Well, I heard in this article that in JDK/JRE 1.6.0_12 and beyond, Sun is going to be delivering a 64-bit Java plugin. Finally. I've been waiting for a long time for this, and while I have to say it's not going to impact me that much as I don't do a lot of web/applet-based development any more, it's nice to know it's there should I ever get back to it.
Now all we need to see is a pre-packaged Firefox for Linux that's 64-bit.
Today I spent several hours trying to figure out why loading a collection of windows was exhibiting different behavior than loading the windows individually. Basically, I use a visualization system that was written and maintained by another company (a vendor) and it's pretty decent - and terribly complex. There is a way to load a window with multiple views, and a way to load a collection of windows.
Unfortunately, the collection of windows wasn't loading properly. I'd get the first window up just fine, and then the second window would appear to start loading but then all the views from the second window would get sent to the first window. Very odd.
Reverse the loading order and things are reversed. Everything seems to want to go into one window - regardless of which one that is - save it's the first one loaded.
So I wrote an email and sent the window definitions to the vendor's support contacts. I'm not sure what's going to come of it, but it's a bug, and recently introduced, as this used to work. We'll see what they come back with.
This morning I happened to try Transmit to get to a WebDAV server I was looking at, and I noticed that an update was out. This update fixes a few things with improving performance and the ability to deal with large files on Amazon's S3 storage. Also improved performance on a few things. Not bad.
I have to admit, it's not my favorite FTP Client, but it's very good.
Today I had my first outage at HostMonster, my hosting service. That's pretty impressive. More than a year and a half and no significant problems. This morning I couldn't post an article to my weblog and saw that the MySQL database server was down. Pretty easy to see.
I sent in a trouble ticket, and with the hour things are back up. I have to say, for the price I pay (which is not a lot) this is fantastic service. Sure, it's not a lot to them, but it's their business, and something I don't have to worry about. I have enough of those things.
So kudos to HostMonster. Not for being perfect, but for being really good.
[12/11] UPDATE: the tech support response from HostMonster said that if MySQL went down, it would repair itself and come back up. Seems reasonable to have it restart. Good enough.
This morning I noticed that Coda 1.6.2 is out, and the release notes indicate that there are a few FTP bugs fixed as well as some cosmetic highlighting and a maintenance issues. Not really earth-shattering, but I'm guessing that with the FTP process being so critical to Coda's functionality they wanted to get this out as soon as possible.
Once again, it's great to have products that are created by indie Mac developers. They see the problem, fix it, and post a release. It's that closeness with the customers that I like.
This morning I was reading the JavaDocs for VantagePoint's TwoDimCrossScatterViewer to see if I was missing anything on the secondary Y axis issue I was having yesterday, and I saw it. In working with the new graph type we have two ways of looking at the data - as pairs and as columns. In the first cut I assumed they wanted the pair number. There, in the docs, was the key I'd been missing. In the docs for the TwoDimCrossScatterViewer was the method:
public void setSecondary(int colNum, boolean isOnSecondary)
Clear as day... they are saying that in order to put a column on a secondary axis, you have to specify the column. Not the pair. You can put either the X or Y on the primary or secondary axes - making this far more configurable than I had planned. This was very clever of Gordon. Love it.
The result is beauty:
I fired off an email to Gordon to tell him I "got it", and to ask him which question of mine he wanted to answer next. There were three:
OK, there's a few things that get under my skin, and Comcast being down is one of them. It's not the end of the world - it's not even a reason to get really angry... but it's part and parcel of my work and what I do. It's the way I get my news, stay in contact with tracking packages, etc. It's my primary personal interaction medium. And when it's down, I'm disconnected.
I don't really use the phone all that much. There are probably weeks where I don't make or receive a call at home. I need it for emergencies, but that's about it. I don't know of anyone that uses US mail to send me anything anymore. It's just not done. I know people that start their day with the Wall Street Journal, and if they don't have it, there's a serious feeling of loss of information.
So I don't read papers, talk on the phone, or mail stuff. I do all these activities on the computer: RSS feeds, IM, email... it's my morning routine. Except for days like today.
Well... when I get into work I'll be able to get a connection there and then be able to get what I need.
UPDATE: it's just come back up at 3:52 am... OK, let's get what we need and head to the train.
UPDATE: a minute later it's down again. Grrrr....
[9:25 am] UPDATE: still down. I've gotten a call from the house saying the internet is down, and I said "Yup, it's Comcast". It's still down, and I now wish I'd moved to git from CVS as I'd have what I needed on my laptop. It's not horrible, but it's annoying, and getting more so. I want the line back up.
[1:00 pm] UPDATE: Liza called and it was back up. Hope it stays up.
GraphicConverter 6.3 is out, and it's one of the first graphics apps I got for my first G3 MacBook. It's been a valuable asset to me over the years, and while I haven't used it much since getting Acorn, I still want to support the authors, and while this was a free update, I'll get the paid updates as I think this is really good software and is deserving of my support.
This morning I saw that the great guys at Panic have released Coda 1.6.1 with quite a few improvements. I've been seeing quite a lot of traffic on the Coda mailing list - a good deal of which was a pretty nasty thread about Git integration. Now I'd love it if they supported CVS and Git, but I'm not going to get out of hand if they don't - face it, the tools don't have to be integrated to be useful.
It's a wonderful took for working on non-Java web sites. Nothing wrong with that. But it would be nice if they had CVS and Git support to the tool.
I got a tweet from Gus M. at Flying Meat that VoodooPad Pro 4.0.2 is out with a ton of bug fixes. I read the release notes for a good 5 mins. There are changes in the Python interpreter for plugins, lots of crashing bugs fixed, and a complete WebDAV update. Sounds like a great update - had to get it.
Interestingly, now the tabs for the pages I have open are ordered differently, and I can't figure out how to order them manually. It's not a huge deal, but it'd be nice to know what the magic was to getting them in any particular order. Seems dragging them is the key, but what if one is off screen (to the right), due to a window being smaller than the combined widths of the tabs? Hmmm... no solution there, my friend.
Work-around: maximize the window, move the tabs, and restore it. Not bad.