njr 3.0

No time to write recently; life has been even more crazy than usual. My parents visited this weekend; as always, it's wonderful to see them.

Since Wednesday, when I removed the Flash plugin, Chimera hasn't crashed once. How terrific. According to Simon Fraser, if you download the latest Flash beta plugin, it should fix the problem that was causing Chimera to crash.

I decided on a hiptop. My parents bought it at CompUSA in Brighton Wednesday before flying out here Thursday, and it's amazing and wonderful, especially for $100 after rebates. The interface is incredibly well-designed. It's still 1.0 feature-wise, but I haven't found a bug yet. So far I've managed to drop it on the concrete and get something blue all over some of the keys.

One of the amazingly elegant touches to the hiptop, which dawns on you after a while is its great asynchrony. The hiptop knows that its Internet connection, while always-on, will be intermittent, and doesn't bother you with “no network access” all the time; it simply queues everything from AIM messages to emails to SMS messages until the network is available, then goes about its business sending them. When necessary, there are subtle UI clues such as italicized names in the AIM client to indicate that someone isn't available.

The hiptop mail client is great, though I need to figure out some solution to duplicated mails between my primary local/IMAP accounts and the hiptop. Reading the same mail twice is annoying. You can directly address mailboxes on the hiptop by sending mail to mailbox#username\@tmail.com, which is rather neat; however it's not possible to configure a mailbox to match an account, that I could see. Perhaps I need to do some more digging.

I need a new Mac OS X FTP client. Interarchy 6 is slow and buggy. MacSFTP is nice and fast, Fugu is slower but still usable, but they don't support FTP. Transmit 2 has some incredibly useful features such as the preview pane, but it's too slow at operations I want to be fast (for example, when you try to delete a file, you have to wait at least 2 seconds for the sheet to come down and roll up). The interface is generally decent but flaky in places.

While talking on #macdev last night someone asked about OS X fonts, and I took some time to update my Mac OS X font rendering article for Jaguar, with new screenshots.

10:33 PM | Radio
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wmf points to Googlism. Some of the more humorous matches for me:

• sabi is an outstanding location for the wildlife photography enthusiast
• sabi is sometimes referred to as a style of art
• sabi is often best enjoyed in the winter months
• sabi is an unforgettable experience
• sabi is a way of life
• sabi is aligned with the science and technology white paper and the product of broad consultation in the relevant research community
• sabi is the beauty found in things worn and weathered with time and use
• sabi is not to everyone's liking
• sabi is the art of finding beauty in the imperfect and the incomplete
• sabi is a prisoner of conscience

The last two are truer than you might think.

1:50 AM | Radio
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Jordan Mendelson, former senior architect at Napster, has done some major fixing on the Ogg Vorbis QuickTime components. They now work seamlessly in iTunes, and playing Oggs uses even less CPU (5-7% versus 7-8%) on my G4 than MP3s. Importing is a bit slower, perhaps because of QuickTime overhead. Take a look and download.

3:36 PM | Radio
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I was all ready to get a Hiptop this week. Now Sprint has flat-rate wireless data and its price is down to $249 from $500, only $50 more than the Hiptop (essentially a wash given the activation fee), the Treo 300 is rather enticing: it will mean one fewer device I will have to carry around with me. I realize data integration on the Treo will be worse, but if it'll do always-on AIM or email messaging, I will be happy.

Here's a comparison of the two devices (keep in mind I've used the Hiptop but not the Treo at this point). If any of you folks have used both, please let me know if there's anything important I've missed.

2:31 PM | Radio
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Progress exam over. Did well on genetics, ran out of time on histology (but the latter was only 10% of my grade, luckily).

I spent the vast majority of my non-studying time over the weekend working on Pester. Lots of new features are coming in 1.1, and most are already implemented. The only major new features still remaining in my plan are repeating alarms and better notification of expired alarms, but there are a lot of bugs still remaining to fix. I may put off repeating alarms until 1.2, depending on my bug fix rate.

9:13 AM | Radio
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