What's it all about, Alfie?

I was chatting with friends today and Adium let me know that 1.4b10 was available for updating. I had to say Yes to that! There's a lot of new things in this release - including a new release of libpurple. They are certainly be careful and getting a lot of things fixed in this release, and as long as it's running well on Snow Leopard, I'm content letting them get things done at their own pace. I just would like to know that things run well on Snow Leopard, and I'm not getting the sense of a lot of confidence in that area.

Soon, maybe. I hope.

I was looking this morning to see if Tomcat of some kind was available at HostMonster - just in case I was interested in doing a little servlet work or something like that, and found that while they don't support Tomcat, they do support PHP (knew that), and there was an update for WordPress to version 2.8.5.

WordPress is one of the most common platforms, and as such it's open to all kinds of hackers. This means that I need to stay as up to date as possible to make sure I don't get hacked. So I took the few minutes and got everything up to the stable release and now I'm ready to keep going.

Just feeling a little safer. I'll have to find a Tomcat install somewhere else.

They updated the Instant Hijack component of Audio Hijack Pro in 2.9.5 along with a few other bug fixes today. Nice to see the indie Mac development crowd doing so well.

Today I spent most of the day trying to check the fix I made yesterday afternoon. I believe it's right, as I've stepped through the code and I can't see why it might be wrong, but I wanted the users to check the data. I was very hard to get them to verify the data.

The primary problem was that the data is sampled from one system, pushed into another system and then shown in a client. It's a bit of a travel, and the question is: How old is this data?

The problem I kept running into was that I could not prove the data right because there was much I could not tell about the processing. The original developer used Aspect logging, and while that did what he wanted (kept the logging out of the processing code), it meant that there were limitations on the logging because of that same fact.

I decided that it had to change, and started putting in the logging at all levels of the application so that when I was done, there would be one log file that would tell me:

• what machine gathered the data for the server (by hostname or IP address)
• what type of request was done
• when it was sent to the extraction process and how long he took
• time required to parse the packet received at the server
• time required to incorporate the data in the packet
• total time from start of grab to the successful incorporation of the data

This is the kind of logging this application needs to have. It's got to mean something and be useful.

In a way, I'm a little glad. After thinning out the old Aspect logging, it's starting to look like something I might have done from the start. I can quantify the delays so that I can tell the users exactly what they are seeing. It's a much better place to be.

They may not like it, but that's a different issue.

Today Apple released a lot of new hardware - new iMacs, new Mac Minis (including a server version with no DVD but two hard drives), new mouse, new remote, and updates to the wireless products. It was a pretty amazing update to the iMac: 27" display with quad-core, up to 16GB RAM, and 2TB disk. All for less than $4k. Amazing.

The mouse looks great because it's got the multi-touch interface on the top - no buttons at all. Very sweet. Definitely cool hardware. Can't wait to see it in the Apple Store and check it out.

I want a new desktop machine 🙂

Wow! I missed the final release of LaunchBar 5.0! This morning I noticed that LaunchBar 5.0.1 was released and I got it right away. There's so much in this app that I don't use, and should... the clipboard history is incredible... the search in Google Images is sweet... there's a ton of stuff that's sitting in this little app that I feel it's something I need to spend about a month on to really find all the value in it. Until I have the time, I'll just use it as I do, and be very happy.

[10/22] UPDATE: it turns out that I didn't miss the final release of 5.0 - this was the final release. They just didn't let 5.0 see the light of day. Interesting. I don't feel nearly as bad about this.

Today I was trying to make headway on a problem I was struggling with and got word from the users that there was a data error in the web app I inherited - in production. Not good.

The problem was that they believed that the data they were seeing was not correct, and while I had changed a lot in the code, I hadn't changed that. Assuming they were right, it would mean that the code has been wrong for 9 months! Yikes.

Nothing like getting blasted from something you never expected.

I started digging into the code (no comments, of course) and realized what I thought was the problem. I spent the afternoon putting in a fix for this problem, and got it running before the end of the day. Unfortunately, there's not enough time to really check what it's doing, so I'll have to check it tomorrow.

I sure hope this works.

Transmit 3.6.8 was updated this weekend with much improved Snow Leopard support. While it's not my favorite FTP client, it's a good one, and built into Coda, an excellent web site development tool. I still like to keep it around as it's got capabilities that are far more than simple FTP, and when you need those, it's usually a panic situation and you really need them. Good tools to have.

Shimo 2.2.2 was released this weekend, and I had to get the update. It's the slickest, cleanest, way to deal with VPN issues that I've seen on Mac OS X. I can connect, do work, and disconnect without any issues at all. It just works. That's a lot better than the old VPN software I used to use at my previous job. It wasn't nearly as nice. If you have VPNs to deal with - really consider this. It's incredible.

I wanted to like Miro, as I like the concept behind it - Community Commons licensed content scoured from the web and displayed in a nice application, but it's the content that has left me wanting more. What's there is nice, but it's just not the content I was looking for. Even so, Miro 2.5.3 is out, and I decided that I needed to get it just on the off-chance that I'll someday find that the content is there, and I'll have a nice tool for viewing it. Hope springs eternal.