geoff.mollyandgeoff.com

From Slate:

When I’m in a tight spot, my BlackBerry always helps me out. It also sends a subtle signal to my correspondents that I’m getting a lot done. An e-mail that says “Sent from my BlackBerry” gives the impression that you’re on the move but still chained to work, e-mailing from the elevator. An e-mail that says “Sent from my iPhone” conjures an image of a doofus who wants you to know he has an iPhone.

Actually, “Sent from my Blackberry” always gave me the impression that I was dealing with a doofus who wanted me to know that he had a Blackberry. I removed “Sent from my iPhone” from my signature before I ever sent my first email from my iPhone for that very reason.

The metadata aggregator looks particularly good. Just linking them here so I don’t forget about them. Edge-Security tools.

Today is one of those days that makes me happy that, at least at home, I don’t rely on Microsoft Windows for anything important. Though Microsoft might claim otherwise, product activation is nothing short of treating your customers like thieves. They assume you’re stealing their software and require you to prove otherwise in order to continue using it. Activation has grown more pervasive with the newest versions of Windows (”Vista”) and activation failures have become more intrusive. In older versions, failing to prove that you were using genuine Windows software just meant you couldn’t download certain updates from Microsoft. In newer versions, Microsoft actually checks more often and disables features, especially gaming features, in the operating system. Well, today, Microsoft’s activation servers are having a problem. No Aero or DirectX for you, vista users. But don’t worry. You should be able to use your software again in a few days. Hope you didn’t need that. The irony of all this is that, if you’d gotten an illegal cracked copy of Vista instead of paying for it through a legitimate channel, you would not be suffering from this failure right now. Only a monopolist could mistreat customers this badly and keep them.

wxWidgets is a nice, cross-platform C++ GUI library. It’s generally easy enough to use (as such things go) and produces results that are, on Mac, Windows and Linux, nothing short of stunning for a cross-platform library. To be sure, it’s not as nice as cocoa on the Mac, but if cross-platform compatibility is a must, I recommend it unreservedly. There are instructions floating around for using it with XCode, but none seem to be quite accurate right now. Don’t use the project template that’s about; it doesn’t work. Here’s how to create a new project using XCode for use with wxWidgets:

1. Build wxWidgets per the instructions on wxwidgets.org.
2. Run the wx-config from the build you just made twice. Once with –cxxflags and once with –libs. Record the output.
3. Edit the output from wx-config –libs to remove any -arch flags.
4. Create a new empty project using XCode’s wizard.
5. Add a new Carbon target.
6. “Get Info” for that target and edit the “Other Linker Flags” to include your edited output from wx-config –libs
7. Add your source files to the project in whatever groups you like. (For example, if you have output from wxDesigner, add it here.)
8. “Get Info” on the target again and edit the following settings:
• put the output from wx-config –cxxflags into “Other C++ flags”
• disable Zero Link
• disable “Precompile prefix header”
• remove the path from “Prefix header”

It’s clearly more involved than setting up a standard cocoa project, and the results aren’t quite as nice. But you’ll have nice cross-platform GUI source code that, if you are careful, will look and feel right to users of each platform.

This is distilled from various mailing list posts and information available on the wxWidgets wiki. Good luck.

Tonight, I received more than one email with utterly meaningless confidentiality disclaimers attached to the end. There is one legal theory that attaching such disclaimers to non-confidential emails actually hurts you. All legalities aside, though, they’re pointless. Any disclaimers I encounter in the future will meet with the following response:

This message is digitally signed. Any confidential information sent to this email account should first be encrypted using the X.509 certificate included with this digital signature. The recipient of electronic communications controls neither the routers handling internet email nor the server upon which such messages will ultimately reside. Given the mechanics necessary for the transmission of email over the internet, it is impossible to compel any intermediary or recipient to delete or disregard information contained therein; the only reasonable guarantee of confidentiality is encryption. Failure to encrypt confidential information indicates that the sender accepts sole responsibility for any breach that may occur, regardless of any disclaimers or instructions that may accompany such information.

It’s no secret that I like to dork around with Mac programming in my spare time. People often ask me what my Mac software ideas are. Here are some of the top items on my list for when I get time, in no particular order:

GeckoKit – I’d like to produce a WebKit-style interface for Mozilla’s Gecko engine. I like it much better, in general, and others would find it useful as well. I made an aborted attempt at this some time back; it’s hairy but doable. Most of the work that needs to be done has been for the Camino browser. Really, all that remains is a non-trivial packaging effort.

An email “swiss army knife” – It seems like at least a few times a year I wind up writing a script to troubleshoot email problems. It’d be relatively easy to produce a program that lets a mail admin set the parameters that I’m always scripting and give some insight into what’s going wrong with an email server.

A multi-engine generator for driving directions – The free services for getting driving directions are pretty good. The main problem is that for a particular route any one of them can be wrong. I’d very much like to have an app that submits a route to, say, MapQuest, Google, MSN, Yahoo and Rand McNally and lets me view them side-by-side to vet them against each other. This would not be a particularly difficult tool to produce, and it would probably save me several hours each year.

A mail program that doesn’t suck – Every mail program I’ve used on the Mac and on lesser machines has had problems. Some are minor and some are sever. No program totally meets my needs. Here are the features I really want:

• Impossible to accidentally send out HTML cruft
• Integration with OS X address book
• Good implementations of both S/MIME and PGP
• Ability to search on arbitrary headers and body text
• Integration with multiple spam filters
• Very restricted rendering of incoming HTML
• Completely standard message stores
• The ability to pass icalendar entries off to a calendar app
• Reply-to-list functionality
• Good support for multiple email accounts

Oh, and I want a nice Mac native UI as well . I’m so unbelievably picky about my email that I’m beginning to think that the only way I’ll be happy is if I write my own client.

A program to snipe cool woot items – Maybe I’m getting old, but I can rarely stay up until 1AM to try and get the woot BOC. I’d like a program that can recognize a BOC and snipe it for me.

The web is rife with posts about MacBook and MacBook Pro annoyances. (No links given because the point of this post is to combat the echo chamber effect the ‘net is currently demonstrating.) There are things from the whine to heat to swollen batteries to bad sound. And I don’t doubt that one or several people has experienced each of these problems. Nor do I dispute their right to rant on the internet about such. That’s one of the things that I love about the near zero-cost soapbox provided by a globally interconnected network. But the complaints of a few seem very amplified these days. It seems that the people who link to experiences about these issues seem to be linking the same handfull of sites over and over again.

With that, I’d like to rave about my MBP. It’s fast as blazes. With a 2.0GHz core duo, it’s far and away the fastest laptop I have access to. It builds software much faster than most any machine I can currently get my hands on personally. The OS X on intel experience is fantastic. There’s no question, this is a real, first class Mac. I had one of the first generation Power PCs (the 7100 for those that remember such things). The transition is way better this time. PPC software, by and large, feels every bit as usable as it did on my PowerBook with a 1.3GHz G4. Quite a contrast to the 68k emulation that lagged a midrange 68030 in 1995. My Mac doesn’t wine. It does run a little hot. I can still use it on my lap when I’m on battery power, though, and it does not feel dramatically hotter than the P4m Thinkpads floating around the office. Sound is about what I’d expect from laptop speakers. And, since I added another 1GB DIMM, Parallels runs like a dream. My windows and linux installs zip right along, in windows on my Mac desktop.

This is not buying advice. My buying advice would be to wait if you’re currently happy with your machine. The intel-based Macs will only get better and better as more software goes Universal and the motherboards trend more toward Apple-developed innovations and away from reference designs. The next version of the OS will be even better, too. I took the plunge myself because I had given my PowerBook to Molly to replace an iMac that had recently begun to panic and my old Linux laptop was beginning to show hardware issues. I don’t regret it.

Oh, and buy AppleCare if you get one. It’s just good policy with laptops and their $900 screens

Delicious Monster is having a really cool sale on their flagship (only?) app, Delicious Library. It’s called the “gamblers’ sale”. For four weeks they progressively reduced the price of the app by $5 each week, valid only until some undisclosed number of copies sold. It certainly worked for me. At $40, I wasn’t sure the app was useful enough (for me) to buy. At $20 it was a no-brainer and I got a copy. These guys are really good, BTW. I almost felt it was worth the $20 just because of the level of craftsmanship that went into the tool. I guess that’s one rather bizarre thing about computers; I’ve never thought that a screwdriver, multimeter or similar was worthwhile even though it would see limited use just because it was such a nice tool.

In response to criticism from “I.T. Managers,” Microsoft has apparently removed the newest addition to their download site. Private folders was a nifty little utility users could download that would allow them to encrypt some of their private data such that other users of a system could not read it. Obviously, there’s nothing groundbreaking about this functionality. Free utilities that perform just as well abound; anyone who’d like to keep their data private has many options. The strange thing about this whole affair is that some “I.T. Managers” felt the need to gripe to Microsoft about the matter. Moreover, they were loud enough that Microsoft caved and removed the download!

I hate to knock hard-working I.T. folks. Managing a company’s systems is fraught with challenges. Sometimes it’s difficult just to keep the lights on. But any “I.T. Manager” who complained to Microsoft about this utility is surely not doing his or her job. Microsoft has provided I.T. departments with facilities to control who can and can’t install software for many years now. These facilities are actually pretty good in Windows XP, which is required for Private Folder. The fact is, if a user cannot be trusted not to expose your business to increased risk of data loss by installing and running this utility, that user should be prohibited from installing software on your systems and you should refuse to install this software on them. End of story. Any manager who allows this type of user to install software is neglecting to manage their infrastructure.

Before we got a DVR, I’d have told you I didn’t watch TV. I still don’t, really. But if it weren’t for the DVR, I’d never have caught two shows that have proven immensely interesting.

• Hustle – It’s a collaboration betwen AMC and BBC about a group of con artists and how they pull their scams. This is easily some of the best non-sports TV you can find right now, but the schedule is so irregular I’d never catch it without the DVR. I’d say this is the only show I watch where I’m routinely caught by surprise at the end.
• Mythbusters – It’s almost like science, but not quite. These guys experiment with urban folklore in a very entertaining way. My favorite test to date: Can foods containing poppy seeds really cause you to fail a drug test? They’ve also tested whether alcohol or cell phones diminish your driving skills more and whether there was really an epidemic of spontaneous combustion in 1930s-era farmers’ trousers.

Neither show comes on at a convenient time for me to watch, and I think I’d be sorry if I missed either. I seldom say that about television unless the Red Sox are involved.