Zzot!

This applies to software distributed on compressed disk images, which includes most indie software. It excludes software distributed on disk images that are then compressed, only because this annoying behavior is thankfully uncommon. I’m talking here about things that I see frequently.

Finder’s toolbar is hidden

The most convenient access to the Applications folder is almost always going to be the toolbar or the sidebar. The user is usually going to want to put your app somewhere, and most of the time, the disk image has a background image telling you to put it in your Applications folder. Which the software vendor has conveniently not given you access to. The most obvious workaround to this is to show the toolbar, which leads us to…

Window looks like crap with sidebar

Finder only stores one window size; the with- size. If a window doesn’t have a with- size, Finder guesses what you want — and if your Finder has the sidebar, and mine has for some time now, it guesses wrong. It adds the sidebar to whatever you’ve already got, throwing out whatever doesn’t fit. This blows the careful layout of the disk image, frequently hiding the damned application. The one I’m still trying to drag to my Applications folder.

I guess one is forgivable, but not both. Sure, I might be one of the eleven users with a convenient alias to the Applications folder, or think dragging the application, whacking my _show desktop_ Exposé key, hovering on my hard drive icon, waiting for its window to spring open, and then finally dropping on the actual Applications folder is easier…but I’m not, and I don’t think that’s unusual. Plus, if someone is horrified by the sidebar and instantly hides it, Finder obviously gets that right.

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It snowed here Sunday evening, and since we spend Christmas morning with L’s parents and the evening with mine, we had to drive through it.

It wasn’t a note-worthy drive because it was the first snow — that happened weeks ago. It wasn’t snowing especially hard, the roads weren’t glassed over with ice, and you could generally see things farther away than your hood ornament when you looked out the window.

So, why blog about unremarkable snow? Because people can’t drive. There were at least four accidents that featured cars with the headlights no longer pointed forward, and at least one case of tires not pointed down. You would think that, living in Michigan, people wouldn’t be flying off of the road like they’re giving out free t-shirts every time it snows. Okay, I would think that. I _do_ think that, in fact — even though I’ve been living here a while.

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Yes, it’s been a while. So long, in fact, that this very entry is the first in the category — in spite of the category having been here for ages. On Friday, I tried to recreate one of my greatest hits; Killer Apple.

Lets just say it came out as more of a 24-hour virus than Jack the Ripper. Don’t get me wrong, it was still pretty good — it just wasn’t killer. In their book (which got me started making ice cream, and which I highly recommend for beginners), Ben & Jerry say:

There’s no such thing as unredeemingly bad home-made ice cream.

I’m certainly not disputing this. On the other hand, there was a…grittyness that I haven’t explained, and the fruit flavor was sort of buried (like muddy base, if I was setting up speakers, instead of making ice cream). I strongly suspect that I know the origin of the flavor issue, so I’ll have to mess around to see how to resolve it. The gritty part, however, I’m not sure if could even reproduce, much less find and fix the underlying problem.

This probably makes my process of making ice cream sound very regimented, but one look at my notes on Killer Apple would instantly resolve any confusion; never mind that my sister would probably have someone bumped off if they caused that document to be misplaced.

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It’s a simple rule, really — when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. It isn’t even a new one really (except to Sony apparently). It’s one thing (albeit an incredibly stupid one) to use a buggy rootkit in your DRM; it’s another entirely to tell the SysInternals guys how Windows really works in defense of your half-assed software.

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I know there are periods where I change my favorite text editor as often as most people change their underwear, but still. I like their take on tabbed editing (including what happens when you give their command-line script a list of files). There are a gazillion language-specific packages available (scripts, syntax, etc.), and you can slurp up a whole mess of them from a single svn repository. Block (i.e., rectangular) editing that’s easy to use and doesn’t require a mouse. Folding; enough said.

I was convinced I needed to find this editor and try it out simply by watching the Ruby on Rails 15-minute intro, so you might watch that to see TextMate in action.

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The second 4,500 was a lot harder than the first — and not entirely because of the number of connections we made. A high point of the return trip was the United agent taking boarding passes for the last hop from O’Hare to Detroit Metro; none of the others had commented on us presenting an Island Air boarding passes. “Back to reality, huh?” (The joke being that it was actually the last flight where someone asked us this)

The trip was fun, and we’ve gotten an assortment of compliments on how the wedding went and everything — although it’ll probably be another few days before the weariness of travel is gone from our faces. Plus, the hotel had neither our cats nor our bed. I think both of our employers missed us — there’s something to be said for that, at least.

For now, at least, we’re stepping boldly forward into the first phase of any marriage — paperwork. (Oh, and that poor woman in the internet café© in Keauhou; she was right that the wedding ring was new, but I didn’t have the heart to tell I constantly fiddled with the previous ring — even two years later)

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Since I do occasionally have to fiddle with a Windows server, and there are little things about Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Client that bug me (only one session open at a time, for example), I wondered if the matter was scriptable somehow. Here’s one way (after installing rdesktop via DarwinPorts):

#!/bin/bash
#
RDC="/opt/local/bin/rdesktop -a24 -g 1024x768"
#
set -x
if [ "X$DISPLAY" = "X" ]; then
    open-x11 $0
else
    exec $RDC -ushloob example.com
fi

The interesting thing (to me anyway) is having the script exec itself inside X11, to avoid having two dumb files laying around for each server listed. (A benefit that becomes irrelevant if you wrap it up in a nice, tidy AppleScript bundle so it is doubleclick-able)

If you’re enough of a command-line wonk to think a slew of new scripts in your path is actually a shortcut for something, just put a copy of this in your path for each server and mark them all executable. Building a generic script that creates a temporary file (open, for which open-x11 is simply a wrapper, doesn’t let you specify arguments to the command) and flings that at X11.app is left as an exercise.

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At times, I miss the punch and gas economy of my Civic, even though that was two cars ago now. At no time, however, do I miss squeezing my 6′ 5″ frame into a Civic. Where’s a convert any gas vehicle to a biodiesel-electric hybrid for less than a year’s salary service when you need one? :)

Then again, how many years would pass after such a surgery before someone accuses you of wasting money on gasoline so you can tell them “my car runs on discarded fryer grease from my nearby McDonald’s with the wads of potato shrapnel filtered out. From the way they look at me, they must think I’m drinking the stuff.”

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You know what the most important thing in comedy is? Timing.

For this trick, you need a cat and an audience — I used my own cat, and Lins was the audience. Pick up the cat, and hold it in a manner the cat finds slightly uncomfortable. How slightly? Just enough that cat doesn’t miss its cue — this works best with cats you’re familiar with (see the most important thing in comedy for details). Now, feed the cat your straight-line:

I wonder if it’s latent fish DNA; “I don’t want to be here anymore!”

The cat, right on queue, flails its tail around, either because you’re holding it weird or it detests being used as a plot device in bad melodrama (the joke works either way).

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The previously mentioned link problems are by no means the only issues; they’re just the most likely to be noticed by anyone.

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