njr 3.0

AOL has finally implemented multiple simultaneous sign-ons to the same AIM screen name. As of today, I have no more use for njriley@mac.com (previously used on my PowerBook) and njrwireless (previously used on my hiptop): I use njriley everywhere. This not only makes it easier for other people to contact me via AIM, it means I’m more likely to get your messages. Half the time my hiptop is sitting somewhere I’m not, or I can’t hear it or feel it vibrate when I’m wearing headphones. Someone IMs me, then gets frustrated that I don’t respond when I appear to be around.

A bonus is that it’s a lot more convenient not using iChat all the time if you want to carry on audio and video chats. I hope to see some type of iChat-on-demand make its way into the third-party AIM clients for the Mac, so it’s possible to start AV chats from a contextual menu or similar mechanism.

I also looked at the popular third-party AIM clients for the Mac. Adium 2 seems wonderful except for its lack of Address Book integration and a few user interface nits; Proteus seems to have fallen behind, as it seems quite flaky, and I can’t get its Address Book integration to do anything. Proteus also maintains its own buddy lists separate from those stored on the service, which I’d have to manually sync between my desktop and laptop Macs, and copy separately to my hiptop…not worth it. Fire I haven’t tried in ages; it used to be very unstable.

So until I can see people’s names instead of their nicknames in other clients with a minimum of setup, I’m sticking with iChat.

6:09 AM | PyCS
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Another in the series of “this is dumb” screen shots.

Every few weeks it seems LiveJournal revises their RSS generation, and half the LiveJournals I subscribe to become “unread” in NetNewsWire. Most of the time the changes are unnoticeable, but this time it was definitely for the worse (yet slightly more humorous).

6:26 AM | PyCS
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A Wired article mentions the increased visibility of Philip K. Dick’s work as Hollywood picks off short stories to make into movies.

Quite coincidentally, I just finished a book of Dick’s short stories which Steve loaned me, including four of those which had been turned into movies (Total Recall, Screamers, Minority Report and Paycheck). Being a not-too-fanatic watcher of movies, I’ve only seen Total Recall and Minority Report.

I read “Second Variety” last night, was somewhat drawn into its world, but it ultimately left me thinking how hollow its premise was. I spent more than half the story anticipating how it would end, just wondering what was taking so long. Tonight I finished with “War Veteran”, which was for me among the best stories in the book. Dick seems to do a lot better writing about people than technology, though part of that may be my inability to ignore the technical implausibility of many situations.

One of Apple’s computer systems had issues on Sunday when I called for repair service, and it apparently caused the request for a box for my PowerBook to be lost. I spoke with a very helpful, realistic (and funny) woman at Apple today, and I should be able to call back in the morning to get a same-day box shipped to me.

10:10 AM | PyCS
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I put off my ECE 441 project preparation today, and to thank me for it, my PowerBook’s video hardware died a few minutes after I started work. At least I can still back it up.

This in addition to the 512 MB DIMM in my desktop Power Mac which died last week. I guess November is Hardware Failure Month or something.

5:53 AM | PyCS
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I finally switched from Palm Desktop to iCal a few weeks ago, the superior force of iSync winning me over. iCal and Apple’s Address Book are usable in Panther, but still very slow and inefficient to use compared with Palm Desktop. Compare the information density of the images below:

Sorry about all the modifications, I can’t seem to stop PyDS from upstreaming… (Answer: Preferences: Basic Data: show on/offline switch.)

There doesn’t seem to be an “actual size” option, so for the moment I’m constructing the above images with $pictures.imageTag(2, (400, 400), bigpage=’1024×768′).

9:46 PM | PyCS
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George Bauer (who’s been really helpful, thanks!) explained briefly how to use PyDS’s PictureTool in a comment:

Of course PyDS has a PictureTool. You need to enter a path on your disc in the Pictures preferences and then can upload pictures from there. To upload a picture go to the pictures upload area and enter title and description for those pictures you want to upload. After uploading, you can refer to them with $pictures.imageTag(picid, (sizex, sizey)). Set picid to the numerical id of your picture and sizex,sizey to the boundingbox the resized picture should fit in (resizing honours aspect ratio, so you picture might actually be smaller than your boundinbox).

It seems that the PictureTool is optimized for posting pictures, not screen images; PyDS provides a nice album-style overview page. This is good, and something Radio didn’t even attempt to do, but all I really want is a single image uploaded. The interface looks like this:

I have no idea what the various text fields represent, and I get a Python exception when I try to submit a fully populated form. If I remove entries 2 and 5, nothing seems to happen. Time to dig into the source code.

Turns out QuickTime 6.4 (and earlier?) incorrectly output PNG tEXt chunks including a trailing null, and PIL chokes on them. PyDS discards the error, and behaves strangely.

That fixed, my next problem: still not getting any thumbnails. pyds-start -f will run PyDS in the foreground.

error: Server Error: exceptions.IOError, encoder jpeg not available: file: /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/ Versions/2.3/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ PIL/Image.py line: 325

After rebuilding PIL, I ran into another problem with PyDS: once it attempted to create a thumbnail and failed, it’d write a zero-length file and give up. Fixing that, I finally had thumbnails.

9:00 PM | PyCS
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My life hasn't entirely settled down yet, but I have really missed being able to write down whatever is on my mind.

I have a new weblog, created with PyCS and PyDS. I'll miss a lot about Radio, but not its instability, CPU usage or bugginess.

Posts from this weblog will migrate to the new one at some point. For the moment, this page will remain. If you're accessing the RSS feed from sabi.net, it should automatically redirect; if not, the new feed is here.

6:31 PM | Radio
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After all that template work, I don’t have any time to write a real blog entry. I’ve accumulated quite a number of “this is dumb” screen shots over the past few months. I’ll try to post one a day for a while. Here’s one:

PyDS has nothing like Radio’s MyPictures tool, which means I’m back to the old method. I should write a quick script using PIL to generate an IMG tag and upload an image for me.

3:44 AM | PyCS
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I’m going for a much more minimalist look with this weblog compared with my last one, hopefully CSS-only. So far there’s a lot of gray and blue. Some of the template changes aren’t taking effect so I’m posting this as a test, hopefully there’s something I forgot to rerender.

*sigh* This doesn’t seem to post properly…

Ahh, I see, if the template is broken, PyDS doesn’t say anything, it simply doesn’t render. Also, much like Radio, you start a render and just wait an indeterminate amount of time before you have any idea what happened. I wish it were possible to just say “rerender THIS page” because it’s the one I’m staring at as I’m going through 8000 design iterations. Or to have the /preview/ URLs simply do no cached rendering at all, would be much better. (That’s what Radio does.)

1:13 AM | PyCS
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Georg Bauer posted some clarification of PyDS’s use of asynchrony and threading.

I wish I could find a picture of me in the first grade programming our Apple IIe, on the top floor of our condo in Durham. Better yet, I’d like to see some of the Applesoft programs I wrote back then.

Looking for old pictures of my work environment, the earliest I could find was this one:

It shows a portion of my cube at Invantage’s third office space, at 149 Sidney St., Cambridge, MA, in late 1997. That’s my old PowerBook 540 (soon to be replaced by a Wall Street) and new Newton 2100 ($1000… sigh.) The Newton woke me up this morning.

4:46 PM | PyCS
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