Angus Thinks

Month: November 2004

  • Added Staticize plugin

    To fit in with my views on websites (only as dynamic as absolutely necessary), I have installed this plugin. Hopefully this will not cause too many problems.

  • Ebay Suspension

    Weird thing happened today. I was checking my email and I saw a message from ebay stating that my account had been suspended. I assumed it was fake and went to visit ebay itself. But it seems real.

    The whole business is odd. I have never bought or sold anything on ebay. I think I once made a few bids, but they were unsucessful. Who knows what’s happening. It doesn’t reassure me though about the ebay security system.

    Perhaps more information will appear shortly.

  • SQLEditor

    Oracle connectivity has been one of the main things I’ve been working on this week with SQLEditor. This involved installing Oracle on my iBook. Oracle 10g is a remarkably complicated bit of software. It arrives in a 500MB+ download which takes forever to download and then a significant amount of time to install.

    My machine is also noticably short of memory for oracle because it has only 256MB of ram, rather than the 512MB recommended.

    The good news is that simple databases are now accessible using oracle, although larger ones are still a bit too big. I’m still working on trying to fix this. The idea of schemas in Oracle is also quite different in that you pretty much use one database and then sub-divide it up.

    I’ve added a nice about box to the application that now includes a two column credits section and details of the username and serial number for the application.

  • Pocket PC and Mac OS X

    In a break from SQLEditor and other similar things I’ve been trying to connect my pocket pc to my macintosh.
    After some experimentation I have sucessfully installed synce using instructions .
    I have also got the pocket pc to connect to the internet from the cradle using a slightly modified ppp script (use proxyarp) and have Avantgo synchronisation from the desktop using agsync.

    I also have a new tool that handles detection of connections and disconnections on the device which I hope to make available shortly.

    Unfortunately there are still some bugs, but excellent progress is being made.

    I’ve also made some progress on mounting the device on the desktop using a modified webdav server. I can get read support, but I’m still working on write support.

    More on this later…

  • DocBook and Apple Help

    One of the key tools I’ve been using recently is Docbook. Docbook is an xml-schema which can be used to write documentation for things. This can then be converted via the wonders of XSL, XML and XML-FO processors into PDF, HTML or several other formats. I’ve written all of the documentation for SQLEditor using docbook and it is really handy. Slightly verbose, but really handy.

    Unfortunately at the moment there doesn’t seem to be an Apple Help stylesheet for docbook. Since one of my targets is Apple Help this is slightly unfortunate, but I suppose in time either I can write one or someone else will. In the meantime, I’m using the microsoft help stylesheet and altering the results a bit to work with Apple Help.

    Docbook is definitely a handy tool for documentation though. I wish I had discovered it earlier.

  • SQLEditor released!

    After a rather over-extended development cycle SQLEditor version 1.0 has now been released. Which is a great relief to me. I’ve been working on it for so long now that I can’t quite remember not working on it, which is weird. Admittedly that’s only really about 12 months, but still, it’s a significant portion of my life. It’s also the first major product I’ve released.

    In a moment of commercialism I would encourage you to buy a copy because it makes a wonderful christmas gift, or at least it might if the recipient really loved databases or if it was some other kind of program altogether. As it is, it probably wouldn’t make much of a Christmas gift. Socks or bottles of wine would be a better choice for almost anyone.

    Releasing SQLEditor isn’t the end of the situation though. Version 1.1 is already being planned and I’ve various other projects that I’m working on as well, but SQLEditor is first and will always be the first piece of software that I released for sale.

    Releasing software is complicated. In addition to the actual program, there is the distribution package, online help, the website, notifications to trackers like MacUpdate and Versiontracker, plus checking the online store is working correctly. Bad news with this release for anyone hoping for the pre-release discount. With the release of version 1.0 the offer expired.

    People keep talking about MacPAD but nothing seems to be happening at the moment, only MacShareware.net seems to be supporting it (which is logical, since the two are quite closely tied together). I’ve got a MacPAD file up now, but nothing much else. I haven’t integrated it with the release managment stuff I’ve written (a motley collection of php and make files with a bit of XML for good measure).

    If there was any market in it there is an interesting opportunity for a release management system (written perhaps in java?) that could generate everything automatically. Perhaps if I get really bored at some point I might do that.

    The next step is to write a press release and send it out today. Joy 🙁

    So, in conclusion, if you haven’t already tried SQLEditor, then version 1.0 will improve your life so much that you won’t know how you got by without it. Or at least might save some time when designing SQL databases.

  • Writing Documentation

    I’m currently in the middle of writing user documentation of SQLEditor. I finally settled on docbook as the format of choice since it seems the most compatible with other things.
    I’m using this tutorial to build the stuff although saxon has now made it into darwinports which is nice.
    http://www.boksa.de/tutorials/docbook_macosx.mpp

  • Mac OS X keyboard layouts

    I was reading macsurfer today and I came across an interesting article by a Canadian called Joe Clark who wanted to remove the US flag from the input mode menu item. This got me thinking, could I write something that would alter the default US keyboard layout to have a user specified flag. Could I write a keyboard layout with a Scottish flag for that matter.

    It turns out that I didn’t need to.

    There is already a Keyboard layout generator for mac osx. All you need to do is to enter a name for your new layout (“Scottish”) and then choose xml format. (You may also want to set the autodefine option to “define them all”) Then hit the download button. Finally save the resulting file as name.keylayout. (“Scottish.keylayout”).

    If you want an icon to go with it you also need to create name.icns (“Scottish.icns”) using IconComposer or something similar.

    Then drop the files into /Library/Keyboard Layouts/

    Now logout and log back in again and the new keyboard layout should be available in the international pane for you to select. (hopefully)

    But that isn’t the end of it. There’s more! The system is actually much cleverer than it seemed. You can set particular keys to generate combinations of characters. So if you want to do really odd things like have the number keys spell out the numbers as words that seems to be possible. (1 becomes ‘one’ for instance). Or maybe you dislike commas intensely, you would be able to redefine the keyboard layout to give space whenever you hit comma. It is also open to practical jokes of all kinds.

    Tip: Check /Library/Keyboard Layouts/ if you’re getting odd effects when typing, someone may already have altered the layout.