njr 3.0

Hubzilla: “When he's not destroying your desk he's helping you with your FireWire connectivity problems.”

9:02 PM | Radio
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Jaguar's Terminal app offers significant improvements in user interface, capability and stability. I'm glad the emulation is now reasonably robust, and the source code has been mostly rewritten.

Some new features and fixes: Terminal now responds to telnet and ssh URLs. The bizarre way settings were replicated inconsistently between the inspector and Preferences window is resolved. It lets you split the window between active text and scrollback—something that I'd suggested years ago, and Chris eventually implemented in some early versions of the now-moribund next-generation MacIRC. (Actually, the MacIRC implementation was quite a bit more elegant, but I'm not complaining.) You can now drag text out of as well as into Terminal, though the drag feedback is horrendous. The extent of text selection on a dark background is no longer invisible. The I-beam still becomes close to invisible, however—Cocoa cursors fail to invert when they'd otherwise be hidden, no matter what you do to their masks. Carbon cursors continue to properly invert the same way they always did, so it's no OS X bug.

Terminal is still incredibly slow performing certain operations. Screen drawing during scrolling doesn't even remotely keep up with mouse or scroll-wheel movement on a G4, where rxvt in XDarwin and GLterm have no trouble. Selecting text which spans the split bar is horrendously laggy. Performance improvements should be forthcoming—and Apple should really put more engineering effort into Terminal given its wide use among Unix converts used to xterm, rxvt, and friends.

For months I've had code floating around to support Command-click URL launching in 10.1's Terminal, but I haven't distributed it to more than a few people because it's crash-prone in certain situations. An ICeCoffEE user sent me an email last week pointing out another new Jaguar Terminal feature, undocumented as best I can tell: Terminal lets you launch URLs with a command-double-click. This is useful, but it does a bad job: it doesn't properly strip delimiters such as trailing periods or enclosing parentheses, it doesn't handle email addresses or “slack” URLs such as www.domain.com, and responds to a nonstandard shortcut that happily leaves room for me to have ICeCoffEE intervene on a Command-click.

The rewritten Terminal is an opportunity for me to pick up where I left off on ICeCoffEE. I took a break from research tonight and did some poking around with F-Script Anywhere. It looks like I'll be able to access the contents of Jaguar Terminal windows easily (and without sporadically crashing, hopefully!) The TermStorage class has about every conceivable accessor I can think of—much better than the weird and flaky manipulation I needed to do to extract the contents of the buffer in older versions.

3:27 AM | Radio
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This article on MacMerc.com is a brief, Mac-centric introduction to RSS. More importantly for me, it provides links to official RSS feeds for MacMinute and LiveJournals, neither of which are well documented on their respective sites.

11:39 PM | Radio
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Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon on mailing lists?

• 02:46: person A sends an email.
• 03:19: person B (in this case, me) responds to it.
• 03:26: person C responds to it.
• 04:39: person A responds to person C, as if person B's email never existed.

As is my custom for messages I think have some reasonable content, I sent my message to the list and copied it to person A. I received no personal or on-list response from person A.

This seems to happen to me with about half the list posts I make: they're ignored and people route around me in conversation as if the messages I send don't exist. Am I really that inarticulate, or is there a technical explanation for this? I mentioned this behavior to someone in conversation, and they ascribed it to list propagation delays. An hour is a bit long for that, however.

If I'm such a horrible communicator, I need to do better, otherwise I might as well not waste my time posting and trying to help other people. Or does this happen to everyone else too, and I'm merely unobservant?

3:10 AM | Radio
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Apple Technical Note TN2056: Installable Keyboard Layouts documents the new XML keyboard layout format in Jaguar. I wonder if I can replace my keyboard rempaping utility with some XML—it wasn't possible to use a classic Mac OS keyboard layout for the purpose.

10:51 PM | Radio
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I just typed in the URL of Andy Ihnatko's blog, thinking “I should really add this to my bookmarks page, since he doesn't have a RSS feed and updates rather sporadically.” But as of today, CWoB has a RSS feed, per item permalinks and all. Thanks Andy, for saving me some time (which I proceed to waste reading your blog…)

2:51 PM | Radio
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The FireWire DriveDock, which I discussed a few weeks ago, arrived yesterday. The prices of 80 GB 7200 RPM drives came down a bit since then—I got a WD800JB (7200 RPM, 8 MB cache) for $105 including shipping from NewEgg. I'll buy another 80 or 120 GB disk in a few weeks or months when my finances permit.

Tonight I tried plugging this tape drive (whose abortive installation caused the FireWire ports in my desktop G4 to die) into the DriveDock, and was happy to note that it worked.

Not that I'd use it this way, of course, but it's nice to know that OS X and Retrospect support some rather bizarre and nonstandard configurations.

6:16 AM | Radio
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For some reason I missed the SliMP3 when it came out about a year ago. The server software and firmware has improved significantly since then.

I saw the OS X 3.0 software update on VersionTracker today and downloaded it to take a look. Setup couldn't have been easier: it imported my iTunes 3 songs automatically, and presented me with a fast Web-based interface which bears a strong resemblance to the iPod's interface (not a bad thing at all). First-class OS X support: what a concept!

There are a bunch of reviews linked from the site, of varying quality. I found this LiveJournal entry to be the most informative. I don't spend anywhere near enough time at home to justify getting a SliMP3, but it looks like an extremely well-designed product. What I really want is an iPod-like device which also lets you stream to it via 802.11b.

10:19 PM | Radio
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iCal uses a lot of memory too. Sigh.

4:25 PM | Radio
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Someone neglected to mention to me that the WWDC 2002 sessions are available for streaming to everyone (at least, to student developers) from connect.apple.com now. Thanks Apple!

4:05 AM | Radio
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