What's it all about, Alfie?

VLC 0.9.8a - a security update for a problem in the Real codec, is out today. I found out by starting VLC to play a little downloaded YouTube video ('The Website is Down'), and it said there was an update, and asked me if I wanted to download it. "Sure", I say.

Then it acts as if I'm downloading a file - not updating the app. What gives? These guys make a Mac OS X app and don't even bother to use Sparkle? It's free and will do all the upgrade stuff for you. If not Sparkle, then the Google Code updater, update-engine. There are just too many reasonable ones out there to have something like VLC that's been in the works for so long, not to use one.

Anyway... it's updated now.

One of the types of graphs that we have wanted to make available in BKit with VantagePoint is the true x-y line graph. Currently, the line graph assumes that all x-coordinates are shared across all data sets and that they are uniformly increasing. This means that there's no way to really properly display a step function... or anything that might "double back" on itself like a hysteresis loop.

A while back, I asked Gordon at VantagePoint if there weren't some way to do this, and if not, could it be added? He responded that yes, indeed, there was - the TowDimCrossScatterViewer. Basically, it's meant to be able to plot multiple scatter graphs where each set of points is a data set. But if you go in afterwards to the data points and tell them to connect the dots, you can actually get a graph. Like this: (sort of)

The problem here is that I'm trying to display the square wave on the secondary axis, which was Y in the previous graphs, but it now seems to be X, and that's not really what we're going for. So it's close, but I still need to ask Gordon what I need to do to get the secondary axis to be the secondary Y axis. We'll see what he says, but it's getting really close. Exciting stuff.

It's exciting to see that there is clearly the new ability to create non-functional representations. This has been something that I really wished we had had a long time ago. Well... better late than never.

This morning I was spending a little bit of time trying to see if I could add in a few nice section headers using the h2, h3, etc. headers. I knew from experience what I liked in the defaults, but I wanted to dive into the CSS and see if I could make them better, and more logical - like why is the first one I like h3?

Well... it turns out to be an interesting problem and because the WordPress Theme makers use these in their layout as well, it's not really up to the posts to change these. For example, h1 (in my theme) is used for the title of the page, h2 is used as the title on the post, etc. If I wanted to make an h1 for the post, I might be OK, but if I did that to h2, I'm going to have a problem with the title of the post.

So while the might have explicitly used a class="post_title" to indicate what they were doing, I can see why they chose to use the more familiar h2. After all, these are probably not modified by a ton of folks, and if they are, then, like me, you're going to see the problems and then decide how to get around them.

It's all possible to fix - but it involves essentially re-writing the entire theme and putting in the class tags to make sure that there will be no conflicts with the default post tags. Not impossible, but more work than I wanted to do today. I got what I needed - two levels, and that's going to be more than enough for what I've been doing.

I decided to check and see if there was an update to iTerm - and there was! The latest release hits the transparency problems as well as removing updating threads to limit the contention issues and pasting big hunks of text. While I'm probably not going to switch as Terminal is still better with the workspaces feature, it's nice to keep up to date and see what's happening with the project.

Who knows, maybe it'll leapfrog Terminal again? I still like that I can remove the scroll bars in iTerm. Wish I had that in Terminal.

Over the past several weeks I've been mulling over the MySQL/PostgreSQL and PHP trifecta in my head. Wondering if I needed to just give in and switch to MySQL as it was/is supported by the PHP Apache plugin from Apple. It would certainly make good sense. Then this morning I read this article and I'm glad I didn't.

In the article, MySQL creator Michael Widenius is quoted from his personal blog:

"We still have 20 known and tagged crashing and wrong result bugs in 5.1 [and] 35 more if we add the known crashing bugs from 5.0 that are likely to also be present in 5.1," he wrote. "It's of course impossible to get all issues fixed, but we should at least have tried to ensure that all issues important to a lot of MySQL developers and MySQL users should have been discussed, fixed and/or addressed in a public manner! We should also never have a single serious crashing/wrong data bug in a GA release."

This sounds like a serious quality control issue until you read later that it's systemic to the MySQL group at Sun. Again, from the article:

Despite the alleged friction between prominent MySQL developers and Sun management, Widenius contends that Sun was not responsible for the failures behind the 5.1 release. He blames Mårten Mickos, the senior vice president of Sun's database group and former CEO of MySQL AB. According to Widenius, Mickos no longer treats quality as a priority and unilaterally chose a premature GA release date because "he needs something he can sell."

While I can understand the need to sell a product in Sun's corporate environment, it seems more reasonable to have smaller, more stable releases, as opposed to adding in all the amazing new features in 5.1 just to have something that's feature-rich for the selling. It's certainly not where PostgreSQL is right now, and given this, I think it was the right thing to do, and continues to be the right thing to stick with.

I was hoping that Sun would take MySQL to a new level... but maybe it was a new low. Sigh.

This morning I noticed that Fantastico had updated WordPress to 2.6.5 (from 2.6.2) to keep up with the security fixes, etc. and three known bugs. I'm sure they are also making strides in the UI to keep things fresh, but that's OK too. I'm happy that Fantastico is keeping up with things. It really makes using HostMonster a lot nicer.

Interestingly, there was a fake WordPress 2.6.4 floating around, and because of that the WordPress Team went from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 with this release - making it a lot easier to know if you have the right copy. Interesting play on trojans. These guys are nasty at times.

I must say that this is about the fastest Fantastico has updated WordPress. I was planning on doing 2.6.3 on Friday, and then today shazam! it's 2.6.5. Impressive.

The guys at MacVim have fixed up the forking issue and updated the latest fixes from the Vim core code, and have packaged Snapshot 39. It's something I expected them to do, given the fact that they had discovered it right after creating Snapshot 38.

Just one of the best editors on the best platforms ever.

The guys working on MacVim have released an update to the project - Snapshot 38. There have been some annoying error messages related to the forking of the processes for tabs, and the guys have been hard at work getting to the bottom of them. Based on the comments in the mailing list, I think Snapshot 38 still has some issues, but the next snapshot will have them all cleared up. Excellent news for the coming days.

Still, it's nearly the perfect implementation of Vim. The only thing it's lacking is the beautiful temporary zoom on a find that Safari and SubEthaEdit do. BBEdit still doesn't and it's not strictly necessary, but it is beautiful to watch.

Today I was looking at a weblog and saw a pointer to Base 1.0.2 by a single indie Mac developer for dealing with SQLite3 databases. These are the databases of CoreData, and in that sense, very interesting to work with - when I get into the CoreData game more. Right now, I'm thinking that I need to get into it (CoreData) a little more. However, it's got a lot going for it and I want to support the indie Mac developers. They have a hard enough time, and they deserve the support when they make something good.

The Mozilla Group has released Camino 1.6.5 today with the standard stability and security fixes as well as the latest Gecko rendering engine. They biggest annoyance to me is the buttons on the web sites. Why is it that Camino seems not to be able to do those right?

I understand their desire to be a Mac-like browser, but then they need to be smarter about what they do for the rendering of the buttons. I'm sure it's not high on the list of bugs to fix, but it's a style point that makes it easy for me to place it third out of three for browsers on OS X.