Curiouser and Curiouser! on macosx

The Tiger has claws

Thu, 12 May 2005 16:39:28 +0100

Not everyones happy in Tigerland:

The Internet is filled with angry OS X Tiger upgraders, there are security exploits, the whole thing is a mess. [Sam Gentile's Blog]

I'm hoping they'll have 10.4.1 out in July when I look to buy.

Find me a better Finder

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 11:02:57 +0100

On Windows I'm an avid user of the excellent Directory Opus which is a connoisseurs tool for working with lots of files & folders. By constrast the Finder is something of a low point in the whole MacOS X experience. A little spade work with Google suggests I am not the first person to feel this way.

I'm open to recommendations for a replacement. I've already come across Path Finder from CocoaTech. The screenshots don't look vastly different from Finder itself so I'm not sure what to make of that.

What do advanced file juggling monkeys like me use?

The Command+W blues

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 11:10:57 +0100

One thing I haven't gotten used to on the Mac is controlling my urge to misuse Command+W. On Windows the Alt+W combination brings up the window menu and it's my habit to use it to see which windows I have open. I've lost count of the number of times I've managed to close my current window instead of getting the desired effect.

This seems to be the only windows habit of mine which is persistent and irritating. I've also noticed I am having occasional troubles copying & pasting on windows now when my fingers end up doing ALT+C and ALT+V. I guess this is actually a good sign :-)

Well I'll not be dashed

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:25:57 +0100

I've just done the upgrade of Tiger to 10.4.2 (thanks Tao of Mac). It went smoothly. Exactly two weeks since I last had to restart the MacTop, not bad when you think I've only had it for 3 weeks!

No sign in the release notes of anything new vis-a-vis BlueTooth so probably my Motorola HS820 still won't work, I'll try it out later.

Oh and I've disabled Dashboard. I never use it.

Disable Dashboard Eminently simple. defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES Either of the following to turn it back on again. defaults delete com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO [From RixStep]

After logging out and back in again you won't notice any change in the Dock Icon for Dashboard but it's definitely not running.

Dr. Frankenstein would use Longhorn

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:26:52 +0100

Take a look at this beta image of Microsofts latest operating system. It makes me want to throw up. I am so happy I own a mac. First of all, having everything transparent makes it hard for my eyes to focus on the content, they are going all over the place trying to look for solid ground.
Second, there are artifacts of the old look and feel WITHIN THE NEW ONE. How confusing can you get when you have a pair of Xs, both which look like they should close the window and both in different styles. It is amazing how little can get done with billions in the bank. [Microsofts Complete Lack of Taste - Technoblog]

All the previews I have seen of Longhorn have looked terrible. The Windows UI is like Frankensteins monster in the movies. The special effects get better but it still looks like your worst nightmare come to life. I think it was Freewheelin Franklin who used to say

"Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.".

for Microsoft dope could read vision. Longhorn appears to be a testament to the failure of throwing money at a problem.

At the risk of confirming my status as another boring born again Mac zealot I'm finding the Mac UI a very productive environment (Okay Terry you can shoot me now!) Switching from Windows has largely been a matter of relief rather than confusion. This thing works.

So it ain't perfect

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 23:26:06 +0100

Okay here's something bad. It seems that the Tiger 10.4.2 update has done something funky (in a bad way) to the Airport extreme in my PowerBook. I'm connected to my wireless network but the OS thinks I am not. It shows no bars in the network level meter and shows me as having

No network selected

It could be worse, it might be saying these things with me not actually able to connect.

Browsing Apple's forums it's clear I am not alone in having Airport problems with the new update but it's not clear what to do about it. Some people appear to be overwriting the Airport kernel extensions with those from their 10.4.0 CD. I'm not confident enough in my mastery of MacOSX to attempt this kind of thing yet.

I guess I'm hoping for 10.4.3 soon.

Update: No sooner do I post this than someone in #macosx tells me that the Airport 4.2 update is available. I installed that, logged out, and now my Airport is singing all 5 signal bars again! Totally cool :-)

My first MacOSX mystery

Thu, 21 Jul 2005 11:57:35 +0100

Okay this is happening often enough now to be considered a problem: Icons are disappearing from my dock.

It seems to be the same icons each time and, anecdotally, it seems to happen after the system has been to sleep, but not every time. The affected apps so far are:

CocoaMySQL
Airport Client Monitor
SSH Tunnel Manager
iTerm

I keep putting 'em back and they keep disappearing. I haven't moved the applications, they work if I invoke them from the Finder or the dock (once I've dragged them back in).

Help! Help!

Get Haxie

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 19:56:13 +0100

Now that i've drained my bile duct somewhat, a question:

Is anyone familiar with the MacOSX haxie called MenuMaster?

MenuMaster allows you to arbitrarily modify the menu shortcut key bindings across MacOSX applications. I think this is a good thing since many bindings are obscure or the authors just decided not to have a shortcut for some function you find you use a lot.

However it requires injecting a haxie platform into MacOSX called Application Enhancer and I'm a little uncertain about how good an idea this is.

Can I tap into any experience here?

Update: They have two other haxie's which look interesting: WindowShade X for it's Minimize in-place feature, and Labels X for allowing you to name the MacOS X labels in the Finder. I don't use the coloured labels because I can't remember what a particular colour is supposed to signify. I think if I could be satisfied the APE introduces no unpleasant side-effects I'd buy these to enhance my MacOSX experience.

Update: l.m.orchard writes to tell me that Tiger actually gives me the ability to change the menu shortcuts for apps via the Keyboard & Mouse system preferences page. It works a treat. Thank you l.m. He also mentions that WindowShadeX is rock solid for him which is good to know because I think it looks very useful.

Getting along with Pages

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 11:13:29 +0100

As part of my switch to MacOSX I bought a copy of iWork which includes Pages and KeyNote. I bought it for KeyNote which looks (in everything except slide sorting) a nicer application than PowerPoint. However I've been using Pages a lot in the last month and it is a very capable replacement for Word for everything I do with documents.

My one Pages bugaboo (and the thing which might force me to buy Word for Mac) is that it's Word support doesn't extend to the comments and "track changes" features. If, as I do, you work collaboratively on propositions, specifications, and white papers this is can be a problem.

Pages will import/export from Word format quite well so my current approach is to export Word from Pages and send out a document for review. Then open the returned documents in Word on my Windows desktop where I go through the comments and make the appropriate amendments in the Pages document.

This is workable but far from ideal. I'm hoping Pages will support multi-author features soon.

A nice cup of cocoa maybe?

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 11:40:36 +0100

Can anyone recommend me some books for getting started with Objective-C and Cocoa programming?

Although my language of choice is Ruby these days and I'm not keen to start using a language without garbage collection I find myself thinking about writing some Mac software. I don't really have an app in mind yet, just a few vague thoughts, but the interface makes me want to do something with it ;-)

Recommendations?

Giving consolas a run for its money

Sat, 30 Jul 2005 13:44:29 +0100

Tao of Mac has posted that the new Longhorn fonts have escaped into the wild.

I remembered Don Park was pretty keen on Consolas as a coding font so I gave it a spin and, even on MacOSX, it looks pretty good at 9pt. Maybe even better than ProFont.

My PowerBook software portfolio

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 20:08:06 +0100

It's only been a month since I got the PowerBook and already I seem to have accumulated an awful lot of software. I thought it would be a good idea to go through /Applications and take stock. So here are a few lists, please leave me a comments and tell me about your favourite app

Here is what I am using on a regular basis:

Adium - Multi-protocol Instant Messenging and nearly as good as Trillian (which is high praise indeed!)
AntiRSI - A worthy successor to the excellent BreakReminder for Windows
Camino - I use occasionally but, although it looks nice, it's not stable enough to replace Safari
Chmox - Reading those pesky CHM files from Windows
CmapTools - Great concept mapping software
CocoaMySQL - Now I have the version for MySQL 4.1 this is my DB Admin tool of choice
Colloquy - A good IRC client. Wish it was a plug-in for Adium
FastPic - Decent full-screen slideshows
Firefox - Doesn't look good on MacOSX so used mainly for debugging
FruitMenu - A haxie which allows you to customise the Apple menu. I've added expandable system preferences, terminal, and my e-books folder
Fugu - SFTP client. Some reports of buggyness but it's been okay for me so far and makes editing remote files in TextMate very easy.
Growl - Sweet system notifications for MacOSX. Rapidly becoming the standard and has Ruby bindings!
iStumbler - Finally a Wi-Fi sniffer which does AirportExtreme!!!
iTerm - I flip flop between iTerm and Terminal.App
ManOpen - It's nice to be able to see manpages in decent window
NeoOfficeJ - Andy Fragen turned me onto this as a way of getting decent Word support on the Mac
OmniGraffle Pro - The first drawing tool I've ever been able to use
OmniOutliner Pro - Use this all the time for note taking and organising thoughts
Pages - pretty good word mangler however the spell-check is broken, there is no grammar checker, and Word support doesn't extend to comments & track changes
Personal Backup X3 - Came with my Lacie 250Gb FireWire disk. Using it to clone my system volume
Sidenote - So far the best quick note taking app i've found. Pops to a hot left screen edge, simple, works
Skype - Who isn't?
SSH Tunnel Manager - It's just automating the params to SSH but it makes life easier when I want to point CocoaMySQL at my TextDrive databases
snvX - Subversion GUI. I have mixed feelings about would welcome recommendations for other cocoa clients.
Stuffit Expander - Seems ubiquitous. Works but I'm not suhttp://macromates.com/re why I'd upgrade it.
TextMate - My kind of text editor!
TinkerTool - Got it to try and mess with the system menu font but chickened out. Also used it to turn on Safari debug menu
Unison - A very nice Usenet reader from Panic
VLC - Plays all the stuff QuickTime won't
WindowShadeX - Minimize in-place is da bomb
Writers Cafe - For the budding Writer in me (includes StoryLines)
XRG - System monitoring done right

Now for the apps which I've installed but which, for one reason or another, I'm not using:

AirStumbler - Doesn't seem to work with Airport extreme (sadly)
BlueCrab - Seems I don't need to mirror websites often enough to want to register
ComicLife - Looks cool but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet. Saw it on Ross Mayfield's blog.
Delicious Library - Good looking cataloguing app for books, cd's and so on. Scans barcodes using iSight. Bit pricey for me right now.
DesktopManager - Multiple desktops for your Mac. In practice I didn't find it that useful. WindowShadeX's minimize in place is much better for me
Eclipse - My Ruby environment on Windows, now I have TextMate. Almost stuck with it for the excellent Subclipse plug-in
FreeDMG - Create disk images the easy way. Sure i'll get around to using it at some point
iFill - Something iPod related, must look at it
IDEA - I haven't written any Java for a long time, don't seem to miss it
KeyNote - The reason I bought iWork but i've not been called upon to build any presentations recently
KisMac - Doesn't seem to work with Airport extreme (someone please write drivers!)
LittleSecrets - Other people seem to use these little password store apps, i just don't get into them
Location X - I'd probably use it if I could spare the time to figure it out
MacJanitor - System housekeeping. I don't think this is necessary with 10.4.3
MacStumbler - Doesn't seem to work with Airport extreme (please!?!)
MySQLAdministrator - Mostly covered by CocoaMySQL. I still run it occasionally.
MySQLQueryBrowser - Mostly covered by CocoaMySQL.
PathFinder - I didn't find it compellingly better than Finder. I might give it another try
Radio Userland - Still have this running on a PC. I might move it. I'd still rather replace it if I could be bothered to crack the legacy issues
Shiira - Some kind of webKit based browser, not sure why I installed it
SubCommander - Looks better than svnX but I couldn't make it work with the DarwinPorts svn
SubEthaEdit - I know it's cool but I haven't been to a conference with the Mac yet (and did I mention TextMate?)
TinderBox - The Powerbook put a big hole in my slush fund, this will have to wait
Tofu - Lovely idea but it doesn't do PDF which is what i'd most want it for...
YourSQL - Didn't like it as much as CocaMySQL

Built-in Apps I couldn't wait to get rid of:

Dashboard - What a waste of bits

Update 15 August 2005: Added FruitMenu which I registered along with WindowShadeX. Being able to put a few handy items in the Apple menu was worth $9 to me. Also added Sidenote which I'm using as a quick note taking app and iStumbler.

Update 16 August 2005: Installed but not evaluated yet: Cluster, Disk Inventory X, Handbrake, iHook, Image Tricks, Metronome X, Noise, R, Spike, Zoom

SubCommander gets demoted

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 12:43:32 +0100

I just tried replacing svnX with SubCommander as my MacOSX subversion client.

I'm never been very comfortable with svnX. I find it's interface counterintuitive and I don't like the way the repository browsing and working copy are separated. So I deactivated my subversion port, installed the required 1.2.0 (not 1.2.1) version of subversion for Mac recommended on the SubCommaner website and tried SubCommander.

I'd like to say it was promising but frankly I didn't get far enough to find out. The damn thing crashes at the drop of a hat. I learned to avoid one of the buttons on the project definition page which crashed it every time, but trying to open the working copy made it crash too.

Less significant but worth noting is that the UI isn't great and has a few funnies (e.g. buttons rendered wrong or in the wrong place). I guess if there are still considerable stabillity issues there hasn't been time for polish.

Now I have the extra RAM for the PB I'm going to try Eclipse again. Not for editing but purely so I can use the subclipse plugin which is, hands down, the best subversion client I've seen. Funny how they should both come from Tigris and, yet, be so different.

Picking up your litter

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 19:21:08 +0100

As a reminder to myself:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Should stop the Mac writing .DS_Store files being written on network mounted volumes.

Updated apps portfolio

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 14:54:04 +0100

I just updated my MacOSX apps portfolio posting to include: FruitMenu, Sidenote, and iStumbler. I'm a dabbler with software so I've decided to try and keep this list in tune with my current usage in case anyone finds it of value.

There can't be many more apps to install

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 19:03:44 +0100

Another applications update. Some of these I installed today, others I had just missed when I first wrote the app portfolio. So today I'm adding: antiRSI, Cluster, Delicious Library, Disk Inventory X, Fugu, Handbrake, iHook, Image Tricks, Metronome X, Noise, R, Spike, Zoom, Growl

It's an aqua adventure

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 11:20:18 +0100

I just registered the Saft extension for Safari. It adds a lot of neat stuff but I registered it for two features:

It can consolidate open browser windows into tabs on the main window. This is huge for me.
It can make Safari an Aqua application!

I'm sure ad-blocking and the other stuff will be handy too :-)

Note to Apple: Keep the Mac expensive!

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 18:57:59 +0100

I was pondering the Mac's security and the fact that, compared to Windows, it's largely virus and spyware free. Why should that be?

Some answers which spring readily to mind might be:

the Mac's low market share compared to Windows
dislike of Microsoft making it an easy target
MacOSX's Unix underpinnings

however I wondered if there wasn't something else to it as well.

I have a (possibly naive) stereotype of the virus/spyware author as a 14 year old kid using an el-cheapo x86 box and a pirate copy of Windows. Not having the pocket money for a a Mac this kid is only using (and hence targetting) Windows.

If there is even a grain of truth in this then I think it's imperative that Apple ensure that MacOSX never runs on commodity PC hardware. Indeed the very pricing which makes a Mac a luxury can be seen as a not having to install Norton Anti-Virus tax and I'm willing to pay it for that alone.

I never thought i'd hear myself say this, but, Keep Mac's expensive!

Outlines and smart guides and Beziers, oh my!

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:25:17 +0100

Omnigroup software have finally released OmniGraffle 4 and Woo hoo! I get a free upgrade from v3.

I love Graffle for being the first diagram drawing tool that I've been able to just sit down and use and, critically, the results look good. If, like me, you've found yourself wrestling with the likes of Visio you'll know how refreshing it is to come across a diagramming app for the rest of us.

Act Without Doing

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 21:16:35 +0100

As time has gone by I guess I have become less and less enamoured of the Dock as a way of starting applications. I have quite a few and my Dock got cluttered. So I cut it down to my most regular apps which works great but then leaves me hunting about in Finder for the rest.

I've decided to give quicksilver a try. It does the launcher thing but, more than that, it's actions extension mechanism looks like it could be very powerful and the whole Wei Wu Wei philosophy appeals to me.

I'll have to see how I take to it.

Note to MySQL: please start at boot time

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 21:21:01 +0100

Something that is puzzling me is why MySQL doesn't start when my PowerBook starts. I have the MySQL prefs pane and it claims that MySQL should auto-start. Certainly I can start it manually from there. I'm guessing this is because the start up script is either missing or broken but I'm not sure where to go from this. Can anyone help me?

What's the matter Safari?

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 11:28:14 +0100

Well now this is annoying. For some reason Safari has stopped opening pages in a new tab when I Cmd-click links... what could be the matter with it?

How sick is my Dock?

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 18:48:24 +0100

I've just noticed in my console log an awful lot of messages along the lines of:

Sep 23 12:31:20 Irulan crashdump[14331]: Dock crashed
Dock[14333]: Welcome to the WSX:Carbon
Sep 23 12:31:22 Irulan crashdump[14331]: crash report written to: /Users/matt/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Dock.crash.log

Hrmm... when I go check it out my Dock.crash.log is over 2MB (since July when I got the PB). That seems pretty big for a file just containing Dock crash info. The error always seems to be the same:

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x00000000

and there are a lot of them, sometimes only a few seconds apart. Is the Dock really that buggy?

If it weren't for the fact that the crashes seemed to start from day#1 I'd wonder if it's because I was musing about completely replacing it with Quicksilver?

Display resolution gripe

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 12:05:26 +0100

Since I seem to be grousing about MacOSX glitches at the moment let me add another: Why is it that MacOSX keeps intermittently choosing the wrong resolution for my 2nd display, no matter how many times I correct it?

I have a ViewSonic VE702m 17" LCD monitor connected to my PowerBook and the PowerBook knows this (the Displays System Preference correctly identify the monitor model). It shows me all the right resolutions and yet, about every 5th or 6th time I hook it up it chooses 1024x768 instead of the native 1280x1024 resolution.

It's the work of a few moments to correct it but it bugs me a little more each time it happens.

Griping about Interface Builder

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 11:05:37 +0100

At the risk of becoming a proper gripe monkey how the hell do MacOS X developers get any work done!?!

Interface Builder seems like a buggy piece of crap to me. Latest example: Whenever I use the

Test Interface

option, after I exit the scaffolding application, I end up with it's application menu embedded in the Interface Builder menu (only without a label) and, shortly thereafter, Interface Builder crashes. It's at Version 2.5 for goodness sake, you don't expect this kind of bug in a piece of software that's, what?, 3 years old!

MacOSX on Rails

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 15:04:14 +0100

Any MacOSX users that want to give RubyOnRails a try might want to check out Ryan Raaum's Locomotive package. It's kind of a 1-click deal for Rails that includes Ruby, Rails, useful libs, and the SQLLite database (it also includes MySQL and Postgresql bindings if you have those already). I'm setup already but it looks kinda cool.

Hands up Safari!!

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 17:36:50 +0100

I keep hearing people talking about how Safari is dreadful, crap, what have you. I guess that, since I installed Saft, i've not felt that. It looks nice, it seems fast and, if the history and bookmarks leave something to be desired, well there's always version 3. And GreaseMonkey? Who needs it when I have MouseHole? (Check it out, it's very cool).

However, lately, I've been starting to feel that Safari is indeed cursed. One thing it seems prone to do a lot (for a MacOSX app) is crash.

It seems that all my crashes happen at around the same point: between Safari starting and finishing loading a page. If I try and stop it, if I click a link before it's finished, or try to go back before it's finished. Well there seems to be a good chance it will crash.

Again, Saft limits the damage by recovering the lost page addresses (if not any dynamic or form content). But you have to wonder why that feature got implemented. Was it, by any chance, because Safari crashes regularly?

To keep things in proportion this doesn't happen that often, largely because I am learning to be patient and let Safari finish loading a page before doing anything. Also a crash on MacOSX always seems so much less serious than Windows. The app crashes, I report it, then I run it again and all is well. I've not yet seen one crash lead to anything worse.

If I had one wish for MacOSX 1.4.3 it would be a more stable Safari.

Talk to me Cocoa

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 09:26:58 +0100

One of the things I'm trying to work out is the best way to approach writing GUI apps with Ruby. There are a number of options including wxRuby, fxRuby, QTRuby, Ruby/tk, RubyCocoa, and so on. Since I'm really interested in an Aqua interface (for my own benefit) I narrowed the field to wxRuby and RubyCocoa. The latter looks especially promising to me although I'm not making much progress on it.

Today I came across CocoaDialog which might act as a neat stop-gap for some of my needs. It's designed to be called from a script that needs to get user input or present information. So in the same way that you can use ruby-growl to display notifications from a script, you can use CocoaDialog to collect input.

Putting the Dock in the dock

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 11:09:37 +0100

Okay it's less of an issue now that I have Quicksilver but I am pretty irritated with the way icons disappear off my MacOSX dock. I installed Microsoft Word yesterday, dragged the icon from Applications to the dock and it was fine, click it and up comes Word. It was certainly there yesterday afternoon. This morning when I looked for it the icon had gone!

The principle of learned helplessness is beginning to kick in now. I'm thinking of removing all the icons from my dock so it doesn't compete, mentally, with Quicksilver.

Is there a way to get rid of the dock altogether?

Update: So, more or less as soon as I posted I thought "oh what the heck, let's just get rid of all the dock icons" and proceeded to do just that. In the process I discovered that applications I had removed yesterday had come back! I had weeded out 3-4 apps I don't use often, those icons are in my dock this morning. Great. The stupid thing seems to be rolling back to a previous point. I wonder if it's related to all these Dock.App crashes I see in the log.

Have I told you recently that I love you?

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 12:16:01 +0100

By the way, lest my recent griping should fool you into thinking I am anything but in love with my PowerBook and MacOSX. Just try approaching the PB without permission and see how far you get.

Why would you do that?

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 00:33:46 +0100

What is it with some MacOSX apps (like iTerm for example) that use Cmd+; as their preferences key instead of (the seemingly default) Cmd+,?

A time for great applications

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 00:29:37 +0000

Getting the Powerbook has had a strange impact on my life. Beyond the obvious - that the Powerbook is a great computer and that MacOSX is light decades ahead of Windows in terms stability, usability, and bliss - I was never a Windows or Unix evangelist. I have become a Mac evangelist (I think my CEO is on the ropes, I see an IMac in his future).

Part of this is the quality of some of the applications for this platform. The Way of the Mac seems to extend out to Mac developers.

TextMate hits version 1.5 today and is the best editor I have used since Brief (anyone remember that). It's got warts and flaws and it's not all it will be given another 12 months of work, but it's a hugely productive text editing machine that has, alongside Ruby, made coding a pleasure for me again.

Then there is QuickSilver which, since it was introduced to me (by the SuperNode?) has relegated the dock to being a distant memory. Now with the newly released v3744 I can get application menus within QuickSilver. If you've never experienced QuickSilver then you don't know what you're missing and with this new ability it's simply amazing.

A year ago I was fed up with computers, writing software, bugs, crashes, stupid applications. Today I find my interest in development rekindled, bugs rare, crashes rarer and seeing my MacTop come to life still - 5 months later - brings a smile to my face (esp. since it comes to life in about 1.5 seconds!)

It has occurred to me...

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:27:00 +0000

...that Safari hasn't crashed for quite a while. In fact I can't actually remember the last time it crashed. Looks like whatever changes they made in the 10.4.3 update did the trick.

Now, can anyone tell me why my Powerbook sounds like an Airbus getting ready for takeoff? It's been this way since I got home (many hours ago) but was fine earlier on today. Activity Monitor and XRG both show nothing much going on: CPU is at 54 degrees, load average is 0.37, 0.48, 0.62. It's puzzling.

I don't want to restart if I can avoid it. My uptime has reached 24 days. My previous record is 27 days. Since I bought the Mac back in June I've never reached 30 days uptime. There has always been some update that required a reboot. I am determined to beat my record by at least 3 days.

Let's see what logging out (and going to bed) can do...

Do we trust Logitech?

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 20:11:39 +0000

As an experiment I have begun using my Logitech MX1000 mouse with the PowerBook. Since I got the PowerBook I've been using the trackpad which, unlike any trackpad before it, I have found very useful. But I kept looking at the (expensive) mouse sat there unused all this time and thought it was a waste. It's a good mouse and maybe all those extra buttons could be handy...

So I find that the basic mouse function fine but, without Logitech specific drivers, most of the extra buttons do funky things that, by and large, you'd rather they didn't do. The only solution appears to be to install the Logitech Control Centre for MacOSX.

My Mac has been working pretty well thus far and I think that this is, in part, because I have not installed any significant system affecting products from big vendors. In my experience Big Vendor system software is often a festering pile of crap made without a care for the users system. On Windows Logitech drivers and software were flawless but My Mac works good and I want to keep it that way.

Does anyone have any experience they can share about using LCC on MacOSX Tiger? Am I being paranoid? Or should I steer well clear?

Chat transcript searcher

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 13:09:13 +0000

One of the few things I miss from my Windows days is the Trillian Pro instant messenger client. These days I sit in IChat for AIM and ICQ and Colloquy for IRC. Although I rarely start it, I have AdiumX to handle MSN, Yahoo, and the like. IChat is okay but the whole thing is a mess compared to Trillians integrated approach.

In particular I find that trying to search transcripts is a real pain. Both IChat and Colloquy make their transcripts practically impossible to search. Colloquy's own search function doesn't seem to work. XML formats all over the place. Yuck. Don't even get me started about Trillians beautiful Activity History.

Unsanity are addressing this issue with their new Chat Transcript Manager. Right now it's $10 (down from $20) and despite my thinking some sort of Spotlight integration is in Aim, Colloquy, and Adiums future I think CTM might make a good solution today.

I already use Unsanity's FruitMenu and WindowShadeX and think they are great tools. Chat Transcript Manager looks nice and does most of what I need. For $10 it's hardly got to save me much time to pay for itself. Downloaded!

Giving 10.4.4 a wide berth

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 23:18:51 +0000

Usually I'm a complete update junky and would have jumped all over the 10.4.4 update but, for rather silly reasons, I didn't. My uptime was an almost record breaking 27 days and I really wanted to make it past 30 days.

Today I read Rui Carmo's take on the update and I'm pretty glad I didn't take the plunge. I was hoping for improvements in Mail.App at least. Frankly updating to get a flaky Bluetooth updater is not my idea of an upgrade!

I'll wait and see what happens and maybe reach a mini-milestone while I'm at it.

ActiveRecord, Ruby 1.8.4, and GCC4

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 11:53:45 +0000

Yesterday was something of an exercise in frustration when I attempted to update my PowerBook to the latest and greatest Ruby 1.8.4. I use DarwinPorts so you'd think it would be easy but it's wasn't because (a) I didn't realise you had to manually use

sudo port sync

to get the list of ports to update (so I didn't realise they even had 1.8.4) and (b) various ports wouldn't update properly or compile.

In the end I ripped out my existing DarwinPorts installation, upgraded to the latest XCode 2.2, and began to rebuild. At the end I had 1.8.4 along with the relevant gems and extensions and it all seems fine. Squib is running okay using it.

However I notice that the ActiveRecord unit test suite is failing in some rather peculiar ways. Most of the errors relate to the non-existence of tables and rows which are there at the beginning of the test run (I verified that the executed DDL correctly created the tables). So it seems like something is dropping the tables and/or deleting rows as the tests execute. But if there was such a huge problem with Ruby/MySQL why is squib running okay? (Yes I am backing up my data!)

Where I do have cause for concern is the interplay between GCC v3.3 and GCC v4.0.1. When I tried building Ruby 1.8.4 just after the release (to help with Rails testing) it didn't seem to work properly using GCC4. The wisdom at that time seemed to be that something in the GCC4 compiler wasn't right and was building ruby improperly. So naturally I used

sudo gcc_select 3.3

before attempting to get the Ruby DarwinPort built. However when I came to testing the MySQL native extension I got a very unpleasant error:

dyld: NSLinkModule() error dyld: Symbol not found: _sprintf$LDBLStub Referenced from: /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle Expected in: flat namespace Trace/BPT trap

The general wisdom seemed to be that this was an error caused by compiling with GCC4 but I was compiling with GCC3! In desparation I tried using GCC4 and it worked!

But now I have Ruby compiled with GCC3 and various native bits and pieces with GCC4 and it does not make me happy or comfortable that everything will be okay. Especially in the light of the unit test failures in ActiveRecord.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone else whose tried these tests. Maybe there is something amiss with them.

Overall I'm left with the feeling that Ruby 1.8.3 and 1.8.4 could have been smoother. And was it beyond Apple just to fix the Ruby install that came with Tiger in the first place?

Taming QuickSilver

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 12:18:34 +0000

Alcor's excellent tool QuickSilver has become the constant companion to my PowerBook. If I could keep only one (among the many excellent tools I've discovered since becoming a Switcher) it would be QuickSilver.

One thing that was bugging me though. When I'd use the phrase 'it' it would bring up iTunes as the first choice when 99% of the time I'd be wanting iTerm instead. The worst part is that I've gotten so automatic in my use of QS that I would hit 'it' + confirming for QS that I did want iTunes and hence making the problem worse.

Yesterday one of the kind denizens of FreeNodes #quicksilver told me how to get around this and it's a handy trick to know. When you use your trigger to bring up the app selector bezel (I use Cmd+Enter which on the PowerBook keyboard is the two keys to the right of the spacebar) and type your phrase, e.g. 'it', you then press the down arrow to drop down the menu of choices and, from there (not the bezel), right click the application you don't want.

In that menu will be an option "Decrease Score" which when you select it should descrease the weight of the association between 'it' and iTunes. In my case it allows iTerm to beat iTunes and now iTerm is the default choice and I am happy.

QuickSilver truly is an outstanding tool and it has many tricks to teach me yet!

Three Mac oddnesses

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 13:57:24 +0000

I have three strange MacOSX UI quirks at the moment. None affects my work but all three are mildy irritating and I'd like to fix them.

The first invovles the I-beam cursor. What i've noticed is that the I-beam cursor does not travel properly from one monitor to the next. That is, if I'm editing text in a window on one monitor and then move the mouse to the other monitor the cursor disappears at the edge of the screen but does not re-appear on the other monitor. I either have to click somewhere and it will appear as an arrow cursor, or if I bring it back onto the original monitor the I-bean cursor re-appears at the edge of the screen. That one is weirdest and the most irritating of the three.

The second involves Safari and how it sometimes doesn't show links in the status bar. That is, when I mouse over a link it doesn't reflect that visually or by displaying the link URL in the status bar. I'm not sure there ever was a visual indication but the status bar thing is weird. The links are still clickable though. Note that I'm talking about all links in all my Safari windows. It seems like Safari just gets into an i'm not going to show you any links now mode.

The third seems mainly to affect my iChat windows although it might affect any windows with rounded corners. What happens is that, when the window is over another window with a white background, and it has focus, you can see a little wingtip. Like so:

Like I say none of these problems amounts to a hill of beans but it sure would be nice to get rid of them. Anyone have any clues?

Mini-milestone

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 14:20:58 +0000

I bought Irulan, my 1.5GHz 12" PowerBook G4, at the end of June 2005. Since then I've had to reboot it maybe 10 times. There have been several MacOSX updates, several QuickTime updates (and I have to reboot for these why exactly?), and a couple of instances where I decided to restart either to fix some problem or test something out.

All of which has conspired so that, up to now, my maximum system uptime had been 27 days. Which was, more or less, what it was when the 10.4.4 update came out. This time I hung on though and yesterday we crossed the 31 day mark:

I think uptime of a month and running for a machine that I am pushing hard each and every day is pretty good going and yet another vindication of my decision to switch.

The attractive side of XML-RPC

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 13:39:52 +0000

XML-RPC is a neat way of hooking up processes on different computers and operating systems. Now I find there is a neat client for MacOSX too! You fill in the endpoint URL, the method name, and the parameters (using Javascript syntax). The client then shows you in separate tabs: the request XML, the response XML, and the response displayed as a property hash. Looks very handy for XML-RPC debugging.

My only request at this point would be a way to save & reload queries.

My 7 month Mac report

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 18:19:06 +0000

I just read Dave Winers 6 month Mac Report. It occurs to me it is just over 6 months since I got my first Mac, so heres my report.

I bought the 12" PowerBook at the end of June 2005. I choose the 12" model because I wanted portablity over power. After 3 years of lugging a Dell around I was looking forward to something that wouldn't leave creases in my shoulder. For reference my Dell was a 15" Inspiron 4150 with a 1.6GHz P4, 1GB of RAM, ATI Radeon 7500 with 32MB VRAM, and a 40GB 5400 RPM HDD and boy was it heavy.

Performance: The PowerBook seems faster than the Dell but not heaps faster. I guess you'd expect that given the relative parity of CPU speed and the poor bus architecture of the PowerBook. Certainly with 1.25GB of RAM the PowerBook is plenty fast enough for everything I do (including development work, I don't play games on it though). Where the PowerBook really scores over the Dell is how it performs under load, it stays very responsive even when the CPU is running on overdrive. That really does make it more usable. I've not suffered from the kind of typing lags that Dave seemed to have with his iBook.

Usability: MacOSX is streets ahead of Windows XP in my book; they're not even in the same city really. The UI is generally well done, pleasant to use, and doesn't have too many surprises. I was able to switch in no time with only two things catching me out for a while: 1) In most Windows apps Alt-W gives you the window list, in MacOSX Cmd-W closes the current window. It took me a few weeks to learn to stop doing that. 2) Maximize doesn't. But I quickly adapted to whatever it is that it does do. In short I was more or less immediately productive with MacOSX.

When you add that I can drop to Unix whenever I need, that QuickSilver is an incredible productivity tool, and access to a wide range of excellent applications like Omni Outliner Pro, OmniGraffle Pro, KeyNote, TextMate, and XyleScope. The only application I really miss is Trillian Pro although maybe Proteus is a replacement.

Stability: MacOSX just doesn't crash. As I reported the other day I have had continuous uptime of over a month. I restarted at that point to install 10.4.4, who knows how much longer it might have run for. This is a compputer I am working out every day. That's a pretty good definition of robust to me.

So, what don't I like?

Battery life isn't great. It's not a problem the way I work, but I imagine it would be disappointing if I were away from a power socket more often and for longer.
Screen brightness isn't great. I didn't notice it before but now I have a 20" Dell panel next door you can see it. And if you want to get 4+ hrs from the battery you need to turn the brightness down.
Safari still crashes or behaves unpredictably. Not enough for me to switch to Firefox but, after 3 point releases of Safari 2.0 it's pretty much unforgivable that it still crashes.
Mail.App is bleh
Firefox looks awful and Camino has few pluses over Safari.
Some UI glitches as reported earlier.
Umm... that's about it

Summary: Nicest computer I ever owned. I love it.

Great flow

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 11:54:24 +0000

Despite being very money conscious right now I shelled out $20 on Friday for Flow. I can't remember where I got the link from but I'm damned grateful because it's great.

According to author Karlheinz Essl, Flow:

Generates an ever-changing and never repeating soundscape in real time that fills the space with flooding sounds that resemble - metaphorically - the timbres of water, fire, earth, and air.

I now tend to leave it running while I work and I find it really helps me to get into flow state and ignore distractions. I also find it quite restful in the evening before bed.

Definitely recommended.

No wait a minute, I know this one..

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 08:54:56 +0100

I am hopeless at remembering birthdays (well, any dates really) and, by a process of embarrassment, am populating my iCal with birthday events.

This morning I realised that iCal has a specific birthdays calendar that tracks birthdays from AddressBook. That's very neat but here's what I can't see:

I want an alarm to go off at least 3 or 4 days before the birthday. I can do that when I create a manual repeating event but I see no way to have it for the automatic birthday events created by iCal and AddressBook.

Can I have my (birthday)cake and eat it too?

Diagnosing an intermittent performance problem

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 17:02:25 +0100

I'm experiencing some slow downs on my PowerBook of the annoying intermittent kind. I'll be browing a page in Safari and get a few seconds of beachball which is gone by the time I can get to Activity Monitor and see where the hold up is.

I'd like a tool that could monitor system activity but instead of giving me real-time summary information like Activity Monitor I want tracking information. For example I want to see, over time, which process went over %% CPU usage and for how long and so on. I want a tool to help diagnose tricky problems and which doesn't require me to be looking at it all the time.

Anyone using such a tool?

The parlour state of outlining on Windows

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 12:10:19 +0100

At the moment I am knee-deep (expecting to be waist-deep by tea time) in writing my product management plan for 2006/7. Of course I am writing it in the excellent OmniOutliner Professional where I am making use of the notes, to-do's, styling, and attachments.

Now I want to let Graham (CEO), Peter (CTO), and Chris (Business Development Director) see them and make changes. Okay so Omni doesn't handle change tracking like Word but I could live with that.

What I can't live with is the fact that I have no way of sharing this document with them without, it seems, converting it into some dreadful legacy format like RTF! I guess I can use HTML if I sacrifice their ability to change anything (if I only I were that good!)

I tried installing Dave Winer's OPML.exe editor on Grahams machine and sharing my outline as OPML. I have no question that Dave understands outlining but OPML.exe is a dreadfully sober experience coming from Omni. Opening my outline (saved as an OPML document) I can see the outline, sure, but I lose the notes, styling, attached documents. In short I lose everything but the structure.

Apparently it's time to ramp up my campaign of switching Graham to Mac.

Neat Safari trick

Thu, 11 May 2006 10:50:55 +0100

Did everyone know this one already?

In Safari i have a bunch of my common links in my links bar: GMail, Squib, metrics, Bloglines, Techmeme and so on and they're easy enough to click.

But if I hit Cmd+1 it loads the first link from the links bar in the current window, Cmd+2 the second and so on.

What a neat trick.

The trail unblazed

Sat, 27 May 2006 15:46:05 +0100

I was just noodling around through a list of open source Mac applications when I came across TrailBlazer which turned out to be a full browser that has an excellent set of features for understanding your browsing history and searching pages you've visited.

It's like a souped up version of the BrowseBack utillity. I ended up not liking BrowseBack very much because of the system load I seemed to incur for having it and because the UI really didn't suit me.

TrailBlazer's "path through the forest" visual metaphor works very nicely. What a pity it was a separate browser (although in 2004 maybe that made more sense) and that it seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur.

Bad label type blues

Sat, 27 May 2006 22:10:27 +0100

For a few days now I've been having an irritating problem with the Mac. It manifests itself in pages not loading properly in the browser. For example I'll be happily browsing eBay and then, all of a sudden, when I follow a link the page won't load with a message like:

Safari can't open the page “http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/blah"
because it can’t find the server “cgi.ebay.co.uk”.

Can't find cgi.ebay.co.uk? What's up with that? A few retries will get the same response and then, mysteriously, a few seconds to a few minutes later everything will be fine, until the next time.

Then again I seem to see the problem quite a lot when using GMail. During one episode I tried using nslookup to confirm the problem and it revealed something quote odd:

> mail.google.com
;; Got bad packet: bad label type
49 bytes
33 62 80 80 00 01 00 01 00 00 00 00 48 0e cd 13 
6c 06 67 6f 6f 67 6c 65 03 63 6f 6d 00 00 01 00 
01 00 01 00 01 00 00 00 00 00 04 11 fe 00 5b c0 
10

I've never seen a bad label type error before. Is this a DNS error? Or something to do with my ADSL modem perhaps (an old WebRamp 600i) which is acting as local DNS proxy?

As you can see, a few seconds (to a few minutes) later all is well again:

> mail.google.com
Server:         192.168.1.1
Address:        192.168.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
mail.google.com canonical name = googlemail.l.google.com.
Name:   googlemail.l.google.com
Address: 72.14.205.83
Name:   googlemail.l.google.com
Address: 72.14.205.19

I seem to see this error only on popular sites like Google/GMail, Amazon, and eBay. But it may be that the problem is intermittent and, since I use those sites a lot, I just haven't noticed it for another site yet.

It's got me baffled and you'll notice that a Google search (when it works) for that bad label type error message doesn't seem to turn up anything relevant. This of course means that probably noboy reading this will have any clue what the problem is...

But if anyone can offer me some advice on this I'd appreciate it. It's not a devastating problem but it is becoming consistently irritating now.

I wonder if it may be related to an occasional problem I've had with lookupd since about 10.4.4 where, every now and again, it will spike up to ~100% CPU utilization and then sit there. Sometimes logging out fixing it, sometimes it doesn't.

I'd really like to get these two ironed out.

SeeingTheLight

Mon, 29 May 2006 09:55:06 +0100

I've just discovered Matt Neuberg's NotLight application. It's a proper application interface to MacOSX Spotlight search and vastly less irritating than the built in MacOSX interface.

For example Neuberg has replaced the type-as-you-go search which always frustrates me with a query interface that gives control over options like name vs. content search, whether the search is word-based, case-insensitive, and diacritic-insensitive, as well as the ability to combine previous searches and search within specific folders.

It's a must-have utility for anyone using Spotlight regularly.

This is out of the park

Mon, 29 May 2006 17:18:50 +0100

I've just learned that the upcoming 2006 edition of Out of the Park baseball will be available on the Mac! Woo Hoo! This is fantastic news!!

OOTP is the best baseball simulation game ever and 2006 sounds like it's another big leap forward. Can't wait to buy this and waste many hours as manager of my beloved Giants!

Almost brilliant you say?

Mon, 29 May 2006 19:59:01 +0100

I was using Amar Sagoo's beautiful utility Tofu to read a reasonably long Word document today and, since I didn't want to hunch over the keyboard while reading, decided I would try the speech control feature.

It's actually pretty good. I changed the default configuration slightly so that it is triggered by the word computer (actually I tried many variations including the momentarily delicious slave) rather than pressing the escape key.

I was then able to read, sitting back comfortably, with Tofu expanded to show three fat columns on my 20" display and move along by saying computer move right whenever necessary.

This is fantastic, it's almost brilliant. Why isn't it actually brilliant though? The first reason is the speech recognition and the second is the lack of PDF support.

MacOSX built-in speech recognition is pretty good but it's just not good enough. In training I found that I couldn't get it to reliably detect two of the phrases. show me what to say was recongized about 15% of the time and open a document about 30%. This despite trying 3 different microphones (the built-in mic, my Telex USB headset, and the iSight mic), 3 different positions, all the recording levels, and a range of voices Rory Bremner would be hard pushed to beat.

This meant that, in practice, it failed to recongize the command move right just often enough to be irritating although move left was fine. By contrast I could hardly get move page left and, especially, move page right to work at all.

However the promise of this kind of speech driven technology really excites me. I got a real buzz out of being able to control the computer this way and was surprised that it didn't seem to spike my CPU. I really hope that the speech recognition is improved in MacOSX 10.5.

The second problem with Tofu was the lack of PDF support. I say was because Amar Sagoo is working on Tofu v2 which uses the PDF-Kit functionality provided in Tiger to get a text stream from PDF's. However, as Sagoo mentions, it's not all plainsailing:

One limitation, however, is that it can't distinguish between line wraps (which occur at the end of each line) and real paragraph breaks. This is because PDF files don't really store continuous text, but rather the position of each character on the page.

He's working around this and it will be interesting to see how good it can get. I dream of being able to sit back and relax while reading e-books using Tofu and voice control.