my second ipod

April 19, 2006

So, apparently there was some kind of controvery with the earlier iPods’ battery life. Apple advertised eight hours and they only lasted six, or something like that. Maybe the battery replacement plan fitted in. All I really know is that I got a class action form, filled it out, and then got a gift coupon. It was for $50 on Apple branded hardware from an Apple outlet.

angry emails and api breakage

April 17, 2006  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻

I did some overhauling to a module a few months ago. I added a new interface to it, and left the old one in with a deprecation warning. After a little while, the original author uploaded a new release that totally removed the old interface. Within a day or two I’d received comments on IRC and via email. They were all something like, “The new interface is definitely better, but I had code using the old one!”

Proxi

April 15, 2006  💾

This looks sort of neat: it lets you build automator-like actions and assign them to different kinds of triggers like keypresses or mouse gestures. I’m afraid that it will lack the ability to usefully script things I want to do, that it won’t talk to Growl, and that it will stagnate when it’s abandoned and its source is never released.

google calendar

April 14, 2006  💾

Someone I know wrote something like this in his blog, this week:

my next laptop

April 13, 2006  🍏 ⚙️

I bought my current laptop just before OSCON ‘03, and my plan was to keep it for three years. That was the deprecation schedule for laptops at IQE, as I recall, and it seemed like a reasonable number to latch on to. That time is quickly approaching, and isn’t it just my luck that the kind of hardware I’m likely to want isn’t currently on the market, exactly.

brik software - unplugged

April 7, 2006  💾

This neat little application keeps track of your power status on your Mac. If you disconnect or reconnect your power, it tells you about it with Growl. Since my laptop AC adaptor doesn’t have a little ring of light on it, sometimes I lose power without noticing. This makes sure I notice.

death to filehandles

April 5, 2006  🐫 🧑🏽‍💻 🤤

Adam has a module called Params::Util. It provides a bunch of routines that let you say something like “is this value an X value?” X might be “array” or “valid identifier” or so on. In general, I don’t put that module to a lot of use. Maybe I should, but I don’t.

itunes, applescript, and the eternal blank box

April 5, 2006  🧑🏽‍💻

Why is AppleScript so slow? Whenever I try to do a bunch of things repeated tasks with it, it feels like it takes forever. I assume it isn’t really AppleScript per se, but the underlying Apple Events layer. When I’ve used Mac::Glue, it’s been about as slow.

the perl foundation

March 29, 2006  🐫

This morning, Adam wrote his faux pitch to become TPF President. There were a decent number of replies, many of which were on the order of, “We actually don’t need to raise more money” or “people don’t actually want Perl certification.” The problem is that his “platform” outshone what I think is a real issue: TPF still seems like a black box.