sunsetandlabrea

Obviously they are using a definition of ‘best’ with which I am unfamilar.

So Nokia announced the 770, a little internet tablet which runs debian. It doesn’t include a phone, but instead WiFi and bluetooth. I think this thing looks awesome, much more exciting than the LifeDrive (800 x 480 screen resolution for starters).

My Palm Tungsten C feels old now and I’ve been looking hopelessly for something to upgrade to. I’ll have to wait a while, Q3 2005, but I think I might have found just the thing.

I’ve seen Greasemonkey mentioned in a few places and yesterday found out the Mark Pilgrim is writing another dive into online book on that very subject. I’ve never fully explored it, simply because I don’t tend to use FireFox.

However on the Greasemonkey User Scripts page I saw a script to replace links on audible.com. Audible wrap every link in javascript which means that I cannot use my usual trick of scanning a page and opening interesting links in the background to read later. It’s especially annoying at Audible because that’s exactly how I’d like to choose my next book.

So I started up FireFox download Greasemonkey and the script and tried it out. It worked perfectly, very nice indeed.

I then discover that Opera 8.0, currently my main browser, has Greasemonkey capabilities baked in and will in fact work with most Greasemonkey scripts. They have a tutorial on the feature as well at http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/userjs/.

So now browsing Audible is suddenly a whole lot nicer.

I’ve put together a little Tinderbox syndication site at http://tinderbox.sunsetandlabrea.com, or grab the feed at http://tinderbox.sunsetandlabrea.com/wp-rss2.php. I was intending to do a little more work on it before announcing it but Technorati seems to have picked it up so now is as good a time as any.

It is currently subscribed to whatever I happened to have in NetNewsWire related to Tinderbox. I have probably missed some good candidates, and maybe there are some people who don’t want their feeds syndicated in this way. If you want me to add or remove something or have any other suggestions then let me know at richard@sunsetandlabrea.com.

Jolyon along with Doug Miller and Jeffrey Radcliffe have been making comments recently on Tinderbox’s direction, including support for newer features in Apple’s OS. All of them make good points, some of which I’ve pondered over myself.

Jolyon talks about Tinderbox being a “quirky” application which bears the stamp of Mark Bernstein. This is almost certainly true, however I have to say if you’re going to have that kind of influence then Mark is a sure fire choice to produce something worthwhile.

As a developer I personally like to see strongly lead application development from a single person. Even where software is developed in a team I feel it is important to have someone to apply their unique stamp. Apple is oddly enough a good example of exactly this. If you read anything about Apple you’ll know that Steve Jobs is fairly dictatorial in his approach to running Apple. I can see Jobs’ influence in almost everything Apple makes, both software and hardware. You get the feeling that things like the iPod were almost certainly the result of something Jobs would personally want to own.

The opposite of this approach is I think epitomised by Microsoft Office. This design by committee suite successfully builds an application that covers all the bases, but does so with a lack of personality and almost no discernible originality.

Jolyon also comments on the look and feel of Tinderbox. I’m strongly influenced by design and I admit that when I first tried Tinderbox I found the user interface lacking. It took perseverance to get to the point where I understood enough about it to see the depth it offered. I can well imagine this effects the bottom line of sales. It takes time to get Tinderbox and I expect most see the eye candy of OmniOutliner and fail to appreciate the finer points of the former.

I was thinking the other day about software that I would personally like to be involved in the development of. One of those was the Opera web browser. I think their mail client is a brilliant bit of clever thinking, but is unfortunately let down in implementation with a few nagging bugs and missing features. I’d like to get my hands on the code, just so I can finally use it.

Another one would have to be Tinderbox. In this case I’d really like to work over the user interface, and again this is led by my own personal desire to get something that works well for me. I also want services support, spotlight search-ability and Tinderbox dashboard widgets.

Tinderbox’s file format is xml and in fact this makes it possible to hack around quite a lot. I’ve just mentioned three things that would be entirely possible to implement without any help from Eastgate at all. The situation is not ideal because changing the XML is something you should not do whilst a file is open. Building an application that exports a service, which in turn manipulates a Tinderbox file wouldn’t be that difficult. Nor would writing a Dashboard widget. So I’m not all that concerned personally about Tinderbox lacking in those areas because if I was desperate the open file format allows me quite a degree of control.

I am currently working on a project which is taking all my spare time at the moment but when that is complete I may well look at developing some of these ideas. I especially want the ability to spotlight my Tinderbox files so that is almost certainly something I’ll add to my Tinderbox based task list.

dotquote.org is a new Forth weblog. Not much there at the moment, except an article on RetroForth. Hopefully there will be more soon.

I’ve finally made the decision to sit down and properly learn Common Lisp. I’ve bought ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham because I like his style of writing. I will probably also get a dead tree copy of Practical Common Lisp when it comes into stock somewhere in the UK.

This is actually one of the reasons that I’m using Emacs. I doubt there is a better editor for Lisp than Emacs, in fact I doubt there is a better editor.

Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwall is probably not the normal kind of book I read, although I’m not quite sure what is if I was honest. It tells the story of three brothers and their part in the building of Stonehenge. Obviously I cannot attest to the historical accuracy, but it is none the less an enjoyable story. It certainly makes you consider the enormous feat achieved in the construction of Stonehenge and the sort of lives led by the folk of that time. It’s well written and the author’s notes at the end of the book lead me to believe it was also well researched.

Hot on the heels of my Emacs post, Bare Bones released BBEdit 8.1 with Subversion support. As my versioning system of choice this is a good thing. You’ve also got to love their release notes, now that is thorough.

Over the past few months I have tended to vacillate in my choice of text editor. BBEdit, TextMate and Emacs have been the contenders. BBEdit needs macros, TextMate needs maturity and Emacs… Well Emacs has pretty much everything except perhaps style. I pretty much always use Emacs during a SSH session and have tended towards BBEdit or TextMate on my PowerBook, mainly BBEdit to be honest.

I spotted a new binary version of Emacs recently and downloaded that, and so for the last few days I’ve been using Emacs completely. It has improved a lot on the Mac since the last version I used which I compiled myself about a year or more ago.

There are two main things to notice about this screenshot, firstly it’s Tetris and I know of no other text editor which can play Tetris. The second thing is I did really, really badly.