What's it all about, Alfie?

I spent a little bit of time yesterday updating this and that on sherman and fiddled with Vim on OS X. There's the Carbonized version that's really more akin to 'gvim' on linux, and then there's the command line 'vim' with no graphical component. I'm sure if someone really wanted to make one distribution they could, but I'm not unhappy about having to deal with two versions. They are both based on 6.1, so the differences are all exceptionally minor and don't effect me in the least. However, I needed to get the colors on the Terminal windows right, which was as simple as setting the TERM variable to xterm-color and away we go. It's really quite nice.

I've also spent a little time with the X11 xterm on OS X to get the default colors to be white on black. This meant editing the ~/.Xdefaults file and putting in the lines:

xterm*VT100*foreground: white
xterm*VT100*background: black

But the really interesting part was that the file had to be a 'Unix' file for it to be read properly. On Mac OS X you can have DOS files, Unix files and Mac files - all with their different line endings. Well, X11 needs to have the Unix 'newline' endings or else it won't work properly. This is a very nice thing to know, and it would have saved me quite a bit of time to know that. But, in the end, everything worked out and the defaults look great. Once again, the command-line vim works great in the xterm session.

One more little thing I updated was to the latest version of iTerm - a very nice little tabbed terminal emulator. It's come a long way since it's initial releases, and I have to say that it's pretty darn close to being my preferred terminal program because it will make it possible to get more terminals in a smaller space, and there isn't an abundance of space on my iBook's screen. Very nice.

Safari seems to be coming along, and I'm hoping to see a new release in the coming days. Also, the iPods are way past due for an update, and while I'm not going to get one of those until my existing MP3 player craps out, it's still exciting to wonder what the next generation will bring - besides increased storage.

I've been working on a few changes to the code for these projects at work and I've gotten myself to a point today that I've tested everything, but there is so much to release it's going to be a pain in the morning. I've changed more than I probably should have for one day, and while I'm not worried about the changes working (I have tested them), there are still a lot of things to do when rolling out new versions of the apps that it's going to be a very busy morning tomorrow to get everything done in time for the first traders.

Thankfully, I stopped changing things when I realized that I'd pushed the limits, and so I've had time to write everything up, update the docs, and make a good To Do list for tomorrow morning. I'm pretty sure I've got everything covered, but it's going to take a bit of final testing to make sure that everything's OK in the morning.

Yikes!

On a lighter note, it's interesting to see how interdependent everything is when you build a large number of large systems and each feeds data into the other. Yup, it's circular data time, and it just makes keeping things straight that much more important. However, it is interesting to see that all these systems work together to get the complete job done. Of course, no user is really interested in the least, but they aren't really supposed to either.

From here on out, I'll be planning my daily changes a little more carefully so as not to get into this spot again. Just a little bit uncomfortable this afternoon keeping everything straight.

I know I've said it before, but here's another reason to switch to Mac OS X - the Mail client that comes with Mac OS X is the next generation of the mail client that was in OPENSTEP/NeXTSTEP. The advantage is that in these earlier versions, there was the capability for developers to add plug-ins into the Mail application simply by placing their plug-in bundle into the proper directory and restarting the application.

The developer of httpmail plugin has used this capability to add to OS X's Mail the capability to download mail sitting at Hotmail. This means that email sent to a properly configured Hotmail account appears as though it was sent to your normal email account - be it IMAP, POP, whatever. Since I have a Hotmail account for the MSN Messenger (really Fire which does a lot more than just Hotmail) I end up getting a bit of spam to the Hotmail account. Normally, I'd have to pull up the web page, login, and then delete the emails. Now with this plug-in, I can let OS X's Mail application get the spam and let it's spam filtering take care of it.

While this isn't like getting a new machine for free, it's a very nice little functional addition to an already excellent application. I don't have to hassle with the problems of getting to Hotmail, and yet I don't have to worry about having hundreds of junk emails there that need to be cleaned out every month or so.

It's really an incredible platform - OS X... I haven't found something that I wished it could do that it can't. And then there are these wonderful little surprises like
httpmail plugin that makes something good really extraordinary.

Let's not forget that in the past few days Apple has released the second version of X11 for OS X in an elegant little package. I'm really not able to think of something that I might want to do that I can't do with this machine. Wow... that's nice.

I had a bad case of The Blues this past weekend - I wanted to get a few things done and as it turned out, none of them got done. I've put too much emphasis on the weekends as a recharge cycle for these weeks I've been having. Too bad it took me until today on the way in to realize this. But I guess I had to have something snap me out of it, and that little something this morning was the realizition that there's a company that will upgrade the hard disk in my iBook from the existing 20GB to 30GB, 40GB, or 60GB. One of the problems I had this weekend is the realization that my iBook was not very user-servicable and I was running out of space on the 20GB internal drive. I didn't want to believe that it was a dead-end, and with finding this company this morning, I know that if I don't want to do it myself, I have an option.

The other thing I wanted to do this weekend was look into getting an additional drive for barney my SGI Indigo². It's getting closer than I'd like and while it's easier for me to add the drive because I have the enclosures and cables, it's still a couple of hundred dollars to get a 36GB SCSI drive - as oppoed to 80GB+ if it was EIDE... but that's the cost of SCSI, and it's worth it.

So I didn't get either of these things done and I realized this morning that there's no one that's going to get me out of The Blues except me. I'm the one that's responsible for my own happiness. Yeah, it's the standard party-line from the counseling I had years ago, but it's easy to forget and blame other things.

The Road less Traveled is less traveled because it's harder... Every now and then it's important to remind oneself.