Life, Technology, and Meteorology
Buzz Andersen posted comments and a summary page for the planned WWDC Weblogger Meetup. It looks like there are about 15 people who have already shown interest on his site, so it should be pretty fun.
I guess I should probably register for the conference…one minor technicality that I haven’t taken care of yet. 🙂
March was the first month that I’ve gotten over 1Gb of traffic on my web server, 1.07Gb to be exact. Probably chicken feed compared to some sites of more popular software, but it’s a pretty good milestone for me.
Buzz Andersen mentioned in his blog that there should be a get-together for Mac bloggers at WWDC this year. I’m all for it. Last year I met a lot of great developers at the MacOS X Conference (some of which are mentioned in the links in the sidebar), and I hope to do the same this year at WWDC.
I’m pretty excited about going to this year’s event. I’ve never been to WWDC before, but every year I hear great things about it, and wish that I could have went. Apple recently posted a partial listing of the conference sessions, and a lot of them look to be very good. I’m hoping they release some good hardware there too, as I want to get a new G5 and I’m waiting for the next revision to come out. 🙂
I believe this was posted in the last few days on Slashdot, but there are a couple of guys that are starting to make quick videos on different topics relating to hacking. The show is called thebroken, and they already have 3 episodes out so far. Think of it as a 10-15 minute show that covers a couple of topics that might be covered in a magazine like 2600, except a little more watered down, slightly younger, and a lot more fun. For example, the first episode has information on how to go out war driving for WiFi hotspots (including the process of cracking a WEP key), and finished up with showing how to use social engineering to get a free pizza. 🙂 The third episode is pretty good as well…learn how to fry your computer pretty easily “just in case” and see an interview with Kevin Mitnick.
Just a disclaimer, I don’t endorse any of the activities that are shown in the episodes. I’ve always found it interesting to learn about the possibilities of hacking randomly without ever really acting on them. That said, if you dig this kind of stuff, check it out.
I’m a total LaunchBar fanatic. Since I started using it last year, it has become an indispensable tool on my Powerbook, and I’m caught by surprise when I use another Mac that doesn’t have it installed.
Today I was browsing this forum over at MacNN and noticed some people mentioning a new launch manager similar to LaunchBar, called Quicksilver. I decided to check it out, and it looks like it has a lot of potential. They are still in the beta stage of the project (beta 19 is the most current), but it seems to work well, and has a nice interface too. The only problem that I’ve found with it is that it’s not fast enough. I might just be spoiled by LaunchBar’s speed, but now I expect a launcher to be ready to go as soon as I hit command-space. Launching a utility in LaunchBar takes less than a second, but Quicksilver takes a second or two just to display, and another couple of seconds for me to type in a shortcut and find what I want. In the long run, things will keep getting faster though, so it’s probably nothing to worry about.
Anyway, check it out here if you’re interested. The best part about Quicksilver is the price…free!
As Michael McCracken commented in the writeback of my First Blog Posting, he wrote an app called Blapp to post to Blosxom blogs from a very handy interface. This is my first time giving it a go, so I hope this works. 🙂 So far I am very impressed. The main application window is a Blog Items view. Here you get a listing of all your posts, organized by date. Optionally, you can switch to the Files section and it will give you a hierarchical listing of your blosxom directory. Double click on an entry, and a blog posting window shows up. Each blog posting window is split up into two sections. The top is where you write your HTML, and the bottom gives you a live preview of what it will look like when it’s rendered.
This is definitely cool, and I recommend checking it out if you use blosxom. <Publish>
Last Tuesday I was pleasantly surprised to find XRG featured as the MacOS X Hints Pick of the Week. Robg had a lot of good things to say about the app. Getting reviews like this is what makes all the development time I’ve put into XRG worth it. The amazing thing is how much traffic I have gotten in the past few days just from their site alone. Their site has generated almost 3,000 visits (over 40,000 hits) since Tuesday morning, more than twice as many visits than any other Mac news site that XRG has been featured on, including this article on MacSlash. It’s a good thing I’m not paying any hosting fees for my bandwidth. 🙂
Philippe Martin released an initial version of his haxie called DesktopSweeper a couple of days ago. DesktopSweeper allows you to toggle whether or not your desktop icons are displayed. To me, this is very useful since I don’t like having a lot of clutter on my desktop, but I still want to have shortcuts there to my most often used locations on the file system. The key combination used to toggle whether or not the icons are shown is configurable, but is set to command-enter by default. Hit that key combo once, and it hides all your icons, leaving a nice clean desktop. Hit it again, and all your icons show up again right where you left them. Response time is fast, and you don’t have to be in the Finder to use the key combination.
This is the most useful utility I’ve seen since I discovered LaunchBar 6 months ago. I also want to mention that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Philippe for quite awhile now. He has given me a lot of input and ideas for XRG since the early days, and he does a great job of picking out small interface bugs and pointing out how things on XRG’s interface should work. Anyway, if you have a Mac, check out DesktopSweeper.
For awhile now, people have been requesting that I put something in XRG’s interface to allow them to turn off the UI Elements, such as having the XRG icon shown in the dock. There has always been kind of a hack to do this, by adding the following text to the app Contents/Info.plist file:
<key>NSUIElement</key> <true/>
This is fine, but in Panther it got a little bit more difficult. Panther now caches these Info.plist files. This is great…the more caching the better, especially for things like Info.plist files that don’t change often. The bad thing is that the cache doesn’t check the last modified date of the plist file. Instead, it checks if the modification date for the .app directory has been changed. I’m not sure why they would do this, as it seems to me that checking the plist file modification date would be just as easy, and that way they know they have a copy of the latest file.
Some people have remarked here that if you move the application to a different directory and back, that the cache gets updated and all is well. This is fine, if a user is changing this value by hand and using the Finder to do it, but it leaves a little to be desired if you are trying to change this value programmatically. I thought of just moving the .app to “X Resource Graph 1.app” and then back real quick, but that doesn’t seem like a nice way of doing things. So that got me thinking, and I found a much easier way to do it using the simple Unix executable, “touch”. I was very pleased to find that making the change manually and touching the application worked just fine. Since it’s very easy to run a quick system command from code, this shouldn’t be a problem at all, so it should be in the next version of XRG.
Anyway, so if anyone is trying to do this same thing from code, hopefully this will help. Now all I need to do is find a way for the change to take effect without having to restart the app. Maybe some kind of hack on the Dock like the one other coders use to add rogue menu extras.
I came across this application called teleport for MacOS X. Basically, it works as a software KVM switch between two computers. You configure one Mac as the server, and the other as the client, and when you move your mouse to an edge of a screen on one computer, it will appear on the other computer and send all keyboard events there as well. Kind of like having multiple monitors, except with multiple computers as well. I never would of thought of doing something like this in software. This type of application has a ton of potential. I hope the developer keeps on it, as right now the released version is “Public Preview 1.”
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