njr 3.0

MagicHat is “a programmer's research and reference tool. With MagicHat, you navigate through Cocoa's application programming interface (API); review the declarations of language elements such as methods, functions, and constants; and retrieve relevant passages from the Cocoa developer documentation.”

If you're used to using class-dump, MagicHat should seem familiar. MagicHat lets you move easily between class-dump style (except better) generated headers, framework headers, documentation and class hierarchy information. If I ever get any time to work on my Cocoa projects again, I'll certainly be making use of it.

An input manager version is forthcoming, which should make it possible to embed MagicHat like F-Script Anywhere for use as a debugging tool.

6:59 AM | Radio
No Comments

Quarter Life Crisis has a great travelogue of Portugal, Germany, London, and Oslo, as a bunch of weblog posts all Interesting to hear about the weight limitations on Ryanair, which a few of my friends are flying from London to the Torp airport outside Oslo.

Had a nice dinner tonight with Mark Benedetto King, like me a former EFnet #unixer and current Subversion contributor. He doesn't exactly look like this any more, and I'm sure glad I no longer look like this.

9:15 PM | Radio
No Comments

Vonage has improved their voicemail status notifications email to reach parity with their previous system. The message body is now customizable, so I embed a URL to the voicemail system so our messages are just a click away. Still wish the notification emails contained a direct link to the message, or better yet the message itself as an attachment.

I called the new voice response system for the first time today to record an outgoing message and was very impressed. It was the easiest setup of any voice mail system I've tried: fast, responsive and helpful.

So much to do this week sysadmin-wise for my family—setting up network monitoring, Web and mail servers, backups, buying a serial cable for the UPS. I really never imagined I'd be having to maintain 4 laptops, 2 desktops and 4 servers for my family, or how much time it would take.

Our newest server is arnold, a used Sun Ultra 2 I picked up for about $300 including shipping. Currently it's not doing anything public, but it will take over for hamton as www2.sabi.net, and serve as backup MX and primary webserver for rileys.us—meaning I can get my family's stuff off the sabi.net domain where it doesn't really belong.

Relearning Solaris has certainly been an adventure, helped greatly by the Solaris guru who's hosting arnold for me. I really miss Debian's packaging tools, but appreciate the overall quality of the OS in comparison with Linux.

10:27 AM | Radio
No Comments

The first few bits of the Pester hiptop port are emerging…



I'll wait for dre, the resource editor, to be released before I go any further with the UI—either manually constructing UI or trying to reverse-engineer the resource compiler's file format (not really Rez-like, but quite decent) is a waste of time when I could be working on something else. Thanks in particular to one Danger employee for going above and beyond to help me through this period. So far, it's a lot like the early days of Cocoa on OS X, except with even less documentation: there's good design underneath there, enough to make me put up with programming in Java. Not that I expected any less given the outstanding quality of the hiptop for a 1.0 product.

12:43 AM | Radio
Comments Off on

I've got loads of stuff to talk about, and really want to do a long weblog entry, but can't find the time. So, here's a brief summary of recent events.

Flew into Boston on Thursday; spent the rest of the day sleeping and recuperating. Booked my flight to Norway for July; myself and about 10 friends are going to visit a former UI graduate student and officemate of mine, on an approximately two-week tour of the country (I can't wait). Slept in on Friday, did a couple hours of work, then drove up to New Hampshire.

Spent yesterday morning and this morning skiing with my parents. My mom is finally making progress with her skiing: it's been 10 years, but very much worth the wait. My father's learning telemark and is getting to the point where he can do tele turns on reasonably steep slopes. He went to Alta while at a conference a few weeks ago: I'm quite jealous.

Went to the gym Saturday night; swam for the first time in years. I had to stop after three lengths: ouch. Hard to believe I used to swim a mile on a regular basis. On the bright side, I weighed myself and found out I lost 15 pounds so far this year, almost reversing last year's 20-pound gain.

This afternoon we bought a stained glass window in Rumney and checked in on our partially-finished barn in Henniker. The driveway is still covered with snow.

Back in Cambridge now, doing some research work. Wondering whether to go to see Dave Winer on Thursday night. More tomorrow if time permits.

6:16 PM | Radio
No Comments