Fat Cat Software - iPhoto Library Manager - since I was stupid enough to create a photo book on a different Mac than usual (well, the usual one was always busy), I guess I have to check this out to see if I can merge my books onto a single machine. It's a shame that Apple doesn't offer any merge function in iPhoto. With a notebook and a desktop, you quickly end up with separate libraries. If Lightroom supported book printing, I would have left iPhoto long ago. It's all a bit unsatisfactory.
mac-os-x
Links
rfc1437 | Content-type: matter-transport/sentient-life-form - Strong trends towards "throw away with archive and start from scratch" with slight options for "throw away, static archive and maybe shovel a part into the new platform if I find the time". The link shows where I'm currently playing around. Wordpress with a few small plugins and an nginx caching front.
Bitrot
I've been hit by this as well. My old blog software probably won't be able to survive unchanged. Old Python version (2.3), old (very old) Django (0.91), old PsycoPG driver (1.0), old PostgreSQL (7.4) and all of this on an old Debian (a wild mix of various versions with backports and custom programs and several failed upgrade attempts). Argh.
Well, I'm still torn between "rewrite" and "throw away". The latter has the charm that I won't have to carry all that junk around anymore. And honestly, nothing particularly interesting ever happened on my blog anyway. Maybe I can set up a wget mirror beforehand and dump the whole thing somewhere statically, as an archive.
Rewriting naturally has a lot of charm as well, but converting thousands of old entries (over 4000 articles and over 4000 links, plus almost 200 images) from 8 years (first entry on 3.11.2002) of blogging doesn't sound like fun. And presumably, thousands of the links are outdated and obsolete anyway.
No idea what I'll do, maybe I'll try to bring the Metaeule to the new box first, where I only have the problem that PHP4 is no longer in the Ubuntu repository for 10.04 and I therefore have to force the owl onto PHP5 (and that with code based on Wordpress 1.5 - I must really be crazy).
Or I try to install an ancient Debian with the packages used at the time - the box doesn't run in the front anyway, but behind other machines, so the hacking risk is rather low at this point. The Metaeule naturally also has a few thousand posts in the archive (only 8291, which is almost nothing), but if I can keep the old software running (some security patches have been applied over time, so it can actually continue to tinker along), I don't necessarily have to tackle it.
Somehow, the internet was also such a really bad idea ...
Twisted Orchestration Language in Launchpad - and someone has ported the Orc combinators to Python, using Twisted. However, I personally find Twisted rather disgusting to program, but if you like ...
Kilim - stumbled upon this while browsing the Orc documentation, a microthread library for Java.
Orc Language - haven't read anything about it yet, but it looks quite interesting. The core is Cor, a functional language without side effects, and Orc, which is built on top of it, is used for orchestrating services in distributed systems. The whole thing in a quite appealing, compact syntax on the JVM. One could certainly take a look at it as an alternative to Scala and Clojure, Java is integrated as an external service, which makes it quite easy to build distributed systems in which parts are implemented in Java. It reminds me in many points strongly of the ideas of Erlang (generally assume a distributed system, but still keep parts local for performance reasons), but I find the syntax much more pleasant. And with the JVM a much more widespread VM than Erlang's BEAM.
Interactive Fabrication » Beautiful Modeler - wow, that's incredibly cool.
Tornado Web Server Documentation - I really need to take a closer look at Tornado. For a side project, I've built a web service with web.py, which was shockingly simple (and dirty). Tornado is based on a very similar concept, throws Django-like templates into the mix and offers a good asynchronous server and support for asynchronous sockets and http requests right away. Could be a good alternative for web services that need few resources.
Fat Cat Software - iPhoto Library Manager - since I was stupid enough to make a photobook on a different Mac than usual (well, the usual one was always occupied), I'll probably have to take a look at this to see if I can merge my books onto a single machine. It's quite annoying that Apple doesn't offer any merge function in iPhoto. With a notebook and a desktop, you quickly end up with separate libraries. If Lightroom supported book printing, I would have been gone from iPhoto a long time ago. Everything is somehow not quite satisfying.
The V4Z80P – A Z80 Based Laptop @ Retroleum - here someone not only builds his own computer with his own system, it's also a laptop. Or something similar anyway.
Oracle cooks up free and premium JVMs - and Oracle begins to try to cash in on Java. If it works, Java could soon be in a similar situation as .NET: the free implementations lag behind the scope of the commercial ones. What this means for alternative languages on the JVM remains to be seen - but it will certainly cause some problems. However, the JVM world is large enough and equipped with enough alternatives, and Oracle is not Microsoft. Therefore, this could all just be a storm in a teacup and only affect the typical Oracle victims.
Kunsthalle Bielefeld: Der Westfälische Expressionismus - I think I actually have a reason to drive to Bielefeld.
Mediathek für Mac OS X - I need to check this out. After all, archiving is now the viewers' job thanks to stupid private broadcasters (and politicians who have made themselves their errand boys).
Panasonic DMC-GF2 Preview: 1. Introduction: Digital Photography Review - I hate you, Panasonic. Now I want the cute little GF2+14mm kit. Menno. First Apple with the MacBook Air and now Panasonic, everyone just wants my money.
Eventlet Networking Library - I need to take a closer look at this, the monkey-patching of standard libraries to make them trivial to use in an asynchronous environment looks very interesting.
Magic Launch - interesting little tool with which you can configure the application that comes up for a file when you double-click. Especially interesting if you want to open some files in different directories with different editors (e.g. because one project works with Netbeans and the Netbeans Python plugin, another one normally with TextWrangler and a third one with VIM for Unix compatibility). Or if you simply have a file extension that is used by different programs.
TidBITS Watchlist: TinkerTool 4.2 - if you don't like the silly button arrangement in iTunes 10, here's some help. You can also disable Safari RSS support, which is quite helpful if you only use an external reader. And you can adjust all sorts of other things.
NinjaKit: GreaseMonkey for Safari! : apple - Link to Reddit because the original site is in Japanese. Greasemonkey provides a nice interface for user scripts to modify websites, can sometimes be quite helpful. For Firefox already a standard, for Safari rather unusual (although it is e.g. already integrated in Fluid, a WebKit-based browser).
Introduction - those who prefer to automate with Ruby instead of AppleScript will find a good documentation for a Ruby AppleScript Bridge here.
Creating ePub files with Pages - the latest iWork 9 version of Pages now includes ePub export. Could be a fairly simple way to create your own eBooks, provided Pages can handle the source of the eBook.
itod's fluidium at master - GitHub - the foundation of Cruz (social browser), Fluid (site specific browser) and Fake (browser automation ala Automator). Suitable as a basis for RIA as well as a basis for specific browsers for websites or mashups or whatever. However, it's Mac only.
Fake - Mac OS X Web Browser Automation and Webapp Testing Made Simple. - by the author of Fluid, which I like to use for site-specific browsers.
iPad or Bust! - Blog - The Omni Group - OmniOutliner for the iPad? That would be great. Although for many things I now simply use Taskpaper because of the easy syncing. I still hope that more apps will use Dropbox as a file storage, but so far that's still quite scarce.
HDRtist "HDR Software will never be the same" - Ohanaware - the software I used for the HDR test. No adjustment options beyond simple calculation strengths for the individual images. But the result pleases me and looks quite natural.
Creaceed - Hydra - I should check this out, as it has several tone-mapping algorithms and supports pixel mapping/morphing, so you don't necessarily have to work with a tripod (though of course you have to make compromises then). Additionally, it is available as a Lightroom plugin.
HDR PhotoStudio: HDR photo software, HDR merge & editing, BEF plug-in, realistic HDR imaging - and another software that focuses on correct color representation and not this silly pseudo-HDR look.
Bug 560738 – No Mac-style keyboard shortcuts - woah. Since November 2008, there has been an open bug in Tomboy (note-taking program for Linux, Windows, and Mac) that the Cmd+Anything hotkeys on the Mac all do not work (or sometimes at least limited for cut/copy/paste) ... somehow one might get the impression that Tomboy is not really widespread on the Mac ...
Waveboard – Google Wave Client for iPhone and Mac - I actually don't do anything with Google Wave, simply because so far (despite account) no opportunity has arisen, but the apps here - both for OS X desktops and iPhone (and I suspect in the long run also iPad) look quite nice.
Mac OS X on netbooks | myMacNetbook.com - everything about Hackintoshs. Since Apple still doesn't deliver a decent subnotebook with a matte display, and my little Asus has a somewhat small display, keep an eye on it.
Keychain reports: Access to this object is restricted - because I just had the problem again, and because it really annoys me that this nonsense is still there after so long: never use MobileMe for keychain synchronization. Sometimes it works for a while, but that's deceptive. sooner or later the sync will mess up the keychain and in the worst case you have to reset it completely (or check if you have a functioning keychain in TimeMachine). To Apple: this is really shit.
HoudahGeo - Photo Geocoding for Mac - I should definitely check that out. On my last vacation trips, it was a bit of a shame that I didn't have any points on the map. And the idea of simply taking reference photos with the iPhone and using its GPS and timestamp for the subsequent coding of the photos is not a bad one at all.
iPhone / iPod Touch Backup Extractor - since iPhone backups are binary files and a friend now has problems with a corrupted backup, I linked this tool as a precaution, with which you can extract files from potentially defective iPhone backups, as long as the basic structure of the sqlite files is still somewhat clean.
Menial » Base - and if you just want to quickly take a look into a SQLite database with a GUI tool, this shareware tool doesn't look so bad.
homebrew - GitHub - new package manager for Unix software on OS X. A few interesting approaches, unlike Fink and MacPorts (I usually prefer the latter) it builds on already installed tools and libraries and therefore does not install half the internet if you only need a small tool. However, it currently has almost no support for dependencies, and the selection of packages is still quite narrow. And the result is really just self-compiled tools with a bit of link management around them.
Building a Codeless Language Module with BBEdit 8.5 and (Ir-) Regular Expressions - since I keep looking for this, here's a guide on how to build codeless language modules for BBEdit and TextWrangler. In the new version, they can use regular expressions. Tip: try out the regular expressions in the grep search of BBEdit/TextWrangler, then you can see if they work correctly on a source.
Daring Fireball: The Tablet - "I am not predicting that Apple is phasing out the Mac. (On the contrary, I’ve heard that Mac OS X 10.7 is on pace for a developer release at WWDC in June.) Like all Apple products, The Tablet will do less than we expect but the things it does do, it will do insanely well. It will offer a fraction of the functionality of a MacBook — but that fraction will be way more fun. The same Asperger-y critics who dismissed the iPhone will focus on all that The Tablet doesn’t do and declare that this time, Apple really has fucked up but good. The rest of us will get in line to buy one."
Plex Media Center for OS X - poorly blogged, because I might want to build a small media server with a Mac Mini. With the mountains of digital photos I have now, automatic slideshows on a large monitor might be quite nice.
The Tumblr Backup app is ready for its first beta... - for those who use Tumblr and have a Mac, there's now a backup tool. I might check it out for my small image Tumblr.
RWPluginMarkup - Markdown plugin for RapidWeaver.
UNITY: Game Development Tool - is now free as in free beer.
Apple cancels ZFS project - why Apple dropped ZFS.
bamboo-language - "Bamboo is intended to provide an implementation of Smalltalk and Strongtalk for both the iPhone and Mac OS X, leveraging Apple's Objective-C runtime, LLVM, and Clang.". There is not much content there yet, so it should rather be considered a statement of intent.
xmlisp - and yet another MCL descendant (or perhaps rather a CCL descendant). So a Common Lisp on Mac, this one with specific extensions for 2D and 3D graphics and game programming. Reminds a bit of Processing at first glance.
Major bug in Snow Leopard deletes all user data - ok, I don't use the guest account, but maybe someone out there does. If so, better read here first, before the data is gone.
Winclone - because I've been wondering all the time how I can properly back up my Bootcamp partition - this makes it simple and easy from OS X (which is where I spend most of my time).
Phone Amego Help - an interesting little tool that allows you to make and answer/reject phone calls on your mobile via Bluetooth on your computer. Okay, I belong to the "nobody calls me" class of iPhone users (I hardly use it for anything other than the internet), so it's probably not very interesting for me.
Set newer portable Macs' sleep mode - because I've looked it up again and again. My MBP strangely doesn't go into Deep Sleep, as far as I can tell - when the battery is empty, the RAM is gone, even though I'm in Mode 3. Hmm. I could just as well switch to Mode 0, delete the Sleep Image, and use the 2 GB for something else ...
ADC—Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby - nice little tutorial for the new Ruby version from Apple.
MacRuby » Home - hadn't I seen that before? Never mind. Ruby implementation based on the Objective-C runtime. It already looks very good (see also the previous tutorial) and it's definitely more fun than Objective-C.
GitX - a graphical interface for git on OS X. I'm actually a Mercurial fan, but for some things git is quite practical (better support for binary data, for example).
MonoDevelop on MacOS X - is though Microsoft junk, and the executable programs are called .exe, but at least there are a few interesting programming languages under Mono that you can now also meaningfully try out under OS X.
Axiotron Modbook - does anyone have 2000 EUR to spare for me? This thing could be pretty awesome with something like Blender for casual sculpting sessions in the comfy chair.
Mothers Ruin Software: Suspicious Package - interesting tool to quickly take a look at installation packages with QuickLook without having to start them.
Mac-Bot-Netz? - not that I would believe the nonsense about the "unassailable MacOS X" that some Apple disciples spread (Hello Apple - could we maybe get more detailed update descriptions beyond "improves compatibility and increases stability"? Thanks!), but would I necessarily believe a store that has always tried to sell strange products to Apple owners and has always tried to spread panic and purchases of its software with more than questionable press releases?
Getting the most out of a 1024x600 screen - three posts with good tips on how to free up more screen space on small computers. Especially interesting are the configuration options for the Dock (you can actually make it a bit less annoying!) and the menu bar (auto-hide depending on the application) as well as the screen scale factor already used by me (also application-dependent).
KeyCue - find, remember, and learn menu shortcuts - not uncool. Just hold down a modifier and it shows a list of hotkeys. Practical if you don't know all the hotkeys yet and want to learn them (because the keyboard is indeed faster than mouse around).
macvim - Google Code - another VIM version for Mac, but one with better support for various Mac techniques. And better integration (e.g., many standard keys are supported). In addition, it is based on the current version.
Scripting Drawer für Acorn - my favorite image editor is Acorn - because it's so small, fast and sleek. Plus, I can program it in Python. And with this plugin, the windows get a Scripting Drawer à la Nodebox - with which you can then run the Python code directly, without always having to navigate through the filter menu. Nice!
Stainless for OS X Leopard - interesting project: a multi-process browser for OSX. Essentially similar to Google Chrome (each tab is its own process), but further in that each process can have a local cookie storage and separate auth sessions. So for example, you can be logged into multiple Google Mail accounts in the same browser in multiple tabs, without any problems.
ExpanDrive: Ridiculously simple SFTP and FTP drive access on your Mac - also worth a look, after all I have tons of stuff lying around on SFTP servers. And while the Cyberduck is nice, I would actually prefer to use the Finder - at least, if the result is usable.
Instant color schemes for your Mac with ColorSchemer Studio OSX - and since I always use the same boring color combinations in SL, something like this might be useful.
Intaglio — Macintosh Drawing & Illustration - looks good, I should check it out. Specifically, the ability to use texts as paths could be interesting for me
VectorDesigner - and another graphics software that I should take a look at. Vector graphics would also solve some of the text problems (for SL I sometimes need text on paths and text as paths, which is rather cumbersome to do with Acorn).