Smoothies

Posted on 07 January 2005 by Angus Hardie

New smoothie recipe that I tried:

2 bananas
250ml Orange juice.

Put bananas in blender. Add orange juice to blender.

Blend until smooth.

Not exactly impressively innovative, but it tastes quite good.

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Amazon ads

Posted on 06 January 2005 by Angus Hardie

I was just doing a quick search for Lemony Snicket books (of which there are apparently now 11) on Amazon.com

Oddly enough when I did the search I got the following within the search results:

Picture showing links found on amazon.com to whsmith (uk bookseller) and shopping.net

It appears that they are using google ad words, and one of the advertisments offered was for a competitor.

It does seem a bit odd to say the least, to be advertising a different online store …

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How stuff gets popular

Posted on 30 December 2004 by Angus Hardie

This article:The Long Tail in the October issue of wired is really interesting. It offers the idea that the sucess of the most popular media titles is actually less than the cumulative totals of the other titles.

The article also offers a key point. Shelf rental value is a key factor when determining stock levels. The example is a CD-store that must sell two copies of a particular title each year to stock it at all. However amazon doesn’t really work like that. Internet retailers have a lower cost base and thus it doesn’t really matter how many copies get sold, as long as some stock exists somewhere. Similarly revolutionary changes are also occuring with dvd-rental services. Online rental outfits have thousands more titles than even the largest physical store.

What this may mean is a revolution in consumer habits. People up until now have been buying stuff because it is available (as I often seem to do) but now they can buy whatever they actually want. The smaller, better, but less populist titles may win out against the heavily promoted mainstream titles.

Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

(Maybe?)

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Daily WTF!

Posted on 30 December 2004 by Angus Hardie

The Daily WTF

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The Twelve Days of Crunch Time

Posted on 26 December 2004 by Angus Hardie

The Twelve Days of Crunch Time

Weird!

(from Slashdot)

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PalmOS future?

Posted on 13 December 2004 by Angus Hardie

Weird things seem to be happening in the Palm OS sector. PalmSource recently bought China MobileSoft which is a Chinese linux smartphone developer. This comes after spending about $11 million to buy BeOS from be back in 2001.

One obvious motivation in buying a Chinese company is to get access to the Chinese market (which is always going to be huge real soon now. IBM is thought to have similar motivations in selling it’s PC division to Lenovo. But PalmSource is now also talking about basing future Palm OS versions on Linux. So maybe they were after technology as well as market access.

The alternatives aren’t pretty. PalmSource hasn’t been making much progress since the incremental Palm OS 5. Licensees have yet to ship a PalmOS 6/Cobalt device. The software seems to be available to device developers but everyone is still on the PalmOS 5 platform. Not one Cobalt device has yet been released commercially by anyone. It almost makes one question what exactly is wrong with Palm OS 6. Performance? Memory footprint? Price? The about box?

In the operating system market it seems anyone writing operating systems and selling them (as opposed to open source things like Linux) always has a major failure when trying to develop the next big operating system. Apple had Copeland (which would have been Mac OS 8 if it had been released but was actually abandoned) before Mac OS X. Microsoft had OS2 (with IBM) before developing Windows NT/XP. Now perhaps Palm OS will fail on Palm OS 6 before releasing a new platform based on Linux?

Posted in General, Internet Stuff | 1 Comment

Ethical Hacking: A BCS Talk

Posted on 08 December 2004 by Angus Hardie

This evening I went along to the Edinburgh BCS talk on Ethical Hacking. It was really eye-opening and made me suitably paranoid about my own security.

Peter Wood of First Base Technologies gave a remarkably useful, informative and funny talk on the subject. (and left me totally paranoid as I said before).

Some interesting points and some thoughts

Physical intrusion is very likely
Physically entering a building and stealing data is often easier than getting past network security and cracking a network.
Social engineering is a serious concern

It is relatively easy to get people to give access information away
Have a plan to deal with physical intrusion.

In one case the receptionists realised that the intruder was present but didn’t have any instructions on what to do in that situation – result: failure. Have obvious guidelines on who to call and what to do if an intruder is spotted.
Look at logs
Log files are often the first sign of unexpected happenings
Encrypt valuable data
The machine doesn’t have to be secure for your data to be secure
Firewall all access and especially firewall dialup accounts
One of the examples should how an apparently secured network was compromised by a dial up access point within the network
People with clipboards and pens are always accepted as genuine, even when they are actually intruders
Suggestion: Have anyone holding a clipboard and pen removed from the building immediately. Or at least don’t assume that they are genuine, just because they look busy

Overall fascinating and really interesting.

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Rabbit in Sauce Sublime

Posted on 04 December 2004 by Angus Hardie

“Rabbit in Sauce Sublime, a recipe that sounds right out of a Warner Brothers cartoon”

There are several really odd websites with recipes from a time when taste was lacking and people cooked the oddest things.

Gallery of Regretable Foods

Some words on nutrition (kind of)

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Added Staticize plugin

Posted on 29 November 2004 by Angus Hardie

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.

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Ebay Suspension

Posted on 27 November 2004 by Angus Hardie

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.

Posted in General, Internet Stuff | 1 Comment

SQLEditor

Posted on 22 November 2004 by Angus Hardie

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.

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Pocket PC and Mac OS X

Posted on 22 November 2004 by Angus Hardie

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…

Posted in General, Macintosh | 1 Comment

DocBook and Apple Help

Posted on 15 November 2004 by Angus Hardie

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.

Posted in Macintosh, Writing Software | 2 Comments

SQLEditor released!

Posted on 15 November 2004 by Angus Hardie

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.

Posted in Macintosh, SQLEditor, Writing Software | Leave a comment

Writing Documentation

Posted on 11 November 2004 by Angus Hardie

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

Posted in Macintosh, Writing Software | Leave a comment

Mac OS X keyboard layouts

Posted on 01 November 2004 by Angus Hardie

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.

Posted in Macintosh | 1 Comment

Word press spam and comments pages

Posted on 29 October 2004 by Angus Hardie

I’ve got tired of people spamming my web log. So I’ve changed the name of the comments posting page. I’m going to see if it makes a difference. If it does then the people spamming are automated, if it doesn’t then the automatic system is either too smart or it’s figuring it out in some other way. I’ve got some more ideas so if this doesn’t work then I’ll move on. Either that or ban URLs in comments altogether.

Potential spammers should note that advertising or commercially orientated posting in the comments area is specifically prohibited. Under no circumstances is any such posting permitted. Posting any such comment counts as unauthorized and illegal use of this machine.

Posted in Internet Stuff | 1 Comment

Walled City of Kowloon

Posted on 23 October 2004 by Angus Hardie

Leynos posted a really interesting story about the Walled City of Kowloon.

It’s fascinating and I’ve been reading all the linked web pages …

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Integrate flyspray with CVSWeb

Posted on 23 October 2004 by Angus Hardie

Currently I’m using flyspray for bug tracking.
I use cvsweb to view the cvs tree online.

One thing that I really wanted was to be able to click one bug numbers in the cvs log reports and see the bug tracking entry that matches it.
It turns out this is amazingly simple. I added the following code to the cvsweb.cgi file inside the htmlify function, just below the bit that does the urls. (new section in bold)

# get URL's as link
s{
((https?|ftp)://.+?)([s']|&(quot|[lg]t);)
}{
&link($1, htmlunquote($1)) . $3
}egx;


# replace FS with correct bug track link in flyspray
s{
FS#([0-9]+)
}{
&link("[$1]","/flyspray/index.php?do=details&id=$1")
}egx;

# get e-mails as link

And now my cvs logs display a link whenever I use FS#100 or a similar bug number. Next I suppose is to integrate it the other way and have the cvs system automatically close resolved issues in flyspray. There is actually already some code for subversion so it wouldn’t be very hard to implement probably (but there are better things to do with my time).

[edit]
subversion code is at http://flyspray.rocks.cc/bts/index.php?do=details&id=310&area=attachments#tabs

Posted in Internet Stuff, Writing Software | 1 Comment

Java FileWriter, XML and UTF-8

Posted on 23 October 2004 by Angus Hardie

Oddly enough the java.io.FileWriter class doesn’t use UTF-8 by default. I’m not exactly sure what the default encoding is (possibly ISO-8859-1 or US-ASCII?) but it doesn’t seem to be UTF-8, which is odd given that java strings are supposed to be unicode. This causes a problem if you want to have non-ascii characters and you don’t realise what’s happening. This was a bug in SQLEditor and somebody accidentally typed an umlaut into one of the fields and the file wouldn’t reload. (Which was annoying).

The correct thing to do seems to be to use the following:

OutputStreamWriter out = new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream(path),"UTF-8");

Which ensures that you are using UTF-8.

I suppose that the motivation for this is that it means that simple use of FileWriter is compatible with applications that are not unicode aware and don’t support UTF-8. It probably makes sense at some level, but it just goes to show that you can’t assume anything. 🙂

Update: Bela’s comment (below) explains more about which character set you’ll actually get.

Posted in SQLEditor, Writing Software | 43 Comments