njr 3.0

John Gruber writes:

So but what did surprise me is that both of the new Intel-based machines are using the existing enclosure designs. I can’t recall a single previous instance when Apple switched to a new processor family without introducing new case designs, and the switch to Intel processors is as big a switch as they’ve ever made, certainly a bigger deal than, say, the switch from G3s to G4s, or G4s to G5s — all of which transitions coincided with the introduction of new case designs.

He might want to check his memory, then, because it seems to stop in 1998. Consider the PowerPC transition—the Power Macintosh 6100, 7100 and 8100 had identical case designs to the Quadra 610/660AV, 650 and 800/840AV that preceded them. The G3 transition was almost the same way—the original PowerBook G3 looked like the 3400, the desktop G3 like a 7300/7600, and the tower model like a shrunken 8600.

Regarding my own software and Intel compatibility: I don’t have any plans to buy either of the current Intel Macs, nor do I have easy access to one for the time being. ICeCoffEE needs recompilation, certainly, and I hope to find a little time to test it on a friend’s Intel iMac. I’d imagine everything else would work in Rosetta.

12:07 AM | Computing, macOS
No Comments

A quick way I just discovered to get an .icns file out of any Finder icon, using no third-party software.

• Select an icon in the Finder. Copy it to the clipboard.
• Open Preview. Hit command-N to create a document with the clipboard contents.
• From the preview drawer, drag the top icon (labeled “Untitled Image #”) to icns Browser.
• Note that icns Browser has no Save command. However you can drag the proxy icon from the title bar and drop it while holding down the Command or Option keys. You’ll have an icns file.

1:06 AM | Computing, macOS
5 Comments

Time to put on my curmudgeon hat for a second.

Glyph Lefkowitz presents a font choice as a foregone conclusion: we like the second, antialiased, version better. Some of us don’t—I’ve been using Adobe’s Helvetica, Courier and Times bitmaps since 1986 or so and don’t really see what is so wrong with them. Antialiased versions would be OK, I guess, if you like that kind of stuff, but there’s no reason to use different default fonts to the rest of the planet just because. FreeSans looks enough like Helvetica to pass at a glance, but the others don’t even come close.

I’m not saying people have to set their default Web browser fonts to Times, Helvetica and Courier—I’ve got mine set to Goudy, Univers and Screen, for example—but I’m just saying the standard fonts make more appropriate defaults, since they’ve been that way since Netscape 0.x. (I seem to remember Mosaic used a sans-serif font as the default, but my memory is a bit hazy.) One of the more irritating things about Safari’s font choices is that Lucida Grande has no italic/oblique version, so italic Lucida Grande ends up being forced Helvetica, which is quite a bit smaller. Firefox/Camino algorithmically italicize (slant) Lucida Grande, which ends up looking worse, mainly because they get the metrics wrong in the first place; a properly laid out, slanted Lucida Grande is actually not bad looking at small sizes.

Oh yeah, about all that Mac and hiptop programming I’ve been wanting to do in my “spare time”—it’s not happening any time soon. I’ve got a significant deadline at the beginning of March, and it’ll take every spare cycle I’ve got to finish on time. Luckily the research is finally stuff I’m really enjoying, and as long as I remember to take my allergy medication so I can avoid painful, headache-filled days like today, I should be all set. It might be something people outside my research area care about, too—wouldn’t that be nice? :-)

11:11 PM | Administrivia, Computing
1 Comment

I ported Brian Swetland’s RPN calculator to the new hiptop OS 2.3, and made a few small UI changes. It’s now got a splash screen (of sorts) and an icon stolen from my favorite Mac RPN calculator, Kalk. You can check out the sources from Subversion or grab a tarball.

My overall impressions of hiptop OS 2.3: reminds me of Mac OS 8.5. It’s gaining a lot of useful features: the new text system, Web browser, and J2ME implementation are phenomenal, but the UI is starting to outgrow the device, and flakiness has begun to appear in places. The IM client is a poster child for well-intentioned but poorly-implemented features in this version: the disclosure triangles are just wrong, replacing a perfectly usable older interface, and the odd buddy icon display gets in the way, yet you can’t turn it off without disabling away messages as well. Being able to easily delete email without the keyboard is great, but the user interface sounds you get are broken.

I’m missing IRC on the hiptop already, so I’ll get cognet ported next. Need to restore the latest sources from a backup, because the CVS server Dan and I were using is no longer functional.

12:44 AM | hiptop
1 Comment

Arjan van der Velde made several valiant attempts to post a shell script that did most of what my Python script did, but there seem to be some issues with the HTML parser in the comments truncating whatever he tried to post.

I’ve posted Arjan’s script; you may prefer it to mine because it doesn’t have the PyObjC/SystemConfiguration wrapper dependencies, though it doesn’t support multiple VPN domains/nameservers. It uses scutil to apply the same changes as my script, unlike the first shell script linked in the comments.

Here are a few minor tweaks I’ve made to my OpenVPN client setup.

First, I start OpenVPN with a zsh function and completion:

vpn () {
        title "OpenVPN" "${1:r}"
        sudo openvpn --config ~/.openvpn/$1
        chpwd
}
compctl -W ~/.openvpn -g '*.conf' vpn

which lets me type vpn <tab> to see a list of the (currently four) networks I can connect to, and the window title will change to OpenVPN:calamity or similar, courtesy of the title function:

title () {
        if [[ $TERM = "screen" ]]
        then
                print -Pn "\ek$1\e\\"
                print -Pn "\e]0;$2\a"
        elif [[ -n $xterm_prompt ]]
        then
                print -Pn "\e]0;$1:$2\a"
        fi
}

That’s part of another tweak I made a few months ago to get screen titles to be concise yet helpful… I’ll write about that another time.

Second, I added a line under if going_up at the end of acm-client.py to minimize the window once it’s connected:

if going_up:
	[...]
	print '\x1b[2t'

That way there’s a very visual cue indicating the VPN connection is established, and I can mouse over the minimized Terminal windows in my Dock to see what VPNs I’m connected to. Not exactly the world’s best UI, but it works.

2:43 PM | macOS
3 Comments