The USB FM tuner I ordered arrived today. There's no Mac software, but Paul Haddad's DSBRTuner works wonderfully. I did a bit of an interface overhaul:
Changes submitted back to the author, and if they don't get incorporated into the next version I'll post them. My primary reason for buying it was to do direct-to-MP3 recording of radio programs, since I'm hardly ever around when what I like to listen to is playing on WILL or WEFT.
Finally released Pester 1.1b1 yesterday, and beta 2 today, to testers. So far the biggest complaints I've received have been about user interface rather than functionality, which is a good thing. If anyone else is interested in testing Pester, please let me know and I'll add you to the list. The final release should be early next week if everything goes well.
The CocoaDev recent changes RSS feed should be back up and running now—it broke in mid-November and I didn't have a chance to fix it.
Today's Apple introductions, which I slept through in uncharacteristic style, were great. Safari is terrific, and has the potential to provide a great user experience and speed since Microsoft gave up after releasing MacIE 5. It's not as innovative as Cyberdog was in its time, but it isn't just another Web browser either. The positive energy radiating from Apple these days is really refreshing.
In challenging Apple's choice of Web framework, most people seem to neglect Mozilla's significant footprint and overhead: the choice of KHTML/KJS was the right thing to do. Now I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop and Apple to expose their higher-level interfaces (check inside Safari and you'll find a likely-looking WebKit.framework) so app developers on the Mac can finally get a modern standards-compliant Web rendering component. Even other Apple applications such as Project Builder, Help Viewer and WebObjects Builder should benefit from the change.
The new PowerBook hardware looks terrific, although the only thing I'll likely be buying is a new base station with USB printer sharing support and an external antenna connector. My mother's Christmas present was a Canon i850 printer, which has outstripped my expectations in every way. It prints a 4×6 photo, borderless, looking just like something you got developed, in less than 45 seconds. Micro Center had a sale on the photo paper, $3 for 20 sheets, last week: we bought 4 packs which should last us a while.
If you're the a market for a cheap yet good photo printer which can handle light duty text as well and doesn't cost a fortune in ink and paper costs, go get an i850—you won't be disappointed. If you're using OS X, you'll need to download the drivers and ImageBrowser software from Canon's Web site, but it works well. I wish iPhoto or iView MediaPro supported borderless printing.
I got back to Champaign on Friday, and med school classes started yesterday. Since the classes are harder this semester, I'll probably only take immunology to leave enough time for research. I got my medical genetics results back from last semester—I passed, but not with a margin I'm proud of. My goals for 2003 are to make a huge dent in developing software for my PhD, to excel in med classes, to keep in better shape (I gained 20 pounds last year), and to make slow but steady progress everywhere else.
Last but not least, MacIRC is back, for OS X. More on that soon.
Sorry for the posting lapse; my desktop Mac crashed, taking Radio with it (if you work at Apple, check out bug 2813146, filed November 2001, tagged “can not reproduce”—I can certainly reproduce it frequently). I'm several states away, and my officemates were out of the office. Finally got it back up and running today (thanks Mario!)
Still working on Pester 1.1. It's been “almost finished” for days now, but the bug list has finally stopped growing and I should have a feature-complete beta ready by the time I get back to Illinois on January 3.
Lots to talk about… later.
This post was made with the new NetNewsWire beta. I've found plenty of glitches so far, overuse of sheets, a lot of other questionable UI, and the crashing bug with OS X's Web Services API while trying to post, but it seems to be on the right track. I'll probably start using it as of 1.0 final. For now, I'm going back to writing in Archipelago.
Sorry about the lack of blogging recently. As a a poor substitute, here's a quick recount of this week's events.
My med school finals finished Monday and went well, though I never know for sure how I've done with multiple-choice exams. After finals, I've had to catch up on everything I put off in my life. Tuesday morning was a budget meeting for the condo association; Tuesday evening I went to Chicago to shop for a sofa and go to the CAWUG meeting (Apple's Chicago offices are nice!). After I got back, I had to do some emergency sysadmin work to fix my mother's email; not working on my own system, I broke a lot more than I needed to before fixing it all. (Sorry Kriss!)
After being up until 5 AM for the above ordeal, I accidentally slept through my research meeting Wednesday morning; thankfully it was sparsely attended as most people were away. Wednesday afternoon and evening I caught up on email and prepared to depart; some more unforeseen computer problems kept me up the whole night, and I had to leave to the airport at 5:15 AM Thursday morning.
For the first time in over a year I flew into BOS. Normally I arrive at PVD or MHT, both smaller, newer airports which are quite a bit cheaper and more convenient. I slept and relaxed for the remainder of Thursday. Friday I had an emergency dentist appointment (nothing was wrong), shopped for Christmas presents, and installed some drive sleds we bought for calamity, our 9500. Virtually nothing but the motherboard is original on it. Amazingly, it all fits: 2 SCSI hard drives and a CD-ROM on the 2940UW, an ATA tape drive on a Promise Ultra100 card, and a CD burner on the original 53C94 external SCSI bus (the internal MESH SCSI is toast on this particular machine). After everything was working, I knocked a jumper off one of the hard drives while putting the case back on, and couldn't find where it went. This brought the night's activities to a close until we could go to Micro Center and buy some more jumpers.
Today I spent most of the day with calamity, updating it to Linux 2.4.20-ben1 and getting its disks converted from reiserfs to xfs so I can use dump for backups (there is no dump for reiserfs). The tape drive has definitely been more trouble than it was worth: I've spent so much effort installing it, first on my desktop G4 then on calamity, and now it gives me an I/O error when I do a mt eod. I'm hoping this is a side effect of writing to it with tar. If I still have problems with xfsdump, I've got a couple of extra 4 GB SCSI disks, formerly plugged into my desktop G4 (in the right MTI case in the image linked above), which I can use instead of tape; just need to figure out a cheap and durable way to transport them from Illinois back to Boston.
Tomorrow (should have been today, but for the jumper incident) we're heading up to New Hampshire.
Work on Pester 1.1 continues: the user interface is almost to the point I want it. What remains are some reasonably large architectural improvements (saving and loading alarms, default alerts, sleep/wake interaction) and a lot of bug fixes. As a rough benchmark, Pester 1.0 was 1520 lines of code; Pester 1.1a1 was 6561, and the current size is 7596 lines.
launch 1.0b1 released. Several convenience features are new in this version: launch “slack” URLs (launch -l web.sabi.net), and email addresses without the mailto: (launch -l someone\@somewhere.com).
launch can now accept piped input as the bbedit tool does. launch represents standard input by the single dash (-): the equivalent of ls -l | bbedit is ls -l | launch -i com.barebones.bbedit -.
8:14 PM