Patrick Beard: Technical

Wed, 26 Mar 2003 03:59:15 GMT

Ah, a system for patching Win32, as implemented by Microsoft Research...

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 23:25:59 GMT

JNIDirect is released! The code is checked in to Source Forge and there is a white paper describing what it's all about. Using native methods w/o JNIDirect is like debugging with stone tools...

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 16:22:16 GMT

Wow, the IPv6 transition is really a mess. This article describes why it is being bungled. Perhaps they need that networking saviour, Stuart Cheshire to step in and come up with some clever solutions.

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 07:20:07 GMT

This item from MacCentral boggles the mind: Microsoft acquires Virtual PC from Connectix Here are a couple things Microsoft might do: 1. kill the VirtualPC product for the Mac, to lock Mac users out of future versions of this powerful PC emulation engine. 2. recompile the Windows bits as PowerPC native code, potentially hugely accelerating the performance. If they chose option 2, then who knows, maybe they'd release PowerPC code generators for their compilers, and things could get weird pretty fast.

Thu, 13 Feb 2003 19:00:34 GMT

OK, I finally get this RSS stuff. Represent news items as XML, aggregate them in a page. Voila! You have a web log. For a long time I didn't get it. What would an end user want with all that XML? Well, not much really, it's only valuable if it's displayed in a format the user can use. But one never knows what it might become useful for down the road. Makes you think... Being an editor is the most crucial thing. Sure, you get lots of RSS stuff thrown your way, but you sift the good stuff from the chaff, and decide what YOU think is interesting. One thing I'm curious about is attribution. For example, I just posted a blurb about Apple which included attribution to MacSlash. Must I do that? Are there rules about this stuff?

Thu, 13 Feb 2003 18:45:21 GMT

Just saw this on MacSlash: Apple Posts XML Schema For Keynote Very interesting. Makes Keynote all the more attractive over PowerPoint. Microsoft uses XML file formats too, but they don't document it, and have so many extensions that it isn't very useful XML. If Apple stands behind this specification, this is a really good thing (tm).

Tue, 03 Dec 2002 16:16:32 GMT

I recently posted a blurb about TuneXML in which I referred to a transcription of a tune in TuneXML format. It turns out that if you look at this with IE 5 on the Mac, you'll get a parse error. It parses and displays just fine in Chimera 0.6. The problems seems to stem from the inclusion of a Byte-Order-Mark (BOM) character at the beginning of the XML file, which is what you're supposed to include so that a UNICODE file is perfectly portable. This character seems to mess up IE 5.2.2.

Sun, 01 Dec 2002 18:44:45 GMT

I've been thinking a lot about representing music in XML. There is a good survey of this topic here. MusicXML seems to be fairly dominant, and is getting commercial support behind it. Although, it isn't terribly easy to read and is quite verbose, it looks like a good interchange format, which is certainly a good use of XML. Still, it is overkill for how I want to use XML to represent music. My application is representing Jazz tunes, which consist of chords, melody, and sometimes lyrics. I would like to develop a library of arrangements of Jazz tunes in XML format. Here's an example of the tune All The Things You Are encoded in what I'll call "TuneXML" format.

Sun, 25 Aug 2002 04:38:16 GMT

Started playing around with Application Enhancer the first real system for patching Mac OS X. These folks have done a bang-up job on this incredibly useful tool. Now, what kinds of risks are there associated with running software on one's system? Clearly some rather invasive programs could be written with it.

Sun, 14 Apr 2002 04:20:18 GMT

Very interesting article on defeating spambots. Lots of useful background information about web spiders, firewalls, and using interesting Apache Perl modules. I keep seeing references to MySQL, so I checked to see if it is available from fink, and happily it is!

Sat, 13 Apr 2002 23:14:16 GMT

Enabled feedback comments, by going to http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/prefs?page=3.4, which is the template for each news item. However, the last two posts that I added on 12-April-2002 mysteriously disappeared.

Tue, 09 Apr 2002 20:40:47 GMT

I'm working on a way to extract plaintext from HTML documents. My first approach will be a DFA state machine scanner that simply extracts the non-markup tokens. This will work for most documents, except when there are script tags, which will provide the bulk of the noise I expect. To remove these, I may have to resort to a full blown HTML parser.

Thu, 21 Mar 2002 07:27:57 GMT

Off to Redmond for an ECMA meeting. ECMA is the standards body in which my company (Netscape) and other companies collaborate on the future direction of JavaScript (ECMAScript).

Sat, 16 Mar 2002 00:07:18 GMT

Getting CFM browser plugins working in the mach-o version of Mozilla. To make this work, all function pointers for calling between the browser and plugin need to be wrapped with glue that translates between the calling conventions. I learned that plugins really expect to be running in a bonafied Mac OS toolbox WindowRef, when trying to run a plugin in a Cocoa NSQuickDrawView. The QuickTime plugin doesn't properly redraw itself when it is running in a grafport.

Wed, 27 Feb 2002 14:42:58 GMT

I think it would be more useful to have a counter that is implemented as a JavaScript variable. My idea would be to have something like this:

<SCRIPT SRC="http://countersRus.com/counter.cgi?id=foo">

And the result would be a JavaScript declaration that looks like this:

var counter_foo = 1;

Then, I am free to use the counter in the page in whatever way I choose. Has anybody else done it this way? I found a free counter at www.HostedScripts.com that is also script based, but it simply uses document.write(counterValue) each time you load it, which is much less useful.

Wed, 27 Feb 2002 05:17:47 GMT

Google is such an incredibly useful tool. I use it every day. This evening, I wondered if there were any free web page counter services out there, and yes there are. I created a new counter at www.digits.com. Their counter service is pretty simple, and I've only observed one glitch. I set the counter's initial value to 100, but for some reason, it reset itself back down to 7, and has been counting up from there since.

Wed, 27 Feb 2002 05:04:25 GMT

I'm using Radio to publish a web site on an iTools home page. The rub to doing this with Radio is that there's no direct ftp access to an iDisk, so I simply mount the iDisk using WebDav, which is built into Mac OS X, and then connect to 127.0.0.1 to upstream the files. Since Radio now supports fileSystem upstreaming, this can probably be made simpler, and faster using that, but as yet, I haven't quite figured out how to use it.

Wed, 20 Feb 2002 16:09:33 GMT

What if I want to archive my web sites in a CVS repository? If I want to have more than one person work on a web site, this seems crucial. Radio needs to be taught that if there is a CVS directory in my www folder, then it shouldn't be upstreamed. Or, here's a novel idea, perhaps a CVS upstream mechanism should be provided, which adds new files, and commits changed files.

Thu, 14 Feb 2002 16:34:23 GMT

I figured out how to do styled text editing in Java with a swing JEditorPane. It's not terribly complicated, but it isn't necessarily how I would have imagined styled text support would be designed. The weirdest part is that you represent text style information using the interface AttributeSet. I had to dig through the javax.swing.text package to find out how to create an AttributeSet that has the right attribute values, and which concrete classes to use. These turned out to be SimpleAttributeSet (which implements MutableAttributeSet) and StyleConstants, which is a helper class that has static methods like setFontFamily() that map style information into attributes. Finally, I used the StyledDocument interface to insert text with style information by calling its insertString() method.

Sat, 09 Feb 2002 15:42:09 GMT

I ran into one more snag when changing my category based web site's #upstream.xml file. I changed both the path and url elements, but Radio only noticed to the change to the path, and all of the site links still pointed at the old url-based location. See my posting on the discussion list for more details.

Sat, 09 Feb 2002 15:35:36 GMT

Well, the new Led Airegin web site is now live, thanks to the power of the Radio content management system (CMS).

Sat, 09 Feb 2002 00:55:41 GMT

OK, using Radio to construct an independent web site is starting to gel in my brain. I've been using it to revamp my band's web site, same content, new look. The one snag I ran into was dealing with the <%siteName%> and <%description%> macros in #template.txt. I posted this problem on the radio discussion board. Edward Shea posted the same problem. Pat Matheny on the radio right now, theme to "Falcon and the Snowman." I've always dug that song.

Mon, 04 Feb 2002 19:20:34 GMT

Messing with themes and the SoundWaves theme is pretty cool... Helpful hint, to rerender all pages in your radio site when you change your theme, choose Radio -> Publish -> Entire Website.

Fri, 01 Feb 2002 20:00:29 GMT

Occassionally, I will accidentally repost an older item... I don't know how exactly I keep doing it. But it was when this happened that I accidentally clobbered the "weblogData.root" before. So I may be triggering the same bug that caused this other problem.

Thu, 31 Jan 2002 19:56:43 GMT

Wow, somehow I messed up my "weblogData.root" file this morning, when editing an older item. Somehow I ended up with a new item that was a duplicate of the old item, which I subsequently deleted. After that, Radio generated an error: [Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "00000012".] I promptly reported the problem, and thanks to the kind support folks at Userland (you know who you are!) I was back up and running in under an hour. Now that's great customer service!