njr 3.0

F-Script Anywhere 1.1.1 released. New stuff:

• Starts up a lot faster: it was rebuilding the app list once for each app. Don't ask.
• Handles applications whose path contains non-ASCII characters. Ditto.
• Some user interface cleanups.
• A very cool code snippet from Philippe Mougin, F-Script author, which lets you target user interface elements by clicking on them. I hope to enhance this support in future versions.

7:57 AM | Radio
No Comments

Louis Gerbarg: “Mac OS X is eating my soul.” I'm not sure whether that's a good or bad thing—for Louis or Mac OS X.

Incidentally, I read Louis's BSDcon paper tonight, and it cleared up a lot of issues for me regarding Mach, BSD and IOKit. My conception of funnels had been completely, utterly wrong. Luckily I never spouted nonsense to anyone about them!

I'm fixing some bugs in F-Script Anywhere right now. Earlier tonight, I had a great IRC discussion (#macdev, irc.openprojects.net, thanks to Ben Hines for the pointer) with Ed Wynne, author of libPatch. He's working on a libPatch replacement which avoids the nasty dyld reentrancy problems that cause sporadic crashes with libPatch.

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to talk to Ed at MacHack, but IRC made up for it. He came up with a truly evil method of storing state information which can survive an aextd crash: sending a Mach message, but not retrieving it. Unlike the version that was distributed at MacHack, the final version of aextd will load dynamically: no StartupItem necessary.

I use libPatch in F-Script Anywhere and HostLauncher. Since FSA and HostLauncher both use libPatch differently from most other apps (the first will patch individual apps on demand, the second only patches a single app), I registered my needs and Ed will be adding some special support for on-demand patching, in the form of a generic bundle-loading stub aext. I'm really looking forward to playing with the aext mechanism when it is released RSN.

6:10 AM | Radio
No Comments

This week, Strong Bad appears to have some issues with a poor tangerine iMac.

2:48 AM | Radio
No Comments

A List Apart: Time Management - The Pickle Jar Theory. Moral: focus on the big stuff. I need to pay much more attention to that advice.

8:07 PM | Radio
No Comments

It's July 1 and I need to see about becoming an Australian citizen.

1:21 AM | Radio
No Comments