Angus Thinks…

I seem to be using more multi-touch stuff, but I do have this irrational fear that my finger tips will slowly start to wear away from constantly dragging them over metal or glass surfaces …

Years ago I saw a documentary about Russians living in the country side where the local people had to push, by hand, a railway wagon filled with bread.

I could never find any trace of it later, but today I did:

Chlebnyy den (Bread Day) 1998
Directed by Sergei Dvortsevoy

The Harvard Film Archive showed it a while ago

I was working on the new labels panel in SQLEditor when I realised that I’d run out of modifier keys for clicking shortcuts. Tables already use several of the standard keys for selection control, leaving pretty much only option/alt remaining, and I’d already used it for something else. 🙁

Apple: please provide more modifier keys on the keyboard for even more complicated shortcuts!

😉

(Or more rationally, I’ll probably change it around and the commands will end up in a popup menu or something, which is actually better for discoverability anyway)

Cancom seems to have closed their Edinburgh shop after being bought out by Trams.

Sorry about staff 🙁

Here is a video showing a breakdown of a lumix digital camera. (mikeselectricstuff/YouTube)

The amazing thing is how small the mechanical parts are, and how many there are in there. This camera probably costs no more than £200, yet there are minuscule parts and an amazing level of tiny details, all of which has to work reliably, without any maintenance, for a possible lifespan of several years.

The details of the lens assembly are particularly clever with multiple layers and motors which move the different parts. The coils which are printed onto the circuit board and form part of the movement mechanism is clever feature.

I’m amazed 🙂

Kodak, perhaps the photography company, appears to have filed for bankruptcy.

It seems to be something of a representative for the state of the non-digital photography market, which looks pretty much dead except for a few limited areas.

In recent years they seem to have sold off much of the research and development and focused on the hyper-competitive desktop inkjet printer market instead.
(Although the reasons for this decision still remain a mystery to me)

I remember having a kodak camera with kodak film, that got photos printed on kodak photo paper, but I guess people a bit younger than me might never have even seen a roll of film, nor for that matter a kodak camera.

It’s sad to see this happen to such an iconic company and I hope that things don’t turn out badly for the employees.

Just hours remain to buy the The Web Development Kit Bundle.

It’s got a useful mix of tools for Mac web development and its an excellent bargain even if you’re only looking for one or two items in the bundle. HTMLValidator is our contribution to the bundle which costs just 39.99

The trick is that the library install path isn’t right in the gem bundle.
The following commands fixed it for me:

$ cd /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.8.1/lib
$ sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib mysql_api.bundle

$ cd /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.8.1/ext
$ sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib mysql_api/mysql_api.bundle

The install name is set to the absolute path of the library that the bundle links to.

Original source for the fix is here:
http://lightyearsoftware.com/2011/02/mysql-5-5-on-mac-os-x/

A truly remarkable piece of door step selling occurred to me this afternoon.

Three people turned up at my door, claiming to be from Talk Talk, complete with ID badges. (So possibly genuine?)

I said I wasn’t interested, but one of them started arguing with me. He started by claiming that the exchange had been upgraded and then claimed that all broadband was now free. (!)
This is a particularly odd claim given that they certainly seem to have prices on their website. There were also various other points made which I believe to be partly or wholly inaccurate.

I’m truly amazed at the stupidity of the whole thing. If I tell people I’m not interested I expect them to go away: they’re not going to change my mind. The only thing the argument did was make me annoyed and I cannot see how that can be a viable sales strategy. Especially when giving information which is actually wrong, surely they will get caught out as soon as the order is submitted to the company and the customer is billed for the service?

What am I missing, where is the advantage in these practices?

I am also somewhat concerned that someone with less technical knowledge might get caught out and switch to this crowd.

It is truly disappointing that this sort of behaviour is permitted.

As a final, ironic twist, I found this page on the talk talk website, describing how to avoid door step sellers. 🙂

I recently spotted the following line in an online forum by a person associated with the Growl notification system.

I’m tired of being yelled at and having my life threatened, but that’s at least better than being insulted like this.

If I understand the background to the comment correctly; Adobe included the open source Growl library in their CS5 suite. They also modified it so that it doesn’t use the standard Growl installer, but instead installed it ‘silently’, without notice to the user.

Assorted CS5 suite users then noticed that a mysterious piece of software had been installed on their machines and instead of blaming Adobe, blamed Growl and the Growl team. Some of them appear to have become very heated indeed.

The whole situation is disgraceful.  Adobe appears to have taken an innocent and very useful open source library and cause an unimaginable amount of harm. At least some of the angry users appear to believe Growl is actually spyware or malware of some kind. For an entirely open source project distributed free of charge, without any expectations at all, this is a remarkable and most unwelcome development.

Adobe needs to fix the problem and make things right. (If that is even possible).
I would also suggest that Adobe pays the Growl team for the time they have spent dealing with all of this.

Perhaps I’m biased, but if this was a little indie mac developer with a $15 app who’d messed up then there might be some allowance made, but this is Adobe – one of the biggest 3rd party developers around – and a company that charges hundreds or thousands of dollars per license.

As a final irony, it appears that the CS5 suite only uses growl once, to advertise some kind of marketing offer after installation. Then it never uses the library again; so much damage for so little actual benefit.

My opinion of Adobe has been getting worse recently, but this whole situation is particularly bad.

Adobe needs to do better.