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Well, I finally received my iPod Shuffle on Thursday. Unfortunately, it appears to be a lemon. It worked sporadically - I was only able to load music onto it once. Whenever I inserted into my G5’s myriad USB ports, nothing would happen. So, I finally broked down and called Apple. They were very helpful and after an hour of futile plugging and switching, agreed to send me a replacement. Secretly, I did not tell them that - against explicit instructions—I did, in fact… try to eat the iPod Shuffle.

2,000-ton mountain of cow manure spontaneously combusts.

Via Yahoo! News

WTH? This review of M83’s new album, Before the Dawn Heals Us, is this most cockamamie piece of writing I’ve ever read:

Also built on rock’n’roll, “Fields, Shorelines, and Hunters” punts a precipitous Milky Way barnstorm of cascading feedback, drum buildups, and vocal cut-ups that lead into the even headier ”*”, which breaks orbit, uncoiling the previous track’s static energy with a patch of cathartic shoegaze glaciers from Saturn.

Um, what?

Gentoo for Mac OS X is installed and up-to-date! Pretty straightforward. I’ve got my build settings and USE flags tweaked… now I just need some packages! Not surprisingly, most of the ebuilds are masked. Though, there is an RSS feed for stable packages. Very helpful.

I noticed a thread on the Gentoo forums comparing and contrasting portage and fink. A good point was brought up about the advantages of fink’s separate directory structure. I certainly agree that it is preferrable (though collision protection is great).

It’s encouraging to see that gentoo may be pursuing the separate directory structure path, too.

Well, it was news to me - but TheServerSide has relaunched using Tapestry - my favorite Java framework!

Congratulations, Howard. I heartily recommend Tapestry—it makes Java/J2EE fun again.

Well, I couldn’t resist any longer… I have been using Gentoo since version 1.2 (yeah, that long) and it is - without a doubt - my favorite distribution. I chafe at fink, whereas Portage just seems to get everything right. Portage gives me plenty of control and excellent dependency. Plus (I know it’s cliché) writing an ebuild really is easy, so it’s a snap to add missing packages to Portage.

Anyway, I downloaded Gentoo for Mac OS X and am in the process of syncing right now! I’ll keep a running evaluation of Gentoo for Mac as best as I can, though things certainly seem more more stable than in the recent past.

Feels like home…

Two minor site updates:

• Added a link to my burgeoning Projects page.
• My Links section is now powered by my Bloglines Blogroll

After much procrastination, I have made some minor updates to CocoaTextile. Namely:

• Ability to apply CSS to the Preview: simply put a stylesheet in ~/Library/Application Support/CocoaTextile/StyleSheets
• A fancy toolbar!

There are some other behind-the-scenes changes, but nothing too exciting. Feel free to post any comments here or contact me directly—my contact info is in the About… box. Enjoy!

Download: [CocoaTextile-0.02.dmg]

An O’Reilly article about Rails, a web application framework for Ruby, has certainly piqued my interest. There were a couple of bumps in the road to getting setup, but now I’m totally enamored with Rails!

I used fink to install Ruby 1.8 (OS X comes with an older version). I already have MySQL (for WP - more on this later). Next, I downloaded and built gem manually (unfortunately, there is not yet a fink package for gem). I also found CocoaMySQL - a nice GUI front-end for MySQL. After that, I modified my httpd.conf and was up and running!

Until I tried to actually pull things from the databse… I kept getting:

<pre><code>
Packets out of order: 1<>3: SELECT * FROM
</></code>

Thankly, this issue had already been noted, has a ticket and solution/workaround. Because WordPress does not support the new MySQL 4.1 password hashing, my database password was encrypted with OLD_PASSWORD. So, I just created another user and encrypted the password with PASSWORD. Voila!

I’m still learning - this is my first foray into Ruby - but I’m very impressed! The O’Reilly article is helpful, but the Todo tutorial at Ruby on Rails is much more comprehensive. Also helpful is the API docs.

My only “issue” so far - and it may turn out to be unjustified - is the lack of XHTML templating functionality (ala HTML::Template, Mason or even Smarty).

This is very cool.

J2ME development on the Mac is sorely lacking. This O’Reilly article noted one of the few J2ME gems for Mac developers: Michael Powers. Michael provides (I think) the only MIDP 2.0 runtime for the Mac, mpowerplayer. I used DR2 successfully, but it looks like DR3 is out and has many improvements!

Also helpful for Mac J2ME programmers:

• MIDP 1.0 for the Mac, also by Michael Powers.
• Antenna is a set of tasks for Ant and will work on the Mac with some tweaking. I have uploaded my build.xml with a good, general-purpose configuration. It will run with both mpowerplayer and Michael Power’s MIDP 1.0 implementation.
• Do It Yourself MIDP on Mac OS X: the introduction by Michael referenced in the O’Reilly article.