numbersix

trying out Chimera, a browser based on the mozilla geko engine. strip out all the stuff mozilla adds on, and you really see how fast it can go. the one biggest problem i have with mozzila is why oh why did they have to pile all that stuff on top? the browser is fine on it's own, i don't need all that other stuff thanks.

currently putting off all my other todos by dabbling a little with Cocoa coding in Objective C. managed some simple GUI stuff, string manipulation etc. trying to get used to the way the GUI designer and coding are abstracted. kind of a pain to keep having to swap back and forth, especially if you're used to VB, but makes for more structured approach to the whole thing I think, forcing a lot more design in the early stages the way it should be.

I would like to do something meaty with it, but as usual at a loss for a project. I'd have a go at an RSS browser if the excellent NetNewswire didn't already exist.

the AppKit objects have all sorts of intriguing bits and bobs, like the initWithContentsOfURL method for the String object, how cool is that :) also very impressed with the documentation that comes with the developer package.

one way of finding out what type of processor your Sun machine has (assuming you are running Solaris) :

# psrinfo -r

Casimir Funk, what a cool name. AND he discovered vitamines.

excellent article explaining the difference between cocoa and carbon - http://www.realsoftware.com/realbasic/about/Carbon_vs_Cocoa.html

excellent article explaining the difference between cocoa and carbon - http://www.realsoftware.com/realbasic/about/Carbon_vs_Cocoa.html

the first blog entry with my new iBook. installed and online in minutes. the modem did an odd thing during the registration bit, but other than that it's looking fine :) gotta get used to this weird keyboard. and mozilla will have to take the place of ie as soon as i can download it.

no # sign on your iBook/TiBook keyboard? try:

alt+3

no # sign on your iBook/TiBook keyboard? try:

alt+3

i think i'll re-design this site. decided i don't like the front page menu thing, going to try and fit it all on one page, blog down the middle, links to other stuff at the sides. not an original idea by any means, but it seems to work well for other sites. been reading other blogs recently, particularly dutchbint. excellent stuff, and great design.

the mail application on my ibook recently stopped working. i think it was a combination of moving it from the applications folder to a sub folder, and then upgrading it when i upgraded to OSX 10.2.1. when i tried to run it, the app just bounced a few times in the dock and then vanished. the console showed error messages reguarding a missing nib file. anyhoo, after a bit of poking around i discovered Pacifist, a util based around the unix pax util, something i'd been looking at recently for something else. using this i opened the essential packages package from my OSX install CD, and was able then to re-install the mail app.
and it works. i am now of course in the position of having most of 10.2.1 installed, but the mail app from 10.2.0. it seems to work ok though, so it's not something i'm particularly bothered about.

just discovered a neat feature of the MacOSX terminal - you can drag highlighted text to other applications/windows. you even get a copy of the text under the mouse cursor while you're dragging. still not sure if i prefer this to the x windows highlight / paste, will have to experiment....

i love this stuff, but somehow I don't quite understand what it's all about. Adult toys gives the wrong impression, but that's pretty much what they are. They have a neat shop on Beak Street in Soho. I have to get some.

at last i find themes for OSX - http://www.resexcellence.com/themes/. don't get me wrong, I think Aqua is ok, i just get a little irritated with the notion that Apple knows best and that you should just go along with their ideas of what your desktop should look like, especially if they insist on making everything brushed metal. sorry guys, but when I spend 8+ hours a day staring at it, I would like to have control over what it looks like. that's what i like so much about blackbox on my BSD machine, in fact pretty much any other UNIX wm. sheesh, even windows is customisable from that point of view.

"Art Spiegelman is one of the world's most revered graphic artists. Yet when he turned his hand to the burning issues of our day, the US media didn't want to know." - from the Independent. Thanks to my bro for the link.

iTerm is a replacement for the standard OSX terminal application. It is faster (doesn't make it seem you are typing through treacle), has tabs, bookmarks, and is generally pretty cool.

At last, simple when you know how :

dtterm -xrm *menuBar:False

This makes use of X resources. You could also put the resource in your default .XResources file.

Do you ever have a compelling urge to throw your wallet or keys into the water when you're near a river or lake? Like a little devil on your shoulder battling against your common sense. I was relieved to find out from a friend that I am not the only person who has this. There must be a word or a term for it. Very odd. It's a bit like the (un-suicidal) urge to jump when standing at the top of a tall building, or at the edge of a cliff. This discussion suggests a link to Tourettes Syndrome.

Read about it but never had the need for it until today. Cygwin does exactly what it says on the tin, ie "a Linux-like environment for Windows". I was most impressed with the X support, works wonderfully. My thankfully brief forrays into the world of Windows will now be slightly less troublesome.

How to pipe standard output into the OSX copy buffer :

cat foo.txt | pbcopy

And then to grab it again :

pbpaste > bah.txt

Now that is cool! From ./

At last I can play avis under OSX - VideoLAN

Just found this solution to the problem of Avantgo not providing an OS X conduit. Idiots.

This is a frightening account of what happens when you say something on a web site that the powers that be don't like.

OSX has a rather agressive NIS authentication mechanism. Once configured, if configured wrongly or the NIS server is un-available, the OS can get horribly locked up trying to contact it. This can be a pain, as it even prevents going in and changing the config. Bit stupid really. Marcel Bresink has written a very comprehensive set of instructions on using NIS with OSX, including (at the bottom) a way of fixing a mis-configured machine.

I mentioned a while back that I'd found a util to sync Palm devices with Avantgo through OSX. Although that solution worked it wasn't integrated with the Palm desktop (you had to run it seperately) and it was extremely slow. I've since found MAL Conduit which is a proper Palm Desktop conduit, and works as fast as you'd expect it to. Very nice. I still think Avantgo could have written one themselves.

Seems that I have fallen prey to the dreaded iBook logic board problem. Bugger, and I had only read about it a few weeks ago after someone at work had mentioned it. There's me thinking I had gotten away with it.

The more I use Apple's iTunes the less I like it. My main gripe is the way it forces you to use its library idea of managing your music files. I personally like to manage my mp3 files myself, maybe playing a local file, then one from an NFS mount, then maybe one on the desktop. iTunes insists on abstracting the user from the fact that these are all files, and adding them all to its library. You end up not knowing where the files are, problems when you detach from remote mounts etc. And I don't really like the interface either, way too busy.

I can see how the average Mac user would like all this, but from the perspective of someone who is used to a command prompt it gets a little grating.

So along comes Cabrio, a minimalist mp3 player I found this morning. Seems to do everything I ask for, which isn't much from an mp3 player. Plus it's skinnable. Let's see how it performs.

Messing with Cocoa development and Objective-C. After the documentation supplied by Apple, CocoaDev has to be one of the most useful sites, simple, easy to use and very well designed. It has also introduced me to a web concept I've managed to avoid so far, Wiki. Interesting aproach to allowing users to add content to a site.

So the BBC have been making a ton of their radio programming available on the web via their Listen Again service. This is great if you happen to be near a broadband connection, but not so good if you're out and about with your iPod. I've seen a number of solutions to this, I even paid for a copy of Audio Hijack, but nothing so far has made the conversion from Real Audio stream to iPod as seamless as I'd like. So I rolled my own script based on bedouin's script found at www.macosxhints.com.

Pre-requisites :

- Lame
- Mplayer for OSX
- Curl (which I think is installed on OSX by default?)

The mplayer binary must be in the path (create a symlink to /usr/local/bin for instance).

Also, you need to make the cook codecs available for mplayer. I did this by copying the ones that come with RealPlayer thus:

$ sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib/mplayer
$ sudo cp -R /Applications/RealPlayer.app/Contents/Frameworks/HXClientKit.framework/HelixPlugins/Codecs/cook.bundle /usr/local/lib/mplayer

You could do this with a symbolic link also.

Then excecute, eg :

$ ./real_to_mp3.sh http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/ram/inourtime.ram "BBC IOT The Physics of Reality"

Still to do - Pipe each stage into the next so things happen more smoothly, and automatic uploading to iPod would be neat.

Thanks to Nick for this very cool site. I've got to try this.

Adium is a very cool messenger client for OSX. It takes the OSX interface to the max, very slick.

After finishing Super Mario and finding absolutely nothing else worth playing for the DS I needed a new game type diversion. I think I've found it now in Oolite, a very faithful if awkwardly named Elite clone for OSX. Apparently it is flexible enough to allow easy modification of missions, ships and so on.

BBC radio widget, I might yet be a convert to what otherwise looks like a bit of a gimmick.

I've updated my real_to_mp3.sh script to fix a small problem with the mplayer command line, the syntax seems to have changed recently.

See here for the original blog entry on how to install/use it.

http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/postgresql/

Just had to remote desktop from my iBook into a Windows machine using the MS Remote Desktop Connection and do a right click in an application too stupid not to have a menu equivalent for the function. Hum. One mouse button. Some trial and error lead me to find out that SHIFT+CTRL+MOUSE BUTTON translates into a right click, in RDC anyway.

Hope this is useful to someone.

Delighted with my new toy, an Apple Macbook Pro, 2.4GHz dual core, 2GB, 200GB. But the wireless network speed was bothering me. I was getting ping times of between 20 and 50ms between the laptop and the base station, a DLINK 604+. Tried a bunch of stuff over a couple of hours, eventually got to the stage of systematically going through all the options I could see. Hit the nail on the head by turning off the "turbo" option in the wireless settings on the router. No idea what this does (actually reminds me of the old IBM AT turbo button), but the ping times immediately droped down to 1-2ms.

An other odd thing is that this was never a problem with the iBook.

Something I didn't previously know, modern Apple machines have a 'target disk mode' which allows you to mount one machine's disk onto a second machine over firewire. Very cool and easy to do. Useful also for problem machines, and dare I say it, hacking someone else's machine :)

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583

Found out how to make a real DVD from a VIDEO_TS folder.

makehybrid -udf -udf-volume-name "name of dvd" -o name_of_iso.iso path_to_directory_containing_VIDEO_TS

It is important that the directory containing the VIDEO_TS directory doesn't have any other files in it, otherwise the DVD player seems to treat it as a data DVD.

This from :

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070612161317338&query=burn%2Bdvd

I've been using the Matias Tactile Pro keyboard for a while now. Wondefull old school clacky feel to it. However one of the feet broke. Quick email to the guys at Matias and they are sending me a replacement. Now there's service. Thanks guys!

Apple have written an article detailing how to stop .DS_Store files being created on remote volumes:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1629