Openoffice aqua looking good

Posted on 11 June 2007 by Angus Hardie

I just downloaded the new aqua port of OpenOffice a few days ago and it looks good. There are some bits which aren’t finished yet, but it runs quickly, it runs natively and it runs the same as the other OpenOffice platforms. (So far as I can tell). It may well be the best upgrade path for people using VBA macros on the Mac.

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What have I been doing recently?

Posted on 11 June 2007 by Angus Hardie

Well no updates for a bit. Humm?

The main things I’ve been working on:

1) SQLEditor. Lots of things are being worked on. The user interface is being rewritten to improve speed and increase flexibility, the data layer is being rewritten to switch it to cocoa (instead of java), the JDBC code is being rewritten to make it use JNI instead of cocoa/java and a new crash reporting system based on Google BreakPad is being worked on. There are also some other things too like live source view and assorted bug fixes.
2) HTMLValidator. Also undergoing development. It recently moved across to use Sparkle (yey!) instead of the SQLEditor derived update system (which will also be replaced eventually). The final 1.0 release is due very soon now and several people have set in nice comments.
3) A new idea (still secret) 🙂

4) Web site improvements for malcolmhardie.com. Some have been deployed, others are still waiting to be deployed. Although the biggest one which is almost entirely invisible is the rewritten order processing system, which now supports multiple different products and better management features. But only I (and my somewhat-trusted minions) will ever see it. 😉

Then when I’ve not been working I’ve been playing Pikmen on my new gamecube. (Many thanks to Leynos!). I’ve wanted to play this game properly for years and years and it definitely meets and exceeds my expectations.

Although I also played some theme hospital this morning using Parallels 3.0 (new release). It runs really nicely, although since it is an ancient game (1997) this shouldn’t be too surprising. I hope to try out some of my other really old games to see how they perfom under parallels.

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building antlr 2.7.7 on Mac OS X

Posted on 28 April 2007 by Angus Hardie

It appears that antlr on Mac os x doesn’t like the jikes compiler, at least when I tried building antlr it gave lots of weird compile errors like this:
Found 2 semantic errors compiling "ANTLRException.java":

While it would be a good thing to try to fix the actual code, it’s easier to see if the solution is already available.

The answer came in this posting which suggests renaming jikes before building. Which works, but there is an easier way. Just declare an environment variable before starting the build.


export JAVAC=javac
./configure
make

Changing the java compiler that gets used is documented in the configure script.

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Is it plagiarism if you’ve paid someone else to write the paper for you?

Posted on 27 April 2007 by Angus Hardie

I happened to browsing a popular site that allows people to post tasks that others can bid on. The focus tends to be on small to medium sized technical tasks like web page design and small applications.
But there are other categories too. One of which is for technical writing. Ah! I thought, perhaps people offering to write documentation for pay. Well, no, it wasn’t exactly that. What I found was mainly people wanting essays written. One in particular I found very funny. It was looking for someone to write an essay about a networking topic and the requester had simply pasted in the entire task description, including the instructions from the lecturer. It even included the plagiarism statement:

Academic integrity requirements. Please remember to use quotation marks when you use the exact words from your references. Also you need to use enough citations inside your final paper. The citations should be clear enough for a reader to separate your work from other people’s work. Failure to follow these instructions may lead the paper to be considered as plagiarism.


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Java class file version numbering

Posted on 21 April 2007 by Angus Hardie

http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~leif/opensource/bcver/BcVerApp.html

This page has a list which shows how java class version numbers relate to java platform version numbering. It’s useful if you get one of those UnsupportedClassVersionError errors.

This relates to the Java ClassFile structure which defines how classes are represented.

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HTMLValidator 1.0b3

Posted on 02 March 2007 by Angus Hardie

A new version of HTMLValidator today. I moved the validation into a separate thread to improve responsiveness. This is also the way that HTMLValidator will be doing multiple page validation. In fact the new release even includes pretty much all of the code necessary to do this, but it doesn’t include the interface yet. The 1.0b3 release actually validates a list of urls, but the list contains only 1 element. The idea is to test that the basic code works as expected before bolting the interface on the top. 🙂

Also new is a little spinner that spins when the application is doing something, some improvements to error display and handling and a few other fixes here and there. The changelog gives a complete list.

Next feature is the multiple file validation interface and then probably a 1.0 release.

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Google Talks: Camino

Posted on 23 February 2007 by Angus Hardie

Mike Pinkerton of Google talks about the Mac web browser Camino. It also includes some interesting history of the Mozilla and Gecko projects.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6765603919277760697

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Linux autologin

Posted on 21 February 2007 by Angus Hardie

I use a collection of virtual machines in parallels for a number of things, like testing SQLEditor and running web apps that would otherwise require lots of software dependencies. However I’ve been getting tired of logging in to my linux virtual machines all the time. If it were just a case of ssh then obviously I could set up ssh key pairs and do auto-login, but I also need direct terminal access too, in this case in the main parallels window.

With a physical machine to get autologin in this situation would mean that the machine would boot and immediately log the user in without interaction.

Important Warning

This represents some security risk. You need to consider your circumstances carefully first to ensure that this will not open your machine to malicious use.

(Of course there is always the point that if someone has physical access to your machine then there’s not much hope anyway. But still …)

Fortunately this is possible and actually quite easy if you don’t mind editing a configuration file.

The file you need is /etc/inittab

Important Warning (2)

/etc/inittab is vital to the operation of your machine. Incorrect editing will cause a number of problems.

If you are making these changes to a virtual machine simply make another. Alternatively try logging in via ssh to undo the changes.

The change you need to make is to find the line that looks like:

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1

and change it to look like this (where username is the user that you want to autologin as)

1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty --autologin username tty1

The original source of this is EasyMameCab; which looks like a clever idea in itself. They are using linux as the base system for building a video game cabinet, so obviously they don’t want logins appearing.

Posted in Linux, Writing Software | 1 Comment

HTMLValidator beta 2

Posted on 16 February 2007 by Angus Hardie

HtmlValidator beta 2 has just been released. The new version offers assorted fixes and a slightly improved interface (a green tick or red cross now appear in the validation window!)

There is also a new downloads page which currently offers an Applescript to validate the source of the front page in Safari.

Usefully it validates the actual source that the browser received, it doesn’t download the url itself.

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Mac GPRS Modem scripts

Posted on 12 February 2007 by Angus Hardie

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. 🙁

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Keynote in Lego!

Posted on 12 February 2007 by Angus Hardie

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.

[link]

(via reddit)

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HTMLValidator

Posted on 09 February 2007 by Angus Hardie

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

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SQLEditor 1.3.6

Posted on 03 February 2007 by Angus Hardie

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.

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SQLEditor 1.3.4 and 1.3.5: bugs

Posted on 25 January 2007 by Angus Hardie

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.

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SQLEditor 1.3.2

Posted on 17 January 2007 by Angus Hardie

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.

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MacFuse released – userspace Mac OS X file systems

Posted on 12 January 2007 by Angus Hardie

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]

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SQLEditor 1.3.1

Posted on 10 December 2006 by Angus Hardie

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.

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Insanely transparent …

Posted on 18 November 2006 by Angus Hardie

You can just see Steve Jobs stroking a white cat and telling engineers to make products “insanely transparent”, can’t you?

[link]

(It’s actually an article about keyboards, but worth reading anyway)

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Writing Unit tests for Cocoa

Posted on 15 November 2006 by Angus Hardie

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.

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IP PBX delivered on an iPod?

Posted on 04 November 2006 by Angus Hardie

“We have put our complete IP PBX on it [the iPod Shuffle]”, says Dr. Harry Behrens, Managing Director of 4S newcom. “It is so compact that even on the smallest iPod Shuffle (512 MB) enough room is left for 4 full hours of music.”

[link]

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