Ross Barkman’s site has scripts for using mobile phones as modems with Mac OS X.
This post is mainly so I remember where it is if I ever need it and don’t have access to my bookmarks.
Also the tutorial/setup instructions
It is surprising how often I seem to need to use my mobile to access the internet from my desktop machine. 🙁
A site called PodBrix offers customized Apple themed lego sets. You too can have Steve Jobs at a keynote or the famous Apple 1984 advert recreated in Lego.
(via reddit)
HTMLValidator 1.0b1 has just been released.
It runs on PowerPC or Intel Macs with Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
The current version expires 28th February 2007.
HTMLValidator is a new desktop HTML validator that works on both web pages and files. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while now in between SQLEditor releases. The main motivation is that I often seem to use the W3C validator, but I can’t always do that with files I’m working on locally. I also tried installing the W3C validator on a local web server and although it works, it seems to require a lot of installation effort, with different dependencies. So the idea occurred to me: what if you could have a drag and drop installation. From there came a web version using drag and drop and finally the application bundle version that is being distributed from today.
The earlier application versions actually displayed the results in an html webview in a window, while the newer releases display the results in a table.
On the drawing board for future releases are more validation options, the capability to validate multiple pages and the ability to watch pages for changes and then validate. Also better printing and Applescript support (although both of these are present in the current version).
I’m really interested to know what you think of HTMLValidator so feel free to send in comments, either to me personally Angus [DOT] Hardie [AT] malcolmhardie [DOT] com or to the support [AT] malcolmhardie [DOT] com email address
SQLEditor 1.3.6 has now been available for about a week and so far it looks good. 1.3.6 was mainly released to fix bugs found in 1.3.x releases and to add in a few important features that had been widely requested.
MySQL auto increment was probably the main improvement, but there were also some more changes to fix the connection issues.
One slight change that probably won’t get noticed at all if it works is that the page that version updates are directed to has changed. The url is now a special page rather than simply the product page. This should make it easier to download updates. (I’ve been looking into sparkle and friends for use in some later version)
I guess the upgrade advice is that 1.3.6 is recommended for all users, but if your current version is satisfactory then no need to upgrade.
SQLEditor 1.3.4 got released on Tuesday, but unfortunately there is a bug in this version. 🙁
The problem is that in 1.3.4 the connection presets system in the database connection panel was modified. There were a couple of fixes made, but one of them releated to selecting presets when the window opened. Unfortunately that change caused users who hadn’t made any presets to experience an error. The problem was that the new code didn’t correctly account for the possibility that there might not be any presets, it was trying to access an array of presets that was empty, which is obviously an error.
This has now been fixed and corrected in 1.3.5. Which should work correctly with or without presets.
SQLEditor 1.3.2 received a very limited release to a few selected testers at the end of 2006. However there were some additional issues that needed a bit more work, so the current plan is for a 1.3.3 release before the end of January.
I just noticed this announcement on the google mac blog.
Amit Singh has released a mac version of Fuse, which is way for people to write interesting extensions to the file system without writing kernel code. The way it works (as I understand it) is that the Fuse system runs one kernel module which communicates with the actual file system code in userspace.
It looks really clever and there are already a number of useful file systems available for fuse (including ssh as a filesystem and a ntfs driver).
[link]
SQLEditor 1.3.1 got released on Friday afternoon, this was really just a bug fix release which fixed a handful of problems that were identified. I think the only major fix was that the new UID system was slightly broken in that if you copied an object, or duplicated it in some cases, then SQLEditor would not always recreate the unique ID numbers that represent each object. This had the effect that if you copied an object, SQLEditor couldn’t distinguish between the objects when reloading and so all connectors would be attached to the original object and not the new one. An unfortunate bug. 🙁
It has now been fixed, along with slight improvements to image saving and a fix for a menu shortcut not being correct. The latter was an odd problem in that a shortcut was set, but it actually conflicted with an existing shortcut and the cocoa menu system is smart enough not to display the same shortcut for more than one menu.
[Download] 2.8MB DMG
For some reason also I don’t think I posted about the 1.3 release. But the 1.3 release was posted on November 23rd and is the first non-beta release to be released since May 2006. It rolled all of the improvements that had been made during the beta testing phase into a new release and is definitely worth upgrading (especially since the upgrade is free). However the 1.3 release has been superceded by the 1.3.1 release, so download that instead.
You can just see Steve Jobs stroking a white cat and telling engineers to make products “insanely transparentâ€, can’t you?
[link]
(It’s actually an article about keyboards, but worth reading anyway)
I realized something interesting today.
I use unit testing to (hopefully) improve the quality of my code.
With Java I use JUnit. With native Mac stuff I use OCUnit.
One really clever thing about OCUnit that I realized today is that if you have several SenTestCase subclasses, each with multiple tests in it, you can put all of them into one XCode target and OCUnit will automatically run them as suites in one test run. This means that you get a summary of all of the tests at the end.
Previously I had a separate XCode target for each test case, where each test case class reported its results separately, which isn’t nearly as good.