I just downloaded Eclipse 3.1 M7 and tried it out.  This is the first eclipse build I’ve tried on OS X 10.4 (on Java 1.4.2_07 and Java 1.5.0_02) and for the first time it actually appears usable on my powerbook.  Previous builds (on previous OS’s with previous versions of Java) were always frustratingly slow to use and I’d rapidly give up and go back to a Linux or Windows box (or vi).  With this release it appears to keep up with my typing, editor windows open and close quickly and startup is really fast.

I may have commented on how great NetNewsWire is a couple of times before (1, 2) but I have to do it again.  If you have the full version of NetNewsWire (as opposed to NetNewsWire Lite), you can easily create and subscribe Feedster searches using File->New Special Subscription->Search Engine.  There’s a range of search engines you can choose from and a bunch of other options in the New Special Subscription that may be useful as well.

Various people seem to be having problems with Mac OS X 10.4, particularly in the installation process.  Perhaps it’s just my innate desire to rub it in but I feel compelled to point out that my upgrade has been pretty much seamless.  The only problems I’ve had are with Mail.app – GPG caused it to crash which is to be expected since Apple explicitly said not to use those APIs as they are likely to change.  I’m also having a weird problem where Mail.app is no longer synchronizing mailboxes properly.  When you choose ‘Synchronize “adrian@intencha.com”’ from the Mailbox menu, it doesn’t do anything – nothing shows up in the activity viewer and new messages aren’t found.

I’ve been watching the Harmony development list since just after it’s inception and it’s been very interesting reading when you look at the big picture.  I’ve skipped over most of the technical discussions and focussed more on the interpersonal and inter-organizational topics as well as legal issues etc.

What is clear from watching the posts flow through is that there are a whole lot of people from outside of of Apache getting involved.  There’s also a bunch of people that appear to be completely new to open source as well.  Most of these people will rapidly drop off when they realize they can’t keep up with the amount of email passing through the list, let alone the actual work involved when that really gets started.

Useful little tool for seeing what people are searching for: Keyword Selector Tool

Just dumping it here so I can find it later.

Tim O’Reilly makes some interesting remarks about how to make advertising more useful.  I have to wonder though how much damage has been done by the constant attempts to grab people’s attention with advertising using cheap gimmicks and generally annoying people (popups, flashing images, distracting animations etc).  A huge number of people have become accustomed to just totally ignoring advertising.  I know that I don’t care how good an offer an ad puts in front of me anymore or what the ad does to get my attention I ignore it.  The only message I get out of web advertising these days is that I hate web advertising.

I wanted to be able to have all my RSS feeds combined in the cool (looking but totally impractical) RSS screen saver but sadly it only allows you to select one source feed.

I tried two approaches to solve this:

1. Set up a personal planet planet instance that aggregates all my feeds and point the screen saver at that.
2. Create a combined RSS feed using AppleScript.

Item one I got working but didn’t like the fact that I was then downloading all my RSS feeds twice, so I scrapped the idea.  If however you ever want to create a planet instance that stays in sync with your RSS feeds, use something along the lines of the AppleScript below and execute it periodically.  I’ve snipped most of the paths involved to try to avoid making the lines too long.  A bunch of lines have also been wrapped – the compiler should find them.  It reads the configuration file from config.ini.tmpl, adds the RSS feeds to the end and writes it out to config.ini

Straight from the webblog of The Fat Man, Viva La Resolution.  Funny, funny stuff.  Read the story, listen to the song, live the moment…

There’s been a bunch of long term planning going on at work recently – lots of good stuff has come out of it but I’m going to skip most of it here.  Most of the responsibility fell to the managers in the company which leaves me to actually get some work done and push our products forward.  One thing I did pick up though is the responsibility to ensure that Ephox eats it’s own dogfood.  Henceforth I am on a mission to cram our products into every conceivable place and by any available means (we use a number of hosted solutions which we can’t directly integrate our products into but JavaScript hacks are a fun pass-time so I’m sure I’ll find a way).

For some reason this morning I felt compelled to publish the list of RSS feeds I subscribe to.  Thus, on the right hand side over there (or over here if you’re reading via my RSS feed) is a blogroll.  There’s currently no process to keep it up to date and it might still contain a couple of internal URLs that won’t work for everyone but it should give the morbidly curious a pretty good idea of what sources I’m following.

So this CEO walks into an engineering department and asks about setting up the news section of the company’s website to use a blogging system instead of updating it by hand.  Great idea.  Now given that the company’s website is hosted on an IIS server with MS SQL 7, ASP, ASP.Net and PHP available – what software does the intelligent engineer recommend?

If there was a very significant benefit, a subdomain could be used for news and pointed to a Linux server with MySQL, Apache and PHP (and for which root access is available) but that’s a lousy option due to the extra overhead of having to maintain that server entirely ourselves and the difficulty caused by splitting our website over multiple servers etc.  It would have to be one heck of a big advantage to make it worth the trouble.

While the buzz surrounding the release of OS X 10.4 continues to build I’ve found it amusing how Microsoft have been desperately pushing Longhorn in the last couple of weeks only to receive criticism about it and then desperately try to point out that all the cool stuff just isn’t there yet, but it will come soon – honest!

I’d say more but I think Crazy Apple Rumours summed it up perfectly.