Angus Thinks...

Virtualized Mac OS X servers

Angus Hardie — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:39:54 +0000

Media Temple are running a beta programme for virtualized Mac OS X server hosting (Using Parallels Server)

This sounds really interesting, it would be nice to be able to rent a Mac OS X box and run services on it.

It might even be useful for things like running a build system or even as a testing server.

The question is how much will it cost. That isn’t entirely clear yet, apparently because they’re not entirely sure how much each instance will need in the way of resources.

How it compares to SliceHost and Bytemark will remain to be seen.

(It must surely be more expensive, but how much more?)

SQLEditor 1.4b26

Angus Hardie — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 05:07:10 +0000

SQLEditor 1.4b26 is now available for download.

It fixes only one problem which is related to auto increment and SQLite.

This should hopefully be the final beta version for 1.4

The next version should be the 1.4 final release which will probably happen later this week or early next week (assuming no more problems are reported)

SQLEditor 1.4b26 Download [3.6MB DMG]

SQLEditor 1.5

Angus Hardie — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:05:12 +0000

SQLEditor 1.5 is making good progress. The latest thing that I’m currently working on is to extract SQL Views from a database. In theory this should be just like extracting tables, but it’s looking much harder to work out than I ever expected.

The new SQL parser is mostly finished. It’s been completely rewritten using ANTLR3. This offers a number of really good improvements, the most important one being that it’s not running in Java anymore. The parser is now completely native code.

Also pretty much finished is the new document model code, the new document export code and the new JDBC handling code. I’m hopeful that it will now be possible to run JDBC drivers that use AWT (which I’m informed the IBM DB2 driver may do).

SQLEditor 1.4 is just about finished too. There is one change that needs to get beta tested and then the 1.4 final release should be available.

Watch out for a new 1.5 download soon and of course the final candidate for 1.4

Water found on Mars

Angus Hardie — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:32:17 +0000

They spotted water on Mars!

Colonising now seems a step closer …

MarsPhoenix Twitter

(via Boing Boing)

Reggy for regular expression testing

Angus Hardie — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 21:32:58 +0000

Handy new tool I came across today which allows you to test regular expressions and see what they select.

Reggy

280 Slides

Angus Hardie — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 03:51:33 +0000

A cool new online presentation tool:

http://280slides.com/Editor/

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!

Film Release Schedule

Angus Hardie — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:40:05 +0000

Because I can never remember where this list is kept:

UK Film Distributors’ Association Film Release Schedule

Scripts in XCode

Angus Hardie — Tue, 27 May 2008 19:31:17 +0000

The build system for SQLEditor has lots of steps, from building each of the component frameworks, compiling the application, assembling the bundle, creating a disk image and then uploading everything to the server. (Plus things like version histories and read me files).To reduce errors I have several aggregate targets and a collection of scripts, but I was puzzled how to produce those little note entries that OCUnit generates when it’s running unit tests. There were several notes I wanted to make but I couldn’t figure it out.

However it occurred to me one day to inspect the souce of RunTargetTests and the answer was of course right there in the source.

:: note:

gives you a note.

::

gives you a warning.

where

is the name of the file you want the message to appear from

is the line number in that file

is the message you want to display

In the note form the word ‘note’ is a constant. Don’t replace it with anything.

As an alternative you put in use an empty filename and 0 for the line if you’re not interested in these details.

Example

@echo ":0: note: disk image creation complete"

Will display the message “disk image creation complete” as a note in the build window.

The inspiration for star wars?

Angus Hardie — Sat, 10 May 2008 20:10:52 +0000

George Lucas in Love

A parody on the origins of the star wars story…

Engineers without borders

Angus Hardie — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 01:56:46 +0000

Wired has an interesting article about Engineers without borders, a group that is trying to develop cheap technology solutions for developing parts of the world. The latest idea is a low cost wind turbine to generate electricity for lighting.
Best of all the design is intended to be produced by local manufacturers in the destination country, so it encourages local industry too.

Wired: Engineers Without Borders Bring Tech to Villages Without Power