njr 3.0

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

2:48 AM | Radio
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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
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It's July 1 and I need to see about becoming an Australian citizen.

1:21 AM | Radio
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Mike Pinkerton (whose weblog I don't read regularly because it doesn't have a syndicated version I could find) complained about nobody at MacHack using Mozilla on their TiBooks. I find Mozilla barely usable on my dual G4/533 and G4/800 TiBook—to the point I use it as my primary Web browser, and have for months—but unusable on a G4/400. That might be part of it: not everyone can afford the latest hardware to run their Web browsers on.

Pink also complains that there aren't enough external Mozilla Mac developers. I've tried, on several occasions, to contribute; most often I just get ignored or yelled at that I shouldn't be doing something. While the few Mozilla/Netscape developers I know personally are quite nice (as were those I met at MacHack—there was a huge Netscape contingent there: scc, pink, smfr, brade, dagley, and another?), the whole development process seems amazingly cliquey and resistant to people who don't have their entire lives to give over to the greater good that is Mozilla. Scott Collins was bragging on #mozilla about his 23" Cinema HD display. Then as now... *drool*. I gotta get me out of school so I can afford this stuff again.

Which leads me back to work. I'll get back to DockCam next weekend if miscellaneous festivities don't overwhelm me.

9:52 PM | Radio
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