What's it all about, Alfie?

I've been holding onto this for quite a while, but it's a really nice component of Mail.app on Mac OS X. If you have entries in your Address Book then Mail.app puts their picture in the corner of your mail messages. It's a neat little way to "see" the people that are emailing you. But what if you have a lot of mailing lists, or stuff like that? You don't want to have them in your Address Book. Well… you don't have to.

This posting reminds us that we can simply create a directory of images, and with properly named TIFF files, we can give Mail.app all the information it needs to match up images to senders. Simply:

  $ cd ~/Library/Images
  $ mkdir People

then, for every email address you want to have associated with an image, make a file in that directory with the name: email_addr.tiff. So if you wanted to have an image for everything coming from yoyo@gimme.com, you'd place a TIFF file in the People directory named yoyo@gimme.com.tiff. Simple.

Restart Mail.app and it'll see the images and you're in business. Very slick.

This morning I noticed that once again, work, not laziness, has killed my posting here. I really hate that. One of the real joys of what I do is being able to write a little bit about it every day, but the way things have been going at The Shop, that's nearly impossible these last few weeks. It's been non-stop work on finishing up the Greek Engine project, and dealing with the fact that ultimately, we are helpless to really have the kind of system we'd like to have because the people maintaining the instrument data just don't seem to have it together.

I'm trying to believe that they are doing their best, but it's getting increasingly hard to believe that. I don't want to think badly of people, but when I come in to a database with five instruments in it - not the 400,000+ I was expecting, then it's really hard to think that they even did any testing at all on the data. I know it's a matter of expectations and abilities, and for the longest of time the expectations have been crazy low, but at some point you can't fall back to that and have to take some level of responsibility for your actions.

I can write the greatest code in the world, but what my users are going to remember is that the data coming out of it was horrible, and therefore my app was horrible, all because of bad data. There's no way around it. The Team depends on every single person doing their job. There just are no unimportant roles.

It's just heartbreaking to me to see this. Having put in the work I have to see the complete and total lack of personal responsibility in the quality of the data I'm getting. It really is just heartbreaking.

But then to add insult to the injury, I'm unable to write about it all. Unable to vent about it. I've tried and tried to make this a priority, but in the end, I know myself. When there is code to write and I have time before the train, I'm going to write it. That's my work-ethic, and there's very little I can do about it - even if I wanted to. Which I don't.

I'm going to have to try harder. I'm afraid that in the end, this is just the wrong job. Maybe it's a matter of timing. Maybe it's more fundamental than that, I don't know. I'll try to give it all the time I can to turn around, and I know there are people here really trying to turn this around. But if things don't change, I know there will come a point where I simply have to disconnect myself from this place in order to save myself.

I hope I can hold out.

This morning I noticed that once again, Google Chrome dev was update - this time to 17.0.938.0 and this time, it looks like the big changes for me is the new V8 Javascript engine to 3.7.6.0 which includes the new garbage collector. The release notes post indicates that downloads might be broken for some, but thankfully, that's not the main usage I have for Chrome, so I'm safe - for now. I'm happy to see Google keep moving forward on Chrome, it's about the only thing I'm positive about when it comes to Google. The engineers aren't running the show anymore, and it pains me to see the "Do no evil" corporation do such horribly bad things.

Sigh.

But at least Chrome is going well.

I remember years ago, Cabel S. writing about the nice little Javascript and graphics snip called FancyZoom that allows you to easily put thumbnail images on your web site, and then with a click, the full-size image is displayed. It's really pretty amazing. I downloaded it, and started messing with it a bit. I can understand the directory structure he chose - it's common for him, but for me, it was a little different, and that's OK fine with me. I was able to easily move things around a bit, get the links right, and it fit right into Liza's home page.

I remember it being a lot smoother back when it first came out, but now that machines and browsers are so much faster, it almost flashes up. Pretty neat, in my book. So I need to run it past Liza and see what she thinks, but I'm pretty pleased with it. What I need now is a lot of Liza's artwork and then we can get to organizing it in folders, etc. and then making thumbnails of the images, and we'll be ready to go.

I'm not sure if we'll end up needing to back-end this with a real service, but if we do, there's more than enough capability in PHP, should we need it, and I can even put up a little database to hold the information for the pages.

Pretty sweet.

As expected, Google Chrome dev 17.0.928.0 is out, and with it are a few big ticket items: the new V8 Javascript engine is at 3.6.6.3, there are additions to the incognito windows, and several changes to the linux version to speed it up. Nice work. I read in the comments to the last release that Google is trying to make the release cycle six weeks. It's something to strive for, but I think that's a little arbitrary as there's no way to know what the next six weeks will bring, and how that will impact the ability to release significant changes to the code.

More likely, it's an arbitrary scale to just "change the numbers" and the third number, 928, is really the number to watch. Still, it's nice they are trying to have something out regularly. It's a nice goal to have.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 16.0.912.21 was out, and while I'm still expecting 17.x any day now, it's nice to see that they are still looking into the finer points of the codebase. The release notes for this version are pretty tame - nothing amazing, but it's progress nonetheless.

This morning I noticed that the Growl Team had updated the Growl Version Detective to version 1.2, and with it, they changed significantly the interface and it's capabilities. In recent days, the Team had released the 1.3 SDK and the new version of the Growl Version Detective gathers together all the known Growl-based applications and lists their version of the Growl.framework. It then allows you to upgrade the app to version 1.3 of the framework, which is a nice new feature.

I was able to see that Colloquy was on 1.1.2, I think, and after trying to upgrade it to 1.2.2 myself, I didn't hold out a lot of hope that 1.3 was going to fix things. Silly me! I punched the button and restarted, and things started popping up in the proper style just like magic. Amazing. Clearly, they have done a lot of work on the 1.3 SDK, and then to put that into the Growl Version Detective was really a wonderful idea. Brilliant, in fact.

So I'm now just waiting for Colloquy to get an update. It's in the offing, waiting for the 1.3 SDK to become final, and then they should be able to update the codebase and release something. Looking forward to it.