How Embarrassing
Monday, 19 August 2002 6:18:57 pm
I sent out mail to a few folks asking for feedback on the gallery — and discovered this morning that I’d pushed a version out with a serious HTML coding error that made the contained link unreachable. Oops.
How Disappointing
Monday, 19 August 2002 9:00:00 am
I see from a Slashdot article that Microsoft have pulled their suite of “free” standard fonts for web display. Apparently they are still available from the Corefonts project, but that doesn’t completely help, as there is a fair chance that Microsoft will shut down this point of distribution.
I really cannot begin to fathom Microsoft’s reasoning on this: the fonts are scattered widely around the globe, and if anyone wants them, they can easily obtain them. The only thing this action does is irritate people who are trying to promote web standards, who now have no reliable de-facto standard set of typefaces. The CSS spec does not directly refer to the MS typefaces, but heavily leans in that direction.
This is a good example of why a better way is needed for web designers to specify and control the display typefaces at the client end. The current CSS method of listing a set of typefaces in descending order of preference only really works when there is a common set of more-or-less standard set of typefaces in common use. If every OS vendor starts shipping their own versions of similar typefaces with different names, chaos ensues (again.).
Heartbreak Hotel
Friday, 16 August 2002 8:21:06 pm
Twenty five years since Elvis Left The Building, apparently for good. All day long I’ve nursed an image in my mind: the faithful are gathered (as they are while I type this) around the gates of Graceland, nursing their candles and trying to keep their wigs straight. A blinding beam of light shines down from the massive flying saucer hovering soundlessly overhead, down which Elvis Himself returns…
Maybe I’ve just been working too hard this week.
The boys and I got together on Wednesday to bash out (literally) the bucklers, in a serial fashion. It all went fairly quickly, and we had great fun doing noisy things with hammers and rivets. The day saw much coming and going of all concerned. Robert had to jump in his car and drive back to the other side of town to get the drill that he forgot (the single most needed tool of the day!). Robyn went for a walk to look at clothes stores and escape the ringing clanging rhythms.
And of course, to top it off, we had to race Miss Kitty out to the vet surgery in the afternoon. She’s been brawling again, and has picked up a substantial duelling scar across her nose and down her lip. Dr Leigh has shoved handfuls of antibiotics past her clenched fangs, which appears to have successfully staved off the almost inevitable systemic infections Miss Kitty is prone to.
Meanwhile, all week I’ve been struggling to get the CSS and HTML markup on these gallery pages working. In the end I built something involving a polyglot mixture of CSS and tables which seems to work correctly under most circumstances. At last I can get back to preparing the content!
But not tonight. Tonight I install “Medal of Honour” and amuse myself.
More Incompatability
Tuesday, 13 August 2002 6:24:23 PM
I have almost finished pruning my list of technical things-to-do. Unsuprisingly, it was software flaws that has slowed me down.
For the past week or so I’ve been preparing the gallery section of the Sable Rose website. The plan was to scan the photos, store them in iPhoto, then use BetterHTMLExport to automagically build the pages. I decided early in this process to move all the existing pages from a table-based layout to a CSS base.
While it took me a little while to come up with a solution that mimicked the original look, once I had one it was only a few hours work to reforge the pages. Two factors — apart from using a Mac — made the task relatively painless. First, the table layout was fairly clean: a big wrapper table for the overall layout of blocks, and sub-tables to shape the menu bar, footer and body. The second, and more important factor, was that I had taken the time to format the HTML and litter it with comments, as though it was program code. That made it absurdly easy, albeit deathly boring, to pluck the content out of the layout noise.
Getting BetterHTMLExport working was a little bit fiddly, and would challenge some users. The documentation could be extended, although an article at the O’Reilly site helped. What caught me out was that if the tool had trouble parsing a template file, it reported that it couldn’t find the file. It took a few hours to figure that one out. The second attempt at getting my templates together involved cloning and modifying existing templates rather than writing them from scratch.
Eventually I had something that worked, and looked the way I wanted it to do in the Mac version of Explorer. I shipped my test files to the web server, and myself to bed. The next day I looked at the trial pages with Explorer 5.x for Windows. Oh my God! It looked terrible! As far as I could tell, my CSS was valid and sensible, yet Explorer completely garbled the page. Later tests with Opera showed some minor glitches, but nothing as bad as the MSIE 5.x results. Good Grief! This stuff has been an accepted standard since the last century! Can’t anyone get around to implementing it properly?
In the end, I changed the design of the internal gallery pages in order to get something which doesn’t break. It currently is pure CSS, but I may yet go back to using a table to build the grid of thumbnails. And to stop it breaking on OmniWeb, which I’ve almost completely abandoned since it is still badly broken.
Oh well. The good news is that Jaguar is out and getting good reviews, and Adobe have released Elements 2.0. I’m not completely thrilled about the price on Jaguar, but at least I’ll get a pretty major upgrade for my cash. Looking at the glossy brochure for Elements I can see a few nifty enhancements, but the one thing that will make me buy it is that it now runs native in OS X. The current version works ok under Classic, but makes Classic a major resource hog. Switching back and forth between X apps and Elements under Classic is best described as interesting.
Once I upgrade Elements, the only thing I need to go more-or-less Classic-free are OS X drivers from HP for the scanner. Which are now more than a year overdue. Note to IT marketing: don’t advertise release dates when your company is in the middle of a massive merger or restructure, and all your coders are busy updating and faxing their resumés…
Let’s try that again...
Sunday, 11 August 2002 8:15:45 PM
For a while there, I abandoned use of MacJournal. Dan has now released a new version, 2.1, so I’m going to give it another try. There was nothing horribly wrong with the first version, it just had a few flaky behaviours when I exported the journals to HTML format. We’ll see how we go now.
I’ve had a particularly busy day today. Up at the crack of dawn to go and play with swords with the Boyz — not a particularly brilliant idea on my part, since I’m in the process of losing my voice, and still feel fairly ill. Then we nipped across to a planning meeting for next year’s Ricardian conference. A quick stop on the way home to wish my father-in-law happy birthday, a hurried dinner. then head first into filling out my tax return.
Somebody who works for the tax office described the tax situation well today: inventive tax evasion is a national sport. In response, the tax laws mutate on a daily basis, and are so incredibly arcane and convoluted that the tax commissioner stood up in court a few years ago, put his hand on a Bible, and admitted that the tax laws were now so large and complex that no single person who works for the tax office can understand them.
Thus, every year, we are faced with a different set of questions, all contained in several handy books roughly the weight of a small child, and we get to tell the tax office things that they basically already know about our affairs. Then our benighted and dim-witted Federal government spends more than they collect without any particular exercise of either rational thought or frugality.
Flower Power
Wednesday, 7 August 2002, 8:35 pm
Some
weeks ago Janis Ian wrote an open letter to the RIAA, speaking as a
member of the lowest rung on the recording industry food chain — the recorded artist. It has become something
of a rallying call, and she has published a
follow-up article which I highly recommend you read.
What is most significant about her comments is that they are being made by someone other than a techno-geek.
The average punter still doesn’t understand how far-sweeping and potentially damaging the bone-headed laws
being passed in the US at the behest of the recording and movie industries are. (Hmm. Is that sentence
gramatically correct? Yes, it is. Unreadable, but gramatically correct.)
There’s an almost 1960’s feel to the protest that is starting to stir into life. Smash The System! Bring Down The Man! Musicians And Poets To The Barricades! Particularly if voices from the distant past start to be heard again. You may wonder why I’m concerned about the various changes being made to copyright and fair use laws, particularly since there are obviously more pressing concerns in the world. Worrying whether I can listen to a particular CD on my shiny computer is a uniquely first-world concern. And only about 0.5% of the first-world at that. My concern is that box-headed decisions made by ill-informed or corrupt legislators now will seriously hamper any effort to make it something that the other 99.5% of humanity would care about. History has shown that dumb laws can have effects that ring down through generations. Apartheid springs to mind.
A previous comment that I made lists some references out there which give a background and introduction to some of the scary and complex issues. Go. Read. This stuff is actually pretty important.
As you may have noticed, it has been a few days since I last wrote. That’s because I have been lying comatose while some dread virus waged thermonuclear war throughout my system. I still feel as though a team of wombats have used my aging and decrepit carcass as a rugby ball, but at least I can sit upright for long enough to rant at length. Yet another benefit of modern air-conditioning: I believe at the moment that this particular beast has knocked over at least 80% of the staff on my floor.
On another note, I’ve finally finished — more-or-less — trawling through the pile of “things to play with”. I must report one definite keeper: LiteSwitch X from Proteron is simply fantastic. I don’t know why Apple hasn’t built this into OS X in the first place: a simple, light weight Apple-Tab program switcher. This is application coding at its best: it’s small, simple and just does one thing well. I’m less certain about Space, which gives the X user an arbitary of virtual workspaces or screens to switch between. I rather like these virtual screens under X-Windows — the one for Reflections-X I use at work is about the only thing that makes Windows 2000 bearable to use, given the tendency of Windows programs to have an enormous amount of interface chrome. There’ a lot to like about Space. It’s free, you get the source code so that you can play with it, and it basically works. I’m just not completely sure that I need it.
I’ve also had a little bit of time, stolen moments as rose from my sick bed, to start moving the Sable Rose website to a CSS basis. The job is not yet finished, but there’s not too much more to do. This is in preparation for finally getting the gallery there up and running. All part of a Cunning Plan you see. By moving the pages to a CSS basis, it’s a lot easier for me to build a stylistically consistent template that I can use with iPhoto to automate the production of the gallery. A Bold and Cunning Plan indeed! Time will tell, truth will out, and other banderole as appropriate.
Whew…
Friday, 2 August 2002, 6:45 pm
What a week. Ok, some really good things in it, like picking up the new gauntlets (photos to follow (no, really, I’m not joking)), grabbing the buckler dishes, receiving my copy of the Medieval Tailors Assistant. And I’ve almost finished setting up the old G3 for Clan Barry. But the rest of the week? I think I’m getting too old for work days full of Fun and Excitement!
Unfortunately, I can’t tell you why the working week was a bit rough (ha! Understatement!), otherwise you would have to be taken away in a black car and locked away to prevent the secrets getting out.
Blah
Monday, 29 July 2002, 5:28 pm
Which is worse? A work afternoon that leaves you so tense and frustrated that you’re ready to chew holes in the edge of your desk? Or walking across the road to the train, boarding it, and finding that the carriage appears to have been used as a public urinal? At least tomorrow, as the saying goes, is another day, and home is where the heart is.
Somewhat Weary
Sunday, 28 July 2002, 8:03 pm
I think that I’ve just had one
of those weeks where I’ve tried to fit too much in. Come to think about it, I think it’s actually
been two of those weeks. Several late nights watching silly television shows (Ok, I’ll come clean — the season
final episodes of “Buffy”) while spending the days at work creating Order from Chaos, parting the Waters and
The Earth, and then neglecting to rest on the seventh day has taken a toll.
Not only have I managed (finally) to get the purchase of several bucklers organised — although the final construction is still to be done — I got around to finishing the rewrite of my resumé, began rebuilding the old G3 for Kevin and Breege, finished playing “Icewind Dale” (the final stages are a bit disappointing because the game designers elected to cheat, rather than building something fair and fitting), moved the Sable Rose website and email addresses to cope with the .Mac mess, and have done a considerable amount of exercise.
This weekend may not have been as restful as weekends should be. We went on a picnic yesterday, which was lovely and gave us a chance to sit on a hill looking across the bay while reading the Saturday papers. Unfortunately it is currently unseasonally hot for winter in Brisbane, which meant that sitting on the hill meant sitting in the sun and getting a bit hot and weary. This morning the Boyz only managed to get one and half hours training in, rather than our normal two hours, because it was just too darned hot. Then this evening Robyn and I went off to Donald and Violets’ wedding, which was strongly late 17th — early 18th century styled. Robyn and I are both very pleased that the wedding came off so well, and wish the happy couple all the best.
I must leave off, shoulder my tools, and go back to sorting through the pile of software littering my disk. Miles to go before I sleep, and all that…
Significantly Irritated
Thursday, 18 Jul 2002, 4:07 pm
By now most Mac folk will know about the .Mac bombshell dropped at MWNY by Steve Jobs, and the unattractive price on the 10.2 upgrade.
I strongly expect that Apple will revise its pricing on the upgrade. The $US129 price is a bit steep for what really is a maintenance release with a few new applications. The really clueless part of the pricing is that it doesn’t distinquish between upgrades and new licences. I will definitely be purchasing the upgrade, as there are a good number of things in it that I want, and iSync promises to simplify and improve management of data shared between the Palm and Mac. It’s just that living in a country with a third world currency makes the cost painful rather than a simple pain in the ass.
What really has me irritated is the .Mac changes, or more accurately the way they have been dropped on the users. You may not know, but the free iTools service that has been agressively marketed by Apple, and adopted by over 2,000,000 users, is being canned and replaced by a functionally equivalent commercial service with a dumb name. There’s more offsite storage available, and some software thrown in. All for the bargain price of $US99 per year. Or $49 for the first year, so long as I subscribe by September 30. If I don’t subscribe, my email and web site go away.
What really peeves me is the clueless way this has been done. Our single Mac manages three accounts and corresponding iTools accounts: mine, Robyn’s and Sable Rose. Apple expect me to pay $US99 per year for each. I don’t think so. Which means in the short term Robyn’s email address goes away, and Sable Rose’s web presence gets subsumed into mine. It is profoundly irritating that I have so little time to deal with this: it is an enormous pain in the neck now to change email addresses and web addresses. Both have been widely published as points of contact, and email addresses are used all over the place as account names for mailing lists and web services.
The practical upshot is that I’m effectively forced to pay the $US49 subscription as ransom against the enormous hassle of renaming myself. I only hope the software thrown in to sweeten the sour taste this leaves in my mouth is worth the effort.
Thursday, 18 Jul 2002, 8:46 pm
I’ve had a play with the Backup program, and downloaded iTunes 3. I suspect that Apple, a the 11th hour, realised how unpopular their announcement would be, and pushed iTunes 3 out the door to appease the rampant techno-nerds. It’s pretty good, with some nice new features, and is worth the download. I remain unconvinced about Backup. The supplied documentation is lousy, and the on-line documentation uninformative. Will it allow me to backup the whole machine to DVD? Will it split backup sets across multiple DVD or CD-R? If I backup to CD-R can I then do incrementals to iTools? At the moment the only way to find out is to pay the $US49 and test the product. The old clue meter is registering close to zero in Cupertino tonight, boys and girls.
Further tinkering
Tuesday, 16 Jul 2002, 6:51:23 PM
The pile of things to play with was deeper than I thought, so I’m still digging through it. It probably doesn’t help that I keep putting things on the pile… I read a few things about iPhoto today, that inspired me to go looking at a pair of utilities that sounded interesting. Portaits & Prints from Econ Technologies is a lovely utility to help printing photographs. It takes an image and automatically lays out multiple scaled copies for printing. It also includes red-eye reduction, image cropping, and various image enhancement filters. It would definitely be worth the $US20 fee — but it doesn’t do anything that Adobe Photoshop Elements doesn’t already provide me (apart from being an OS X program, while Elements is still stuck in the land of Classic).
I am more likely to hold onto SplashPhoto. This is available for OS X, MacOS 9, and operating systems from that-which-shall-not-be-named, and provides a slick drag and drop interface for distilling photos into a format that can be displayed with a companion application on the Palm. The astute reader may point out that I can do the same thing with GraphicConverter and some AppleScript, but this tool brings it down to a mind-bogglingly trivial task. Highly Recommended.
Installer Grumbles
Sunday, 14 July 2002, 9:34 am
Since Chris has cut his hand, and Robert-the-other is working, and Bec is looking after Chris, I’m sitting here fiddling with various shareware tools. I know that a lot of people have commented on this, but I’ll chime in as well: why are so many developers so clueless when it comes to distributing programs? Apple have given developers access to the .dmg format which reduces installation to “Drag This File To Where You Want It” and yet I’m still faced with situations like this: HTML Color Picker X 1.0 downloads from the developer’s web site as a StuffIt archive of a .dmg file. Uncompress the archive, and you find that it contains a Vise installer that requires an administration password. Why didn’t they just ship the installer, rather than wrapping it several layers deep? The StuffIt archive of the .dmg file is 674,538 bytes, the .dmg file itself is 674,316 bytes. So compression did nothing except add 222 bytes and an extra installation step. OK, the product itself does what it is supposed to do, namely add a HTML color picker to the Cocoa color picker. Fine. Except it’s not really what I need, which is a little application that will show me a color swatch for a few specified HTML colors. I may need to write it for myself, in some of my copious spare time. Still, I could probably get Sian to beta test something like that for me. The ReadMe file in the .dmg tells me that everything gets set back to normal after I deinstall the program — but doesn’t document how to uninstall. Perhaps if I intuitively choose to run the installer program again, click through the several splash screens, ReadMe screens, licence acceptance screens and find the uninstall button from the pick list. Oh, wonderful. It wants me to shut down all other applications.
Back again. The uninstaller has uninstalled, and everything is back to normal, despite this minor trip into cluelessness. Drag all that into the trash, and move on. I just wish there was some way of billing the clueless for wasting my time. Onward to the next thing. skHTML from Sean Kelly is a reasonably good basic HTML editor. Does it give me anything that BBEdit Lite gives me for free? No. Good try Sean, but that goes in the can as well.
hyperColor Scheme X from Code Line Software is a bit closer to what I need, although the user interface is pretty cludgy, particularly the features for mapping a sample RGB value to the closest “Web Safe” color. Again, some serious demerit points for: including documentation including screen shots of the Classic version, not the X version; making the main interface a set of three sliders to mix R, G and B values, cheerfully warning that most of the slider positions do not result in Web Safe colors, but not providing any way of quickly snapping to the safe colors; and providing a very brief trial period. Still, I will give it a try for the next bit of design, to see whether it is worth paying for. Somehow I doubt that it will be. Any product where more attention appears to have been paid to picking a really cool name and designing a snazzy icon than getting the user interface working smoothly usually does not have a bright future. With the exeption of several from that-which-may-not-be-named.
Robyn, my editor, wife, proof reader and boon companion has cheerfully read this rather obscure technical ramble, as well as those from last night, and given it her seal of approval. She is of the opinion that it probably will not be of interest to many readers, but I expected that anyway. Great art is never understood by the masses. Robyn has returned to her position seated on the floor at the foot of the chair that Miss Kitty sits in.
Addendum
Sunday, 14 July 2002, 11:18 am
I’ve kept on tinkering, trying to winnow the pile of things that I’ve downloaded from time to time, keeping the chaff and throwing away the wheat. Or have I got that back to front? Anyway, I’ll jot some notes on some of the things I’ve found. All of these programs are Mac OS X only — users of OS 9 or one of the lesser operating systems will simply have to drool enviously.
UnicodeChecker from earthlingsoft is deeply technical, and only useful to people with an interest in and at least a limited understanding of Unicode and typographically correct markup. For those folk, this could be a boon companion. Not only does it provide a simple means of perusing the entire Unicode set, it adds a number of nifty services to the Services menu to help in converting text backwards and forwards to different coding standards. Highly recommended.
PhotoMesa is an odd beast, written in Java and apparently able to run anywhere — it certainly runs brilliantly under OS X — which provides a novel and intuitive way of browsing through image archives. I’ve tried many different browsing/cataloging tools in the past, and never been particularly thrilled with any of them, but this is one that I think I will keep coming back to. The interface is a bit weird, it’s not fantastically fast, but it works very well. Recommended.
I can’t recall where I found Locator, by Sebastian Krauss, but it’s a definite “keep”. Sebastian describes Locator as a tool to find stuff, and that is exactly what it does. It provides a GUI for the unix locate and grep commands, and is significantly faster than Sherlock, at the expense of only being able to find things that are in the locate database. Very nifty.
Puzzle Palace is another gem from Brian Hill which provides a drag-and-drop tool for encrypting files (built on top of the OpenSSL toolkit). I normally use GPG for encryption if I intend to sign and/or encrypt something I am sending someone else, but this is very handy for encrypting a file for local purposes. Under normal circumstances I’m not particularly trusting of crypto products that have not been intensively reviewed and checked in the way that GPG is, but since the encryption is apparently handled by OpenSSL, and Brian has a very good reputation, I’ll take the risk with this one. Anything I’m really worried about I can use GPG on — or both!
Housekeeping
Saturday, 13 July 2002, 2:49:00 PM
Thinking of things technical, since I’m huddled in the study watching the sun stream through the window while I
wait for this rotten head cold to melt away, I thought I’d get around to adding some of the missing bits to
this website. 
If you’ve
been here before, you might notice that the "Archive" link in the left column now
works. Various quotes and other magic characters have been forced to be typographically correct, and some of
the hidden DCMI description markup tags have been corrected. I must be
ill…
Things Technical
Saturday, 13 July 2002, 11:03:00 AM
I finally put aside some time to do some moderately technical fiddling with my OS X machine to get some of the Unix things under the hood working the way I like them. I was going to start by getting sendmail working, but then got a little sidetracked. I’ve been using Brian Hill’s lovely little MacJanitor to kick off the daily, weekly and monthly cron housekeeping jobs, since I don’t leave the Mac running 24 by 7. I realized that I could be a little bit clever and put a shell script in place to check whether the jobs were due to be run, and run them as necessary.
To start with, I knocked up this little script, RunCron. It makes a few assumptions, and definitely should have more robust error checking (not to mention a few comments), but it’s fairly robust.
#!/bin/zsh
CONF=/Library/StartupItems/RunCron/Resources/last.flags
APPNAME=${0##*/}
if [ ! -r $CONF ]
then
/usr/bin/logger -i -t $APPNAME \
"Unable to open $CONF for input"
exit 1
fi
set $(/bin/cat $CONF)
DAY=$1
WEEK=$2
MONTH=$3
TDAY=$(/bin/date +%Y%m%d)
TWEEK=$(/bin/date +%W)
TMONTH=$(/bin/date +%Y%m)
if [ "$MONTH" != "$TMONTH" ]
then
/usr/bin/logger -i -t $APPNAME \
"Launch /etc/daily, /etc/weekly, /etc/monthly"
(/bin/sh /etc/daily ;
/bin/sh /etc/weekly ;
/bin/sh /etc/monthly) 2>&1 | \
/usr/bin/mail -s "Monthly Housekeeping" root &
echo "$TDAY $TWEEK $TMONTH" > $CONF
exit 0
fi
if [ "$WEEK" != "$TWEEK" ]
then
/usr/bin/logger -i -t $APPNAME \
"Launch /etc/daily, /etc/weekly"
(/bin/sh /etc/daily ;
/bin/sh /etc/weekly) 2>&1 | \
/usr/bin/mail -s "Weekly Housekeeping" root &
echo "$TDAY $TWEEK $MONTH" > $CONF
exit 0
fi
if [ "$DAY" != "$TDAY" ]
then
/usr/bin/logger -i -t $APPNAME \
"Launch /etc/daily"
/bin/sh /etc/daily 2>&1 | \
/usr/bin/mail -s "Daily Housekeeping" root &
echo "$TDAY $WEEK $MONTH" > $CONF
exit 0
fi
exit 0
Note that out of paranoia I’ve specified the absolute path name of all the binaries that it runs, since it runs in a privileged mode. Rule one of writing super-user scripts: trust nobody. The script assumes that it can find a file /Library/StartupItems/RunCron/Resources/last.flags that consists of a single file containing three words formatted like ccyymmdd ww ccyymm, where ccyy is the year, mm is the month, dd is the day and ww is the week number. For example I currently have the following for the 13th July, 2002.
20020713 27 200207
This file contains when the daily, weekly and monthly scripts were last run. In other words I’m assuming that I want the daily, weekly and monthly scripts run once a month, the daily and weekly scripts run once a week, and the daily script once a day. Because I’ve tossed this in the StartupItems folder (more details on that particular magic below), the file will be checked each time the computer is booted, and the appropriate housekeeping scripts launched if they have not already been launched for the current day, week or month.
You’ll notice that the script pipes output from the housekeeping jobs through the Unix mail command. This implies that you need to get sendmail up and running. I won’t touch on that here, but instead send you over to Chris Stone’s comprehensive tutorials over at the O’Reilly MacDevCenter, particularly “Learning the Mac OS X Terminal, Part 2” and “Update to Mac OS X Terminal, Part 3”. If you read the latter, make sure you also have a look at the attached comments, as they include a very important discussion of the required Unix permissions on various files and a significant tip to speed up sending local mail. Provided that your OS X system has not been hacked about too much, the instructions in there will get you up and running.
While not everyone needs to go and play at the Unix level when working with OS X, there is an enormous amount
of power available to tap. Not only do you get the industrial strength data munging powers of such tools as
sed, awk and perl 
harnessed to a mindboggling array of Unix command line tools, the
ability of AppleScript to launch Unix scripts and Unix scripts to run Aqua applications gives the power and
flexibility to automate and extend applications that high level macro languages such as AppleScript and the
macros in Microsoft products cannot come close to matching. I can highly recommend the tutorials at
MacDevCenter as a starting point to get into this side of the Mac,
and the O’Reilly Nutshell books when you need to find out everything
else.
Oh, yes. Almost forgot — setting up the StartupItems stuff. All the information you need is buried in “Inside Mac OS X — System Overview”, available from deep in the bowels of the Apple developer website. In particular, Chapter 4 reveals that all that is needed to run something at start up is to put a directory (as an administrator — I did all this from the command line after sudo to operate as the root user), in /Library/StartupItems with the same name as the progam to run. In my case this meant /Library/StartupItems/RunCron, which contained the RunCron script. That directory also must contain a StartupParameters.plist file. You can build this with the GUI plist editor, or it is just as quick and simple to knock it up with a text editor. Under most circumstances you only need something like this:
{
Description = "Housekeeping Launcher";
Provides = ("Housekeeping Launcher");
OrderPreference = "Last";
Messages =
{
start = "Starting Housekeeping Launcher";
stop = "Stopping Housekeeping Launcher";
};
}
This file provides the message that flashes up while OS X is booting, indicates that you want the program to run very late in the boot process, and provides a description used for internal purposes. It would be nice if Apple provided a quick way of doing this from say the Preferences panels, but I guess they want to keep casual users away from this.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. Meanwhile, I’m off to push this online, and play with RsyncX and Pic2Icon from Sugar Cube Software
Infirmity
Wednesday, 10 July 2002, 11:04:29 AM
The Abbey went very well. I’ve not yet heard what the crowd numbers were, but it certainly looked like the overall numbers, taken over two days, were more than they’ve had in the past. Unfortunately Beck’s back was thrown out by hauling around her huge frock on the Saturday, but I managed to do both days. I think the military outfit was far more comfortable than the clasy outfit, which helped a lot. Once we’ve finished the roll of film, I’ll put some photos up on line.
It was good to meet some new folk, and to get some leads on some equipment. Anyone who’s visiting here after picking up one of my cards, and is wondering about the “Things Medieval”, you might like to have a peek at the FAQ, or have a look over here.
The only drawback to the weekend is that I inhaled my own body weight in dust, and (probably as a direct result) have been struck down by some frustratingly irritating viral infection. I feel like I’ve been gargling steel wool while being trampled by a team of sumo wrestlers on the way to dinner.
Productivity
Tuesday, 2 July 2002, 4:31:19 PM
Herself (Tribble Tail, cat of a thousand disguises) has been seeing a lot of Dr Leigh this week, as have we, as
she’s popped in every morning for the last week to give Miss Kitty two antibiotics. This involves me grappling
every limb while tucking her (Miss Kitty, not Leigh) under my arm, while Leigh levers open her jaws (Miss
Kitty, not Leigh) and tosses the tablets in. So far we’ve survived with our limbs intact, 
but have suffered some very cutting looks.
I’ve spent the last week or so whipping up props for the upcoming Abbey Tournament, where I’ll be spending the weekend with The Richard III Society. As well as finishing up some spiffy new hose, I’ve managed to whip up a livery jacket in Gloucester’s colours, complete with a boar badge, and a little England pennon. All that’s left to do is finish the sword belt and rehanging my arming sword in late 15th Century style.
The Tournament has had a bit of showing on TV, so there should be a reasonable crowd. As usual even though there are plenty of pictures and film of me in action, all that can be seen is an elbow, knee, or back. I seem doomed to exist on the fringes…
