DasGenie:!Scrap

My first S.M.A.R.T. failure

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:32:54 CET

My bad luck with hardware continues to amaze me. Bought in September last year, my Western Digital 250 GB latop drive has a S.M.A.R.T. failure. A first for me, normally my disks fail first and then show a S.M.A.R.T. error. How did I notice? I accidentally openend disk Utility and my disk showed up red. What I am wondering is why apple doesn’t show me the S.M.A.R.T. status more prominently somewhere if it fails?

If your disk has a S.M.A.R.T. failure and you are on a Mac then you can get more information about the failure using SMART Utility – which shows me this:

Which IMHO means that this time I could be lucky and no data has been damaged. So here I go and order a replacement from the Western Digital website which much to my suprise offers a variant where I get the new disk first, and have to send the broken one back in a 30 day time window. So if my disk holds up until then I can safely clone it using disk utility. If not, I have my time machine backup and will see how well it will restore my old state. Wish me luck!

P.S.: I just found SMART Reporter which actually checks for the S.M.A.R.T. status all the time, and shows up an alert and red hard drive if it detects a failure. It is freeware, and has just been added to my startup items.

Bugs, Child Windows and Spaces

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:04:35 CET

During my recent SubEthaEdit bugfixing efforts I came along some pretty annoying Cocoa Child Window issues.

First a little preamble, why did SubEthaEdit use child windows – this could be filed under “it was a bad idea anyways”. I got the idea searching for a good and safe way of displaying the little SSL-lock icon in the upper right of the window if a connection is SSL-encrypted. Safe meaning a way that wouldn’t break if something fundamental in the way how the window title is displayed would change in the future. Since most of the displaying in the titlebar window area is private API, the results I found when looking around did use some mean subclassing. I didn’t want to do that, so I thought having a tiny transparent child window on top of my window would be a very safe thing to do. So I did. And I was wrong.

Bug number one: Spaces breaks

This seems to be a known issue, when I filed it it almost instantly got duplicated to this one: Child windows and Spaces [rdar://5593261] .

If you have a window with a child window it behaves strangely on spaces. If you open spaces and drag such a window to another screen, then it does not move to the point you dragged it, but to the point it was on the previous screen – much like when you press shift or apple while dragging windows in the spaces view. That in itself wouldn’t be a major problem, but here you go: if you have multiple windows with child windows, all of them gather together on the screen you activate after moving a window around. Hurray, no more spaces for you puny little app :(. So if your app behaves this way, that might be the problem. This was not easy to find out, I found it by chance after making sure that both the main window and child window did have the same collectionBehavior. (P.S.: if you want to put a view in the titlebar, simply ask a standard button for its superview and frame and add some view relative to that. Thanks to Panic for this idea which sounds quite safe too.)

id superview = [[[self window] standardWindowButton:NSWindowToolbarButton] superview];

Bug number two: Your app crashes on quit in certain situations

We had this nasty little bug that every now and then crashed SubEthaEdit on quit. Quite an annoying habit, but we did not find a way to reproduce it. Thankfully amongst the many bug reporters who sent us the crash log via the built in reporter, there was one that actually found out a way to reproduce it. The crash only happens if you quit the application while it is in background. Then the child window is somehow overreleased. You can see the setup code of my sample NSDocument here:

- (void)windowControllerDidLoadNib:(NSWindowController *) aController

{

    [super windowControllerDidLoadNib:aController];

    // Add any code here that needs to be executed once the windowController has loaded the document's window.

    {

        // add a transparent child window to display a lock next to the toolbar button

        NSImage *lockImage = [NSImage imageNamed:NSImageNameInfo];

        NSRect frame=NSZeroRect;

        frame.size = [lockImage size];

        frame.origin = [[aController window] frame].origin;

        frame.origin.x += 100;

        NSWindow *childWindow = [[NSWindow alloc] initWithContentRect:frame styleMask:NSBorderlessWindowMask backing:NSBackingStoreBuffered defer:NO];

        [childWindow setIgnoresMouseEvents:YES];

        NSImageView *imageView = [[NSImageView alloc] initWithFrame:frame];

        [imageView setImage:lockImage];

        [childWindow setContentView:imageView];

        [imageView release];

        [childWindow setOpaque:NO];

        [childWindow setBackgroundColor:[NSColor clearColor]];

        [[aController window] addChildWindow:childWindow ordered:NSWindowAbove];

        [childWindow release];

        NSLog(@"%s %@ %@ %@",__FUNCTION__, childWindow, imageView, lockImage);

    }

}

This is reproducible both in Leopard and in Tiger and a very bad thing. Not really grasping what goes wrong exactly in that case (if you close the windows or quit normally everything is fine, hence no general memory management problem – update: look at the bottom of the article to see that I was wrong nevertheless) I fixed this one in the 3.0.2 release by changing the lifecycle of the child window. I did so by putting the child window into an instance variable of my window controller subclass, and autorelease it on the dealloc method of it.

What I did not know then was that this didn’t fix it on Tiger in a special occasion: If on Tiger you quit SubEthaEdit while it was not active and had unsaved changes, and then without activating SubEthaEdit first directly click on the “don’t save” button. On PPC-Tiger that is. So I revisited the bug after a bug reporter finally added this magic information of reproducibility. What I did to fix it first was retain all child windows in the AppControllers applicationWillTerminate: delegate method. Which interestingly enough needed me to make an extra class for theses windows to identifiy them, because in the applicationWillTerminate: method the child windows were still alive – the parent windows weren’t. However I finally got rid of all of this by using a different and better method of adding the SSL-ock icon to the window, but some of you that might not be in the luxury of removing their child windows might find my trip valuable.

This one hasn’t been made a duplicate yet and is quite annoying. So if you have the same problem, report a bug referencing this one: Child window overrelease [rdar://5686435] .

Sample Code

If you want to reproduce it, here is my ChildWindow sample I wrote for the bug report. If you want to reproduce the last part of bug number two you have to add an NSWindowController subclass to the sample. Thanks for listening.

Addendum isReleasedWhenClosed

I have just been informed by the nice guys at Apple that programatically created windows default to a isReleasedWhenClosed state of YES which explains the overrelease. However why the heck it doesn’t crash when a window is closed does still not seem right to me. And what that means is that if I add the window without autoreleasing or releasing it beforehand that my app leaks windows. Which I verfied using ObjectAlloc – so it is still a bug, but a different one. If you want to do it right you have to setReleaesedWhenClosed:NO on the child window before you add it and everything is fine.

SubEthaEdit 3.0.2 released today

Wed, 5 Dec 2007 01:21:56 CET

This is “just” a point release – but we put in much effort to find many little annoying crashes which hid in special cases. There is nothing more unsatisfying than a crashing product. We know that and are very thankful of your bug reports which let us find out and fix the ones that are harder to reproduce. We especially want to thank the ones of you that take the time and reduce the problem to something that is reproducible.

So go ahead and grab the update via “SubEthaEdit -> Check for updates…” or directly via our Website . For your feature requests or bug reports please take the time and enter them into our Bugtracker – or just give us feedback via our Feedback Form – we value your input and feedback very much.

Comments in the New Pages...

Tue, 7 Aug 2007 22:58:51 CEST

...really mark badly, and print even worse. See for yourself:

All of the lines are off, there are white stripes and some Text is overlapped with markers…

Nice viral marketing...

Fri, 27 Jul 2007 14:17:16 CEST

I hope the film is nice – however – rate me if you want.

Versionshelf just got better.

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 15:21:18 CEST

We just updated our subversion hosting service Versionshelf with the following cool new features:

much improved optics of the svn browser
intra line diffing in the svn browser (those of you who know FileMerge.app know how vaulble it can be to see exactly the 2 characters that changed)
international pricing in USD for non european customers.
all plans now have more features (more users and/or more repositries and/or more space)
the basic plan got cheaper

So check it out – it’s a 30 day free trial. And feedback is, as always, very welcome!

SubEthaEdit 2.6.4 is out

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 18:55:28 CEST

Mainly a bugfix release. But I especially like the triple click selection for strings and variables. Check it out! SubEthaEdit 2.6.4 – Full release notes – here an excerpt of the more interesting ones:

Additions/New Features

Added the AppleScript command "show" to the document. "show" will show the frontmost window / tab of a document.
Added the system wide show animation for selecting found text on Leopard
Triple click now selects up to style boundaries. E.g. strings, variables.
Save dialog now preselects filename without extension

Changes

When removing a split now, instead of the cursor position of the upper text view, the cursor position of the active text view is taken
Changed "Check Syntax" in all modes. It now should work with all encodings and with tabs.
Improved the syntax highlighting in Perl Mode
Improved Objective-C Mode to include support for Objective-C 2.0
Improved a behaviour where new windows would open across screens, now new windows open on the screen of the topmost window.
The report a bug menu item in the help menu now directly selects SubEthaEdit and the correct version in our bugtracker.

iPhone

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 00:41:01 CEST

Thanks to the imported iPhone of Alexander Olma of iPhoneBlog.de today I got my hands on an iPhone. And thanks to the nice hackers that provided a way of activating it without buying an AT&T contract. Of course we did talk about it at our german podcast, Bitsundso

My impressions:

everthing is way smaller as seen on the screenshots. I knew that the iPhone had a high resolution display, but everything was quite a bit smaller as I expected
the browser works great, however, selecting and deleting in large text areas really is missing. But I could post a nice bugreport at codingmonkeys.de/bugs and all the nice javascripty features worked fine
it really is super responsive. Especially the speed of flicking through the images on the phone was astounding. A big big contrast to every smartphone i used before.
the keyboard works great. I was able to instantly write long english notes quickly in the notes application with two thumbs. And even unknown words are easy to type if you do the push, move until the correct key is shown lift your finger then trick
I was surprised that the youtube app wouldn’t work without a sim card, obviously it looks for EDGE first which isn’t even an option without a sim card
it streams podcast nicely when going through the feeds with enclosure – however – no chapter marks or images for enhanced podcasts.
the calculater app is missing a possiblity to export the calculated number – again because of the lack of a copy and paste mechanism
the sms app misses a character count, so no way of knowing if you are over the 160 characters per sms. And because of the missing sim card I couldn’t test if it justs sends more than one message or merges longer messages as the nokia does.
although everything is quite small, all the buttons and even links in webpages are easy to hit, and hard to miss.
the mail app seems to miss a sent folder for pop accounts, i hope it has one for imap accounts
even when sending mails while in another app, the familiar Mac OS X mail sent sounds confirms that the mail was sent later on
great detail has been put in the way navigating works. Especially the way it animates when coming to boundaries when scrolling or zooming.

All in all a very nice device, and nothing short of what apple announced. I’m really looking forward to the european launch and I think I will be an instant buyer.

iPhone crash log information

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 22:17:17 CEST

Apparently when an app on the iPhone crashes, the phone notices after 30 seconds, writes out a crashlog and continues to work. On next connect with iTunes it wants to post the crashlog.

The contents of these crashlogs are interesting, as Frasier Spears already noted and found out.

So far I have found 2 crashlogs on the net. One at Daring Fireball and one at Martin Gordon – I think there will be more soon.

Here are the “Headers” of the two logs found up to now:

Process:         MobileMail [67]
Path:            /Applications/MobileMail.app/MobileMail
Version:         N/A (N/A)
Code Type:       0000000C (Native)
Effective UID:   0
Parent Process:  SpringBoard [15]

Date/Time:       2007-06-29 20:42:06.479 -0400
OS Version:      OS X 1.0 (1A543a)
Report Version:  6

Exception Type:  00000020
Exception Codes: 0x8badf00d
Crashed Thread:  Unknown

.hr

Process:         Preferences [73]
Path:            /Applications/Preferences.app/Preferences
Version:         N/A (N/A)
Code Type:       0000000C (Native)
Effective UID:   0
Parent Process:  SpringBoard [15]

Date/Time:       2007-06-29 20:27:24.929 -0400
OS Version:      OS X 1.0 (1A543a)
Report Version:  6

Exception Type:  00000020
Exception Codes: 0x8badf00d
Crashed Thread:  Unknown

Both crash logs look almost identical, both don’t know which thread crashed and both have the funny exception code of “badfood”.

Let us compare this to a standard Mac OS X Tiger crash log:

Host Name:      dom
Date/Time:      2007-02-08 15:48:36.933 +0100
OS Version:     10.4.8 (Build 8N1037)
Report Version: 4

Command: SubEthaEdit
Path:    /Appications/SubEthaEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/SubEthaEdit
Parent:  WindowServer [96]

Version: 2.6 (2043M)

PID:    414
Thread: 0

Exception:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes:      KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS (0x0001) at 0x73617283

So we can see there is no explicit PID mentioned on the iPhone, instead it is displayed in brackets behind the Process information (which seams consistent with the way it always was displayed for the parent process. The Report Version has bumped from 4 to 6. Also the OS Version scheme is different, although similar. It is not 10.something but OS X 1.0 – the running build number (1A543a) seems to be a similar scheme than the build number on tiger (Build 8N1037). The Parent Process for the Apps is the “SpringBoard” which seems to replace the “WindowServer” on Tiger. The Version of the current App seems N/A always – the Path to the binary seems to have lost a “Contents” which was quite superfluous anyway and is a old relic from next times that I never understood. Maybe they thought they would put metadata in the space between the .app folder and the Contents Folder… The “Effective UID” field is new, but filled with 0 doesn’t tell us much. Also new is the “Code Type” field – in which (native) would suggest that there may be other values which are not native…

Since we have no symbols I skip the thread part. After the thread part however, interestingly enough, there is no thread state in the logs, so no deducing of the CPU because of the displayed contents of the registers. The only text we get is:

Unknown thread crashed with unknown flavor: 4, state_count: 1

Moving on – The binary images list has a different format on the iPhone:

0x301c7000 - 0x301d4fff  AddressBook UUID (7D1B2DA0EC1D4A1382D5FE0B91851ACA) /System/Library/Frameworks/AddressBook.framework/AddressBook

against

0x94726000 - 0x9486cfff com.apple.AddressBook.framework 4.0.4 (485.1) /System/Library/Frameworks/AddressBook.framework/Versions/A/AddressBook

So instead of version numbers we now have UUIDs, the reverse DNS name syntax seems to have gone, and the complicated linked structure of the framework bundles also seems to have gone.

I want to close with the list of library/framework names which don’t appear on Tiger:

AddressBookUI UUID (0E6FBEAA0D9C411FB1F0794F35D2CFBA) /System/Library/Frameworks/AddressBookUI.framework/AddressBookUI
AppSupport UUID (4D84C1C39C7C4DB9981FEBF8E48FF450) /System/Library/Frameworks/AppSupport.framework/AppSupport
BluetoothManager UUID (E00ECB53D4B5426A818DA8D77CD1B09C) /System/Library/Frameworks/BluetoothManager.framework/BluetoothManager
Calendar UUID (5D3EB213B2A94C4C97C194283493122C) /System/Library/Frameworks/Calendar.framework/Calendar
Celestial UUID (15045615F83249D49720253EBDF9132A) /System/Library/Frameworks/Celestial.framework/Celestial
CoreSurface UUID (7280076DC074497CB145741A15FCE472) /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreSurface.framework/CoreSurface
CoreTelephony UUID (7B909435DABA409098995CC24EE26587) /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreTelephony.framework/CoreTelephony
GraphicsServices UUID (1C4876C189F34562ACF6B7D44770FF97) /System/Library/Frameworks/GraphicsServices.framework/GraphicsServices
IAP UUID (C298EEA4A51040D1959591C364206B54) /System/Library/Frameworks/IAP.framework/IAP
IOMobileFramebuffer UUID (AE80733EB6514BB88A6287971C7E09C9) /System/Library/Frameworks/IOMobileFramebuffer.framework/IOMobileFramebuffer
ITSync UUID (B02A31E7730A46BCA6B336F097D542C4) /System/Library/Frameworks/ITSync.framework/ITSync
LayerKit UUID (B9468BD4F4F041C3ADA50B830305E7A2) /System/Library/Frameworks/LayerKit.framework/LayerKit
MBX2D UUID (1583F2C2C78B4058BD8C1DF338738C05) /System/Library/Frameworks/MBX2D.framework/MBX2D
MBXConnect UUID (B5E73A95A84E4706A922D56674D4809D) /System/Library/Frameworks/MBXConnect.framework/MBXConnect
MeCCA UUID (5031D4A8F03B4605A6233D351EF790E0) /System/Library/Frameworks/MeCCA.framework/MeCCA
MessageUI UUID (ED6F6EA00B1346BEB98F00733C936922) /System/Library/Frameworks/MessageUI.framework/MessageUI
MobileBluetooth UUID (5F13101DF17B442D8DE5CD0BDB50D7AB) /System/Library/Frameworks/MobileBluetooth.framework/MobileBluetooth
MobileMail UUID (8859A31CE4874DF1AE2A9A92B1B717A5) /Applications/MobileMail.app/MobileMail
MobileMailSettings UUID (C7B98C13676647FA9A1A6D9DE36897E2) /System/Library/PreferenceBundles/MobileMailSettings.bundle/MobileMailSettings
MobileMusicPlayer UUID (C3D3AC1CC6384FDDB34D1D2D0A7E90F0) /System/Library/Frameworks/MobileMusicPlayer.framework/MobileMusicPlayer
MusicLibrary UUID (B9815425F5D742CD9B9FFF948A4E590D) /System/Library/Frameworks/MusicLibrary.framework/MusicLibrary
OpenGLES UUID (3405A88B732E4DF3A127E182483D9E69) /System/Library/Frameworks/OpenGLES.framework/OpenGLES
Preferences UUID (26FA104E4D88438285B988DDADDE39D6) /System/Library/Frameworks/Preferences.framework/Preferences
Preferences UUID (8E1045DED5F040138101BCE1C4C06AEC) /Applications/Preferences.app/Preferences
TelephonyUI UUID (15006830A8B94F7590AC10CBB664D0E7) /System/Library/Frameworks/TelephonyUI.framework/TelephonyUI
UIKit UUID (8A129F9979114365B637E144A3C67868) /System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.framework/UIKit
URLify UUID (54B6437BCD3A452F9CC7493CB9E010FF) /System/Library/Frameworks/URLify.framework/URLify
liblockdown.dylib UUID (30A0EB0C05724FA487617B860E360B88) /usr/lib/liblockdown.dylib

That’s all for now :)

Update: Engadget identifies the processor used as an 620MHz ARM1176JZF which seems to contain the ARM Jazelle for embedded java execution. So the Code Type counterpart might be Java Byte Code.

Apple Introduces: Fixed width Pixel Fonts!

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 01:59:11 CEST

What the hell is happening in the Apple Pro App department? While Color might be a really great tool – why the heck did they use Amiga style fixed width pixel fonts all around the interface? Are we back to the days where Pro Tools have to look ugly, because they are Pro? Or did the Pro guys just not listen to Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech of 2005 – just wondering…

Another German Thingy...

Tue, 6 Mar 2007 16:31:31 CET

My Thawte email certificate expired in January – so I went for a renewal. There I found out that my certificate is not the only thing that would need an update…

Music DRM be gone!!!

Tue, 6 Feb 2007 22:20:12 CET

Steve Jobs has given his opinion on DRM on the Apple Website :

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.

Please, Music Industry, make the world a better place and let my purchased music be DRM free!

Amazon UnSpun: Best Text Editors

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 12:24:36 CET

Have a look and give your rating: Best Text Editors

At the moment of writing Textmate is Number 1 and SubEthaEdit is on Number 7 which is the second place in Mac Specific Editors.

Wii - some afterthoughts

Mon, 25 Dec 2006 15:36:19 CET

So I got my wii on the first day – here are some random thoughts about it:

Wii Play: Okay, what do you expect from a game that actually is thrown in with a controller. But seriously: most of the games would just need a little improvement to be really cool.

Rayman Raving Rabbits: This one I really like. It really shows what Wii Play could have been if they hat put more finish on the mini games.

Internet Channel: looks promising. What’s bad though is that it doesn’t support Bonjour. WHY? just so I have to enter 10.0.1.10 instead of brainy.local? Really Wii, just add Bonjour and you become my media center. I feel the urge to find a remote iTunes flash app, and a nice foto browser for iPhoto that just works web based and I got most of my media on TV – jay.

Zelda: Really nice. But more an evolution than an revolution. And Zelda really shows that more graphic power wouldn’t have hurt. It kind of feels like the blurry graphics of the N64 Zelda that always kept me from playing it. However I enjoy it a lot and forgive the wishi washiness of the graphics. I’m really looking forward to metroid on.

The Controller: What I really don’t like is, that if you have a game that uses the nunchuck, both of your hands are tied to the controller. you can’t just get a bite or a drink because either you can’t steer or you can’t move. hmmm. And I really like my junk food and drink when I play games.

Wii Sports: Tennis is kind of way to blurry to control. I really had higher hopes for it. But Baseball and especially golf are great.

Mii Channel: nice gimmick but what gives? I’d really like more support and use for them.

Wii Console Codes: It’s really a shame that both ends have to enter their respective wii codes to be able to send each other stuff. A simple invite and deny variant would have been way better. And I’m really hoping for great online gaming experiences. I hope spore goes wild on wii. Promising but far from impressive at the moment.

IE7 installer is a good parent...

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 14:41:04 CEST

...and asks you if you have been a bad boy before you get the treat:

MP4 video to crash Quicktime and therefore Safari with it...

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 15:30:58 CEST

The German popular video-blog Ehrensenf regularily posts MP4 videos in Quicktime that crash on Intel Macs. I filed a bug under rdar://4578460 on 08-Jun-2006 04:59 PM and it is still there. Embarrassing Apple. Really. Why am I writing this now? I got my Intel iMac because my DreckBook Pro needs a Major repair – don’t ask – and I wanted to watch this Ehrensenf Episode while copying stuff. And Booom – there goes the crash. I hope I can post some nice Apple things soon. Maybe when my DreckBook Pro comes back and is fully healed… for now I’ll watch Ehrensenf using Flip4Mac and WMV. What a shame.

And for the interested: the relevant part of the crash report:

Thread 11 Crashed:
0   ...le.QuickTimeMPEG4.component     0x98cd45c1 Reconstruct_8x8(unsigned char*, int, unsigned char*, int, short*, unsigned char, unsigned char, unsigned char, int, unsigned char const*) + 261
1   ...le.QuickTimeMPEG4.component     0x98cfe288 DecodeMBInter(int, int, short*, short*, unsigned char, macroblock_stuff*, INSTANCE_DECO*) + 1206
2   ...le.QuickTimeMPEG4.component     0x98cffbdc ReadACombinedVideoPacketSimple(long*, frame*, frame*, INSTANCE_DECO*) + 3052
3   ...le.QuickTimeMPEG4.component     0x98d01cae MPEG4DMPR_Decompress(WorkInfo*, INSTANCE_DECO*) + 2942
4   ...le.QuickTimeMPEG4.component     0x98cf5710 MPEG4_DDrawBand + 50
5   ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore     0x90ccbd57 CallComponentFunctionCommon + 513
6   ...le.QuickTimeMPEG4.component     0x98cf5106 MPEG4_DComponentDispatch + 176
7   ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore     0x90ccba3c CallComponentDispatch + 34
8   ...ickTimeComponents.component     0x98754639 ImageCodecDrawBand + 43
9   ...ickTimeComponents.component     0x97edc9dd BaseCodec_DecompressWorkFunction + 1006
10  ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore     0x90cd7bf8 InvokeComponentMPWorkFunctionUPP + 22
11  ...ickTimeComponents.component     0x97edaa83 BaseCodec_DecompressCallBack_Common + 1014
12  com.apple.QuickTime                0x9436482d ExecuteCallBack_priv + 125
13  ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore     0x90cdec97 InvokeDeferredTaskUPP + 15
14  ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore     0x90ce7bec DeferredTaskThread + 120
15  libSystem.B.dylib                  0x90023d87 _pthread_body + 84

I've had it with iChat video chat...

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:36:32 CEST

Every frickin’ fraggin’ time I want to use or demonstrate iChat Video chatting it doesn’t work. Yay for the build in iSight, big nay for the network coders of iChat and Airport Extreme. Yes I have an Airport Extreme Base Station and a Standard DSL line on my side.

That has to be enough to be able to do a video or audio chat!

But obviously it isn’t. I have all Apple Hardware here, one might think that this should make sure that a connection can be made. You can say what you want about Skype, but they got this one right. Skype always just works. iChat doesn’t even work when you have all Apple Hardware. Shame on you Apple! And all you did to improve the situation is provide a “Send to Apple” button if something doesn’t work. I sent and sent and sent. Now it’s enough, I’ve given up. Apple – when did you change from being the company where stuff just works?

update: An excerpt from the Using iChat AV with a firewall or NAT router – I highlighted the great statement. The Innovative feature is calles: Yourself did not respond, which makes perfectly clear who is to blame.

Network Address Translation (NAT) Some Internet service providers (ISPs) and home networking routers use a technology called network address translation (NAT) to share an Internet connection. Though this often interferes with video and audio connections in other conferencing applications, iChat AV uses an innovative approach to establish a direct audio and video connection even on networks that feature NAT. In fact, iChat AV works fine with many popular household routers in their out-of-box configurations. You can see a list of these routers in technical document 93333, “iChat AV: Compatible Network Routers”.

Applying Behaviour without Behaviour.js

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 19:01:34 CEST

In June 2005 Ben Nolan made my web-development live more joyful by releasing behaviour.js – a little javascript library that helps you keep your HTML clean. With behaviour.js you add all the javascript behaviour and magic after the page is loaded via CSS selectors.

So, instead of adding the onclick=”something()” attribute directly to the HTML you can put clean images into your HTML with classes like “removehandle” and apply this behaviour:

var often = {

    '.removehandle' : function(el) {

        el.onclick = function() {

            Element.remove(this.parentNode.parentNode)

            return false;

        }

    },

    '.optionlist_removeitem' : function (el) {

        el.onclick = function() {

            Element.remove(this.parentNode)

            return false;

        }

    }

}

Very nice. But what is even nicer is, that the current prototype version 1.5.0_rc0 features the $$() function which can do exactly the same in combination with the each() method. Interstingly enough, the easiest way to get your hands on this prototype version is the rails repository .

function applyRemoveBehaviour() = {

    $$('.removehandle').each(function(el) {

        el.onclick = function() {

            Element.remove(this.parentNode.parentNode)

            return false

        }

    })

    $$('.optionlist_removeitem').each(function (el) {

        el.onclick = function() {

            Element.remove(this.parentNode)

            return false

        }

    })

}

Versionshelf has landed

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:31:55 CEST

I’m proud to announce that Verionshelf is up and running today. Have a look, try it out. We offer a free educational plan, Secure Socket Layer throughout all plans and a 30-Day free trial period. So there is nothing to loose, but so much to gain. Once you version you never go back…

StopGoogle.com

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 19:20:05 CEST

Google is now actively warning about “malicious” pages. As you can see at stopbadware.org Google doesn’t just place a “bad” button next to your search result, but it shows you a page that looks a lot like a 404 to tell you to not go there, and if you really want to you can find the link further down.

Call me paranoid, but I think that is evil. Just imagine the damage caused by a wrong entry?

And very interesting, stopbadware actively reports that www.ThemeXP.org is evil but if you google for it, ThemeXP.org is the very prominent first hit which doesn’t get the nag screen. So just started and already some disconnect between google and stopbadware – what will stop anyone from making arbitrary decisions there?

You just gotta love my Mac OS X Issues...

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 22:50:10 CEST

Guess what, today my vlc crashed again on my MacBook Pro (which it frequently does when switching from and to fullscreen, or/and adding and removing secondary displays). But this time the crashing crashed:

Date/Time:      2006-08-11 22:39:58.661 +0200
OS Version:     10.4.7 (Build 8J2135a)
Report Version: 4

Command: Exited process
Path:    Exited process
Parent:  kernel_task [0]

Version: ??? (???)

PID:    2144
Thread: Unknown

Exception:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes:      KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS (0x0001) at 0x1887f000
(null)
Unknown thread crashed with i386 Thread State:
eax: 0x1887f000    ebx: 0x1c3036d2 ecx:0x03406ae4 edx: 0x1887f008
edi: 0x1d604200    esi: 0x034067bc ebp:0xb04fd578 esp: 0xb04fd560
 ss: 0x0000002f    efl: 0x00010206 eip:0x1c3b37d2  cs: 0x00000027
 ds: 0x0000002f     es: 0x0000002f  fs:0x00000000  gs: 0x00000037

Binary Images Description:

Model: MacBookPro1,1, BootROM MBP11.0055.B02, 2 processors, Intel Core Duo, 2 GHz, 2 GB
Graphics: ATI Radeon X1600, ATY,RadeonX1600, PCIe, 256 MB
Memory Module: DIMM0/BANK 0, 1 GB, DDR2 SDRAM, 667 MHz
Memory Module: DIMM1/BANK 1, 1 GB, DDR2 SDRAM, 667 MHz
AirPort: spairport_wireless_card_type_airport_extreme (0x168C, 0x86), 0.1.24
Bluetooth: Version 1.7.5f10, 2 service, 1 devices, 1 incoming serial ports
Network Service: AirPort, AirPort, en1
Serial ATA Device: TOSHIBA MK1234GSX, 111.79 GB
Parallel ATA Device: MATSHITADVD-R   UJ-857
USB Device: Built-in iSight, Micron, Up to 480 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: IR Receiver, Apple Computer, Inc., Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Apple Optical USB Mouse, Mitsumi Electric, Up to 1.5 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad, Apple Computer, Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA
USB Device: Bluetooth HCI, Up to 12 Mb/sec, 500 mA

WWDC 2006 Keynote

Tue, 8 Aug 2006 10:02:45 CEST

Hmmm… am I the only one that is a little bit underwhelmed by this Keynote? Mac Pro and Xserves, alright. They are at a good price point too. That they are “only” 2 times faster than the current fastest G5s kind of is a good testament to the G5. It seems it really was a nice Chip after all. Just too big and too hot.

What have we got. Well, notes in Mail ? WTF? Sounds like a feature Steve wanted. It doesn’t make much sense to me. A global To-Do list “Server” on the other hand sounds great, but putting the to-do lists mainly in mail on the other hand doesn’t really. But I love how the global Address Book turned out, so let’s hope they did it equally well. But Stationery in Mail? Yes my mother will love that (if it looks great in outlook on the receiving side and doesn’t get caught in the standard spam filters), but is that innovation? I don’t get the audience clapping on that.

Time Machine . I have very mixed thoughts on that. Could be great could be horrible. I hopes it comes with a successor to HFS+. And the UI? What’s up with that? I imagine a dual screen setup, and then an itsy bitsy tiny wheeny Address Book window in the middle. That just doesn’t work right. They wanted to show Core Animation , alright, but please please change that UI.

iChat Theater as well as screen sharing is IMHO the real deal. The first one makes video chatting so much more useful, the latter is ideal for support, which I need to give regularily to my mother and friends I brought to the mac. Real great. I hope it works faster than VNC and Apple Remote Desktop today.

And all that mocking about Redmond: Okay, Microsoft copies stuff. They do. But hey, now Apple postponed Leopard too. At least until Spring. I mean okay, we had a transition to Intel in between, that was much work. So be it. But Mac OS X is far from golden. There are so many things not working right, or as good as they could, please focus on that. Finder, Trashes, SMB-Support, Window Handling, OpenGL Speed, the Dock (when will it finally springload?), iChat AV connectivity, Laptop Heat, and and and. So stop mocking and continue working I say. I hope some of the Top Secret no-shows are really great, and the reason for not showing is not that they are just much too far from ready.

So what I’m looking forward to? iChat, Xcode 3.0, Objective-C 2.0, finally a significant update for Interface builder and of course, the top secret stuff. But what I’m really sad about is: With that timeframe, the next WWDC won’t be very interesting.

IB Wisdom: who knew?

Wed, 5 Jul 2006 18:37:07 CEST

Here I am, 3 years developing cocoa applications and working with Interface builder. And always I hated the fact that I had to resize all the interface elements when I wanted a different default window size. Little did I know that you actually can resize a window in IB with all the subviews autoresizing. Did you know this? And if, why didn’t you tell me?

Just hold ctrl while resizing. That does the trick. Haven’t that found documented anywhere, though.

CocoaDevHouse Munich: Results

Sun, 2 Jul 2006 14:14:46 CEST

It has been already a week now since CocoaDevHouse Munich happened. It was a great event – big thanks to Boinx for hosting it.

I worked together with Achim of Boinx on a Quartz-Composer only variant of Tetris. It was great fun, and although we had the game working on Saturday I spent some extra hours on Sunday to polish it so it can be released. But somehow I forgot to put it only somewhere ;). So here you go, the fruit of our labor: Compositris

We have been inspired by the AsteroidsQC that can be found on quartzcompositions.com. A great resource for nice compositions.

Be aware that Compositris is very demanding, best played on an intel Mac with built-in iSight. Achim was keen on doing much more visual stuff (neatly remove lines, and I already saw a great start game animation) and I’ll hope we get his enhanced version soon ;).

On another sidenote: I recently started the company Shelf Cloud which will soon offer reasonable priced Subversion hosting at Versionshelf.com – and we were happy to provide a repository for CocoaDevHouse Munich. If one or all of the other Dev Houses is interested we’ll add their attendees to the list of users for the repository we created or give an organisator admin access. I think it would be great if work on the started projects would continue between the dev houses, and versioning is a great tool for that.

Finally: I get to see .kkrieger

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 09:33:35 CEST

I heard about .kkrieger some time ago, but now on my MacBook Pro with Bootcamp I can actually play and see it. It’s amazing. All in 96k. That’s inspiring.

Big Fire in my Hometown

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 22:10:52 CEST

Time to use my .mac bandwidth. Two days ago, there was a big fire in my hometown, I captured the beginning using my Nokia N70 and put it on .mac. Really spectacular and dangerous. More pictures will be available on the local firefighters homepage. No one was harmed. The cause of the fire is yet unknown.

Update: The article on the firefighters page has been posted, and the video has been put on mytube for use at the Feuerwehr Weblog.

ZotCast on SubEthaEdit

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 13:51:40 CEST

Pom Pom Pom Pom has a nice advertisement and accolade of SubEthaEdit in his new ZotCast – and all in 5 different languages :).

Wocoa Frankfurt 2006

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 11:53:46 CEST

As mentioned on the TheCodingMonkeys Company Blog we’ve been to the Wocoa in Frankfurt. Although it was quite disorganized this time, we had some nice talks and I still would recommend the Event to anyone into cocoa or webobjects in germany / europe. Always a great place for socialising with fellow enthusiasts / programmers working in the field.

Mine and mbo’s photos can be found on flickr via the tag wocoa – I encourage the other attendees to also post their pictures there. And also to use OpenBC to add everyone. After all its all about networking :).

And I was happy to hear about Big Nerd Ranch Europe is holding a Ruby on Rails Bootcamp in Frankfurt. I encourage anyone that is interested in Ruby on Rails and has some training budget to keep an eye for their high quality classes.

All things monkey...

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 15:29:31 CET

...have now an own place: TheCodingMonkeys’ company blog. – have a visit and read about SubEthaEdit and our little Company.

Which sci-fi crew would I best fit in?

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 12:47:41 CET

You scored as Deep Space Nine (Star Trek). You have entered the dark side of the Star Trek universe. The paradise of Earth is far from you and you must survive despite having enemies on all fronts. But you wouldn't have it any other way because you thrive in conflict and will know what needs to be done to take care of those around you. Now if only the Founders would quit trying to take over the galaxy.

Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com

Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)

94%

Serenity (Firefly)

81%

Moya (Farscape)

81%

Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)

75%

Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)

75%

SG-1 (Stargate)

75%

FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files)

69%

Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)

69%

Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)

63%

Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)

50%

Bebop (Cowboy Bebop)

50%

Enterprise D (Star Trek)

38%

On getting the university degree

Thu, 16 Mar 2006 02:25:50 CET

In mid October 2005 I finally finished my university degree and I’m now able to call myself Diplom-Informatiker Univ. It took me about 6 years – 1 1/2 years longer than the regular time of 4 1/2 years. Why did I take longer – mostly because of 2 things: For one I worked a year without leave in an Web-Company (the .com boom payed so well), and of course there was the time invested in the creation of SubEthaEdit . I studied at the Technische Universität Munich which is considered one of the best in Germany. Now that some month have passed I think I’m able to do some retrospective. Things I’ve learned and want to pass on to all the new computer science students out there:

On learning how to be a good programmer
You simply don’t. There aren’t even lectures on programming or on specific programming languages. And the stuff you do in lectures and so called practical courses do not take you much further than any tutorial in any language does. In fact it is easily possible to get your degree without having to produce a single line of production quality code. If you want to learn coding you have to do it excessively in your spare time or get a part time job early on. And I think this is a major flaw in the german university education. Yes, abstraction and theory are important. But IMHO you need to have a good grasp of the basic skills in any profession to really understand the advanced concepts and theory.
Most lectures are bad or mediocre at best
I actually went to many lectures that were on topics of interest to me – and dropped out because they just made me tired and left me wanting for a good book. Of course there are the few exceptional ones, and I urge you to find them. To find the professors that are really enthusiastic about their subjects. This is something I’d also recommend for the final stages of school: choose by the teacher, not by the subject. A great teacher can make any subject interesting and valuable. The contrary holds true too: a bad teacher can totally spoil all your interest and enthusiasm about a subject. There is the argument that students are getting less and less interested, and that’s also true to some extend. But the average lecture quality really has to improve.

Having said that, I want to mention the people at the TU Munich that really had an impact on me:

Dr. Peter Vachenauer who held the Higher Mathematics lectures in our first year. Not only is he and educator par excellence but he also has just a phenomenal breadth of mathematical wisdom. He was able to show me all the interconnectiveness between the mathematical disciplines and the essence of some great mathematical concepts. He put an enormous efford into his teaching and it just showed. And he takes pride in his work.
Prof. Dr. Christoph Zenger who showed me that there are professors out there, that really cared that students get the best options for their educational career.
Prof. Donald Kossmann who really did the best lectures at the TU Munich. Sadly he only held three and then went on to other universities. I regret deeply that I missed his first lecture.
Prof. Bernd Brügge Ph.D. whose enthusiasm for the Apple Macintosh and his decision to have an open Mac Lab gave me the exposure to Mac OS X that I needed to find an successor to my Acorn Risc OS machines.
Dr. Rafael Kobylinski who gave me the opportunity to explore and learn Mac OS X technologies in an university context by doing many courses, lectures and projects.

And finally some things I really would like to see in computer science university education:

Getting Real
Let practical courses be real practical courses with companies and real projects – not extended tutorials. Show real world examples to go with the theory. If you talk about databases and indexing take the time and understanding of some real open source code out there. Little sandboxes of pseudo code are good for a basic understanding – but the reality differs enormously. When doing techniques like UML diagrams – show them on real world projects – not only praise their benefits, but also show their deficiencies. Teach things on the edge of current standards, not things already deprecated.
Teach basic skills
Teach that the choice of language does matter – that there are different programming languages out there that have their specific place for speicific tasks. Provide additional courses for the main programming languages and teach more than one. Teach about bug tracking and versioning and the basic tools needed. Recruit students for that – students that know because they we’re interested in the subject. Let them teach and get credit points for it.
Embrace Open Source
Teach that one man can make a difference. Teach how to read code. Teach how to contribute and fix bugs. Teach how to start an open source project. Teach how to take different open source projects and combine them into a new exciting one.
Teach passionate and from experience
Stop making the professors do lectures about subjects they obviously don’t care or know about. It shows and it doesn’t help. Good educators can only teach about subjects they are really into.
Take interest and value initiative
Inspire students to create software in their spare time, talk to them, lead them, take them to the point at which they become expoerts in a field, appreciate that.

mist blogs

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 17:18:54 CET

Fellow ex-tu-student and Xbox hacker – developer Michael ‘mist’ Steil has joined the ranks of bloggers together with Melissa Mears at pagetable.com – read and enjoy heavy intel assembly :)

Adobe is teh suck...

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 16:59:05 CET

In case you wondered if to install the flash security update on an intel based mac: don’t. Adobe doesn’t mention anything about being universal or not, but just installs on a MacBook Pro – after that you only have flash in rosetta. Once again: Big booo booo Adobe…

MacBook Pro - Sleeping / VLC crash

Wed, 1 Mar 2006 13:45:49 CET

Just two Things:

First, my MacBook Pro sometimes wakes from sleep very slowly – something I didn’t experience with my TiBook. My guess is that this is related to hibernation, although I don’t know why the machine would hibernate when the batteries are nearly full. We are talking about 10-15 seconds here to show me the display instead of the usual few.

Second, my use of the VLC nightly build of February 23rd came to an astounding halt, show the display in a state that I only know from turning of my GameBoy Advance (that slow fade to white). It happend after i hid VLC while being in the middle of a show – then some half our later I clicked on it. Pictures taken with my N70:

MacBook Pro - No Luck...

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 22:29:35 CET

My MacBook Pro arrived today – after all the sweat of moving my 90 GB from my old Titanium PowerBook G4 800. Did I mention I have no luck with apple machines? I think I did. Sad me – this time is no different:

My right speaker seems be broken – the left one is fine and good sounding – the right one distorted as if totally over powered or connected cross over. oh. that just might be the case. Has anyone the same issue? I bet – here is a thread in the support forum: Problem with built-inspeakers – sad sad thing. Nice remote for iTunes listening and movie watching, but awful sound.

Oh and a sidenote – when wanting to transfer my account via the “normal” way, instead of using ditto on the users home directory, this is what showed:

Yes, Mac OS X is thinking I got 9802631.3 GB on my TiBook…

P.S.: I also had my first kernel panic – yes – although maybe it was not wise to play world of warcraft to calibrate the power manager – when the battery hit zero, the machine paniced.

Thu Feb 23 23:52:12 2006
panic(cpu 1 caller 0x0019C9BE): Unresolved kernel trap (CPU 1, Type 14=page fault), registers:
CR0: 0x8001003b, CR2: 0x13c03d18, CR3: 0x00b26000, CR4: 0x000006a0
EAX: 0x0290ca00, EBX: 0x0290ca00, ECX: 0x0000000e, EDX: 0x23ef8038
ESP: 0x13c03d18, EBP: 0x13b3bf84, ESI: 0x13c03d18, EDI: 0x2a7bc0b8
EFL: 0x00010206, EIP: 0x2a7bc0dd, CS:  0x00000008, DS:  0xd1860010

Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack) 
0x13b3be24 : 0x128b5e (0x3bb060 0x13b3be48 0x131bbc 0x0) 
0x13b3be64 : 0x19c9be (0x3c04e8 0x1 0xe 0x3c02a0) 
0x13b3bf14 : 0x197a43 (0x13b3bf28 0x13b3bf84 0x2a7bc0dd 0x310048) 
0x13b3bf20 : 0x2a7bc0dd (0x310048 0x250010 0x10 0xd1860010) 
0x13b3bf84 : 0x13d683 (0x290ca00 0x13c03d18 0x134aec 0x13b3bfd8) 
0x13b3bfd4 : 0x197911 (0x0 0x0 0x3ae2d48 0x290ca00) Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0x0
      Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
         com.apple.iokit.IOUSBHIDDriver(2.4.0)@0x2a7ba000
            dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOUSBFamily(2.4.0)@0x29c8d000
            dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOHIDFamily(1.4.6)@0x23e0b000

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 8.5.1: Mon Jan 30 21:07:08 PST 2006; root:xnu-792.8.36.obj~1/RELEASE_I386

SubEthaEdit 2.3 and BugShelf

Mon, 6 Feb 2006 17:19:38 CET

It’s out, we released SubEthaEdit 2.3 today. Check it out. It’s full of improved UI and over 35 fixes, changes and additions – we also changed our license from free for non commercial use to free trial only.

Which brings me to my next subject: BugTracking. You know we used Atlassian’s Jira for quite some time now and were very outspoken about it. We want to thank them again for providing us with their great bugtracker. But since we changed from initially free software to the full commercial software now, this time is over. And although we really like Jira over the time we developed some urges for some ajax goodness, had some own ideas and felt that Jira was a little over the top for us. So this is what we did: we did our own Bugtracker – which is trimmed for simplicity yet have as much features as we needed. First thing you will note is, that it isn’t totally public anymore. Much like Apple’s bugreport.apple.com you can only see the bugs you reported. But I stepped it up a bit in that you can also see the bugs you reported duplicates for. And of course you don’t need to register to report a bug. However, if you report a bug and provide an email address, you can register using the confirmation email. And we have tags ;-).

We migrated all our Jira data and accounts, so if you had an old account, you can use it again to check up on all your reported bugs. All the old bugs are there, we changed the HYR-XXX naming scheme to SEE-XXX while keeping the numbers.

So that’s it, no more java on our little server. Please tell us what you like / dislike about SubEthaEdit at our Feedback form and file bugs and feature requests at our BugShelf .

lighttpd, apache 2 and rails

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 11:55:07 CET

James Duncan Davidson has written about Reverse Proxying SSL Connections To Rails and identified one problem we ran over too. Actually I have a different solution for the simple case in which everything should be https. Just put this code in your environment.rb after the requirement of boot:

#https patch

class ActionController::AbstractRequest

  def protocol

    'https://'

  end

end

Moreover in such a setup make sure that you are running an apache 2.2, because there is a nasty bug in the mod_proxy with 2.0.55 that totally screws up data when used in conjunction with https. Bug 37145

Music: Linda Perry - In Flight

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 18:26:03 CET

Finally: New Music from the ex-front-woman of the 4 Non Blondes Linda Perry . Her voice is just incredible. I got my hands on Fill Me Up some time ago, and it has been one of my favorite songs ever since. Checkout the album, it is really great.

My new MacBook Pro...

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 09:29:50 CET

I just ordered mine. My now over three years old TiBook just has to be replaced. Although the new name made me think twice. However, for those of you in Europe thinking of buying one and wondering what “February” means: This is what the german apple store predicts (and I made my order the earliest point it was possible, 8.00 o’clock in the morning, hanging 25 minutes in the waiting loop. I had to make it via phone to use my ADC-Select Hardware discount)

Ihre Bestellung wird voraussichtlich am 15.02.2006 versendet.

And some thoughts on the keynote:

Why the hell did steve show safari as a speed benchmark after photoshop?
I would have never thought they replace the new iMac models this quickly.
Is the fast iMac now the fastes Mac? I surely bet so
Enjoy the speed bump folks, we won’t see another speed bump that gets even close to twice as fast any time soon.
Wood or marble 3D charts in iWork? I’m sorry, somebody lost it’s taste there…
I want my numbers… but at least now I can use Pages instead of word for my invoices (calculated values in tables), yay. After I pay another 79 EUR…

Update: Oopsi, closing the lid sends the current ones into nirvana, look at these comments – hopefully they fix all issues until they ship.

My #&!+9$!# iMac 20''

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 11:54:55 CET

I’m totally out of luck with my Macs. Every Mac I owned had its problems. First the iBook G3 (first white iBook), logic board failure. Then my powerbook: a broken RAM that wasn’t detectible via tests, but shuffled some bits on my harddisk, and every two to three month my machine was broken because of that. Then the Powerbook 12’’ for my mother. Had some sleeping problems – sometimes didn’t goto sleep, sometimes hung in an endless loop with full fan activity when put to sleep. And the iMac 20’’ for my father. I encountered the problem described in this knowledge base article . Ok, so repair was the way to go. Yes it was repaired and it was on warranty. But now, some month later, the same problem again? WTF? did they replace the parts with the same faulty but newer ones? I don’t know, and hope that the repair extension program still is in place and will make this repair cost free. I really hope this.

Boot Screen

Here we get stuck…

Single User Boot

Update: The first time I actually get an error code from the Apple Hardware Test: 2NVD/1/4: 2103 – probably the nvidia graphics card…

The barely readable results of the Apple Hardware Test

Update: the iMac got repaired quickly and on warranty. Hope this time in wil work a little bit longer than just a few month…

Apple Bug Report Someday: Application Activation fails in certain occasions

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:39:56 CET

Bug #4364207

Summary

If you change between applications, and do the activation click as a cancellation of a context menu you generated via a right click, then the application can’t be activated anymore and the menu bar does not react.

Steps to Reproduce:

open Textedit and a new window
open Finder
make sure the finder is active and the textedit window is visible
right click on the textedit window in the text area, see the standard context menu of a TextView
now cancel that menu by left clicking somewhere in the textedit window
see the textedit window raise, but the window is not activated, neither is the menu of textedit shown
now you can switch between windows of textedit and nothing works
if you press apple-b for bold, then the menu blinks and appears, but only certain items are enabled, and most of them don’t do any work

Expected Results:

After cancellation of the context menu I expect normal activation of this window and app

Actual Results:

The application gets into some kind of almost-active zombie mode, that can only be escaped via changing to another application and back

Notes:

This behaviour can be reproduced also with safari or any other app that produces a context menu on right-click.

Please please don’t fix this feature by first activating the app and then sending the right click. This would be a real bad behaviour too.

Rails Tidbits: Association Proxies

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 14:43:51 CET

I’m astounded how sure I can be about how things worked, and then be totally wrong. That was the case with Rails and association behaviour. After the latest upgrade, I thought something broke which in fact never worked the way I thought it works.

As I was sure about it and thought it was a newly introduced bug I quickly pested the rails folks with this Ticket 3178 bug-report. At least I provided my informations, but sorry for the big hassle. Now to some explanations why this snipped works this way:

>> comment = Comment.find :first
=> #<Comment:0x2735284 @attributes={"name"=>nil, "id"=>"1", "user_id"=>"1", "status_id"=>"1"}>
>> old_value = comment.status
=> #<Status:0x2730a40 @attributes={"name"=>"ok", "id"=>"1"}>
>> new_value = Status.find 2
=> #<Status:0x272a794 @attributes={"name"=>"not ok", "id"=>"2"}>
>> comment.status = new_value
=> #<Status:0x272a794 @attributes={"name"=>"not ok", "id"=>"2"}>
>> old_value
=> #<Status:0x272a794 @attributes={"name"=>"not ok", "id"=>"2"}>

As you see the old_value somehow magically sticks to the value of comment.status, not something you would expect. Especially because even the object ids are different. Why is this the case?

Acutally its rather simple, when you add belongs_to to your model, then accessor methods are created. These accessor methods have a little twist on them, that is the object actually returned is not a model object, but an AssociationProxy object (active_record/associations/association_proxy.rb)- this association proxy really acts as the targeted model object via mainly this piece of code:

alias_method :proxy_respond_to?, :respond_to?

def respond_to?(symbol, include_priv = false)

  proxy_respond_to?(symbol, include_priv) || (load_target && @target.respond_to?(symbol, include_priv))

end

This code actually redirects all of the methodes to the target of the proxy. Pretty neat. So while looking like an actual model object what you have is a proxy object. Moreover, the setter method added by the belongs_to method doesn’t replace that proxy, but merely updates its target. So, one side effect is the behaviour I thought was an bug. Now that I know, I can easily cope with it. However, I think it would be more appropriate if the Accessor method actually would return the target of the association, instead of the Proxy. On the other hand by this behaviour the Proxy can delay the way to the database.

=> #<Comment:0x2749bd0 @attributes={"name"=>nil, "id"=>"1", "user_id"=>"1", "status_id"=>"1"}>
>> old_value = comment.status.target
=> #<Status:0x27470d8 @attributes={"name"=>"ok", "id"=>"1"}>
>> new_value = Status.find 2
=> #<Status:0x27449c8 @attributes={"name"=>"not ok", "id"=>"2"}>
>> comment.status = new_value
=> #<Status:0x27449c8 @attributes={"name"=>"not ok", "id"=>"2"}>
>> old_value
=> #<Status:0x27470d8 @attributes={"name"=>"ok", "id"=>"1"}>

So bottom line: be aware that model objects returned by association accessors aren’t the real deal, but proxies, which update with the model.

Joel on Interns

Tue, 6 Dec 2005 09:46:32 CET

I watched my copy of Project Aardvark yesterday. BTW: really nice blog layout. When I first heard of that Joel Spolsky was making a documentary about an internship at FogCreek software, I instantly ordered my copy. Well, after I watched the trailer ;-).

After watching the film I have to say I really liked it. Although I would have loved to see more coding and coding problems and less fun-making. Nevertheless a very enjoyable film, and Paul Graham’s guest appearance really is a plus. The quote I enjoyed most was by Aaron Swartz :

You have this experience to this outside world, right. And like, you sat down and you’ve built software that seems useful. You feel like, well, you could be part of this outside world, you don’t have to be in this sort of fake world of school doing what: you know, some silly assignment that has no real purpose. You could build something that’s actually useful. You can go put it up to your website and people can really use ist. So I think thats what you really like. If you can build something real, why spend time doing stuff that’s fake?

So go ahead and buy it! I’d like to see more of this type of documentaries!

Ruby Observations: Hash#select vs. Hash#reject

Sun, 4 Dec 2005 16:47:01 CET

hash = {:key1 => 'value1',:key2 => 'value2'}

=> {:key1=>"value1", :key2=>"value2"}

hash.select{|k,v| [:key1].include? k}

=> [[:key1, "value1"]]

hash.reject{|k,v| ![:key1].include? k}

=> {:key1=>"value1"}

So the result of an select is an array of 2 element array, where the result of an reject is a hash. Useful but strange. I was already on my way to implement something like Hash#select_by_key because I saw the behaviour of Hash#select.

Apple Bug Report Friday: Safari: Canvas element.

Sat, 3 Dec 2005 21:24:49 CET

My first entry for the Apple Bug Report Friday, may seem to be a nuisance, but IMHO really symptomatic for Mac OS X.

Bug #4364207

Vector art of the canvas element gets rasterized on print

look at here

there is a perfectly drawn vector monkey. real nice. now you want to have that in pdf. Simply press print and preview? sadly no. then you get a pixel image, although the canvas element is filled using vector commands.

This is getting quite frustrating. There is Mac OS X with Quartz, so potentially everything is vector, and could be full quality. Vector graphics really is treated stepmotherly all over the place. All the technology is in place, please provide the tool-chain to actually get out as much vector art as possible, without all that rasterization. Much of the time it is easier to get decent vector art on my old Risc OS machine than on my Mac.

sidenote: please make the svg support right. so you can put svgs in img tags and as well print them as vector art.

Microsoft Office 12

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 07:30:32 CET

After my first look at the screenshots of Microsoft Office 12 I was disgusted and thought wtf? But after I watched the promo video and the other stuff on the net, I understood where they are heading. It may not be very good, but I think it will be a big improvement over the previous overloaded UI design. But what really hit me is, that Microsoft is at least trying to change some UI stuff fundamentally.

I mean look at Keynote and Pages. What do we have? Inspectors and Palettes and much too big toolbars. That doesn’t work. It’s annoying in Photoshop, it’s annoying in OmniGraffle and is annyoing in Pages and keynote. Ever tried to edit a keynote presentation on a 12’’ powerbook on 1024×768? No way you can adjust your window setting in a pleasant way to work. Inspectors are old, and while an quite ok idea, the screen clutter they create is really a pain in the as. I really would like to see Apple to innovate in that area. Microsoft did in its own way, by forcing the inspectors in the upper toolbar row and making this row very context sensitive. I think its a big improvement and a step in the right direction. It will be very interesting what the next Office for mac will look like.

New Website, new Logo, new Language

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 14:16:07 CET

Hi everybody! Hallo zusammen!

Our new website is up, featuring our new Logo! I hope you like it, comments are very welcome.
Seit Gestern ist unsere neue Website online. Feedback ist erwünscht.

The Logo was designed by Frank Röpke of the DesignerInNot and we are very happy with it.
Das Logo ist von Frank Röpke, einer der DesignerInNot und wir sind sehr zufrieden.

And we finally made our homepage and the SubEthaEdit page bilingual. As is this blog. As I know not many of my readers are bilingual, so I added 2 rss feeds – one for all german articles and one for all english articles. Articles like these with weird bilinguality will show up in both feeds.
Endlich haben wir auch deutsche web-seiten. Sowohl die Firmen- als auch die SubEthaEdit Seiten sind jetzt zweisprachig. Und da ich auch gerne mal deutsch oder englisch blogge, hab ich mein Blog jetzt um die Kategorien english und deutsch erweitert, zu denen ich auch eigene RSS feeds gemacht habe (ganz unten auf der Seite und rechts in der Seitenleiste). Zweisprachige Einträge wie dieser erscheinen in beiden feeds.

Back to blogging...

Thu, 3 Nov 2005 08:24:51 CET

Hi everybody!

I’ve been quite busy the last few month to get my university degree and therefore neglected my blog somewhat. This will change again now. With the degree in my pocket I will concentrate on TheCodingMonkeys and my other ventures. And on my way I will blog along regularly again. So stay tuned!

Pom Pom Pom Pom mit TheCodingMonkeys

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 01:08:25 CEST

Pom Pom Pom Pom ist ein witziger deutscher Mac Podcast. Und wir waren diesmal dabei. War ein Riesenspaß und ich hoffe ihr habt soviel Spaß beim anhören wie “Affen die coden” beim machen hatten. Wir haben das mit einem netten binauralen Micro auf einem Basketball gemounted aufgenommen, so dass mbo rechts ist, map links und ich in der mitte.

We have been on the german podcast Pom Pom Pom Pom , if you understand german, check it out. We did it with an binaural microphone mounted on a basketball, mbo is on the right, map on the left and I am in the middle.

New iPod...

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:07:34 CEST

Just to be the first to have said it: no more firewire for your iPoddy… so no new iPoddy for my old PowerBooky… (30GB via USB 1.0? don’t think so).

And no more remote control, which is equally bad for me in my car. So definitely no new iPod for me anytime soon.

Finally: Xara will come to the mac!

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 09:42:15 CEST

After years of begging the Xara people for making a Mac version they really will do it. More so, they will make it Open Source. For Linux too. I hope this isn’t a hoax. Finally a decent creative vector graphics package will come to the Mac. For me it is christmas already…

Another Mac OS X inconsistency: list views

Sun, 4 Sep 2005 13:24:19 CEST

When I read wil shipley’s rant about his treo I discovered that you can put groups in groups in address book. Seriously. Just drag a group into another group in the left most column. What happens? Now you have an entry for the group in the “Name” column. Super. And what happens if you select it? nothing. literally nothing. To view the content of this group you have to double-click it, and then the group is shown in the Group column.

Ok, thats obviously no great interface, as there is no indication anywhere that you can groups in groups, moreover there is no good way to edit such aggregations of groups. What does Safari in the same situation? If you look at the bookmark management, its somewhat better and somewhat worse. First, in safari, the left column has no multiple selection. Second you can’t drag a bookmark group into another one by drag and drop inside the left column, since the list is ordered, and hence only gives you the possibility to rearrange. If you want to add a folder to a subfolder, you have to do this with two windows and drag and drop from the left column to the right column of the other window. But then you do what you do always in safari, you move the folder, you don’t link it, like you do in address book. And, because you can’t multiple select the left column, you have to do this one by one, if you want to move many folder in one subfolder. If you want to do the opposite, you can use the multiple selection in the right column to move them all at once. And now for the better in Safari: in the right column you get a nice outline view, that shows folders and bookmarks nicely.

If you’re interested in more inconsitencies in list views look at this great article . As far as I am concerned we all should file bug against most of this behaviour. At least to allow for gradual unifying changes, like safari having multiple selection in the left column of bookmark management.

TheCodingMonkeys on Cocoa Radio

Fri, 2 Sep 2005 16:09:42 CEST

As “Blake Burris suggested, I wrote cocoa haiku:

Drinking Cocoa.
Being objective.
Using Java? .Not

---

KITT or RoboCop -
Strange Comparison you think?
Begin 'Cocoa Programming'.

If you’re wondering why I got into poetry, It’s at about 31:30 in the podcast. We had great fun doing it, and hope you enjoy it.

Share and Enjoy!

Window handling in Mac OS X is so inconsistent...

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 10:51:04 CEST

If you use the cycle through window shortcut in Mac OS X (look under system preferences -> keyboard & mouse -> keyboard shortcuts for the shortcut) then if only one window was in front of the other applications, it stays that way. The current window moves back behind the others, when you cycle through to the next. However, If you reverse cycle through application windows (hold shift), then all the windows you cycle through stay on top of all other applications. Inconsistent and getting on my nerves constantly, as I always work with more than one Application. This really has to improve in the next Mac OS X versions, but I really doubt it. Since Apple seems to care less and less about good consistent UI behaviour…

Start It Again Mac...

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 23:01:53 CEST

Have you ever encountered a Situation where you wanted to start another copy of an Application that is already running?

Do you want Windows Media Player, Real Player or VLC to open more than one video simultaneously?

There is and always was one way to do this: duplicate the Application and run it. But this is cumbersome. But now there is Start It Again !

Just open an Application via:

File->Open….

Launch Again

the dock menu

drag it to the dock icon from the Finder

But be aware: Some Applications have never meant to be run more than once simultaneously, so you’re on your own if you cause a crash. Don’t blame me. This Application is strictly under a use at your own risk licence.

P.S.: inspired by this post made by Ali Ozer

Chomsky 1

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 18:25:19 CEST

I’m learning automata and formal languages for my final exams. As a test I constructed a grammar for

a ^{n^ b ^n} c ⁿ with n >= 1

which seems to be correct and somewhat better than the ones found in literature:

S -> aSBc

S -> aBc

cB -> Bc

aB -> ab

bB -> bb

However, it strikes me as odd that I may have found a shorter and slightly better grammar than:

S -> aSBC

S -> aBC

CB -> BC

aB -> ab

bB -> bb

bC -> bc

cC -> cc

In the latter you can run into situations that end up with something like aabcBC and end up with a word that you can’t go on with. With my grammar you always end up with a real word.

However, I don’t think I can be the first one to have found that grammar. So if you know that it isn’t correct, or that someone has published it somewhere, please correct me ;-)

P.S.: the wikipedia had a similiar grammar on it’s page, but it was simply wrong. I corrected it to my grammar which I think is correct. Maybe that will verify it quickly ;-)

Update: the wikipedia’s grammar was right. I corrected it back. Bad me. While mine wasn’t wrong, the wikipedia’s is even shorter:

S -> aSBc

S -> abc

cB -> Bc

bB -> bb

it just folded the S -> aBc -> abc rule into one.

SubEthaEdit: Diff.mode

Wed, 17 Aug 2005 03:48:26 CEST

I made this a while ago, it has been of great use to me, so I think I'll share it with you:

My SubEthaEdit Diff.mode. To install it as with any mode, drop it into
/Library/Application Support/SubEthaEdit/Modes/
or
~/Library/Application Support/SubEthaEdit/Modes/
(does anybody know how to link to a subfolder of your home directory?)

Here is what it looks like:

Index: Info.plist
===================================================================
--- Info.plist  (revision 1008)
+++ Info.plist  (revision 1095)
@@ -210,7 +218,7 @@
    <key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
    <string>SubEthaEdit</string>
    <key>CFBundleGetInfoString</key>
-   <string>SubEthaEdit 2.1.2, Copyright © 2003-2005, TheCodingMonkeys</string>
+   <string>SubEthaEdit 2.2, Copyright © 2003-2005, TheCodingMonkeys</string>
    <key>CFBundleHelpBookFolder</key>
    <string>SubEthaEditHelp</string>
    <key>CFBundleHelpBookName</key>
@@ -226,7 +234,7 @@
    <key>CFBundlePackageType</key>
    <string>APPL</string>
    <key>CFBundleShortVersionString</key>
-   <string>2.1.2</string>
+   <string>2.2</string>
    <key>CFBundleSignature</key>
    <string>Hdra</string>
    <key>CFBundleURLTypes</key>

I use it mostly in conjunction with svn diff:

svn diff | see -m diff

The function pop-up includes the “+ filename” and “@ location,location @” for nice navigation.

Share and Enjoy! Feedback is, as always, very welcome!

Mighty Problems - Final Mighty Mouse Comment

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 07:24:15 CEST

Now that I have the Mighty Mouse in use for about a week, a final pro / contra list:

Pro:

Short cord
Beautiful design
The ball works great, and is a big improvement over scrollwheels

Contra:

Just one button. You can’t press more than one button at once (needed for games, and some pro software). You can’t rest your left finger on the mouse while right clicking. It’s counter intuitive: no one expects this mouse to have a different behaviour depending on where you press it (there is no visual clue of the 2 buttonness)
The ball seems to send much more events than a scrollwheel, which causes e.g. iTunes to totally suck at responding.
The squeeze buttons, although quite hard to active, active accidently on normal movement (because the location of the buttons is the only location you can hold the mouse while clicking). Making things worse, if you put App-Exposé on the squeeze button, there is a way that exposé is activated while dragging something. This in itself is a little bit annoying, but ends up in the total embarrassment : this can bring the window manager down to act like a transparent window is above all other windows, so that no mouse clicks get through anymore. This requires a login/logout. I will file a bug report as soon as I have the exact actions for reproducing this. After this happend twice to me, I disabled the squeeze buttons…

So what could have been a really great move by apple, is a flawed upgrade that finally admits the need of more than one function on a mouse. Apple made a design / functionality tradeoff at the expense of functionality. At least they didn’t make the mouse round again…

svnadd redux

Fri, 5 Aug 2005 11:12:49 CEST

An improved version of my svnadd bash alias:

alias svnadd="svn st | grep '^\?' | sed -e 's/\?[ ]*/svn add /g' | see -r -t \"svn st\" -j \"->to sh\" | sh"

The mouse that still had one button...

Thu, 4 Aug 2005 20:35:28 CEST

So. My Mighty Mouse arrived today. And what should I say. To say it looks good would be to unfair. Of course it does, but that’s not the point. The point is that it has some minor and major issues:

It is still a one button mouse. This is really an issue. Because all three button events are triggered by the same mechanical mouse click. You really have to concentrate to do a right click. Because the slightest touch of your index finger on the left half of the mouse makes it a left click. So you really have to lift your index finger to do it. That’s simply not ok. Having to learn how to make a correct right click. I always let my middle and index finger lay down on the mouse until I decide to click on something. This really is a problem when e.g. on a website. I want to open the link in a new win….. damn. Mouse thought I didn’t want to and did a left click. Hmmm…. Moreover, the middle click recognition works fine. It too is activated by the same mechanical click, but the pressure on the ball seams better measurable than the position on the surface.
Scrolling diagonally via the ball is virtually impossible. But I consider this more of a good thing, because most of the time that’s what you want. left-right or top-down. It would be much more annoying if it always would jiggle a bit in the other direction.
Short cord! Great thing. There is nothing as bad as a too long cord on a mac mouse. I loathed my Logitech mouse for having it, at was more than once tempted to just cut the knot that was formed in the middle ;-)
Apple admitting that to properly use a Mac a second button and a scroll-something is needed. That political statement is what counts.
The squeeze buttons are fine with me and set on application éxpose.
The ~~nipple~~ ball performs quite good.
Finally I think the mouse sensor performed better before I installed the driver than afterwards.

And something very annoying: after installing the mighty mouse drivers and restarting, my Brightness Control Issue has turned up again. Now I have to try all these little things mentioned in the comments to that article again, to revive it. To be fair, the mouse drivers probably haven’t been the cause. More the restart as such after a fairly long uptime of some weeks. So, off I go…

Update: Hmmm…. brightness issue is still there. And one interesting thing with the Mighty Mouse and Firefox: left-right scrolling does history forward and backward. very annoying. I have yet to find out how to switch that off in firefox….

Update2: The firefox issue can be easily resolved, look at the comments. What cannot be resolved is the issue with stuff like World of Warcraft: Some Applications want you to press both left and right mousebutton… you can’t do that if you have only one…

Update3: Beware of using the mighty mouse ball in iTunes. If I do in my library, it takes 2-5 seconds till iTunes reacts, and cpu % goes up to 100%... and exactly in the application I would like to use the scroll ball most…

IPv6 link-local addresses

Thu, 4 Aug 2005 08:14:47 CEST

In IPv6 the link-local addresses are really link-local. What I mean by that is, that the addresses, like fe80::230:65ff:fe1b:f0ad are ambiguous. If you try to ping one of your local interfaces via ping6 and the IPv6 address reported by ifconfig of say, en0, it doesn’t work. You have to specify the link (interface) to which the address is local. In the case of en0 it is e.g. fe80::203:93ff:fe98:a624%en0 – for link-local addresses the interface is added with a % sign. So far so ugly. Nevertheless ping6 fe80::203:93ff:fe98:a624%en0 doesn’t work either. Because ping6 doesn’t understand this format. (Maybe this is something I should patch in darwin? ;-) ). What you have to do is specify the interface via the -I en0 option. Then everything works as expected.

Not so in telnet. In telnet the fe80::203:93ff:fe98:a624%en0 syntax works. And interestingly enough, if you look at my last post, then you could see that the IPv6 link-local addresses SubEthaEdit connected to didn’t start with fe80:: but with fe80:4::. The 4 is the number that ifconfig shows as scopeid. As far as I could find out up to now this is an internal implementation detail, and should not be using this.

Now to my final observations: When you use the % representation in an URL (as specified in RFC 2732 ) then things get ugly. You know, in an URL you have to escape % so, % becomes %25, so e.g. the address above translates into http://[fe80::203:93ff:fe98:a624%25en0]/. As ugly as it might get.

And one more thing: if you thought you could just change the interface name to mean the same computer on the other interface, then you’re wrong. You can’t. That would have been nice IMHO, but the design of IPv6 link-local addressing works by encoding the MAC-address of the interface into the address. And even more, as far as I understood the interface that is specified is the one on your local machine. So if you change en0 into en1 on a powerbook, then you ping the same remote interface, but with the former you try from your wired network, and with the latter you try from your airport interface.

If anyone can enlighten me some more on the subject, I’d be delighted to read / listen.

The Mouse is Mightier...

Tue, 2 Aug 2005 18:00:31 CEST

Finally Apple has realized that one button isn’t enough. I hope the new Mighty Mouse is as good as it looks. But the name sucks. Nevertheless, I already ordered one. Test will follow.

The state of IPv6 in Mac OS X Tiger

Fri, 15 Jul 2005 16:41:42 CEST

As some of you may know, Panther did already support IPv6. We added full IPv6 support in our initial SubEthaEdit 2.0 release 2004-05-17. Bonjour returns IPv6 addresses since panther, as indicated by the Technical Q&A 1298 created 2003-10-15. So what happened since then? How many applications really listen to IPv6? To test this I started all the programs and sharing I have on my machine, and used lsof -i 6 which lists all IPv6 network connections. This is what I got:

dwagner@dom:~$ sudo lsof -i 6

COMMAND    PID    USER   FD   TYPE     DEVICE SIZE/OFF   NODE NAME

launchd      1    root   10u  IPv6 0x01c27bb0      0t0    TCP *:ssh (LISTEN)

launchd      1    root   21u  IPv6 0x01c27490      0t0    TCP *:ftp (LISTEN)

launchd      1    root   24u  IPv6 0x01c27820      0t0    TCP *:eppc (LISTEN)

launchd      1    root   27u  IPv6 0x01c272c8      0t0    TCP *:printer (LISTEN)

configd     31    root   10u  IPv6 0x01efee10      0t0 ICMPV6 *:*

configd     31    root   12u  IPv6 0x01efeee0      0t0 ICMPV6 *:*

mDNSRespo   39    root    8u  IPv6 0x01c22860      0t0    UDP *:mdns

SubEthaEd 5760 dwagner   11u  IPv6 0x01c26ba8      0t0    TCP *:6942 (LISTEN)

SubEthaEd 5760 dwagner   19u  IPv6 0x01c27100      0t0    TCP [fe80:4::203:93ff:fe98:a624]:51203->[fe80:4::20a:95ff:fec1:cb70]:6942 (ESTABLISHED)

SubEthaEd 5760 dwagner   20u  IPv6 0x01c26f38      0t0    TCP [fe80:4::203:93ff:fe98:a624]:51205->[fe80:4::20d:93ff:fec2:6ee4]:6942 (ESTABLISHED)

SubEthaEd 5760 dwagner   21u  IPv6 0x01c26d70      0t0    TCP [fe80:4::203:93ff:fe98:a624]:6942->[fe80:4::20a:95ff:febd:c7d2]:64837 (ESTABLISHED)

AppleFile 5992    root   29u  IPv6 0x01c279e8      0t0    TCP *:afpovertcp (LISTEN)

Ok. There’s ssh, ftp, printer, afpovertcp and of course, mdns. In the application category? Only SubEthaEdit – Are we really the only application using IPv6? Surely I must have forgotten to start all the other applications and services… but let’s have a look at the IPv4 connections:

dwagner@dom:~$ sudo lsof -i 4

COMMAND    PID    USER   FD   TYPE     DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME

launchd      1    root   11u  IPv4 0x01f7ac48      0t0  TCP *:ssh (LISTEN)

launchd      1    root   18u  IPv4 0x02438a90      0t0  UDP *:netbios-ns

launchd      1    root   19u  IPv4 0x02456670      0t0  TCP *:netbios-ssn (LISTEN)

launchd      1    root   20u  IPv4 0x03313530      0t0  TCP *:microsoft-ds (LISTEN)

launchd      1    root   22u  IPv4 0x024583a8      0t0  TCP *:ftp (LISTEN)

launchd      1    root   25u  IPv4 0x0245981c      0t0  TCP *:eppc (LISTEN)

launchd      1    root   28u  IPv4 0x01f7d530      0t0  TCP *:printer (LISTEN)

mDNSRespo   39    root    7u  IPv4 0x01c22930      0t0  UDP *:mdns

mDNSRespo   39    root    9u  IPv4 0x024380d0      0t0  UDP *:mdns

mDNSRespo   39    root   17u  IPv4 0x02438000      0t0  UDP *:mdns

netinfod    40    root    7u  IPv4 0x01f7c0bc      0t0  TCP localhost:netinfo-local (LISTEN)

syslogd     41    root   20u  IPv4 0x01c21270      0t0  UDP *:*

Directory   44    root    6u  IPv4 0x01f7cc6c      0t0  TCP localhost:1019->localhost:netinfo-local (ESTABLISHED)

Directory   44    root   10u  IPv4 0x01c21680      0t0  UDP *:*

Directory   44    root   11u  IPv4 0x01f7a670      0t0  TCP *:* (CLOSED)

Directory   44    root   24u  IPv4 0x02439ad0      0t0  UDP *:*

Directory   44    root   25u  IPv4 0x029653a8      0t0  TCP *:* (CLOSED)

cupsd      136    root    0u  IPv4 0x03313244      0t0  TCP *:ipp (LISTEN)

mds        150    root   13u  IPv4 0x01f79dac      0t0  TCP localhost:1015->localhost:netinfo-local (ESTABLISHED)

ntpd       161    root    5u  IPv4 0x01c21f70      0t0  UDP *:ntp

ntpd       161    root    6u  IPv4 0x01c21ea0      0t0  UDP localhost:ntp

ntpd       161    root    7u  IPv4 0x01c21d00      0t0  UDP 10.0.1.200:ntp

automount  190    root    8u  IPv4 0x01c22e10      0t0  UDP localhost:1023

automount  198    root    8u  IPv4 0x01c22ad0      0t0  UDP localhost:1022

httpd      205    root   16u  IPv4 0x01f7a95c      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)

httpd      211     www   16u  IPv4 0x01f7a95c      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)

Mail       219 dwagner   12u  IPv4 0x036dc530      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   15u  IPv4 0x02458f58      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   19u  IPv4 0x02457ae4      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   20u  IPv4 0x036d0c6c      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   21u  IPv4 0x036dcb08      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   25u  IPv4 0x02455ac0      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   26u  IPv4 0x01f7ddf4      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   27u  IPv4 0x024577f8      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   28u  IPv4 0x01f7bdd0      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   29u  IPv4 0x01f7d81c      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   30u  IPv4 0x0245695c      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   31u  IPv4 0x02456f34      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   33u  IPv4 0x02966530      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   34u  IPv4 0x02457220      0t0  TCP #####

Mail       219 dwagner   36u  IPv4 0x01f791fc      0t0  TCP #####

iChatAgen  221 dwagner    9u  IPv4 0x0296681c      0t0  TCP *:5298 (LISTEN)

iChatAgen  221 dwagner   16u  IPv4 0x02459244      0t0  TCP #####

iChatAgen  221 dwagner   17u  IPv4 0x01c219c0      0t0  UDP localhost:49729->localhost:49729

iChatAgen  221 dwagner   20u  IPv4 0x036dc81c      0t0  TCP #####

iTunes     244 dwagner   17u  IPv4 0x02458980      0t0  TCP *:daap (LISTEN)

mysqld     572   mysql    5u  IPv4 0x02459530      0t0  TCP *:mysql (LISTEN)

httpd      590     www   16u  IPv4 0x01f7a95c      0t0  TCP *:http (LISTEN)

NetNewsWi 1304 dwagner    8u  IPv4 0x02455dac      0t0  TCP *:30874 (LISTEN)

lighttpd  1868 dwagner    3u  IPv4 0x02456c48      0t0  TCP *:irdmi (LISTEN)

BitTorren 2525 dwagner   10u  IPv4 0x0331381c      0t0  TCP *:6881 (LISTEN)

BitTorren 2525 dwagner   11u  IPv4 0x01c222b0      0t0  UDP *:6881

Safari    5384 dwagner    8u  IPv4 0x03313b08      0t0  TCP #####

SubEthaEd 5760 dwagner    7u  IPv4 0x036dbf58      0t0  TCP *:6942 (LISTEN)

SubEthaEd 5760 dwagner   16u  IPv4 0x0330b95c      0t0  TCP #####

mount_web 5797 dwagner   12u  IPv4 0x02439e10      0t0  UDP *:49792

mount_web 5797 dwagner   13u  IPv4 0x02965f58      0t0  TCP #####

lookupd   5934    root    6u  IPv4 0x01f7d244      0t0  TCP localhost:960->localhost:netinfo-local (ESTABLISHED)

AppleFile 5992    root   30u  IPv4 0x03313df4      0t0  TCP *:afpovertcp (LISTEN)

slpd      6016    root    1u  IPv4 0x02438270      0t0  UDP *:svrloc

slpd      6016    root    2u  IPv4 0x024580bc      0t0  TCP *:svrloc (LISTEN)

slpd      6016    root    3u  IPv4 0x02456384      0t0  TCP *:* (CLOSED)

slpd      6016    root    5u  IPv4 0x01c21c30      0t0  UDP *:*

slpd      6016    root    6u  IPv4 0x036d0694      0t0  TCP *:* (CLOSED)

ARDAgent  6054 dwagner   15u  IPv4 0x01c218f0      0t0  UDP *:net-assistant

AppleVNCS 6055 dwagner   22u  IPv4 0x02456098      0t0  TCP *:5900 (LISTEN)

rmdb      6056  daemon   55u  IPv4 0x01c21dd0      0t0  UDP localhost:50740->localhost:50740

rmdb      6057  daemon   55u  IPv4 0x01c21dd0      0t0  UDP localhost:50740->localhost:50740

nmbd      6094    root    0u  IPv4 0x02438a90      0t0  UDP *:netbios-ns

nmbd      6094    root    1u  IPv4 0x02438a90      0t0  UDP *:netbios-ns

nmbd      6094    root    8u  IPv4 0x02438340      0t0  UDP *:netbios-dgm

nmbd      6094    root   11u  IPv4 0x01c21b60      0t0  UDP #####

nmbd      6094    root   12u  IPv4 0x02438b60      0t0  UDP #####

distccd   6122 dwagner    3u  IPv4 0x036d03a8      0t0  TCP *:distcc (LISTEN)

iPhoto    6295 dwagner   21u  IPv4 0x02965694      0t0  TCP *:8770 (LISTEN)

Quite a bit more. Apache, lighthttpd, mysqld, apple-remote-desktop, distccd, BitTorrent, ... . And of course the applications that are making use of networking: iTunes, iPhoto, iChat and NetNewsWire. All of them use Bonjour as main means of networking, iTunes even uses Bonjour exclusively. Yet they don’t listen to IPv6 yet. For all of them, making IPv6 work should be as easy as setting up an IPv6 listening socket, and maybe remove the disregard of IPv6 addresses in your bonjour code. Source code for doing so is available in the Echo sample code (/Developer/Examples/Networking/Echo/Server.c:147) if you use CFNetwork API. I encourage all the other Bonjour using applications to join us in our IPv6 compliance!

Presentation links

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 11:31:40 CEST

On Monday, fellow CodingMonkey mbo held a presentation about the development of SubEthaEdit at macintum. I just wanted to present the proper links to the things I’ve mentioned in the Q&A afterwards:

Update:

The presentation is now online

Less known facts about SubEthaEdit Modes

Fri, 8 Jul 2005 13:55:51 CEST

As I’m going over the PHP-HTML.mode to add PHP 5 Keywords and compatibility, I’ve seen a feature again, which probably no-one except me is using.

Everyone using Xcode knows about a nice little code organisation feature: pragma marks.

#pragma mark -

#pragma mark ### accessors ###

Putting this nice little lines in your code adds them to the function pop-up. #pragma mark - creates a separator, #pragma mark some text creates an entry in bold with “some text” in it. Very nice.

In SubEthaEdit we support this too. And since we have no special mode recognizers, this can be put in any mode. You just have to add a symbol to the RegexSymbols.xml file in the mode . The problem is, that other than the C pragma mark convention I don’t know any for the other languagues, so we haven’t build in anything in these modes. Except for PHP-HTML. There I have put in a regex that recognise this kind of comment as a symbol that comes up in the function pop-up.

//- mark -

//- mark Cloning

//- mark 

Will look like this:

And how it’s done in the RegexSymbols.xml:

<symbol id="Comment Marks" font-weight="bold" indentation="0" ignoreblocks="yes">
   <regex>//- mark[\t ]*(?:-(?=[\n\r]))?([^\n\r]*)</regex>

</symbol>

This regex looks a bit complicated but actually it just finds the characters that follow a //- mark up to a return. Interestingly enough since I added it to a special kind of comment, it also works after some code in the same line. The seemingly complicated bit in the middle : (?:-(?=[\n\r]))? just consumes any "-" if it is followed by a return.

SubEthaEdit displays the text found for the first group in the function popup. If the found string is empty, it displays a Separator.

This can be done in any mode, and if you know of any conventions in any of the SubEthaEdit modes we ship, please let me know. If you use SubEthaEdit for your PHP then use this kind of comment to orgranise your code. It’s really helpful.

see and the subversion command line

Thu, 7 Jul 2005 00:00:07 CEST

Adding many files via the svn add command can be a tedious effort. Especially if they are dispersed over many directories. But here the see command line tool can help. Instead of svn add do

svn st | see | sh

What this does is simple, it does a svn st and pipes it to the nearest SubEthaEdit for editing. So far so good. The next steps are easy:

trim all the lines which you don’t want to add
select all and do a blockedit to replace the first few characters with a svn add
then close the window

the closing of the window hands this little snippet over to sh which does a decent job of executing every single svn add line you just left in your text. Much more convenient than adding the files one by one.

Too add even more convenince, I added the following alias to my ~/.bash_profile file. Now I have a convenient little command called svnadd that does a svn st, greps for all lines that begin with a ? (which are the files that may need adding), shows them to me via SubEthaEdit in which I can pick my lines and add the svn add, and sends them to sh when I’m done. Very handy.

alias svnadd="svn st | grep \"^\?\" | see -t \"svn st\" -j \"->to sh\" | sh"

Random Rails Bits - "Universal Applications"

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:21:26 CEST

When creating your rails app, you’d probably want it to be able to run on almost any machine in the net. Problem being: There are quite some different path for ruby to be installed in, not every provider puts ruby in /usr/bin/ruby. So one way to have some indirection there is to use the following shebang:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

Unfortunately in a rails application there are many many executable ruby scripts. Thankfully the rails guys have added an option to their rails command line utility, the one that generates rails apps. So I recommend you use:

rails APPLICATIONNAME --ruby "/usr/bin/env ruby"

from now on to generate your “universal” rails applicaitons ;-).

San Francisco 2005 - WWDC and more...

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 00:32:35 CEST

I just recently cam back from my trip to San Francisco this year. Here a quick recap:

Our first flight with Air Canada which sadly wasn’t a good experience. Not only that the website tells me that “Some features of this site won’t work because your browser is not compatible.” when I use Safari, moreover all of our flights had delays. Our initial flight from Munich to Toronto had an 5 hour delay which made us sleep 5 hours in the toronto hilton (in one room with 2 beds for 3 people… thanks air canada) and loose one day. And the food on our way back was really really bad. So much about Air Canada.

Thanks to Jonas we could have a look at the offices of Technorati , one of our first customers that bought to buy more than 5 licences of SubEthaEdit , and meet up for dinner with some employees including Niall Kennedy . It was a very nice dinner. Nice to note at that point that we all thought the intel rumors weren’t real. How wrong we were. Next Jonas took us to the computer history museum which was very very nice. Seeing all those really old computers. And while I heard of “slide rules” in my math classes at school (I even happen to have an old one at home) I never heard of sectors . If you (like me) want to know more about it, here you go. Note: wikipedia is still clueless about this meaning of the word sector .

On Saturday, map and I headed for the Aquarium of the Bay while mbo and tuxtina did a bike ride over the Golden Gate Bridge. The aquarium was a very nice experience, map took some very nice pictures . And of course, I guess they found Nemo . ;-)

Then WWDC. Student Sunday. Really my last student sunday, I realize now. Thanks to apple for three years of scholarship! Next year I will have to pay, and will pay, if our company works out as planned. Speaker was Aaron Hillegass , it was my first time to actually listen to him instructing in person (I of course read his books , which I recommend heavily for anyone who wants to start with cocoa or know about Mac OS X unix programming). And know I know he’s worth every penny. If you’re in Europe and have any need, Stefanie Höfling now seems to have become big nerd ranch europe, and there will be more europe trainings. And the end of a very good introduction into Core Data, another treat was given to the students: Wil Shipley from Delicious Monster gave a talk about starting your business and had some nice stories about his own. His opinions, much to my surprise, have been quite compatible to my own. And while my critique still is valid, I still congratulate them to Delicious Library and their design Award(s). People seem to like it despite all that, so it seem Wil made all the right business decisions. And the interesting bit is: There are some many things that are still missing which all translate into new features and upgrades, which in turn again translates into more money. They really have promise. And if you’re a cocoa developer in the US, I think you should think about applying. ;-)

Then the big Intel day. Which was quite saddening for me. One the one hand because the marketplace has gotten rid of just another quite good processor architecture (I don’t like monocultures) and on the other hand because I would have liked to see at least one new product. Sigh. But the good thing is that the move to intel probably is best for users and performance, and very few people have to go down to the yucky instruction set of the x86 architecture. My guess is, that Maklar always outperformed the PowerPCs Apple had, and with the G5 not being able to hit the 3 GHz barrier as promised and moreover not producing a nice mobile processor, they just couldn’t hold up the “Megahertz Myth” anymore. And now we will have really comparable computers. We’ll see if Windows is faster or slower on all the tasks we have. Nobody has to fake benchmarks any more or fight the holy processor war. Yeah.

On Tuesday we hat dinner with Stuart Chesire the inventor of Bolo and wizard of Bonjour . We had the chance to run the way we handle networking in SubEthaEdit , and we’re glad to be able to say he seemed pleased by the way we handling it. Moreover we learned that he is actively using SubEthaEdit with wide area Bonjour already! And everyone that has access to a more or less public dns server under his control can do so. Infos are at dns-sd.org as well as a preference pane for System Preference to enable wide area browsing on Mac OS X. Very nice.

Over the week we got the chance to compile SubEthaEdit on the Intel Transistion Systems, and as map blogged already we were able to produce a universal binary without fixing in SubEthaEdit and a small fix in OgreKit . This transition should be easy. Although rosetta run programs really will have a huge performance hit. I’m thinking about a fourth of native speed, which still is great seeing that it’s done on the fly, integrates superbly and has to emulate a different architecture. The list of already working apps at the WWDC as shown on the white board in the universal lab.

Then finally on Saturday we our chance to take the San Francisco Segway Tour – 3 hours with a Segway. It was very nice and funny, but yet again made it clear to me how useless the Segway is. After the tour my legs ached, it felt like standing in a line for three hours without beeing able to move. Nevertheless the tour was great fun. Afterwards we met up with Jill and Suw and had some nice time in the Biergarten “Zeitgeist” and in Sausalito.

P.S: I really really missed the jamba juice at the WWDC. And I got a cold this time. I think there is a connection. Next year I will pay for WWDC and I expect Jamba juice and better food. Yes. I do. ;-)

Musical Baton

Wed, 18 May 2005 22:53:35 CEST

After being tagged by map , mbo , Tobi and Brent I don’t seem to have a choice :-)

Total volume of music files on my computer

19.70 GB – all synced up to my 20 GB iPod

The last CD I bought…

Guano Apes live – incredible good value CD DVD set, more infos in Ein Besuch bei WOM . Since then I restrained from buying real CDs because all the DRM that’s going on there. I got my iTunes account, and I am quite happy with it. If anybody can give me access to the iTunes Music Store USA that would be fabolous, things like the The L Word: Second Season Sessions may never appear in good old germany…

Song playing right now…

Von hier an blind by Wir Sind Helden (Go go Mrs. Holofernes !)

Five Songs I’m listening to a Lot:

“Hallelujah” by Rufus Wainwright – Really nice simple piano and voice. Nicely placed in Shrek 2
“Ein Kompliment” by Sportfreunde Stiller – One of the best love statements I ever heard
“Fill Me Up” by Linda Perry – I’d really like to hear her more. She really has a great voice, I also love the old 4 Non Blondes LP “Bigger, Better, Faster, More”
“Demo (Letzer Tag)” by Herbert Grönemeyer – This piece of music gives me goose bumps, and the music video is fantastic.
“Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” by U2 – classic.
“Am Ende” by Die Toten Hosen – I love their songs with deeper meaning…

Ok that have been 6 songs… I could go on ;-)

Passing the baton on to:

stevenf , tuxtina , boinx ;-) , britta

Ihr - nicht ich!

Mon, 9 May 2005 17:36:22 CEST

Woah... Google got hit

Sun, 8 May 2005 00:52:14 CEST

>whois google.com

Whois Server Version 1.3

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.COM
GOOGLE.COM.HAS.LESS.FREE.PORN.IN.ITS.SEARCH.ENGINE.THAN.SECZY.COM
GOOGLE.COM

To single out one record, look it up with "xxx", where xxx is one of the
of the records displayed above. If the records are the same, look them up
with "=xxx" to receive a full display for each record.

>>> Last update of whois database: Sat, 7 May 2005 08:52:39 EDT <<<

10.4: iChat audio chat

Sat, 7 May 2005 23:15:46 CEST

Today I had my first Tiger to Tiger iChat audio chat with my powerbook, and i have to say I’m impressed. The audio quality was really good, and iChat knew my powerbook: only the right speaker was used for audio out, the left side, where the micro is sitting, was muted. Nice. Finally usable without headset/earphones.

10.4: Quicktime Player annoyance...

Wed, 4 May 2005 21:47:42 CEST

Even with Quicktime 7 a running quicktime player still doesn’t prevent the display from going to sleep. WTF? MPlayer OS X , VLC both do it since ever. Why doesn’t apple do this? It’s just frickin’ annoying…

BTW.: at least now you can disable that other annoyance, the dimming of the display halfway thorugh the inactive sleep time. Preferences -> Energy Saver -> Options -> “Automatically reduce the brightness of the display before display sleep”

10.4: Preview - disable "Greeking"

Wed, 4 May 2005 12:17:01 CEST

Finally you can turn of that damn thing where preview replaces actual glyphs with strange rectangles if you zoom them too small. That absolutely ruined thumbnails of e.g. printed word files etc. Or if you wanted to the the flow of white in a document and small scale. Thankfully with tiger you can turn that dumb idea off. Go to Preferences and make the “Greeking” threshold zero:

Oh: and one last note: When I rotate an image now, I can’t save the rotated state. You too? It always saves in the same position it loaded first.

10.4: QuickTime Player fullscreen for free

Tue, 3 May 2005 17:33:30 CEST

Just being inspired by macosxhints, I tried the following AppleScript:

tell application "QuickTime Player"

    present front movie

end tell

Now put it in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Quicktime Player/Present.scpt. Enable the Script Menu via /Applications/AppleScript/AppleScript Utility.app, and off you go. You now may present any movie openend in QuickTime. Long live the AppleScript!

IT Conversations - Recommendations

Mon, 2 May 2005 00:03:30 CEST

Clayton Christensen – Capturing the Upside

Really nice. I think I will have a look into his books. He’s got a nice theory about what is a disruptive technology and how it succeeds in the market place. Very nice talk and insights, but what about that slow valium-esque voice? ;-)

Keith Devlin – Math talk

Nice view on inherent math calculations. Also mentions, Numb3rs a new TV Show that I really like which features compelling math in an FBI environment, featuring Peter MacNicol as a really nice Paul Erdos type of mathematician .

Malcolm Gladwell – SXSW Interactive 2005

Snap judgements, and how we can improve them. Includes a really nice bit about orchestras and how they are “infiltrated” by women since they introduced a screen to hide the artist at the audition.

Probably missing [super dealloc];

Sun, 1 May 2005 11:02:45 CEST

Nice warning which wasn’t there on panther, even although I switched go gcc 3.3 on tiger:

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger - No more brightness control on TiBook 800 MHz

Sun, 1 May 2005 00:37:23 CEST

Hmmm… after switching to Tiger on my TiBook 800 MHz (also known as most expensive of all Powerbooks, I bought it at the absolute price peak…) the brightness control ceases to work. And I can’t switch to non full resolutions via the display System Preference Panel anymore. Sad me. Of course I filed a bug. If anybody experienced the same problem, or can help, please tell me!

www.stadtplandienst.de hat Luftbilder!

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 14:20:44 CEST

Grade entdeckt. Unter www.stadtplandienst.de gibt es Luftbilder von ganz Deutschland, bis 1:7.500 umsonst für jedermann. Mein zuhause ist da gut zu sehen ;-). Schön dass es auch in Deutschland eine brauchbare alternative zu Google Maps gibt. Cool.

Got my E-Ticket! WWDC 2005 I'm coming...

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 12:06:16 CEST

Cheerio. This will be my last WWDC as a student, next year I’ll have to make enough money to be able to afford a ticket to. But believe me, I will try ;-). Interestingly, I haven’t got any email about this, yet. Has any of you other lucky ones?

I’m really looking forward to meeting everybody again. I definitely will take part in the WWDC 2005 Weblogger Meeting .

SubEthaEdit 2.1.2 is out!

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 19:14:27 CEST

A recommended update! We really improved stability, so if you ever experienced a crash, please download SubEthaEdit 2.1.2.

For all you mode customizers out there I'd like to mention a new feature I did: Now in the Mode menu if you press alternate, you get an alternate menu which shows you what modes you've got, which versions they are and where they are on your Mac. Moreover you can jump directly inside the corresponding mode bundle by clicking on it.

And of course, make use of our special offer! Only till April 29th!

Mail, Outlook and Mac OS X 10.3.9

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 12:31:05 CEST

My mother has a friend. Sadly that friend is using outlook with only HTML content. So what she gets is bad bad email, with only HTML content and tons of <FONT size=”2”> tags in it. Really bad.

Nicely up to now there was a simple fix: provide a custom CSS file to deal with this malformed bullsh*t. Here is how you do this. Sadly this does not work anymore due in Mac OS X 10.3.9. In Mac OS X mail always overrides the WebKitUserStyleSheetLocationPreferenceKey on every start with some strange UTF-8 direct content. Setting MinimumHTMLSize or WebKitMinimumFontSize doesn’t work either. Help would be greatly appreciated!

Adobe buys Macromedia

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 11:31:19 CEST

Oh shit. What will be the consequences?

What will happen to SVG vs. Flash?

Freehand vs. Illustrator?

Dreamweaver vs. Go Live?

Is Adobe now finally the equivalence to Microsoft regarding “creative” Software?

No matter what happens, one thing is for sure:

We users will continue to see loads of crappy user interfaces.

I, for one, am hoping for a new competitor on the mac, for photoshop as well as vector graphics.

Update: WTF? I cite cnet [via map ]

“After 9/11, we both realized that being enemies didn’t make sense,” Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said in a conference call Monday, referring to his discussions with Macromedia’s then-CEO Rob Burgess. “We were not longer competing.”

Mac OS X 10.3.9 update

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 11:27:09 CEST

Interesting stuff:

Safari 1.3 including a big WebKit update – judging from a little testing also that speed issues with AutoFill have been resolved. What a relief.
Rendezvous is still Rendezvous, not Bonjour – I really excpected them to change that in this release
Disk Utility has been updated to version 10.4.4 – No idea what they changed
iChat has been updated to use the InstantMessage Framework v194 instead of v193 – subtle change
Keychain Access has been updated to 3.1.4 (v185) from 3.1.3 (v183), but of course still sucks. I will be so happy when switching to tiger. Finally being able to search my keychain…. wohooo…

And things from Apples release notes of course:

Avoids a potential Mail issue if the application is running when Daylight Savings Time changes
Finally :-) Have you read all those reports? My mother was affected too, one hour full of 100% CPU, which then just stopped. Everyone, including me, had his own theory what helped.
Accessing certain websites, such as msnbc.com, mail.yahoo.com, ticketmaster.com, and others, no longer displays a “bad server response” alert that could occur in Safari.
Funny thing, the german apple store also showed this error from time to time :-)

Days Left was awarded!

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 09:13:07 CEST

Rather strange one. So Now it’s certified, that Days Left is absolutely spy-ware and ad-ware free. What a relief.

Dom on rails!

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 14:22:39 CEST

Today I did it, I switched to typo on rails !

Why did I do it?

Comment spam was really getting ugly…
As you know I think PHP sucks , but perl cgi with an abandoned version of movable type isn’t very cool either
typo is on rails and I really wanted to get onto the rails , not only for this blog but also for future web projects
Now I have full control. I read and understood all the typo source code, adapted it to my needs, and can do what I want with it.
I really want to see how well rails behaves.
Did I menation that typo has a live search and textile support? very nice.
I’m in the fortunate position to be a customer of .webflow – one of the first german ISPs that is on the rails

Why didn’t I move my old content?

I didn’t want to. It’s good where it is. RendezCon and Days Left are served there, my PHP sucks page has a really good google rank. :-) If I had wanted it, there is a nice script in existence, that transfers all the content from movable type into typo.

What did I change in typo?

As I got onto rails and typo a month ago, some things where missing that I liked.

Good caching
I really think blog software sucks if the articles and the main page aren’t static pages. Fortunately that was a very easy thing to do with rails. In the default state typo cached only the rss feeds. I also had to put the cookie reading code for the comments into javascript instead of the default rails code.

Categories
Very easy. Is in latest typo release.

Ajax comments
It’s also in the lastest release, but without preview. And I really like having a preview, especially with all those nice textile possibilities.

del.icio.us support
for some very strange reason, the XML parser does not respect the order of the del.icio.us RSS feed, so i had to sort the entries again. I sent my patch to “too-biased”, but sadly it’s still not in there . And yes, my del.icio.us links have the delicious comment as title, so you get them when you move your mouse over them.

The Layout
Of course. Should look like my good old scrap. Just a little different. :-)

A quick hack for MarsEdit
Sadly MarsEdit strips out whitespace on certain occasions, so I had to hack the XMLRPC code to escape the responses a little bit different. Hopefully Brent will fix this soon.

Live Search
My live search searches in the title too… typo doesn’t.

Why so much effort, you hardly posted in the last months…

I know. Much stress lately, and the ever growing comment spam invasion on every post didn’t help either. But now I’m back, I swear. :-)

DasGenie:!Scrap

My first S.M.A.R.T. failure

Bugs, Child Windows and Spaces

Bug number one: Spaces breaks

Bug number two: Your app crashes on quit in certain situations

Sample Code

Addendum isReleasedWhenClosed

SubEthaEdit 3.0.2 released today

Comments in the New Pages...

Nice viral marketing...

Versionshelf just got better.

SubEthaEdit 2.6.4 is out

Additions/New Features

Changes

iPhone

iPhone crash log information

Apple Introduces: Fixed width Pixel Fonts!

Another German Thingy...

Music DRM be gone!!!

Amazon UnSpun: Best Text Editors

Wii - some afterthoughts

IE7 installer is a good parent...

MP4 video to crash Quicktime and therefore Safari with it...

I've had it with iChat video chat...

That has to be enough to be able to do a video or audio chat!

Applying Behaviour without Behaviour.js

Versionshelf has landed

StopGoogle.com

You just gotta love my Mac OS X Issues...

WWDC 2006 Keynote

IB Wisdom: who knew?

CocoaDevHouse Munich: Results

Finally: I get to see .kkrieger

Big Fire in my Hometown

ZotCast on SubEthaEdit

Wocoa Frankfurt 2006

All things monkey...

Which sci-fi crew would I best fit in?

On getting the university degree

mist blogs

Adobe is teh suck...

MacBook Pro - Sleeping / VLC crash

MacBook Pro - No Luck...

SubEthaEdit 2.3 and BugShelf

lighttpd, apache 2 and rails

Music: Linda Perry - In Flight

My new MacBook Pro...

My #&!+9$!# iMac 20''

Apple Bug Report Someday: Application Activation fails in certain occasions

Summary

Steps to Reproduce:

Expected Results:

Actual Results:

Notes:

Rails Tidbits: Association Proxies

Joel on Interns

Ruby Observations: Hash#select vs. Hash#reject

Apple Bug Report Friday: Safari: Canvas element.

Microsoft Office 12

New Website, new Logo, new Language

Back to blogging...

Pom Pom Pom Pom mit TheCodingMonkeys

New iPod...

Finally: Xara will come to the mac!

Another Mac OS X inconsistency: list views

TheCodingMonkeys on Cocoa Radio

Window handling in Mac OS X is so inconsistent...

Start It Again Mac...

Chomsky 1

SubEthaEdit: Diff.mode

Mighty Problems - Final Mighty Mouse Comment

svnadd redux

The mouse that still had one button...

IPv6 link-local addresses

The Mouse is Mightier...

The state of IPv6 in Mac OS X Tiger

Presentation links

Talks:

Trademarks:

Development tools: