breathing new life into...

(originally posted at pixeljuice.livejournal.com)

into nothing, really. i'm just testing out ecto with various web-based publishing platforms. i remembered i had this old livejournal account and wouldn't you know, it seems to still work.

go fig.

Nintendo's New Portable

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

The Register has an interesting story about what could be some leaked specs on the new Nintendo portable system - possibly dubbed the Nintendo Nitro.

It had been confirmed early on that this would be a double-screened device, which led me to question where the buttons would reside if it were a clamshell design.  The possibility of a tri-fold device dawned on me, but just didn't seem too likely.  The leaked document claims the device will have at least one touch screen.  This makes a whole lot of sense, but I'm not sold on whether it's a good idea.  Let's explore...

Nintendo's GameCube controller has one main "A" button and on diminutive "B" button which are the basis for most menu-driven game controls.  The "A" button (cleverly colored green) accepts a selected menu item and the "B" button (just as cleverly colored red) cancels selections or backs out of the menu.  During normal gameplay, these buttons (along with X/Y support buttons) take on a "virtual" quality - where their use is context-sensitive.  Their current context is usually displayed on the screen in the form of "A will now attack!" and the like.

Couple this with Nintendo's use of the GBA as an input device and support screen for some GameCube games.  In Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, the GBA is used as an extra menu system, but also shows maps and meta-data that you wouldn't normally have access to in the game.

So ask yourself, what lessons might Nintendo have learned from these experiences?

It sounds to me, that with the use of a touch-screen, Nintendo is looking to take input to a completely new level by making it completely virtual - an experience to be programmed by the game designers, not limited to the hardware.  You'd have a clamshell device with a main screen on one side and a support/input screen on the other.  This would allow developers to create input zones of arbitrary size and number, and at the same time use the input screen to display gameplay meta-data.  Sound neat, sound innovative?  You bet.

Here's the problem: people like the tactile sensation of mashing buttons with their fingers.  No, I don't have any evidence to back that up other than common sense and a myriad of gameplay hours since I was young.  What's more, with the GameCube's controller and virtual button setup, you could instantly pick up any GC game and almost instantly know which buttons do what.  If developers are allowed to go wild on interface design, that level of cohesion is lost.

Also in the specs are shockers like 802.11 and hardware-accelerated 3d graphics.  But those are side issues for me.  What's up with the touch screen, Nintendo?

iChat Wishlist

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

About a week and a half ago, Apple responded to my iChat feature requests.

First and foremost I asked them to support XMPP-Core now that it's an IETF proposed standard.  This would effectively make iChat a multi-protocol instant messaging application.  During development of the first rev of iChat, the developers used the Jabber protocols as a model while the biz-heads worked things out with AOL.  Here's a post iChat's history.

Secondly, I asked them to fix their implementation of buddy groups.  Currently they use a drawer with checkboxes for the displaying of buddy groups.  Most other clients on the market use a tree-view, folder-list metaphor.  With their innovative implementation, Apple "fixed" something that wasn't really broken to begin with.

They responded by calling both items "known issues."  Obviously the lack of XMPP support is "known" - as it was simply a design choice.  But calling the current state of the buddy group implementation a "known issue" really surprised me.  Either they didn't really read what I wrote, or they're admitting that they made a mistake.  Either way, I hope I don't have to wait until 10.4 for the next rev of iChat.

OS X Application Roundup

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

I've just finished updating my newly-serviced 15" Powerbook G4, and now I have the fun task of downloading the newest versions of my favorite applications.  Here's what makes my OS X experience so much fun:

• BBEdit (text editor for programming projects)
• Firefox (mozilla browser)
• iChat AV (latest beta does AIM vidchat)
• iPulse (graphical system monitor)
• iRoster (rendezvous browsing)
• iTerm (tabbed console/terminal)
• iWork (time-tracking and invoicing)
• MacStumbler (wifi detection)
• mplayer (does divx better than quicktime)
• NetNewsWire (rss/atom newsreader)
• OmniOutliner (mind-mapping, outlining)
• OmniWeb (innovative web browser)
• OSXPlanet (xplanet front-end)
• Psi (jabber client)
• SubEthaEdit (rendezvous-enabled text editor)
• Teleport (software kvm)
• Vim (for quick and dirty text edits)
• VideoLAN Client (yet another movie player)
• WeatherPop (menuling with local weather info)
• X-Chat Aqua (irc client)

I'm not linking to them right now because I plan on adding each of them as nodes to the wiki when it's up, that way I can document my usage.  If you want to find them, head on over to google and slap an "osx" after the application name.  Quite a list, eh?  Who says there's not enough software for the Mac platform?

iTunes Error

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

I ran out of RAM, the iMac crashed hard, and my iTunes Music Library file became corrupted and unusable.  I'm not a big stickler for application-specific metadata, but tune ratings are an important part of my iTunes/iPod experience.  A quick trip to google yielded this tip page, which is a bit dated but still valid.

What it boils down to is: if you have a valid .xml file but not an iTunes Music Library file, import the .xml file and you'll be fine.  If you've got a particularly large .xml file (mine's 16 megs!) it'll take quite a while to re-import.

On the one hand, it's a pain.  On the other, Apple could've easily kept the file format totally closed.  By choosing XML, they saved me quite a lot of time and effort.

Quickies

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

iPulse upgrades to 2.0.2

Unannounced iSight update to 1.0.2

Zengobi announces a sketchboard app Curio, which looks nice in theory but not something I could find much use for... at least not until Apple releases a tablet...

MacXWare announces LogoCreator - which I could've used just a week or two ago.

Teleport

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

This Teleport software is amazingly useful.  It allows you to control two Macs with one keyboard and mouse entirely through software.  It even has Rendezvous discovery for quick and painless configuration.

First come across a month or so ago over at the tao of mac, I found a review over at macosxhints and decided to give it a whirl.

Installation was easy, just drag the supplied .prefPane file to a PreferencePanes folder either in /Library or ~/Library (depending on if you want all users on the computer to have access to it).  It took two minutes to configure and to my surprise and delight even required authentication when connecting the two machines for the first time.

This is fantastic for me, because it allows me to clear up the clutter of a keyboard/mouse on my work table.  I've got a large table with a Powerbook dead-center, an iMac just left-of-center, a television to the right and peripherals to the left.  This doesn't leave much room for open books or half-full diet coke cans.

Now my table has some free space and I can control my iMac simply by "throwing" my cursor off the left-edge of my Powerbook.  Once I'm better-equipped, I may need to switch to osx2x which has similar functionality, but also lets you control machines with VNC and/or X server running on them.  Hot stuff.

Firefox 0.8

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

By now you've heard that Firebird has been renamed Firefox and a 0.8 release has been, well, released.  Here are a few first impressions for the OS X user:

• Startup time is not noticeably faster than Firebird 0.7, but it is noticeably slower than Safari 1.2.
• Yes, you still get that tiny phantom window when you use Apple's Expose feature.
• Woohoo! They've included DOM Inspector, I now have no reason to have the full version of Mozilla installed.
• Yes, the new Pinstripe theme is that cool.
• OS X hotkeys like cmd-m to minimize and shift-cmd-left/right to switch tabs still do not work.  Bummer.
• about:plugins shows they're still working with Java 1.3.1, so still no Newsmonster support.  Argh.

Enough to get me to switch?  I dunno.  It's tempting to want to use a cross-platform browser, but I'm really only using one platform on the desktop these days anyway.

AppleScript and Airport

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

The goal was simple, create an AppleScript to automate some of my daily functions - but only to do so when joined to a specific wireless network, and over a specific signal level.

As a newbie to AppleScript, I tooled around in Script Editor for a while and tried opening different dictionaries. I got online and searched through Apple's knowledge base, versiontracker, macosxhints, all the usual places and only came to find references to "Airport Scripting Application" - which appeared to be an AppleScript library to allow you to interface with Airport. The library was bundled with Airport software version 1.3. The current version is 3.2 and the library is no longer included (I braved the download and checked the manifest).

All was not lost, however, it only took a few minutes in #joiito to learn that the functionality was bundled into the new Internet Connect application, and that I should be checking out the associated dictionary - which I did. It's got everything I need, now it's only a matter of writing the script I want.

BBEdit Discovery

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

It started when I wanted to create a User Friendly plugin for iComic.

iComic has an "open architecture, supporting plugins written in perl." Neat. So I found one of my plugins in ~/Library/iComic/Plugins and dragged it to TextEdit. No dice, didn't open. Odd, I thought, the plugin should just be perl. So I dragged it to BBEdit, which launched a type of window I hadn't yet seen - the Disk Browser. Come to find out, the plugins are more like application packages.

Disk Browser mode is a two-pane window with file navigation on the top and text editing on the bottom. Looks great for switching back and forth between resources and property lists. Neat.

Debugging Feeds Apps

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

Turns out there were three sites that were the problem. One site has a bump php script that yields an XML parser error instead of the expected RSS and two sites had invalid RSS by not specifying the DOCTYPE, thus creating undefined entities.

I've culled them from the database, and hopefully cron will rest easy this evening.

Evolution and RSS Feeds

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

While reading an article yesterday about what UserLinux might look like, I learned that Ximian's Evolution now does RSS aggregation on its Summary page. Neat.

As Evolution 1.4 comes standard in the Fedora Core 1 Personal Desktop Installation, I decided to give the feature a whirl. To find it, you have to be at the Summary page and click Tools, then Settings, then select the News Feeds tab. Simple enough.

The most immediate feature lacking was the ability to import OPML files, which is important when you've got a lot of subscriptions... which brings me to the next downfall: the feature doesn't scale well. As evidenced by Ximian's screenshot of the summary page, the formatting and display of the feeds takes up quite a lot of screen real estate. Most RSS aggregation software uses a 2 or 3-pane view for a reason. If I wanted one long list of news feeds, I'd find a way for php to parse opml and collect the news items for display on a webpage.

Which brings me to the third and most important point regarding Evolution and RSS aggregation. RSS is a technology more closely tied to browsing than to e-mail. So why isn't RSS aggregation built into the browser?

Web Services

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

• Google AdSense
• Amazon Web Services

I've signed up for both of these services and will be exploring what they have to offer over the course of the next several weeks. I'm looking for Amazon to supersede the functionality of AllConsuming.

So far, Google AdSense has been wonderfully straight-forward and simple to use. After signing up you're re-directed to a page that helps you pick a color and layout scheme and generates the code for you to paste into your website. Once that's done, you simply wait until Google crawls your site and associates links suitable to your content.

On the MT front, I'll be looking at the blogroll plugin which would do away with the blogrolling account... as well as considering writing a custom plugin to link MT with PhpWiki either automatically or via a custom tag such as <$MTWikiLink$>.

Quickies

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

• gillmor on data mobility
• search engine decoder
• cranky old man hates bill gates

I skimmed Gillmor's column and it reminded me of an idea I had for a next-gen automobile cockpit UI. The car would receive speed limit data as it travels and the speedometer would glow green if you were obeying the speed limit or red if you were over the speed limit. A lot of the data presented by roadside signs could be broadcast directly to the car and displayed according to the driver's preference.

The future won't come fast enough.

Removing Smilies from iChat AV

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

This one comes courtesy of dkp, but since he's being stubborn about posting to his blog, it has to appear here.

Find the file SmileyTable.plist nested way down in your /System/Library folder and rename it to SmileyTable.plist.bak

This will prevent iChat AV from rendering the smilies with images and will instead render them using text.

Because your change affects the entire system, you'll need to go into the Terminal and use sudo to mv the file. To undo the change, simply apply the instructions in reverse.

Simple.

Feeds

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

Based on ~stevenf's post RSS to Web, I've finally gotten around to building a page of the feeds I read daily.

In the comments section of his post, to which I've posted, I found a link to Feed on Feeds, a fully-featured php/mysql aggregator application. In fact, it was so fully-featured, I wasn't comfortable using it for a public feeds page!

However, I was also able to find in his comments a link to Magpie RSS, a php-rss parser. With it and Feed on Feeds, I was able to hack together a rudimentary page to be updated hourly by cron.

Not too shabby for half a day's work, though I'm just told by Brent that the CSS isn't rendering properly in IE. Now there's a surprise. Gah.

Update: IE now renders it decently, at the expense of the other browsers - but the compromise was minimal. Also; I'd be remiss to not mention the other inspiration for the site, and that's Brendyn Alexander's RSS roll for the #joiito IRC channel.

Quickies

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

This is a quick article on what happens when you sit users down with operating systems they aren't familiar with. Naturally, the Windows user doesn't fully understand the power of the underpinnings of OS X.

This is in the same vein as the Ars article on Panther, but it touches on more of the little things that makes Panther awesome.

New Front-End, New Back-End

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

Well, not entirely.

The front-end is new, the back-end isn't quite ready yet, but you can check it out here. I've gotten PhpWiki up and running, now I just need to hack it into submission.

I've mixed feelings about the new design. I disliked having everything hidden, but it looks a bit busy with everything showing. We'll see how it weathers the test of time.

Ars does Panther

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

This is a fantastic, in-depth look at Apple's OS X 10.3 (Panther).

The most interesting bits to me were...

• packaging/marketing of 10.1 v. 10.2 v. 10.3
• the mini-widget set
• the brushed-metal usage guidelines
• nested tab-area views
• OS upgrades make the system faster*
• the history of window management
• hitting tab while in expose-mode

* - really fascinating, this bit was. Especially in light of my recent hardware inadequacies. In the world of Windows and Linux, we've come to expect a performance hit with each new version if the hardware stayed the same. That OS X has turned that around completely is something that I quite simply took for granted.

Fedora Core 1

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

Downloading this was a pain. I eventually gave up on all the US mirrors and found a server in the UK that was blazingly fast.

Installation went largely without a hitch. The first time I tried to install, I skipped the disc verification. This crashed the installer program and I needed to reboot. The second time I tried to install, I went through the disc verification process and everything proceeded smoothly.

I noticed that beside looking prettier, the installer still couldn't find my ThinkPad (A21p) monitor. That didn't stop it from loading suitable drivers enabling 1600x1200 full-color display. Also curious was in the Personal Desktop installation, samba isn't selected by default.

During the final stages of installation, I chose eth1 (my orinocco card) as my default connection. This was a mistake, though not a drastic one. During the first boot of the new installation the network wasn't located because the pcmcia drivers hadn't been loaded yet!

Once I booted into Fedora, everything was going, well, not smoothly. Rather choppily in fact. Turns out 128 isn't the magic RAM number. Not surprising, I suppose. I checked pricewatch.com and RAM looked dirt cheap. Of course, the kind of RAM I need for the ThinkPad (144-pin, 64-bit SDRAM in SODIMM form running at 100mhz) tops out at 256mb per SODIMM - which means I can only have 512 total. What's more, IBM wants $150 per SODIMM. Three hundred bucks is a good chunk of what a decent new laptop would cost. So I'm faced with the question of when to upgrade versus when to buy-new. CDW has similar SODIMMs for just under a hundred, so I may just get one to see if it speeds things up.

Apart from that unpleasantness, I was pleased to find Evolution 1.4 to provide suitable enhancement over whatever version came with RedHat 9. With my previous experience, setting up Firebird and NewsMonster was a snap.

We'll see how an infusion of RAM helps the situation. As I've just told Scotty, Fedora is almost enough to get me to switch from OSX - but not quite.