What's it all about, Alfie?

He is my one and only son, and while parents and teenagers don't always see eye-to-eye, he is my son, and I wish him a very happy 17th birthday.

I installed something this morning - the latest Citrix ICA plugin for Mac OS X, and then I couldn't seem to find it. I started wondering where it might be, and then wanted to see the contents of what I had installed. It's supposedly all in the Receipts directory, in on of the pkg bundles, but I couldn't remember how. So I did some digging, and figured it out - again.

The first thing is to find the receipt for the package you installed. For the sake of example, let's call this package Squish.pkg, and there are two places it will be found: ~/Library/Receipts/ or /Library/Receipts/. So look these two places and find it.

When you've found it, get to a shell and get into this receipt and find the bill of materials (bom) file like this:

  $ cd ~/Library/Receipts/
  $ cd Squish.pkg
  $ find . -name \*.bom
  Contents/Archive.bom

where the output of the find command should list the one bom file that you are looking for. Then you can list the contents of that file with:

  $ lsbom -fls Contents/Archive.bom

If you're really interested in being efficient, you can do this all with:

  $ cd ~/Library/Receipts/
  $ cd Squish.pkg
  $ lsbom -fls `find . -name \*.bom`

What I found was what I thought had happened - the Citrix client itself was updated, so nothing new was added to the system - only updates to the existing ICA client. Fair enough. But now I'm glad I have this written down so I don't have to hunt for it.

Well, this morning I got another little treat - iTerm2 Alpha 15 is out and has a rather impressive set of features (scraped from the Sparkle update dialog):

Alpha 15
This release has one big feature: split panes! You can divide a tab into rectangular regions, each showing a different session. Also, you can now save your window arrangement and have it automatically restored when you start iTerm2.

Big new features
- Horizontal and vertical split panes. Use Cmd-D to split vertically, Cmd-Shift-D to split horizontally, and Cmd-Opt-W to close a pane. Navigate panes with Cmd-Opt-Arrow keys (but note that you may have conflicting key mappings in your bookmark, as this had been a default setting).
- Save your window arrangement including window positions, size, tabs, and split panes. You can open new windows with the saved arrangement with a keypress or use a new preference ("Open saved window arrangement at startup") to do it automatically.

Small Enhancements
- Make window title and tab labels more configurable so you can remove window number and job name.
- Add global keybindings for cmd-arrow, cmd-pageup/pagedown, cmd-home/end to scroll.
- Make opt-arrowkey send proper escape codes.
- Preferences and Bookmarks windows can now be closed with Esc key.
- When the "hotkey" is pressed, prevent the running app from getting the keypress.
- Made Find With Selection (cmd-E) behave like a normal cocoa app.
- Allow the OS to pick the initial window position if smart placement is off and no saved location exists.
- Improved wording of context menus.
- Fixed context menu's "send email" feature.

Bugs fixed
- Fix arrow key behavior in paste history and autocomplete windows (bug 407)
- Various memory leaks fixed.
- Improved behavior of full-screen tab bar display.
- Fixed applescript bug with setting window size before adding session.

While I'm not a huge fan of the split screens, I have a lot of friends that swear by them - and interestingly enough, they are emacs users. Hmmm... coincidence? Maybe not.

In any case, it's a nice update because I can get rid of the instance number on the window title and just get what I want. Also, the saved window positions is as nice as Terminal.app, and I don't have to deal with the scroll bars any longer. Unfortunately, the window positions don't include the Space they were on. I'm really hoping that Apple fixes this soon as it's one of the most annoying things about the Terminal.app (after the mandatory scroll bars).

This morning I noticed that after a year of nothing, HandBrake 0.9.5 is out, and it's hardly a "bug fix" release. There are some major new features, and thankfully, it's going to keep do the job I need it to do - ripping DVDs, as long as I need it. There are new UI features, and the ability to run more than one at a time. I can't imagine doing that, but OK.

Fantastic update.

I'm back from a nice week off and it's nice to get back into the swing of things. I'll admit it was a little tough this morning, but it really worked out pretty well. Now that I've caught up with email, and reading, it's nice to be back in the full swing of things.

Vacation is nice, but it was also a lot of work with the house. It's nice to be creative once again. Ahhh...

I noticed (while on vacation) that there was an emergency bug fix for WordPress to make 3.0.4, and it was quickly available on HostMonster, so I took the time to make sure that everything got upgraded nicely. It's not a lot of work, and there were plenty of ways to know that there was an update in the offing, so it's not bad, but it is sad that WordPress is such a target of goofballs that it takes eternal vigilance to make sure servers aren't abused. Sad, but true.

Seems Google Chrome dev 10.0.612.3, out today, fixes a regression test with the RegEx in the engine, but that last part is an assumption that wasn't explicitly stated in the release notes. In any case, it seems that we have two regression test related fixes in just a few weeks. The engineers at Google are slipping... maybe they've had to lower their standards to get employees?

OK... maybe just sloppy - but which one is the worse explanation, really?

I noticed this morning that Dropbox 1.0 was finally released. This is a major move for something I've used for quite a while. The story is impressive in what they have done and are now capable of doing. I'm a believer. It's like github for syncing clients. Very exciting to see the 1.0.10 release and start to use it.

This morning Google Chrome dev 10.0.612.1 was released and represents a big jump in the browser, specifically, the new V8 engine (3.0.2.1) is in there, and the new WebKit (534.15) is in there in addition to a mess of other new stuff. I'm interested in seeing how this guy tests out as it should be a significant improvement to what I've had for a while. Exciting times...

Today I'm off to do as much Christmas Shopping with Liza as we can get done in a day. We need to get the kids a few things, and while they are selected in our minds, they aren't physically sitting in the house, so it's necessary to go and get them.

Ho ho ho...

In all honesty, I don't mind the shopping. Liza's a lot of fun to be around and we laugh and giggle about all kinds of things - from the silly gift ideas to the people in the lines, and even the cars in the parking lot. It's a lot of fun.