Category: development

I feel guilty. I just unsubscribed from the YellowDog Linux Listserv. I know! What’s wrong with me? The group is extremely active, helpful and all around cool. I just don’t use YellowDog anymore, and haven’t for quite a while. They’re a great group for general linux tips and will even help (without flaming) when folks ask OS X questions. Why did I leave? I just felt it was time to move on. I loved YellowDog when I used it, but now that I don’t have a machine that can run it, and since I’ve fallen in love with OS X, I’ve actually lost my desire to run it. I run RedHat 8 on one of my office PC’s, and well, that’s linux enough for me. Not because it’s better than YellowDog, just because it runs on the platform I have to run it on. I also just haven’t been reading it lately. It comes in, I’ll look at the titles, and for the past month or so, I just haven’t read it.

I feel so guilty.

I don’t talk about a lot of things on this site. I’m sure that if I did talk about some of this stuff, I would be a much more popular blogger. I self-censor constantly. I’ve only ever written something unpleasant about someone at work once where that person might be able to recognize themselves (and if they don’t, I’m sure the people that know him would).

So, here’s a list of the things I probably won’t ever ever talk about on this site:

• Embarrassing or mean things about my family members and friends. I’m fair game. They’re not. I offend them enough in person to do it for the world to see.

• Embarrassing or mean things about co-workers. First, I don’t want to get fired. Second, I offend them enough in person.

• Stupid thing my company does. Again, I would like to keep my job.

That leaves a whole rich palette of things to talk about untouched. It leaves me opinions about stuff (which I’ve been sharing freely the last couple days), cool stuff, stuff I did, cute family stories, geek stuff and… oh yeah, stuff pretty much covers it. Now, the people who talk about the stuff listed above are brave. Maybe not thinking it all the way through, but brave nonetheless. People have been fired, broken up over, lost friends, etc over things said in blogs. Now, if I lose a friend for an opinion, I can live with that. If you don’t like what I think, and can’t handle the thought that I might have different opinions from you, then you’re probably not my friend to begin with. I’m doing my level best not to rag on people or embarrass anyone other than myself. If I’ve failed, I’m sorry. Really I am.

Do you use multiple computers? Are they all running different OS’es? Do you use different text editors on each one? Does that piss you off? You’re in luck, my friend!! Go download jEdit today. It’s a full-functioned text editor written in Java and delivered as an executable jar file. So, any platform that can run Java can run jEdit. Problem of the text editor collection – SOLVED!! It also has an impressive array of plug-ins which are awesome. Go get the latest stable build and check it out. You’ll love it.

I’m feeling better today. No more whining today. I’m playing with using Tcl around Movable Type and it’s a lot of fun. I wrote a little template that spits all the categories and entries into a tcl array, where things can then be sorted, goofed with, etc. Since everything is in MySQL, I could just go right to the db, but I can never get the MySQL driver to build right on my Linux box. I know I’m kind of wasting my time because I’ll never ever find a hosting company that doesn’t charge an arm and a leg to run AOLserver, but it’s a nice diversion.

For example, I don’t like how Movable Type’s MTEntryNext and MTEntryPrevious work. I usually only want to go back and forth within a category, not through the whole site. You also can’t re-sort by field or ascend/descend like you can with MTEntries (which means your next/prev are out of order if you sort any other way than the default). I’ve already posted it to the Request a New Feature board (although I think it’s a minor minor bug).

I’ve done all kinds of stuff today. I wrote documents, finished up a project, put off starting a new one, ate a salad, drank a gallon of water and wrote up my goals for the first quarter:

• I will write more code than documents this quarter.

• I will mourn Steve Case’s resignation quietly and keep my grief to myself. I will no longer start sobbing in meetings and crying out, “Oh, STEVE!!!! WHY DID YOU LEAVE US?!!”

• I will stop laughing when I hear the word “functionality”.

• In the interest of cost savings, I will institute a toilet paper rationing program. I will personally set an example by using no more than four sheets per visit to the little boys’ room.

• I will stop putting rude comments in my code.

• No more easter eggs (I swear, there haven’t been ANY in anything y’all might have seen).

• Instead of wasting company time walking all the way to the bathroom, I will install one in my office.

• I will stop referring to my co-workers as Squeaky McSoggypants

Steve Case to resign from AOL Time Warner

I surfed with Safari last night and I have to say I’m not impressed. On my TiBook (500mhz w/ 512mb), it took 5 seconds to launch. Mozilla takes 9 to bring up the first browser window, and I get more. Chimera only took 4, and provides most of the features of Mozilla. I’m not going to switch, because there’s nothing really new there. Steve touted the snapback button, and the improved bookmarks, which I don’t think are really all that great to begin with.

It’s not that it’s not good software. It does render pages quickly. It is nice to look at. But, it could be so much more. I’m not really happy having to worry about another browser, even though its rendering problems seem minor.

I picked up the MacWorld Keynote by Mr. Jobs in the middle while he was showing off iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD. What just came to me while watching this is that Apple isn’t gunning for the workplace anymore. They’ve ceded that to Microsoft. They’ve created an amazing Lifestyle Suite of software. The collection of iApps is robust, and with the new features, I think the Mac’s killer app. We geeks can talk about the BSD underpinnings of OS X, the cool things we can do with things like Fink and the Apache webserver built in.

Yeah, and I just saw the part where he dropped the name on us: iLife. Yeah… Ummm… I called it?

Anyway, I’m pretty excited about the bundle and the new features in all three. PLUS, the predictions were wrong. You’ll be able to download iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie for free or go buy the bundle. Sweet.

Ummm, why did they go and build their own browser? Hopefully, it’s based on Gecko so we don’t have to worry about yet another browser’s quirks. It’s pretty funny how familiar the Safari toolbar is to the Windows AOL Client’s. I’m honestly not seeing anything too hot about Safari so far. The benchmarks looked good, but the features don’t look compelling enough to make enough people switch to make supporting it worthwhile. Also, Steve, please stop touting the Google integration. Big deal. There are Google bars for pretty much every browser out there that offer the same features. Hopefully, it won’t be another HotJava (Sun’s unbelievable horrible browser packaged with Solaris).

If you don’t own a Mac… consider it. I’m making the switch as we speak (it’s harder at work than at home, where the switch is already pretty much complete), and I’ve been extremely impressed.

Oh boy, my friend Jon linked to BlamBot – WOW. They have some of the coolest free fonts I’ve ever seen: clean, well done titling fonts. Sweet, sweet stuff.