What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning, I saw that Perian 1.1.2 was released fixing the problem that the updater never actually ran, thus making it impossible to use the built-in update mechanism. Additionally, some of the video stream codecs were dropping some frames. I hadn't noticed the latter, but I had certainly noticed the former. I was thinking Why is this taking so long?

Well, there's my answer. It wasn't ever going to complete. So I'm glad I went and grabbed a copy myself. Nice to have if you have media you have to deal with.

This morning I saw that Cyberduck 3.0.3 is out - fixing a few "arbitrary crashes" and fixing the handling of the Web URLs. I'm not exactly sure what arbitrary crashes is all about, but I'm guessing that it's something that was hard to track down, they put a big hammer to it, not wanting to really dig in and find the problem, and this 'big hammer' solved the issue. Like making large blocks synchronous - it doesn't really find and solve the problem of multi-threading contention, it just removes it, and in removing it, the problem goes away.

But it's just a guess. Still, it's a nice app.

This morning I saw that OsiriX 3.3 is out and while I don't spend all day looking at the x-rays of the family, it's nice to see what they are doing and staying up do date. This update looks about the same, and I haven't had time to dig into the release notes for this version, but I'm guessing that there are a ton of under-the-covers changes for this guy. It's also fun to check out the x-rays every now and then, and an update means I'll fire up the app and have a look. Fun.

There aren't a lot of Dashboard widgets that I really use a lot - but I have to say, Calc Board is one of them, and today they released Calc Board 1.6 which includes the ability to resize the board as well as change the font and save the contents to the desktop. It's a very nice upgrade.

The interface is simple, clean, has great features. It's just a great little application.

I started playing with Blender several years ago on my SGI Indigo² High Impact and it was impressive. Those were the days before it was bought by the community - which, to me, remains one of the great stories of the internet age: a company can't support the product any longer, doesn't want to give it away, sets a price and the community gets enough donations to actually buy it. Amazing.

Anyway, today they released Blender 2.48 and I got that for my Mac. It's an amazing app, and like Photoshop, it takes an amazing artist to create something nice on it. I am not that artist. However, I want to be, and someday I hope to have the time to work on it. Which is why I keep updating.

In the days of Mac OS X 10.4 - when the Terminal.app didn't have tabs, I was a big fan of iTerm. But when OS X 10.5 arrived and Terminal.app had tabs and workspaces and seemed to be just as nice, then I stopped using iTerm and went back to strictly using Terminal.app. But it hasn't been perfect. iTerm has much better control of the rendering of the window than Terminal.app does, and while speed is no longer an issue, the ability for iTerm to remove the scroll bar from the window is still a big plus to me.

I've tried several hints off the internet to remove the scroll bars on the Terminal.app windows - even going into Interface Builder and seeing if I can remove them there. Unfortunately, no. It's not something that's supported any more. I can see the reason - the resize handle. If you want to have a resizable window then you need to have the resize widget. If you have that, then it's going to have to exist in the left border or the bottom. So you might as well have it in the left and not make problems for yourself.

Of course, iTerm solves this by simply removing the resize handle with the scollbar. If you're going to be looking at an undecorated window then chances are you're a guy that's going to set the size of the window and leave it. I can see the trade-off. I just wish Apple agreed and put something into Terminal.app to remove the scroll bar and resize widget.

Until then, when I really want to have a terminal window without the scrollbar and resize widget, I'll pull up iTerm. With the new version, it's better than it was, and maybe worth another serious look. After all, for all of 10.3 and 10.4, I used it instead of Terminal.app.

UPDATE: I started playing with it again and I have to say I'm a little disappointed in iTerm - it's memory usage with one window open is more than Terminal.app with nine windows open. While I'd really like to skip the scrollbars, and I will still keep it on my box, it's not worth the memory footprint. Shucks.

I've been looking for a good (decent) desktop client on Windows to keep my work blog (journal) up to date. I've tried w.bloggar and it's OK, but when I try to edit an existing post I get a time-shift on the posting time by five hours - exactly the same as my timezone offset from UTC. It's OK, but what I have to do is to post in w.bloggar and then edit any posts in the WordPress web interface.

So I looked again... and this morning I tried Deepest Sender a Firefox add-on and it's pretty nice. I'd like it if they had the ability to set the font in the 'Source' view to something fixed-width, but I can live with that as a minor annoyance. The biggie is that when I save an edited post it's not off by 5 hours, it resets the post date to epoch!

OK, that's a little extreme... I just wish these guys would allow an option to leave the posting data/time alone. So I sent in a bug to Deepest Sender as I think I'd like to use that one more as it's cross-platform with Firefox. We'll see what happens.

The Adium team has released 1.3.2 that fixes two bugs that I've been having - problems with MSN (they updated to the latest libpurple) and the frequent disconnects from Yahoo!. There were a few cosmetic changes as well, and that's nice that they're working on the "little things" as well as the biggie like tons of daily disconnects from Yahoo!.

So... pick it up, it's the very best IM client I've ever seen.

I was formally introduced to Python in the context of a vendor's application. They used it as the glue that binds and controls the individual components of their system as well as the internal language of operation. It's a gigantic python collection. And the experiences I've had with the product, and therefore by extension, the language have been bad. Miserable, in fact. But I'm trying to overcome them.

Python is a very simple language with great power because, as in perl, people have taken a liking to it and have written tons of libraries and add-ons to it to provide all the power the original author(s) and designer(s) didn't have the time or vision to write. Both languages are impressive in that way.

I have to admit that I'm not a fan of a language where control rests in the level of indentation, but I can see the reason for it - uniformity of the look of the code. You can't have the religious arguments about tabs/spaces or where to put the bracket if you have to indent to create the structure of your application. But I have to admire a simple language where the creativity is in finding and using those additional libraries and putting them to good use.

So I'm trying to warm up to Python, and I think I'm going to make it. It's just got this major handicap right now - it's connected with a product and a vendor that I really can't stand, and getting over that is hard.

Today I had a few minutes, and I wanted to spend a little time messing with the CSS on my work WordPress blog because the CodeHighlighter plugin I'm using is great if the background is white, as this guy is, but it's not so great when the background is black - like the YellowJacket theme for WordPress.

The problem is that I wanted a simple <pre> tag to have the same foreground/background color scheme as the regular text - not the code-ified version that the CodeHightlighter uses. So I had to be a little tricky with the CSS... but in the end, I got it.

The trick for me was to realize that the CodeHighlighter really just set the class of the <pre> tag to the language (give or take). So, if I added those specific tags to the CSS for the theme, I could make the code <pre> tags different from the other <pre> tags and that was the ticket. Trying to make the 'standard' <pre> tag different was a waste - and never got me what I wanted.

So, the CSS looks like this:

  pre.java, .sql, .c, .cpp, .css, .bash, .python {
      font-family: 'Luxi Mono', 'Courier New', Courier;
      font-size: 90%;
      line-height: 100%;
      background: #fff;
      color: #000;
      border: 1px dotted #ccc;
      padding: 0.2em 0.5em;
  }
 
  pre {
      font-family: 'Luxi Mono', 'Courier New', Courier;
      font-size: 90%;
      line-height: 100%;
  }

With this, I can get the code segments with a white background so they look nice with the CodeHighlighter, and at the same time, I get my simple <pre> tags looking like they fit in with the rest of the text. Nice.

UPDATE: I decided that I liked it so much, I saved off my copy of the theme to my WordPress home on HostMonster. Now I don't have to worry about losing it. Sweet.

UPDATE: Another thing to note: Don't put the <pre> tag on a line by itself if you're using a 'language' option. It'll put in an extra line at the top and bottom and thus space out your code more. Keep it tight.