watch this  

With the Keynote buzz still in the air, here are my initial thoughts:

1. Mac Mini: while very slick, it’s just too under-powered to be of any interest to me. Especially with only 256MB RAM. As an auxiliary Mac, I’d rather have an iMac G5.
2. iPod Shuffle: Very cool! I think the price-point is just right at $99. Too bad it doesn’t have a screen. Even my discman has a screen…
3. Tiger: This is definitely what I’m looking forward to the most. 10.4 is just going to be too cool. I’m anxious to play with Dashboard . And Spotlight just might make me give up “find . -exec grep”! Core Data should have some nice possibilities too.

If Macworld 2005 coverage is any indication… Technorati is where it’s at. Technorati was updating in near real-time. Great source of info.

So, I want to get involved. I’ve created a Technorati profile and claimed my blog! Excellent.

Look like iWork is a go! From MacCentral’s coverage:

iWork is the successor to AppleWorks, according to Jobs. It includes Keynote 2, which uses ten new Apple-designed themes, animated text, new animated builds, presenter display (which can display notes, next slide, timers and more), interactive slideshows and self-playing keynote slideshows.

Welcome the Mac Mini. Very small (“half as high as an iPod Mini, surface of a little dish”), quiet. Firewire, USB2, analog/digital video out. Can’t wait to see that! Looks like it’s a G4, though. Avaiable January 22. $499 with 1.25 G4, 256, 40 gig, Combo. Wow! Too bad Christmas is over…

iPod Shuffle 1oz., 12 hour battery, 512MB $99 or 1GB $149. Sweet!

Looks like they’re official:

• iWork
• Mac Mini
• iPod Shuffle: “do not eat iPod shuffle” ha ha ha

The Keynote is over. Let the Buzz begin!

In the continuing saga of Weather Plugin woes: The new Quicksilver beta 33 dropped API support for the messaging/action scheme the Weather Plugin uses. Needless to say, the plugin doesn’t work at all right now. I’ve been in touch with the QS developer—we should have things sorted out shortly.

After wrestling with dynamically loaded code all day, I have finally fixed the Weather Plugin.

Basically, the problem had something to do with the way the NOAA webservers were responding to the request to download the XML. If I used Cocoa’s built-in initWithContentsOfURL, I got back junk. Downloading by any other method was fine. So, I swapped in the multi-talented CURL wrapper, CURLHandle. However, I wanted to include this framework directly in the plugin so as to obviate the need for downloading CURLHandle separately. Needless to say, getting a framework to dynamically load inside a plugin proved to be difficult for this novice Cocoa programmer. But, with some help from the QS community and some time on CocoaDev, I was able to get it working.

The final trick was to not link against the framework, but still include it in the plugin bundle. You can downloaded the latest version here: MYWeatherPlugin-0.5.qspkg.

There is a problem with all versions of the Weather Plugin for Quicksilver. The issue manifests itself as Quicksilver doing nothing when the Weather plugin is invoked.

The issue appears to be caused by some change on the NOAA servers. I have observed that they send junk data when the request is made my Cocoa’s NSUrl. Other UserAgents seem unaffected.

I should have a fix soon.

Great article on managing your $HOME directory with source control (in this case, Subversion). It may be a bit of overkill, but it gave me some good ideas.

I have too many computers and it’s a hassle keeping my personal configurations (usually in the form of dot files) synched up. Whenever I setup someplace new, I always grab my .bashrc, .vimrc and a couple others… but they quickly get out of synch. So, using the ideas from the O’Reilly article, I put my most commonly used files in CVS on an easily accessible server. I chose CVS because it is basically ubiquitous. Now, I can “checkout” my $HOME anytime I need to setup in a new place and I can “update” whenever I need the latest.

A couple of things came to mind reading Downloading comics: threat or menace? over at Boing Boing.

One, some comics - namely Queen & Country - I prefer to read in the TPB. I think that reading an entire story arc at once can really enhance the experience. If you don’t believe me: go buy the first Y: The Last Man trade.

Two, my local comic shop is great. Great people, great selection of new and old titles, really great prices. But, their subscriptions aren’t worth a damn… I mean, if I don’t come in for a few weeks, none of my titles have been pulled or worse some have and some have not. So, I started thinking: there has to be a Technical solution for this. I’ll spare you the details, but I quickly went from envisioning ways of programmatically managing my subscriptions to designing my own Online Comic Shop. I can’t imagine that running a comic book shop is the most lucrative business. Online competition - be it from a “Amazon” Comics or P2P - is only going to hurt these local shops… but they have to compete more effectively…

Which brings me to my last point: sometimes online is the only place to get a comic… There is no way around it. For example, I missed Issue #4 of Powers Vol. 2 and now it’s out-of-print. Where’s the next place I looked? Ebay.

I generally agree with the notion that downloading may (eventually) drive business. In fact, I got hooked on Fables after downloading the (here it is again) out-of-print first issue. Great idea, Vertigo! Next?

The 2004 OnJava Reader Survery results are in. No big surpises:

• Java programmers use Oracle. It follows that .NET programmers use SqlServer…
• Java programmers develop on their Windows workstations, but don’t trust Windows for Production.
• Some Java programmers still don’t use an IDE and more power to us.
• Ant is still the most important Java development tool.

Howard hit several nails on the head in this post. However, I think he held back on one of the major reasons why people choose in-house development: hubris.

I have used the Tapestry framework for my last two major projects. It has made an incalculable difference. By using an Open Source framework, I was able to focus on meeting my requirements while, at the same time, having access to the deepest levels of the code if need be. Earlier in my career I created and used my own J2EE framework, no more. I encourage developers to use a framework, any framework. The benefits (shorter development time, less “plumbing code”, genericity, community support) certainly outweigh the costs (steep learning curve, not being able to do it “your way”).