What's it all about, Alfie?

OK, this is a really odd feeling... I got an email that someone is following me on Twitter, which is not a big deal, but the odd thing is that I don't know this guy, and I can't imagine why he things the tweets I've sent are of such quality that they all deserve to be read.

I mean, it's not that I didn't want people to follow me - but I expected friends, co-workers, ex-co-workers, that kind of stuff. I didn't expect total strangers to think what I had to say 140 bytes at a time was worth really reading. Kind of wild. No... really wild. I guess this might be what it's like to have people want to read a comic you wrote. You did it for a reason, but didn't really expect some stranger to like it. Wild.

Who knows... it could be someone following 32,768 people, so it's not like there's something valuable I have to say. Could be someone that follows everyone. Anyway, it was odd enough to warrant a post.

I was chatting with an old friend this morning and he asked if I had done anything with Twitter, and I told him that I'd looked into it, and the Mac client, Twitterrific, but hadn't done anything. He mentioned his primary reason was the same as mine - it seemed that a lot of indie Mac developers are using it, and it might be a way to learn something. However, I had looked at enough posts that I was pretty sure that the twits were not about coding as much as they were about personal-stuff. Which isn't bad, it's just not technical.

But since he asked, I figured it'd be something I'd give a go. So I went to Twitter and signed up as drbobbeaty and then downloaded Twitterrific and got that configured and ready to go. Then we sent a few tweets back and forth, and realized that it's not as immediate as IM - which I use all the time, but it does have a 'chat room' component to it that IM doesn't have. You can post a tweet and many people can see it at roughly the same time. While I do wish it were more of a 'service' such that the connection wasn't polling the web site, I can see that it's done this way to make it more reliable as the connections don't have to stay up and that helps get things going faster.

I was pleased that Twitterrific was a serious Mac app - looking and acting like a solid Mac app and not like something written in Java using Swing. That's always nice. Also, it seems like there's a critical mass on this app, so if anything is going to get where I'd like it to be, this is the most likely candidate. So I registered it. Only $15, and to support indie Mac developers, that's a good deal.

I'll see what happens as we go... I think the real thing will be if I monitor enough 'friends' to make it interesting, or just enough to make it like IM. And for IM I don't think it's possible to beat Adium. Well... I'll give it a go with Bret, and see where it goes from there.

I read this morning from Apple Insider about the expectation to see massive design changes in the MacBook and MacBook Pro come mid-year. The primary reason seems to be the fact that the design hasn't changed, and so I'm a little leery, but it does make sense, if Apple is trying to sell more machines. Make them look different, and people will update.

I suppose it'll be nice, but I can't see buying one just because the case is nicer or the trackpad is bigger. I want more cores and more memory - make it a quad-core, 8GB RAM machine and then I'm buying.

Yes... that would be a great upgrade.

One of the nice things I like about Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is the new way that X11 is launched. With launchd it's just a matter of a second or two when X11 tries to connect back and it's launched. Excellent. But it's not perfect.

When you close X11, it prompts you for a confirmation dialog, and there's no preference setting to say "don't confirm close". But some clever individual found a hidden defaults setting that does just that.

  defaults write org.x.x11 no_quit_alert -bool YES

And then the next time you launch X11 it'll not ask you 'are you sure?' when you want to quit. Nice.

David has released DataGraph 1.5 for Mac OS X 10.5 and the DataGraph Framework. This is a nice little upgrade as it adds several plot types for DataGraph and after the emails we have exchanged, I wanted to get the Framework (again) and look into the 'Real Time' example for ideas about plotting tick data or the simulation results.

He's also got a nice facelift to the icon. 🙂

After playing with the new release I started digging into the Framework and the example code for the real time data. Basically, he's sending a completely new data set to the graphing engine each time. This is a little different than I was looking at, but it's a worst case that shows that even in the case of redrawing 1000 points many times a second, DataGraph can keep up. Very smooth drawing. Impressive.

What I'm going to see if I can do is to take the results of one of my simulations and see if I can get this working on a simple 2D graph. I'm not sure how well it'll work out because the best fit right now would be the electrostatic solver and that's completely 3D, so I'll have to have it plot a slice through the workspace, I guess. Alternatively, hooking it into my FORTRAN code is going to be a little more difficult as that's not even generating any GUI and therefore I'll have a lot more work to do to get that going.

Anyway... fun times.

OK, I think I'm finally over Photoshop. I ordered Photoshop Elements 6 a few weeks ago thinking that I've enjoyed versions 3 and 4 and gotten a lot of use out of them in the process. I'm not a massive graphics artist - I'm a developer, but there are a lot of times that I need to have tools like Elements, and in those times, it's been really nice to have it in the toolbox.

But with Elements 6 it's a different story. Partly because of what Elements 6 is, and partly because of what's cropped up in the indie Mac community in the interim. For example, Elements 6 takes over the entire screen. Why? I hate that. Be a nice citizen of the machine - use your windows, but don't be so arrogant that you think there's no possible way anyone could want to do anything other than be in your app. Jimminy! That's horrible.

I'm sure it's got lots of features, I haven't even really started looking at it in any depth, but when I look at Acorn and DrawIt, I see two different kinds of apps and I'm much happier using them than Elements 6. I'm sure part of it is because I've changed, and part of it is because Elements 6 has changed. I'll try to get Elements 6 looking and acting like it should, but I'm guessing that in the end it's still going to be more obtrusive than I'd like, and come to realize that it's possible to get in other apps.

Too bad... Elements 6 could have been really great.

I was reading this on Red Sweater Blog this morning and I can agree with the assessment, but I think he's being a little hard on Leo. I'm not sure Leo was advocating that everything for a computer be free, but there was a time that a lot of things were little "ditties" done by someone on their off-hours, and they simply posted it to the 'net and people liked it.

I did it. Lots did it.

It wasn't about making a buck, it was about having fun with the development environment, or the system, or the fun of seeing if it could be done. In the blog terms, it's Pure Charity.

Sure, it's not going to pay any bills, but that's what we did. For the Amiga, it was the Fish Disks - if you made it there, then you were living large. Seeing your code on an ftp site was a reason to be excited not upset. But those were the old days.

I don't disagree with Daniel's point. If you want something of quality, you should expect to pay for it. I do. I don't mind paying for good software, I like having good tools, and I let the people know that I like what they're doing, and when I'd like to see something a little different in the app. Totally agree.

But there was a time - and Leo and I remember it. That time may be gone now, and if it has, then OK. But don't slam the guy because he remembers the days when things were different. Hey, you may not have been around then, or even alive, but they were times, and often times we look at current events through the life experiences we've had. Nothing wrong with that.

Cut the man a break... he's not advocating the death of your industry, he might just be talking about days gone by.

I'm not a big file-sharer... in fact, I don't think I've gotten more than three files from the 'net in the last two decades - and those were for digital versions of soundtracks that I already owned - Eddie Izzard. So I'm not a big fan of getting stuff off the 'net, but I never liked the way Comcast was stomping on the BitTorrent traffic saying it was standard network management techniques. Bull Cookies. It was to stop those people that paid for high speed internet from actually using it.

So I was excited to hear this morning that Comcast and BitTorrent have reached an agreement that means that Comcast has opened up it's monitoring software and no longer hinders the BitTorrent traffic that it once did. This agreement clearly indicates that Comcast was doing something, and while it's nice that the two are now working together, it's sad that it was in place in the first place.

So I had to try out my BitTorrent client - Acquisition, and sure enough, it was working far far better than it has been in the past. I was able to get connected to several hosts and search for something from Eddie. It was enough to convince me that they have stopped this silly practice, and started playing it a little more open. Good for them.

Doesn't mean I don't think they are pirates, though.

Well... I don't like air travel. I don't fit in the seats particularly well - the top of the seat hits me right about the base of my neck, and my knees hit the seat in front of me all the time. I don't like the conditioned air all that much, and I'm far too cheap to pay for first class where the seats are nicer, and the service is good enough that you don't notice much else.

But today we're on our way back from a nice little 4-day trip to San Antonio, TX and we're stuck in the airport because American Airlines is canceling flights left and right to Chicago. First, we were supposed to be on the 9:20 am flight. When we got into the check-in line we learned that that flight was already cancelled due to the FAA inspecting the plane. So they put us on the 5:40 pm flight - a joyous eight hour layover in the San Antonio airport. I was able to find WiFi for $7 a day and a plug to charge up, so I settled in for the long day of being in the airport.

The kids got a deck of cards, played a for about 3 hours, and then pulled out the PSPs and had a blast for a while. Then Liza called American to see if there were an earlier flight out and they informed her that the 5:40 pm flight was already cancelled! Their best advice at this point is to try to get on "stand-by" for the 2:30 pm flight and hope for the best.

I'm not impressed. You pay for a ticket, you get from point A to B on the date in question barring Mother Nature. Not the FAA, not something that's foreseeable. You may loose a little money, but that's your fault. That's why airline tickets are expensive. You pay to have the empty seats. You pay for the overhead. But you pay for the travel.

I can't imagine that I'll ever fly American Airlines again. I realize that I didn't make the decision in the first place - Liza did, but I'm willing to bet that she's never going to give them another dime again as well. You have to be trustworthy, and if you aren't flying when you should be flying, then you're going to loose customers - like us.

UPDATE: OK, Liza went to the ticket counter for the 3:20 pm full flight, and they booked us on Frontier Airlines to go to Denver and from there, back to Chicago. It's a crazy trip but it got us home. Late, but at least all in one piece and while they lost our baggage, they delivered it the next morning at 9:12 am, which is about as good as we can expect given their ability to move people.

While the news is playing up the grounding of all the M80 planes in American's fleet, I think it's a bit shabby to have either such a dependency on one plane, or no significant portion of those planes actually checked out, or provisional plans for dealing with the cancellations. It's a shame, really, because we'll never fly American again.

Today was a great day. One of those days that wasn't restful but boy oh boy, was it a great day.

It started off with my daughter wanting to get into a little stop-motion movie making. Additionally, she wanted to get a decent digital camera as her camcorder is nice but doesn't take stills. So we did a lot of Googling about making stop-motion videos with iMovie, and it sort-of worked, but not really as nicely as we had hoped. The minimum frame delay in iMovie HD was 0.15 sec/frame (6.6 frames/sec) and that was too slow for what she wanted to do.

iMovie '08 was not even that good - stopping at 0.20 sec/frame (5 frames/sec). So we did more Googling and found a site that reviewed a lot of stop-motion software for the PC and Mac. One of the packages they talked about was something we had seen in our Googling - iStopMotion. The web site for the software didn't really jump out at us saying "This is what you need", but we took a chance and got the demo. I'm so glad we did.

This is incredible software. There are three versions and we're going to be getting the middle one for Marie as it looks to have the best combination of features. I'd go the 'Home' version but it doesn't allow you to put in the soundtrack. Yes, she can export the video to iMovie, but there are a lot of limitations she's seeing in iMovie HD and iMovie '08, so we'll go with the 'Express' version and get the soundtrack tools. It's really exceptional.

She can take images with her camera... hook it to her MacBook get the photos into iPhoto... open iStopMotion and drag in the images and fiddle with a few things and bingo! She's got a movie. The software will also control the camera or video camera to do time lapse imaging which is really exciting as well. I look at her with this new medium and she's already made two movies today. Incredible.

The second great thing that happened was my youngest has been a skate board nut for about two years now and has been trying to drop-in for at least a year. We go to one of the two skate parks in the village and she rides and rides with her 'posse' and has a blast. Except for the drop-in. It's just the fear of standing at the top of that half-pipe. So Sunday was another day. We went because she was convinced that this was the day. After about an hour of trying, it was time to go home - no drop-in.

I walked up to her at the half-pipe. I had her just jump off it. No biggie - he's played flag football, been in karate for years, she can do this, but she's scared. So I knew what she needed.

I told her to stand on the board and I pushed her up the pipe, held her, and let her go.

Whew! That worked. Big smile.

I did it again - a little higher this time. And then a little more... pretty soon she was at the top of the pipe. Next was the drop. So I told her to get on the board at the top of the pipe and hold on to me. I held onto the board, she stood on it. I slowly rotated the board until it was sitting, wheels down, on the pipe - all the while she's holding onto my jacket. Then I let it go.

The look on her face after doing her first assisted drop-in was something to see. Tears in her eyes and a smile as big as Texas. These are the moments you live for, as a parent.

We did it a few more times and then it was really time to go. Here's a picture of us walking back to the car, with the half-pipe just on my right shoulder. It was a great day.