21st Century Digital Boy

This article goes on at length listing 18 features Windows “should have but doesn’t”.

Let me save you some time.

It lists everything currently en vogue in Mac OS X (Spaces, Expose, Spotlight, etc) and a couple of random Linux features.

In short, “blah blah blah, I want a Mac that runs all the games I have”. Well, buy one and dual-boot it, jagoff, and quit your bitching.

There is nothing more frustrating than years of “Macs are toys no one wants” then endless articles on how to replicate their features.

So I have been kinda-sorta messing around with the new Plaxo beta web thingee, despite a general dislike to social networking. (Every now and then I feel compelled to try out the current done thing, but just blobbing into Facebook seems pointless as everyone else is already there.)

Anyway, Plaxo ships some sort of Address Book.app plugin, which as near as I can tell syncs local addresses into the Plaxo cloud, and spams everyone to come and sign up. (Sidebar: Also, fail.)

I don’t know precisely because I didn’t install it. Why? Because it’s full of fail.

1. It is shipped as a zip that unzips to a disk image. Fail: please just either ship a disk image or a zip file, but not both. Seriously, guys, man hdiutil .

When you do this, it means you have a minimum of 2 double-clicks to even get to the install, and the user now has not one but 2 files to trash.

2. It ships as an Installer.app package. Fail: Why do you need to run as root to copy a file to /Applications? Hmm? An Installer.app package means, almost certainly, that it’s going to monkey with my startup items, Dock, or whatever. I didn’t ask for that, so fuck you, I’m not installing you.

Installer.app packages have a purpose. An app that reads a per-user, documented data store to talk via some REST-y cloud endpoint does not need anything more than drag-and-drop. If you must install long-lived things, 1)tell the user and 2)make it optional.

I was playing with Aptana over the weekend, and it’s really neat: except I currently don’t own a computer with enough horsepower to make it work worth a damn.

One thing I think is neat about IDEs and Eclipse, is their whole “internal HTTP server” thing. My users are, at times, silly, and making them maintain an Apache instance is problematic. I really wish I had a way to view content, wherever it may be, without making them (and me!) have to wrangle apache.

So here’s what I did.
Continue reading ‘A simple app server’

Problem: I have a bunch of “workflow” wrappers to svn, but I’ve foolishly hardcoded my svn server to svnserver.local, its name on the Bonjour network. So I go home, and on the same laptop I use at work, I have to do 86 extra steps to use my scripts. Wouldn’t it be great if the scripts knew how to figure out if I was at home?

Complication: Airport at home and office are configured essentially identically, so it’s not like I can just look at the IP address.

Solution:scselect! It’s important to note that calling it w/o options prints to STDERR not STDOUT. No idea why.

Anyway after some messing around with things I ended up with this:


scselect 2>&1 | egrep “\*” | tail -1 | awk ‘{print $3}’ | sed -e ’s/(//’ -e ’s/)//’


This returns the current network location. Configure (and switch to) the appropriate network location, and now my wrappers know which repository URL to use. Yay.

Now someone please tell me there’s an easier way ….

Our “enterprise” must be somewhat unique; for us enterprise has nothing at all to do with Exchange. (We use simple IMAP and Mail.app, and the excellent Daylite for contacts, calendars, etc. )

For us there are 2 killer apps for our phones, and sadly I fear one of them will be impossible:

1, a reasonable amount of access to unix-y bits, in particular ssh. Being able to perform simple maintenance while on-the-go will be such a massive “force multiplier” for us that the phones will almost pay for themselves, in terms of no longer tethering the person on-call to their internet connection at home.

I see no reason why there won’t be 50 different competing SSH terminal apps out the day the App Store goes live. So that’s good.

2, we need a modification to the SMS app to allow it to act like a traditional pager; that is to say, “when an SMS comes in, keep making goddamn noise every few seconds until someone comes over and does something”. Like, oh, just about everyone we use Nagios (and I’ve started rolling out monit for stuff, too) to check status on machines. Machine go boom, nagios pages oncall@.

At 2am, that would be a quarter-second-long “boop” on a phone across the room, and maybe you had an extra glass of wine too many that night, and are sleeping a little more soundly than usual…

I am assuming at this point that it means we’ll need to go and buy a traditional pager: before with our shit RAZRs, you just set the most obnoxious ringtone available to incoming SMS, and it worked great. Well, except you dread that sound …

Anyway the “no background apps” rule seems to preclude anyone from writing a better SMS app.

So we’re stuck with maintaining a second cell account, or buying a physical pager. Or hacking our phones, which I sorta refuse to do. (FFS, I refuse to use input managers or any other hacks, you think I’m going to sysadmin my phone???)

It’s sort of sad to think, one day I’ll be restarting a troublesome httpd process one day, from my phone in the dark of a movie theatre, after my stupid numeric pager went off …

So I’ve been screwing around with Emacs again, and generally remembering everything I love and hate about Emacs.

Mostly hate.

Anyway, I always end up back in BBEdit. And I started wondering about, since they added a few features I wanted like folding, I wonder if the next release will support some new stuff, like improved syntax highlighting.

That got me wondering: so just when is the next release?

They’ll never tell you of course, but it only took about 5 minutes here and here to figure it out.

Very broadly speaking, Bare Bones releases an update (”point release”) of BBEdit every couple of months. To wit:

8.7 was released 8/6/07
8.7.1 was released 10/31/07
8.7.2 was released 12/19/07

8.6, 8.5, etc generally follow the same pattern.

What’s else, missing the window has almost always tended to be a larger release (”minor version”); really missing the window hints a major release is brewing. Although it’s hard to call some 16 months from 8.6.2 to 8.7 “minor”, I assume you tend to follow the major.minor.point system.

Anyway they’re only a couple weeks over, so it would be hasty to wonder if they’re baking a version with an embedded Javascript interpreter and radical syntax highlighting … but if 8.7.3 doesn’t show up by the end of March, feel free to start speculating.

(please please please be working on better syntax highlighting and visible svn status, like in the status bar and includes for dynamic languages and …)

UPDATE Well it’s a couple days to April, no betas posted on the mailing list, so, I’m going to bet 1 (one) US Dollar that we’ll not see any updates for BBEdit for some time, perhaps a version 8.8 or even 9. We’ll see how my ostensibly fact-based prognostication goes.

So I’m currently connected to a v100 over a serial line to a keyspan USB adapter thingee, and a terminal running `screen /dev/tty.usbserial 9600`. This works swell for talking to Sun boxes, right up until I need to send Stop-A.

Sending ‘break’ (cmd-.) doesn’t work, and I can’t make any of the screen break thingees do much of anything.

Halp?

Update. Apparently the answer is one of:
1. Purchase ZTerm, which is not a Universal Binary and seems like it never will be, or
2. Find a Windows machine that has a proper break key

Earlier I don’t think I was sufficiently effusive of Script Debugger 4.

It’s goddamn fantastic.

It manages to make Applescript suck so much less that you almost sorta forget that it sucks in the first place.

It’s expensive and big and complex, but I’ve written like 15 non-entirely-trivial Applescript thingees in the past 2 days. That’s more Applescript than I’ve written since I moved to the Mac in 1999.

It’s that awesome. Go buy it, now.

A bit of a plug here: Applescript is still a completely wretched piece of vomit covered in AIDS and fail, but you can wipe a little of the fail off with Script Debugger.

Now to convince my boss to drop the dosh on it TO MAKE THE FUCKING PAIN STOP.

TUAW has a post, “Remove iTunes DRM easily and quickly with iMovie HD“, which talks about exactly that: the old iMovie/iTunes DRM “loophole”.

But the inexplicably, it goes on to say:

This makes you question why DRM is there in the first place.

It … does? 3 words, TUAW: Cory. Motherfucking. Doctorow. You can positively hear him jumping up and down saying “ARE YOU SHITTING ME?”. He has from time to time posted the occasional remark on the topic, in the general direction of Cupertino …

Maybe my dad’s not hip to the fantastic world of DRM, but anyone hip enough to know they need to break the DRM has already questioned why it’s there in the first place. UH DUH?