Nope, not literally - this is a mac geek thing.
Got a copy of Mac OS X Tiger in a nutshell today, so in between baking, mixing, and stiring I took a look. I was actually disappointed not to see a reference to textutil in there, seeing as it came out new in Tiger. Even still, it’s a pretty complete volume, and it has a great reference in there about Bash, Emacs and vi, which I thought was kinda cool.
I still use vi as a default “I need something now” command-line editor, but that is honestly a throwback to the days when it was the only thing reliably installed on machines. Anymore though, I go for TextWrangler, SubEthaEdit or SciTe (when on windows). I used to use BBEdit all the time, but I found I just didn’t use all its features, so it wasn’t worthwhile paying the upgrade fee. Their products definitely don’t suck.
Back to the book. The vast majority of it is really a printed “man page” for all the command-line features available in there. It would have been sort of nice to get a little kick as to what was where - there are some things that are only 10.4, but they’re not easy to spot.
Oh - and there’s a section in the back on using XWindows programs with Tiger, but it really focuses on fink as the medium by which they expect you to install code. I’ve headed to preferring darwinports.
The pre-thanksgiving cooking has commenced!
Tonight is ginger bread and pumpkin pie prep. Gotta bake those pumpkins down first, although it looks like we won’t be getting 6 pies out of this batch. I think the real pie baking will take place tomorrow morning (letting the pumpkin cool is critical), and I may have to go get more if I decide that a single pie isn’t going to do it for us.
Mac command line stuff - did you know about textutil? I didn’t - not until I read the article at OReilly this evening. That’s a cool program!
(I already knew about tidy and opendiff)
Normally I ignore the microsoft hype engine when it comes to that latest “open standard” that Microsoft is proposing, but this one caught my eye: SSE. It’s really a pretty simple spec (GOOD!) on how to detail attributes for adding onto the basic RSS bits with some detail about what was added, when, and some data to enable you to check against the last time you synchronized to that feed.
While I’ve read through the spec, I haven’t really sat down and sketched out how it all would/could work. Seems like for a basic concept of synchronizing really simple feed information bits, it’d be pretty worthwhile. It’s not a pub/sub model, but for a simple polling mechanism, you can set up unidirectional or bidirectional flows pretty effectively.
I first read about it on Ray Ozzie’s blog, which I subscribed to after I heard he had one now… just to see what rolled out on it.
I’m watching through the Evening at Adler, and I just caught Wolf’s anti-tag on Perforce. I never had any particular bitch with Perforce myself except the cost, so that was really intriguing to me.
So while I was hunting for Wolf’s email address to write him and ask him what his bitch with Perforce was all about, I spotted that he’d just written it up on his blog.
If today gets any more surreal, I’m going to scream.
Although I’m not hip on getting an XBox 360 immediately (I want to wait and see with this one, and the games aren’t that compelling to me), this Google Maps remix of where inventory resides nearby is pretty cool.
I was doing some walking last night and watched Stargate Atlantis off netflix. Hey, you know - it was science fiction, and it gives me something to do while I’m walking. As far as episodic science fiction goes, well - it’s really not very good. Of course I’m comparing it to Firefly… But that just makes me even more annoyed that Fox cancelled that original series.
I didn’t watch any episodes - just the pilot. But even still it was grossly predictable, and the characters really didn’t seem to have much of an arc. Not really much development anywhere, that I could tell. Hopefully they did more character development in the series itself, but I suspect not.
This is what happened when I went to the URL http://connect.apple.com this morning:
When I reloaded, the apple developer login page came up normally, but I’ve never seen an error page that read: “No Error”.
Michael McCracken has a delicious link that I thought was incredibly useful tonight, so I wanted to share: Troubleshooting Cocoa Bindings.
While the bindings are cool, debugging and troubleshooting when code is using it is a real pain. Yeah - almost like giving a cat antibiotics. This article doesn’t explain it all, but at least it’s a decent subset. And it’s been around since August, so I’ve just missed it in the past.
