I've had a report that the latest OS X Tiger patch breaks Aqua emacs again. What the hell?
I'll post a fixed build here probably tomorrow.
My friend Steve built one that works. Here it is.
September 2005 Archives
I've just about had it with iPhoto. It does some things very well, like organize and order the bound photo books that Apple sells. However, if you have a lot of pictures, it really starts to break down. I don't even think I have a lot, at least not in this age of digital cameras. I have about 6 years worth of pictures in my iPhoto, which is about 5,000.
iPhoto does weird stuff with caching at different resolutions. It winds up sucking down vast quantities of CPU time just to display thumbnails.
Then there is the bigger problem, in that it keeps all the JPG files inside its own little directory tree. Normally, that's not a big deal, but when I moved my photo library from my old G4 Cube to my new Mac Mini, iPhoto decided to make double copies of thousands and thousands of files. Not all of them, mind you; just about 2-3000 of them. So now my carefully maintained photo db is a mess.
I want a separate photo database program that will look at a hiearchy of JPEGs, inspect the JFIF info, and keep track of them by some reasonable unique ID number. Maybe some message digest of the JFIF info, if not the entire file. Is that so hard? I would be perfectly happy if that program even launched external programs for editing.
Why can't google release picasa for mac?
ROKR Motorola iTunes Phone = boring, crappy; very un-Apple like.
iPod Nano = nice. It must really piss Motorola off to have all their thunder stolen by a partner.
I started playing around with MediaWiki. I don't really have any need or desire to start a public Wiki on any topic, but I do like a place to keep notes for myself. Currently, I have a "doc" directory that I keep in my various unix home directories; it is under CVS control, so I can keep in reasonable synch across the dozen or so unix systems where I have accounts.
This works amazingly well for scripts and emacs files, as well as .cshrc and other shell configs. It's sort of OK for little text files. The problem is that often I need to look at a little document, but I might not be at a place where I can easily get a shell prompt.
I haven't liked most Wiki software I've tried, but I do like MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia. So I set up my own install, locked it so that only I can write articles, and put it behind .htaccess so no one can even see it but me. Curiously (or not, I suppose) there is no way in MediaWiki to easily add read restrictions. There is a sort of hackish patch, but it is for exceptions and not to lock down the whole site.
I like it. Set up was very simple; install the files into web root; chmod a+w config; create a mysql db; go through the web based install; delete config dir. Done.
People who know me tend to think I hate Microsoft. I actually don't. In fact, I think it is great that Bill Gates and his cohort really stuck it to the established IT industry of the 80s and built a monopoly. That's my dream. If I could, I would build a business into a huge empire and make untold billions of dollars. I'm not even jealous of Microsoft. Great for them, nice job. I think the vast majority of folks who work at Microsoft sincerely want to make great products that people want to use, and make a lot of money doing it.
I feel precisely the same way about Microsoft the company as I do about Google (the company). I love it that smart people saw the state of things, came up with a great idea, and relentlessly built it into a successful, huge, company. It's really annoying the turn of the tide on slashdot (for example) against Google: now that they are successful, whiners and crybabies infer all kinds of nefarious plots in any action they take.
I know it's completely unrealistic, but I really hope the pending iTunes phone from Apple/Motorola shocks the crap out of everyone by being... a good phone. Like one that is good at making phone calls, with long battery life, a small number of big, simple buttons, sub-2-second turn on time, clear microphone and speakers and simple download of address book from various PC and Mac PIMs. Nothing else matters. In fact I hope it is not even an iTunes phone at all, but that the whole iTunes thing was a ruse to hide the fact that Apple made a mobile phone that actually works.
If it's yet another crappy camera-phone-video game-mp3 player-email device, then I could care less.
Humbug!
