A cool new online presentation tool:
The slide show application is really nice in that it feels very much like a desktop application when in use, even down the way buttons and key presses behave. The object rotation is particularly clever.
Another thing that makes this one clever though is the underlying framework, which is said to compile cocoa like code into dynamic web pages. It will apparently even be opensourced at some stage!
Johan Basberg (who designed the beautiful SQLEditor icon) has a handy list of recommended mac applications at
http://dittverk.no/mac/files/tag-editor.php
And SQLEditor is on this list 
The ACM is offering free downloads of selected classic works of computer science to anyone who signs up.
(via Lambda The Ultimate and Dusty Decks)
OneMonthApp is using SQLEditor!
OneMonthApp is a project where they are building a complete web application in a month. It’s going to be a simple and easy to use cash flow application, apparently. And they’re going to make it free, which is great too.
I’ve signed up to be notified when it’s done, which the counter is promising for sometime in the next couple of days. (They started in September, so less than a month)
Stephen over at OneMonthApp very kindly included SQLEditor in a list of 20 tools for web application development that they’re using for the project.
Maybe I need an “I use SQLEditor” badge icon or something?
Well the iTunes store is finally offering tv shows in the uk. It’s totally disappointing. The prices are ridiculously expensive and the list of shows is small.
All of the MalcolmHardie software sales are denominated in dollars so I watch the exchange rate with great interest.
The current exchange rate at xe.com as of today is 2.01599 USD to 1 British Pound. (In the reverse direction that is 0.49603 British Pounds to 1 USD).
iTunes in the US charge 1.99USD for most tv shows. Therefore the UK price correctly should be 99 pence. (0.99 British Pounds). Given the usual kind of price gouging that goes on, possibly 1.29 or even 1.39 would have been acceptable.
Instead they have decided to charge 1.89 British Pounds. This is almost twice as expensive!
Add 9 pence and it would be exactly twice as expensive.
I almost thought of writing to them and asking if they have mistaken the exchange rate somehow.
The most annoying thing is that while the catalogue will increase in size, the prices will probably be fixed.
This made me laugh when I saw it:
http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/retro-mac-os-wordpress-theme
Definitely memories of simpler times 
So, if you’ve visited the MalcolmHardie.com site today you’ll have seen the new site design.
It’s Blue.
But that’s not all. The layout structure of each page has been substantially changed (for the first time since 2004, I think)
. The new 2 column design is also wider (960px) and offers more flexibility than the old 3 column design. There are new graphics and section headings and a new about page (with a message from me!).
The MalcolmHardie logo has been used in a reversed white on blue form, which I think worked out quite well and the main body is black/dark gray 13px Lucida Grande on a white background. (With Verdana as the second choice)
The content management has also been improved. The whole site is now a sort of wiki. Although it is somewhat static as wikis go. Each web page is now a wiki page that is rendered when necessary to deliver the page. Page expiry dates match the wiki source document expiry and all of the meta-data is cached into a database so that things like recently changed lists can be generated. The next iteration of the system may also cache the text as well.
Apache is configured to serve the wiki pages only after any existing index pages, so the whole thing can be switched to static html without recoding (if necessary).
There were several things that I really wanted to do with the re-design.
The first, obviously, was to get the web2.0 thing going. The first step in the design process was therefore to identify the gradient that I wanted to use. The blue/blue gradient seemed to be a good choice here. Although I didn’t in the end go for reflection or glass effects, several prototypes had glass effects.
The second was to serve html pages as html pages with a .html extension. Which was achieved (mostly)
The third thing was to clean up the arrangement of the site, previously there had been a mix of systems used to generate content from an interesting (but probably obsolete) attempt at a php visual class library, through ordinary php to finally plain html. The new wiki style system is consistent across the site. (I’m hoping that this will last)
Software
The site is written in php and uses a mysql database (standard, boring even!)
I used the PEAR Text_Wiki classes to handle the wiki side of things.
The wiki dialect is Text_Wiki default with extra classes to do php includes and page meta data in the same document.
Things I hope to improve
At the moment there are some limitations to the wiki syntax. This means there are more blocks of raw php and html than I want. Eventually I hope to write some more wiki plugins to reduce this
Another area that could be improved is the concept of relative pages within the site. Currently the wiki links are hierarchical with the full link required each time.
I’m very interested to know if you like the new design. Feel free to send me email or add a comment below.
HTMLValidator 1.0b1 has just been released.
It runs on PowerPC or Intel Macs with Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
The current version expires 28th February 2007.
HTMLValidator is a new desktop HTML validator that works on both web pages and files. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while now in between SQLEditor releases. The main motivation is that I often seem to use the W3C validator, but I can’t always do that with files I’m working on locally. I also tried installing the W3C validator on a local web server and although it works, it seems to require a lot of installation effort, with different dependencies. So the idea occurred to me: what if you could have a drag and drop installation. From there came a web version using drag and drop and finally the application bundle version that is being distributed from today.
The earlier application versions actually displayed the results in an html webview in a window, while the newer releases display the results in a table.
On the drawing board for future releases are more validation options, the capability to validate multiple pages and the ability to watch pages for changes and then validate. Also better printing and Applescript support (although both of these are present in the current version).
I’m really interested to know what you think of HTMLValidator so feel free to send in comments, either to me personally Angus [DOT] Hardie [AT] malcolmhardie [DOT] com or to the support [AT] malcolmhardie [DOT] com email address
“We have put our complete IP PBX on it [the iPod Shuffle]”, says Dr. Harry Behrens, Managing Director of 4S newcom. “It is so compact that even on the smallest iPod Shuffle (512 MB) enough room is left for 4 full hours of music.”
[link]
I read today that Jim Baen of Baen books fame has passed away.
I think I have more Baen SF books on my shelf than any other single publisher and to a great extent Baen Books the publisher was always strongly connected to Jim Baen the man. Baen have published some of my all time favourite books (including Bujold and Weber) and their approach to electronic publishing is by far the most rational, sensible and intelligent of any publisher.
Although I never met him online or off; I feel, somehow, that reading the books that his company published changed the way that I think, and to a certain extent who I am.
My sympathies are with his family and friends and my hope is that the spirit he brought to Baen Books will continue long into the future.
Recently I’ve been trying to set up a box to run Oracle again. There are enough SQLEditor users that Oracle support is important.
Fortunately Oracle have several downloads that can be used, there is a developer license for 10g and various chargeable options. However the option that is most interesting is Oracle Express. This is a cut down version of Oracle that has some limitations in maximum performance, but otherwise works the same as the regular version. For my purposes it’s perfect, since I’m not actually doing any data processing at all, maximum performance is irrelevant.
So the next step was to download and install a copy.
First I had to select windows or linux. Obviously a difficult choice, so I avoided it and downloaded both just in case.
Next I looked around for a suitable machine to run this database on. Oracle 10g does run on macs, but no word of Intel mac support, so my Imac is out (directly at least).
My next thought was a virtual machine on my Intel Imac ‘aslund’. Qemu runs windows really quite well and it runs linux perfectly well too. Unfortunately despite several hours playing around with settings I couldn’t get anything that would run fast enough and I couldn’t seem to get Oracle to run properly at all. I suspect that either I didn’t get one of the settings right, or there is some other problem somewhere.
Next I thought about ‘cetaganda’, which is my windows box. This meets the minimum requirements of 256MB ram, and has both windows and linux. No worries there.
Unfortunately it was debian linux and this requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux. After some thought I realized that Centos is a clone of Red Hat and so should work just as well. Which is probably would, if only my machine had enough memory. Unfortunately this machine was built to a (small) budget and has integrated graphics. The integrated graphics use memory from the main system for graphics, which reduces it from a nominal 256MB to only about 218 MB. 218MB isn’t enough for Oracle apparently and it complained.
Next step, the windows download (lucky I got them both before).
Windows XP sees the installer, unfortunately the same problem: not enough memory. (Although oddly the release notes mention this being a problem that has been fixed).
Next I may consider my iBook ‘Komarr’, however that will be annoying, because when I tried it before, it was slow.
The best plan may be to add more memory to cetaganda and run it that way.
A Review of the
Cisco-Linksys & Vodafone 3G/UMTS Wireless LAN Router
It’s a 3g router, so now you can connect a small network to the internet anywhere you can get vodafone 3g connectivity.
Total price = 150 GBP + about 50 GBP/month which allows 1GB.
It’s hideously expensive still but if you need this kind of thing you can now get it
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc968.txt
An RFC in rhyme
See also the complete collection of April 1st RFCs (at wikipedia)
An odd thing occurred today, I was trying to do trim($string) on a string in php, but I kept getting strings back that appeared to have a space at the beginning, the exact thing that trim is supposed to remove. I carefully checked and the space was definitely found when I copied the result out to TextWrangler. Finally I tried substr($string,1) and then I got the answer, the new string started nbsp; the string I was trimming had , a non-breaking space at the beginning, which trim doesn’t remove. A quick switch to str_replace and now my string doesn’t have a space at the beginning.
Today I released SQLEditor 1.1b3. I think this could very well be the last beta version before 1.1 final release.
My first minor point release application!! (x.1)
Originally I hadn’t intended to update all of the websites today, but they discovered it automatically so I uploaded the details onto the others so that everything was consistent.
However one thing really stood out today: Softpedia. The people at Softpedia not only grabbed all of the details, they also created some screen shots and gave me a nice “No Spyware, adware or viruses certified” logo. And it wasn’t just a quick screen shot either, they must have spent some time using the application as can be seen on the screenshot page.
I was amazed
Obviously I should have some screenshots of my own to distribute and they should arrive with the new manual, but still, I was really suprised by this.
And very grateful.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2005-06-10&res=l
From Penny-Arcade
I realized that I’d managed to update to Sarge (v 3.1) mostly without noticing. I should have pinned my packages to woody (3.0) but didn’t realize, which meant that I went through the update process without actually noticing. This led to a number of odd problems. In particular I hadn’t disabled a number of backports, which led to difficulties with apache, php, mysql and postgresql. This happened because the ports were set up to target woody (3.0) rather than Sarge (3.1).
However I have now properly upgraded to Sarge on marilac. Hopefully this will be a suitably satisfactory release and will provide many hours of happy uptime.
Following the suggestions in this article, I’ve been considering forum software recently to offer customers (and others) somewhere to discuss SQLEditor.
Currently I’m considering PunBB, because it seems to be simple, fast and well received by reviewers and users.
PhpBB seems a popular choice but is probably a bit more than I actually need for this project.
The Register has a new article up about the Osborne effect, a supposed problem that means that if you excessively pre-announce products then nobody buys the stuff that you’re selling right now. The article suggests that the whole idea is rubbish and that osborne was actually suffering from a totally different problem, Managment failure. Supposedly an executive found some old parts and spent a vast amount of money trying to put them into products, in the process wasting far more than the value of parts.
Yet again Management failure causes a company to fail.
[Article]
There is a story up at Wired about Spore [flash heavy site]. Although spore is a single player god type sim game it will have some kind of internet access facility along the lines of the sims, you can place your planet into an online universe. Whether your creatures can then interact with creatures created by other players is unclear but the idea does sound like lots of fun however it works.
Spore looks to be released sometime in 2006, presumably for PC. Hopefully a Mac version will come out at some point as well.