What's it all about, Alfie?

This afternoon I saw that Safari 6.0.1 was out on Software Updates along with iPhoto. I'm very interested in the improvements in Safari, so I had to update right away. Interestingly enough, this did not require a reboot - so they must have done something in 10.7.x to make it possible to update Safari without the reboot. It used to be required.

What's very exciting is that the memory usage has really changed. This is great news as I was really getting close to the limit recently. Now I've got a good bit of headroom, and don't have to worry about things for a while.

Nice work, Apple!

At The Shop we use Campfire for 'chat' as opposed to using IRC. I can see the advantage - it's very popular, it's already logging, and there's a reason to outsource those things that you don't offer a competitive advantage. There's a nice Mac OS X native app called Propane that allows you to have Campfire open in a nice app as opposed to a web browser. It's basically a simple WebKit view of the data stream from Campfire, but it's nice and slick, and there's several things it can do that are nice.

One of the nice things is that it can do is to offer call-backs to the image rendering so that we can modify the stream, and easily add additional CSS for the rendering. This was something I've been looking to work on as I don't really like the default font and size as well as seeing a few guys in The Shop having a nice call-back that adds the user's gravatar to the stream.

Here's how I did it.

First, you can get use copy this gist:

as the file: ~/Library/Application Support/Propane/unsupported/caveatPatchor.js

Restart.

That's most of it as it's got the gravatars now. Next, is to change the fonts of the main text and the fixed-width text in the chat window. In order to do that, you need to look in the directory: ~/Library/Application Support/Propane/styles/ and modify the file cf_chat.css to have:

tbody#chat div, tbody#chat span {
  font-family: Arial, "Lucida Grande", verdana, helvetica, sans-serif ! important;
  font-size: 0.8em ! important;
}
code, pre {
  font-family: Consolas, monospace ! important;
  font-size: 10px ! important;
}

The first part is the main body chat, and the second part is the fixed-width text.

Restart Propane, and you're in business! Much nicer for me.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 23.0.1270.0 was out, and there's a nice set of changes for this release. There's the V8 javascript engine - 3.13.7.1, and then there's quite a bit of codec/playback work done as well. I don't typically do a lot of that, but I can see that others do, so it's a good thing to get nailed down.

The speed is nice, the redrawing is superb… very nice tool.

I loved Skitch when it came out. I paid for it (twice), I paid for the "Skitch Plus" service - all because I wanted to support the guys making great software for the Mac, and I didn't want them to get bought up and thrown away. This was all before it was even out of beta! And for a while, things were good. But no good deed goes unpunished…

I knew a while back that Evernote bought Skitch and I had a bad feeling about it. Skitch was perfect as it was - small, targeted, and perfectly worked UI for the task at hand. Now it was going to be some uber-thing part of this Evernote suite of products. I had a very bad feeling.

Still, for a while, things didn't change.

Then yesterday I saw this tweet:

and my heart sank. I had to read this blog post to get the real effect of the change.

Skitch is getting even better. Soon sharing in Skitch will go through Evernote so that you will be able to take advantage of Evernote's syncing, searching and sharing features. To do this, we are making a few very important changes.

Yeah, you're trashing it!

So I downloaded the Evernote app… made an account, and started the transition. What I found was that the concept behind Evernote is noble. The implementation is just plain nasty. As in crooked nasty. Selling stuff about me, nasty.

I want to pay for something simple. Something clean. I want to support the developers that make great products, but it's clear that far far too many of the devs for the Mac are really looking for the IPO Cha-Ching!, or the Facebook Buyout. They really aren't into sustainable development and pricing. So they do this.

I will admit that they cleaned up the web page a bit:

but they removed all the good URL links. Why?!

My feeling was they didn't want people hitting their servers for the images like Skitch used to allow. I'm not sure that this is the case, but it sure seems like it. For the time being, I'm going to have to live with this as I have at least found a work-around.

But I'll be writing to Evernote and asking for them to be re-instated. Also, can't they use some better URLs for the images? The image above has a URL that's about 250 chars! Gee whiz!

I'm going to have to start looking around for something else. Maybe I need to look at WebDAV and use Skitch as well, but then I'm a little high-and-dry if I loose something. Not really likely, but it's something to think about.

I really hate this kind of change… it's all about the money - not at all about the supporting users.

UPDATE: I tried very hard to post the images form Evernote to this post, and in every case, it failed miserably. I think the Evernote server is again doing this out of spite for the blogs, as the old Skitch site works well. I'm going to have to look at setting up a WebDAV server on HostMonster just for my Skitch usage. Crud.

UPDATE: I spent more than an hour trying to get WebDAV and SFTP working. I was able to get the server-side config working as Panic's Transmit was fantastic. But it's Skitch. Crud. So I sent off a note to Evernote/Skitch support. I sure hope I get a decent answer soon.

[9/12 4:50am] UPDATE: got this back from Evernote support:

Thank you for contacting us.

At this time, Evernote does not provide a direct link to an image for use in hot linking to other websites as it does not provide web image hosting capabilities like other services. You are able to share the URL of the image as it is stored on Evernote for viewing, which will bring viewers to the Evernote site.

We apologize for this inconvenience,

Jerks. They are purposefully shutting down the Skitch.com site and leaving on this non-functional replacement. Great.

[9/12 7:19am] UPDATE! Success! What I can do is to make a generic, insecure, FTP account and then put that into Skitch, and it will then properly use it. Yes, I'm not happy about FTP versus say, SFTP, but there's not a lot I can do about that. It appears that the code used in Skitch doesn't match up the SSL keys properly, as the log indicates. This means that all I can do is FTP, but at least then all the images are on HostMonster, and that's perfect!

This morning I noticed that again, Google Chrome dev is bumped to 23.0.1262.0 with some more good release notes. There's an update to WebKit (537.10), and the V8 javascript engine (3.13.6.0), and at least one Mac-specific fix. Nice! The page refresh speed is really quite amazing, and has been for the last two releases. It's really impressive. I'm hoping they keep it up!

This morning a co-worker tweeted that he found this spiffy Bash prompt generator built in Python. Now I'm not normally one to adorn my shells with command prompts like this, but Wow! this is impressive. I mean it's got your name, the path, the git branch you're on, and even history with a red background in case of an error. That's pretty impressive.

Then again, it's probably a serious Python script that takes some time to run, but for those that want a pretty prompt, this looks pretty amazingly stylish. I gotta hand it to him. It's really close to something that's nice enough for me to start using it.

So it goes… I'll keep it in mind for now.

This morning I noticed that Java 1.6.0_35 was updated on Software Updates most likely due to a security issue that's been patched. Given the way Oracle is handling Java, I'm really wishing that Apple would retain control of Java for OS X. Right now, I'm wishing they had it slightly better integrated into the OS such that starting a JVM instance wasn't so time-consuming. Linux handles this with all the shared libs being loaded. Then it's a very lightweight thing to spin up the JVM. On OS X, it's a lot more.

Still, it's nice to see that they have at least one more update. Maybe cooler heads will prevail in the coming months? Most likely not, but a guy can wish, can't he?

I just read this tweet this morning:

which leads to this article advocating that young people look to entering an apprenticeship program and not continue school. It says, in part:

Universities are the typical place that established businesses expect to find these high-potential beginners. While many software developers finish college with a good education, they’re often burned out, deep in debt, and understandably eager to cash in on their hard work. Apprentices, on the other hand, inject enthusiasm, hard work, and a thirst for knowledge into your teams. They will consistently launch from your apprenticeship program with context, momentum, and loyalty to your organization.

While I can understand the point of the article, and you should read it to get that it's not saying people shouldn't go to higher education, it's saying that you, as a business owner, can capitalize on the cost of higher education, and get those people that might go to college and get them into the workforce.

But is that what we want to have happen, as an industry? I don't think so. I think it's robbing the future to staff the present, and that's a mistake. A big one.

I'm biased. I've got the higher education and the advanced degrees, and I think they are the right thing to do. But even if you discount my position, and do what the author suggests, aren't we just creating a bunch of Software Plumbers? They'll know what they see, and will be able to work with it, but their understanding of how to solve new and unusual problems will be very limited. Oh sure, you'll have a few percent that naturally think outside the box, but their exposure to new things and new ideas will be incredibly limited.

This is the exact purpose of those liberal arts classes for engineers - to broaden a student's horizons. If we just allow people to learn what we want them to learn, aren't we really just forcing ourselves to re-train them when we want to change technologies? Of course we are.

While there are times to have an apprenticeship program - for those that can't make it into college, I think it'll be overused and draw the real future of the profession into one where only a few can really think creatively. And that would be very bad.

It didn't take long - just a few days, and now Google Chrome dev 23.0.1255.0 is out with a nice array of fixes for crashing bugs - including a video problem on retina MacBook Pros. There are a few things about the security of apps in the browser, which I don't use, but I'm sure there are quite a few Angry Birds fans out there.

This past weekend when everyone was busy - but me, I decided to give the TV series Breaking Bad a try. The first half of the first season was very interesting - even funny in many parts. I was able to identify (slightly) with the main character, Walt, and his need to provide for his family, and wondering what was going to happen to them after he was gone. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't turn to making drugs, but hey… that's what makes the show funny.

I'm now into the second season on Netflix, and I can really appreciate Netflix for allowing me to play catch up on all the past seasons. But the show is starting to loose me. Far too much violence, and not enough humor, and while it's still probably far too "tame" to be anything like reality, it's getting less entertaining and more dramatic.

I hope they pull it back from the edge a bit. One of my friends loves the end of the second season, so I'm going to see that through, but I'm not sure how much further I'll go. We'll have to see.