If you use Ruby and REXML on OS X you should know there’s a bug that prevents writing REXML documents to a file. Take a look at this bug report, but the file you want is in /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/Current/usr/lib/ruby/1.8.rexml/document.rb
Yesterday was a particularly successful day of technology acquisition. I ended up buying and configuring an Apple Time Capsule (802.11n WiFi + network storage for backups) as well as a Wii Fit. Of course setting all that up took a big chunk of time, but there you are.
I needed to acquire some more data storage and I had been debating a Time Capsule or biting the bullet and getting a Drobo. But in the last week I had several network outages that ended up being fixed by rebooting the Airport Extreme (my router), so it seemed like the Extreme needed to be replaced. As a bonus that meant I could move the Extreme as a relay in my office (the iPhone has been having some problems lately getting a good signal when I’m in my office).
The thing about configuring WiFi is it’s always a mess. There are three nodes in the network - the new Time Capsule, the Airport Extreme, and an Airport Express (which also streams music to the kitchen). Getting the Time Capsule to replace the Extreme was pretty straightforward, but getting the Airport Express to reconfigure took well over an hour. And the frustrating thing is that I can’t say what I did differently. I’d swear I configured it the exact same way three or four times and then suddenly the last time it went “Oh, you want me to join the existing network? I can do that.” And the Time Capsule insisted that my previous WiFi password wasn’t the correct length so I had to change the WiFi password and then go teach it to all of the relevant devices. Whee. But now I’ve got a Time Capsule and can backup Horton (the Mac Mini) and Lorax (my new laptop) using Time Machine.
On Wii Fit, they are fairly difficult to find (surprise! Stupid Nintendo!) On our recent vacation we checked out a fair number of Wii games, and Wii Fit, which is only sort of a game. Karin ended up wanting WarioWare and a Wii Fit, and neither is very easy to find. (If you want WarioWare the only choice I found was ordering it from bestbuy.com. It wasn’t in any local stores and it’s not available from Amazon or Gamestop.com.) Several Amazon Marketplace stores are selling WarioWare at higher than MSRP, so it must be out of print. And what is up with that? If I grudgingly accept some sort of hardware issue with Wii supply and then with Wii Fit, but WarioWare? That’s just a DVD for crying out loud!
The Wii Fit had worked out that I was just calling a few stores every week and trying places like Target or Best Buy when I was there anyway. We were at Target on Sunday and I figured I’d ask in the electronics department and they seemed to have just discovered they had “two to four units” in the back. Which makes no freaking sense, but whatever. There was a guy already waiting for one, a girl asked for one while I was waiting for them to find the stock in the back. So if they had four they sold three of them before they could even get them.
Frankly I have trouble believing that the Wii Fit board is tough to make. It’s a neat piece of hardware, but there’s nothing cutting-edge inside it. Nintendo really needs to stop screwing around and get their manufacturing sorted out. I’m done trying to guess what the problem is, but it’s really getting ridiculous now. Having WarioWare not be in the stores is just absurd. They have plenty of shelf space in the stores for crappy third party titles, and it seems like WarioWare is a game that people might actually want.
Washington, D.C. – Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) recently introduced H.R. 6588, which prevents customs officials from using the pretext of border searches to conduct groundless search and seizure of Americans’ laptops and other electronic devices when they return from overseas travel. The bill does not prevent the search or seizure of laptops or other electronic devices when legitimate law enforcement purposes justify that search or seizure.
While I’m still stuck with Senators that are in the RIAA/MPAA’s back pocket, at least I have a Representative who continues to do useful work that I can support. One out of three ain’t bad?
I should follow up a bit on my last post. Versions did in fact fix the 1.4/1.5 issue that drove me to looking at Cornerstone in the first place. And in the comments a developer of Versions stopped by to mention that they’ve really improved the visibility of contact information since I first looked at their site. Lastly, somebody from Cornerstone responded to my question and told me that it doesn’t support svn switch functionality. Versions doesn’t either, but one key difference is Versions is a free beta, whereas Cornerstone is a 14 day trial and they are charging for version 1.0.3.
Given that, I’ll probably go back to using Versions. I just got the new version and checked in some code with it, and it seemed fine. I still give them a black mark for attempting to force the svn 1.5 upgrade but they responded quickly to customer pressure and did the right thing. But more to the point - I don’t think a svn client that doesn’t support branching is “finished”. These apps are sort of specifically vying for position based on fit and finish/polish and branching is such a core function for version control that it just seems really glaring to me. I seriously doubt Cornerstone will add branch support in the next 8 days, and when my trial license expires it will likely get deleted.
In the meantime, if you want to use svn as far as I can tell you gotta know the command line tools. Which isn’t the worst thing in the world for a programmer I suppose.
So I’ve been experimenting with some of the new Subversion clients for the Mac. Until yesterday that experimenting was with Versions, but they did something that drove me to investigating Cornerstone.
I use Subversion for my own personal version control system (VCS). The software ships with OS X, it is stable, and it is cross-platform. I know all the cool kids are messing about with git, mercurial, or bazaar but I don’t need bleeding-edge stuff in my VCS, nor would I benefit from distributed storage. I’m reminded of when Subversion was first on the scene and I was still using CVS. There are things I want the latest and greatest of and things I want the “Hey we know this works and works well” and VCS is the latter.
One thing that has bugged me is that the state of OS X Subversion GUI’s has historically been very poor. I’ve been using RapidSVN for OS X repository browsing, but believe me that’s not a recommendation, just a statement of fact. For whatever reason several new svn GUI candidates have surfaced recently so I’ve been trying them. Versions was slightly earlier than Cornerstone and so I had been using the Versions betas for a while now. Versions is pretty cool but I haven’t figured out how to handle branches with it and there’s no documentation available and it’s not even clear how to contact the developers from their web page. Major strikes!
While I was on vacation I had been doing some working through the Cocoa Programming book and I had a new project on my laptop. I hadn’t checked it into Subversion but now that I was back yesterday I wanted to get the code on my desktop and work on it some more. So I fired up Versions, but the beta had expired (sigh). I downloaded the new version, but here’s the kicker: the new version used Subversion 1.5 so if I used Versions I would have to upgrade all of the command line clients across the four machines I access Subversion from. Well no. This is a show-stopper people. I wanted to check in a handful of files and suddenly you’re shoving an unannounced VCS upgrade down my throat in a “Sorry our old software stopped working” manner? Oh, and Xcode isn’t compatible with svn 1.5? Fantastic! (In fairness I noticed today when I went to get the links for this post that there’s a new version that supports Subversion 1.4 but still - they decided yesterday they didn’t want to be my client, even for a day. You have to respect that sort of call when a developer makes it.)
So I installed Cornerstone and took it for a spin. I like it so far. The history view seems more elegant and somehow it was just more intuitive to set up. It’s just like Versions in that there’s no documentation, but at least they provide prominent “contact the developer” links. I don’t see the GUI equivalent of svn switch, and quite frankly I’m not going to pay for a client that doesn’t support that. If I have to drop down to the command line to do the complicated things then I might as well just stick with the command line. I sent the developers an email today inquiring about switch, so we’ll see what they say.
Versions looks nice, but I don’t like their support thus far and I can’t recommend something with frequent beta “expirations” and cavalier “Let’s all switch to the new shiny!” attitudes. If Cornerstone has the svn switch functionality somewhere I’ll probably go ahead and drop the $60 to buy a copy.
So I got my first PS3 “trophy” this morning in Pixeljunk Eden and I’ve played a bit with the Playstation network id. It’s still not a good equivalent to Xbox Live and Gamerscore. First off you apparently can’t see trophies from the web or anywhere but the PS3 itself. Second off, this silly PSN network ID badge I added to my site doesn’t display anything other than an avatar icon and a phrase I set on the PS3. Worse, it doesn’t even update when those change unless I got to a web page and click an “update” button. Lastly, trophies without Home is just a text string. Whoopee! No graphic, no score, just a little picture of a bronze trophy and the trophy description.
It’s hard to imagine this catching on. Seems like if they were going to rip off Xbox (while Xbox was busy ripping off Nintendo), they should have been at least able to rip off the cool bits ….
I’m off on vacation, but I took a moment to grab a picture of Kool-Aid (my old 17″ Powerbook on the left), Lorax (my new 15″ MacBook Pro in the middle), and Karin’s uninterestingly-named laptop (the 12″ Powerbook on the right). I need to get a wallpaper on Lorax before I head out, but I thought the size comparison was amusing.
Yesterday in the comments JP asked about iPhone applications that I recommend. It’s still early days for iPhone 3rd party apps, but a few stand out so far.
My two most favorite applications would certainly be NetNewsWire (RSS reader) and OmniFocus (productivity Getting Things Done application), but both of those are probably only interesting if you use the Mac desktop versions. They both sync so that you can move easily between the desktop and the phone and manipulate the data in either place.
After those my favorite is the Apple Remote. If you have iTunes, an Airport Express, or an Apple TV you can now use your iPhone to control that music source. You can browse music, set volume, and if you do have an Airport Express you can select which speakers are in use. I used this over the past weekend at Game Day to control the music playing in two different rooms and it worked great. Again, if you don’t use iTunes in some flavor it won’t do much for you, but if you do you should definitely check out Apple Remote.
Other freebie apps that I’ve been impressed with are Twitterific, Yelp and Shazam. Yelp is a front end for Yelp (big surprise), and Shazam records a snippet of a song, then sends it off to some internet server and about 80 - 90% of the time it comes back and tells you what song it is. That’s really cool. Mocha VNC Lite seems to work as advertised (and it can control a Mac with “Back to My Mac” turned on if you open the firewall port for it). I’ve downloaded but not yet tried the Wordpress app. Tap Tap Revolution seems pretty fun, but the no-name music is a bit of a bummer. Obviously if it played from your music library it would be a good bit better.
I’ve used FileMagnet to put a couple of PDF files on the phone and that seems decent. It isn’t free, but if you want to read PDF’s on the phone it’s worth $5.
The only app that I paid for so far that I find disappointing is Super Monkey Ball. The camera interacts poorly with the tilt controls and the game requires you to play something like 10 levels at go without saving - which is very un-iPhone-like. If you shut it off after only five levels when you come back you need to play those five levels over again.
I just bought Cocktails today and I like it for what it does, but it seems really short on tiki recipes (it doesn’t know a Shark’s Tooth or a Blue Hawaiian for example). I haven’t really used it enough yet to pass opinion on the database, but it looks like a nice enough application. Plus it will Twitter what drink you’re making!
Good Lord, I’ve been as criminally negligent of this blog as it’s possible to be criminally negligent of a personal blog.
It’s time for Technology Catch-Up(tm). Part the first: I bought Wii - I’ve had it about a month now. One part the Penny Arcade guys gushing over Boom Blox, one part some other technology fooling about making me realize that if I reconfigured the home theater just *SO* I could squeeze a Wii to the existing input and cables, and one part it finally being in a local store when I called and asked them.
Verdict? Well, it turns out I can improve the sloppy control I complained so much about - set the sensitivity to “5″ (the max) and it helps a lot. I still feel very strongly that you don’t feel like you’re pointing at the screen due to the ergonomics of the remote and you’re driving a pointer around. The visceral “I’m pointing at the screen” doesn’t work right, and whenever you need to do that it seems like there’s a fair amount of “Just wave the remote until you get a cursor and then adjust from there.” Boom Blox is a lot of fun despite that, and I’ve played an awful lot of Super Mario Galaxy in the last month. I still think it’s a gimmick overall and I can’t see it ever dethroning my 360 as my main console. But as I said in the comments here I don’t think they are even competing really. I don’t regret buying one, but I don’t regret not having one for the last 1.5 years either. I haven’t bought Zelda yet, but by the end of the summer I’ll have blown through the back catalog and then the Wii will be like the Gamecube - hardly ever used except when Nintendo released a game every six months or so.
That’s not all on the technology parade. I’m going on vacation next week and I decided I wanted a new laptop before I went, so I got a 15″ Macbook Pro. It’s smaller and lighter than Kool-Aid, both of which will make it more airplane friendly. Kool-Aid needed at least a new battery, and it couldn’t run the iPhone development software (needs an Intel Mac), and it was just getting a bit old for what I wanted to do. I’m still installing and configuring software but I like it a lot. As an odd aside Karin bought it with her educator discount and we got a free iPod touch in the bargain.
Which brings us to the iPhone 2.0 software. I don’t have any real desire to upgrade to the iPhone 3G as I already own a GPS and most of my iPhone network usage is via WiFi anyway. But the new software is full of awesome. The App Store is great and a lot of new applications are fantastic. I should post more about this. My biggest surprise so far is to realize I actively prefer reading RSS feeds on my phone and I opt for it even when I’m at home and could use Tiny God and the twin 24″ screens. The phone forces me to triage more from article title and so far I’m not missing anything but getting through more items in less time. There’s a lot of good stuff in the App Store. A metric shit-ton of crap as well, but there it is. The phone seems much less stable as well. I crash it several times a day now, as opposed to less than once a month. Most crashes seem to be right around app launch and it recovers gracefully but it’s still a sour note.
Sony added the ability to badge your PSN (Playstation Network) account on a web site, just like 360 and I added mine to the sidebar. The badge doesn’t seem very useful, since all it displays is the account picture and apparently some sort of message that I have to use the PS3 to set, but whatever. I’ll put it next to the 360 badge and if Sony makes it look stupid that’s Sony’s problem not mine.
Anyway, if anybody has a Playstation, go ahead and send me a friend request or whatever they call it in Sony-land.
Some day I really have to change the theme on this blog to get a second sidebar ….
