Still a EE geek at heart, it does my heart good to see that MacSpice 2.10.23 is out, and still kicking. It's not going to win any Apple Design Awards for the UI, but the graphs work, and are clear, clean, and legible. The numbers are SPICE and spot-on. It's hard to complain about the app. It's something that could use a nice face-lift, but it's still great to see that they're working on the engine, and making it better. Fantastic!
This morning I noticed that iTunes 9.0.3 was released to Software Updates, and this time it wasn't about a new device - it was about fixes to features. Imagine that! The changes aren't dramatic, but really annoying - like not respecting the "save password" for purchases, these are things that people complain about day after day.
I haven't really hit any of the listed issues, but I'm glad to see that they aren't treating iTunes like nothing more than a delivery vehicle for their content. Make it better, guys... we'll all love you for it.
Over the weekend, I stopped by the Apple Store in Naperville to pick up two of their small aluminum keyboards to use with two machines at work that used to share a keyboard/mouse with a switch-box, but last week were "split" so that I needed two keyboards in a pretty small desk.
For this desk, I need to get rid of the numeric keyboards to save the space. Just have to.
So the question is "How do I make it work with linux?"
Thankfully, xmodmap is going to do everything we need, and all I need to do is to get the keycodes from the keyboard and put them into the .Xmodmap file that I've already got to swap CapsLock and Ctrl.
Open up a terminal and type:
$ xev
What you'll see is a new window with every X event getting printed to the standard out. Lots of information there, but in addition, you'll see every key press and release - and therein you can find the keycodes.
What I found was the following:
| Key | Keycode |
| L-Apple | 115 |
| L-Option | 64 |
| L-Ctrl | 37 |
| R-Apple | 116 |
| R-Option | 113 |
From this I was able to create the .Xmodmap that made the "Apple" keys act as "Alt" keys (their default appears to be to act as "Windows" keys) so it's easier to do what I need:
! ! Swap Caps_Lock and Control_L ! remove Lock = Caps_Lock remove Control = Control_L keysym Control_L = Caps_Lock keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L add Lock = Caps_Lock add Control = Control_L ! ! Make the Apple keys Alt keys ! keycode 115 = Alt_L Meta_L keycode 116 = Alt_R Meta_R add mod1 = Alt_L Meta_L Alt_R Meta_R
I may try to map some of the function keys to PgUp and PgDn keys, as those would be nice, but for now, it's enough this morning to get the Alt keys working on the new keyboards as that's how I switch between workspaces - which is essential.
I really like the additional desk space... that's a real plus. Just a little more fiddling with the location of things, and I should be settled in with the new hardware.
This morning I noticed that the Panic guys released Unison 2.0.3 with a short but important list of changes for this release.
I've had a chance to really put it through it's (reading) paces, and I have to agree with myself (a beta tester) that it's a really nice improvement over 1.x, but there's a few little cosmetic changes I'd make, and have mentioned to them in emails or bug reports. No show-stoppers, but still things I'd like to see changed.
This morning I noticed that the Mozilla group has finally released Firefox 3.6 - with a stunning list of changes. Among the biggies for me:
- Protection from out-of-date plugins to keep users safer as they browse.
- Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness, and startup time.
- Support for new CSS attributes such as gradients, background sizing, and pointer events.
- Support for new DOM and HTML5 specifications including the Drag & Drop API and the File API, which allow for more interactive web pages.
but there's a lot more there for everyone.
When there's a major update to Firefox, like this, all the themes and plugins fail until the developers have a chance to update them to the new system. This morning was no exception for me. I had to mess with quite a few things in order to get Firefox working on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
I use the Whitehart theme for XP and Linux and of course it's not ready. Sadly, there's nothing I can do here as it's not in my skill-set to mess with the theme. I'll just have to live with the default theme until they get around to updating it.
I need to look at the XML output of several different servlets and because the servlet's content-type is text/html as opposed to application/xhtml+xml, I don't really see the XML - just some of the unbounded data in the XML. This isn't very useful. The old plug-in I used to force a content-type switch wasn't compatible with Firefox 3.6, so I tried Force Content-Type 1.2.2. What a gem!
I simply install this, activate it, and then put in the mapping for the URLs I need using JavaScript regex and BINGO! It works like a champ! I spent nearly half a day initially trying to figure out what the problem was, but this time, this guy had me up and running in less than 15 mins. That's fast.
If you need to see XML in Firefox on XP or Linux get it.
This was a puzzler until I started googling it... the Java plug-in for Linux for Firefox 3.6 changed from the old libjavaplugin_oji.so to the new libnpjp2.so. For the JDKs distributed from Sun, this file is in the same basic directory structure, and a simple find will find it. But there's no errors in using the old one, it just doesn't load. Switch to the new one and restart Firefox, and all is well.
This little tidbit wasn't in any of the docs I read, and I wasn't the only one that thought this was an oversight. I can't imagine that after years of using the old plugin, I'd have thought to switch on my own. I'm sure glad one of the developers spoke up on this thread. Yikes!
This morning I noticed that the guys at Panic have released Coda 1.6.10 - which is great. It's still the all-in-one that I want to use for my next project on the Mac, I just haven't had time to get to it. The CSS, JavaScript and HTML along with the preview and publishing make it just what I want to use.
The guys at Bare Bones have updated their free editor TextWrangler to version 3.1. It's the little brother to BBEdit, and is a great alternative for those times you don't need everything BBEdit has, or for those that just can't see the need to pay that much for a text editor. In any case, it's nice to have as a backup.
The guys at Panic have been busy... they also released Unison 2.0.2 this morning with the lovely new feature that the unread article count is now in the display. Very nice. There are still a few visual issues - most notably, the window width seems to be set up such that it can't be as narrow as I'd like and display things properly, but I can send them a note about that.
Still a terrific newsgroups client.
This morning I noticed that Skitch 1.0b8.5 was out with a few Snow Leopard fixes, but an additional extension on the beta period. I'm guessing this will continue for a while, but eventually they may have to charge for storage. If they do, I'll sign up as it's just amazingly valuable.
Nothing else like it in my opinion.
I just got a tweet about Acorn 2.2 being out. The release notes are impressive and there's a lot to play with - gestures, new UI features, bug fixes... it's a major upgrade. Gotta love that stuff.