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plist.py 1.2
Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 17:07plist.py 1.2 is now available, adding support for boolean values. It is a Python module which converts between Mac OS X XML property lists and Python data structures.
Thanks to Robert White for the addition.
Monaco Gripe
Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 19:46Mac OS X 10.4.4: "Includes later versions of the Courier and Monaco system fonts that resolve certain Central European language and Cyrillic glyph display issues". In unantialiased Monaco 9, I have noticed the following differences:
- •: The bullet is slightly smaller. Good.
- & « »: The ampersand and angle-quotes look smashed. Bad.
- t: The lowercase 't' is intermittently shifted left one pixel. Bad.
- p: The lowercase 'p' is intermittently displayed narrower (the loop is squished). Bad.
And yes, I do mean intermittently. The appearance of 'p' is changing as I use the system.
Half-Baked World
Wednesday, November 16th, 2005 13:25This is another Mac OS X screen saver, which I've been working on but haven't really “finished” to my satisfaction. I’ve decided to publish it anyway.
The basic idea is that there is a grid with various terrain types (which is incrementally modified), and various “mobiles” wander about it. The terrains so far are ground, mountain/wall, water, and bridge. The mobiles are bouncing rollers, edge followers, and fish.
The camera picks several mobiles (usually two) and keeps them in view, choosing different ones after a while, or if the group wanders too far apart.
What's missing:
- More mobile types. Mobiles that modify the terrain. More modes of locomotion: flying, hopping, etc.
- Better camera control, so that it doesn't spend as much time showing stationary mobiles or wide-area views, and will follow individual mobiles longer if they manage to move significant distances.
- Better collision handling. I've already incorporated ODE to manage the basic position-and-velocity, but haven't updated the collision system to take advantage of it (if you're familar with ODE: the space system is not used; no contact joints are created; collisions are handled by setting velocity components to 0). As a result, mobiles may get stuck or run into walls and vanish, won't ever bounce or tumble, etc.
- A better name.
Here are some rather small screenshots:
mergesvn (not to be confused with svn merge) is a simple tool I wrote to resolve conflicts in Subversion working copies using the Mac OS X FileMerge application.
Given the name of a file with conflicts, it automatically finds the ".mine" and ".rN" files svn creates for a conflict. Saving the FileMerge window will overwrite the file; you must do svn resolved yourself. [Update: The above-linked version will run svn resolved for you.]
MudWalker
I just uploaded GLToy 1.1, a Mac OS X screen saver. From the page:
Miscellaneous OpenGL-based effects with transitions. Highly randomized. Slightly interactive (press I for help).
- Changes in version 1.1:
- Info area and particle textures work under Mac OS X 10.3 and later, instead of having or being large white areas.
- New effects: Voronoi diagram; point grid; infinite tunnel.
- Plot effect has several new functions to plot.
- Trail effect is somewhat less ugly.
- Fractal effect has modes where subdivision boxes appear instead of disappearing.
- Grids effect has multiple styles of grids, and may turn the camera independently of the direction of motion.
- Chain effect: spheres will be less oversaturated; new "curl" motion mode; fixed incorrect info display.
- Particles effect: an uninteresting motion mode has been removed.
Sleep problem update
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005 13:34I wrote in a comment previously:
No, it's a PowerBook G4 12", latest revision (scrolling trackpad).
It goes to sleep normally. On wakeup the light goes out and the drives make the usual noises, but the screen remains off (not blank, and not backlight-off-but-showing-an-image). The one time I tried network access, SSH just hung and ping reported, IIRC, “Host is down”.
It didn’t do this when I first got it, but I didn’t put it to sleep for a while after that so I didn’t notice exactly when it started doing this.
I had an unrelated crash today, and I decided to try something while I had the opportunity.
I turned it off, waited five minutes, unplugged everything, waited five minutes, removed the battery, waited five minutes, put the battery back in, waited five minutes, plugged it in, waited five minutes, and then turned it on again. Now it works.
Ah, modern technology.
Update’s update: Apparently if I do anything but click Sleep at the login screen, it again won’t wake up. Ngh.
10.4 notes
Saturday, April 30th, 2005 11:30Installed Mac OS X 10.4 last night. Miscellany that I can remember this morning:
- The installer no longer offers separate Custom Install settings for whatever-the-fonts-for-many-languages-package-was-called and Additional Asian Fonts, but only one. I wonder if it’s just all in one now, or the A.A.F. are in the base system or not provided any more.
I clicked on Safari. Safari loaded, started showing a page, crashed. The Crash Reporter dialog now has a button to relaunch the application. If it crashes again, the dialog offers to relaunch it with the preference file moved aside. If it crashes again, the “Report” button becomes the default. (Still no apparent hooks for reporting a crash to anyone but Apple.)
I got it to not crash after launch by copying the plist entry (ack, plists are now binary by default!) from my 10.3 system that says “start up with blank page”. Trying various web pages, and setting up a WebView in Interface Builder, seems to indicate that WebKit crashes whenever a GIF (not PNG, not JPEG) image is present on a page.
I haven’t seen any other reports of this problem yet. Hmm.
- Looking at Console indicates that a “
mdimporter” process is crashing about once a minute (and accumulating crash logs). I understand this is the Spotlight indexing process. - Dashboard has plenty of Gratuitous Visual Effects, and works as described, but I haven’t yet seen anything obvious that I’ll be using it for.
- Safari is said to support viewing PDFs in-browser, but I haven’t tried this yet. I’m looking forward to it.
- Audio MIDI Setup had something called “Network” in the MIDI device configuration section.
- I should turn on speech recognition and see if it’s become less crashy.
- My computer still won’t wake from sleep properly on this clean-installed system. This means it’s probably a hardware problem. Aargh.
