This morning I got a tweet that MarsEdit 3.2 was out with a nice little list of goodies for the blogging public. Honestly, I think he'd be well-served by including a decent editor like SubEthaEdit or Vim, but that's his choice, and that's what makes life great.
Great app. Can't imagine using anything else for my journal.
Late yesterday I noticed that Mac OS X 10.6.7 was out on Software Updates, but I just didn't have any time to download the 300MB+ update and get everything going on my laptop. But this morning I wanted to get it installed before the day started. The big changes seem to be in the App Store - it doesn't get confused by already purchased software, and for the continual list of bug fixes, etc.
It's nice to see the update, but I know a lot of their attention is focused on Lion (10.7), and this is more maintenance than new features or cool stuff.
Today starts the push for the next four weeks to get out a new greek engine at The Shop. I'm not at all sure it's even possible, but I'll give it everything I've got for the four weeks to see if it can be done. There are a lot of things that have to happen in the right order, and pretty quickly. I've been told they'll all get done, but I have my doubts. It's just a lot of things that have to happen just so.
This morning already I'm spending too much time getting the next release of ZeroMQ checked out. It should be a pretty simple thing to check out, but it's taking far longer than the previous versions. Still, I have to get this done, and then I have to get SQLAPI++ working for the FreeTDS drivers we have on the boxes. All this in order to load up the data from the MS SQL Server databases that holds it all.
Yup, it's going to be tough to get it all done, but I'm willing to give it a try.
This morning I decided that $99/yr is only $8.25/month, and I pay more than that for my NNTP feed, so I decided that getting Xcode 4 was best achieved through joining the program as opposed to paying $4.99 at the Mac App Store. Plus, I get a lot more stuff in the Mac Developer Program - like access to radar bugs, pre-release software (if I want it), and I think it's even a decent discount on buying machines.
So I plopped down the PayPal card, and away we go! I'll be able to get Xcode 4, and while I may not love the single-editor pane interface, I'll see if I can't get used to it as it seems to be a big win for a lot of things.
Just kicked it up a notch... Nice.
This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 11.0.696.14 is out, and it seems to have several updates for a small minor point change. OK with me, I'm glad to see the continual improvement of the dev channel. I was also interested in the about:gpu, and tried it on my MacBook Pro - very neat. Glad it's used in rendering.
This afternoon I realized that git on my Mac Mini at home had the 64-bit version of git installed from the Mac OS X git installer, and that was a big mistake as it's a simple Core Duo CPU which can only run in 32-bit more on Snow Leopard. I had the 64-bit version for my MacBook Pro, and my iMac, but forgot to get the 32-bit version for the Mac Mini. Bummer.
Clearly, it'd be great if they had a universal build so I didn't have to deal with this, but hey... they build it and I can just keep things straight. My bad. Plain and simple. So I got the most recent builds for x86_64 and i386, and put the 64-bit package on my MacBook Pro, and tonight I'll install the 32-bit version on my Mac Mini. There. It'll work.
It's nice to see:
$ git --version git version 1.7.4.1
Nice. Love it when things "just work".
[3/18] UPDATE: this morning I installed the latest updates on my Mac Mini (i386) and on my iMac (x86_64) so all boxes are up to date and working fine.
I was looking on the web today for some C++ library that would wrap the erlang interface (ei) that appears very full-featured and yet somewhat cumbersome for a C++ codebase. I looked at several until I found one that looked to be full-featured, well thought out, and complete. I stopped when I found eixx on GitHub. This looks to be very nice. I haven't used it - yet, but if we go forward with the idea of having each service connect into the distributed erlang network and use that as the way to talk to the services, and serve up data.
The real advantage with this scheme is that we no longer have to deal with async I/O on the sockets for the client or the server. It's all encapsulated in the erlang runtime/library and that takes all the responsibility from our hands and puts it in the hands of the guys who made the language. Very nice.
Anyway... it'll be interesting when we move on this. I'm actually looking forward to it.
I've been using Growl for a very long time. I think it's about the most interesting new technology - with style, that I've seen in workstations in the last few years. It's really amazing. Anyway, when I started using Colloquy I was very impressed with the stability, features and style of the IRC client. I've written IRC clients for a while, and this guy is just amazingly nice. Beautiful, in fact.
But there's one issue that I've never figured out - Colloquy supports Growl, but Colloquy 2.3 and Growl 1.2 on Snow Leopard (10.6) just doesn't work well. Both Growl 1.2.1 and Colloquy 2.3 are 64-bit apps, but Colloquy is constantly showing the "Bubbles" Growl notification style - even though I changed the default style. And the notifications fall on top of other notifications. It's like Colloquy 2.3 has a parallel version of Growl. Very odd.
So this morning I did a little digging and found a posting about an error in Colloquy with regards to Growl. I'm not positive, but I think it's related to Growl 1.2.1 being beta at the time 2.3 came out, and 32-bit at that. Then I found this article and it pointed me to the nightly builds of Colloquy.
I chose the latest - Colloquy-5138.zip and BINGO! Everything is working amazingly well now. Very nice. I still have 64-bit apps, and the style is respected as well as the location of the notifications. It's like it's working the way it was meant to. Lovely.
I'm sure they'll push out a new version soon, and when they do, I'll get back on the "released" version of Colloquy, but for now, this is just fine.
Today has been a mixed bag... I did get a little development done on the ticker plants - just a few little things to polish up some things, but I also had hour-long design meetings (not bad), and then multi-hour-long debugging meetings where there was no hope of actually finding a problem because the developers had so little experience developing on linux that there was no hope of a successful test, and they really just needed to understand the proper way to edit/compile/test code.
The design meeting was really kind of interesting. We have The Broker, and it's been an erlang process, and a Java process, but it's always been centralized. I mentioned today that I wondered why it wasn't using Distributed Erlang, and let the entire brokerage system sit on all the machines and handle everything in a more distributed manner. Let erlang handle the registration, and the message passing. We can use J interface (Java library) and el (C library) to make our server applications appear as distributed erlang nodes. This makes it much easier to do all the things the Broker does.
Sure, the clients still can use sockets to connect to the Broker - or should I say A Broker, where we can have one running on each server in the server room. The client (defined as processes that aren't nodes in the distributed erlang system) can then use the socket interface to connect to a Broker and work as it always has, but the wrinkle is that it's only really brokering his traffic. This gets rid of a lot of the problems we had faced in the past - and went to great lengths to try and solve.
So much gets easier if the main components of the system are all distributed erlang nodes. Very nice solution to the problem.
The debugging session was only slightly productive, and ultimately disappointing. The code was compiled on CentOS5 and run on Ubuntu 10.04.1 - I'm not at all surprised that things broke. Far too different a version of libc, gcc - everything, really. We couldn't even get the code to build on Ubuntu. They need to step back, build the code on the box they are going to run it on, and then move forward.
It's slow going sometimes.
This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 11.0.696.12 is out, and it's got a good number of fixes - mostly UI components and front-facing issues, but that's OK too. Glad to see it. One thing I didn't expect as a brand new icon - seems the Googlers are going for a more geometric look and less of the shiny plastic look.
Good for them. I like it.