I don't really think I am going to have any terrific insight into this that you've never heard. Of course that is a liberty I can take on my own site. You as the reader can do with it what you want.
Yesterday a friend of mine mentioned on Facebook that she was using a Mac at the library and loved it. Immediately afterwards you see the standard debate start, one person in particular posted something about the macs being overpriced, monopolistic and so on. My gut reaction would have been to take the typical 'someone is wrong on the Internet' stance. But I soon realized that from the average persons perspective, these things sound almost true. So I thought I'd address some of his points in a wordy blog post because I almost never need to write anything over 140 characters. I realize that this might be the worst thing I've ever done, written a blog post because of something I saw on Facebook.
I'm a fan of Apple, iPods and iMacs are both things my wife and I own and use on a daily basis. They are not flawless but that is another post. I say this only to establish bias ahead of time so you don't feel clever for calling me out later.
Let's get started with the complaints:Adding fuel to this fire though, particularly concerning iTunes is the recent antics with the Palm Pre. Neither party is without blame. Palm going as far at one point to pretend it was an iPod by using Apple's USB Vendor ID(big, HUGE no no). But the whole situation does stink a bit, people are buying Palm Pre's and finding out they can't sync their iTunes synced music to it. At least I assume this is the issue. I'm not really sure it surprised anyone, the Pre is a direct competitor to iPhone, why would they let them work with their software? It is getting irritating to download these minor updates to iTunes so Apple can fight the latest Palm hack.
I'll also note that the current practices of the app store for the iPod Touch and iPhone are certainly raising eyebrows. Not just because they are closed, but because of the things that get rejected, for example, the google talk fiasco. I won't say much more about this, I just know the 'm' word got tossed around a lot(probably in reference to AT&T) when this happened. Other app rejections haven't had that blatant edge to them but boy do they stir up a lot of 'press'.
At the end of the day though this price isn't paying for better hardware(maybe shiny). It's probably going toward the awesome that is OSX ;) That is the whole reason I buy Apple. Not because it is shiny or thin, but because I love the idea of Unix with a very polished desktop environment on top. No, Gnome on Linux is not polished to that degree. I've been using it since .99 and even with vast improvements, it's still not there. Don't even get me started on windows. A friend of mine summed it up best by referring to it as the 'non deterministic operating system'. If I ever run in to problems on windows my solution is 'wipe the drive' more often then not. I'm sure more windows savvy folk don't take this slash and burn approach, but I don't pretend to know a damn thing about windows.
As you may know, I find myself on the road for business from time to time. Being married, with a family forming, this is far from ideal. Beyond just being home sick and missing my wife, I find myself bored out of my mind. This particular trip is nicer in that respect though. I've been bitten by the development bug of late, so I've been doing a bit more hobby tinkering than normal. Being on the road gives me a lot of time to tinker with random things that I normally wouldn't want to take time for during the week.
Yesterday I took the time to write a short script to set my timezone based on my fire-eagle location. Tonight I converted afterfate.net to use the fire-eagle api directly instead of parsing the eaglefeed.me atom feed. The performance increase is at least 2x based on some quick tests with time/wget. This also means that time-zone information doesn't require me to contact a second service because the fire-eagle response contains that data already.
Tomorrow I think I'll take a shot at having the service I wrote on apps.afterfate.net take my location data and find the closest weather station. I'm hoping I can find some way to use this information to automatically update my gnome weather applet data. Of course, I don't actually have trouble setting my own time-zones or new weather location, I'm doing this only to say it's been done :)
We spent a lot of time on the road tonight so I didn't really get to mess with dashcode to the extent that I had hoped. Initially I thought 'hey I'll just mess with it for a few minutes and go to bed'. Instead I ended up messing with the graphics for the CPAN search widget. Yup, ZERO functionality.
I was waiting for the dryer to finish so I could go to bed. I figured it didn't have enough time left on it to bother starting my FireEagle work, and/or continue screwing with BrightKite::Auth. So I said, 'I need a widget for CPAN, I wonder what dashcode is like'. About 10 minutes later, half of that messing with trying to figure out how to place an image, I've got a widget that opens a new tab in my browser with the search results for something on CPAN. It looks like crap, and doens't display search results inline, which would be nice. It just opens a new window.
Holy crap that was easy, I love dashcode, I want more. I'm going to start trying to think of other dashboard widgets I need and see how hard they are to put together. This should be fun.
In retrospect, iframe was a retarded choice. With as much XMLHttp stuff as I did this fall you'd think I'd have turned toward that initially. Well eating dinner managed to kick my brain into gear and I re-factored how I handle the BrightKite map support. Basically the application will serve up an img tag to be used in an iframe, XML, or JSON. Using Dojo I changed the page to make a call to the JSON response type. This required moving the 'display' portion of the app over to the afterfate.net vhost instead of apps.afterfate.net but that isn't too bad. Most of the 'work' for this app is handled by the back-end components which come off the same place in the filesystem.
The worst part is up until about two hours ago 'apps.afterfate.net' hadn't even been registered, so the iframe wouldn't have worked for anyone who wasn't NIS bound here in the _house_.
I was bored this weekend with the typical fare. I decided I would take a cue from @ffg and 'stalker enable' my blog using the google maps API. On the back-end it's powered by a mason app loaded in an iframe on the blog's main page. Eventually I want to see if I can make a simple facebook app to throw this into the facebook profile side-bar. For now having it on my blog is fine. Before anyone shouts 'but privacy!', I'm not going to check in unless I want just about everyone to know where I am, duh.
I'm not sure if an iframe is the best way to do this, but I don't see any reason for the image to come off of afterfate.net rather than google itself. Since the afterfate.net/ blog is completely static I can't just make a call to my google maps code.
# overzealous rm command
*curse*
*crawl under desk to plug in backup drive*
# su -
# mount /<backup drive>
# cd <to backup for web-site>/
# cp *.css <htdocs dir for site>/
# umount /<backup drive>
# ^D
# try to make changes to css
*annoyed grunt*
# su -
# chown stuff
# ^D
# cd <web-site htdocs>
*sigh*
# svn status (shows files I needed)
*headdesk*
Those of you playing WoW since the latest patch have probably noticed a few of your favorite mods going through some growing pains. The most notable of which is probably Omen. Omen is a great tool but they've been having to update nearly every day (sometimes 2-3 times) because of the recent changes. Eventually Nicole and I became frustrated with this and she gave me a 'programming excersie' to write something to handle this.
My first instinct was to write a shell script to handle this, then dump it in a copy of the WoW Launcher app so it could be launched from the Dock as an actual application. This method is pretty hacky and I wanted to hand this out to some friends, and I didn't want it to be a complete hacky pile.
Enter my local Mac fanboy/oracle Dave (http://freeke.org/ffg) with a suggestion to use Mac's Automator app. Here is where my normal habits of writing some shell script on a Unix machine to handle simple tasks get called in to question. Dave's initial suggestion was to just put my shell script in an Automator, but this tool is pretty darn useful on its own. The screen shot below illustrates the simplicity of grabbing our latest mod version, unziping it, and starting wow. Something that a shell script could of course do pretty quickly, but this feels like the Mac way ;)
I'm quite impressed with how dead simple it was to get this working, and being a Automator n00b I'm sure I am going the long way round, it I still find it quite nice. The best part is the Automator workflow can be saved as a proper 'app' which can be launched from the Dock, all this in something like 15 minutes with Automator (which brings my life total Automator usage to 30 min).
The longest part of this whole experiment was putting the icing on this workflow. Figuring out how to effectively edit mac .icns files was an interesting experience in itself. (tip: When in doubt, type 'icon' in spotlight)
That is the least impressive icon you've probably ever seen, but the goal of this was to have an Icon, not to get an award. Once my app had an icon the next step was packaging. This was pretty easy once I looked over the hdiutil man page and used skitch to make a quick and dirty background.
Overall thinking like a Mac (with a little help of course) has given me a fairly simple way to keep my Omen settings up to date, and hopefully it'll help out some of our Mac WoW guildies. The whole experience was interesting just in learning a bit about the 'icing' bits like custom disk images with views and backgrounds, to editing icons. The funny part is it probably took 3 times as long to get all the 'icing' on the cake than it did to bake the thing.
Maybe someday I'll get off my lazy ass and write something that takes longer to make, than to package.
