What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I took the time to update the web sites on sherman and ghost - my two iMacs in my office at home. Sherman is an Intel iMac, and Ghost is an older G5 iMac that used to be Sherman until it died and I took it to the Apple Store to get it fixed only to find out that the cost of the repair ($900) was almost as much as a new Intel iMac. At the time I needed a machine, and so I got the new one and shelved the old G5.

After about a year, I decided with the office re-make, I needed to fix the G5 for sentimental reasons. This time, the Apple Store fixed it for free! Gotta love that service. I'm sure it had more to do with the fact that I'd dropped several thousand dollars at the Apple Store this year, but hey, free is free!

So I needed to update their web sites with correct pictures, names and details. Not hard, just needed to pay attention to a few details. Got it done and even updated the DNS records at easyDNS for Ghost.

This morning I noticed that MacSpice 2.10.15 is out and the release notes indicate a smattering of bugs fixed.

This is just one of those things that is like a time machine for me - it takes me back to my roots in Electrical Engineering and the hours I'd spend on the design and then verification in SPICE. It's not a tool to help you design something as much as it's there to verify that you've done your job. It's like a compiler - it's a measuring device on the correctness of your work, not an aid to doing it.

Lots of interesting times sitting at the terminals at Purdue getting outputs. It was so very long ago, but at times it seems like yesterday.

I was sitting here after a hard day looking at a few of my systems restart and pick up a bug fix, and thought: Yup, some days are easier than others... Not every day can be a winner. Even when you do good work, and get a lot of stuff done, you can feel run-down and tired, and that just casts a shadow over how you feel. Good day, but with a headache, it feels crummy.

Well... not every day can be sunshine. Today's my day to take a hit for the team. Hopefully, tomorrow will be better. Get started on something new, get a fresh look at things... get rid of this headache.

Here's to tomorrow...

I put a few finishing touches on the multi-scatter graph today. It was pretty much done, but I wanted to give it the ability to read the initial selections for the x-axis column as well as any y-axis columns from the applet PARAM tags. With that, the developers that asked for this can pretty much put together everything they need.

The new applet PARAM tags are pretty simple:

• defaultXAxis - this is the name of the column that is the initial selection for the x-axis.
• defaultYAxis - this is the encoded string of a Vector of Strings that are the column names to be placed on the y-axis initially.

where the encoded string is the output of the call:

  Vector    v = new Vector();
  ...
  String    str = BKTable.generateCodeFromValues(v);

where the Vector v is populated with the names of the columns to place on the graph.

I have to say it looks good and works well. I've handed it off to the developers that want to use it and supplied them with an example HTML file where it's used.

This morning I noticed that the Mozilla Group had released two releases: Firefox 3.0.4 and Camino 1.6.6. The Firefox release was about the typical security and stability fixes, and the Camino was the same. However, I have to say that this release of Camino has markedly better button rendering when going to sites that didn't render buttons nicely in the past. For that, I'm grateful.

So, it's update time for browsers. Not bad.

Today Apple made this announcement - it's going to be the last MacWorld for Apple. It's the last keynote, and it's not even going to be given by Steve. So it appears the days of great product announcements from Apple is over. Now, it'll be trickled out in special media events at Apple's campus, or just on the online store.

While I can understand the realization that the trade show is not the center of attention that it used to be, it's sad to see Apple stop supporting a show specifically created for them to showcase their products. In fairness to Apple, that's the job of the Apple Stores, now.

So it's going to be a different release cycle. Maybe the rumor pages will have increased importance... hard to say. But it is a definite shift.

The more I use VoodooPad Pro, the more I like it. Version 4 was a great update - the best part being the singular palette like Acorn (another FLying Meat product), which makes it very easy to manipulate things in the notebook.

With 4.0.3 released today, there are a lot more things to like. Most of these things are bug fixes and a few extensions. Nothing hit me, but it's great to stay up to date.

Probably the nicest graphing package for Mac OS X - DataGraph, was updated to v1.6.2 today. He added a lot of nice features - templates, assistants for the date/time formats, pop-up widgets for the selection of values like line width, etc. It's a nice little update. I still like the fact that if you register for $30 (or something like that) you can incorporate his graphing frameworks into your own apps. My idea was to use this as the basis of a lot of simulation graphing. I haven't gotten around to it yet - as much by the time as for the fact that he still doesn't support the types of graphs I need - 3D mapped to 2D. Contour, heat, those kids of graphs.

Still doesn't make this any less nice of a package. Excellent.

Amazingly, BBEdit 9.1 had just the feature I was hoping it'd add - stripping white space at the end of lines. I do that a lot - even have a macro for it, but now I don't have to. Just set it up in the Text Files preferences pane and every time you save, it's going to strip those nasty trailing whitespace characters.

The release notes have a lot more - like a new font: Consolas Regular. It's remarkably like my current favorite: Panic Sans from the guys at Panic who distributed it with Coda, their all-in-one web development app. It's clean, clear, and the only difference I can see is that the point sizes are a little different. Consolas 10pt is Panis Sans 9pt. That's it.

Yet there's even more. BBEdit 9.1 has a much improved FTP/SFTP interface that is supposed to be much faster than the previous version. Excellent. RCS keywords are handled better - it's amazing, really. The list goes on and on. It's still my favorite editor on the Mac.

UPDATE: I've been looking at the new Consolas font and how it differs from Panic Sans... it's got more white space above and below the line. More even, than the same point size in Panic Sans. Meaning that if Consolas 10pt is the same horizontal size as Panic Sans 9pt it's got more vertical room than Panis Sans 10pt. That's very interesting. More whitespace in between the lines may make this more readable while making the horizonal compression able to get more columns in the same real-estate. Interesting.

Well, I heard in this article that in JDK/JRE 1.6.0_12 and beyond, Sun is going to be delivering a 64-bit Java plugin. Finally. I've been waiting for a long time for this, and while I have to say it's not going to impact me that much as I don't do a lot of web/applet-based development any more, it's nice to know it's there should I ever get back to it.

Now all we need to see is a pre-packaged Firefox for Linux that's 64-bit.