Life in the Geek Lane

Testing wordpress app for iPhone.

I’m the type of person who needs to write things down in order to remember them. I’ve always been a list writer just to keep things organised so I know what I have to do. I’ve tried a number of ways, from paper based lists to text files on the computer but in some ways I got even more unorganised.

The past few months I’ve been using Things, a task management application currently in development by CulturedCode. I’m finding it really good and it serves as a reminder list and also a task management app all in one. I’ve found it really simple to use and keep using, which was always part of the battle with other task management applications I’ve tried.

I’m pretty sure I’ll buy a license for it when it finally goes 1.0, until then I am hanging out for .mac syncing support so I can have my task list on my imac and powerbook with little fuss.

Cleaned my iMac keyboard on the weekend following the directions at

http://theminiblog.co.uk/archives/2006/11/16/how-to-cleaning-the-apple-keyboard/

It worked really well and was actually really simple. Whole process took maybe 30mins.

Now my clear iMac keyboard is all clean and new again!

WiiFit was released and being a Wii owner I had to get one.

I was a bit skeptical at first (sorry Nintendo), but after using it for the past 3 days I’ve realised how awesome it is. The WiiFit board is really good and is very responsive and the activities in the game are really well thought out and implemented perfectly.

Over the past 3 days I’ve done about 1.5 hours total of the various activities and according to my log I’ve lost 0.5kgs. I’m not sure how accurate that is or whether I was just wearing lighter clothes or didn’t have a stomach full of food. Either way, I’ll take it.

I seem to be a whizz on the hula hoop but I find some of the yoga poses a bit tricky. The other various activities are all fun. I don’t think I’ve done one yet that I haven’t liked.

Only thing I wish it had was a automatic exercise plan generator. So you could basically queue up activities and then do one after the other instead of having to stop after each one and manually pick the next. Would be even better if the ‘trainer’ allocated you a plan of activities to do based on what you had previously done. I think that would make it a bit more random and perhaps push you to do certain activities that you had otherwise been skipping.

Another awesome product form Nintendo though. There’s no doubt about it they definitely know their stuff when it comes to this type of thing. The board works superbly.

So there is a new version of MSN messenger out for mac.

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/messenger/default.mspx

After previous mention of the mac version being bought up to speed with the windows version I was a little bit excited. I go to the website to check it out and find they have implemented voice and video chat! …. for the corporate contacts only… w..t..f

Where is the voice and video support for regular users wanting to voice and video chat with their friends / family using messenger on windows?

I’m sure the mac people who work on messenger at microsoft have no idea.

Picked up Mario Kart for the Wii and have been playing it a fair bit.

So far impressions are good. It came bundled with a steering wheel attachment that the Wiimote plugs into, which at first seems fun but I found it soon became very limiting especially when driving in the manual mode.

I imagine it would be a lot of fun using it with a group of people who all have the steering wheel, but for trying to break records and unlock maps you really can’t go past using the Wiimote + Nunchuck.

As far as the game goes, it’s a heck of a lot of fun. A lot of the tracks are re-hased from previous titles on GameCube, N64, DS, etc but that doesn’t really take away from the entertainment value. The addition of bikes is good and adds something new to the Wii version.

There are numerous un-lockable tracks, cars, bikes and characters which gives the game a lot of replay value, but it’s also really fun just racing against over people both locally and online.

Facebook seemed cool when I joined a few months ago. It allowed me to find people I had lost contact with which was neat but recently I’ve kinda grown tired of it.

The friend finder aspect of it is great, I found a lot of old friends, but I’m getting sick of all the stupid little ‘mini applications’ that are floating around. It’s really starting to remind me of MySpace, which I loathe.

Some of the applications are cool and useful, but I think probably 85% - 90% of them are completely useless.

The thing that really annoys me is the oodles of ‘invites’ I get to join some team, or take some test, or do some ‘thing’. All the applications have a ‘invite your friends’ section where you can select the friends you want to share it with. I swear most people just choose the ’select all’ option and send it off, which effectively spams everyone to join this new application.

I’ve received messages from people, which I apparently can’t read because I don’t have the required application installed. I have no wish to add all this useless stuff to my profile, so the message effectively gets lost.

It just looks like facebook is becoming too commercialised.

So yeah, I love how easy it is to track people down that I had lost contact with, but the extra crap that is starting to clog down my facebook page is annoying.

I purchased NetNewsWire back when it was not part of the NewsGator group and have been very pleased with it.

The other day I received an email stating that my premium NewsGator membership was running out soon, and by renewing I would continue to get updates for NetNewsWire.

I found this kind of strange. I’d already purchased NetNewsWire, and I expected to receive minor updates for free without further payments being necessary. I can understand having to pay for major releases but when I bought the product there was no ’subscription required’ clause mentioned that would indicate I would have to pay $20 per year for updates.

So I replied to the email, asking for clarification. The response I got confirmed what I thought. In order to receive any kind of updates, I needed to subscribe to the premium NewsGator service for $20 (USD) a year. The reply I received talked about how the $20 also includes a syncing service and allowed me to sync any number of other NewsGator products like FeedBurner.

None of that ‘extra’ stuff meant anything to me. I use .mac to sync my feeds, I don’t use FeedBurner or any other of the NewsGator services. So basically I would be paying $20 a year to receive updates to a program I had already purchased, including minor updates.

This seems ridiculous to me and I am kind of annoyed as I purchased NetNewsWire before it moved to NewsGator, when the whole ‘Premium subscription’ bullshit didn’t exist.

So I am left with an app that I will no longer get updates for. Looks like I will be ditching NetNewsWire soon for some other alternative. One that isn’t controlled by a company that is only interested in pimping out its subscription based services.

Very disappointed.

I bought a new external hard drive recently to use as a time machine backup drive. Anyway, I was having all sorts of problems with the firewire 800 connection. It would just randomly unmount the disc and give me a ‘The disc was unmounted and files may be lost” type message.

The firewire 400 port on it would work fine, but as soon as I plugged it in via firewire 800 it would randomly unmount.

Same thing would happen if I had it plugged in via firewire 800, then plugged in a separate firewire 400 hard drive. The 400 connected drive would show up and the 800 would unmount.

Went and tried it out at the mac shop and it works fine, which kind of indicates a problem with my iMacs firewire 800 port. So I have to take the iMac back in for them to look at.

Such a pain, having to cart the iMac back to the shop. It’s not exactly the easiest thing in the world to carry around.

It’s still under warranty, which is good, but the hassle of having to take it in and get it looked at then fixed is a pain.

I’ll probably take it in tomorrow, if they can’t fix it before the weekend I’ll just get it back and take it in again next week.

bleh…

For as long as I can remember I have had issues with the speed of transferring files between my mac (laptop / imac) and the windows XP machine I have. It would take what seemed an eternity to copy files and was so slow in most cases that I simple didn’t bother and found it easier to burn the info on a cd and put it in the other computers drive… silly eh?

Anyway, through the power of google I stumbled across a [post](http://echeng.com/journal/2006/09/13/mac-os-x-slow-network-performance-to-windows-xp/) on [Eric Cheng's site](http://echeng.com) which had the following solution.

1. Disable IPv6 on Mac OS X (System Preferences->Network->Configure->Configure IPv6->Off)
2. Uninstall ipv6 on Windows XP via command line:
netsh interface ipv6 uninstall
3. On MAC OS X, set ACK no delay by adding:
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY
to your /etc/smb.conf file.

I did exactly this and now my network is running a heck of a lot faster!

So my new iMac finally arrived. It took one day short of 3 weeks due to a shortage of 24inch models in Australia, but once a new shipment came in from Singapore all was well.

The screen really is huge, and very crisp. I’m glad I went all out and got the upgraded model. So far everything is working great. Having a few problems with .mac syncing between the imac and powerbook though, which is kind of annoying.

I’ve even managed to get iChat working with my modem, something which I’ve been unable to do for some time. I guess having an iSight built in is more incentive to get it working then having to setup my old iSight.

There seems to be a new batch of ‘new imac’ rumors floating around the web. I thought this would worry be but I’m actually really happy with the current model. The new ones may have some newish features and what not but will also most likely have the usual ‘new model’ bugs that Apple products seem to have.

So yeah, iMac has arrived and is working great.

I’m so jealous of people who excel at graphic design and user interface design. I like to think of myself as a fairly competent programmer. I think I have the skills to be able to pick up a new language quickly and get reasonable results. As far as graphic design and user interface design goes, I suck.

It is a genuine struggle for me to design a user interface. Sure, I can whack together something that does the job, but if you look at it with any kind of ‘user interface design’ in mind you see that it is severely lacking. I stare in wonder and amazement at good user interfaces, wondering why I can’t come up with something similar or as efficient.

I don’t believe my lack of skill comes from not trying. I spend a lot of time drawing user interface designs on paper or reading user interface guidelines, but I just don’t seem to get any better.

I guess it’s just one of those things that I will always struggle with, which is a bit of a shame because I actually enjoy it.

Why do normal windows float totally behind the dock while iCal reminder alert windows float in the space between the dock icons and the dock background?

I like Apple stuff, I’m a bit of a fan… but is anyone else sick of all the iPhone related news recently?

I know I am.

I got [Disco](http://www.discoapp.com/) as part of the [macheist](http://macheist.com/) end bundle. I like it for its simplicity. Anyway, the other day it bugged out while burning an audio cd…

Not sure what caused it but it seemed to lose its window texture. Letting it go and restarting after the burn finished seemed to fix the problem… weird.

*NOTE: Cool text added with Skitch

I got my invite to the [Skitch](http://plasq.com/skitch) beta last week.
First impressions:

* The UI is refreshing. Although non-standard, it is [plasq](http://plasq.com/) goodness, much like [ComicLife](http://plasq.com/comiclife/) was when it was released.
* Very responsive
* Extremely fun to use
* Very useful for anyone who posts images to any kind of online environment

I’ll play with it some more over the coming weeks, but at this stage it looks definitely like an app that I would pay money for and use quite often.

You can check out my ’skitches’ at [http://myskitch.com/brettbrooks/](http://myskitch.com/brettbrooks/)

Last week I bit the bullet and ordered an iMac. I’ve been following the latest iMac update rumours for some time now, the ones reporting that a new iMac will be released with a brand new enclosure and what-not. After numerous rumour deadlines came and went I got sick of waiting and decided to just jump right in and order it.

I’ve been using a PC as my desktop computer for what seems ages. Always having a mac laptop was good enough for me to work and develop on and the PC allowed me to play whatever games I wanted and have access to other PC related software. In recent years though I’ve found that I’ve been using my PC less and less for actual programs, and mainly just for games, a bit silly really.

So, after all these years, I’m moving back to the world of Apple desktop computers. I’m looking forward to it, and looking forward to having less to do with windows.

The model I ordered is as follows:

* 24inch iMac
* 3gig ram
* 750gig hard drive
* NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB video card

Should run fairly decently.
Currently ETA is sometime next week *hopefully*, so in the meantime I’ve been busy cleaning off my old PC. Sorting out all the documents and stuff I have on it ready to transfer it over to the iMac.

Can’t wait for it to arrive, although the 24inch widescreen is going to look huge compared to the screen I have sitting on the table now.

I’ve been working on an app that has a few NSComboBoxes. I wanted the NSComboBoxes to work as expected, allowing the user to choose an item from the drop down list or enter a new item directly into the text field. I ran into a few problems using bindings in this situation and found that just setting the bindings up in interface builder was not enough as it didn’t seem to automatically add any new items typed in to the associated NSArrayController.

(more…)

I’ve spoken about [Adium](http://www.adiumx.com/) in the past ([1](http://www.geeklane.com/blog/2006/12/17/indispensable-mac-apps/),[2](http://www.geeklane.com/blog/2006/12/04/adium-i-want-to-like-you/)), both times I have both praised and also bagged it due to an [annoying bug](http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/1583) involving multiple group chat conversations. Basically, If you had multiple group chat conversations going, all the text would get displayed in the first conversations window. This of course made it almost impossible to have multiple group conversations.

Thankfully, via a [comment](http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5776832&postID=1812221075554604629&isPopup=true) I left on the main adium blog, one of the lead developers - Evan Schoenberg took a quick look at the bug and whacked together a quick fix. Apparently it was rather basic and was caused by group conversations all using the same group chat ID and not unique ID’s. Anyway, as of Adium 1.04, the multiple group chat bug is fixed!

The seemingly simple fix actually motivated me to download the source code and take a look at it. I wouldn’t mind trying to fix some other bugs or maybe make some features better.

Evan’s quote in the comments of the bug say it all really:

>>Sigh. We really need someone interested in Adium development who actually uses MSN. This took about 30 minutes to create what I believe is a fix, and it has been a major flaw in our MSN implementation for 2 years.

The adium source code is huge, way bigger then any other source / project I’ve ever been involved in. I have a feeling it’s going to take some time to figure out how it all works.

So yeah, I now use Adium for my MSN messaging needs. It beats the pants off the clunky default MSN messenger app.

I’ve had a .mac account now for some time. I basically only use it for the iChat account (which you can get without continuing to pay) and the email address.

I never use the webspace, and occasionally use backup, which I guess justifies the cost for me in some way.

It seems that these days, you can get comparable free services which in some cases are much better. I kind of hope Apple are working on some kind of updates for .mac to make it seem a bit more worthy of the yearly subscription fee.