geoff.mollyandgeoff.com

Developers often have a love/hate relationship with wxWidgets, especially on the Mac. The common complaint, which I can’t dispute, is that wx applications don’t look and feel particularly well-integrated on the Mac. If you devote some effort to polishing the look and feel, this doesn’t have to be the case. It can be a lot of effort though, to build something that really feels native. That said, sometimes I’m just amazed at what you get for free. Here’s one of the test applications for PKIF, with no tweaks other than some mild build system manipulation, running on the Mac (not an officially supported platform). Screenshot after the jump.

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Mac|Life has a nice list of the 5 best and 5 worst Apple laptops of all time. The list is mostly good, but I have to quibble, naturally. Anyone who puts the Duo on the list of the best seems unlikely to have used one. They were a neat idea, and ahead of their time, but they really sucked both as laptops and as desktops. They certainly weren’t among the worst, either, but clearing them off the list would make room for the 12″ aluminum G4 PowerBook.

As for the worst, most of the stinkers they name deserve to be there; not the “toilet seat” tangerine and blueberry iBooks, though. Those were great, solid machines and among the first inexpensive machines with available built-in WiFi. But even if you think they’re bad, the hideous ball of suck that was the PowerBook 1400 has to overshadow them. And every machine Apple’s produced since, to be honest.

My “desktop” machine has been a problem of late. I do most of my home computing on a Mac laptop and like it a great deal. My desktop machine is a tougher call, though. I like the Mac OS well enough to use it there, too, but Apple doesn’t sell the desktop I want. They offer either the all-in-one iMac, the underpowered mini, or the insane Mac Pro workstation. I want a machine in between the iMac and the Pro. Its purpose is to run server applications that I want to use on my LAN (along with serving as a development sandbox for my own stuff) and to be a virtual machine host so that I have a beefy and convenient place to try out new software that I don’t trust yet.
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So I’ve been playing with Symfony a bit lately, and it’s growing on me. I think I understand most of the “magic,” and am now looking to convince myself that it’s actually safe.

Since the different notes I found through google all have undesirable side effects (IMO), here’s how I did it. My goal was to minimize lasting impact on my system (i.e. I’d like to delete /Applications/MAMP and have everything back to normal, more or less) and minimal deviation from the standard MAMP install.

These notes were taken while setting up symfony 1.0 on MAMP 1.7.

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Word on the street is that Verizon is going to stop carrying most of the Usenet. Apparently this is how they plan to implement their settlement with the NY AG. You have to suspect the rest of the mob who’s settling will use similarly coarse filters. With that, at least in the alt hierarchy, September could at last be over. I’m sorry to see it go, for a reason like this anyway.

I’ve finally decided to bring my personal projects out of the dark ages. After using CVS for years and years, I’m making the leap to Subversion. Git and friends look appealing, but, the fact is that “a little better than CVS” does it for me at this point. Plus I understand Subversion and the tool support on the Mac is excellent. For my server, I’m using VirtualBox 1.6.2 as the host and Ubuntu JEOS 8.04 as the guest. These notes may or may not be useful for others. I’m just trying to keep track of what I did here.
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Auction 73 is over. Most of the spectrum that will be freed up by the discontinuation of analog television broadcasting in 2009 has been sold off. According to Engadget, Verizon and AT&T bought most of it. Verizon had previously warned the FCC that the open access rules it was imposing on the spectrum would prevent telcos from bidding on it. Looks like they decided it was valuable anyway.

This screensaver goes out to google and searches for publicly accessible surveillance cameras, and displays what they see. I don’t know whether it’s fun or just creepy. I’m leaning towards creepy. There’s a Windows version too.

I’ve kind of liked podcasts for some time now, but have not listened to them on a regular basis largely because of a flaw that I had entirely imagined. Today I drove around running a few errands, listening to one of my favorite podcasts from these guys. I was mildly annoyed when I finished up earlier than I thought I would and had not gotten to the end of my podcast, because I knew I’d have to fuss around to figure out where I left off and hear the end. Since I’m generally only in the car for 20 - 40 minutes at a time, this characteristic of podcasts has left me less enthusiastic about them than I might be. Today, though, out of dumb luck, I plugged the iPhone in to sync/charge a few minutes before I double-clicked the podcast to resume listening. I was quite happy to hear it pick up just where I had left off in the car. I can think of three or four podcasts I’d have listened to more regularly for the past couple years, had I discovered this feature sooner.

There’s a very handy script floating around that makes it easy to add an “Open Terminal Here” button to finder windows. It can even make sure the terminal goes into a new tab. For some reason, I wanted the tabs opened by this button to have a particular (non-default) them. Making this work proved trickier than it ought to be, because the script was just sending a command-t keystroke to the terminal in order to open a tab.
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