So, tomorrow's my last full day in the U.S. And an open source unlocking tool for the iPhone has just been released.

Oh Internets, how you tempt me...

</lust>

So, I'm settling into a new user account on my sister's computer while mine's getting its case fixed.  A couple minutes ago, I realize that I should put Scrivener on my Dock.  But I don't want to go into the Applications folder and find it.

So instead, I pull up Quicksilver, intending to open Scrivener and pin it to the Dock while it's open.  I call up Scrivener in the direct object field and I'm just about to hit Enter when I think, "Wait a second..."

Hand to the trackpad.  I grab the Scrivener icon and drag it down to the Dock—which separates to indicate I can drop it right there.

In summary: I love the Mac's ubiquitous drag-and-drop.

A crack formed in Dagny's palmrest area, apparently from the lid being knocked into it too hard and often. The Apple folken said that they'd fix it under warranty, but I have to leave my poor laptop in their hands to do it. So I guess I'll be leaning on my sister's computer for a couple days...

Went to see Order of the Phoenix. I'll probably talk about it more tomorrow, but for today I'll just say that if you liked the previous movies you should definitely see it. However, someone asked for me to provide a picture of the costume I wore, so:



The robe and sweater are from Whimsic Alley in Santa Monica; the rest just comes from my closet. I'll need to tune it a bit before next week...

Apple is masterfully manipulating the information getting out to people. But the one critical bit of info they haven't given out yet is the monthly rates.

( Since some of you are probably really sick of this stuff... )

(I won't be in line Friday, though—at least, not unless a series of very unlikely events occurs, including both a better plan than I think they could possibly afford and a firm decision on college.)

EDIT: They released it today. It's fairly good, but nowhere near the sort of amazing I'd need to be able to afford it. Le sigh.

While Steve Jobs was doing his keynote yesterday, Apple quietly introduced a new version of their web site with a new style and lots of AJAX.

One of the most interesting bits is what they did to the online Apple Store. They've gotten rid of the usual pagination; instead, they basically have a big empty grid and load the products as they're needed.

As an example, load the Software page under Mac Accessories. (I can't do a direct link, unfortunately.) You'll load a page with a grid of programs on it. If you scroll, it'll seem like the grid is already full of hundreds of programs--but if you grab the thumb and yank it way down the list, you'll see a spinning "wait" icon in each box for a couple seconds.

The trick is that it's not only loading the current screenful; it's also loading about half a screen above and below. That makes the scrolling look seamless. Very clever, really. I might want to reuse the technique...

I grabbed a new Camino nightly, and it looks like they fixed the rendering of Georgia and Trebuchet MS, the two fonts I have a long-time torrid love affair with. Yay!

In other news, I wrote my first Mac GUI program last night. It was based on an exercise from the Yellow Book—basically, write a GUI program where you can type in a text box and it'll count the number of characters. The cool thing was, I wrote only one line of code:

[label setStringValue:[
    NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d characters", 
        [[sender stringValue] length]
    ]
];

Most of the rest was just frozen objects that are automatically thawed when the program starts. So cool.

So, there was a Ducks playoff game today, which included possibly the most spectacular check I've ever seen. The dude went skidding along the top of the boards right in front of his own bench, then hit a pole and fell onto the ice.

Well, my brother turned it into an image macro, and once I saw it I knew it had to be iconed. So...here it is. Whee.

@a=map{ord}split//,"CodeIsFreeSpeech";@b=(58,
-138,83,99,-84,-1,-157,23,-115,36,-3,-85,2,15,
-37,-182);printf"%02x",$a[$_]-$b[$_]for(0..15)

Let's see them claim now that source code is purely functional.

I decided yesterday that I'm now a Mac user.

It feels so weird.

Motoko finally stopped being able to charge her battery, so I got my new laptop a little early.



This is Dagny, my 2GHz Macbook.  I also got the Bluetooth mouse, which has four buttons.  When I took the picture I didn't have Linux set up; I now do, although I'm in Mac OS at the moment because I had to go to class and hadn't tested suspending yet.

It is teh shiny.

In other news, I submitted a Summer of Code proposal.  It's for a file synchronization program that auto-syncs with Avahi/Bonjour (basically, it senses other computers on the network).  Should be fun if they pick me.

About the only pundit I follow is Robert X. Cringely.  His article this week has a great insight, but he did a horrible job of explaining it, so I'm going to see if I can do any better.


Once upon a time, some explorers stumbled across a new continent, and named it Internet.  When they returned to their home country and explained their discovery, a group of pioneers became very excited.  They convinced a few schools and companies to help them set up shop on the new continent, and founded a small city.  Each organization in the city would get a few buildings and there were some narrow streets connecting them; people would use those roads to visit the other organizations.  The flow of people was about even--each organization got about as many visitors as it had members who visited somewhere else.

Holy shit, I haven't posted here in forever.  Okay, here's the story as quickly as possible:

• New House
  In it.  Adore it.  And I have the awesomest improvised whiteboard ever.  Although I keep putting off finishing unpacking my room.
• Internet
  Got the Fucking Magic Internet online.  After a problem where our first radio crapped out, things have been going pretty smoothly.
• Server
  I signed up for Google Apps for Your Domain, which means that my server isn't directly handling my e-mail anymore.  It also means that Gmail no longer throws away all my PayPal e-mail, since the SPF checks pass.  Yay.
• Classes
  Taking four classes this semester--College Writing 2, Psychology, Logic, and Microeconomics.  I've had two weeks so far.  Writing is okay so far; we're not going to have to write about literature this semester, which is a total win.  Psych seems alright, but we'll see.  I don't really feel like we've done much in Logic yet.  Microceconomics is with the same econ teacher I had last semester,who I liked a lot, but thus far most of what we've learned was covered in Intro to Economics last semester.
• Family
  My sister's been accepted to the college we're both trying to go to.  Hurray.  Only now Mom's on my ass to get my application done.
• Laptop
  I've been having trouble for a while keeping the power cord seated properly in my laptop.  To make it worse, my battery is now convinced that it's getting old; it's holding about 45% of its design capacity.  And it was at 70+% a few weeks ago, so I think it's just confused.
• Work
  Have a client.  She runs a bookstore booth at Scottish fairs and wants a website, including both a calendar of upcoming fairs and an online bookstore.  That's keeping me busy.
• Homework
  Also have a draft paper due tomorrow in Writing.  That's keeping me busy too.
• Health
  Oh, and I have a nasty cold, which isn't helping.

And that's life at the moment.

At about four o'clock today, I was listening to an audiobook of Emma by Jane Austen and baking.  I suppose I should explain why.

Well, the book is part of my ongoing self-taught "Potter Shipping Studies".  Emma is one of Rowling's favorite books, and although it's not at all my genre, I can see why—the plotting is superb.  The Portkey folken already spoiled me for the ending, but that just means I can see how she's constructing her red herrings, and it's really very clever.  Unfortunately, the writing is very hard to get through, but the audiobook makes that much easier to cope with.  (You can get Oggs, MP3s or iTunes audiobook files from Project Gutenberg for free; I'm listening to them on my iPod.)

As for the baking:  It's finals week at community college.  The Econ final yesterday was a breeze, although a question occurred to me while I was working on it; as a result, I ended up drawing a line at the bottom of a short-answer question and writing "P.S. Are food stamps part of the money supply?" along with my e-mail address.  This amused me to no end.

The College Writing final tonight was a bit harder.  It was an in-class essay; the teacher gave us excerpts from four short stories we previously read, and we had to develop a thesis from one of the excerpts and then write an essay supporting it, all within an hour.  I was writing the last sentence I'd planned for the conclusion when he called time, so things worked out nicely.

(Oh—I managed to hyperfocus through the first 45 minutes, so kitsunenomiko's nefarious attempt to distract me failed.  Huzzah.)

But afterwards we had planned a to have a potluck.  Being an open source hacker, I could hardly ignore those plans, so I made cone cakes.  They're basically cupcakes, except that instead of putting the cake batter in little paper cups you put it in ice cream cones; Mom's made them since approximately the birth of the Universe, but this was the first time I'd ever made them.  They came out alright (I need to work on finding the exact right amount of batter per cone, though), and people liked them.

In any case, I think I need to watch an action movie tomorrow or something to reassert my masculinity.  Maybe I'll do that while the Roomba's wandering around the new house picking up all the bits of carpet.

Plugged my laptop into the DVI cable usually used to connect the DVD player to the 61″ HDTV. The result is simultaneously completely impractical and so fucking cool I could die.

More or less finished the house thingy. (Although I'm thinking about switching the load-and-store mechanism to something using AJAX to keep it on the server.)

To use it, you'll need a room set; the one for the new house is posted here. Just paste the contents into the textarea and hit "load". You can add little blocks for various pieces of furniture, modifying their properties with the controls at the right and moving them within their rooms by drag-and-drop. The implementation is in index.html, roomarrange.js, and roomarrange.css; there are a bunch of JavaScript libraries I'm using as well, but I didn't write those.

I think my favorite part of this program is that it seems like there's not really any substance to it at all. I wrote fifty lines of HTML, eighty of CSS, about three hundred of JavaScript, and carefully designed a data format to get this right—but I can't really point to any one piece and call it the core, because the core is really Firefox bringing all the pieces together. It's an oddly satisfying way to write a program, perhaps because it leaves you feeling like you got much greater results than you should have been able to with that amount of effort.

Now, to bed.

We're starting to think about how the furniture will be laid out in the new house.  When we rearrange a room, we usually do it by sketching it out (to scale) on graph paper, cutting out to-scale pieces of graph paper to represent the furniture, and then moving all the furniture around the room until we're happy with the arrangement.

I spent a couple nights doing this and finally finished on Wednesday night.  When Dad looked at it, though, he wasn't very happy with it--I had used a scale of one square = 5 inches, which is about the largest I could get away with and still be able to fit all the rooms.  The problem, of course, was that five inches is an incredibly inconvenient number to work with.

So I sat down tonight to sketch them out again with a one square = 6 inches scale.  And then I realized something.

There are basically two things involved in sketching a room:

1. Drawing boxes with straight edges.
2. Performing simple computations to handle a scale factor.

As it turns out, there's a computer program that excels at doing simple math and then drawing boxes on the screen.  It's called "Mozilla Firefox".

So I described the rooms as XML:

<room xmlns="http://xmlns.brentdax.com/roomarrange"
        width="170.5" height="206" scale="2">
    <name>Living room</name>
    <thing type="deadspace" top="61.5" height="83.75" left="0" width="2"></thing>
    <thing type="deadspace" top="63.5" height="79.75" left="2" width="23">
        <name>Fireplace</name>
    </thing>
    <aperture type="window" surface="left" top="36" height="23"></aperture>
    <aperture type="window" surface="left" bottom="34" height="23"></aperture>
    <aperture type="window" surface="top" left="58" right="58"></aperture>
    <aperture type="walkway" surface="right" top="60" bottom="61">
        <name>Hallway</name>
    </aperture>
</room>

And then wrote some simple style sheets to render it and a little bit of JavaScript to convert the various sizes to style= attributes, based on the specified scale.



Thus far, it works like a charm.  Next up: allowing people to create furniture and move it around the room with drag-and-drop.

Applications are useless.

Most of applications on my computer are never opened by hand. The only ones I open are the specialized browsers (Firefox, Banshee music player, F-Stop photo organizer, Gaim) and the utilities (Terminal, Calculator, Control Center and its applets).

The rest of the programs on my computer—the document editors like OpenOffice and Gedit and The Gimp—I open by double-clicking on a file. (Well, if I have to make a new one I may open the application, but only because Gnome's "new document" menu isn't comprehensive.)

So why don't we have a Universal Browser? There's always Back, Forward, Refresh, Stop, and an address bar in a toolbar at the top of the screen. When you double-click a file, the current window transforms into an editor for the file. Saving is done automatically. There's no Open, Save As, or New—they're done at the folder level. The only items that remain from a typical File menu would be "Print" and "Close" (and maybe they can be put somewhere else). When you're done with the file, click Back and you're returned to the folder it's in. To create a new file, double-click a "New..." item (probably the first in any file listing), select the type from a list, name it, and off you go.

Offline games? Double-click your savegame to start it up. Online ones? Your account file or character file. Web browser? Your bookmarks or your home page. E-mail and IM? Your account file.

As for the specialized browsers: why doesn't my music player pop up whenever I open the Music folder? Or my photo manager when I open Photos?

Except for utilities (and there's no way around them), the concept of "what program am I using?" is pointless to most uses of a computer. Why do we still expose this?

Personally, I think it's because it makes software companies invisible. Of course, Open Source doesn't care about that.