njr 3.0

Compact your data files. If you use Radio heavily, follow these instructions to compact your data files. My “Data Files” folder went from 58 MB to 2.4 MB.

5:25 PM | Radio
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This thread has been going for several days on macosx-admin and, without a doubt, is the funniest I've read on the list since I've been subscribed.

4:49 PM | Radio
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My parents are visiting this weekend. My mother flew down from Montréal last night, and my father's on his way from Providence right now. I hadn't seen them since March, and miss them so much… unfortunately I've got a lot of work to finish this weekend, but I'll spend as much time with them as I can.

3:25 PM | Radio
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Seth Dillingham writes about calendar positioning. I experienced the same issue myself, but there's one big reason I don't move my calendar to the bottom of the page: having a navigational element which changes position is bad. If I'm trying to scan through several days, with a calendar at the bottom of the page, the .

Conversant's “discussion thread” iframe on the page I linked to exhibits a similar problem: to view consecutive messages in the thread, you have to keep moving your mouse back and forth, because the position of the iframe varies depending on the length of the message you're currently viewing. Ideally, the thread navigation should be in a separate, fixed-position frame (the way Google Groups does it), or at the top of the page in an iframe.

I like to think my solution to the problem—keeping the calendar at the top of the page, but providing a link at the bottom of the page that points to the calendar, for those people unfamiliar with it—is a good compromise.

Speaking of Conversant, version 1.0b1 was released today. I don't have much use for it at the moment, but for those people who are interested, it's a very nice piece of software.

4:34 PM | Radio
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New iBook, still a G3. No sale.

12:14 PM | Radio
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'm' just stopped working in Project Builder. It stopped working right in the middle of my typing:

- (SXDocument *)docuent;

My first, frightened thought was that the key had failed. I switched to the O2, it worked fine; switched to Key Caps, fine there too. Mu, option-m, capital M, command-M to minimize, they all work, just not plain old lowercase m.

The April beta of PB 2.0 hasn't crashed once in several solid days of development; the only flakiness it's showed is in showing class information for multiple targets (it doesn't, so it picks the first one and you have to work hard to persuade it to forget), and one time when the Find panel stopped coming up, fixed by quitting and restarting. So the upshot is that this 'm' situation is the biggest thing I've had to complain about in a while.

(Closing and reopening the project fixed it.)

10:25 AM | Radio
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I am the #1 link on Google for “overdue weblog”, which someone
searched for earlier today. Surprisingly (or maybe not considering
the primarily technical material I discuss here), I haven't had any
referers which would qualify for “Disturbing Search Requests”.

How could a Weblog be overdue, anyway? Library books, projects,
payments, sure, but a weblog?

7:39 PM | Radio
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Nat discovered Mutt's incredible threading features. I sure wish I used a graphical mailreader again, but until I find one that lets me read mail as fast and efficiently as Mutt does, it's a no-brainer.

Mutt threading is even better with the “last-mailbox-order” modifier, which sorts active threads to the bottom of the mailbox. In my .muttrc, I have:

folder-hook lists/.*    set sort=threads
folder-hook lists/.*    set sort_aux=last-mailbox-order

8:37 AM | Radio
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Brent Simmons' MacNewsWire uses the very interesting-looking SQLite as a back end.

The folks at Black Hole Media wrote an Objective-C wrapper for SQLite. Also on their Code page is URLTextView, which properly tracks URLs in NSTextViews. Definitely something to look at for the next release of ICeCoffEE… assuming I ever get out from my current pile of work.

7:28 AM | Radio
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Having trouble rearranging items in outline views in Project Builder? I always did. The reason it behaves weirdly is that the target is based on the position of the cursor (mouse pointer), not the position of the items you're dragging.

This is really poor design IMO. Consider the physical equivalent - you're picking up an object to move it, and its final position depends on where your hands are, rather than where the object is.

But at least I understand now, and I won't be fighting with PB to position my files somewhere.

4:51 AM | Radio
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