What's it all about, Alfie?

Yesterday afternoon I noticed a message from Adium saying that it could not connect to ICQ because the version of libpurple had expired. That's odd, I thought, and checked then for an update to Adium to see if I had missed something. Nope... no update. Since I don't get a lot of chats on ICQ, I figured that there was nothing to do, and I let it go.

This morning, Adium 1.2.6 was available with (surprise) an updated libpurple so ICQ is once again working. I got it and everything is fine.

What surprised me the most, I guess, was that an open source library would expire like that. Maybe it was the protocol at ICQ that required it, but it seems so counter to the open source ethos that it should expire. Very odd. But... I have to say, the Adium folks were on top of it quickly. Good enough.

Today one of the users of my scatter graph - the guy who asked for the pseudo-z-axis capability, in fact, asked if I could make it a little easier to understand what was happening on the z-axis data, so I decided to take a swing at it.

I was really surprised to find out that by simply putting a border on the group of z-axis widgets, and moving the buttons from below the list to the right side of the list, I could get something that really looked good, and didn't take up more vertical screen real estate than the old way of doing things.

The result (above) is something where the z-axis is clear (FTSector), and the values are easily seen, and the inclusion is easy - All or None. I have to say that I think this is a big improvement.

Also, I'm trying out the posting from Skitch for the screen grab. There have been a lot of times when I wanted to do this, but didn't want to mess with it in my WordPress install. So we're going to see how this goes for a while. Not bad, so far...

I tend to agree with Joel, of Joel on Software fame, but today there's something he's saying that just isn't right. His point is that you should not hide or disable menu items because there's no feedback to the user why they can't use these, if they can see them in the case of disabling, or not see how to do something in the case of hiding.

While I can understand his logic, I have to say that I think he's taking an extreme point of view to try and make the point. His point is that your application should be easy for all to understand. And to that, I agree. However, it might be a lot easier to understand if the menu items were grayed out if the actions we're allowed. As Daniel J. points out in this rant, there's a lot of ways to indicate why without having the user try something and then be greeted with a message box saying "Hey, no can do".

It's a question of usability and your users. On a Mac, the average user is going to expect that applications behave a certain way - including having disabled menu items. On this platform, if you don't disable a menu item that is illegal in a certain context, the users will think it odd, and say it's a bug. And it is. For this platform. On some other platform, maybe not. But I think it's going to be tough to really make hard and fast rules like this without looking at the environment and the expected users.

I found this article on MacOSXHints.com about how to set up the default Apache web server with https functionality along with the standard http service. It references another hint that really does all the work of creating the certificate, and this hint is really just how to use that certificate with the latest Apache2 that's on Mac OS X 10.5.

It took me all of about 10 mins. to get the files created and then a few minutes to fix up the Apache2 config files. Pretty nice, really. I haven't done any https work in a few years, but I remember it being a lot more complicated than this to get Apache configured for the SSL work. The certificate was always about a half-dozen commands that you never remember so you always look them up and do it once every ten years or something.

I'm not sure if this is a big deal, but it's nice to have the option again of being able to do some https work, if I need to.

This morning I updated to 10.5.4 on my MacBook Pro. There are security fixes in Safari, a few things for Safari, and a few things for the new MobileMe (was (dot)Mac) and the iPhone Store in iTunes. I was pleased that they put in the fix for Spaces and the Finder window focus, but I'm not sure if the faster Javascript engine is in Safari now, or if that's targeted for a later release.

I'll have to update my iMac and the kids' MacBooks one of these evenings, or this weekend. I'm not sure they'll see any difference - I haven't yet, but for all the web surfing they do, the added security fixes will be a very good thing.