njr 3.0

This week has been great—it is terrific to spend time with my parents. We've made a considerable dent in the pile of Western red cedar siding, but there's still about 100 boards left. Framing is proceeding in the second-floor apartment; the person building it for us is doing a terrific, careful job. We've taken lots of photos, but still need to sort through them…

I've been using Jaguar full-time for a few weeks now, booting off an external FireWire drive on my TiBook. Overall, it's great: not perfect, but much improved. The new Finder is really nicely done, more pervasively multithreaded than the 8.5 Finder was. Classic screen redraws are much faster, and new APIs look to be sensibly designed. Sunday, after I get back to Illinois, I'll reformat my desktop G4 and install Jaguar on it.

10:36 AM | Radio
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Been home since Friday night. Yesterday (and this morning) I spent setting up my TiBook so I could do some coding from home—XDarwin, especially, needed a lot of prodding to start working properly—but all works well now.

Yesterday afternoon I spent in Marblehead at the tenth annual Boston BBS Lobsterfest (and second Annual Meeting). This was the tenth time the Lobsterfest had been held, but the first time I've been able to attend. The last time I had met any of the rest of the group was at Macworld Boston in 1997. The weather was terrific, and it was enjoyable, if slightly more low-key than I expected. Here's a group picture:

I'm just about to drive up to New Hampshire, where I'll be for the next 4-5 days at least. We pay per minute to make a local telephone call there, so my Internet access will be rather restricted. Barn construction is proceeding: work began on the inside last week. My parents and I will spend the next several days painting the outside (while it's still on the ground, thankfully): 3000 linear feet of wood, on both sides.

5:19 PM | Radio
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A few people have asked me recently what exactly about Mozilla's bookmarks interface is so unusable. Perhaps they were joking, and if so, I guess I'm dumb enough to take that question seriously. Short of a full review, I examine one small yet visible example: the “Add Bookmark” dialog box. I found a lot more to write about than I anticipated: it's deserving of a story in length if not quality. Mozilla's bookmarks.

4:18 AM | Radio
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jlibtool, which I wrote about a week ago, is now able to build APR and Subversion; if you're similarly frustrated with GNU libtool slowness on OS X, check it out.

9:47 PM | Radio
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Since I'm going back to Boston next week, and am finally hitting my stride in my research, I've been working my butt off this week. This accounts for the blog slowdown (and my absence from IRC, for those people who miss me ).

Some quick links to things I've found interesting recently:

Wilfredo Sanchez describes the shell scripts he wrote to manage bug-fix CVS branches at Apple, display CVS changes in FileMerge automatically, and more. Conveniently, they're bundled and distributed with OS X. HostLauncher is still in CVS while I've moved the rest of my apps into Subversion, so I can try them out there.

Incidentally, the traffic on the Subversion list continues to surge, but since the S/N ratio has improved as well, I'm happy to read it all, Posts like this make me really happy that one of Subversion's goals is to be the revision control system “for the rest of us”. So far, they're delivering, and I hope to contribute further in the future.

So far, I've got three ideas for Subversion clients on the Mac: a contextual menu plugin à la TortoiseCVS, an additional back end for MacCVS Pro, and extensions to Goliath. The first one looks most likely since it can grow slowly, feature-by-feature. I just got my first issue of MacTech today, and it helpfully includes an article by the estimable Brent Simmons on contextual menu plugins.

In the realm of other underpublicized, shipped-with-the-OS Apple developer tools, I still have to look at agvtool, (which Apple uses for versioning) for use in my own projects.

I followed a series of links about the Mac SE/30, one of which was my primary machine from 1989 to 1994, when I bought my PowerBook 540, and was astonished to see a Micron Gray-Scale 30 card that sold on eBay for $400. The SE/30 is still in use by my parents as a fax server, thanks to the wonderfully efficient, stable and low-overhead CommuniGate, and as a LocalTalk to Ethernet bridge. But in order to plug in the Ethernet card I needed to remove the Micron Color and Gray-Scale 30 cards; I should really sell them even if I can get half that price.

The Gray-Scale 30 card, if you're wondering, replaced the board on the back of the SE/30's CRT to display 256 grays at the original 512×342 resolution, or a higher resolution with hardware pan support (similar to the software behavior of Stepping Out!, if any of you have used Macs long enough to remember it). I used the grayscale card with Micron's accompanying color video card before I bought a monitor, a NEC MultiSync 5FGe, in 1992. The monitor is similarly still going strong, connected to the UMAX J700 we use as a router, Retrospect server, and X10 coordinator.

Unfortunately it seems upgrading to Mutt 1.4 did not fix my problem with saving mail. I think it might be in my .muttrc, since I set my “record” folder like this:

folder-hook . set record=`date +'=sent/%Y-%m'`
folder-hook \+/.* set record=`date +'=+/sent/%Y-%m'`

Since I guess there's no folder open if you open Mutt to compose a message, it may be that even a completely generic folder hook never is evaluated.

Thanks for the great suggestions (in the comments section and by email) on a replacmeent bag. I figured out how to hook up the shoulder strap somewhere else for a temporary solution, but I'll be buying one next week and will let you know how it goes.

Certain viewers may find it interesting to know that in the last week my reading material has included this and this . Almost nobody will care that I spent a significant portion of today reading the GNU Make manual cover-to-metaphorical cover. (Hint, so you don't waste an hour the way I did: despite the name, you run texi2pdf on the .texinfo file, not the .texi file). Such is life.

Last but not least, well-known .test personality Mike Hunter is off to California, still jobless. Good luck, man.

9:30 PM | Radio
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