What's it all about, Alfie?

I noticed that Firefox 3.0.6 was out this morning with a handy load of security and stability fixes. I think that's the standard mantra these days for finding holes in the code that can be exploited for incoming hacks and plugging them without acknowledging that they ever existed in the first place.

After all, if there's a published problem with a certain library - like OpenSSL, then the update would specifically state that in the release notes. But hey... that's reasonable. They are probably working on a big new release and these are the maintenance things that need to be done given all the users that are depending daily on Firefox as their browser.

OK, the technician just left, and I have to say that he was a very nice guy about the installation. He was not used to all Macs (save one linux box), but we got it installed and working in no time at all.

Now I'm running at 50Mbps down, 10Mbps up. Very nice. Sure, it's just the "next level", but it's something that I've wanted to have for a long time. No longer is the speed of my connection the limiting factor - it's going to be the hardware on the ends that decides. And, with my new laptop, that's not going to be a real problem.

Love the speed. Highly recommended.

UPDATE: OK, from work the speed into the house is fantastic! I can't believe it. It's as if I'm sitting there. True, a lot of it may be because the line here is not very loaded - and I'll have to check later in the day, but it's a wonderful sign so far. Wow... this is what I've wanted for a long time. I'm really glad I got it.

My family doesn't watch a lot of TV together, but every time we have an episode of House, M.D. on the DVR to watch, it's time to get everyone together and sit and watch carefully. Everyone tries to pick up the clues, tries to match the BINGO card of House-imsm like "Plasmaferesis" and "it's Lupis", or "get a CAT scan"... it's literally fun for my entire family. And I love every minute of it.

However, last night wasn't the typical House joy-joy as it caused a little problem for the kids. First, we have been having 'issues' with the Comcast DVR box - the fast forwarding would jump minutes and not seconds, just to the end of the recording or to the beginning - seemingly randomly. So Liza called Comcast yesterday and they said that they'd have a technician come out and bring a new DVR box (dual HD tuner). Problem is that all the shows are physically on the DVR, so new box means no shows. This means that the House, M.D. that was taping at 7:00 pm last night on FOX would be gone today when the DVR switch-a-roo happened. No good.

So we decided to watch the episode last night. Yeah... not the first thing you'd see in "Parenting 101"... but these are desperate times, and require desperate measures.

Problem was that after the show at 8:00 pm, two of the kids had homework left to do that they "neglected" to tell us about when they got home and before dinner. So they were planning on sneaking it in after dinner, but then House was far more interesting, and so they put it off.

Procrastination is a type of behavior which is characterized by deferment of actions or tasks to a later time. Psychologists often cite procrastination as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision.

Thanks Wikipedia... I could have put the pictures of my kids and Liza up there and be just as good. They all get it from her, and she knows it. But, she also got on them for it, and forced them to get their work done quickly so that they still had a reasonable bed time.

So we have to be more careful about replacing DVRs on Tuesday. Prior planning - that's what it's all about.

I was looking at trying to clean up a few digital recordings I'd made back on my old NeXTSTEP turbo Color Slab, which is now gone to the great computer room in the sky, as there was a lot of noise in the samples and it seemed like a simple thing to do - filter it, baby. High-pass filter to be more precise. So I started looking around to see what I had to work with.

Unfortunately, when I sent an email to the Fission creators, it was clear that Fission was going to be a time-slice editing tool - lossless editing in their marketing terms, and I can certainly respect that. It's far more likely in this day and age to have access to a good digital master than the crummy digital master I have now. But be that as it may, it was clear after emailing them that I wasn't going to be able to use Fission for this - I had to look elsewhere.

The next thing I saw was Audacity 1.3.7, a free audio editor. It looked like it had decent capabilities, including a lot of plugins that got installed into the system at /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/ so that they might be used by many different audio editing applications. While I liked the capabilities of Audacity, it just wasn't getting done what I needed. However, it did point out to me that these plugins might be useful by other apps, and that was very helpful.

The next thing I found was something I'd hit on before - Wave Editor 1.4.4. This was a very nicely done audio editor, and while it was $79, I'm not against paying for a good tool when I see it. What I was able to see when I started playing with it, in depth, was that it had the tools to filter out the noise pretty effectively. I was still a little concerned that it suppressed the volume as much as it did when I applied the HPF, but that's probably something I can deal with in the app as well.

It had the nice tools like a spectrum analyzer and lots of ways of looking at the data - very much as I might have written it - from a math and engineering standpoint. Pretty nice. I also like that they have a complete support system built right into the app so I can ask a question if I get stuck on something. Pretty nice for a tool like this that there's a steep learning curve on.

So I'm going to see if I can't fix up these old files and clean out the noise. Sure do hope so.

This morning I noticed that GitX has been updated to 0.6.1 with quite a few new features from version 0.5 that I had been running. I haven't done a lot in Git, but I know that's where I'll be doing all the work I want to do, and for the little projects that I have put into Git, it's a great little tool for visualizing the repository.

I'm still a command-line guy, but old habits die hard. If only Xcode put in Git support. That would be great.

It looks like the guys at Bare Bones software have been busy working on BBEdit 9.1.1 which seems to be just a fixes release. No new features at this time, but plenty of bugs fixed - some even crashers. Nice to see that the updates are still coming.

I've just finished what I can call "Round 1" of the refactoring and updating of my Potentials application. Basically, it's a Poission's Equation solver that allows for several difference shaped objects - metals and non-metals, on a field with boundary conditions and varying dielectric constants. The solution is the potential at each point, and from there you can get the electric field - well, actually, I do in the output.

What I had originally written was the 'engine' of the simulator, and not really spent any significant time on the UI. Well, a few days ago, I decided that I needed to have a test case for the CorePlot work I'm going to be doing and so I decided to start fixing up this guy as I was going to need to sharpen my skills anyway, before diving into the CorePlot code.

The original UI had an NSTextView for the log messages from the simulation and an NSTextField for the filename to load up and run, along with a "Go" button and a status line label. Really, it worked, but it wasn't very clean at all.

The new UI has an MSTextView, but now it's for editing the source for the simulation and using menu selection and keyboard shortcuts for the running of the simulation. It's also got the File Open and File Save dialogs so that you interact with it as you would a 'real' application.

No question, I need to add a lot to make it "real". Most notably, preferences and the saveing and loading of same. That way, the font could be changed, the window's position saved and reloaded, and even the working file reloaded on restart. There's a lot that could be done, but I've been making really good progress so far, and I think now it's time to spend a little time on the CorePlot framework to see what it is that needs to be done there.

I noticed this morning that Cyberduck 3.1.2 is out with a dozen or so new features. There seemed to be a few issues with the WebDAV support and the Amazon S3 support, but they managed to fit in a few new features as well.

Great little app if you need stand-alone FTP/SFTP file moving.

This morning I was starting up Colloquy to put in the connection parameters for the new CorePlot chat channel (irc.oftc.net/#coreplot) and noticed that Colloquy 2.2 was out with quite a few new features.

These included a few high-CPU usage fixes and several localization fixes. In general, this had been a significant update. I know they have been working on the iPhone app for a while, but it's nice to see that they haven't given up on the Mac app, either. Very nice.

I have been having a blast refactoring the GUI of my Poission Equation solver - Potentials, using Xcode. I had a very simplistic interface in the beginning because I wanted to focus on the math involved, and then never really took the time to mess with the GUI as I realized that I didn't have access to a really good graphing package with which to display the results.

With CorePlot on the horizon, I got interested in it again and decided that the simplistic view of the app needed an update. I had a simple text field for the input file name, a "Go" button, a status label and a text field for log messages. Problem is that the solution is so fast, there's no need for the log text area as the status line will be fine for user feedback.

So I decided to make the app an editor of the source file and headed in that direction. I was very happy to see that I had already really laid down about 80% of the necessary code for this, and there were only a few things I needed to change. When I started to edit the MrBig.h header to include more outlets and actions I was stunned to see that InterfaceBuilder automatically re-parsed that header and added in the actions and outlets to it's representation.

That was a real treat. In the past, you had to manually ask for that to be done and it was always a touchy process that could get you into trouble if you didn't format the actions and outlets properly. Now, with the IDOutlet and IBAction descriptors, it's easier for IB to figure all this out.

Amazing tools, and lots of fun to work with.