Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 1800

It’s official: the Big Mac is the world’s third-fastest supercomputer. Just wait until they install Panther!

Some cool Mac facts: You can use the tab key to switch between windows when Exposé is on. You can also use command-` to tab between windows of the current application without Exposé. If you want to read PDF’s within Safari (or, presumably, other Mac browsers - though who uses those anymore?) try the PDF Browser Plugin. You can block ads in Safari with PithHelmet.

Word count: 3450
NaNoWriMo link of the day: Procrastination from despair.com

I’ve been searching for weeks for a way to get soundbites out of movie files. I vaguely recalled that DivX Tool (or a newer beta) would extract the soundtrack as a mp3, but I didn’t know of an easy way to work with the results. (By the way, DivX Tool will refuse to open a write-protected file, sometimes silently.) It sounded like I might have to use something complicated like mAC3dec with LAME. Instead, all my problems were solved when I stumbled across a little shareware tool called MP3 Trimmer.

My first soundbites are up in the Repository under GDO and Teal’c.

Word count: 1340

I just wanted to blog for a moment to say how stunningly convenient the orange arrow is in Safari. It’s called SnapBack (see the SnapBack movie), and it’s even more useful than shift-command-left/right arrow for switching tabs. Just click the orange arrow and you’ll be returned to the page where you started. This is great for reading a multipage article and then snapping back to the first page to grab the correct link. Since I open new links in new tabs one SnapBack is all I need, but you can also mark more pages to snap back to (using the History menu).

I had heard that the small-caps support was supposed to be added to Panther, but I’m still not seeing them.

Word count: 2145 (100 of which was a Stargate drabble)
Helpful link of the day: Trackback for Beginners

My NetNewsWire demo expired, so I’ve downgraded to NetNewsWire Lite and am posting to the blog from the MovableType web interface again. Forty dollars was just too high a price to pay for the convenience of posting from NetNewsWire itself.

On the upgrade side, I’ve built a new Emacs that no longer crashes in Panther. I’ve also forced it to run ispell. I was getting a Searching for program: no such file or directory, ispell error, even though I had installed ispell with fink. Rather than try to figure out what path the Emacs shell process was using, I decided to put a symbolic link to ispell in /usr/bin: sudo ln -s /sw/bin/ispell. Presto!

I had a Safari crash, which leads me to believe that Emacs isn’t really my problem. I still haven’t rebooted - that would probably be a good idea after installing a new OS, but Kitty never asked me to reboot. Anyway, I’ve found some neat tricks while playing with Kitty - some are my own discovery, but most are from MacOSXHints.

The whole command-shift-left/right arrow thing for Safari is new to me, but that’s the quick way to switch tabs. Command-tabbing in Panther has changed a bit, too - now there’s a big program switching popup.

To make your own keyboard shortcuts, open the Keyboard and Mouse panel in System Preferences and choose the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. I added a shortcut to all apps (choose All Applications at the bottom of the shortcut list and hit the plus button). I typed Show All to add that menu item and gave it the shortcut control-alt-command-H. I’m also adding a Hide Chat Participants shortcut to iChat.

When I first set up iTunes to play Filk Radio, I went through a whole song and dance to get the correct Live365 streaming URL into iTunes. I wanted to add some others today and discovered a much simpler method:

1. Find your station at Live365.
2. You should arrive at the station page, which will have a URL like http://www.live365.com/stations/filk_com or http://www.live365.com/stations/295422. Each station has both a name and a number, and it doesn’t seem to matter which you use.
3. Edit the URL in your location bar - replace stations with play.
4. If you want to listen to the station in Safari, just hit return and the stream will play as embedded Quicktime (though I thought embedding was illegal now).
5. If you want to listen to the stream in iTunes, which I find more convenient, then don’t hit return. Just copy the new URL http://www.live365.com/play/295422 from the location bar (command-C), go to iTunes and choose Open Stream from the Advanced menu (or just hit command-U), and paste in your URL (command-V). The stream will start playing.
6. Any time you play a stream in iTunes, it ends up in your Library. (In fact, I have three or four versions of Filk Radio resulting from these experiments.) To put it in a more convenient playlist, just drag it from the Library playlist (it will be the one playing) into your playlist of choice. For some reason you can’t drag a stream into the official Radio playlist, but you can make a new playlist for Live365 stations.
7. Now anytime you click on that tune in iTunes your Live365 feed will start playing. The free version includes commercials. I don’t know how the paid version works - probably by adding your username and password to the URL. That project is left to the reader.

So I’ve finally backed up my home directories and (wisely, it turned out) my Apache configuration files and installed Panther. I just did the upgrade, not the archive and install option, and I customized it just to drop most of the printer drivers and foreign languages. They take up space better spent on educational videos.

The first odd thing Kitty did was pull up my first preferred keyboard in alphabetical order (Dvorak) rather than the one I’d been using before the upgrade (US). I caught on to that pretty quick and switched back. I played with Exposé and Mail, and configured my new Finder windows. Exposé was definitely worth the upgrade. I took a short stroll through Font Book, but my main concern has been Emacs. I can’t start NaNoWriMo without my text editor. Fortunately I’m outlining my novel with the free copy of OmniOutliner, so the situation isn’t quite desperate yet. (Note that OmniOutliner has an upgrade available for Panther.)

Rumor has it that Emacs’ pty bug is gone, which I think means that ispell and other spawned processes will now work from within the GUI version. (It was an OSX bug rather than an Emacs bug, and now Kitty is all better.) It would be much nicer if Emacs actually worked.

The trouble began the first time I tried to rebuild Emacs, probably because I’d forgotten to install the developer’s tools (now called Xcode). My old build of Emacs wouldn’t run, either. I also had trouble the second time, but that looks like it was a CVS problem. I managed to get everything out of CVS and and my last build compiled, though make install didn’t move Emacs.app to the Applications folder like I expected it to. You can’t have everything, especially not at 3 a.m. Now that I look at my emacs build at a reasonable hour of the morning, I find it crashes occasionally. Such is CVS, I guess.

The other thing I did last night was redo my Apache config files, which were moved to a backup spot in the upgrade. I’m wasn’t sure what had changed so I reinstalled Entropy PHP. I’m getting a [warn] module mod_php4.c is already added, skipping, which I can’t figure out, since there’s only one AddModule statement in the conf file. I hear that may mean I have the wrong Apache build installed, but I never touched it, really, Senator. Otherwise PHP seems to work.

Maybe I should have gone with Archive and Install after all…

Virginia Tech’s supercomputer built out of 1100 Macintosh G5 computers has jumped to #3 in the “semi-official” rankings of the world’s fastest supercomputers. It spent a little time at #2 in the preliminary rankings, then dropped to #4. The final numbers will be out in November, and the Big Mac will be upgraded from Jaguar to Panther next month as well.

Panther has arrived! I wasn’t planning to rush into upgrading - I just wanted the $20 upgrade copy safe in my hands before Apple changed their minds about the new mac qualifying.

I checked out Mark Pilgrim’s article (with screenshots) on What’s New in Panther and now I’m tempted to upgrade now. My favorite new feature (besides, obviously, Exposé) is the Font Book. I’ve always wanted a good way to view my fonts, but I’m too cheap to pay for the popular font programs.

I suppose I should get the upgrade out of the way before NaNoWriMo, but there will always be new cats to vacuum.

Word count: 100
Weird link of the day: Hummingbirds reenact the Book of Genesis (by way of my friend Kendice)

According to Apple my copy of Panther has shipped already, but the FedEx site can’t find my tracking number. It’s a sly OS, sneaking around their warehouse, pouncing on unsuspecting Windows users and eating them for lunch…

I’ve been using Safari since I got the new mac, but this week I finally discovered something that Camino does better. Its XML+CSS is better than Safari’s - I spotted a few font substitutions in Safari that didn’t happen with Camino (which means the font is on my system, though I knew that already). Also, Camino has basic XLink support and Safari has none.

Safari has at least one HTML+CSS issues as well, which I spotted while playing with Jade’s stylesheet: it doesn’t seem to support font-variant: - at all. Camino does.

I’m not saying I’m going back to Camino or Mozilla, but the old pointy-planet icon is back in my dock now.

[P.S.] The Big Mac at Virginia Tech achieved a preliminary ranking of 4th fastest supercomputer in the world. Wired claims it may hit #2 soon.

[P.P.S.] New iBooks are out!

I’ve been having Emacs crashes lately, though I didn’t notice the problem when I first built Emacs. According to the Emacs for MacOS X guy, this is a garbage collection problem that’s been going on for a few weeks and has now been fixed in CVS. So I updated my tree and I’m about to rebuild. Wish me luck.