Yesterday I was doing some C# programming at home and needed to view the API help file for a library I was working with. The help files was a Microsoft Compiler HTML Help file, which Windows has built in support for, but Mac OS X doesn't.

Luckily I found a couple of CHM viewers for OS X on the Internet:

• xCHM
• Chmox

Although Chmox looks nicer, xCHM is the one I chose to go with as it shows both the index and the contents of the CHM file, whereas Chmox only shows the contents, and provides no means of searching.

Earlier this week, I attended the Oracle Partner Network day in London. I got attend many interesting presentations, and learned a lot about what's going on in the Oracle world.

As it has been a long time since I've used Oracle, this morning I decided to install Oracle on my iBook G4 with 512mb RAM. Officially, Oracle on OS X is only supported on OS X Server, so I was prepared for this to be a bit of a challenge.

The Oracle 10g Installer

I spent the afternoon playing around with the Oracle setup and got it working in the end. While I was running the Oracle Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA), the virtual memory usage on my laptop peaked at over 15 gigabytes, and things were getting pretty slow at this point. Having a gigabyte or two of RAM would have helped a lot here.

Processes ordered by VSIZE, and VM size peaking at over 15gb.

I had to change some things in init*.ora to get the database working. Each of the things I changed was in response to an error message thatI got while running 'startup':

• ORA-00205: error in identifying controlfile, check alert log for more info
  To correct this, I set the correct paths in the CONTROL_FILES parameter
• ORA-01103: database name 'SANDY' in controlfile is not 'DEFAULT'
  To corret this, I set the DB_NAME parameter to the name
• ORA-00201: controlfile version 10.1.0.2.0 incompatible with ORACLE version 10.0.0.0.0
  To corret this, I set the COMPATIBLE initialization parameter to 10.1.0.3

Success: Oracle 10g running on Mac OS X Tiger

Tonight I did some work on Wildcat BZR's diff and merge preferences. The preferences dialog now has a list of diff and merge tools that it know about, and can be chosen from a drop down list. Additional diff and merge tools can be supported by specifying the executable and what parameters must be supplied for diffing and merging operations.

At the moment, the following tools are know about, and I will be expanding this list when I have more spare time:

1. SourceGear DiffMerge
2. KDiff3
3. Apple opendiff

Earlier this week, I read Scott Hanselman's article about the Microsoft DLR team's LOLCODE implementation for the DLR. It's a good a read, and excellent news for the LOLCODE community.

Not wanting to see Mac (and Linux) users being left behind, I decided to get the DLR implementation of LOLCODE running on OS X under Mono. The tools required for this job are:

• Mono 1.2.6 (Preview 2)
• IronPython 2.0 Alpha 6 (for the Microsoft.Scripting assembly)
• Gardens Point Parser Generator (GPPG)
• Gardens Point Scanner Generator (GPLEX)
• LOLCODE for the DLR (Source code)
• This Makefile

Unzip everything, and place the Makefile in the LolCode directory, where the LolCode.sln file is. You may need to edit the paths at the top of the Makefile to ensure the referenced assemblies can be found. With a terminal window open in this directory, run make.

You should now have a working implementation of LOLCODE for the DLR on Mono. Please note, that although this can compile with Mono 1.2.5, it needs 1.2.6 to run properly.

Today and tomorrow, I'm on holiday from work. After having a pretty lazy weekend, I've decided to make my short holiday productive. I've installed Common Lisp and Ruby on Rails on my iBook, and have been playing around with Lisp, getting to know its syntax.

I've been cleaning up various directories full of text files on my iBook and have come to the conclusion that I have so many notes scattered around the place that I'm probably losing track of some things. The solution? A wiki. I'm playing with Instiki. It seems to meet my requirements, and was pretty simple to set up on OS X. Here are the steps I took:

1. Installing Ruby 1.8.5 from here
2. Installing rubygems from here
3. sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies
4. sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby --include-dependencies
5. unzip instiki 0.12.0
6. Run ./instiki

Then, pointing a browser at http://localhost, you'll be prompted to specify some details about the Wiki, and then be forwarded to the wiki's homepage:

I started writing a Bazaar client this weekend. After two days, here's what I've got:

Currently supported features are:

• Init
• Commit
• Add
• Pull
• Merge
• Push
• Commit
• Merge using an external merge tool

I've only tested it on OS X at the moment, but it should be able to work on any platform that supports wxWidgets (Linux, Windows, Mac, etc). There are a few things I want to clean up in the application before I release a 0.1 version on the Internet:

• Dialogs like the commit and add ones need their layout made nicer
• At the moment, only Apple's FileMerge is supported as an external merge tool. I plan on getting SourceGear's DiffMerge working as well.
• I need to add diffing and history support
• I need to change the way it walks the directory tree, as it's slow with large projects

I set up the Bazaar distributed version control system on three machines today (two Macs and one Debian), after Kevin mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. Iplayed around with merging and branching - it seems pretty similar to Git, and I'm not sure what all of the advantages and disadvantages are. Git seems marginally faster, but Bazaar seems to be simpler to install on different platforms (it has a native Windows version, and doesn't need Cygwin like Git does). On OS X and Linux, Bazaar's installation was as simple as Git's.

To get SSH support in Bazaar, it needs the pycrypto and paramiko Python libraries installed. They're available from Debian's repository, but on OS X, I had to install them manually.

I plan on using Bazaar for Wildcat COBOL's version control, so I'll be able to give a more detailed account of how good I think it is and compare it to Subversion later.

I installed git on my iBook today as some of my projects are starting to become rather large, and in desperarate need of some form of revision control. Installing git was simple. I used fink to install expat first, then installed git from source, which went flawlessly.

I've played with branching and merging, and it all works nicely. This is the first time I've seen merging go 100% smoothly with no human interaction. No more Subversion for me, apart from at work.

If you've not tried git yet, give it a shot, and if you don't know why it's better than everything else, watch this video.

A colleague pointed me in the direction of lolcode - a programming language based on the lolcats. I found many compilers/interpreters on the website, and the one that really caught my eye was LOLCode.NET - a lolcode compiler for Microsoft's .NET runtime.

I just *had* to try that on Mono. Here's a screenshot of it working perfectly under Mono 1.2.4 on Mac OS X:

Update:
You can get the source code via SVN by following the instructions here. If you're trying to compile it on a Unix-like system (eg Linux, OS X), you'll need to place this Makefile in your lolcode-dot-net directory, and run make.

Ever wondered how to get screenshots of web pages that show the whole page, exactly as it would be viewed in your browser, even though the page is too big to fit on your screen?

Today I found the perfect application for doing that...

Paparazzi!.

It even creates thumbnails by itself like this one...

Paparazzi! was inspired by webkit2png, and for those of us running Linux, there is a khtml2png available as well.

Version 0.1.12 of the Wildcat COBOL compiler is out now, with bug fixes in the handling of complex IF statements, and support for all relation operators.

Pieter Baele has been working on a COBOL syntax highlighting bundle for TextMate and I have started putting together a COBOL syntax highlighting definition file for Smultron.

To make Smultron use this syntax highlighting, you will need to put this file into /Applications/Smultron.app/Contents/Resources/Syntax Definitions and add the following text into /Applications/Smultron.app/Contents/Resources/SyntaxDefinitions.plist:

<dict>
  <key>name</key>
  <string>COBOL</string>
  <key>file</key>
  <string>cobol</string>
  <key>extensions</key>
  <string>cbl cob</string>
</dict>

I installed the ShortStat Dashboard widget today as a handy way of viewing the amount of hits and recent referrers that my website is getting. It's a Dashboard widget that connects to the web server and retrieves information generated by ShortStat which you need to install on your web server.

Apple released the Safari 3 web browser for OS X and Windows today. Download it here.

I put together a CCNet Dashboard Widget for OS X. This is a dashboard widget that shows the status of CCNet automated software builds. Here's a screenshot:

I realise this widget has a very limited target audience as it's for OS X and CCNet traditionally runs on Windows, but I found some information relating to running CCNet on Mono recently: here and here.

Today I compiled and ran my first Cocoa# application in COBOL - probably the first time anyone's ever had a working Cocoa# application written in COBOL.

The Wildcat COBOL Compiler now supports referencing packages like mcs does, which made this strange mix of technologies possible. It feels strange running a COBOL .NET GUI application on OS X.

The updated compiler and source is available here and the example is available here. Here's a screenshot of my Cocoa# test application running:

Logos with the text reflected below them are one of the popular "Web 2.0" styles, and they're very simple to create in Photoshop. This short tutorial will show you how to create a logo like this one:

There are plenty of similar tutorials out there on the web, but I couldn't find one that creates a logo that looks good on top of a textured or gradient background. This one work since it's background layer is transparent.

First of all, go into Photoshop's preferences and change your transparency grid colour to "dark". This will allow you to see your translucent white text more easily.

Next, create a new image with a transparent background. I played around with the image size a few times to find a size that would be right for my logo.

Now choose the text tool, with the "horizontal type" option.

Use the text tool to enter the text for your logo.

Create a new layer. This will be a transparent layer over the top of the existing one.

Now choose the text tool, with the "horizontal outline mask" option.

Enter the same text again, in exactly the same size, then use the gradient fill tool to fill the text with a gradient that goes from white to transparent.

From the Edit menu, choose Transform and Flip Vertical.

This will flip your text to make it look like a mirror of the text in the first layer:

Save your image as a PNG file, and make up a web page with a coloured background to test it with. Here is the result I got by following these steps:

As Twitter is becoming the latest cool way of keeping touch with friends and generally yapping or moaning about stuff, I decided to take a look at a few desktop client applications for Twitter. I looked at four - two on the Mac and two on Windows: TwitterPost, Twitterrific, VisualTwit and Twitteroo. I thought Twitterrific on the Mac was the nicest of them all:

Twitteroo was the best Windows one I found:

Today I decided to include an image in a blog post, for the first time even in my blogging history.

While reading a recent article about user interface inconsistencies in Vista by Paul Thurrott, I began thinking of UNO, which I installed on my Mac Mini and iBook earlier this week (and has the excellent catchphrase of: "Several ways to skin your Cat").

UNO fixes some user interface inconsistencies in OS X applications. It takes the smooth silvery-gray appearance featuring the unified toolbar and title bar that Apple Mail has in Tiger, and gives you the option of applying it to all applications. Alternatively, you can take the "Polished metal" UI that iTunes has and apply that to all applications.

I thought Microsoft was bad for user interface inconsistencies, but looking at a computer without UNO after using it for a few days make me realise how bad Apple are for this too. I guess it was originally hidden by the shininess of the Aqua and [Brushed|Polished] Metal UIs.



UNO is good - you should try it.

(To get Firefox looking that good, you'll also need the GrApple theme from the bottom of this page)

Today I decided to include an image in a blog post, for the first time even in my blogging history.

While reading a recent article about user interface inconsistencies in Vista by Paul Thurrott, I began thinking of UNO, which I installed on my Mac Mini and iBook earlier this week (and has the excellent catchphrase of: "Several ways to skin your Cat").

UNO fixes some user interface inconsistencies in OS X applications. It takes the smooth silvery-gray appearance featuring the unified toolbar and title bar that Apple Mail has in Tiger, and gives you the option of applying it to all applications. Alternatively, you can take the "Polished metal" UI that iTunes has and apply that to all applications.

I thought Microsoft was bad for user interface inconsistencies, but looking at a computer without UNO after using it for a few days make me realise how bad Apple are for this too. I guess it was originally hidden by the shininess of the Aqua and [Brushed|Polished] Metal UIs.



UNO is good - you should try it.

(To get Firefox looking that good, you'll also need the GrApple theme from the bottom of this page)

iTunes 5 is out, go and download it from Apple if you have Windows or OS X. It looks kind of squareish compared to the 4.x series: screenshot. The iPod Nano, and the Motorola ROKR mobile phone have also been released. ROKR is the first mobile phone with iTunes support. It's available on Cingular in the US and I'm not sure about the UK details yet as the site doesn't seem to be fully updated. On MacOS X, it has introduced yet another GUI style - like the brushed metal one, but smooth. GUI inconsistencies are one of the things that annoyed my about Windows when I used it, and Apple seem to be getting just as bad. It does looks more like Mail.app I suppose, with the smooth look and utilising the full horizontal width of the window instead of have a huge space-wasting border. Functionally, I've not noticed anything different yet, and OGG Vorbis is still not officially supported. |

It's been too long since I wrote anything here. I'll start with this weekend...

Friday: Dad's bithday - went to Elliot's on Bath Street for food. The food was amazing, and the live music was good too.

Saturday: Vikki's birthday night out. Vikki, some friends, Neil_ and I went to Arta for dinner, and stayed late for drinks too. This was my second day in a row of eating mussels in a restaurant... yumm!

Sunday: Went with my family to a garden party just outside Perth for my dad's cousin's silver wedding anniversary. I probably recognised less than 10% of the people who were there. It was a good day though, and draught beer on tap in your house is always a good thing ;-)

I'm now attempting to have a quiet week in. Tonight I'm dist-upgrading a debian server (to the newly stable Sarge). This box will be used for hosting sorn.net while I'm moving to a new flat. I was quite surprised to find that the version of PHP on MacOS X Tiger has no image manipulation support, so I'm currently installing MySQL on a Gentoo box for messing around with a database-driven website with dynamically generated images.
And now the biggest news for me this week (aprt from Sarge going stable) is: Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors

I've added a couple of new desktop screenshots to my website. There's someone new leeching the same large JPEG image from sorn.net again. I'll need to think up something more subtle to do to the image this time! Also, Loudounacademy.org.uk had a page of photos from the school. It seems to have been taken down now, but it's mirrored here on sorn.net now. Does anyone know where these pictures came from? We all know that the real Loudoun Academy website is here though ;-)

My new toy this week is Konfabulator (which you can see on my screenshots page). It lets you add useful little "widgets" to your desktop on Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX. It's similar to Karamba on KDE. Being able to import widgets between Karamba and Konfabulator would be nice.

Have you got a spare computer? I'm looking for a cheap (and quiet) second hand computer to use as a router between my network and GlasgowNet and BackNet. If anyone has a spare that they're willing to sell (something like a Pentium 166 is more than adequate), then please post in the guestbook.

I discovered that Sara and Aaron have a blog: http://glasgownews.blogspot.com... then I discovered a photo of Tina and me on it among lots of other good pics.

Slightly different weekend. No going out to pubs for a start. Spent most of Saturday afternoon walking around Glasgow, then went to see a play in the evening with Tina. It was excellent! Spent most of Sunday playing around with the website, and looking at what some previous versions of sorn.net had, like the blog. Still trying to get OSX to mount WebDAV shares from my web server, without any progress at all. |