njr 3.0

This article does a
lot to clear up the hype of the .NET CLR for me. When people have
asked me for my opinion, I've expressed generally guarded
optimism. Now I can be a bit more blunt and have the facts to back it
up. I haven't read much about SmallScript recently as I don't write
much Smalltalk any more; it's very interesting to hear about its
limitations (and I'm looking forward to an AOS VM port for Mac OS X,
which was promised at some point; SmalltalkAgents used to be Mac OS
only).

4:41 PM | Radio
No Comments

Wow, I knew NAI were morons, but it turns out it's worse than
I thought. Please, please release PGP to someone who has a clue!

4:18 PM | Radio
No Comments

Interview with KDE
developer Cornelius Schumacher. “Q. You are hired to write
the script for a commercial for KDE (like “The Heist” by IBM). What
would be the plot?

A. A big city at night, lots of lights. A thunder storm is over
the city and suddenly electricity goes down, the city gets dark. But
in some windows you still see some light from computer monitors. The
camera zooms into the rooms and you see happy people using KDE. The
slogan appears: “KDE – powered by community”.

Right on. Community—and idealism, in small doses—are
wonderful things. (Now could someone port KDE to OS X?
)

3:51 PM | Radio
No Comments

Got URL launching with ICeCoffEE working in Terminal.app, but it crashes at times. I think the problem is that no more characters are stored than there are characters in a line of text, so if I try to select from character 70, but the line only goes up to character 30, it starts merrily romping through memory. Unfortunately the structure that stores the Terminal buffer (_LineChunk) is not exposed at all, and I'm not very good at using gdb to figure out how it's structured. I've been poking at this for several hours, and I've reached the point of diminishing returns, so it's time to stop.

What I may end up having to do is grabbing more text than I want, to the ends of the lines, and then postprocessing the result.

This is only going to work in the Mac OS X 10.1 Terminal, it was significantly rewritten from the Mac OS X 10.0.x Terminal: for example, the class that shows the terminal view is called “TermView” in 10.1, versus “Terminal” (a subclass of “FieldView”) in 10.0.

5:27 AM | Radio
No Comments

OK. Maybe I shouldn't find this so funny, but… here's a thread from the Boston BBS today.

Anne Griffin writes:
There is an Ant crawling around the inside of my TiBook screen! I'm serious, I can see him underneath the transluscent Apple on my cover! I have no idea how he got inside.

The ant in your screen is a she. Males have a very limited role in ant societies.

Yes, I knew that, somewhere back in my brain, but that wasn't exactly my first response.

9:28 PM | Radio
No Comments