I spend a fair bit of my time up to my elbows in the bowels of web apps. (Hmm, perhaps surgery isn’t as aesthetically pleasing a metaphore for coding as, say, painting.) I access my files via a WebDAV share mounted through the Finder. (WebDAV + SVK = me happy.) These apps are written in PHP because that’s what the servers have and I don’t control the servers (which isn’t really pertinent to the current discussion; I’m just trying to avoid the “Why don’t you just use Rails?”-type comments. No offense to the Rails crowd intended. And, after all, PHP isn’t all bad.)
As a side-effect of accessing the files via WebDAV, dot-underscore files are created for every file I edit. WebDAV doesn’t have support for Resource Forks or the good old HFS metadata, so the FInder stashes it all in dot-underscore files according to the AppleDouble Specification.
For some reason, Apache (or PHP, or somebody) sees fit to barf the contents of the dot-underscore files out right before the contents of the actual file. Meaning I get a nice chunk of gibberish at the top of the screen (TEXTR*ch means a lot to me — heck, I’m currently considering putting on a tee shirt — but to 99.999% of the world it’s gibberish). Worse still, the gibberish is followed by a lot of evil-looking PHP error messages because you can’t mess with the HTTP headers after the content has started flowing — the gibberish counts as content. Gibberish! As content!
Until now, I have fixed this with rm `find . -name '._*'`, which cleans them out. But I have to run it manually from the command line. It’s very annoying.
But, today I have learned there is a new warrior on the battlefield. And his — her — its — [I don't know] weapon is mighty and focused. And it’s pointed right at the little dot-underscore files. It’s pre-release software (but hey, does anything actually come out of beta these days?). It looks quite promising and I’m actually going to breach protocol and install it. I’m not sure if that’s because the product’s web site inspires confidence, because I have a burning need for this software, or just because SuperDuper has made me cocky. Oh well, No risk, no reward.
Posted on 30 November 2005 in Uncategorized
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There is a new bug-fix release of BBEdit out. You can pick it up in the usual place. The reason I’m mentioning it is the second-to-last item on the changelist:
Fixed drawing glitch which would occasionally leave behind
a phantom line highlight at the end of the document.
It’s one of those little annoying glitches that you just sort of ignore and work around (for the record: if you move the cursor down to the last line and then back up again, the glitch usually disappears). But, now it’s fixed. It was the only glitch I could think of in BBEdit.
This is the sort of thing that’s kept me loyal to one editor for almost a decade and a half.
Posted on 24 November 2005 in Uncategorized
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I’m watching TV and commercials hit. And up comes a Pot of Gold chocolates commercial. It’s got an iMac G4 in it, so they get points for taste. The father of this little TV family asks the daughter to check if the brother got his (I’m assuming) Christmas present: a box of chocolates. So she turns to the computer and we see a jerky, fake online video of the brother singing the Pot of Gold jingle. Cute. The computer screen is a fake Mac OS X desktop. The browser is a fake Internet Explorer 5 window.
My instinctive reaction was to (quietly) scream “Why are you still using IE 5?! It’s a dead browser! It’s CSS support sucks! It’s never going to be updated! Safari is preinstalled!”
Then I realized I was talking to the TV.
Posted on 20 November 2005 in Uncategorized
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All I wanted to do was have Babylon 5 playing in the background while I catch up on some coding. That shouldn’t be too much trouble. I decided to use my Windows Xp machine to play the DVD so because it’s screen is right on the edge of my peripheral vision. And thus is in the most distracting position possible. Well, to be honest the real reason is that the TV is behind me, and if I played the DVD on my PowerBook it would be hidden behind BBEdit and friends.
I popped the DVD in the drive, Windows brought up its dispatch form, I clicked one button and VLC started playing the first episode on the disk. Everything’s perfect, right? Nope. After the episode ends, VLC drops me back into the DVD’s menu structure. I click episode two and… VLC stops playing. And stubbornly refuses to let me actually see anything past episode one. It’s entirely possible that I could convince VLC to play the rest of the disk, but frankly, I find VLC’s wxWindows skin to be frustratingly unintuitive — or perhaps it’s just a side effect of the Windows port. Either way, I move on to my next option.
And that’s where my one piece of arcane Windows knowledge came into play. C:\WINDOWS\system32\dvdplay.exe there, now you know it too. I double click the executable (after letting Windows know that, yes, I really do want to see the contents of folders I open) and I get this message (or one very close to it): “Windows Media Player cannot play this disc because there is no compatible DVD decoder installed.”
That’s right: Windows can’t play a DVD out of the box. What The Fuck? Every once in a while I stumble across some fact about Windows that knocks me right over. This is one of them. For reference: Mac OS X plays DVDs out of the box.
So, a quick bit of Googling and I’ve discovered that the only DVD decoder I’m not going to have to pay for (hey, I’m cheap) is Nvidia’s. And that’s only a 30-day free demo. Still, it’s the best offer going so I installed it.
And now I’ll have to wait until Crossing Jordan is over before I find out if it works.
I’m typing this entry on a 15 year old keyboard hooked up to my PowerBook via a second-hand Belkin ADB-USB adapter and an old S-Video cable. And you know what, it just works. That’s far, far more than I can say about Windows XP and a newly-purchased DVD.
Posted on 20 November 2005 in Uncategorized
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Well, not Singapore as whole, just a company based there. And it’s not so much stealing as offering a position higher up the food chain, with a more desirable workload. Not to mention the infinitely preferable climate (Today’s high here in Saskatoon: 0°, Singapore’s high: 32. Degrees. Centigrade). So it’s not surprising that she took the job when they offered it to her. Especially when you factor in the international travel it entails (Lex is very much the traveller type, so flitting from country to country actually suits her.) But, just because it’s a great opportunity, and I’m really happy that she got the chance and is taking it, that doesn’t mean I can’t be bitter about the fact she isn’t going to be in town. Right?
Plus, we live in a world of email, instant messages, and Skype. If that wasn’t the case, I’d probably be more than just half-heartedly bitter.
If I were of a more poetic bent I’d probably be able to pen a few lines for this occasion. And if I wasn’t such a sappy romantic I might actually find something usable amongst the sonnets and soliloquies I know by heart. But, such is not the case and I’m left with to my own devices and (unfortunately) prose. So, to you Lex, I say this:
I didn’t wish you good luck when you got contacted about the position, nor did I in the time between then and now. And I’m not going to wish you good luck now. Because, you don’t need luck to excel at what you’re going to do. And I know you’re going to excel at this. Knock ‘em dead, kiddo.
Posted on 13 November 2005 in Uncategorized
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