I’ve been in one of those coding moods these past few days.

It’s funny really, when the mood bites wanting to work on some code is all I can think about. Unfortunately it never lasts, and most likely next week I will run a mile from anything that involves endless debugging and depressing stares at code that refuses to function correctly.

Took advantage of all this to work on one of my little pet projects. A php bases web service for cataloging and taging films, music, books etc.

Implemented a couple of things I’ve been meaning to do for a while now. Got rid of the whole movable-type style publishing paradigm, it just isn’t intuitive interface wise.

Instead I’ve made some simplified functions that can be embedded into any php app, such as wordpress. It was a bit of an effort because with these functions I kinda have to avoid using session variables, especially class objects in sessions. Annoyingly php classes need to be declared before the session is started if you’re going to use them this way, and if you’re embedding it you have no control of the whole session start affair. Anyway, you can see all this down the right on the sidebar, lists the recent films I’ve seen and all that. And now you can click on them and be taken to a page, which is also embedded into wordpress.

I want to take the embedded functions a stage further and implement XML-RPC so that the service can be on another server.

Speaking of XML-RPC, I’ve also added posting to blogs. It uses the metaweblog api plus a few extra fields derived from movable-type strangely, for doing tags. When viewing a title you just click a link and it does the rest, plus I ajaxed it up so it doesn’t even have to reload the page. Plus it adds the post-id to the DB so that it knows when to do a post update instead.

Also ajaxed up the tagging of titles, so that it doesn’t take so long. And seperated out user oriented tags such as “watched” or “own” from everyone based tags such as “Spanish” and “Gay”.

Oh yeah, that’ll be why you’ve started seeing stupid film reviews in the main blog. Ah well. That’s progress for yerz.

Oh yeah and image support is new too, and quite funky.  I’ve used PHP’s GD library to automatically create a unified sized thumbnail of the image you upload for a title.  And you don’t even have to upload it, you can simply stick in the url for an image on another website and listrbl will grab it and make a copy for itself.

As mentioned before I bought the Mac Heist II bundle and what an amazing deal it was too.

Thing is, there is a huge morel debate around Mac Heist and it has hit controversy again because as it turns out Yazsoft, the makers of Speed Download have used the Mac Heist bundle to offload the last few copies of Speed Download 4 (so to speak) before releasing Speed Download 5.

There are a couple of issues here, Yazsoft, maybe innocently didn’t realise before agreeing to the bundle that the Mac Heist way is that all the licenses are supposed to be full licenses, as in, they should be as if you had bought them individually. This has hit Yazsoft because they state on their website that anyone who purchased Speed Download 4 during January/February can upgrade to version 5 for free. However, they have decided that Mac Heist customers don’t qualify.

Another mistake Yazsoft have made is that Speed Download’s “check for updates” feature let you upgrade to Speed Download 5 as if it were a simple update. It did state at the top of the update notes that it was a paid upgrade but I dunno about you but when that update software dialog pops up, I have never read the blurb before hitting the install button!

Even worse, the app has an opt-in automatic update feature, that upgraded you to version 5 without saying anything.

The people running Mac Heist have psuedo officially called Yazsoft “weasels”, as in, they are trying to weasel their way out of giving mac heist customers access to version 5. I completely agree.

Idiot’s also IMO, because the Mac Heist bundle sold 43,815 copies, and for a small Shareware company to piss that many people off could kill them.

Sure they have apologized, but only after a rather large campaign of mac heist customers emailing them *probably quite abusively* and lengthy discussions on the mac heist forum. But as the apology doesn’t include any re-assessment on their policy, it is rather shallow.

I’d like to also finish by defending mac heist. Some folk such as daring fireball have criticized the bundle for devaluing shareware and for not giving a large enough royalty to the developers. I think this is poppycock, how many of the 43,815 people who bought the bundle would have purchased the apps individually had the bundle not existed? I wager only a tiny fraction. and 43,815 x $1 is still a lot more than 100 x $25. Plus, like many customers I hadn’t even tried the trial periods of many apps and now will keep paying upgrades for years on a couple of them…. as long as the upgrade purchase isn’t in the next week before I have even had a chance to try the app out!

“The only way is UP!” oh wait, that’s Yazz.

UPDATE:  On the heist forum it was mentioned that yazsoft have started replying to complaints with a shiny new license code.  So I complained and it’s true!  I’ve now got my free upgrade to Speed Download 5.  Woohoo!  It pays to complain!

Now I feel kinda guilty. LOI

So we all updated Mac OS X 10.5.1 to 10.5.2 the other day.

Updated both my iMac and iBook, both weighed in at 180MB. Among the fixes are a couple of UI tweaks, one of these is the ability to return the menu bar to the good ‘ol opaque days. But can you see little snag in the screenshot above? The left and behind is the iMac’s desktop property dialog and to the right is the iBooks. Both are 10.5.2. Hmm, I guess iBooks have no business having opaque menu bars.

Hope that screenshot fits in my blog theme OK, it’s a bit large.

Please Steve Bellend aka Monkey Dancer, keep your grubby mits off our Flickr.

The moment I have to log in with a Passport/Windows Live password is the moment I jump ship to zoomr.  Is it zoomr?

Wonder if you can delete flickr accounts and get some money back from the pro membership?  Doubt it.

Susan gave me the lowdown on the heist, but hush hush, it’s strictly on the QT.

Pardon?  Anyway, yeah Mac Heist is on at the moment, not sure when it started but there’s only 13 days left Mr.  It’s a bundle of mac shareware apps for just 49 dollars and the collection is pretty good, there’s at least 4 i’m interested in that makes it a steel!

The apps you get are 1Password, CoverSutra, Cha-Ching, iStopMotion, Awaken, AppZapper, TaskPaper.

There are three more, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro X, Pixelmator which will only be unlocked once enough bundles have been sold, so please buy the bundle so the rest of us can have these three extras!    Please?

Oh yeah, and it’s all for charity.

I’m terrible at organizing myself, and I constantly get stressed out when I remember shit that has to be done.

I may have found the answer however, Omnifocus is a new app, so new it hasn’t even been written yet! It’s a complete life organizer, it looks just like a task list type affair but it’s much more thorough.

Omni were inspired to create the app by David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” self-improvement book (and boy do I need some improving). I’m not even half way through the book yet but I already know it’s going to be incredibly helpful. It’s all about getting every single god damn nagging thing, big or small off your mind and organized, and it’s promised that you’ll feel a huge relief.

Also, you don’t just list things skirting on them like you’d usually do, not just “Complete financial document”, but all the steps involved that you can think of and categorize them. You also specify what conditions must be met before you do it, whether you can do it straight away, how long you will need, if you need to be in a specific place…

Omni seem to have big ideas for omnifocus, there’s going to be a web server/interface, even with an iPhone optimised version. And it will add time based tasks to calendar and the like.

Oooh, I feel optimistic.

UPDATE:

Crazy, just days after I wrote this Omni have announced 1.0.  So if you haven’t already bought it you’ve missed out on the half price beta offer.  oops.

I think i’ve discovered the worst company in the world for consumer rights.

It isn’t Microsoft or Sony or any of them lot.  It’s Waves.  They make professional grade audio plug-ins.

Some years ago I purchased a product from them which I now don’t feel I need anymore, it wasn’t cheap so I want to sell it, ebay style.

Should you not have a right to sell anything you have bought?  Apparently not. Waves require you pay them a whopping 150USD to transfer ownership of their software.. which you bought and should therefore OWN!  Even worse, before you can even pay this 150USD you must have paid for your yearly update plan!

Waves software is a little tricky as they use a dongle called iLok.  It isn’t their own dongle, you have to buy the dongle yourself and have the serial codes authorized onto the dongle.  It’s a very beaurocratic process to use their software.  So I figured that maybe it was due to the whole dongle situation that they charge such a stupid amount, so I emailed them and asked if I can forgo the 150 dollars if I also sell the dongle along with the software…  Guess what…

To complete a transfer of ownership, you will need to provide the buyer with a letter stating the sale with serial number, and your product must be currently covered by WUP.  Once the buyer has taken possession of your ilok, he will pay Waves a $150 transfer of ownership fee to have the product transferred into his account.

Whaaaat!!!

I’ve been using Leopard for well over a week now, 11 days to be precise, so what are my thoughts now?

OS X is going the right direction for an OS, with this release Apple are empowering developers with great API tools for optimal FS management and easier access to OpenGL graphic manipulation. I’m really looking forward to what FOSS and shareware developers are going to come up with over the next year.

An example of what their enhanced file system services is going to help with is the Mozy online backup app which I use to ensure that I still have my files even if Sheffield explodes. At the moment when it does a scheduled backup it has to scan the whole drive for changes. With Leopard and with the appropriate changes to Mozy’s code it will only have to ask the OS what files have changed since the last time it backed up.

With the re-tooled Spotlight I haven’t once pined for Quicksilver, which I have to admit I pretty much only ever used as an application launcher. Not only is the new Spotlight much much faster but it behaves in exactly the ways you hope. For instance if I type “Command+Space…F…I…R…E…Return” in quick succession (probably less than a second for the whole sequence) spotlight won’t bother to try and catch up in the GUI but will immediately close and load firefox. Perfect!

I haven’t found stacks useful at all. In fact the only idea I’ve come up with for using it turned out to not even be supported. With spotlight now being awesome I suddenly wanted to create a smart folder that showed all documents modified today, similar to “Today” under the “Search For” section of the finders sidebar, but with a few extra specifiers to lose some dreg. Problem is, drag a smart folder onto the dock and it doesn’t become a stack. It just sticks there as an alias. Poo.

I love the transparent menu bar when I use un-saturated background, hate it when I use colourful ones. I’ve gone all black-and-white for my desktop, it’s actually pretty cool, very seventh seal. The leopard dock is still a mess to my eyes, my favourite oddity is that those orbs that show which apps are loaded aren’t even orbs, if you look more closely they’re actually supposed to be spotlights with a reflection going through the glass. But the design is so fucked up that no one has even realised.

Many hate the new folder icons. I actually like them, I didn’t think much of the old pin-stripe ones, they always reminded me of random linux distributions. I’m all for subtle standard icons.

It’s nice to have Apache2 and PHP5.2 as default now, still not sure why mysql isn’t installed by default. That’s probably a me thing.

I’ve barely had any beach balls all week. Bliss!

It just seems to do stuff the instant you want it to!

The only performance related issue I have had is a network one.  Apparently Leopard has some bandwidth shaping of sorts, it trys to priorities downloads and all that.  Well, I think they need to check those notes because if I have Azureus download a torrent it cripples all other internet activity.  Even if the torrent download is only coming very slowly and upload is capped at something like 5K it still fucks all internet activity up.

Really happy with it. Which is odd. When I was a windows user I would look forward to each new windows release even though expecting a slower system but hoping for lots of minor differences that I could explore and track down and go “woo that bit of text has changed.”

This is my first Mac OS upgrade (my first mac was just after Tiger) and it feels almost perverse for an OS upgrade to actually be optimized and faster. Those crazy 1 infinite loop guys.

In the first installment of what could be many Leopard updates…

Just had a Kernel Panic, you know this when a semi-opaque gray slowly comes down the screen like a curtain, and then a please hold the power button message appears in several languages. This doesn’t bode well, I’ve only ever seen what, 3, 4 max kernal panics on my mac the whole time I’ve had it.

At the time it occurred I was watching a 720p x.264 of the office on the second screen whilst EyeTV was recording Russell Brands Ponderland and I had just moments before unplugged my external DVD drive (it had no disk in).

Reason I had unplugged the drive is because Leopard seems to be pinging it (if pinging is the right word) around every 5 minutes whilst there is no disk in, the drive makes a faint buzz and then sighs, Tiger never did this. Anyway, i’m finding it mightily irritating.

It seems that any JPG which has been touched by lightroom will cause Finder to relaunch if you try QuickView on it. Very odd.

Any now for software compatibility…

Native-Instruments stuff is an issue because most of the update installers for their apps bomb out. This means that for many of their plug-ins I’m stuck with the original PowerPC versions, which don’t work in an Intel host DAW.

PictureSync is a great app for uploading to photo-sharing sites such as flickr right from such apps as aperture, iphoto and lightroom. Anyway, currently in Leopard you can’t license the app, nor can you authenticate it with flickr.

Popcorn 2 cannot burn a disk, tells you the drive didn’t respond. (External drive, haven’t tried the internal).

Received Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard today.

Actually I shot my wad prematurely on what was a dry run if you will. Um, I mean I got all impatient watching that count down timer on Apples site and ended up downloading it on Wednesday.

I did an erase install ‘cos I had all sorts of crap cloging my HD up and its nice to have a clean system now and then.

It’s taken till today (Friday) to get all my software and stuff back on here so in the end I’m only now getting the Leopard experience, on launch day so getting it early was fair enough in my book.

Still not sure what to think of it, it seems pretty fast, and it’s very refined. But I can’t help feeling a little underwhelmed by the new features.

And I’m having a hell of a time with Time Machine. The backups keep stalling part way through, still haven’t managed to do the initial run.

The box is awesome, it has a sort of hologram effect that’s really crazy. Probably been starring at it for hours. Simple things entertain me.

Update: After stalling again but letting it carry on the rest of the evening Time Machines first backup kicked off again and managed to complete.  Woo.