Angus Thinks

Author: AngusThinks

  • Django Support

    Several people have now asked for this, so it’s being really seriously looked at.

    Plus I’m hopeful that it will be able to support the somewhat different but quite similar Google app engine model class format too

    Having been working on this for the last few days, I can say that the Django plugin is moving towards a working state, the development version is now somewhat able to create and export a suitable python file.

    Although this mustn’t be taken to mean that it’s near to release, because there are still several major things that are needed before it will be complete.

    I think there will probably be two releases, the first will be export only, then a later release will add the import features.

    And it should be a free upgrade for SQLEditor 🙂

  • Loyalty Cards

    I was looking at my wallet and I realized that I have a whole collection of loyalty cards.

    Am I really loyal to all of them? I don’t think I can be, since some of them are for direct competitors.

  • Cinema Audio

    A Fascinating Video with Ioan Allen of Dolby Labs talking about different kinds of Film audio system.

  • Is the iPhone NDA still in effect?

    This post from yesterday on the cocoa-dev list seems to suggest that it is.

    I wonder what is happening?

    (Although it doesn’t affect me much because I’m still not doing iPhone development at all yet)

  • XCode function popup

    I love the XCode function popup, particularly in Objective C, because I can add #pragma mark comments to divide up the list.

    Unfortunately languages that aren’t C derived don’t offer #pragma, so I missed these little dividers

    Then I noticed that a comment that contained FIXME had appeared in the list too, looking just as if it were a #pragma mark entry

    Looking at the XCode documentation reveals that XCode will also search code comments for a range of keywords and use them to control entries in the function popup. And it will do this for Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby (as well as the C based C, Objective-C and C++).

    This means I can write in other interesting languages and still get my function popup dividers.

    Just prefix the comment line with one of the following:

    • MARK:
    • TODO:
    • FIXME:
    • !!!:
    • ???

    and the remainder of that line will appear in the list.

    There is more in the Apple Xcode tools documentation

    (It looks like there has been some discussion of this already (1,2,3)

  • SQLEditor releases

    This is another quick update about SQLEditor releases in the near future.

    1.4.2b1

    Currently version 1.4.2b1 is in beta release, it offers a few specific improvements

    • Added support for editing MySQL character set and collation settings on fields and tables
    • Modified inspector on fields to use popup menu for selecting tabs
    • Fixed bug that prevented saving files after creating new foreign keys when referencing primary keys in tables with indexes under certain circumstances.

    1.4.2b2

    1.4.2b2 is due fairly soon. The following improvements should definitely appear

    • Modified MySQL exporter to use ENGINE instead of TYPE for better compatibility
    • Comments now attached to fields when exporting MySQL
      (i.e COMMENT ‘xyz’ style)
    • Connector inspector is now displayed automatically when a new connector is created
    • More padding added to line click detection to make it easier to click on connectors
    • Better parsing of comments attached to mysql field

    There is also a bug relating to identifying objects in Postgresql when there is no schema when using some versions of that database system.This is currently planned to be included but hasn’t actually been finished yet. If the work on this bug gets completed this week it will appear in 1.4.2b2, otherwise it will get pushed to the next release.

    I think that’s everything that’s coming in the near future, there are some other things that I’ve been working on, but they’re more long term (mainly for 1.5), so not much to say yet.

  • National Lighthouse museum closed

    I was sad to read that the National lighthouse museum in Penzance appears to have closed.

    It was an interesting place to visit and it had lots of real exhibits including light house lamps, optics and models. It was also in a building which had been used to prepare stone work for the Wolf Rock lighthouse construction, so there was a sense of history about the place.

    Hopefully the exhibits will get put on display somewhere else, but it’s still a shame.

  • UCS-2 vs UTF-16

    Since I got confused by this one the other day:

    http://unicode.org/faq/basic_q.html#14

    Q: What is the difference between UCS-2 and UTF-16?

    A: UCS-2 is what a Unicode implementation was up to Unicode 1.1, before surrogate code points and UTF-16 were added as concepts to Version 2.0 of the standard. This term should be now be avoided.

    When interpreting what people have meant by “UCS-2” in past usage, it is best thought of as not a data format, but as an indication that an implementation does not interpret any supplementary characters. In particular, for the purposes of data exchange, UCS-2 and UTF-16 are identical formats. Both are 16-bit, and have exactly the same code unit representation.

    The effective difference between UCS-2 and UTF-16 lies at a different level, when one is interpreting a sequence code units as code points or as characters. In that case, a UCS-2 implementation would not handle processing like character properties, codepoint boundaries, collation, etc. for supplementary characters.

  • Google Chrome Comic

    The Google Chrome comic is a work of art, it’s both functional and artistic, and it manages to explain so many really important points in a way that is easy to understand.

    If you haven’t read it, and you’re interested in browsers at all, you should go and read it. 🙂

  • Cappuccino Framework released

    The people at 280 North have released the The Cappuccino framework as open source. The Cappuccino framework is the system that powers the 280 slides web app, which is sort of Keynote in a browser.

    I’ve been playing around with the framework today a bit and it looks really great. The interesting thing is how many AppKit features have made it across. It wasn’t hard to modify the sample app to use a CPURLConnection object to fetch data asynchronously and then display it in a suitable text view.

    My test app for this btw was an ajax clock. I built a simple php script that displays the output of the php date method and then used ajax calls to update the clock in the browser. It’s not exactly useful but it worked really quite nicely and the coding is relatively easy too.

    I’m now wondering what else can be built using these tools, because it seems a really nice way of doing web apps (if you have a desktop software background)

    I’m very impressed. 🙂