Category: os x

Apple’s Mac and iP* device operating system

The Hand That Feeds 1.0.band

Posted on by david

Cool!

Trent Reznor has released NIN’s latest single as a GarageBand file.

From the README:

For quite some time I’ve been interested in the idea of allowing you the ability to tinker around with my tracks – to create remixes, experiment, embellish or destroy what’s there. I tried a few years ago to do this in shockwave with very limited results.

After spending some quality time sitting in hotel rooms on a press tour, it dawned on me that the technology now exists and is already in the hands of some of you. I got to work experimenting and came up with something I think you’ll enjoy.
What I’m giving you in this file is the actual multi-track audio session for “the hand that feeds” in GarageBand format. This is the entire thing bounced over from the actual Pro Tools session we recorded it into. I imported and converted the tracks into AppleLoop format so the size would be reasonable and the tempo flexible.

You can get the file here.

Mac OS X 10.3.9

Posted on by david

Mac OS X 10.3.9 was released yesterday. There have been several posts on the WOProject, WO Developer, and Java lists that indicate that this update borks Java 1.4.2 for some people. I wasn’t going to upgrade, but I read that the update includes Safari 1.3. Safari 1.3 includes support for contentEditable and designMode so, I’m interested in trying it out.

I shutdown all of my applications, backed up my boot drive (I like SuperDuper!), downloaded the combo updater, crossed my fingers, and let it rip. So far, so good, every thing is running well.

Eclipse fires up fine, and my current projects all run without any issues.

As documented on Surfin’ Safari, Safari 1.3 is very fast. It does seem to have issues with Google Maps though, and I cannot find documentation on getting the HTML editing to work (none of the Mozilla/Midas-based examples light up).

Why Apple insists on releasing OS and Security updates on Friday is beyond me though.

Update: Changing the User Agent to MSIE via the Debug menu in Safari seems to allow Google Maps to function again.

Core Data

Posted on by david

More and more details are becoming available about Core Data. I’ve mentioned it in the past, but with little detail due to the NDA nature of the information. However Apple has now published an extensive overview (thanks bbum).

I am hoping that this gets people really excited. I’m hoping that they start building cool data-driven Cocoa apps because they get this cool stuff for free. I’m hoping they go: “Gee this is neat! I wish we could build web-apps this way too.”

Because, then I could show them WebObjects. ‘Cause you know, you can.

nofollow, php, and Jaguar

Posted on by david

Google, Yahoo and MSN have the blogsphere abuzz with the news that they will ignore links containing rel=”nofollow” when calculating page ranks. The hope is that (when used on links in blog comments) this will diminish the incentive for comment spam. I’m not terribly optimistic, but it is worth a shot.

New WordPress plugin – old PHP

Clint Ecker dissected the MovableType plugin and re-implemented it as a WordPress plugin. I downloaded it, activated it and received this error:

Warning: Wrong parameter count for preg_grep() in /srv/www/siriux.net/html-data/wp-content/plugins/wpNofollow.php on line 29<br />
Warning: Bad arguments to join() in /srv/www/siriux.net/html-data/wp-content/plugins/wpNofollow.php on line 30

It turns out that the plugin requires PHP 4.2 or greater, unfortunately the box that hosts this blog is running Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2.x) and it’s version of PHP is hopelessly obsolete. I’ve been meaning to update but haven’t quite got around to it, this seemed like as good a time as any.

Upgrading is easy! 😐

I found clear instructions for upgrading PHP to 4.3 here. I grabbed the PHP 4.3.10 archive from php.net and commenced with the install. Sadly, make died on the Zend/zend_strtod.c file. A little searching showed that PHP 4.3.10 cannot be built on OS X, instead I had to grab the latest stable snapshot from the CVS.

Still needs tweaking…

I’ve tested the WordPress plugin, and it seems to work, but it will only recognize URL’s in the body of the comment (without hacking the wp-comment file) and only if the link is fully formated: <a href=”www.url.domain”>like this<a> and it ignores unadorned links: http://www.url.domain or www.url.domain. Though, I’m sure the last issue will be addressed soon.

Update:

Clint posts: “Hey I just found out the solution, I think I can lower the priority of the filter so that it gets applied last. A priority of 10 should accomplish that.”

So, change the last two lines in wpNofollow.php to:

add_filter('comment_text', 'nofollowfy', 10);
add_filter('comment_excerpt', 'nofollowfy',10);