Charismatic Dog

I get that this it’s mostly for fun at this point but I can still appreciate the good folks over at Codeweavers releasing a port of Google Chromium for the rest of us to enjoy.

Just for fun I’ve started checking out Google Chrome from their dev site. I’m not up on what the latest build size is for the WebKit nightlies but 254MB and climbing seems large to me. Again, not really my field so I’m just guessing. Also why is cygwin in there? You know what. Screw it. Nice work Google. My favorite quote reading down a bit on the page is:

Currently, the Mac group is focusing on the testing harness, TestShell. The browser UI layer is not yet being worked on. We plan to start after getting the harness fully operational and better understand how to adapt Chromium’s architectural requirements to Mac OS X.

I suppose I know a little how the khtml folks felt about Safari back in the day. Hopefully Google’s use of WebKit will eventually turn around the same way Apple’s use of khtml is looking to turn around now. In the meantime I have to say that Google is not really challenging Microsoft by making a browser that’s glued to Windows.

• Apple’s Docs on writing an OD Plugin
• The example DS plugin in Apple’s dev tools is a Kerberos plugin
• The LDAPv3 plugin is open source (hurray)
• The Active Directory plugin is not (wtf)

Even at $299 for 16GB I’d have been happy to pick a new iphone up on the floor here. Still the demos were nice and I’ll be looking forward to buying one in July to use with mobile me.

I’m waiting in line to get into the Apple WWDC 2008 Keynote. I’ll try to update this post later with thoughts impressions. Prolly won’t do it live though.

Once upon a time I had a Geocities website. Go ahead and laugh. I’ll wait… seriously I’m patient… alright already shut up! What with Macworld doing a nice little write-up on the iMac’s introduction ten years ago today and even going so far as to post their original reaction. I was put in a nostalgic mood and went googling for the old site.

I had a reaction too. Oddly enough I posted it to the ol’ Geocities site. I think I actually had some interesting stuff to say as a senior in high school, but I may be flattering myself. My spelling and grammar are just as bad as they were then only now I have auto-magical spellcheck.

I made the poor decision once upon a time to use frames in the Geocities site so I’ve copied and pasted the article so you don’t have to fish for it or get lost in Geocities hell.

11/98 Where is myMac?

Warning: This seems to cast a negative light on the iMac. If you have one of those Bondi Blue Beauties, your awsome. You have the best consumer computer on the market today. My deal is not that the iMac is bad or Apple screwed up. Merly a thought that Apple can, and shouldn’t hesitate, to do even better.

11/98 Where is myMac?
Apple recently did a wonderful thing. They released their best consumer oriented machine in years. The only problem, it doesn’t deal with all their consumers. As stated above I don’t doubt the iMac’s greatness. I know several friends and a few coworkers who own them and love them. The adfirm I interned at this summer has deployed about 20 so far. They’ve kept up right alongside G3 300 workstations.Artistic types love ‘em! Inside and out. My problem is that I’m not your average creative mac user. I’m the geek kid whose average mac user mom bought a Mac IIsi to run her home landscape design buisness. I’ve been hooked on Macs since we got a classic for home use in ‘91. I’m using a Peforma 6290 to write and upload this article.

Those of you reading this article, who share my pasion for the hardware side of the machine, know that the IIsi my mom bought was (and is) a great Mac. The si was less of a wallet buster than the IIfx, but not a featureless workhorse like the IIci. The Classic was less of a great machine, but still a good Mac. I have never seen a well designed Performa. The 5200 series macs at my school, and the 6290 I own, are the worst designed Macs I’ve ever used. That still makes them better than any Widows machine I’ve ever used, but come on Apple you can do better.

Well Apple has repented for the Performa. The iMac more than makes up for the pitiful consumer Macs of late. It addresses the needs of the average Mac user. But what about the children of these users? The friends of these users? The people who asked their friends in the publishing industry what the best machine out there was? There is a whole population of Mac users out there who are luckier than average computer geeks. Instead of being hipped into going the frustrating rode of the PC geek, we get the joy of being the Mac geeks. The people who see a better machine and use it. Not for their livelihoods (at least not at first), but simply because they’ve found a better machine. These users (many still in highschool) are children of the revelution. We don’t have the same ideals as are parents had when they created the mac communtity, but we still love what they’ve created and want to be a part of it. We are ready to begin the new revolution in personal computing, and it’s us that Apple has left in the cold. We are the users that drool over Apple’s new Pro lines. We dream of owning our own PowerBook G3s, not so we can creat Quark layouts, or photoshop tiffs, on the road. We want a great machine for mobile browsing, gaming, paper writing. We want a great computer to go with us anywhere. We want a demon on our desks and we want it for under a thousand bucks!

(That would be what’s known as:the rub .)

I’d love to own a Powermac G3 300, but I can’t afford it. If I scrimp I can afford an iMac, but next fall, when I go to college, and I see the new G3 400s and G4 500s and my iMac is still poking along at 233mhz, I’ll just go nuts. I’ll sell my iMac for $500 and buy the machine that was meant for me. (Apple has to release it by then!) Meanwhile I’m out $800 I don’t have. Apple has always promised that great Mac for me just around the corner, and they’ve released it too! For $5000 I could have had a PowerMac 9600 when it was the fasted workstation not running unix. I could easly afford a stripped down 9600 now, but why bother. It can’t even outrace the iMac, nevermind that in a year it’ll be unable to run the latest greatest version of the Mac OS.

This is important stuff to Mac geeks. Average users, like my mom, will be happy with there first and second gen Macs until they refuse to ever boot again. My mom still uses System 7.01. I can’t do that–except for my Classic but that’s like that favorite childhood toy you wouldn’t give up till you were twenty–I need my speed demon.

Steve this article is for you. Don’t just make the next iMac faster for newbies going online. Make the next iMac myMac; a machine I can finaly dig into. If it’s not the fastet, I want to make it the fastet myself, without voiding the warenty, or loosing OS X support. Even if you don’t, I will not become a windoze user, but I will not join the new gaurd until Apple makes a Mac that’s ready for the third computing revolution to begin.

Apple computing began the personal computer market in the late 70’s with the Apple II. They then revolutionized the market in the 80’s with the Macintosh. We at Hi! are now waiting, impatiently, for them to, once again, show the personal computing industry how it’s done.

Those of you who clicked through may have noticed that I used to do all my writing in the recently deceased GoLive Cyberstudio back before Adobe picked up the company.
Apple certainly did do better with future iMacs. The current crop are fabulous home and office computers. What’s funny is that they still aren’t the perfect Mac for me. That was the 12″ Powerbook G4.

Note to self: let it go.

I’ve discovered that the mobile macs are where it’s at. Work provides with me a great MacBook Pro and while it’s too heavy by about a pound I’m hopeful that by the next time I need a new machine, either the MacBook will have slimmed down, or the MacBook Air will have hit specs that do what I need. Oddly, I need a lot less than what I thought I needed from a computer when I was 17 years old. Of course the MBP at work and the G4 Powerbook at home both smoke the crap out of that old Performa…

Watch the iPhone SDK Event and check the gushing praise for developing for the iPhone from EA, SalesForce, AOL and SEGA. Now notice some of them talk about how they’ve never developed for the Mac before, or written a lick of Objective C (Apple’s programming language of choice). I see Gruber’s already beat me to the punch blogging this, but let me say it anyway:

If you want to develop for the iPhone, you not only have to use OS X, you have to learn how to develop for it.

It seems to me it’d be awful easy to take those Mobile OS X skills and crank out some apps for the regular old desktop version. There are no guarantees I suppose, but I suspect there will be some developers who use that shiny new Mac Pro to develop more than great new iPhone/iPod Touch apps.

Hooray Apple. I’ve been wanting to find a good short tutorial for getting up and running with Ruby on Rails. I’ve started on a few of these before but perhaps this one will do the trick. Applescript Studio is still the furthest I’ve gotten with application development outside of TWiki-Apps so it seems fitting to rely on Apple to nudge me into another scripting environment.

Ruby on Rails is a popular and powerful open source web framework for rapidly creating high-quality web applications to help you keep up with the speed of the Web. Rails is thriving on Mac OS X, and Leopard comes pre-installed with Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, Capistrano, Subversion, and other tools that help to streamline the development and deployment of Rails applications. In addition, the Organizer feature of XCode 3.0 keeps your development workflow efficient. This article gives you a full tour of Ruby on Rails 2.0 on Leopard—starting with building a web application using the latest Rails features with Xcode 3.0, and finishing with deploying the application to a production server running Leopard Server. Along the way we’ll explore unique features and benefits that Leopard brings to the party. In the end you’ll be better equipped to consider the advantages of powering your web application with Rail [From Developing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard]

This was listed all over including Ranchero and Daring Fireball.

I happen to agree with those OS X users who say that one of OS’ great strengths is the ability to load random add-ons with your application, but I have noticed the problems caused by rampant input manager spew in apps that really derive no benefit from what appears to be system-wide modifications. In Leopard Apple has started depreciating various parts of the libraries and functions programmers have used to make these application plugins. You can read some of the upset this has caused over at Unsanity. The SafariStand page is another good example of how bad things have gotten for projects that depend on this infrastructure. A new project called Plugsuit claims to have an answer to both the problem of systemwide stability and the demise of the Input Manager.

Plugsuit’s website claims that it does not use the Input Manager trick to load plugins and instead uses another method to load third party code into individual apps instead of system wide. It’s a good trick and something I’m excited to test.

While I understand concerns others have raised over the years about the stability of input manager hacks, I think it would be a shame to lose even the option to mess with the Mac OS in ways Apple never intended.

I took a shot at updating the ol’ loaner iPhone from work up to 1.1.3. This broke SyncJE good. Boo. So then I tried a different method of Jailbreaking instead of iJailbreak this temporarily bricked the phone.

A trip into restore mode and going back to iJailbreak and I found myself back in business. I then ssh’d into the machine and tried running SyncJE from the command line by cd’ing into /Applications/SyncJE.app/. Oh I also had to chmod +s SyncJE (inside Applications/SynceJE.app/). I then created a directory /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/lib/ and /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/arm-apple-darwin/lib/ and ran “ln -s /usr/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib” and “ln -s /usr/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib /usr/local/arm-apple-darwin/arm-apple-darwin/lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib” I also ended up having to add a link between /var/root/Library/Calendar/Calendar.sqlitedb and /var/mobile/Library/Calendar/Calendar.sqlitedb

If I’m bored or feel guilty later I’ll clean all of the above up. Meanwhile, good night everybody!

Update: Here are some links related to this quixotic endeavor:

• http://raddysblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/setting-up-proxy-in-apple-iphone.html
• http://nexthaus.com/SyncJe%20for%20iPhone%20quickstart.pdf
• http://www.oscot.com/apple/how-to-make-an-itouch-with-bsd-root-md0-major-2-minor-0-work-again.html
• http://ijailbreak.com/
• http://code.google.com/p/independence/wiki/Beta14KnownIssues
• http://www.hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?t=26245
• http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=433598
• http://code.google.com/p/mobileterminal/issues/detail?id=72