njr 3.0

I'm having a very annoying problem with OS X that just started yesterday.

Classic only starts once per OS launch. After that, it no longer works. I really don't have time to deal with this right now.

I went from “huh?” to “wow!” in one day with my Instant Outline… what a terrific concept. The very un-sophistication of it is quite appropriate for impromptu, self-organizing thoughts. It seems like it would be a great solution for communication in my family. We could run our own Radio server and share outlines.

9:26 AM | Radio
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From #mozilla today:

<oeschger> bryner: so is the tree closed in earnest right now?
<bryner> what do you mean?
<oeschger> there's that msg from last night about tp performance..
<bryner> yeah, it's still being looked at
<oeschger> ah. ok.
[pause]
<bryner> dbaron: do you think we should reopen?
<bryner> so what i'm getting ready to do is blow away the tree on btek and start it over as a regular tbox
<bryner> any objections?
* bryner doesn't hear any
<bryner> done

Thus ends another wild-goose chase for performance regressions.

7:44 PM | Radio
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It's all the rage; yes, I have an OPML coffee mug. You can read about what I did tonight in my instant outline.

12:34 PM | Radio
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RUPipeFilters: A RU tool that does something I can't figure out, but it uses my updater code, so it must be good. “qbullet.sidesmiley”

New version of launch out, with some minor fixes, and a cool contributed script that lets you talk to launch while not logged in at the console.

9:54 AM | Radio
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I wrote a simple drag-and-drop SCP script. You'll need Bill Bumgarner's excellent SSHPassKey and Satimage.osax (included with Smile).

Mainly useful for me to leave on the desktop so I can quickly upload screenshots for others to look at—especially now Mac OS X is able to generate them directly in PNG format.

It was with some hesitation that I bought Script Debugger a few weeks ago. I now recommend it unconditionally: it's a great tool, well worth the price. Makes writing AppleScript almost enjoyable.

5:31 AM | Radio
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Today's href="http://inessential.com/?comments=1&postid=1920">Brent's
birthday, and Josh
Lucas's birthday, and my birthday as well. I'm 23.

6:42 PM | Radio
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I couldn't resist - tonight is our first real snowfall I've seen this
winter in Illinois - I was away last time. Big difference from the
freezing rain/sleet that pelted everything in sight last night (and it
hurt!) It's so beautiful looking out the window, I don't want to
sleep, but I must.

9:42 AM | Radio
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I'm too far behind with non-Net stuff - house, car, music, family,
etc. Nothing catastrophic is wrong, but I fear it will happen if I
don't start paying more attention to the world outside my computer.
Until I'm caught up I'm reducing my online presence - including this
weblog.

11:50 PM | Radio
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Steve Zellers: “The big loser in Mac OS X is the file system fragility problem.”

Yup. Cocoa makes things easy for the programmer, at the cost of fragility and poor error reporting: I still can't believe there is no result code or structured exception handling in Cocoa at all. Zip, zero. This is a huge failing: if the framework can't return specific errors to the programmer, then how can the programmer present intelligible error messages to the user? These are simple things like distinguishing 'file not found' from 'permission denied' from 'disk full', which Cocoa completely hides as a single boolean success/failure value despite their presence in the underlying BSD APIs.

The old Mac philosophy was to make things easy for the user, at the potential cost of pain and suffering for the programmer. I don't mind the pain and suffering all that much—I just spent the last five hours trying to fix some threading/corruption issues that I still haven't isolated with a (Cocoa) application, but I'd do it a hundred times over if it meant giving users an application that behaved stably and made sense.

As a programmer, I'd prefer the best of both worlds: an API that's easy to use, but robust and predictable for the user.

7:47 AM | Radio
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The big loser in Mac OS X is the file system fragility problem.

7:44 AM | Radio
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