Michael Maclean

2005-10-08T15:56:00.000+01:00

My latest acquisitions:

Mapping Hacks

Web Mapping Illustrated

Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails

Pragmatic Ajax (the beta PDF edition, with the paper one when it comes out next year)

Add to this the Cisco CCNA stuff and the Programming Ruby I got the other week, and I'm going to be busy for a while. I don't quite know what possessed me there.

Oh, and I have a GPX2 on the way as well. Oops.

2005-09-02T17:07:00.000+01:00

I read recently that GMail lets you set the From: address in emails that you send from the Web interface, so I went looking for the setting as it would let me use GMail for webmail for all my email accounts and hide the @gmail.com address. According to the site I read it from, you need to click the Settings link and then Accounts. This didn't appear for me, until I tried switching to English (US) instead of English (UK). Now I can add several From: addresses and switch between them, which saves me running my own webmail software. Putting it here just in case it's useful to anyone else.

2005-08-08T20:54:00.000+01:00

A couple of random comments.

I've just signed up for a Linux virtual server from Bytemark. It's a User Mode Linux machine running in userspace on top of another Linux machine, which has the advantage that it can be rebooted, moved to other hardware, or blown away and started from scratch in seconds should it need it. It doesn't have as much RAM, CPU or hard drive space as a standard colocated server but it's a lot cheaper. So far, they seem to be pretty good. They supply secondary DNS and backup MX service for free and the setup was pretty painless. Support times seem pretty quick as well, and their status reports are in RSS. More ISPs need to do that.

I've been using Windows machines more often these days, and I'venoticed a few things that irritate me compared to the Macs and GNOME desktops I've been using recently. I will admit that Windows XP is a lot nicer than I gave it credit for. A lot of the time the problem is an application doing something non-standard. One example is Skype. As good as it is, its GUI does some odd things. When a tab isn't selected, it's greyed out. That makes me think that it's disabled and I can't use it for some obscure reason. However, if I click on it, it works normally. Windows Media Player is good at doing odd things as well. It usually appears to have a rounded window, until you move the mouse to where the title bar should be and at this point the conventional window decorations appear duplicating the ones that were already there. What's the point of that? I usually try to click through the window to a full-screen PuTTY behind it when this happens and fail.

Apple and GNOME have guidelines for developing graphical interfaces,which means most applications are standardised. Windows doesn't seem to have that, and too many applications try to have their own layouts just to be different and do unexpected things. I think the key thing in UI design is consistency. If a UI has an unusual way of doing things but is at least consistent in its operation, people will get used to it.

I've also got back into doing a bit of PHP code recently, returning from doing my project in Java. That's another place that could do with consistency. Function names are all over the place so I always have to look at the manual to find out which variation_of_spacing or runningwordstogether has been used to construct the function name. Several other people have written far better articles about this and other features of the language than I could so I'll just link to one: http://tnx.nl/php. I'm tempted to go and have another look at Ruby but beyond installing it on my new server I haven't really got time at the moment.

2005-06-08T23:20:00.000+01:00

Apple have announced that over the next couple of years they're going to be switching to using Intel Pentium 4 CPUs at the core of their Macs. I didn't believe the rumours when they started but Steve Jobs announced it so it must be true! It should be interesting seeing what they're going to be doing with the platform. Hopefully they'll be able to come up with an x86-based system that gets rid of all the legacy features that PCs put up with today—things like the BIOS and the bizarre layout of system memory with limits all over the place. It might not have much basis in reality but I expect that a Mac should beat a PC in performance when running at the same clock speed. We'll have to wait and see.

Apple have also responded to all the KHTML people who were unhappy with the level of cooperation they were getting with the Safari team by open-sourcing the whole thing. They've released WebCore, based on KHTML; JavaScriptCore, based on kjs; and WebKit, which is their Objective-C wrapper for the others and includes the Safari browser. That's also great news, hopefully meaning Konqueror will be able to merge back a lot of other changes that have been made since the fork that haven't been able to be implemented yet due to the various problems that were discussed a couple of weeks ago.

Some comments have been made that since Apple have switched to Intel and Debian Sarge has been released that these are the signs of the Apocalypse. People at Heriot-Watt have been thinking that for a couple of weeks now, with a bomb scare two weeks ago and the Civil Engineering explosion at the weekend. I think I'm going to run home and hide under my bed.

2005-06-05T11:19:00.000+01:00

Here's a tip for anyone using lots of Linux machines with NFS-mounted home directories, the virtual terminal utility 'screen', and Vim or some similar editor. Don't run screen with a Vim session on one Linux machine, detach it, and forget about it. Opening the same file in Vim on two machines usually ends up with several hours of work being blown away amidst lots of weird error messages. I hadn't committed what I was doing to CVS yet, because it wouldn't compile and I have a thing about not committing broken things to version control. Now it's all gone, and when redoing it Java is wanting to throw exceptions it never did before. I realise it's my own incompetence but I'm still going to whine about it. I'll whine about checked exceptions later.

2005-06-05T07:31:00.000+01:00

My iBook is dead again and has been for a week or so. It's been in two different shops, the first of which wasn't allowed to do anything with it by Apple, so it's back to the same people who had it last time it went wrong. As I was in the middle of writing my dissertation when it went, I'm not massively happy about it. Oh well. The dissertation should be out of the way on Monday, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Part of the Uni blew up yesterday morning, which was quite exciting. There was a (suspected) gas explosion in the civil engineering department which blew a hole in the wall on one side and parts of the wall on the other side clean out. Fortunately it happened early in the morning and there was nobody about so no injuries happened. I've got photos on my phone, but no Bluetooth to get them off there yet, so for the moment check out the Union's statement on it here which has a couple of pictures.

Talking of the Union, it was my last Thursday night live music gig as part of the Ents crew there this week. It's weird to think that I've been doing those almost every Thursday in term time for three years now. I've learnt a lot, and met a lot of people on the crew and in the many bands and other crew that come through the place. It's been a lot of fun and I'm going to miss it. The bands that night were Underbelly and Team Salt, both of whom are spectacularly good and played a fantastic set with some collaborations in the middle. They also sounded a lot better than they had any right to, as various parts of the rig were dying on us throughout the night, including the Spirit LX7 mixing desk we hired to replace our own one which is considered almost dead. I'm looking forward to hearing the recording we did when I get the data from the laptop we used. Mr Tascam has been well used this last couple of terms.

I just noticed this while browsing, and I really don't like the sound of it. The mileage charge for starters doesn't sound good (though it's apparently replacing fuel tax, which might mean fuel costs go down—though I'll believe that when I see it), but the part that says "every vehicle would have a black box to allow a satellite system to track their journey" scares me. The potential for abuse is massive.

2005-04-07T09:18:00.000+01:00

For some random reason I started playing with Xcode and Cocoa last night on my Mac. I decided that I wanted to write a Web browser that could go full screen, with no chrome or menubars or anything, on a given display: this was something we needed to be able to do at the Union at the end of term, and had to hack by using browser windows that were far too big for the display that they were being shown on. I guessed that by using an embedded Safari Web view it wouldn't be too difficult. I was right. It is very easy to create a basic browser without actually writing any code at all: you drag the WebView object, a text field and a few buttons for back, forward, stop, and refresh onto the page and draw some lines between them and it all just works. This page on macdevcenter.com describes how.

After a lot of googling I was able to find some example code using some low-level functions to set up a "shielding" window to prevent dialogue boxes being displayed over the page, and that also worked, but I suspected it was overkill for what I wanted to do. By removing all the CoreFoundation code I found I was able to use about 5 lines of pure Objective-C to get a list of displays, and choose one, then create a window covering the entire screen. It all works, but now I just need to work out how to make it go back to using a window. I think I know how, but I have other things I need to be doing right now. When the code is a bit less embarrasing I'll probably release it to the world. I was very impressed at how easy it is to do these things with Cocoa, once you get over the slightly strange Objective-C syntax. There are far too many square brackets for my liking.

2005-02-28T07:54:00.000Z

I've begun to realise that while CSS is quite good at some things, it's also really horribly bad at doing others. I'm going to use as evidence the number of websites that have sprung up to offer tips about using HTML and CSS properly—people like A List Apart, Eric Meyer, and the site that kicked off this thought, The Man In Blue. All of these are very good sites, and always very informative, but some of the techniques they advocate are a bit strange. They usually rely on using bugs in some browsers that don't exist in others to create workarounds for problems.

In a recent post, The Man In Blue describes a way to get HTML forms to line up properly and look semi-decent using CSS. This is something that is dead simple to do using tables, but we're not supposed to use those for layout any more. I agree for the most part, but every time I have to do a form that's more than just a text box and a submit field, I end up putting it in a table as it's the quickest and easiest way to make it look decent. It can usually be argued that it is tabular data, it's just that most of it is provided by the user. And it's not just forms—these websites also advocate the use of mad hacks in order to get round broken CSS implementations in browsers, and sometimes of dispensing with tables even for things that should be in tables. Argh! I'm glad I don't have to do this kind of thing full time. I think my opinion on CSS is best described by the phrase "It's better than the alternative", as Cory Doctorow and the EFF are fond of saying. It's still not particularly nice though.

2005-02-19T23:46:00.000Z

I've finally got my Mac back, after a three-and-a-half week holiday at Camp Scotsys in Bellshill. Apparently it was the logic board, so they ordered a replacement. This turned out to be dead on arrival so another was ordered and installed on Monday the 14th of February - this is where the fun began. I phoned on Tuesday, and was told it would be back in Edinburgh on Wednesday. I went to the shop and was told it was on test, and that I'd have it back on Thursday. I phoned on Thursday, and they said it was still on test and that it'd be back on Friday. (Are we seeing a pattern here?) I then called on Friday to see if they'd finally got it back, and they hadn't. Apparently the engineer decided to do one last check on it and it missed the van going to Edinburgh, so I could have it back on Monday. At this point I lost it (though not swearing or anything) and asked why I'd been told it'd be back on Wednesday when they hadn't any intention of sending it back then - they told me the logic board had only been fitted on Wednesday, contradicting what the shop had told me before. They then said that I could have it back if I came to Bellshill to collect it. I hung up.

I then realised I knew someone with a car who would probably be willing to take me there, so I called him - he was OK with it, so I offered to pay the petrol and off we went. I got there and retrieved it without too much incident, though I asked for a copy of all the data they had relating to that case in their CRM (as I'm allowed to under the Data Protection Act) so I can work out who was being incompetent. I won't be dealing with them again.

My Muvo also decided to die last Friday for a while too, just for some attention. It kept coming up "Media Error" any time I tried to do anything with it, even in recovery mode. I suspected the hard drive was dead and got ready to moan at Creative, but then I got home and charged it and it awoke, though without its firmware - I had tried to re-flash it earlier to see if that would help. I don't have a Windows machine so I had to wait till Monday to get one I could use with administrator-level access. I flashed it with the European firmware, which worked fine but even at maximum volume it wouldn't drive the headphones as loud as it did before with the volume about half way up. Evidently, the European firmware has a limiter to stop people blowing their ears off, so after re-flashing with the American firmware all was well.

Damn technology. At least now I can get back to playing with Mr Tascam.

On a happier note, on Tuesday I'm off to see the Doves in the Corn Exchange here in Edinburgh - should be a good gig. I'll have to give their new stuff a listen before I go though. I've also got tickets for Kasabian in April, and a rescheduled Ben Folds gig sometime in June, I think. Not as mad as November 2003 (6 bands in 2 weeks) but it'll have to do while I'm meant to be doing my dissertation.

2005-02-02T03:17:00.000Z

Argh. My iBook has decided to give me problems. It'll run fine for most of about 5 minutes, then the display will go blank (though the backlight is still on), and any audio stops too suggesting the machine itself has frozen. I ran Apple's hardware test CD but it also froze with some odd stripes down the display suggesting the logic board problem that has affected a lot of machines since the G3s. Damn. Even more annoying, it would crash in Firewire target disk mode, where you start the machine up as a big Firewire hard drive, so I wasn't able to get my files off as easily as I'd have liked.

Also been reading a couple of things about how people do podcasts. Both the articles I've seen so far (here and here) have been ridiculously overcomplicated using loads of different applications cobbled together. Why don't they use something like Audacity to do it for free? It's got noise filters to get rid of the hum that built-in mics tend to have and other random background noises, it can do EQ to make things sound a bit better, it can convert to MP3, it's not Mac-specific either. GarageBand is good at what it does but it's daft to use it for something as basic as a podcast. I can see using Audio Hijack Pro being good if you want to use Skype for a conversation though. I have Audacity and my iBook (when it returns) has a built-in mic, as do a lot of machines these days. Or, if I wanted to do overkill, I'd get my Tascam US-122 and my Shure SM57 out. I'm not likely to ever do a podcast but if I did that'd be what I'd use.

2005-01-04T10:30:00.000Z

I really like my Muvo. It's very small and light, has a lot of capacity, and sounds fantastic - there is absolutely no hiss whatsoever that I can hear and it sounds a lot better than the MD recorder I'm used to carrying around. Apparently the signal to noise ratio on it is about 98dB according to Creative, which is not very far off professional audio levels- I didn't think when I read it that I'd notice the difference but it is definitely there. I'm beginning to notice that some of the MP3s I encoded years ago at about 128Kbit/sec don't sound as good as the ones at 192Kbit/sec or VBR do so I might have to do some re-encoding at some point...

The are a couple of things that aren't as good as they could be. One is the iTunes support- iTunes for Mac OS X at least is aware of the device when you plug it in, but it doesn't seem to know about folders. All my music is in directories named for the artist, then another for the album, but iTunes can't see any of it. If you drag and drop files onto the device in iTunes they just end up in the root. It doesn't bother me too much though, as it's mass-storage compliant it just behaves like another hard drive. Though I've not tried it apparently iTunes on Windows doesn't even register the fact that it's there so I suppose that's something.

I didn't get the carry case for the player with it either- Creative seem to have been cutting down on the extras in the pack. I wouldn't mind the FM remote for it, but I'm not going to pay £40 just for that any time soon. Also the headphones that came with it don't fit my ears too well, though I've gone back to the Sony ones I was using before which are a lot better. It's got around 400MB of 4GB free just now, and I'm beginning to think that having so much space could be a bad thing. I quite often put it onto shuffle and select all the music, but I sometimes end up skipping about 50% of the songs it puts on depending on what I want to listen to. Maybe I should pare it down a bit and get rid of the things that seemed like a good idea at the time.

2005-01-01T22:02:00.000Z

I've been playing with iPodder for a while. I hadn't looked at it until I got my Muvo, though I've realised that I didn't really need something like that in order to use it. So far I've been listening to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code and Dave Winer's Morning Coffee Notes. Adam Curry's recording is very well produced, but that probably comes from the fact that he was an MTV DJ. It actually sounds like a proper analogue radio show, whereas Dave Winer's is pretty much him hitting record while he is in his car and rambling for a bit. Also listened to Moira Gunn's interview with William Gibson on IT Conversations- first thing I noticed was that Moira sounds like the default speech synthesis voice on Mac OSX :) I don't think that it's really necessary to keep announcing to people what they are listening to through a programme like that- it's unlikely that the listeners will tune in halfway through, and there's enough information in the ID3s to tell you as well. Not very important but the interview was interesting.

2004-07-12T12:52:00.000+01:00

Random Bookmarklets - putting them here so I can copy them to my work machine. Seems easiest at the moment...
Glasgow Library Author Search (Thanks James)
Google This
UK Postcode Search

2004-07-09T23:30:00.000+01:00

Here I am sitting in my room in Stornoway with my iBook connected by WiFi to my DSL connection. Doesn't sound like much, but I never thought I'd see it happen on this island :) Setting it up was no hassle whatsoever: got a Linksys WAG54G (the DSL version of the incredibly popular WRT54G) and a couple of Belkin 54g PCI cards for the desktops, one of which is not needed as it's wired to the router, though it gives some flexibility in positioning the box for best signal if we need to. The iBook already had the Airport Extreme on board, and Dabs threw a Linksys 54G Cardbus card in for my old laptop which my brother now uses. Discovered Windows XP doesn't support WPA encryption without SP1, so I'm going to install that and upgrade to it from WEP later on. All in all I'm happy.

2004-07-06T23:28:00.000+01:00

Not posted anything for a while, I kind of forgot/gave up on blogger for a bit. Might start using it again now though. Anyway, here is an interview with Rich Wareham, who wrote the very handy and open source Desktop Manager for Mac OSX, which adds UNIX-style virtual desktops to the Mac. I like it a lot.

At one point in the interview he describes the UI on the computer as doing "impedance matching" between the way the computer works and the way the users think. I think that's a cool description - the GUI becomes like a DI box or something. :)

2004-05-22T01:52:00.000+01:00

The Wireless Development Weblog claims that there is no current "killer app" (I hate that term) for mobile data technology. Am I the only one that thinks it might be SMS, and that we have it already? People send a ridiculous number of text messages.

2004-05-12T05:20:00.000+01:00

I've not used this for a while and they seem to have changed it around, and it looks quite cool. I apparently now have a profile which mainly lists the bands I like at the moment.

I've not been doing much computing related stuff recently, only redoing a CMS I wrote for a website for someone else. I'm redoing it in Smarty which seems to be quite handy, and more flexible than what I was using before. I have bought a book called the J2EE Developer's Handbook which should mean that I can learn a bit more about how to do these things properly: although I have written servlets before they didn't really stick to any best practices.

I have been to the Union doing the usual lighting thing a couple of times. Two weeks ago we had bands called Asa (that A should have a circle on it but I can't find the Unicode entity for it) and Engine. We've had Engine in before, so I knew what to expect from them: bass-heavy dance music with guitars and insane vocals. Asa were similar, in that there were folk with laptops (the biggest laptop I have ever seen: something like a 17" Acer, though 4:3 unlike the 17" PowerBooks). During Engine's soundcheck they had their iBook plugged in beside the mixing desk, and after connecting the DIs properly we managed to blow bits of the acoustic tiles off the roof, which was nice :) We like our insanely big JBL rig. During the show I ran lights for them and got to use lots of fast moving heads and strobes, so I was happy.

Last week it was Baltic and Underbelly, who were entirely different to the week before: standard guitar lineups. I think that was one of the easiest to run gigs I've ever had in the Union. I can't say much more about their sound other than they played guitar-based rock music, I'm useless at classifying these things, but they are both extremely good and deserve to do well.

2004-04-25T16:14:00.000+01:00

Macromedia Flex

On Thursday I was at a talk given by Steven Webster of iteration:two about Macromedia Flex, which is Macromedia's new server side system for creating rich internet applications (A rough description is apps which run in a browser but which are not limited to the standard HTML widgets). This system outputs to Flash, which as he pointed out is installed on 98% of the browsers in use today. Otherwise, it seemed to be very similar to the Mozilla platform's system: the user interface is described using MXML which is Macromedia's equivalent of XUL, logic is implemented using JavaScript, etc. The main difference is that the UI is compiled on the server into a .swf file which is then output to the browser rather than being rendered from the XML by the client.

It seems to be a neat system but there is nothing really groundbreaking about it that I could see. It's also very proprietary in a lot of respects: although it will allegedly run on anything with a servlet container such as Tomcat and uses open standards to do everything else, if you want to deploy it as a business it will cost £12000 for a licence. The main advantage that it does have is the fact that Flash is installed on most browsers in use at the moment, other than that it's nothing that can't be done just as well with Open Source software and one of the Gecko based browsers. If Apple for example had chosen to use Gecko as the rendering engine for Safari rather than KDE's KHTML, there would be a larger base of users able to use XUL applications. I still think that Gecko will become a lot more popular over the next year or so since MS have discontinued development of Internet Explorer as a standalone application meaning that most users are stuck with IE6. Hopefully the more technical users will realise that there is a far better browser out there and start using it instead.

The iBook

I've had my iBook for about a week now, and I'm very happy with it. It's a 12" version with an 800MHz G4, 256MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive. My first problem with it was that it arrived a week last Friday, then on Monday Apple upped the specifications so that the lowest end iBook you could buy was a 1GHz machine and cheaper than the one I have: a quick call to Apple resulted in a £50 refund, which was nice.

I've got it to run most of the programs I was using on Linux, or at least their close equivalents. At the moment I use Safari or Firefox as the browser, depending on mood, Thunderbird for mail (I have something against Apple's Mail.app, though I can't really say exactly what), and Fire for IM. Apache, PHP, Tomcat and JBoss (which I've not used so far) are installed either by default or as part of the Developer Tools (now called XCode). I've also got into using iCal, which is something I didn't think I would use: I had tried before to use MS Outlook on Windows to do timetables and calendar type things but I got sick of it and didn't use it. I think the fact that iCal is a small, separate application rather than being integrated into a massive, bloated email überclient helps a lot, and also the fact that everything I wanted it to do was on the front page and didn't require too much fuss to get it to work.

The screen is really, really, nice compared to the DSTN one in my old laptop. The Airport Extreme card is also very handy, I can go into the Uni's library and sit down, unfold the screen and by the time I open a browser it has connected to the WiFi network. I know this doesn't really sound impressive, but it's a lot better than the Linux support for the ACX100 card I was trying to use with the old machine. I never shut it down either: it always lives on sleep so that it will wake up in about a second when I open the lid. Add to that the battery life of around 5 hours, and I'm very happy. The only things that annoy me are the fact that due to the way I type, my thumbs keep hitting the trackpad which makes the cursor disappear into another window and I end up typing about 10 characters into it before I realise what has happened. I also seem to hit a lot of double letters accidentally as well.

The Union

After the meeting on Thursday I went back to the Union to do the usual lighting type stuff that I do there. There were two bands on, as usual: the horrendously named Shaven Kocks and Rolla. I didn't care too much for the Shaven Kocks, their singer was not especially good in my opinion, but then there was the 5 minute drum solo in the middle of one of the songs. I will say no more. Rolla on the other hand were fantastic- they play a kind of fast funk-rock and were very good at it. They did however also have a 5 minute drum solo, but I think I'll let them off.

2004-04-20T23:05:00.000+01:00

I'll get round to talking about the iBook which has now arrived soon, but in the mean time... Jeremy Zawodny has noticed something that drives me nuts as well: people with amusing notes instead of their names in IM clients. It might just be me being boring but trying to find someone you need to speak to in a long list of lyrics/film quotes/whatever is a pain. Apparently some people do it with MP3 playlists too... Here's the blog entry.

2004-04-13T11:05:00.000+01:00

Been reading up on which applications I use on Linux and Windows at the moment also work on MacOS X while I wait for my iBook to arrive. So far, I've discovered:

My preferred IM client, Gaim will work on OSX but needs X11 to run. However there is another project called Fire which amounts to the same thing and is a native Cocoa app.

Eclipse also works natively.

NeoOffice is a MacOS native port of OpenOffice. Apparently NeoOffice itself isn't at a usable state yet, though NeoOffice/J is a reimplementation of OpenOffice using Java2D to draw the user interface, and although the website says it's developer-only at the moment I've read elsewhere that it seems to be usable.

There's also AbiWord which has recently announced a reasonably stable native MacOS port. For the brief time I had it running looked OK, but any time I tried to use it to open a file on my Slackware 9.1 system it would kill X, so I switched back to OO.org 1.1, which I like quite a lot.

Oops, I forgot that Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird both work on just about anything.

I'll update this as and when I come across new things, and of course when I get to play with them after my laptop arrives. I know it left Luxembourg on Friday...

2004-04-02T12:29:00.000+01:00

Playing with a Mozilla FireFox extension called BlogThis, which means that you can right click on anything in the browser window and it pops up a new Blogger window so you can post about it with the link already there. Looks quite cool, and might mean that I actually start using Blogger. Also just installed the Tabbrowser Extensions plugin which means that any links which would be new windows open in new tabs, unless I do otherwise. Haven't seen a popup window in months...

2004-03-09T02:03:00.000Z

Just set this up as it seems like everyone else has one and it also seems like it could be useful for keeping track of things that I come across. Also just got a new version of the Zoe email client which I haven't played with for a long time. It's able to speak to the IMAP server I run on my machine and has run through all my email and worked out what lists I'm subscribed to, and highlights people and subjects so you can bring up emails related to the one you're looking at. It's very cool.