Mambo Taxi

Last night I went to see my friends Jason (aka mrwhistlebear) and Karen perform at the Registry Theatre, as Gaedelica (named from a Gaelic book of poetry, Carmina Gadelica). They are both quite talented. One of their pieces was an original arrangement of The Huron Carol, which I hope they record. Great job guys!

They were followed by a Celtic band, Rant Maggie Rant, which I knew nothing about, other than the evening theme was "Celtic" and "Christmas music". If you know me well, you might know this pairing might make me apprehensive. It did, but I'm glad I stuck around. The Registry Theatre was packed to the gills; they were turning people away when I got there (20 minutes before the show). The band was talented, very energetic, and their two lead singers were attractive, too. One sort of looked like a slightly more fey version of Sting. The other singer made me want to start wearing vests- he wore his well- black vest, black dress shirt, purple tie, gray slacks. Porkpie hat.

And home by 10:30.
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This weekend's main project was cleaning my home office floor. I rented a carpet vac, followed the instructions, and hey, the carpet is clean! ...-er, at least. I'm worried about the off-gassing- my last attempt to clean carpet in this house resulted in a severe reaction from dan, and while it didn't smell like anything yesterday, today there was something like new-car smell, so I went over it again with the vac with just water instead of soap. And there was a distressing amount of dirt picked up the second time around, as well. I suppose this is a cost of dog ownership. Yeah. I'm blaming the dog. She's the main reason we still have one room with carpet- it would make her unhappy if we took it out, because she uses it as her towel when she comes in from the rain and snow (after she's already been dried off).
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Also yesterday I made fudge for today's Christmas Desert Potluck at Quaker Meeting. I was, once again, apprehensive (it's been years since I've made fudge), but it got a number of accolades, including people coming around asking who made it, so I'm happy. Meeting was good, too.
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My desk is a disaster area. I haven't gotten back on top of the scattered papers since getting back from two weekends away, and we're reaching critical density. Ack.

At least the house is otherwise clean. Except for the furniture from my office which I moved out to clean the floor. Hm, I guess I should put that back when the floor's dry, or dan will be surprised.
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Dan comes home on Tuesday! Yay!

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I finally upgraded my laptop to Snow Leopard; the "family pack" DVD has been sitting on my desk since dan did his upgrade. It wasn't as painless as I'd hoped, because when I last swapped drives, I apparently used the wrong default partition map (Apple Partition Map instead of GUID) so Snow Leopard said I had to wipe the drive. So I babysat a reformat/recopy/upgrade (in the process discovering that my backup was not, in fact, bootable as I had thought; whoops.)

Apple did an excellent thing with this release, by the way- I was still running 10.4, and the upgrade DVD jumped me up to 10.6. They didn't have to make it this easy, and in Windows and Linux, I would be looking at either a sequential two-step upgrade, or wiping the disk and reinstalling my software and data; both probably a more fault-prone process than whatever Apple had to do to make this upgrade work in one step.

And I like Snow Leopard.

(Although, chatting with dan in iChat, we discovered the graphic for :-P looks like a big smile-and-tongue, which is just wrong. I don't know if it was that way in 10.4, but NOW IT IS WRONG.)

Ahem.

Check out the video for a new painting and sketching app for the iPhone/Touch. Very neat looking. It's got: infinite zoom (vector graphics), free rotation, a clever palette, and brushes that seem to work very much like real brushes (blending, washes, translucency.)

If I had an iPhone, I would be all over it, even though I, um, don't really draw; and not just because I know the author. Who happens to have an art studio in town AND a long history with writing software for artists. So I know the next version of Paintbook is going be even more sophisticated.

Anyhow, happy Monday!

Apparently, cron is deprecated in OSX 10.5.

K, fine. But its replacement, launchd, is a crappy replacement. It has no concept of time ranges (Or does it? Any mac folks with insight to share here?)

I want to replicate this crontab:


0,20,40 8-17 * * * /users/drallen/bin/thing.sh


So, run every 20 minutes between 8am and 5pm 5:40pm.

My preferred answer is to get my crontab entry working, but /var/log/system.log is reporting errors such as Mar 6 10:20:00 scsmac21 com.apple.launchd[1] (0x1000000.cron[64942]): Could not
setup Mach task special port 9: (os/kern) no access.

Googling finds reports of this same problem and error-message with no solutions offered.

[Edit to add: that error was actually a warning; hiding a $PATH problem that wasn't emailed to me as cron-job errors should be. :-P But it's working now, no help from the OS...]

Google also finds a pile of howtos for launchd from 2005-2006, saying "well, it's not as flexible as cron, but give it time, it's only 1.0." Apple, fix your software!

...I guess I'm stuck with dropping the "8am-5pm" part of it, and writing a launchd plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>scsmac21</string>
        <key>UserName</key>
        <string>drallen</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/usr/bin/some_program</string>
                <string>param1</string>
                <string>param2</string>
        </array>
        <key>StartInterval</key>
        <integer>300</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

There, isn't that so much easier?... :-P

Bleh.

I want my work mac to lock, with password, when I'm away from it, but I'm not too keen on typing in the password when I come back. I've gotten my home desktop to do The Right Thing. The tricky part is unlocking without password, since that's not a standard feature of OS10.4 or 10.5.

To replicate, you need: mac with bluetooth, phone with bluetooth, BluePhoneElite (shareware, $25, boatloads of features I find useful [edit to add: if you don't want the other features, this free donationware script will do the trick], and Mac Development Tools installed.

Steps:
1) Open Script Editor, start a new script, and paste in ( this script )

2) Compile the short C program here, with the provided instructions. I stashed the executable in ~/bin/notify

Now's a good time to test the applescript, perhaps with ( this code. )

3a) If you don't want BluePhoneElite's other features, follow the rest of the instructions here to install the freebie proximity script.

3b) If, like me, you wanted to download all your text-messages off your phone when the memory filled up (instead of deleting them), you'll probably want BluePhoneElite. Give it an install (the trial is free for two weeks). Do the install-related tasks, such as pairing it with your phone. Next, handle the proximity detector: go to Preferences->Triggers and select "Bluetooth phone in range". On the right-hand side, hit the plus, add an "applescript reactor" (in the Notification sub-menu). They have a docs page which shows pictures of the general process.

Click the gear on the right; provide the filename for the AppleScript you previously saved.

It's a good idea to check the "filter" box at the bottom, and Edit Filter to choose the phone you just added. I don't know what happens if someone else's phone comes into range, but you don't want just any phone unlocking it.

And that seems to be it. I've done a bit of testing, and it seems to work consistently. I am curious whether this bluetooth activity will suck my phone's battery much faster, though.

This article from Time has a hands-on description from a reporter, and makes it look that much more appealing. If you're interested in such things, and are willing to shell out the money, that is. I bet lots of people are.

"To Jobs's perfectionist eyes, phones are broken. Jobs likes things that are broken. It means he can make something that isn't and sell it to you for a premium price."

That seems about right. As an example: apparently, they've borrowed the multi-touch gestures that I first saw last autumn where pinching your fingers together on the screen zooms out and drawing your fingers apart zooms in.

I wonder whether the revisions they required Cingular to make so all their network features would work, will filter down to other cellphone companies as well. And I like that this "phone" is actually a sneaky reimplementation of the ideas behind the Newton. Apple has 200 patents for this little device. I'm looking forward to seeing a writeup of the more interesting ones.

But personally, unless I can see one hands-on and decide it's going to change my life in a real way, I can think of better things to do with $500 US.

Incidentally, lost in the news from Cupartino, is news of a real full-size Macbook Tablet, made by Axiotron. (Yeah, who?) Oh well. It's got GPS built in. (I wonder if I can get that as a PCMCIA card for my Mac Book Pro yet?)