What's it all about, Alfie?

Well... it's been another great day. I added a lot of polish to the second web page of the site, and now it can plot normalized greeks - normalized by the thresholds for the selected Portfolio. It makes them all out of 100, assuming they don't breach the thresholds. It was a nice little addition and I know they are really going to like it.

Also, the support crew finally got the production box working, and it's running just fine. Great news, because now I can update Test to include all the additions I've made to the system - the new JavaScript drop-down menus, the ability to link to the base data I'm displaying, and of course, help and how to contact us. It's going to be great.

Then I'll tag it and write up some release notes so that they can keep track of things the way they normally want to. It's all very fair, I just didn't know I needed these things, so this first release was a little 'sketchy'. The next one will be better.

So a good day, and lots of good style improvements on the pages. It's looking like a real site now. Can't wait to do the next page.

Hmmm... I read this article this morning and it brings to the front an interesting possibility - getting an iPhone while retaining my Verizon service. The single biggest reason I haven't gotten an iPhone to date is the fact that it's not available on Verizon and we have the big family plan, etc. and don't really want to leave Verizon. I've heard a lot of issues about the AT&T coverage not being very good, and while I may not like the way Verizon "corporate" is seemingly constantly mis-handling our bill, the customer service agents at the local Verizon store always fix it up right and we never have to pay more than we should.

So if this is true, there will be one less reason not to buy one. If the next version of the iPhone can take movies as well as pictures, and there's 32GB of storage, then it'll easily replace my iPod Touch, and I'll probably be looking to get one. The features are just getting too nice to pass up.

This morning I saw that GraphicConverter 6.4.1 is out with quite a few updates and improvements. While I'm not using it a lot after I started using Acorn, I still like to have it around for those times when I need to convert a very odd graphics data file to something a little more standard. Like the name says, this is what it's really good at.

Nice to see they are still working on it.

This morning I saw that Cyberduck 3.2 is out with quite a few fixes and additional features. While I'm not hip-deep in SFTP, it's something I use from time to time, and Cyberduck is certainly the easiest to use on the Mac that I've run into. It's small, fast, and works like you'd expect it to. Nice.

Today I was spending a little time looking for a simple, yet easy-to-use JavaScript drop-down menu code for my web app at work. I have a feeling that I'm going to need it with the number of pages we'll be writing, it's going to make sense to have something like we had back at my previous job. Actually, I want something a lot nicer than we had back there, so I started digging now.

What I found was a lot of JavaScript menu systems for sale. Now I can see the value of commercial software - I just didn't expect it to be this menu. One of the nicer free solutions was this guy I found. It's simple, seems to work just fine, and I should be able to make it work for what I need.

However, there are limitations. First, there's no multiple level menus. Second, the menu structure has to include a bit of JavaScript in it - not horrible, but not as clean as simple UL and LI list items. That's where this commercial offering really makes a difference.

This one takes nothing more than UL and LI lists, embedded within each other, and a few class tags, and builds a very nice menu. Very nice indeed. Different themes as well as different animation techniques makes it a very nice menu.

But it's $200. Not exactly inexpensive when all I really need will be served by the free alternative. I'm going to have to run this by the purchasing folks and see if they'll swing for it. If they do, that would be great. But I can certainly see their point if they say no. After all... the free alternative is fine for what we need.

We'll see what they say on Monday.

I've had odd luck with the SimpleTech proDrive 1TB external drive on my new Unibody MacBook Pro 17" since I got it. I needed to get more space, and I made the mistake of not going with Western Digital MyBook because the drive in the SimpleTech was a WD 1TB drive. I thought they'd be the same.

Wrong. The I/O board is completely different. I'm sorry I got it.

But that's not the problem. The problem has been that when the MacBook Pro tries to tell the drive to go to sleep, it doesn't understand the message, times out, and then the Mac thinks the drive has dismounted itself on it's own. There's nothing I can do by unplug it and plug it back in to get it going. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's a pain in the neck, and I wish I had a WD MyBook in it's place.

Well, today I noticed it doing this and when I plugged it back in is would not mount! OK, this is new and it's not fun. So I broke out a USB cable and hooked that up. Bingo! Worked fine. Try the FireWire cable - no good. Repeat two more to see that the USB was working and the FireWire wasn't.

No messages in the Console or logs. Nothing.

Then I thought Hey, let's put it to sleep and wake it up and see what happens. Good idea. After it went to sleep successfully, when I opened the case and it woke up, I was able to connect and mount the drive.

Whew!

I'm still not happy with the drive, and now I'm more motivated than ever to get a MyBook. They just don't have any problems. I've had at least four of them at home and they all run like a champ. So maybe that's a task for this weekend - get a >1TB MyBook drive. Anyway, if this happens again, that's the first thing to try.

I noticed this morning that DrawIt has released an update to 3.7.7 with a few interesting fixes:

• Fixed a bug that crashed DrawIt when opening a contextual menu
• Fixed a bug that crashed DrawIt when vectorizing a text layer that contains multiple colors

Interestingly, they anticipated a problem in the auto-updating, and so advised that if you had a problem, go to the web site and download a new copy. I had the problem - an invalid update signature, and did the manual update. Worked like a charm.

I noticed this morning that there was a new version of Coda released a few days ago. The release notes say that there are a few things fixed - including a little better support for Git, which is very nice. Also, there's better syntax highlighting for regexo in Javascript, which is nice, now that I'm getting hip deep into Javascript.

In general, it'd be nice if they also added Tomcat support, but I understand that's not their target audience, and I'm OK with that. It's just such a nice tool.

I was working with the JSON response from my servlet and needed to be able to print the complete structure of a JavaScript object. I wanted to make sure that I was evaluating what I was receiving from the servlet properly. Well... there isn't something that's a part of JavaScript natively, but you can do something simple and you'll get something pretty close:

  var data = eval('(' + xhr.responseText + ')');
  var guts = '';
  for (var key in data) {
    guts += key + ' : ' + data[key] + '\n';
  }

and you get the keys and values for those keys. You aren't not going to get a complete recursive output, but if you wanted to, it's easy to imagine making a print function and you're good to go.

Just a neat little trick.

OK, once again, we have an update from the iTerm group - this one appears to have been release on 4/15 and I just missed it. Fair enough. It's update says:

• Fixed clipping bottom of fonts that are not Monaco (#2735995)
• Smart window placement remembers initial window (#2736180)
• Windows will no longer be placed under the dock (#2740187)
• Fixed default background colour being drawn over background image
• Fixed a bug when pasting more than 1024 characters of text
• Fix overwriting of static window/bookmark titles (#2744363)
• Revert to old force screen update behaviour for 10.4 (#2738986)
• Rewrote large parts of PTYTask

all of which aren't a big deal to me, but nice to see movement is being made. My remaining issue is the lack of "Workspace" support where Terminal.app has it. If it weren't for that, I'd be able to switch back to iTerm. Because I sure do like the absence of the scrollbars on the windows.

UPDATE: I decided to send in a feature request about the 'workspaces' feature. I don't have high hopes for this as it's probably not what they are interested in adding, but you never know. No harm in asking.