njr 3.0

Seven of the the #uiuc.test crowd went to Mandarin Wok tonight for dinner, then to Bakers Square for pie. Seven dishes for eight people meant we didn't come close to finishing the excellent Chinese food, then I wasn't able to resist a slice of European Truffle. Chocolate, and, um, more chocolate.

On the bright side I've lost five pounds so far this year, though I fear I just gained it all back. My fortune read “Your fastidious nature has much more fun this year!”—it's just as confused about my intentions as I am.

10:19 PM | Radio
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If you're having trouble getting speech recognition to work after installing ICeCoffEE 1.3, add SpeechFeedbackWindow to the ICeCoffEE exclusion list. The application is in /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/ A/Frameworks/SpeechRecognition.framework/Versions/A/Resources/.

I'll put out 1.3.1 later this week after I fix the problem (no idea what it is, as yet), but for the meantime, this is a workaround.

1:22 PM | Radio
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About a year ago I posted an Emacs launching script which would, if Emacs were already running, use emacsclient to open a file and AppleScript to bring Emacs to the front. It works well and I use it every day, but the AppleScript activating part is very slow. I usually end up just clicking on Emacs' dock icon instead of waiting for it to finish.

After a bit of hacking, instead of:

osascript -e 'tell application "Emacs" to activate'

I now use:

appswitch -i com.gnu.emacs

The speed difference is significant:

% time osascript -e 'tell application "Emacs" to activate'
osascript -e 'tell application "Emacs" to activate'  2.42s user 1.25s system 62% cpu 5.864 total
% time appswitch -i com.gnu.emacs
appswitch -i com.gnu.emacs  0.01s user 0.07s system 13% cpu 0.602 total
% time appswitch -a Emacs
appswitch -a Emacs  0.00s user 0.05s system 29% cpu 0.169 total

The -i flag is slowest because it needs to construct a CFBundle; fast matching occurs on application name, path, process ID and creator. (Process ID matching would be fastest if I directly converted to a process serial number, but I don't do that.)

If you've used my launch tool, you'll find appswitch very similar—I borrowed quite a bit from launch to write it. I hope it will be similarly useful “glue” for others.

Download appswitch here.

3:44 AM | Radio
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ICeCoffEE 1.3 final released. If you read this Weblog regularly, you’re probably sick and tired of hearing about it, but it includes a bunch of new features and refinements to existing features, as well as the APE rewrite which significantly increases stability and robustness.

One place I'm using ICeCoffEE 1.3 frequently is in Safari: if a Web page renders poorly, just command-option-click on the URL bar to select another browser, even easier than using the equivalent command in the Debug menu.

1:22 AM | Radio
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Happy third birthday to Radio Paradise, which has been keeping me company all night.

7:04 AM | Radio
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