObjC, although maybe there's a way around both those limitations that I don't know about yet.)

# Foo.rb
class Foo
  def foo
    puts 'FOO'
    bar = Bar.new
    puts bar.bar
  end
  def baz
    return "BAZ"
  end
end

// Bar.h
#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
@interface Bar : NSObject {
}
- (NSString*)bar;
@end

// Bar.m
#import "Bar.h"
@implementation Bar
- (NSString*)bar; {
  id foo = [[NSClassFromString(@"FooController") alloc] init];
  NSLog(@"%@", [foo baz]);
  return @"BAR";
}
@end

And you will get this output when you call Foo.foo:

FOO
2009-02-10 02:46:28.017 Untitled[37257:10b] BAZ
BAR

Boing boing boing! Enjoy!!!!

It was a mac shareware company that made some great games: Scramble in particular, was a lot like the current Word Challenge game on Facebook, and then there was Spin Crisis, and a CHM reader called Chimp... and now they are gone without a trace. Their old domain takes you to some band.

All I know that isn't available on google is that when I emailed them, the response was from Shawn Henry. Shawn, if you're out there—what happened?

Update: Here's Sphera Software's home page on the Wayback Machine. It identifies the following people as having been part of Sphera: Shawn Henry (head programmer, student in Ottawa), Neale McDavitt (graphic designer, Montreal), Michael Keogh (musician, Ottawa), Anca Szilagyi (wordsmith, Brooklyn). It looks like several of them were students, and maybe the company broke up when they graduated.

Unfortunately they didn't leave forwarding addresses. But I'm sure you can find some of them if you google.

Someone asked me recently to describe my home theatre. I've put quite a lot of thought & work into it. But not a lot of money. My goal from the start was to achieve the maximum return with the minimum of complexity.

So, right from the start I knew that it was going to be as much digital as possible. I don't care about live TV and I'm a bittorrent expert so I knew I wouldn't have to mess around with cable connections. But more to the point, being digital means you don't have to worry about analog components or duplication. For example, you can concentrate on having just a single Digital/Analog Converter (DAC)... a key component in your audio set-up.

The first thing I bought was the DAC & speakers. I had a new apartment and I wanted to be able to listen to music there. In particular, I wanted to be able to do two things: listen to music coming off my Nokia N95, which functions like an iPod, and listen to music coming off my laptop, a MacBook Pro. I did a lot of research online to figure out how I could get the best sound with a budget of $400. And I wound up finding a REALLY nice pair of speakers.

I actually restricted my search strictly to powered speakers, or, as they are commonly called, "ipod speakers"... and most of them are fairly crap. Even the ones from Apple didn't really score that well when I listened to them. I'm a musician on the side and I know what good sounds like. None of the ones I could find in stores reproduced sound the way I wanted—clean, like the original, faithful. They were bass heavy and muddy. But online I read a review of AudioEngine 5, a pair of "ipod speakers" that got fabulous reviews—from audiophiles.

You probably know that audiophiles are nutcases, but there is something to be said for their discrimination and knowledge of the art. If an audiophile says something is good, then it probably rocks if you're a normal person, even a musician like me. So, I found a deal and bought the A5s for $350. And I picked up an Apple Airport Express at the same time.

Both purchases turned out better the more I learned. The A5s have built-in amplifiers, which means that I don't need to (a) buy an amp (which I planned) or (b) match the amp to the speakers. That's a relief because sound matching amp/speakers would be a LOT of work. With the Airport Express, I started to notice something odd. When I plugged my MBP directly into the speakers, it sounded OK. But when I played through the Express, it sounded GREAT. Turns out the Express has a quite good DAC inside. Sweet! The improvement is highly audible.

OK, a little digression here about speakers. Most products, you get what you pay for. Not with speakers. Speakers are in fact somehow immune to the whole mass production economics. Most audiophiles seem to agree that most, or perhaps all, consumer grade speakers are absolute shit. To get good speakers you either spend absolutely boatloads of money, buy second-hand, or ... you can buy from very small companies, even individual crafters. Audioengine falls into the last category. Even though their website may look slick, this is a small enthusiast company that just wants to make great speakers.

What's up with that? I don't know. I think partly it's the analog ecosystem. For good analog components you just cannot avoid spending a lot of money on expensive electronics to put inside. You can't skimp or replace things with digital. You have to have huge capacitors, big transistors, lots of coiled wire, heavy metal. Good speakers are HEAVY. They are made not from plastic or even titanium but MDF—that's plywood in normal english. You can't fake this stuff, you have to have it, but it's not rocket science, just good workmanship. So, buying from a small company like Audioengine is not silly, it's a great choice. End of digression.

So... now I had a REALLY good sound system and spent countless hours discovering all kinds of wonderful things about my music collection. It really makes a difference. In fact, I admit that I've poisoned my ears on lesser systems... I just need to hear the higher quality. The music is just ... better. There's more in it, detail wise, spatially, musically, tonally. Get a good pair of speakers & DAC, and you too can discover the magic.

Next up: TV. Starting out, I thought I wanted the biggest plasma I could buy. I read all of the reviews, the dark room tests, HD movies, the works. Plasma is the best, blah blah blah. Went to a big store and suddenly I realized different. Two things for me. One: I'm only about 8 feet from my screen and I don't want to be dwarfed. So, I can knock down the screen size dramatically, in fact, I went down to 32 inches. Crazy eh? Second: I have a sunny upper-floor viewing room with a window directly opposite the display, and I intend to watch during the day. That means matte screen which means LCD. Benefits are that I save money due to the small size, don't have to worry about burn in or wasting power, and I know what LCDs are like from long experience. So I wound up with the Sharp AQUOS 32D64U. This model has 1080p, which was essential for me. I have to be future proof. It's going to be a long time before there's a higher resolution than that for films.

Finally, I need something to tie it all together, and here my Mac bias definitely played a role. Mac Mini of course. Of course it helps that they are silent, small, and look very good indeed. No ugly boxes for me. I run VLC and mplayer, but mainly Plex, and awesome port of XBMC. Video goes through a DVI to HDMI converter into the TV, and sound goes analog into the speakers (A5's have two inputs). My only complaint is again, the Mini's analog audio output is not as good as the Airport Express. Eventually I will have to buy a dedicated DAC.

This setup does everything I need, and it's got a good future. If and when I want to move up to new components, all of these pieces will make excellent secondary system components for a second room. They all go together really well, look good, and look and sound great. All told the whole system was about $2K which is a reasonable price considering that I'm basically completely satisfied at this point in time.

For the future? I might—might—try out surround sound at some point. I'm not crazy about—pointless for music, but for the movies—maybe. I definitely don't need a bigger screen. A proper external DAC, driven by USB port, is probably the next item to get, and then I would begin the search for a new amp/speaker combo. Realistically though I can't upgrade my speakers (or add a sub-woofer) until I move into a house. My apartment does not have thick walls and with the A5 bookshelf-sized speakers I can crank it up any time without waking people up.

So, there you have it... complete system, as digital as it can get, and in the $2K range. I'm happy.

Mac OS X has Spotlight (Cmd-Space) which rocks for not just finding files but launching applications (just start typing the name). I just discovered it also does math, just like google. For example, try typing in 5*9+pow(sqrt(10),3) . Nifty.

Alas it doesn't do currency conversion or unit conversions. Maybe in 10.6...?

So after something on the order of 4 years I've finally upgraded my FTX program that draws fractal trees in 2 dimensions. I'll update the program's home page later, but in the mean time, here's the download link, with source code included.

Fractal Trees X 2 beta 1 (FTX2b1)

This has the advantage over the "alpha" in that it actually works the way it's supposed to.

Why am I returning to this after so long? Well, suddenly coding for Macs is cool again, and also I was going to try out MacRuby. So... first get it working in ObjC again I guess, and then we'll see — maybe I'll port it to iPhone and sell it for $0.99 a pop :-) :-)

(NB This version probably only works on Intel / 10.5.)

Yummy FTP is a great Mac FTP program with side-by-side browsing, sychronization, remote editing, etc. I'm not a huge fan of the icon but other than that it's great.

So why do people keep ignoring it?

I've been trying to figure out how to get a perfect CD rip on my mac. The problem in a nutshell is that ripping CDs is "unreliable", in other words, it is impossible to be sure when you rip a CD that you have the correct digital data. How good a copy you get depends on your drive and the software you use.

Why care? In the most extreme cases you can literally get blips and pops in your MP3 file. This might occur even with a totally unscratched disc. But more likely you will get a subtle degradation of quality which will be noticeable if you have a good sound system, and that sucks. So.

The gold standard in secure ripping is Exact Audio Copy, a Windows-only program and likely to stay that way forever. Why? Because you can run it in boot camp or Parallels or whatever. If you want to use EAC definitely follow a how-to guide such as Exact Audio Copy Guide. EAC does not come preconfigured properly.

If you must use a Mac-native program, check out Max, and have look online in how to set it up for maximum secure mode, because it doesn't come in that mode by default. Max was originally written more as a transcoding program (converting between formats) but now supports a linux-originating cd ripper called cdparanoia. Audiophiles still prefer EAC to cdparanoia, and I'm not going to tell them they're wrong, even though they are occasionally insane and overly conservative, so I would say stick with EAC.

Oh yeah, and I would also say, rip into FLAC format. Then, use something like Max to convert from FLAC to MP3 320 Kbps (using LAME "insane" mode) for import into iTunes, use on your ipod/phone/mp3 player, etc. In practise it's unlikely you will be able to hear the difference between a lossless format and a 320 mp3. If you REALLY need to you can use Apple Lossless until Apple supports FLAC, but I like FLAC better as it's the open standard and everyone uses it. Archive the FLAC files for the future. You get to keep a perfect copy but not waste GBs of space on your mobile device.

And by the way, if you download music from BitTorrent, you might as well get FLACs, and they are almost always ripped with EAC.

UPDATE: Actually X Lossless Decoder looks like a good replacement for Max. It has the added ability to split a single huge FLAC/CUE combination into multiple MP3s (or any other format) automatically. Just drag the .cue file onto XLD and you're away.

When I first saw this, I thought, hey cool! Then I took a screenshot and when it came through in the screenshot, that was even cooler. It's not often you get something like this. Memory corruption, maybe, not terminal, and not detected by the graphics software. My laptop gets hot sometimes, maybe the memory got corrupted that way? It happened on wake from sleep. Anyway, voila.

It sort of went away when it redrew areas of the screen but not completely, so I restarted.

What do you get when you mix HTML, CSS, Javascript, Asynchronous Javascript, a web server, a web browser, interprocess communication, and native application views?

I was on "vacation" during August. I only got to have 5 days of "real" vacation because some stuff cropped up for work but I did do some sort of recreational programming. And I had this idea that seemed like a good idea, and my programmer buddies didn't immediately shoot it down as being completely stupid, so, I did up a demonstration in Objective-C and it's called Bottlenose.

Bottlenose is a way to enable graphic designers, and HTML/CSS/Javascript designers, to directly create the interface for a native application. Where a "native application" is something that runs right on the computer, like a work processor (not a web app, ASP, or applet).

I might have used pure java but (a) there's no good web browser API available for free and (b) Apple's WebKit is sooo easy to use and well documented. But still - Bottlenose could easily be ported to other platforms. In fact, I want to see it especially on Linux. Because I think that on Linux it could make a big improvement in the UIs if the graphics people could write it themselves. That is, after all, the Linux philosophy.

Anyway, I have this idea of running a contest to develop UIs for the demo that are better than the one I made. I'll probably even throw in a valuable prize of some sort (some books?) for the winner, and post all of the good entries.

If you have any comments at all, or think it's a good/bad idea, feel free to contact me .

Cory dumps on Apple's decision to use Hardware DRM in OS X . Cory is smart but sometimes I think he's dead wrong about stuff. OK, mobile phones and mobile computing specifically. But I have to say that I share his dislike of Apple's move to hardware DRM in the official developer version of OS X on Intel. It's nasty. It's not right. It shouldn't be done.

Basically, if Apple releases new Macs with hardware DRM I will have to seriously consider switching to Linux. I just can't handle the idea that someone else gets to decide if I can use my computer and what I can do with it. What I install on it, what applications I get to run, and which I don't. It's my machine.

My prediction is that Apple WILL ship with some form of Hardware DRM. My HOPE is that it won't work. If it doesn't work, I suppose I'll buy it and disable the DRM.

If it does work? I don't know. That will be not good.

The problem is of course that I love using the Mac. Apple makes great products. Even the good OSS software that I use - like VLC and Sympa - doesn't have the high quality interface that Apple provides.

On the other hand, it might be the kick in the ass that OSS needs to get with it and put together quality interface.

Damn. Well, I'm glad at least that I'm not actually working on Marklar any more, and I don't have to feel like I'm part of this machine that's destroying the world.

OK, I've been waiting for four long, long years to tell you this. My "Secret Project" at Apple was Marklar aka OS X on x86, finally announced today! I'm not going to say today whether I think it's a good idea or a bad idea, or what, but I will say this. In 2001, my job at Apple was Program Manager for the Marklar project. When I started, Marklar was relatively moribund, being nursed by a handful of Core OS engineers. Lots and lots of new code had been introduced in OS X from the old Mac side, and new code written, since the last release of Rhapsody worked on Intel.

My job was to get the system working on x86 again and that's what I did. I traced dependencies like there was no tomorrow. I worked with engineers in a dozen different divisions, each time making first contact with the division manager, then finding just the right person for the job. Each time the same drill: "I'm going to tell you about a project that is Need To Know only. You can't tell anyone about this, even inside Apple. I'm not even going to tell you everything, just the minimum that you need to know in order for us to continue. If you're wondering who the hell I am and why you should listen to me, ask you manager who will just tell you to do it."

I went on leave in fall 2001 after the WTC thing, but by the time I left the Marklar team gave a demo to something like the top 100 managers of the company with a working Marklar system complete with Finder running and a whole range of apps. I kicked ass!

Obviously such an important part of my professional history, but until TODAY I haven't been allowed to breathe a word. A very SENSITIVE project, of all sensitive projects! But now, tell everyone, tell your friends!

OK, just some notes. To decompile any java jar, use something like this:

javap -c -classpath ./semacoderead.jar org.semacode.imagerec.Ecc200Decoder 

I'm using mpowerplayer on OS X to do my J2ME compiling, which makes things pretty easy, except that I want to use the ProGuard obfuscator. Obviously! You NEED to obfuscate if you've got code like mine (for semacode) that needs to be protected from reverse engineering which is SUPER easy with java. It's available from fink.

Sweet. I just build and installed and ran the series 60 "form" example app .. from Mac OS X!

I've got more or less complete notes on what I did that I'll post a little later. Now, I can finally get along to building apps that work on Nokia's S60 SDK 2.1 (aka Series 60 platform 2.1, Feature Pack 1).

Want to run some command line java app on OS X, but tired of getting the whole dock-launch app-icon thing? Just add -Djava.awt.headless=true to the java command line!

Here's some really lame copy from the iWork page

Pages includes 40 Apple-designed templates for all our customers

...someone wrote that in a hurry.

No powerbooks. Hmm... I'm going to need a new one soon.

The Mac Mini is an odd beastie. It's like a rehash of the Cube. Which we all know was Steve's favorite form factor ever. (see NeXT cube). Maybe they're hoping to sell this to people who already have computers, so they'll basically replace the PC box with the Apple box and keep the same monitor that they already have. Will that work? I don't see people buying this new with a monitor and keyboard from Apple. I don't see them buying it new with a monitor and keyboard from other people either. Maybe it's supposed to be an upsell.

Oh yeah, and one more thing. iWork's Pages is the most interested of the announcements to me. I've been waiting a long time for a decent wordpro from apple. Will this one be it? I also really has to definitely, positively work with Word .docs.

The only problem is that there's no spreadsheet. So for the time being, I will still need to keep Microsoft Office around. I get a lot of Excel docs in the email.

In response to my post Rui noted some pics of what purports to be an Apple 'iHome'. The photos aren't photoshopped, but it looks to me like a mock up. I did some "forensic analysis" in photoshop (I've been doing a lot of image processing lately).

I used photoshop's edge-detection convolution code to locate any strong/fast colour gradients in the image. This is a good way to find hard-to-see features.

This first big clue showed up using Find Edges and Levels. There's an extra horizontal line on the back of the box between what should be the top edge and the apple logo.

Also what are those vertical lines that run across the ports? They look a bit like the lines that appear in transparent shrink-wrap packaging.

This image of the front of the box shows what appear to be the edges of a card or inserted sheet of paper under a plastic wrap.

Plastic wrap might also explain the rainbow line effect that is visible across the dvd slot. Due to thin-film interference (diffraction).

For the next images I used Levels and Hue/Saturation. The blocking comes from JPEG.

Home run. There's a tell-tale colour transition on both sides between the card and the background material. The card shows up more brownish in the top pic, the background/box material as purple-ish. This indicates two different kinds of material.

I'm going to throw caution to the wind and make another prediction ( see previous ) about Apple. I think that their new headless system is going to be a PVR (like TiVo).

First, though, let me explain why it's not going to be just a cheap iMac. Basically Apple has an image to maintain. Literally. Quality imaging is very important to the brand and to Jobs personally. The vast majority of PC monitors are not really up to the kind of quality video that Apple ships with their machines. They would have to go against their established principles to ship a Mac that's intended to run with third-party monitors.

On the other hand, there are several reasons why an Apple PVR makes sense.

1. The PVR is a successful product, but also one ripe for expansion into the mainstream. Apple can dominate.

2. Most people now have an integrated Audio/Visual setup, where the TV and the stereo are connected. An Apple PVR can serve as an iTunes hub for the iPod and connect with the stereo. And it would also integrate with iPhoto with the TV screen as a slide show viewer.

3. The iApps are adaptable to a TV screen resolution. That would include iTMS.

4. If Apple's going to make a Video iPod, where's the video going to come from? Why, the iPVR, of course. Video to go, as they say.

5. One more thing: look either now or in the near future for an iTMS-like store for downloading movies.

Form factor? The usual connections, plus some kind of TV tuner and A/V spots. The software form factor will need to be set up for low-rez display and remote control input device.

Yes, it truly is cool: paean on the OS X color picker .

Bonus: Christopher Holland posted an OS X color list (.clr file) that you can just copy into the Library/Colors folder on your disk and it will update the colors palette with a new list: the entire list of "Resene" colours from X11. While that might seem lame on the face, it's a totally great list, with for example, the following shades of gold:

• gold drop
• gold tips
• golden bell
• golden dream
• golden fizz
• golden glow
• golden sand
• golden tainoi

What's more incredible - that they have 8 shades of gold or that someone gave them all different names? Anyway, he blogged his work or you can avoid the wacky CSS layout and download the .clr file directly .

I finished writing up my HOWTO on using Linux to develop for Symbian. Specifically, it covers Series 60 but the tools can be used for other variantions of Symbian as well.

I upgraded to Panther (OS X 10.3) a week or so ago and I started having troubles with my development environment. Not so much XCode, that seemed to be working fine. But I coulnd't get AxKit to work. And mozilla / camino to build (but that might be another story). So anyway I'm trying to build AxKit and getting horrible error spews when I try to install the XML::LibXML perl module. I try to debug it and I find there's just too many versions of libxml installed. I can't figure out which one it's trying to use. So after pruning out some versions, that didn't help, things seemed even worse. Finally I decided to nuke my entire fink installation. Someone said that fink gave problems when upgrading to panther.

Then I reboot my machine and it won't reboot. It hangs at a seemingly random place in the boot process. So I finally did what I should have done at first, which is forget about the "upgrade install" and just wipe out my old system and do a clean panther installation. I can do that, because I keep my home directory on a different partition. I simply create a symlink to it on the root partition. Works like a charm.

Now I'm reconstructing my system again. Hopefully this time it will work better.

This is amazing: A Speed Reader for some books by Cory Doctorow. It's based on some kind of PARC research. Try it out. Then compare how far you went in the normal book form. I was really surprised.

Also, I just updated my OS X HOWTO for AxKit on Panther.

Mike Pinkerton, lead for Camino, just landed my history patch. This is my first major patch to go into Camino, it's about 1000 lines of code changes or so. It fixes the history view so that you get to see a flat, time-ordered listing with daily folders.

I just posted another alpha of the screen saver. This one fixes the anti-aliasing problem and adds a requested feature to speed up colour animation. Get it here.

I also posted some new gallery images. It really doesn't compare to seeing the thing in operation, but maybe you can get a taste for what it looks like. See more.

By the way the nifty gallery widget is AxKit::App::Gallery by Nik Clayton. It caches the thumbnails at smaller sizes to give the downloads a break, and it generates them automatically as well, so less work for me.

Do you have Mac OS X? Download my screen saver . It's powered by OpenGL. It draws about 60 000 primitives per second now on my machine. I suppose to make it any faster now I'd have to look at the math logic and method passing. Also in this version is the option to draw points instead of lines. It's on by default because I think it looks better.

I just released my first ever screensaver. Get it here .

I just released a new version of FractalTreesX . It's a total alpha, complete with loads of bugs and some very odd behaviour when the size of the tree changes, but it's a LOT faster. I think it's probably about 3-4 orders of magnitude faster now. And the code is completely rewritten and I am MUCH happier about that. I would even say go and read it, because it's pretty good looking. I removed the total spaghetti that someone (initials are MYI...) told me was a good way to do it and replaced it with a nice simple multithreaded engine.

Mike Pinkerton says that he's making some progress on the Panther drawing bug. That's good because any kind of 0.8 release of Camino would have to have that fixed. Also since I don't actually have panther yet, I hope that I don't have to upgrade to look at this problem since I'm still happy waiting for other people to make sure panther doesn't have any big stupid mistakes in it.

My Camino bookmarks patch .

Check out the link. You'll see "thanks to ... simon woodside". I did ton of work on this bookmarks patch. I won't go into the gory details, maybe in a few years. One problem with being a "program manager" (ala Apple and Microsoft) is that you can't take much credit for what you do. Mostly it's "glue" work and we all know how much credit glue gets. I do like to get credit for what I do. So, in that sense, the program manager type role is kind of unfulfilling.

I don't know really what to do about that. The individuals who I work with / have worked with I think fully appreciate what I do/did as a program manager. And I say "did" because this most recent experience kind of nudged me away from taking on that kind of job again. On the other hand, it's cool to see Camino moving again. I think I played a fairly central role in that.

OK, make that funny but TRUE:

From Microsoft, we just want products that don't completely ream us. From Apple, we want the entire world to seem a little friendlier and cooler with every product release, every dot-incremenent OS update. They both disappoint us, but the expectations seem a little different...

In fact there's lots of good comments in this story about the VT Mac OS X (!!!) supercomputer (by the way it's running Mac OS X !!!!)

To log Mail.app's activity on a specific port, launch it from the Terminal. Use the option: -LogActivityOnPort ## where ## is the port number you want to watch. 25 is for smtp, 110 is for POP.

Ludovic Hirlimann has a weblog where he talks about Camino sometimes. And for the rest, practice your French ;-)

I'm involved in the Camino project for Mozilla. It's a pretty face for the Gecko engine basically. Recently the whole Mozilla project was transferred to a new foundation. Mike Pinkerton was moved to a different job at AOL but he's got the nightly builds going again and I've been testing out David Haas' rewrite of the bookmarks manager. Looks good so far. It includes some novel features that I think might be cool, like a top-ten list, and Address Book integration. Could you manage all your bookmarks in the Address Book?

So I kinda sorta have a computer that's finally capable of running WinCrap32 on my powerbook, and what do you know I need to install service packs. Galore. It's so precise that it tells me exactly how many and how big they will be:

Total: 19 = 10.600000000000001 MB

What the hell is that???

Got myself a new computer now. The old one was getting pretty old (2 years old almost exactly) and sloooooowwww and not enough disk space. I was actually at the point where I had to build mozilla on the other computer because I didn't have enough space. Now I've got 60 GB of space, and a nice new faster 1 GHz processor and some other nifty unexpected benefits like more pixels on the screen (although the size didn't change) and some other stuff. I think the battery lasts longer.

Anyway in the last day I've been dealing with the usual environment having to get my environment installed properly again. Camino needs glib which I didn't have installed from fink and it wasn't on the list, so I wasted a day building camino and then trying to get it to recognize that I had actually installed glib. I wound up deleting the configure output files by hand because the new camino.mk doesn't seem to clean them automatically.

And stuff.

I just moved the weblog stuff into /weblog, and so the RSS Feed also moved. I also lost an entry I think. Oh well. Also more stuff validates now. Though not the weblog id's I'm using. That's too bad. But I don't want to change them, because I think they are nice.

Circumstantial evidence (in the form of emails from users...) indicates that FTX 1.5 didn't work very well on Mac OS X 10.1.5. Well, that's what I get for upgrading all of my computers to 10.2. However with me making fixes and sending off test copies to the helpful users, it seems I've squished the bugs for now. Hence the updated FractalTrees 1.5.1 release. Oh yeah, and it's open source software now too ;-)

Check out the Fractal Trees section of the site for a new version of FractalTrees X . The new version 1.5 is lots more fun to play with. Written in the only practical GUI application environment, Cocoa.