This is an old essay I read years ago, but I just reread it this weekend and I found it both very inspiring and very depressing (especially with regard to my current job).
Archive for the 'Software' Category
While reading this Windows Server 2003 kernel guru Q and A I came across this absolutely fantastic quote:
[M]ost of the time, if the application is following the rules then it will run [on Windows Server 2003]. But I must admit the rules haven't been well publicised.
Heh.
Huh, I just noticed that my little mini-review of LaunchBar (my #1 favorite OS X app!) was quoted on and linked from the LaunchBar Testimonials page.
Hm, now I kinda wish I'd said something more profound than "LaunchBar is really an incredible interface, and I'm already having trouble imagining doing work without it. It's that cool..." But I guess it is kinda cool how my emphasis on "that" almost reads like an exclamation point at the end of the "Reviews" section on that page, thanks to them bolding it.
Remember how I wrote about the Save and Restore Safari URLs AppleScripts awhile ago, and how I'd had ideas to do all of that using OmniWeb and OmniOutliner, only to be thwarted when I discovered those programs lacked the AppleScript support to do what I wanted?
Yeah, well, it turns out the newly released OmniWeb 4.2's "AppleScript support has been improved and now allows access to your bookmarks."
Oh, and on the OmniOutliner Exras page, there's a "Save OmniWeb URLs" script: "It's useful when you have a bunch of pages you don't want to lose, but you don't necessarily want to keep the browser running all the time or take the trouble to bookmark them all by hand." Oh, and it was last updated on December 5, 2002, exactly two months before I wrote about my ideas.
So, yep, just as I suspected: There's not an original one in my head.
First up, I read this article about the Windows build process. As I read it, I was a good combination of horrified and fascinated. I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity involved in that thing... Five thousand programmers? That's almost as many residents as live in the UC Berkeley dorms, and I can't imagine all of them being organized towards one common goal, with the possibility that something someone does will impact someone else's system in some unpredictable way...
And yes, I was horrified by both the complexity being described, and horrified that I was fascinated by what I was reading. Proof once again that I am a geek.
As I read the article, I imagined that the programmers at the lowest levels didn't even know what they were working on -- that they were given a specification for a subroutine, and were just asked to make it do something based on the input. This image was fueled by Stephenson's description of Y.T.'s mom's job with the Feds in Snow Crash, where the programmers are "interchangeable parts" turning out tiny widgets, and the actual software engineering is done by people who aren't actually programming.
The quote that most caught my eye from the article was about the significance of a broken build, which boggled my mind almost as much as the complexity involved in the first place. And I
"We've sent out calls at 3 a.m. when the build is broken, find the developer that broke it, and get him into work right then and fix it immediately. The developers are on call 24 hours a day. There's definitely an escalation process. A broken build is considered a critical, severity-1 problem."
It also got me wondering how Mac OS X and Apple compares. Maybe I'll find out some day.
Second, this interview with Marc Andreessen (one of the co-founders of Netscape) was kind of short, but he did say one thing that I found very thought provoking:
"Things like the back and forward button, we never intended that to be a permanent part of the interface. But people get locked into metaphors. You have to be careful with the metaphors you put in front of people because once they click onto one, that's it.
Consider how pervasive the back and forward button have become these days -- to the point of being "basic" features of our file system browsers -- and you'll see how significant it really is.
As a warning, if you're upgrading to OS X 10.2 and you're running Unsanity's FruitMenu, you should definitely uninstall FruitMenu before doing the upgrade. FruitMenu caused me a lot of mysterious issues that took me about an hour to figure out the source of. In particular, contextual menus anywhere would crash the application in question, and OmniWeb's favorites tool bar folders would crash OmniWeb. Since uninstalling FruitMenu, all has been well, though I do anticipate a 10.2 compatible version.
More on 10.2 when I'm less busy... The short version of it is that it's just a little bit faster everywhere, but Mail and the Finder are significantly better. Mac Help, however, has become a hog that takes 4 minutes to start up.
Later: FruitMenu has been updated, and is good to go on 10.2.
This isn't good. And considering that it was in the process of installing the AppleScript update when this happened, this isn't good at all.
The system hasn't been affected? My foot! Now I'm afraid to reboot.
Wow, before upgrading from OmniWeb 4.1b5 to 4.1b6 tonight, I'd been running 4.1b5 for 14.125 days. And I don't just mean that that's how long I'd had 4.1b5 on my system -- I mean that 4.1b5 had been running continuously for 14.125 days, without being quit, let alone crashing. Considering how notorious non-beta web browsers are for crashing, I'm pretty well blown away by that kind of stability. In a beta, no less.
Of course, there's the implicit statement here that my OS had been running for at least 14.125 days, but that's less interesting in the age of Mac OS X.
While browsing VersionTracker the other day, I came across Crystal Ball, which is a D&D Dungeon Master tool for managing practically all aspects of running a D&D campaign, from keeping track of characters and NPCs, to randomly generating NPCs and monsters, to generating treasure and awarding experience, to keeping track of everything that can come up during a complicated melee. It made me sigh and say to myself "Wow, with this, the game would really be able to focus more on the story and less on the details of the rules. That'd be swell!"
It's a polished and very well done program, and it really makes me nostalgic to role play again. Of course, it's not like I have time between school and work, let alone do I know other people who have time, but it made me nostalgic all the same.
Oh, and better yet, it's a Mac only program (and better still, it runs well in OS X). So if you're a D&D player (or better still, a DM) and you have a Mac (better still, a PowerBook or iBook), you should definitely check this thing out.
So back in October, when I made that ridiculous list of which games on each platform I was looking forward to, I only listed Myth III for the Mac. And sadly, I didn't even choose to buy Myth III. After playing it at MacWorld SF, I was totally turned off by the way the game just seemed to have a slower pace.
But in that entry, I made reference to the ridiculous game situation on the mac. But you know what? I forgot the mac game I was anticipating even more than Myth III: Escape Velocity Nova.
And EV Nova came out today! Woohoo!
The graphics might look deceptively simple, but the gameplay is ridiculously addictive. I can't even begin to guess at how many hours I sank into the first two EVs, and this one has everything that was good about the first two and more. And the best part is, it's a Mac exclusive. I remember how envious my Windows using friends were back in the day over EV Override.
(Basically, it's a very open ended arcade space simulator (top-down view), where you start as a lowly shuttle pilot and go on to do any number of things, from being a trader, to a bounty hunter, to an explorer, to whatever you like. It's very addictive.)
Uh, anyway, if you're a Mac user and have spare time to kill (and a big link to download this 100 meg file with), definitely check it out. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to play "one more mission" before going to bed... ;-)
In the last two days I came across two incredibly useful Mac OS X shareware apps. The first, brought to you by the same wonderful folks behind WindowShade X, is FruitMenu, which turns the horribly static OS X Apple Menu into a fully customizable menu like the classic Apple Menu. In fact, I'd say FruitMenu actually offers more features than the classic Apple Menu.
On top of that, FruitMenu lets you assign arbitrary key bindings to items in the menu (including, but not limited to the Fkeys), so if you're already using an app to handle Fkey launching, FruitMenu can replace it and give you so much more.
At $7, FruitMenu is a steal. And what's better, if you (for some crazy reason) haven't bought WindowShade X yet, you can buy both FruitMenu and WindowShade X for $13 and save $1.
The second (and much much cooler) app is LaunchBar. This thing is just really incredible. Basically, you configure some directories for it to know about (for example, mine knows about my Applications folders, my Documents folder, my Terminal Sessions folder, my Bookmarks, and my Music folder (among others). It then scans these directories when it starts up and indexes the contents. Then, I just command-space (the shortcut is of course configurable), type a bit of the document I want to open, or the app I want to launch, or the song want to listen to, and it off and does it.
Here are a few examples of what I type and what I get as a result (By the way, it's not case sensitive, so I'm just writing them in caps because that's how it echos your input):
- HOBU - Pulls up the file "Home Budget.xls"
- LS - Pulls up my Linkstew bookmark.
- IT - Pulls up iTunes.
- G - Pulls up Gimli.term, a saved Terminal session, which will open a huge wide window and ssh to my web server.
- DATIM - Pulls up the song "Lovers in a Dangerous Time" the first time, but then I can scroll through the list with the arrow key and select DateAndTime.prefPane instead, and -- this is where it gets really cool -- the next time I type DATIM, the Date & Time preferences will be the first thing it pulls up.
Basically, it's all cool and adaptive. It's $20, but just putting my Terminal sessions in there will probably save me five minutes every day, let alone all the other savings that are just going to pile up. In just a few hours of use, I can tell that it's already going to significantly going to change the way I use my Mac. And it has other handy drag and drop features that just make it that much more useful.
LaunchBar is really an incredible interface, and I'm already having trouble imagining doing work without it. It's that cool.
So iTunes 2.0.3 was recently quietly released, but on the surface it doesn't look like a very major update. It added one more (moderately useful, mind you) checkbox to the iPod preference box, and it added some languages that I don't care about...
But under the hood, they added AppleScript hooks. This was probably intended for the 2.0 release, but must not have been quite finished in time, so we're getting it now. Check out these sample scripts demonstrating some of what's capable...
But the big deal is this means that I can finally write some AppleScript CGIs to interface with iTunes over the web! Yay! This will probably keep me amused me for quite awhile.