While on vacation, the great guys developing MacVim released another update - Snapshot 33. There are a lot of changes, but I didn't take a lot of notes as I was in a Disney World resort at the time. I got the update, and if you're interested, you should too. I think this is the best Vim implementation I've seen and it's certainly the best Vim on Mac OS X.
I have been working on a problem for the last few days at the Shop - a pricing data issue, and in the past I've worked closely with a good guy in another group to solve these issues. He's a great guy, in fact, always there to help me and we support each other's causes - when he needs to get something going for me, I tell him exactly what I need, and he scrapes it together... when I have a problem with his stuff, I don't scream and rant, I give him a good bug description and don't hassle him constantly for a fix - I know he's on the case, and he'll get it to me as soon as he can.
So yesterday I wanted to ask him if he got the trace data necessary for the problem we're looking at. He said he'd given it to the support team and that he'd check with them and if they haven't gotten it fixed, he'd step in.
He's become the manager.
Why?
I know it's The Corporate Ladder, and you're expected to climb it. It's not called the corporate couch or something, but still - why?
He was (is) a good guy, very talented at what he does, and still he wants to move to a position where he's not sure he's good at it, and not sure he's interested in getting away from the coding, but he still makes the move. And he's not alone... I know most people would be doing exactly the same thing in his position. But I still don't understand why?
I've managed - in fact, this is the first position where I'm not managing since getting out of college. I've owned my own company, I've done the corporate ladder... it's just a ladder that never ends. Never. You'll climb and climb, and then get on another company's ladder and climb there, and for what? Money, Power, Glory? OK, it's nice to have money, but after a point, isn't job satisfaction important as well? When you're coming home to your family, don't you want to say "Hey, I did this today!"?
I know it's not popular, but I like building, and doing, and would rather not talk about it to death. I'll be glad to talk about other people's achievements - great tools and projects I've seen and been a part of... but to do nothing more than be the classic Dilbert Pointy-Haired Boss.... No thanks. I want my life, and here I'm talking about my work life, to be more than that.
One of the really nice things I like about MarsEdit and WordPress is the ease with which you can put images into your posts. Sure, it's not rocket science, but there's writing the image tag and then there's point-and-click. I like the latter when there's a really nice interface. So I've been doing a little experimenting with the image options with MarsEdit.
There's the images that you upload to WordPress, and that's OK, but it has a limit on the upload of only a few kb. It's not horrible, but when I was trying to put up 20kb images it often times didn't work, and it's probably as much to do with the connectivity as anything else - but this is the connectivity I have, and if it's unreliable, then it really isn't a matter of why as much as it's a question of how to get the images up to the site?
Many months ago I read about Skitch, and watched the demo and thought Hey, this is sweet! and signed up for an invititation. After a few months, I got an invite and have been using it ever since. It's been a simple way to take iSight pictures and screen shots and get them up to a place where they can be saved and served.
Flickr is the same kind of service (so I thought) and so I was recently looking at the different Flickr clients - settling on 1001 as it seemed to be a nice small app that did what I needed and didn't make a big deal of itself. The wrinkle with Flickr was not Flickr - but MarsEdit. When you place an image into a post from Flickr you get a 'mini' version of the image and a link to the Flickr page where the image resides.
This is OK if you're really wanting to forward folks to Flickr, but if you want to just display images in your posts, this isn't the best thing because the way it's integrated in MarsEdit. However, if I put the screenshots up on Skitch then I have to go to the Skitch page to get the URL and then paste it into the post in MarsEdit. It's like I have to do the work up-front or force the readers to do it on their own.
Neither is ideal. So I posted a request to the MarsEdit forums about adding Skitch support. Ideally, I'd be able to put something on Skitch (like I can in Flickr) and then MarsEdit can preview those images and I can include the links easily - but as regular images and not links to pages with images.
Daniel wrote back about the future plans, and if he does the plug-in I think I'm going to have to write a Skitch one as this is just about the neatest little snap-n-share application and service I've ever used. If you haven't seen it, take a look.
Yesterday afternoon I noticed a message from Adium saying that it could not connect to ICQ because the version of libpurple had expired. That's odd, I thought, and checked then for an update to Adium to see if I had missed something. Nope... no update. Since I don't get a lot of chats on ICQ, I figured that there was nothing to do, and I let it go.
This morning, Adium 1.2.6 was available with (surprise) an updated libpurple so ICQ is once again working. I got it and everything is fine.
What surprised me the most, I guess, was that an open source library would expire like that. Maybe it was the protocol at ICQ that required it, but it seems so counter to the open source ethos that it should expire. Very odd. But... I have to say, the Adium folks were on top of it quickly. Good enough.
This morning Acorn v1.2.1 was released with a lot of bug fixes and no real feature enhancements listed in the release notes. I hadn't noticed a lot of issues with it in my usage, but after reading the release notes, it was clear that there were some drawing/rendering and such issues that would have annoyed me, had I been using those features in my daily work.
Glad they fixed them, and got a new release out. Interesting aside, I noted on Twitter that Gus was doing the build of 1.2.1 as he was tweeting about it. A few hours later - Bingo! a new release. Twitter is the portent of new releases. Cool.
Also this morning, NetNewsWire v3.1.7b1 was released with the singular bug fix of working much better with Growl, which I use every day for all kinds of notifications. I hadn't noticed any real performance hit, but there must have been something significant going on or there would not have been the need for the fix (and update).
So... good enough. Polish on an already nice app - can't beat that.
I noticed today that my image of the Firefox app icon had a black pixel on the lower-righthand corner of the image. I pulled up Acorn and fixed it, and moved it to HostMonster, and it looks fine if I hit it directly from a web browser. I also copied it but in MarsEdit and removed the old thumbnail image to let MarsEdit re-create it, and still... in MarsEdit's Preview Pane, the old image remains. I'm stumped.
So I posted a message to the MarsEdit online forums and got this reply back from Daniel:
Hi Dr Bob - try deleting the MarsEdit cache folder that is creating by WebKit:
[Home] -> Library -> Caches -> com.red-sweater.marsedit
I'm not sure why some items are cached so aggressively even when they've changed.
So I tried that... still the old image remains. In fact, after stopping/starting MarsEdit a few times the directory is never created. This tells me that this is not only not the place the image is being held, it's not even used for what the author expected.
I'm at a bit of a loss to understand where the old image is being held. It's not on the web server, it's not in the cache I just deleted, it's not in the MarsEdit application support data... I'm stumped. And yet I'm sure it's still there. I can see it. Every Firefox post has this image and it's that way in the preview pane of all of them.
Bugger. I'm going to have to see if I can force MarsEdit to reload things. Or I'm going to have to find out where the image cache is really located and wipe that image out.
[1:15 pm] UPDATE: I've cleared the Safari cache, I've verified that the images on the web site are the correct ones, so it's a simple matter of my laptop thinking that the file hasn't changed, and therefore, not to reload it for MarsEdit. I've updated the post on the support forum to say what I've tried and what hasn't worked, and I guess I'm going to have to wait for another idea. Googling 'image cacheing WebKit "Mac OS X"' gives me nothing of real relevance, and too much noise. So I'm going to have to live with it until it thinks the image needs to be replaced.
[2:00 pm] UPDATE: Daniel suggested looking for a 'MarsEdit' directory in ~/Library/Caches/ and deleting that. There was one there as well - with lots of stuff in it, but removing it didn't effect a thing. Also, it was not recreated after several start/stop cycles. Very odd. I've updated the thread on the forum and we'll see what he comes back with.
[2:30 pm] UPDATE: I've removed the old Ranchero MarsEdit defaults, and while I didn't think they were doing anything, I didn't want to take the chance. Also, the icon database in ~/Library/Icons/WebpageIcons.db didn't hold the key either. I removed that, restarted MarsEdit, and still no difference. Wherever these images are, they are pretty well hidden. I looked at the defaults for the app and say nothing that would point to a different directory. It's a real stumper, I'd say. I think I'm giving up for now. I'm just running out of ideas.
[4:30 pm] UPDATE: it turned out that if I reloaded the page in the Preview pane, the same bad image came back. But if I reloaded it again then on the second reload, the right image was there. So, lesson learned - reload a few times to make sure you get the very latest.
[6/26 3:43am] UPDATE: it turns out from this article that in 10.5.2 Apple changed the location of the WebKit cache from ~/Library/Caches to /var/folders - not for any reason of security but simply performance - the home directory could be on a network drive but /var is on the machine itself. So, to clear the cache, you have to clear out /var/folders. Unfortunately, it's not easy to find the cache entries, and you have to really search (ala find) to find the ones you're looking for. FOr this case, it's:
pushd /var/folders find . -name \*marsedit\*
and you'll find the directory you're looking for. Delete that, and the cache is gone.
With this plugin, you can now view PDF files in a Firefox 3.0 browser window. While I'm not a huge fan of PDFs, they are a popular way of getting out a stylized page, and reading them in Acrobat, or a stand-alone Preview window isn't as nice an experience as seeinf them in-line in the browser. So when I saw this plugin I got it right away.
No time like the present to get things off to a smoother start. With Safari in Mac OS X 10.5, I've really liked the way Preview shows PDFs in the browser window. Very fast, very clean, and less of a horrible kludge that is Acrobat in Safari. I wonder why Adobe doesn't work harder at making the experience with their tools better? Odd. Anyway, I've liked the Safari/Preview combo, and now I'll have a similar set up with Firefox. Excellent.
I caught this story this morning about the problem with a Javascript bug in iWeb and how Firefox 3.0 fixed it and broke the usage in iWeb. It's not a blame game but if you want to get the Photo Galleries in iWeb fixed, you're going to need to get a new Javascript patch from the site and install it on your iWeb site and then the Photo Gallery and Blog postings will work.
I'll have to remember that for the Kids' iWeb pages. I can't imagine that it's going to be that hard to update, so I'll try to get it done this evening - or at latest, this weekend and let them re-publish to the web. Glad that someone is following these issues. I'm sure there will be an iWeb update soon to fix this.
This morning I was checking on the status of a few projects I follow, and I noticed that someone had a link to these fantastic Firefox themes that make Firefox 3.0 look virtually identical to Safari - which is not a bad thing. Personally, I like his 'GrApple Yummy (blue)' best, but I got all four and might switch up if I decide I need a different look.
Typically, I run Firefox and Safari side-by-side because the things I do in Firefox I want to keep around, and Safari is the general web tool. For example, I have a few pages up to my hosting provider all the time - checking on the state of things there, and for that, I want Firefox for it's completeness and support. But for Googling things and hitting the web-based docs and manuals, it's Safari. Because of that, I have to restart Safari a few times a week just because it gets so bloody big a memory footprint.
Anyway, give these themes a try on your Mac - they are pretty spiffy.
I had an interesting message from Growl today about Growl - that version 1.1.4 was out and available for updating. The release notes don't make it sound like a ton of new features, but the things that they did fix seem important - core issues about installation and updates to a few localizations as well as fixes to the Mail and Safari components.
Not really amazing, but it's nice to stay up-to-date. And I use it every single day.