Archive for November, 2007

PubSub is incredibly unreliable

Friday, November 30th, 2007

I really like Leopard’s new RSS functionality in Mail.app. I strongly prefer to have my RSS feeds collected in Mail – I find it far less distracting than have constantly-incrementing numbers in my Safari bookmarks bar, as I feel compelled to look at them and clear the distraction – I’ve migrated almost all* of my RSS feeds to Mail.

But the PubSub framework, which is responsible for updating and storing those feeds, is extremely unreliable. According to Mail.app, there hasn’t been any new RSS items in my collection in over 24 hours – through manual checks I know this to be untrue. Manually updating does nothing, as does restarting Mail.app, and I’m reluctant to forcibly restart PubSubAgent, fearing it will leave data in an inconsistent state (I believe it uses SQLite3). Only a restart seems to cure the problem, and I don’t use a Mac so I can restart it every now and again to regain crashed functionality …

Let’s hope Apple can address this soon.

* I left RailsCasts in Safari’s RSS menu. This is the only way I can find to not have it attempt to download every single movie attachment in the feed – several gigabyte’s worth of files I already have!

PS. Seems “RSS” is fast becoming, or has already become, the catch-all umbrella term for any “feed” service, whether it’s served by the actual RSS format or not. Personally I prefer the Atom format, but seemingly everyone refers to that as RSS as well – including Apple, and, I have to confess, me. Just one of those things I guess – there’s no other simple, commonly-understand name that refers to the concept, so RSS it is, even if it’s ambiguous at best and wrong much of the time at worst. C’est la vie.

PPS. Another annoyance with RSS (hehe, there I go again, ok “feeds”) is in implementation. Some sites don’t supply the whole text in their feed – just a summary, or the first few words. This seems to defeat the point – I don’t want a “notification of updates service”, I want the whole thing archived so I can examine at my leisure. No. 1 offender: Google Groups.

UPDATE: Quitting PubSubAgent in Activity Monitor (or kill from the terminal) works fine to restore functionality without a reboot. No need for a force quit so hopefully it’s exiting cleanly and DB corruption won’t be an issue.

Tags: Atom, PubSub, PubSubAgent, RSS
Posted in leopard, mac | 2 Comments »

NON STOP BONE’N

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

NON

STOP

BONE’N

Tags: BONE'N, NON, STOP
Posted in lifestyle | 1 Comment »

BAC

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

This is so, so, so true. I thought I was the only one …

There are other axes (pronounced /ˈækˌsiːz/) too – amount of time since last interruption, amount of time since last sleep, availability of music, drinks, cigarettes …

Tags: xkcd
Posted in programming | No Comments »

Spider

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

I am staying with 3 girls at the moment, two japanese and one australian. The first japanese is so scared of spiders that she has a history of literally fainting upon seeing them. The westerner is not quite that bad, but screams loudly and involuntarily whenever she sees one, and won’t stay in the same room. The other japanese was supposedly not scared of spiders, but it has emerged that actually what she is not scared of is japanese spiders. She is fucking terrified of Australian spiders, which are on average about 200 times larger.

So guess whose job it is to dispose of spiders? That’s right, mine. And I really, really hate spiders. But this kind of thing is the Big Strong Man’s Burden – doesn’t matter how you feel about them, it’s part of the macho code of honour that we have to get rid of spiders for women. And cockroaches, and mice, and pretty much anything else.

Anyway, second spider of the year and not as big as the first one but still extremely unwelcome. The gravity-defying motherfucker avoided my usual vector of attack (shoe, on or off foot) by running onto the ceiling, causing an escalating arms race of running around while I flailed uselessly at him with various objects, and which ended with my resorting to technological superiority and sucking the damnable thing into a vacuum cleaner. Even then tensions were high as he angrily thrashed around in a whirlpool of air, visible through the plastic shield of the bagless cleaner, until finally disintegrating into the vortex.

I kind of felt sorry for him after that and I’ll give the next one a hero’s death of instant pulverisation from above.

Tags: arachnophobia, spiders
Posted in lifestyle | No Comments »

Dennou Coil

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

My first new anime in quite a while. It’s a story set in a near-future (ie 10 or so years out) world where the worlds of cyberspace and realspace (I hate the term “meatspace”) are highly integrated by pervasive adoption of virtual reality. If you’ve read Snow Crash you’ll immediately know what I mean, and if you haven’t, read it.

It’s exciting and refreshing to see new scifi work along these lines. I am fascinated, almost hypnotised by the coming network convergence and therefore keenly interested to see other’s imaginings along those lines – the creation of a global persistent virtual reality is, to me, an absolute inevitability, and so it’s great to immerse yourself for a while in someone else’s vision of how it will look. A creativity and willingness to frivolously invent the future that’s hopelessly lacking in, well, anything other than japanese animation.

The animation is, of course, about kids – it almost always is. But if you can get past the cuteness, its ideas and execution are very good. And the way the show imagines interaction in the virtual world may not be your cup of tea – but it’ll get you thinking, at least. Someone’s going to come up with this “spec”. And we *already have* virtual pets, embraced by *millions* of kids.

Anyway, I’ve placed the first episode online here so if you want to check it out, please do so! Security by out-of-band obscurity, as per usual.

Tags: anime
Posted in recommendation | No Comments »

Safari 3/Leopard does not support RFC4709

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

Even though the IETF approved RFC4709 back in November 2006 – and Leopard has a far improved WebDAV implementation compared to Tiger (well, it beachballs less anyway) – the simple proposition of 4709, the addition of a MIME type to handle automatic WebDAV mounting to the desktop via Content-Type: application/davmount+xml hasn’t yet been implemented.

Pity. I’d been kind of hoping it got in. Hadn’t gotten around to checking it but just assumed it would work – it doesn’t. Maybe in 10.5.2? ;-)

UPDATE: It’s included in /private/etc/apache2/mime.types, so at least the bundled server implements the RFC …

UPDATE2: I want to implement this to enable ultra-simple asynchronous filesharing between me and my friends.

Posted in leopard, mac | No Comments »

.rhtml vs .erb

Monday, November 26th, 2007

post_update <<-EOF
Can the people who read this rant please remember that this is not a very serious blog. In fact it’s mostly just me talking shit and this post is a prime example. I actually like the changes I’m dissing below, it’s nothing but a rant for rant’s sake and I have no idea why Google seems to be sending so many people to it – so don’t get all upset and leave nasty comments telling me I’m an idiot.

This is a personal blog of the most whimsical and useless kind, and I make no pretensions otherwise. Bear that in mind. Thanks! :-)
EOF

Can someone please tell me what the point of moving from .rhtml to .html.erb is?

I mean seriously. There wasn’t a naming conflict, .rhtml isn’t the nicest extension on earth but it was pretty unambiguous as to what it was – ruby mixed with HTML.

.html.erb is if anything worse. What kind of a file has TWO extensions? Hell, why not have fucking ten. I sometimes like to put CSS and JS into my files as well, they’re feeling a bit left out – I guess that according to this new “all inclusive” philosophy they’re properly named index.html.css.js.erb.

And what the fuck does ERB even stand for? Embedded Ruby, right? Well that would be great if Ruby was two words. One acronym per word is the English standard. Yet another example of Rails flaunting the standards.

I just don’t see the point. Trying to enforce a taxonomy on what are by nature highly mixed and variable files is an exercise in futility. And furthermore, the .erb is completely superfluous within the already highly structured folder structure of a Rails app. What the hell else would it be?

Change for change’s sake. DHH is drunk on power!

Tags: , ,
Posted in development, programming, rails | 16 Comments »

Fuck You, Australian Distributors

Friday, November 23rd, 2007

I have a pair of the fantastic Mackie HR824 MKI monitor speakers. They’re great, easily the best midprice monitor speaker on the market, in my opinion.

So naturally I was interested when the MKII was announced, especially since my MKIs are sitting thousands of kilometres away! And with the , surely the price would be reasonable, right?

WRONG!

Price in America: USD$599 = AUD$625.23 each = AUD$1,350.46 for a pair.

Price in Australia: AUD$2,999 for a pair.

The speakers are identical save the localised power cable. Voltage is switchable on the back. The Australian price is 220% of the American for the exact same fucking thing.

Fuck you, Australian distributors. The only way I’d pay you more than double the proper market price for a pair of these is if it included a free kick right in your useless, greedy faces.

UPDATE: annoyingly, on the mk2 the voltage is NOT switchable on the back, locking us into the Euro or AU model. I don’t know any good EU online stores but the list price is EUR€599, about AUD$995 each. I wonder what they cost in China – where all this stuff is made.

Anyway, the price difference with the US model would easily cover a huge stepdown transformer.

It infuriates me that these power compatibility issues even exist! It all just gets turned into DC internally anyway. Why isn’t there a range of standard interchangeable transformer modules on all electronics? Then they could just make the same thing a million times, and slot the module in as required. Methinks the savings gained by doing that would be outweighed by the arbitrage-style profits lost by being able to segment the markets, DVD Region style.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in music | 4 Comments »

learning jQuery

Friday, November 16th, 2007

I’ve put it off as long as I reasonably could, but it’s a fact of life for those developing web sites these days – at some point you’ll need to learn JS. I’ve managed to hack together a bit of JS in the past, and managed to put together a few bits and pieces of Prototype code, but I’ve never been even a little bit comfortable with it.

And I’ve always disliked Prototype and its companion Script.aculo.us, or whatever the fuck it’s called. Firstly, combined they’re over 100K (!!!!) which is INSANE. A javascript library must be as small and lightweight as possible! Secondly, I find their syntax weird, trying-to-be-ruby-but-not-quite, hard to grasp and frankly Not Worth Learning (TM). So, I needed a replacement.

Contenders are MooTools and JQuery. Initially I had thought mootools was the best option – it’s certainly got a nice website, with some very compelling demos. But as I looked into it further I lost confidence. You know the feeling – you begin to realise that this #{whatever} has been designed and built by someone who does not share your perspective on things. The demos, while beautiful, were opaque and uninstructive. The mootools framework ignores namespace and plays havoc with anything else you might wish to use. The documentation is a shambles, third party writings have a decided “in-group” feel to them, even the pictures of the developers had a nasty 37Signals-esque “kewl” look to them. Well, fuck that, and fuck that name as well.

Which leads me to jQuery, at 24KB (packed) the smallest (and fastest) of the frameworks.

I like a number of things about jQuery. Firstly, as I mentioned, it’s lean and mean. Seriously – fuck Prototype and its 100K download before you’ve even done anything!! In what kind of universe is that even remotely acceptable? People still use dial-up, you know! You’re looking at upwards of 20 seconds just to download the javascript file!

Anyway. Secondly, I like its selectors. They’re closer to the “metal” of CSS/DOM than any of the others. For example, here’s how you’d, say, hide

="hide">hide me!>

in jquery:

$('span.hide').hide();

I like it. $ sends to jQuery. Then you have the css selection: a span, and then its class (with a dot – an ID is selected with a #, just like CSS) – all sent, nicely, to a reasonably named function. Understandable enough.

Tags: javascript,
Posted in development | No Comments »

Speech recognition still useless in 10.5

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

I’d been hoping for some speech recognition improvements in Leopard. Not because I plan on laboriously commanding the mac to do things I could do by myself easily enough using the native mouse interface, but because I’ve long wanted to write a ruby program that takes a (say) mp3, reads it to the speech interface, and gets something useful, like text, back. It might be too error-prone to really be useful, it might be much harder than I think – but at least I’d like to know the basic capability is there!

Alas, not. In a spirit of freewheeling experimentation, forgiveness of past sins and water under the bridge, I turned on Speakable Items and spent the next few minutes trying to make the useless thing recognise a single thing I said. It, of course, could not, no matter how slowly and careful I enunciated each word, or imitated Steve Job’s californian drawl.

Speakable Items is such a worthless piece of crap I wonder why they even bother including it. Ah well .. roll on 10.6!

UPDATE: Amusingly, 10.5 underlines “Speakable” as I type this, claiming it’s a spelling error. Apple are so ashamed of their retarded child they didn’t even teach its name to the internal dictionary!

Posted in leopard, mac | No Comments »

Stupidest Quote Ever

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

Via my good buddy Hans at Daring Greaseball comes an amazing quote, from this Wired article:

“Apple’s day has finally come, and Apple users are going to get hit hard,” security researcher Gadi Evron said. “OS X is the new Windows 98.”

That is the dumbest fucking quote I ever heard. It basically makes me want to punch Mr Evron right in the gob. I think that if I was standing in front of “Gadi” with a gun when he caused those dumbfoundingly moronic words to be issued from his mouth, I wouldn’t even be conscious of my arm raising and shooting him right in the face – it would just be a natural, normal reflex action for the good of oneself and the world at large.

OSX is the new Windows 98! What a stunning insight, and I wholeheartedly agree. The two systems could not be more alike – if, indeed, they were ever anything other than completely identical in every way. I just don’t know why Mr. Evron didn’t go further – after all, OSX isn’t just the new Windows 98, it *is* Windows 98. Literally. First Edition.

I could read this wonderful update from Hans due to a rare condition I recently experienced on this Mac – a cosmological alignment of sorts, by which through an obscure combination of unseen and likely unknowable factors, a one in a million chance really, I was able to read my RSS subscriptions in Mail.app, along with another couple of email messages that managed to run the gauntlet and make it onto my local machine. However, I’m really hoping that Apple doesn’t act quickly to fix Leopard mail’s utterly broken IMAP implementation – I’ve come to enjoy watching it endlessly, pointlessly attempt to synchronise my inbox over the last three days. No, what I really want is for Apple to update iTunes with new features for iPhones!

UPDATE: that article has even more stupid quotes:

But Carl Howe, an Apple analyst at Blackfriars Communications, disputes the security researchers’ theories. He thinks that OS X’s Linux heritage makes Apple systems less vulnerable to attack than Windows-based platforms.

Oh yes, the much-vaunted Linux heritage. But hang on – now I’m getting confused! Is OSX based on linux, or Windows 98? Or could it be .. both!!!

Oh .. maybe linux is based on Windows 98 .. and OSX is based on linux! OK, now I understand.

“I don’t care if you have to type in your admin password,” Eckelberry said. “If you are asked to install a QuickTime plug-in, you will.”

Yeah, you will if you’re a FUCKING MORON. Seriously, anyone who gets infected with this stupid trojan deserves it. You’d have to be an absolute idiot to download and install – as root! – some unknown program from a free porn site. Good riddance, I say.

But Eckelberry (another LOL name) doesn’t care if you have to type in your admin password. You hear that? He just couldn’t give a shit, and that’s the end of the matter. All through this article I’d been waiting for the word from the Meister – “Yes yes, Windows 98, trojans, Linux .. get to the bit telling us what Eckelberry thinks!” said I. And there you have it – the final word. Eckelberry couldn’t give a flying fuck if you have to type your admin password, so get lost.

I’m amazed at the quality of these quotes. Where do they find these people? Do they specifically seek out the “idiot view”? How can these presumably prominent IT industry people be so ignorant – and the supposedly informed WIRED reporter can’t see it?

Posted in external reference, leopard, mac | No Comments »

Is it Christmas?

Sunday, November 4th, 2007

This is exactly the kind of website I like. Simple, does exactly what it says it will, with no bullshit – and with RSS support!

Tags: christmas
Posted in external reference | No Comments »