use Perl

This is one of the coolest bluetooth apps I've seen by far for OS X. No need to buy that remote control mousey thingy for doing presentations anymore...

Whoot! Looks like my talk was accepted for OSCON. The talk is about the sort of things that made the last year a success at Fotango - how we approached the development we did, and where we went right (and wrong). Anyway, I suppose I should sit down and compose my thoughts for the talk now...

UK Citizens told to Leave Iraq. This is not really a good sign.

I just hope they don't actually close down Heathrow tomorrow - I'm flying to Portugal with Katrien for Valentine's Day, and it would be a bit of a blow if we couldn't get there. Of course, it might be an even bigger problem if we couldn't get back. We'll see, I just hope it'll be all okay.

We released the site just over a week ago now, so the obvious implication is that we don't have loads to do at this very minute. Because of that we're coming up with all sorts of interesting add-ons that are being hacked together - for example, monitoring the number of people using the site, plotting their locations on a map, counting the number of registrations etc, etc.

Its all kind of futile and pointless, but it is a great deal of fun :-)

I'm really getting sick of Mail.app in OS X - its far too slow, and it doesn't fit in with the unix toolchain very well. To remedy my situation I sat down to write an mbox parser. The general algorithm I built first in Perl, to test its validity, and ran against several different mbox files I have, just to make sure it worked and was fast enough.

I then translated the algorithm into MailReader.m. It works fine for small mailfiles (I mean really small, like 4 messages). When I ran it on a small-medium sized mbox file (1280 messages) it blew up. Completely. The process grew to 1.8gigs before I gave up and pressed stop in the build-run cycle.

No wonder Mail.app doesn't use mbox, its impossible to parse using Cocoa without grinding the system to an absolute halt.

After an argument about version numbers and a couple of small changes the site finally went live four hours after the planned release point. When you consider that this plan was put together over six months ago its not bad timing for the delivery :-)

Of course, no one can register unless they have a Canon digital camera, zoom browser, and the latest zoom browser/internet communications plug in thingymajig, which will be downloadable tomorrow.

Canon Image Gateway

The new powerbook is a lot worse for fingerprints than the iBook. It looks mucky in what is decent sunlight. We don't get much sunlight at this time of year in the UK, so when we do I think I'd prefer it if my immediate thought wasn't 'Eww, look at all the mucky fingerprints'.

Fotango have been working on a couple of projects for a long time now. Vx -- which Pierre's lightning talk at the last TPC introduced -- was built to support a whole bunch of other stuff. OpenFrame -- which was first released over a year ago now -- was built to support a bunch of other stuff. So today should see the lauch of the first site that is built on all of this stuff -- finally. The project has been long. Working with a big company as a client is hard. I'll be so glad when finally something is visible. If all goes well, I'll drop the URL here later -- I'm sure there is still a chance for a last minute panic.

Oh, and the various OS X window animations on the alpb make sense!

I made the fatal mistake of walking past Microanvika today and I couldn't resist. I am now the proud (but considerably poorer) owner of a new 12" powerbook. Very tasty hardware, and the keyboard is much better than the iBook.

I'll post a better review of what I think of it when I've used it for long enough to know. Now I've got to go and hang some curtains as my pennance.