What's it all about, Alfie?

Because I have had some spare time today, I've been transferring some of the old journal entries from my work journal to a WordPress blog I created for just that purpose. The old system was a single, giant HTML page, and while it loaded quickly, and you could do searches of sorts, it wasn't as flexible as a WordPress system. Which is, of course, why I made the change.

Anyway, it's not all that bad if you get the data formatted reasonably well. Sure, it's tedious, and it's not something you'd do for fun, but if you want to move the entries into the system it sure beats re-typing all those pages. I'm close to getting 2008 into WordPress, but that still leaves 2006 and 2007, and that's a ton of entries.

Baby Steps... just keep taking baby steps.

I just got a little pop-up saying that NetNewsWire had an update for me - to v3.1.7b4. Seems there was a problem at startup, and someone wanted to be able to execute Javascript for the given page from Obj-C. Nothing major, but nice to update in any case.

But after the update I noticed this same problem I've had for a while - every now and then, when refreshing the list of articles, the parser gets "stuck" on PHPmac.com and the "out of" number of RSS feeds climbs rapidly without bound. I typically just cancel the activity, and I'm OK. But I decided to check, and sure enough, the site is there, but I'm not allowed to see anything. I think this is what's causing the problem.

So... if I get time tomorrow I should send in a little bug to the developer and let him know what I've found. I'm not the only one, I'm sure, and it's probably a much larger issue of proper error handling.

[8/20 3:44am] UPDATE: I sent in the bug report. We'll see if they contact me, or an update appears to correct this in the next release.

I'm not a big one for rumor sites, but this rendering of the possible new MacBook is about as cool as I think a laptop can be. While I understand a friend's criticism that the size of the pad could create issues for hands and wrists trying to type, but I think the size issue is a compromise. It probably won't be this big, but it'll be bigger than the Air's trackpad.

I have to say that I like the black border on the screen as well primarily because my background is dark, and this lends to the illusion that the border simply isn't there. This is going to be vastly different for folks with lighter backgrounds, but it certainly hides the iSight camera nicely.

In the end, I'm still waiting for the quad-core, 8GB RAM MacBook Pro with the high-end graphics and HDD, and if I'm lucky, I mean really lucky, I'll get to have something like this with a nice, large trackpad, with gestures, that will make it much easier to do some of the graphics work I want to do. It's like a built-in graphics tablet.

The MacVim Team has cut Snapshot 34 that includes the ability to turn on/off the ATSUI renderer for the app. The ATSUI renderer is the Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging system - basically, the (old) Apple way for rendering Unicode. It's supposed to be significantly faster for rendering text but in the past it's had the limitation that the mouse events simply weren't supported in the MacVim code. What's happened is they added a superclass that had all the standard mouse support and then sub-classed the standard renderer and the ATSUI renderer. I'm hoping that it's faster, but it's awfully fast already.

I'll be working with this guy for a while and trying to find any problems but it'll be nice if it's faster and not picking up any bugs.

UPDATE: interesting note: I read about ATSUI and it seems it's rather old (Mac OS 8.5) and has been replaced by Core Text in 10.5 (and beyond). So... while it seems we're one step up in MacVim, it seems it's come right at the time when it's really a generation behind. Shucks. We'll see what happens in the future with SubEthaEdit and BBEdit - see if they pick up on this.

I saw that Apple released another update to the iPhone/iPod Touch OS - now to v2.0.2 and so I once again got out the cord and updated it via iTunes. It's really easy enough, but I was surprised today when my laptop tried to sync the updates I'd gotten for a few apps off the App Store - one of them failed and gave a very cryptic error message. I'll have to look and see what the status is after the update.

I'm sure this is hard for a company to become so diverse in it's product set when it's still relatively small. I appreciate they are doing their best, and in a few revisions they'll get it stabilized and things will run a lot more smoothly. I wish they'd get MobileMe worked out - and add SSL to the site. I would like to be able to use that someday, but for now, I'm doing it the old fashioned way - manually.

This morning I remembered that yesterday I was having a few issues getting into the house from the net. Actually, I couldn't. So I wanted to have a look at things before I took off for the train. When I hit the router's configuration page I noticed that there was a firmware upgrade - several minor-point updates, but nothing apparently major. So I decided to update it.

I probably should have thought this through first.

I was on my MacBook Pro. Connected to the router. So I killed the update.

I had to go down and use my iMac which was hard-wired into the network and even then I had to power-cycle the router because it was smart enough to know that it was being managed from another IP address. The problem was the WiFi was dead due to the update. So I had to power-cycle it and then do the update from the hard-wired machine.

Now, had I been smarter, I'd have switched to the other WiFi router before connecting to the first router and doing the update. Had I done that, I'd have been golden. Alas, it was clear right away when I didn't.

In the end, the update was good and the connectivity returned. I'm not really sure if that was the issue, or something else, but the update was necessary and that fixed things.

Today a fellow developer came to me to ask how difficult it would be to make the scatter graph rescale the axes when the z-axis selection changed. This is the BKit graph that has the optional z-axis grouping selection list so that a third column can be used to group the data points defined by the x and y axes for easier viewing.

The problem is that VantagePoint (while a great package) is not universal in it's feature set. For example, the Bar and Combo charts allow for the ability to set the specific Observables - basically, the points in a data set (or Variable). If I could have applied this to the scatter graph, then I'd be set - simply make the Observable visible, or not, based on the state of the z-axis selections and the value corresponding to that data point. But the class hierarchy of the scatter graph did not include this functionality. I'm sure there's a reason, but I with they had included this in all graph types.

So I had to come up with another scheme. The problem is, the obvious one is to have a copy of all the data, and then when any of the selections change, we remove the old data and copy in just the data set necessary to plot the complete two-columns on the graph. The problem there is that's a lot of data moving of which a ton will be unnecessary. So I didn't want to do that unless I absolutely had to.

What I decided to do was nearly as compute intensive, but it turned out to be reasonable in the context of the GUI event. That was to look at the data values of the 'visible' points and then set the limits on the data in the graph to these, and let the graph refresh accordingly. The upside of this is that there's no data moving. The downside is that we're getting limits over and over again when they aren't necessarily changing. There's also the possibility that we might mess up the nice axes selections that VantagePoint does automatically.

Luckly, that last part had already been solved in the base graph class, so when I tried this approach, I was very pleasantly surprised to see that everything worked as it should. Not half bad, in fact. Thankfully, this is only active when the user specifies a z-axis column for the graph, otherwise this would impact the performance of the applet at all times. Not really great. Good enough.

I got this email from my daughter today. It's not often I get to look up and a puppet is staring me straight in the face. Nope... not too often at all. In fact, if I had to bet what would happen to me today, I might very well have laid money on the fact that I did not think I'd get a puppet email today.

Just goes to show you, you need to keep an open mind.

My daughter is a huge fan of movie-making and her next foray is into the realm of green screen (or blue screen) movies. She's talking about getting a loft bed to make room in her bedroom to put up the screen. That's a clear vision, I have to say.

So I did a little digging and I have to say that there seems to be a lot of plugins for the older versions of iMovie - you take two clips, one that's the background, the other is the screened clip, and then layer the second on the first. It's a nice way of doing things, but as I've also found out, Final Cut Express ($199) does all this and a whole lot more. So that may explain why I haven't seen any plugins that have kept up with the latest iMovie.

Of these, she seems to be most interested in eZedia's eZeScreen plug-in for iMovie 6 (or later). It's a Universal Binary, and says it'll work with anything after iMovie 6, so we'll have to see what happens when we get the demo and try it out.

I've also seen Norrkross Movie, which is sort of an iMovie replacement, and it's not bad looking for $59. It's got all the things she's looking for, and is probably the place to start as it's a nice entry point for what she's doing. If she keeps up with this, Final Cut is a reasonable alternative, but it's after she's kept with it.

I've been working with this software package for months now, and while I can't use the name for fear of lawsuit, I think I'll borrow a page from J.K.Rowling and call it The Software Package Which Must Not Be Named or maybe just You Know What for short. OK, it's silly, but here's another silly lesson to be learned from this million-dollar fiasco: Sometimes, if things are slow enough, they will be technically working, but the users will think them broken.

Case in point with You Know What was a certain instrument's trade ticket. There were supplemental data fields on the form, and they appeared not to populate after being programmatically set on the committal of the trade. I was testing this very thing this morning and after seeing it happen in front of my own eyes, I reached for my pencil to make notes of the fields I'd populated, and the ones that hadn't been correctly populated with the calculate values.

After a few seconds of writing the notes, I looked up to see the empty fields and amazingly, they had been filled. I'm convinced that this was what was happening all along. The way in which this system is wired up is to save to one database, replicate all changes to another and then reach from the replicant. If the changes went in programmatically, then the GUI might not have known to update them, and so they had to go through the replication chain and that was going to take several seconds. It might just be that the users/testers were impatient, and when they didn't see the data in these fields immediately after the saving, they assumed the fields weren't going to be populated and closed the window.

So... this morning I'm going to sit with the tester and make them wait to see if the fields don't appear. I figure that it's about a 30 sec wait, and if they show up for him like they did for me, then we know it's not a bug... it's a feature. Unfortunately, this is a nasty feature, but there's no helping that short of a significant reconfiguration of the system. Don't know if and when they might happen, but if it does, then this delay should lessen. But we'll have to see.

For now, You Know What seems to be OK. You just have to be patient. I wish I felt that described more of the users, but I don't.