It’s update o’clock

Posted on 2007-08-18 by Graham Lee

In other words, it’s "Graham remembers that someone needs to write the interwebs, too" time. The main reason I haven’t written in a while is that I’m enjoying the new job, so it’s satiating my hacking desires. No hacking projects = nothing to talk about. I can’t really talk about the work stuff, either; this is unfortunate because I did some really cool KVC-cheating in a prototype app I wrote, and it’d be a good article to describe that.

I’ve more or less dropped off the GNUstep radar recently. I still need to talk to the employers’ legal eagles in order to update my FSF copyright assignment, and then find something to hack on. Currently I only have a Mac OS X machine so I’d probably switch to some app-level stuff. I have half a plan in my mind for a SOPE app, but despite reading all the documentation I still haven’t worked out how to get started :-|. The code isn’t too much of a problem, I’ve used WebObejcts before, but WebObjects has a ‘hit this button to build and run your WebObjects code’ button, and there’s no description AFAICT for SOPE of what to put in the GNUmakefile to get built and running SOPE code, even whether you’re supposed to provide your own main() or anything. Hmmm…I wonder if there’s a sample project around…

Posted in cocoa, gnustep, SOPE | Leave a comment

Ich habe mein Handy verloren

Posted on 2007-07-14 by Graham Lee

Ooops. Left my mobile phone on holiday in Germany when I came back. This may explain why some people who were expecting to hear from me in Germany didn’t…anyway, could anyone who thinks I ought to know their phone number please either leave a private comment on this livejournal entry (all comments are private by default on that post), or e-mail me? Thankyou! I promise to buy a filofax which I won’t leave in foreign parts.

Posted in crosspost | Leave a comment

The new netiquette

Posted on 2007-06-21 by Graham Lee

It used to be that netiquette was all about TURNING OFF THE CAPS LOCK, making sure that the subject matched the content, that you didn’t go off the wall if someone didn’t reply to your e-mail in a few minutes, that sort of thing. In fact, this (RFC1855) sort of thing. But now there are different netiquette requirements, and no obvious guidelines, nor seemingly any common practices. Now I’m just the kind of person who thinks that some de facto ruleset would be useful, so that everyone knows what to expect from everyone else.

For instance, take social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook. How well do you know someone before you ‘add’ them as a friend? Once met at a conference, once read their blog, cohabited for two years? Do you talk to them first, to let them know who you are and that you’re not a crazy stalker? If someone adds you, and you don’t know who they are, do you accept or reject by default? Do you ask them who they are? If they claim to have met you at $conference or in $pub, do you accept that, ask for a photo, or what?

Posted in meta-interwebs | Leave a comment

A bit late for that, isn’t it?

Posted on 2007-06-19 by Graham Lee

Just won the above-linkied item on eBay: the Amiga SDK :-) I’m probably slightly late to make any money out of Amiga development, but I’m glad I finally get to tinker. Might have to crack open the AROS if I get sufficiently involved…

I could probably write a three-page rant about how great the Amiga was and how badly Commodore stuffed up. But of course, none of it would be new ;-).

Posted in Amiga | 2 Comments

Apple and Google sitting in a tree, f-i-g-h…erm…t-i-ng

Posted on 2007-06-13 by Graham Lee

This really came out of a throwaway comment I made on Daniel, but it seems popular to pick apart every last iota of Steveness from the WWDC keynote, and I’m nothing if not popular. So here we go.

What is WebClip? In fact, that’s not really the question I want to be asking. We know what WebClip is; it’s a technology which lets users see only the bits of web pages that those users want to see. The real question is what does that mean? Well, I know which bits of a web page I usually want to see; they’re the bits which aren’t adverts.

I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb, and guess that the way WebClip works (I’m not a WWDC bod so I don’t have any more access to the new stuff than anyone else; in fact I haven’t even downloaded the Safari 3 beta) is by observing which DOM elements are within the clipped region, and downloading only media relevant to those elements. If that’s the case, then you can ignore the fact that the ads on the page don’t get seen; they don’t even get downloaded. Therefore if I’m reading, say, the Dilbert strip in a WebClip, I’m effectively getting free Dilbert, even more free than the free website because I’m not upping their ad impression count.

One thing I noticed about the various sites that Steve clipped is that as far as I can remember, none of them features ‘Ads by Google’. It would be quite embarrassing for Apple’s CEO to demonstrate how to reduce revenue for one of Apple’s most prominent board members in a world-broadcast keynote talk. As over 99% of Google’s revenue is from online ads, and Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) is on the Apple board, that is exactly what Steve was showing us, though. There’ll be a doughnut fight back at Infinite Loop over that, I expect.

Posted in Business, leopard | Leave a comment

Miniwindows

Posted on 2007-06-11 by Graham Lee

Maybe it’s just me who gets annoyed by teeny-tiny miniaturised views which are completely illegible. Even so, I’ve just uploaded an article I wrote on Miniwindows which can be used in any OpenStep implementation such as Cocoa or GNUstep. It’s based on the Hillegass TypingTutor example, but doesn’t really use any code from that and isn’t (I hope) otherwise reliant on that context, so it should be possible to see what’s going on even if you haven’t read Hillegass. Which you should ;-)

Posted in cocoa, gnustep, openstep | Leave a comment

Moving on

Posted on 2007-06-06 by Graham Lee

There has been some cat-escaping-bagness, which is mainly my fault, but now that it’s all official I’m going to ‘announce’ it myself: I’ve got a new job! From the end of July, I’ll be working at Sophos as Senior Software Engineer, Mac (the post is still up at the linky in the title, for the moment).

This looks like being an exciting time – I’ve been enjoying the ObjC hacking I do with Brainstorm and this will be an opportunity to do even more of that, and the move from services to user-installed apps will bring its own changes and new experiences.

Erm, that really is all for now. More info as it becomes available, and all that.

Posted in cocoa, personal | 3 Comments

A bit of backup script

Posted on 2007-05-12 by Graham Lee

Good news – there’s a handy tool in OS X called wait4path which can help when writing timed scripts to backup to removable media.

Bad news – it [at least in Tiger….] works slightly esoterically – if a path is already present, it will still wait for another mount kevent before exiting. It should therefore be used in a script like this:


#!/bin/sh

if [ ! -d /Volumes/Backups ]; then
echo "waiting for backup volume..."
/bin/wait4path /Volumes/Backups
fi

# do some backups

Note, however, that if you do this in a crontab job it could potentially wait for a very long time, so you should wrap all that with a /var/run style semaphore.

Posted in darwin, sysadmin | Leave a comment

Official Google Mac Blog: Measuring performance of distributed notifications

Posted on 2007-05-11 by Graham Lee

Official Google Mac Blog: Measuring performance of distributed notifications on the performance of Google Update: “Just how expensive is it? How many notifications can you broadcast per second? As with all Google client products, we want to be good citizens and not bog down the client machine.”

A noble sentiment, but dear Google, answer me this: just how many times per second is each app going to be checking for updates? When does this become an important factor, and not a question of premature optimisation? They decided to go for distributed notifications instead of distributed objects, which seems reasonable – not because of the overhead issues (in fact a DO is probably a lot cheaper, if written properly), but because of the kind of information they’re trying to get through this IPC.

Posted in whatevs | 3 Comments

Bye bye data, hello…the same data

Posted on 2007-05-03 by Graham Lee

Of course it happens to everyone, and yesterday evening it happened to me…my home directory became inaccessible. What seems to have happened is that the filevault image containing my ~ became corrupted upon unmounting (though notably, I didn’t do the ‘recover space’ thing the last time I logged out before the failure, so it should just have been a straightforward unmount). so the simplest recovery route was to delete the user, re-create it then recover my data from the backups. I don’t keep backups of the Library area so lost a few preference files, and of course have had to trawl around my email looking for licence keys and the like.

For the moment I’ve set up the replacement user without Filevault, and am using encrypted disk images for specific data I’d rather keep thus protected. This makes backups harder – I keep my backup drive unencrypted as it doesn’t come out with me, so I now need to come up with a script to backup my home dir except for the encrypted images, mount the images and back up the content, then unmount them. This means that the backup will need to be manually triggered so that passwords don’t have to be kept anywhere…or I write my own backup tool, which uses passwords stored in a keychain kept outside the target user account; and I need to make sure that keychain is also recoverable ;-).

A lot of my data was completely unaffected – work stuff is typically stored in subversion on their servers (as well as another local copy on my work laptop), my email is all on remote servers, my calendar is served by thaesofereode.info and so on. There are some improvements I could make – I could probably use an LDAP server and abxldap to remotify my contact list, and thaesofereode.info offers subversion hosting which I’m currently not making use of. But it happens that next Tuesday, I’ll be talking about data security at the Oxford Mac Users Group, so I will expand on this tale in full and gory detail ;-). St. Cross College, Tuesday 8th May, 7:30 pm.

Update 20070503T1653Z+0000: actually, things look a little more serious than simply a trashed sparseimage:

mabinogi:~/Desktop leeg$ hdiutil attach OmniDazzle-1.0.1.dmg
load_hdi: timed out waiting for driver to load
load_hdi: timed out waiting for driver to load
load_hdi: timed out waiting for driver to load
load_hdi: timed out waiting for driver to load
load_hdi: timed out waiting for driver to load
[…]
2007-05-03 15:41:35.535 diskimages-helper[718] ERROR: unable to load disk image driver – 0xE00002C0/-536870208 – Device not configured.

Good news is that when that gets fixed, my old homedir will start working again. Bad news is: um, it looks fairly messed up to me :-(

Posted in backup, filevault, oxmug | 1 Comment