What's it all about, Alfie?

Today I finally found the Colloquy developers on FreeNode (IRC) because I wanted to start working on getting the latest Growl 1.3 working with Colloquy. I've spent a little of the last several days looking at the other Mac OS X IRC clients, and while there are a few that look OK, there's nothing that's as well-targeted for my needs as Colloquy. I looked at Textual IRC Client, and while it was reasonably minimal, it didn't have the configurability in the themes to make it really what I wanted. Basically, I want a small but readable IRC window that I can have up all the time to monitor all the development group chats that I monitor as part of what I consider to be "important to my life in the trenches". So if I can't change the font, or vertical spacing, it's possible that the client isn't going to be something I'm really interested in.

Thankfully, Textual IRC Client is available as a trial download, so I was able to try it without having to buy it on the Mac App Store. The same goes for the other one I seriously looked at - Linkinus. I have to say that this was a little closer to my liking, but again, there's no way for me to make a theme for it, and if that were the case, I'd have bought it.

It's got all I need - and to be fair, Textual IRC Client had most of what I needed, but in both, it's the visual representation that fell short. Neither seemed to have the ability to configure the theme to the level I wanted to get a view that would fit into what I had with Colloquy.

After all, the only real problem with Colloquy is the Growl 1.3 integration. Also, it seems that the updates for Colloquy have been few and far between, and with Lion, there are a lot of new features that probably need to be addressed. But on the whole, it's not a lot of changes.

So I set out to find the developers of Colloquy and see if I could get the code and work in the Growl 1.3 support. What I found was that Colloquy (#colloquy) and Growl (#growl) are on FreeNode, and that one of the Colloquy developers has already integrated the Growl 1.3 beta Framework, and he's just waiting for the Framework to be released. Wow. Sweet deal! This really help, as all I have to do is watch the chats for the release of the Growl 1.3 Framework and then the Colloquy guys will drop a new version, and I'll have everything I need.

Great news. Can't wait for the new releases.

This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 16.0.904.0 was out, and there were not a boatload of happy folks about it. Seems there's a recurring theme of not working with twitter.com, and there's a good number of folks that are plenty miffed about it. They changed quite a few things, and it riled the masses. So it goes, hopefully, they'll have it figured out soon.

OK, so I ran into what I thought was a bug in a user-defined PostgreSQL function regarding the holiday date for today. It's a Bank Holiday, but it's not a Market Holiday. I was able to prove this and fix it (temporarily) by changing the status of today's date:

  UPDATE calendar
  SET bank_holiday=TRUE
  WHERE calendar_date='2011-10-10';

and then the function I was counting on for telling me if today is a holiday started working.

So I knew the problem. But how to fix it? Well… it wasn't clear from the psql command-line how to do just that. I did a lot of googling to try and find out how to list functions, create functions, etc., and in the end, as luck would have it, PostgreSQL itself had the answer: \ef get_market_hours_for_date

The format is 'e' for edit, and 'f' for function, and then the name. If you just have the '\e', then it pops out into your EDITOR of choice for the last SQL command that was executed. If you give it the 'f' and a name, it'll pop you into your EDITOR and then let you edit the function.

Very nice!

These are the kinds of tools I'd expect from a commercial vendor, but I suppose, this is also what I'd want if I were working on PostgreSQL databases all day. I'm just really surprised and happy that these developers are thinking along the same lines. It's a great feeling to use such a fantastic database for my work - Mac and linux. It's nice to see the progress in time as well. It's really coming along.

Already this morning we're seeing the success of the iPhone 4S. At 3:30 am CST I tried to order one, and the AT&T connection was CRUSHED by the volume. Apple's site was fine, but AT&T was dead. So Apple did the very Apple thing - gave me a reservation number and told me that they'd get back to me with an email to complete the transaction as soon as AT&T was back up. Classy. Always.

So now it's 9:13 am CST, and I'm seeing tweets like these:

which tells me two things: first, I ordered at the right time, and second: Steve was right. Grace, Beauty, Elegance, are all things people want. The talk of the App Store review process is gone… AntennaGate is gone… what's really left is one man's vision of what a phone should be.

I'm still reeling from the news, but this makes me feel like things are going to be OK.

I spent a lot of this morning already thinking about the passing of Steve Jobs yesterday. I have to say, I've shed more than a few tears because of all the people I didn't know, he was the one that seemed to inspire me, and others, to do some amazing work. I secretly wished I'd be able to move to California, work at Apple, and run into him someday. But that's not to be, and I'm the one that's missing out.

There have been, and will continue to be, I'm sure, tons of thoughts and expressions about the man, and what he's meant for others and the industry as a whole. I can't provide any heartwarming or comical stories about his dedication to the company, it's products, it's people, but I spent all morning reading those by people who could. He was quite literally one in a lifetime.

My world is a little darker because he's left. I'm going to do my best to try and turn up my own light to compensate.

Today's Apple iPhone event was, to some, a disappointment. I have to say I don't know exactly what I was expecting - other than the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5. What I expected in the iPhone 5 I don't know. The 4S has the CPU, the storage, the camera and iOS 5, so what was I thinking the 5 would have other than a different format?

I guess in retrospect, the 4S is all I was looking for, but it makes it harder to spend the $600+ to upgrade when my 4 is doing just fine. I guess the one thing is that Joseph wants an iPhone, and so giving him my 4 makes it easier to justify the 4S.

Great products, incrementally improved. Typical Apple. Thank goodness.

This morning I saw that the Growl Team had moved off their traditional web site download system of distribution to a more commercially-viable version on the Mac App Store. The $2.00 price was really just to be able to keep things going, and I can't grudge them that. They have made some major changes - like a complete re-write of the entire codebase. They are saying that it's all about Lion now, and Growl 1.3 is Lion-only.

Additionally, there's no more Preferences Pane - it's just an app, and there's a lot of plusses to that approach to be sure. It's easier to manipulate, easier to get through Apple App Approval, and easier to update. The downside is that the new version isn't totally backward compatible, and that means that several of my apps are not exactly working 100% right with this new version.

But they'll come in time.

I have questions about iMessage in iOS 5, but that appears to be an iOS-only feature. It would have been interesting to see Apple's take on Growl-like notifications, but that seems to be off in the distance. In any case, this is a less-intrusive way to put Growl notifications in the system. Very nice.

I just hope the other vendors notice this and update their Growl frameworks soon.

They're at it again… Google Chrome dev 16.0.899.0 has been released and looks to have several nice improvements - including updating the V8 javascript engine to 3.6.4.1. It's nice to see that it's as responsive as recent builds, for there were a few in there that had issues, shall we say. Good to see progress.

This is another of those really neat web-based tools for documenting your code: websequencediagrams.com. What a cool tool! This guy allows you to type in your transition diagram and then it'll render it for you in many different styles - including a very nice looking hand-drawn style. This is perfect for those times you need to whip up a simple sequence diagram and don't feel like all the mess and fuss of something like Visio.

Take a look. Pretty sweet.

I saw on the ZeroMQ mailing list this morning a slick little web site, asciiflow.com, that allows you to easily draw ASCII flowcharts and then grab them for text documents. It's nothing that you can't do with vi or any other editor, and it's not as nice as Visio, or something like that, but it's nice for those times that you need an ASCII-art representation due to the document requirements you have.

It's interesting. Worth remembering.