geekThang - All

Banned of the web

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 23:18:00 GMT

I’m back online after 4 months without a decent connection.
Ouch.

To make a long story short, the “historical” phone provider which still owns the local loop, put my ADSL line on their network instead of my ISP’s one and took 4 months to fix the problem. Welcome in Belgium. Oh, and they were charging me “Movies on Demand” and other services I never used. Great.

Uninstall Google Desktop

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 23:12:00 GMT

Google Desktop Mac install fails every time, no matter what I try. It fails just at the end (during post-install) telling me:

What can I say? Thanks. Thanks. ?

The problem is it leaves a lot of files scattered across the system (it even replaces some system files¹ with its own version!), so I made a script to clean the mess left by the failed installs. This is a quick and dirty script with absolutely no warranty whatsoever. I doesn’t deal with running processes, you have to kill them first. This is only tested on my system.

Meanwhile, I’ll wait for a release more “beta” than this “alpha” quality software to test it.

Here is the script: remove_gd.rb.zip (1.5KB)

Update: The Google Desktop 1.0.1 update doesn’t fix my problem…

e.g. the file in /System/Library/Frameworks/ where the /usr/bin/mdimport symlink points to. ↩

Site Changes

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 23:07:00 GMT

On with my change trend, I redesigned the structure of this site.

Big Changes

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 23:03:00 GMT

I’m back online, my ADSL line has been transfered today.
My girlfriend, me, our two cats and three trucks (!) of various stuff are now in our new house. I sold my iMac G5 20” and my PowerBook G4 12” and just ordered a MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 17”, so I have to move all my digital life too. Much less physical than moving the boxes, but still a lot of work and as I move from PPC to Intel, I have a lot of things to recompile too.

MacSanta is there

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:42:00 GMT

Rogue Amoeba bring us MacSanta¹, a place where every Mac developers can easily offer a 20% discount on their softwares until Xmas.

There is a lot ² of good stuff there.

Here are my favorites, just to name a few: VoodooPad, WebnoteHappy, Yojimbo, FastScripts, Dragster, Fission, Audio Hijack Pro, SpamSieve, GarageSale, Color Schemer.

A good time to support Mac developers, for real.

Just wonder why it’s hosted on a Microsoft-IIS server and powered by ASP.NET. :( ↩
More than 80 100 developers and 200 softwares until now. ↩

Rails out, go WordPress

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 22:39:32 GMT

I’ve always tried to run this site with Ruby on Rails solutions. I’m not a Rails specialist at all, but I love Ruby since before Rails even existed. I find this language beautiful and I use it for everything I can.

I used Typo then Mephisto. Typo has become a bit of a nightmare, but Mephisto is really nice. The problem is, no matter how hard I try, those RoR blog engines can’t run on my shared server without problem. I still have the SimpleLog and Radiant options, but at this time I’m tired to fight to keep a simple website alive.

Google and my Mac?

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 22:10:00 GMT

According to the Google Mac blog:

We want to provide great products and services to the tens of millions of Mac users around the world, because it’s the right thing to do, and because Mac users inside and outside Google demand it.

It’s nice that they hire new Mac developers and all, but they are still a lot of things not working at all.

Re: TextMate’s Undo

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 02:22:00 GMT

Earlier today, I posted a comment to NSLog();’s entry TexMate’s Undo.
Here’s an excerpt of the article:

I typed a line or two, uploaded the changes, and realized I’d edited the wrong file. I hit cmd-Z to undo and… yeah. TextMate users know what I found. Undo only “undoes” one character at a time.

Into the trash TextMate went again.

Erik Barzeski didn’t publish my comment. I don’t understand his decision, so I wanted to post it here.

Humorless TextMaters

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 02:09:00 GMT

I’m totally flabbergasted by the reactions to the TexMate’s halloween theme, active only for a few days. I mean, can people, supposedly educated (They use Macs and TexMate ;), be so humorless and short sighted?

To make the story short, Allan Odgaard, the TextMate’s dev, changed the icon and added a spider web instead of TextMate’s logo on empty Project window. Big deal.

Fig. 1: Offensive icon.

Almost everybody found it funny, but some found it offensive. Yeah, really, offensive!

TextMate owns KeyCue

Sun, 29 Oct 2006 01:56:00 GMT

I just took a look at KeyCue, it’s an utility that shows all the shortcuts for an app when you press ⌘ for a few seconds.

Mercurial

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 01:11:00 GMT

Mercurial is a distributed version control system. Mercurial is dedicated to speed and efficiency with a sane user interface. It is written in Python. The key here is distributed. Basically it means that every working copy is a full repository clone itself, so you can work and commit offline then push to the main repository when you see fit. See Wikipedia to read more about distributed systems. As I was searching for a good VCS to manage local stuff, I literally tried them all. I chose Mercurial because it was distributed, fast, easy to use, open source and written in a decent language. Once hg1 is installed, no need to set up anything to put a folder under revision. Just type hg init or select init in the {{TextMate}} bundle2 then add and commit all the files and it’s done. All the repository metadata are contained in a .hg folder. I wonder why everybody uses Subversion. Yes, it’s better than CVS but a distributed system makes much more sense and is easier to use. Mercurial command line tool is named hg (atomic symbol of mercury). ↩ Which I’m maintaining, BTW ↩

Ruby

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 01:15:00 GMT

Ruby is an Object Oriented scripting language (or agile language if you prefer). Lately, Ruby got some hype thanks to the Ruby on Rails web framework, but it’s useful in a lot of other places as well. It is by far the language I enjoy the most.

Bookmark Managers

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 12:19:00 GMT

A week ago I though it was time to search a better system to manage my bookmarks. I’m using Safari and sometimes Camino, it’s easy to import Safari bookmarks in Camino and that’s not a problem, but the story is different on my Nokia 770 and, more importantly, it’s such a mess that I sometimes tend not to bookmark stuff cause I won’t ever find them again anyway. I need tags. I’m using del.icio.us for a long time, but I never thought it could replace my local links. More on this later. del.icio.us, furl, Blinklist, Simpy, Spurl, Jots, Blogmarks, Netvouz, Shadows, RawSugar, Site Tagger, WebNoteHappy, here I come. Update Things change quickly. I don’t have much time now to review everything again. Now that del.icio.us allow private bookmarks and that WebNoteHappy is out, my setup is: WebNoteHappy on OS X synced with del.icio.us for sharing and when I’m on another platform. Desktop apps First I looked at desktop apps and I tried almost all OS X bookmark managers. That will be quick. Almost none of them made me even think a minute that I could benefit from using them. Most don’t have tags, which is quite surprising (where were the devs the last two years?) and eliminates all contenders but two: WebNoteHappy and Site Tagger. There is CocoaLicious too, but it’s a front end to del.icio.us, not a stand alone app, it’s still a good idea and I wish it’d work with other services. Site Tagger has some nice features: Tags, fully searchable links, import and post to/from del.icio.us and furl, backup to ftp, rating, smart folders, etc. But the interface is so weird and ugly that it’s useless to me. Sorry. Multiple views, weird widgets, some info only available on Get Info, etc. Check for yourself. The best of all is that double clicking on a bookmark doesn’t open it! You have to it Return. WebNoteHappy is really young and only the “lite” version is out, but it’s the only one worse keeping an eye on, IMHO. It has a simple and clean UI, tags (although they are mixed with comments), automatically imports from Safari, but it has no syncing possibility and it’s a show stopper for me. But I’d like to point that at least one dev got it right and I’ll sure look at the shareware version when it will be released. N.B: There may be a lot of extraordinary apps on other platforms, but that won’t help me, thanks. On OS X, I may have forgotten or misevaluated some apps, of course, but the apps or features I missed are surely well hidden, cause, boy, I did search. Feel free to point me to the good direction if I missed something. Online apps Then I tried something like a dozen online “social” bookmark managers. What strikes me is that bookmark management is one of the rare domain where web applications are way better than desktop applications. Not that they are perfect, far from it, but in this jungle of beta services, you can see some great ideas and implementations. And if you need your bookmarks, chance are that you’re connected anyway. I will only write about sites I really (if not intensively) tried, so they fit what I‘m looking for. I’m sure some that I didn’t like are a perfectly good fit for other people. Most of these sites are beta too, so some are changing fast. All of them except del.icio.us have private links, all of them except Furl, Netvouz and Blinklist have an open API. NB: This is in no way a complete roundup of all available solutions. This is just my adventures in the social bookmarking jungle. You can find a complete listing on 3spot’s “All social that CAN bookmark”. del.icio.us What I like: Fast. Popular. Well documented API. Nice tag suggestion. Almost standard compliant code. Kind of de facto “standard”. What I don’t like: No private bookmarks. I’m searching for a way to manage my links, sharing them is a plus, but I need to keep my pron^H^H^H^Hadmin links private. UI is light, but it’s ugly. Import is broken. Due to its open API and as it’s the most popular service of this kind, there is a lot of nice addons, scripts and apps working with it. e.g.: CocoaLicious: List, search, tag and add new links. Safarilicious: Export Safari bookmarks to del.icio.us, exclude folders you want, export only links not already there,… delicious2safari: Import delicious bm to Safari, although all of them in one folder. Jots What I like: Clean and fast. Fastest bookmark manager I tried so far. Nice simple text based UI. Almost valid XHTML. Calendar view. Browse by date. API. Private links. You can add notes (non-links). Did I say fast? Ruby is my friend. ;) What I don’t like: Needs a better search: “goo” doesn’t return google. :( Needs some kind of auto-completion/type ahead for tags. Bookmarklet doesn’t insert selected text. Narrowing tag search. e.g: Selecting tag “one” then selecting tag “two” in the related tags should give results for one + two. No editing of tags name. Needs easier editing (Ajax), at least a “two click” delete. Popup bookmarklet that insert selected text in description field. Needs Import! Without Leandro Ardissone’s tool to import from delicious, I wouldn’t have even tried Jots. Needs Export. Although you can use the Tom Hoffman’s python script to export to del.icio.us As the two last examples show, the API can be used to create import/export features, but it’s still too basic: All links are imported as private and you have to go through del.icio.us first. Which is bad for private links. Blinklist What I like: Nicest UI in the “non text based” category. Really. Refine tag search as much as you want. Lots of AJAX to edit, delete, make public, etc. Private links. Excellent bookmarklets inserts selected text, shows your tags and recommended tags. QuickBlink bookmarklet: Instant private post with “QuickBlink” tag. What I don’t like: They don’t want to support Safari until now, they even hide the bookmarklets if you use Safari. If you want to use them, you just have to change “document.getSelection” to “window.getSelection”, BTW. They answered my email (good point!) and explained they still are changing things all the time and will add support for other browsers later. Lots of small glitches with javascript make it hard to use in Safari, see point one. ;) I’d prefer having less candy and more speed. Totally non standard compliant code (declared as strict!). Netvouz What I like: Clean. Fast. Text based UI. (Not that nice but still.) Private links. Batch editing. Tag proposal based on page’s content. What I don’t like: No API. Categories. They just get in the way. Auto tagging of imported bookmarks based on page’s content: I don’t care having tags like “2003”, “0.6”, “home” or whatever and this totally ruins the type ahead for tags. furl What I like: Not much, so I didn’t test it a lot to be honest. ;) Private links. Text based simple UI. Fast. What I don’t like: Have to clic on a small icon the open a bookmark, clicking on the title open the detailed page on furl. :( More based on categories than tags. Spurl What I like: Clean UI. Fast. Sync your public bookmarks to del.icio.us. Bookmarklet inserts selected text. What I don’t like: I’m not found of the categories + tags system. Trying to maintain both is too hard, IMHO. Bookmarklet layout sometimes screwed in Safari. No type ahead for tags. Non standard compliant code Blogmarks What I like: Nice UI. Almost standard compliant code. Bookmarklet inserts selected text. What I don’t like: No related tags or tag hierarchy. No way to combine tags to refine search. A bit slow sometimes. Thumbnails. I prefer a text based UI. Shadows What I like: You can post comments every links. del.icio.us compatible API What I don’t like: No way to search only your bookmarks. You can just browse your tags. :( No export feature for now. Too slow. Simpy What I like: You can add notes (non-links). Documented API. Nice “- exclude ~ optional + require” tag search. Browse by date. Bookmarklet inserts selected text. What I don’t like: Can be really slow. UI is a bit cluttered. No AJAX, every action loads a page (see point 1). Problems with bookmarklets in Safari. Non standard compliant code. Never answered my mail. After these tests here is what I found important: Speed. I don’t want to wait 15s to see my bookmarks. Ability to make links private. Open API. Only way to have some nice devs, or even me, invent new ways for using the service. RSS everywhere. A way to see all tags without scrolling 10 min. I don’t like having folders organisation on top of the tags, this make two levels of organisation. You can forget about folders, but this doesn’t helps organizing and gets in the way. A somewhat nice text based UI. I don’t see the point for thumbnails too small to see what’s in the page. Type ahead tags suggestion. I don’t really know why but even if I tried lots of solutions with a lot more features, I keep coming back at Jots. It just feels right, even if it miss some important things (They could be implemented very quickly, btw. I really hope they still working on it). Beside Jots, the other services I may consider are: del.icio.us: If they ever allow me to make some bookmarks private. It’s huge adoption is a plus, considering how many addons you can find. RawSugar: Its tag hierarchy feature could be really smart and it’s really fast to edit/manage bookmarks, but the look is not that nice and they could at least declare a DOCTYPE. ;). Open API. BlinkList: I’m not sure at all that something else than a text based UI is necessary, but BlinkList looks nice and is packed with features. Maybe they allow me, Safari user, to use it one day. XHTML Strict? Comon’! No API. Netvouz: Text-based. I just which there was a way to avoid auto tagging on import and a way to disable categories. Look is ok, but could be better. No API. Google social bookmarks if they ever make it. As you can see, I can’t really find the ultimate solution so the future is open. Anyway, thanks to OnlyWire, you can post to all those service at the same time (works for public links only). One thing that disappoints me is that the Nokia 770’s browser can’t handle bookmarklets and I don’t know if there is some workaround… If you find inaccuracies or have any question, please, leave a comment.

TextMate

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 01:13:00 GMT

Best text-editor ever, and no, I don’t want to play the “best editor” war. ;) One thing I’m sure is that it’s the best €39 I ever spent and v2 will be a free upgrade (it will require Leopard, BTW. Not a problem for me.) Besides the normal code and prose writing, I use it for almost everything thanks to the “mate” command, the “Edit in TexMate” input manager, the blogging bundle, etc. I wrote and maintain the Mercurial bundle and some OnMyCommand commands, both need more attention, I know. ;)

LaunchBar

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 01:10:00 GMT

LaunchBar is an OS X text based launcher like QuickSilver and Butler. In fact, I think it’s the first one on OS X (and maybe on any platform?), version 1 was a NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP application (you can get that version for free, BTW). You should absolutely use one of those three applications anyway. Even if it is not free and lack a plugin API, I still prefer it over QuickSilver. It’s faster and gives better results IMO. Most of the features added via plugins in QS can be added to LaunchBar with scripts. You can find search templates, scripts, etc. on the forum.

Spotlaser

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 22:52:00 GMT

I guess nobody will deny that although incredibly useful, Spotlight can be incredibly frustrating too. You know, the “why searching when I only entered two characters” feeling. I use {{LaunchBar}} to send the query to Spotlight when I’ve typed the full string and when I want to search for filenames only (which is what I want most of the time), I hit ⌘ + F in the folder where I want to search. But what if I want to perform a logical search and don’t want to take the Raw Queries hell path? Here comes Spotlaser. Click to see full size. Note that Spotlaser matches your Appearance preference, I use Graphite but switched to the more ubiquitous Blue for this screenshot. The screengrab is self explanatory, enter your search attributes (the top one search filenames only), hit ↩ or click the round thingy at the bottom and boom: You can view the results of the search in a Finder Smart Folder. Now, there are a few of things that could be enhanced, IMHO: The only way to use a specific location is to use a open dialog and navigate to the folder you want. This is slow and requires the mouse. You can’t even drop a folder on the path field or edit it. A good thing would be to be able to drop a folder on Spotlaser window or Dock Icon and to be able to type the path too (with the last paths remembered, please). It could then be possible to “open” a folder in Spotlaser via a launcher or in a script. Yummy! I don’t know why, but the “Who” field is grayed out most of the time (see picture). I’d like to be able to tab through all elements, not just text fields. A global hotkey could be nice. It’s nice that Spotlaser respects the Appearance preference, but there is a small delay when it switches to Graphite. Still, Spotlaser is well designed and makes Spotlight easy to use. Why Apple didn’t make something like that is beyond me. Spotlight is donationware, consider donating something if you find it useful. I will.

The Unarchiver

Fri, 01 Dec 2006 22:32:00 GMT

I have been looking for a good archive expander for a long time. I like the archives to be expanded to the desktop, and BOMArchiveHelper doesn’t do that. Stuffit Expander can do it, but I find it slow and I don’t need an icon bouncing in the Dock every time I expand something. I want a progress bar too so that rules out the various CLI tools. I made a ruby script (wrapped with the excellent Platypus) to move files to the desktop, open them with BOMArchiveHelper then move them back1, but it was far from ideal. Then, I found The Unarchiver and it’s exactly what I was looking for. You can choose where to expand the archives. It’s fast. It’s free. It handle a lot of file types2: Zip (incl. encrypted archives), 7-zip Tar, GZip, BZip2, Compress StuffIt (.sit, not .sitx)3 Rar, Ace BinHex and Mac Binary Many other more or less obscure formats. You can choose which filetypes it will handle, it doesn’t “steal” them all4. The Unarchiver is a perfect replacement for the OS X built-in BOMArchiveHelper, it does everything better and I can’t see any downside. This was better than just moving the expanded files, as BOMArchiveHelper handles duplicates filenames better than I was willing to do. ;) ↩ “Support for so many formats is achieved by using the libxad unarchiving library.” ↩ .sitx hasn’t been reverse engineered, AFAIK. ↩ A lot of applications should provide this feature. ↩

Dragster

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 22:23:00 GMT

Dragster is a simple OS X utility to move files locally and remotely from the Dock. Just drag and drop files or folders on Dragster’s icon in the Dock, and away they go! Dragster can send files via eMail, upload them to remote servers, copy them to your iDisk, or copy/move files anywhere on your local drives. I know everything Dragster does can be done with (S)FTP clients, aliases, mounted shares, scripts, whatever, but I think it’s nice to have a central place for all quick local or remote file transfers. You can drop file(s) on the Dock icon, choosing the generic shortcuts (Remote Server, iDisk, Mail, Local) or those you saved before. You can also use it as background application with the contextual menu. Draster supports FTP, SFTP, SCP, SMB, AFP, iDisk, Mail and local filesystem. A few things that could be improved, IMHO: On rare occasions, Dragster can have a hard time finding your home directory on some servers (this will be fixed soon). I really wish files could be mailed directly, without using a mail client. Google Notifier doesn’t support attachments1 and if I must use Mail.app it’s as easy to drag the files on its icon. When sending files via AFP, Dragster doesn’t unmount the volume after, this kills the simplicity and I often forget to do it myself. Dragster is a “no thrills” utility, I find it useful and working pretty well @ version 1.02. Add this to my previous entry’s list of Gmail problems. ↩ Yup. There are still people releasing v1.0 directly. no 0.x.x or beta. ;) ↩

Migration

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:24:00 GMT

This site has just moved from FreeBSD/Wordpress to OpenSolaris/Symphony. There are lot of things to do, more info on the About page.

Things

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 02:15:00 GMT

Beta of a new GTD app from Cultured Code (makers of Xyle Scope). Although I’m an OmniFocus owner, Things is very tempting. As everything is organised by tags, you can create the system which suits you the best. Things is a work in progress, but the great design, the focus on simplicity and the planned features makes me which I heard about it before buying Omnifocus.