njr 3.0

If you use Mutt, watch out if you regularly send mail from the command line with 'mutt user\@host'. For me with Mutt 1.3.27i (yes, I should really upgrade to a release version!) it doesn't save such emails in your sent messages (”record”) folder. I just spent several hours writing a 7-page email to the authors of some software I'm beta testing, and was very unhappily surprised to find it was never saved. I sure hope the recipients got it and don't decide to delete it without reading! When I tried to copy my scrollback to the clipboard, Terminal.app crashed, naturally.

Back to work…

3:43 AM | Radio
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Oh, one more thing… Helios is my new favorite screen saver. Sucks CPU like you can't imagine, but it's very pretty.

5:51 AM | Radio
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Not much interesting going on in my life; making slow but steady progress on research. Yesterday I discovered the generically-named and free Calendar. It offered exactly what I was looking for: a small, unobtrusive, customizable calendar. It provides rudimentary event support (which I don't use). As a bonus, it displays the date in the Dock. Here's my setup:

No progress on switching away from UserLand's Community Server over the weekend, though I spent the best part of Sunday morning updating my parents' PowerBooks for the first time in months, and fixed a longstanding issue with Retrospect not sending emails when it finishes backing up.

I'm continuing in my exploration of “Subversion”; currently I am reading the Handbook. RapidSVN is an under-development wxWindows-based Subversion client. It compiled painlessly on Mac OS X, and wxWindows has a Mac OS X port, but the native GUI implementation appears unfinished. Compare the appearance of RapidSVN on Windows with this screenshot from Mac OS X to see how far it's got to go:

A major impediment to my hacking on Subversion is GNU libtool's incredible slowness on OS X. According to Justin Erenkrantz, who's been working on this issue, the problem is that the 'source' command in the bash/zsh shells on OS X is incredibly slow: it takes a significant fraction of a second per execution, and since libtool is just a shell script which uses 'source' a lot…big problem. He's writing a libtool replacement in C currently, and hopes to finish it by the end of the week. That should dramatically improve Subversion build time, and I can start working on patches for Subversion bugs, such as the build scripts' incompatibility with Encap.

5:22 AM | Radio
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My cousin Claire and her husband Roger appear to have started a consultancy. Unfortunately the Web page design seems to take after Brandeis's 1997-era home page in color scheme. (Imagine the entire page has that orange background, archive.org appears not to preserve it).

7:16 AM | Radio
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I'm now subscribed to Doug Baron's Radio Weblog. Not to be confused with Doug Baron's Radio Weblog, naturally.

11:44 PM | Radio
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Michael McCracken: BibDesk: A BibTeX bibliography manager for Mac OS X. He's in a similar research area to mine: I recognize and have read about 99% of the papers I see as examples in his screenshots.

8:11 AM | Radio
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Why you should take a Mac user to lunch: Some errors, but overall clear thinking. I had no idea Windows server licensing costs were so high.

11:10 PM | Radio
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Secret is a password database for the Palm. No sync support with the Mac (yet), but the Palm interface looks loads better than PasswordWallet (what I currently use).

10:55 PM | Radio
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More fun with “Subversion”, after recovering carefully from the repository corruption. In addition to the standard HTML output mode there's also an XML+XSLT+CSS one. Here's the relevant portion of my httpd.conf:

<Location /repos/dev>
		DAV svn
		SVNPath /var/svn/repos/dev
		SVNReposName "sabi.net development"
		<LimitExcept GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>
				Require valid-user
		</LimitExcept>
		AuthType Basic
		AuthName "sabi.net Subversion repository"
		AuthUserFile /var/svn/users
</Location>
<Location /repos/dev-xml>
		DAV svn
		SVNPath /var/svn/repos/dev
		SVNReposName "sabi.net development (XML)"
		SVNIndexXSLT /svnindex.xsl
		<LimitExcept GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>
				Deny from all
		</LimitExcept>
</Location>

10:58 AM | Radio
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This is something everyone else probably knows, but after the n^th time forgetting to bring the plug for my TiBook's AC adapter (of the square variety), I noticed that the plug is exactly the same shape as a standard laptop two-prong power connector, plugged in the extra one I had here from the power adapter for my digital camera, and it worked! So, if you leave the plug or power cable somewhere, just use any old cable instead: it won't look as nice, but it certainly works.

8:25 AM | Radio
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