What's it all about, Alfie?

Part of me is stunned, part expected it to happen just as it did. In the end, today is the first day of a new feeling about America by Americans for Americans. Facts haven't changed all that much - staggering debt, horrible foreign relations, poor international opinion... but things have changed - attitudes.

I've read time and again this morning how nothing's changed today, but people feel vastly different. There is hope, optimism, and a feeling that these problems are going to be tackled with compassion, fairness, and honor. I don't think there are many people that think the change will be overnight, or even in a year or two. But it's the change that the citizenry believe it's time to take back the running of this country.

I am so excited about the future, it's hard to believe.

Today is going to be one of those days that I remember for a long time. Probably the rest of my life. I can imagine what my parents must have felt listening to JFK talking about the Peace Corps, and the Space Race, and the Berlin Airlift... I even have to give it to Regan that for those that were interested in his message, he had a way of making a speech.

But Obama is going to change how we feel about America. He's going to change the sense that it's run by people that think they know what's good for us, when all along we fear that they're doing what's good for them. I am excited about what this will bring. The change is due. We need to have a better moral compass than Gitmo and torture - we need to understand that there are costs to living in a free society, and just because some nutcases flew planes into buildings doesn't mean we have to give up any of the liberties this country was founded upon.

I looked at Intrade this morning and at 9:43 am it's got Obama at 92.4. Excellent. I can't wait to leave early and cast my vote. I really can't.

Today I got an email from the Pragmatic Programmers about two books: Core Data and Core Animation, and after thinking about it for a few minutes and looking at excerpts from the books, I decided to get them both. The Core Data is a "beta book" meaning it's not really done, but it will be, and the Core Animation book is finalized and in print.

I really like the books these guys put together - very easy to read as PDFs with Preview on my Mac, and with updates I don't have to worry about errata. Also, there's no way I can carry around the tonnage of books that I have for reference, etc. It's just not possible. But I can carry all that and more on my laptop.

While I haven't started reading these books, the one I read on Git is excellent, and I highly recommend it. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do with Core Data or Animation, but I know that the few things I have been thinking about require both: simulations and market tools. So... we'll see how these pan out, but I'm betting on "great".

I was just thinking of how nice it'd be to get rid of the scroll bars on my Terminal.app windows, and it got me thinking about iTerm. I wondered if there was an update - so I ran it and sure enough, iTerm 0.9.6.1021 is out, and it fixed quite a few little things:

Version 0.9.6.1021 includes the following changes:

• Fixed a bug that cause crashes when using vim.
• 256 Color palette support (patch provided by Walter Dorwald).
• Improved URL handling for ssh/ftp/telnet.
• iTerm no longer sends a growl alert for a bell event if the winodw is the key window.
• Highlight window when it's in the "send input to all tab" mode.
• Better handling of "fork" errors.
• The anti-idle is no longer sent to all tabs when "send input to all tabs" is on.
• Other minor UI changes and bug fixes.

While I'm not sure it's still the complete replacement for Terminal.app, it's great to see that they haven't given up on it.

Well... today I noticed that there were a few good books out from two of my favorite authors, and as soon as I get done with the latest Clive Cusser book Plague Ship, I was looking to dig into something from Vince Flynn or Brad Thor - both of the same genre. I noticed that they had two books out that I hadn't read - each, and so I got them. Love that Kindle shopping!

What I have been a little surprised about is the lack of additional rumors about the second-generation Kindle. The last leaked snapshots I saw were a step backwards. I'm wondering if the initial tests looked good, but then the usability and form-factor was really off. That was my take on it.

At the same time the new Sony eReader with touch-screen interface is really pushing the limits and it'd make the simply re-pacakged Kindle look pretty sickly. Maybe they pulled it for that reason. Whatever the reason, I think it's pretty clear that we're not seeing a new Kindle in the next 4 days, so the rumor of a new Kindle in October is bust.

Maybe early next year? Who knows. Until then, I'm very happy with the one I have. OK... there's a few things I wish it had - organization is the biggest. I wish there were ways to tag them as "this is the order I want to read them in", and/or put the publishing dates on them in a place easy to see.

Secondly, make it easier to file away a book that's read so it doesn't clutter the screen. And while you're at it, make 'Folders' for heaven's sake. How hard can that be? That would solve a ton on me issues. But until they do, I'll still keep reading.

UPDATE: I sent in the suggestions to Amazon and we'll see what comes of my suggestions. I'm guessing I'm not the only one asking for this kind of stuff, so maybe we'll see something. Would be very nice.

You have to love Twitter for application updates. It seems to be the mechanism for indie Mac developers. Well... today I got a tweet saying that Fission 1.6 was out with a lot of improvements:

The biggest update is that Fission now has built-in iPhone Ringtone saving, using the same method found in our MakeiPhoneRingtone application. With Fission, you can take any audio file in any format (not just AAC), and easily turn it into a ringtone/alarm sound for your iPhone! Just crop it down to 40 seconds or less, then choose “Save as iPhone Ringtone”, and Fission will handle the rest. Your file will be transcoding to AAC if needed, then passed off to iTunes and ready for syncing.

Fission 1.6 also adds the ability to Insert Silence into a file, a command to set the exact location of the playhead, software updates via Sparkle, and almost two dozen additional improvements and bug fixes. It’s a free update for all licensed owners of Fission, and can be downloaded right here.

While I'm not into the iPhone scene -- yet, I can appreciate the Sparkle updater and the ability to make the ringtones as good, solid steps in the right direction.

This morning I saw that DrawIt 3.7 is out with lots of new features and bug fixes. I haven't seen a lot of changes in the UI, but I thought I read in the release notes that it's easier to resize the workarea, but I'm not positive about that. In general, it's my vector drawing app, and had to keep up to date.

There seemed to be a few issues with categories on a few blogging systems, and so a fix was put in the code and MarsEdit 2.2.2 was released today. I'm a WordPress-guy, so this didn't really effect me, but it's nice to see that progress is being made.

I do wish he'd add in a better media component. Something that allowed me to manage it independently from the app, and flickr pictures. Nothing major, as I have Skitch for that, but it'd be nice.

On my way in this morning, I was thinking again about scientific visualization, and in particular, VRML. It's an interesting technology that I never got to do a lot of experimentation on at the time of my thesis, but since then, I've thought it would have been a wonderful way to visualize the results of the simulations. Given that I hadn't updated my VRML viewer on OS X in a while, I decided to see if FreeWRL had been updated recently.

Luckily, it had - to 1.21.0.

Interestingly, there now seems to be a vrml.jar that's part of the package, but I can't find a thing on it on the FreeWRL site. Maybe it's something that's in the beginning stages, but what a hoot to have it embed-able in a Java application. Interesting possibilities.

The tests work great on my aging MacBook Pro. Very nice indeed.

UPDATE: I found that there are a few tools for Blender to allow you to import and export VRML 2.0 files. This would be nice if I were creating them by hand, and it's nice to know about. I just need the talent now 🙂

This morning, I saw that Perian 1.1.2 was released fixing the problem that the updater never actually ran, thus making it impossible to use the built-in update mechanism. Additionally, some of the video stream codecs were dropping some frames. I hadn't noticed the latter, but I had certainly noticed the former. I was thinking Why is this taking so long?

Well, there's my answer. It wasn't ever going to complete. So I'm glad I went and grabbed a copy myself. Nice to have if you have media you have to deal with.