njr 3.0

Steven Frank has been raving about his Hiptop for the past few days. I got a chance to use one tonight. The reviews I've seen so far don't quite do it justice: the interface is really efficient, fast and easy to use with one hand while the device is closed. The AIM and mail clients are well done, and while I will be upset to give up Palm Desktop, the Web-based PIM functionality means I can easily add events from either my desktop or laptop machines.

I want one (but only after my current phone's contract expires).

10:35 PM | Radio
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I just lost another long entry to a Chimera crash (like most recent Chimera crashes I've had, it was caused by the Flash plugin trying to load to display ads on an O'Reilly site). Note to self: compose weblog entries in BBEdit, then paste into browser.

Here's a summary: Wrote Pester, a bare-bones xalarm clone, tonight, because I couldn't find anything better for free and didn't want to have an X server running all the time. NSCalendarDate, NSDate and NSDateFormatter are evil, broken, and atrociously documented: their authors should be ashamed. Localized date formats are a joke in Cocoa: they don't work at all properly. Since the Cocoa framework fixes needed are unlikely to come before Mac OS X 10.3, I'll have to use Carbon (assuming it works as well as it always did) to work around the problems if I want to support anything other than US date formats.

Pester 1.0d1 is available, with source, here. Requires Mac OS X 10.1 or later (tested on 10.1.5 and 10.2.1).

Some obligatory screenshots:

5:12 AM | Radio
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Jon Udell writes about Zoe for oreillynet.com. Finally some semi-mainstream coverage of an amazing program.

4:19 PM | Radio
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As I sit here updating my Subversion install and all its related pieces on three different computers (5 hours and counting…) I realize one thing that would make my life a great deal easier would be a simple distributed notification system that didn't have the single-client limitations of instant messaging.

For example, I don't see why I'm prohibited from signing on to a single AOL Instant Messenger account (or whatever) from my laptop as well as my desktop machine. After a compilation is finished, I want to be able to say “send me a message to tell me this is finished”, and have it reach me no matter what machine I'm user. Systems like Zephyr and Gale have the latter kinds of capabilities-easy command-line access—built in, but have lousy or no GUI clients and require lots of setup. Simpler systems like AIM have nice GUI clients, are easy to set up, but you can only sign onto an account once, and you can't easily send messages from a script.

Can Jabber do this? All the clients I've tried are too flaky to be useful. Several of my friends get around the multiple-signon problem by using one account per computer, but that's incredibly clunky.

Something similar I'd love would be an IM version of xalarm. xalarm is very simple to use, for the purpose of saying something like: in 20 minutes, tell me to go home. But the complicated alarm-clock/calendar programs that exist don't make this easy. Better yet would be a notification on all the computers I'm logged into.

None of this sounds hard from a distributed-computing perspective. So why not?

12:54 AM | Radio
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I had a long weblog entry almost finished a few days ago describing what I did to troubleshoot a particularly annoying OS X problem. Then Chimera crashed, and I haven't had the time to write it again.

The upshot is: I figured out what was causing the Self problem I was having on Tuesday. Ittec, a FinderPop-like shareware utility for OS X, includes an Application Enhancer module named Camel.ape. I had two copies of it installed, one in /Library/Application Enhancers, and one in ~/Library/Application Enhancers. Worse than the sporadic “RegisterProcess failed” error was that I couldn't unlock my keychain, denying me easy access to lots of things I needed.

Removing the second copy of Camel.ape fixed the RegisterProcess problem. Removing the other copy of Camel.ape also fixed a problem that was causing the Finder to complain about a missing autorelease pool every time I clicked. All Camel.ape does is load the Ittec contextual menu module early. This ensures that Ittec's other features work immediately, instead of only after you've opened a contextual menu and given the module a chance to load otherwise.

I've already heard from one person who was having the RegisterProcess problem and couldn't track it down, so here's hoping Google indexes this page soon.

11:41 PM | Radio
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