Ying Tong Iddle I Po

It is the end of the world. I’m off to hide in a bunker.

Well a bad end to the day :(. Firstly I take Jennie’s laptop apart and put it back together in order to try and find why the sound isn’t working and end up nadgering[1] it completely. After sobbing on her shoulder for a bit I take it apart again, put it back together and praise be to $DEITY it worked! Secondly I come downstairs to find a little blob of superglue[2] on the worktop[3] rapidly setting into a lovely clear lump of dispair. A bit of scratching later and I have no superglue but a wonderfully scratched worktop. A bit more wet polishing later with some rapidly improvised equipment and I have a worktop which, although still scratched, isn’t too bad. I’ll have to wait until daylight to check however. Finally I manage to glue my thumb to my forefinger when putting the superglue away. What a sub!

Update: And now I find a screw from said laptop in between the ‘7′ and ‘8′ key on my keyboard. I am going to get a cuddle from Jennie right now…

[1] This word has no American equivalent as far as I know. No other word can sum up the total destruction, yet in an English manner[4], this implies.
[2] I believe our transatlantic cousins call this ‘Krazy Glue’ (how crazy - it is spelt with a K). I am, of course, referring to a cyanoacrylate-based adhesive.
[3] I have a feeling this has an Americanism counterpart but I’m not sure what it is.
[4] Subtle yet fatal - similar to ’silent but violent’ but completely different :).

After last weekend’s sub-ness with Volcano, we decided to rent out The Core and have a real laugh at its poorness. Words cannot describe how much we enjoyed hating this film :).

In boring news I’ve pushed another update to DM to the FTP site. Now the ‘always open on…’ combo should work and be saved to prefs. — I can’t reproduce your pager problems, try deleting your preferences to see if you accidently managed to set the pager to be non-sticky.

OK, update 1 has hit the FTP site. In this update changing window names doesn’t require you to press enter. Hot key changes are actually saved to the preferences and, thanks to Tony, I’ve changed to wording slightly in the Window Inspector.

Not much to say but this is the first sub-release which gets packaged with the new subversion scripts which add a ChangeLog to the distribution disk image automagically. This is generated direct from my subversion commit messages. I love technology :).

… it is the weekend! Plan for this weekend is to actually make the existing DM features work. Must… resist… feature… creep… :).

*cough* rip off!

I’m bored and it is a Thursday. Stolen from about 20 billion people on LiveJournal:

We all have things about our friends that make us slightly envious. Not in a bad way, but in a “Wow! I wish I had that person’s hair, eyes, money, relationship, toe nails, whatever.”

So tell me what about me makes you envy me (cheap-ass ego boost/comment whoring, I know), then post this in your LJ and see what makes me envious of you!

Oh and I craX0red out Lucida Grande to use on my Linux box at work. Mmmm fonts….

Unless you live under a rock or have a life you will have head about the great BitKeeper reverse engineering debate. Well Tridge has presented his side of the story and described his methodology. Was it some secret sniffer program waiting for unsuspecting BK users to check out code? Was is some clever disassembling of the client? No. Anyone with a Mac (or a machine with netcat) can duplicate his steps.

1. Open Terminal.app, find a BK server (e.g. thunk.org) and ask it for help:

echo help | nc -w 1 thunk.org 5000

2. See the useful looking clone command?

echo clone | nc -w 1 thunk.org 5000 >e2fsprogs.dat

Voila you have a local copy of all the BK meta data to play with. You can now reverse engineer to your heart’s content with no need for a BK client.

The recent work I’ve done reverse engineering OS X to add transition support to Tiger was, I thought, the basis for a nice little article — so I wrote one. Thanks to everyone here who tries out DM on Tiger. You are doing a great job.

Now someone just needs to submit it to Slashdot and MacSlash. I would do it myself but I’m English so could never blow my own trumpet like that :). [Now it appears that it is already on /. — I gave in]

Finally here is some more documentation (in the form of a header-file) for CGSInvokeTransition() and friends.

typedef struct {
int unknown;
int transition_type; /* See CGSPrivate.h */
int transition_direction; /* See CGSPrivate.h */
int wid; /* If zero, transition entire screen otherwise window number of window to transition */
float *colour; /* Can be NULL for black or a pointer to 3 member array of floats (R,G,B values of background colour) */
} CGSTransitionSpecifier;

OSErr CGSNewTransition(CGSConnectionRef cid, CGSTransitionSpecifier *spec, int *pTransitionHandle);
OSErr CGSInvokeTransition(CGSConnectionRef cid, transitionHandle);
OSErr CGSReleaseTransition(CGSConnectionRef cid, transitionHandle)

Update: And MacSlash has picked it up.

I’ve switched http://wsmanager.sf.net/ to point to the new Desktop Manager home page. There will be a notice about Tiger compatibility when the site update cronjob fires.

Oh, and Google Maps UK has launched. Wooo!