July 2005

Archives

Waiting for the iTunes mobile/iPod phone.

Posted Sun, 07/24/2005 - 7:26am by developer

This was posted at Engadget. Oh I already have an iPod. In fact it is a 5Gb; the very first model. I quickly found out that I couldn't fit my entire CD library on there so I developed my play lists and swapped music continuously. Now with smart playlists I don't even think about it too much any more, I don't really need another iPod until this one dies.

But I hate my cell phone. I have hated my current cell phone since I found out that it's Bluetooth implementation only went far enough to let me use a wireless earpiece. I hated my older cell phones for lack of Bluetooth, lack of any decent connection to my Macintosh. I loved my old Handspring device, but I got tired of carrying it and a cell phone. I got tired of looking up numbers on it that should already be on my phone. Nowadays I could get a Treo phone and Handspring has become PalmOne. But I already gave up on Palm Desktop software and have no interest in going back.

XCode peculiarites -Library can't find file errors

Posted Fri, 07/22/2005 - 8:15am by developer

I noticed this one when upgrading some projects in CPLAT (a nice cross-platform framework) to XCode 2.1 from 1.5. After creating the source tree for CPLAT in the XCode preferences the compiles went well but the link phase gave an error about a missing library. The files seemed to be present and in the target so I tried taking it out of the target to see what would happen. (I was hoping it wasn't even needed.) Instead I got a new error about another library being missing, I think it was expat.

Software Legos

Posted Fri, 07/15/2005 - 8:18am by developer

I have been programming for over 20 years now. The year I learned to program (in Fortran) was the last year the university had punch cards. By the next semester I was using a line printer and the next year a CRT. Only two years later I had purchased an Apple ][, although I was mainly working on minicomputers. (If you are too young to remember, they actually used to break things down as micro, mini and mainframe. There were never any maxi-computers, just super ones.)

SSI, CGI and PERL, Oh My!

Posted Thu, 07/14/2005 - 10:29pm by developer

Will the wonders of the world wide web ever cease? There are a lot of things about web technology that just don't make a lot of sense. A lot of unixisms show through like a bad one-coat paint job. (And not everything about unix "makes sense" either. It's just the way things are done. After all, the internet is a unix legacy.) What many people seem to love about the web is the way all these different technologies can work together to achieve results. My pet peeve is the way they don't work together.

A Subversive Update

Posted Tue, 07/12/2005 - 10:47pm by developer

Well, the nightmare continues. I decided to try an Apache2 setup on my server. But using DarwinPorts I was unable to get subversion to build the mod_dav_svn. It wouldn't put it into the already installed Apache2 server in /opt. I tried all the variants including building a DarwinPorts Apache2 installation. In the end, I decided to look at Fink which I haven't tried in years.

Learning To Cascade

Posted Tue, 07/12/2005 - 10:24pm by developer

I like to learn new things and when I started trying to change the look of my blog I realized I needed to learn CSS. Up until now I've viewed html and CSS as sort of a output language for tools such as Dreamweaver or GoLive. I figured if I ever was asked to write such a tool then I would learn it just as I learned Postscript once when I was writing some printing routines for a software application I was authoring. Well, I'm in the middle of learning CSS right mow. Or I should say I've learned it but I'm not yet happy with the results. For one thing, the browser incompatibilities are driving me crazy. And, although the stylesheets supposedly support using percentages, or mm, or inches or ems as measurement units, just go ahead and try using anything but pixels. Plus you can introduce errors just by moving html or CSS around. If you want to do anything but the most basic kind of layout; if you are concerned with accessible websites that support different kinds of users, media, and platforms; or if you want to do something a little out of the ordinary, then forget most of the stylesheet attributes and get back to Photoshop to do your work. Anyway, that's how I feel today. Maybe I'll get excited about CSS again tomorrow (or when my blog is actually looking the way I want it!)

Subversive thoughts

Posted Fri, 07/08/2005 - 10:42pm by developer

I was bringing up subversion on my server. I used DarwinPorts to do the install on both my personal machine and the server. Ports seemed easier to me than my past experiences with Fink, but Fink does allow you to update all your installed software with just a few commands. DarwinPorts makes you do it package by package. But I am beginning to think that given how easily unix software breaks, I'd rather do my upgrades one at a time.