njr 3.0

...rom 2001, during which I transitioned from tape- to hard drive-based backup; since then my family’s non-laptop Macs have included an iMac and three Mac minis, so I’ve become very familiar with external enclosures and drive docks. The state of the art in these devices is just bad, and has been for years. I’ve had more hardware failures, both of the drives and their enclosures, than with any other electronics product I’ve used in the past decade. In...

6:17 PM | Computing

…d-line methods for bringing an application to the front. My timings were based on OS X 10.2.4, as of February 2003. I redid the same timings in OS X 10.3.3, adding my launch program, with the following results. Times are in seconds, as measured with time(1): Mac OS X 10.2.4 10.3.3 appswitch -a Emacs 0.355 0.054 appswitch -i com.gnu.Emacs 0.381 0.063 launch -a Emacs n/a 0.085 open -a Emacs 0.842 0.876 osascript -e ‘tell app “Emacs” to activate’ 2.3…

1:38 AM | PyCS

…nt and 347.com have been discussing Zoe and appear to be having similar reactions to mine. I gave Nat an introduction to Zoe last week and he was suitably impressed. Seriously, if you ever ask yourself “how do I find that email I got six months ago about subject X?”, feed your mail into Zoe. I still haven't had a chance to fix the serialization problem I got upgrading to Zoe 0.2.6; a kind soul sent me the 0.2.4 version I accidentally deleted,…

6:52 PM | Radio

…into HTML entities. If you are subscribing to this Weblog via its RSS feed, please change the URL from http:\//radio.weblogs.com/0100148/rss.xml to http:\//web.sabi.net/log/rss.xml. Yes, I realize none of the automatic links point there yet, but they will when I figure out how to do so. For months, I've been having issues upstreaming to UserLand's server, but I can much more reliably rsync to my account at pair, where web.sabi.net is ho…

11:41 PM | Radio

…pos; bundle ID: com.apple.TextEdit kind: Application TextEdit's creator is actually the same as SimpleText's creator. The code in question is in file.writeTextFile. Here's a fun experiment: [p1:26] ~%touch blah 12:33AM [p1:27] ~%SetFile -t ' ' blah 12:33AM [p1:28] ~%launch -f blah 12:33AM blah: document type: ' ' creator: '' kind: Radio UserLand Document Radio actually registers four spaces as a file ty…

11:35 PM | Radio