0xDECAFBAD - Tag: osx

Wine is Nicely Enabled

2007-10-18T02:29:44+00:00

Wine is Getting Good: "Anyone else notice lately how good Wine is getting?"

I haven't checked Wine out in awhile, but I'm a big fan. I was using it to run Radio UserLand under Linux, about 5 years ago. (Wow, has it been that long?) I've kind of assumed that Wine would get Good Enough at some point to run almost everything that matters that was written for Win95, Win98, Win2K, and eventually even WinXP. And, games aside, pretty much everything that matters and that anyone bothers with runs on this range of Windows versions. And, seeing as Windows Vista hasn't exactly set the world afire, I'm betting that Wine might actually have a chance to catch up well enough to be trouble.

Oh yeah, and CrossOver Mac is based on Wine. And CrossOver Mac supports Team Fortress 2 right now, without purchase of a Windows license. Think about that. So, maybe we shouldn't put games aside. Really, unless Microsoft can somehow patent the crucial APIs exposed by Windows - if they haven't already - resistance is futile. There are nerds motiviated and annoyed enough to reverse engineer and assimilate. I'm not a lawyer, though: I suppose by the point Wine actually becomes a threat of any sort, nasty things can be sprung.

Archived Comments

Bill Humphries
2007-10-18T06:45:51

I haven't tried Team Fortress 2 with it yet. Not having luck getting Portal to run. Clues gratefully accepted.
Julian Bond
2007-10-18T07:02:51

I've only tried two programs with Wine. Winamp and Skype. Both are so close and yet so far but ultimately were unusable.

I'd really like to see Apple dump some money into the Wine community. Surely it would be in their interest for it to improve more quickly?
l.m.orchard
2007-10-18T14:39:17

Of course, I spout off about Wine and CrossOver Mac - and I haven't tried Wine in a few years and I don't own either CrossOver Mac or Team Fortress 2. I should actually try them out. :)
Martin Atkins
2007-10-18T17:20:12

I've played through the whole of Portal under Wine with no hiccups whatsoever.

I just installed the Ubuntu package that is available from the Wine website. The only tinkering I did was to reconfigure it to use alsa instead of oss to make the sound work.

What did not work, however, is the purchasing interface in Steam. I regrettably had to return to Windows-land for a short period to actually buy Portal. It downloaded into Steam under Wine just fine afterwards, though.

The fact that it "just worked" for me leaves me puzzled about what exactly you're doing wrong, Bill. Are you using an old version of Wine, perhaps? What is it doing when you try to run it?

(It might be relevant that I'm launching Portal from inside Steam rather than from its own "shortcut".)
Guillaume Theoret
2007-11-13T04:32:40

They really have done an amazing job. Most of what I use personally works just fine. I did run into a sticking point however trying to use windows media encoder. It just didn't work at all.

Vienna is now my weapon of choice for feeds

2007-01-02T21:37:48+00:00

In the last few days, I've switched news aggregators again - this time to Vienna.

I've got a long, long, long history of doing this - partially because of my serial enthusiasm, and partially because none of the aggregators I've used so far have satisfied all of my itches. Some tie up my laptop in terms of memory and CPU, some aren't fast enough UI-wise to help me really blaze through skimming, and some aren't flexible enough for me to tweak to my particular liking.

At this point, though, Vienna comes really close to what I've been wanting for years. It's open source (check it out!); uses WebKit to offer a theme-able feed item display (hello Colloquy!); and uses SQLite 3 for persistence (with schema documentation!). Out of the box, it's a pretty nice app, but it was even nicer when I started poking under the hood. I've even submitted my first small patch, which got accepted into the codebase.

When last I tried Vienna, it was on my poor old PowerBook G4 12" 867Mhz and it was a somewhat rough and bad tasting experience. At the time, NetNewsWire was my tool of choice, and Vienna was lacking some features - like, say, a user-sortable list of subscription folders and feeds. It also thrashed a lot and generally made me Force Quit it and move on. But now, on my new-ish MacBook Pro, the performance is stellar with my set of 500+ feeds and my few showstopper missing features are no longer missing.

Now, it seems like NetNewsWire is the app that thrashes for me and gets a Force Quit. I need to try NNW a bit more and figure out if it's just my initial import of subscriptions that drags things down - but Vienna's got me now. It's catching up mightily fast with the feature list of NNW. And, nothing beats open source software for tossing in a few tweaks to things that are just not quite doing what I'd like.

Again, since I'm a serial enthusiast, I have no idea if I'll be a regular contributor of patches to Vienna or even offer any commitment to the project - but I'm definitely happy with it at the moment.

Archived Comments

Craig
2007-01-02T22:20:49

Not sure if you care much for web-based aggregators, but ReBlog is my current favorite. I prefer the web-based aggregators because it allows me to have the same feed list between home and work... er, I mean my other home. http://www.reblog.org/ Hope this helps!
jose
2007-01-03T01:36:43

hi les

i had used vienna before, it has more features than NNW that i like (IIRC it had flagging etc), but it had just lousy performance. it consumed gobs of memory and CPU and invariably fell apart under my feed load (over 100 feeds).

i've tried probably a half dozen RSS readers on the Mac and they all stink. i miss RSS Bandit for Windows, which had all of the features i like but sadly runs on windows (which i don't use routinely). :-/

hope all is well.
l.m.orchard
2007-01-03T03:54:01

@Craig: I have tried using BlogLines and then Gregarius... ReBlog i've used before, too, but actually as a sort of newsdesk for a team at work - they skimmed through news stories and flagged items for republishing, which our CMS then plucked out of the outgoing ReBlog RSS feed. Nice aggregator. But, for me, nothing beats a desktop aggregator for swift skimming speed. For what it's worth, the Vienna team is working on BlogLines integration.

@jose: Not sure when you tried Vienna last - it seems to have improved markedly, though that might just be my mileage with the MacBook Pro now.
Michal Migurski
2007-01-03T08:17:14

I almost feel bad for wanting to switch. =)

Vienna is really good.
brian cors
2007-01-03T16:45:29

I checked out Vienna today a bit, and it's mucho nice.

However, the one thing that I use the most on NNW is the ability to sync to NewsGator. I use that on my cell to read feeds when I am out and about, and not at the desk. And that setup is particularly nice because it syncs history between NewsGator and NNW, so I dont end up reading things again that I have already read.

I'll definitely look at this as a freeware feed aggregator to use at work though, on our workstations. I need to get a decent, easy to use one for people here to learn about RSS. This might be the ticket. Thanks for pointing it out!
Adam Lipkin
2007-01-03T23:35:34

I've been a complete Google Reader addict for the last two months (although I also suffer from Serial Enthusiasm). It seems to toe the line nicely between web-based reader and true app, and combined with Firefox 2.0's nice handling of tabs and links (closing an article I head to from Google Read will pop me back to the Reader tab), it's integrated pretty seamlessly into my browsing.
jank
2007-01-08T21:57:02

I'm checking out Vienna, too, but, like Brian, having the ability to sync with a non-mac client (preferably a web-based one) is the biggest thing that NNW has going for it.
l.m.orchard
2007-01-08T22:42:53

Ironically, I've never spent much time with an aggregator that syncs with any other client - web-based or not. So, that's a feature of NNW I've never really appreciated or had much use for. I tend to have a laptop with me at all times, so my aggregator tends to go with me.
Peter Miller
2007-01-11T08:24:55

Thanks for opening my eyes to Vienna. I was using Bloglines for the longest time and never knew what I was missing!

stickis and subethaedit icon

2006-11-28T23:45:43+00:00

Update to the Update: The whole issue is corrected now!

Update: In the comments on this entry, I got a quick response from TheCodingMonkeys and a quick response from Stickis. I didn't expect either response, and was happy to see both. Nothing nefarious to see here, move along. :)

Checking out Stickis from a TechCrunch story, and just curious:

Is the SubEthaEdit application icon public domain clip-art, or did the Stickis crew abscond with and recolor it?

Stickis:	SubEthaEdit:

I mean, it's a pretty compelling, attractive, and clever icon for an OS X app that scales up and down pretty well. I've only ever seen it used for SEE.

(~~Oh, and for posterity: Since I've linked directly to each sites' images, the table above may look silly if either site changes.~~ ...and the image on Stickis has indeed been changed, so the above table looks silly now!)

Archived Comments

map
2006-11-29T09:06:49

Hi!

This is Martin from TheCodingMonkeys.

The SubEthaEdit icon is NOT public domain and we are already talking with activeweave about their unauthorized use of our artwork.

(About the recoloring: SubEthaEdit 1.x (still available on our website) used the blue icon, that's where it's from.)
Marc A. Meyer
2006-11-29T15:12:15

Hi. Marc Meyer, CEO of Activeweave, maker of Stickis, here. We're talking with codemonkeys, and resolving this immediately.

We got the icon in its current state from a source we believed to be public. We didn't change it (or we would have made it green like most of our site), and had no idea it belonged to subethaedit.

Unfortunately, searching the web for "copyrighted works from which this image might be derivative" isn't very efficient, at least until you get several thousand people looking at your site and some remember something they've seen before :-( Personally, the blue version reminds me of the grateful dead bears, which would have gotten us even more press.

Thanks for your understand as we suffer some minor growing pains.
Marc A. Meyer
2006-12-02T02:26:40

All gone now. See my blogpost. Thanks Martin and thanks Les. Marc
l.m.orchard
2006-12-02T03:53:47

Thanks for humoring me. The new icon looks pretty keen!

Safari RSS database columns not so mysterious now

2005-12-13T21:08:06+00:00

The column names were inspired by the freebie game Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot published by Atomic Sock Monkey. It’s fun! Try it!

The fact that there are weird column names was inspired by sqlite’s (then-)inability to add columns to existing tables. So the last time I had to break the schema to add a new column, I added four more as a reserve.

Needless to say, the contents, schema and very existence of that database are subject to change without notice, etc. etc.

Source: A comment by Jens Alfke

Remember when I wrote about the SQLite DB backing Safari RSS? I found a veritable zoo of natural enemies lurking in there. Jens Alfke was nice enough to leave the above comment today, and I thought it was worth calling out. I love hearing about this sort of trivia behind the code! :)

More on ignorant feed handling

2005-12-13T13:50:13+00:00

Part of the reason this whole must ignore thing with respect to feeds has me a bit fired up is because it seems like so few feed processing tools out there embrace this idea. And because of that, these tools are unfortunately brittle and prone to future shock.

For example, take Syndication.framework on OS X: Amongst the monkeys and ninjas and pirates and robots, you've got your standard title-date-link-description columns with a few other bits for good measure. But, where's the data from iTunes RSS extensions? Nowhere, gone, lost. If it was in the feed when Syndication.framework found it, it wasn't understood and so it wasn't retained after the parser finished chewing up and spitting the data into that DB table.

I've written about shared feed processing foundations before, but I don't think I've totally gotten the idea to gel in my head until now. Here's the thing: If you want feed processing tools that are useful for the general case, they have to be tolerant of things not understood. Rather than intrusively breaking apart and recasting feed data into a predetermined data structure, you've got to remain hands-off as much as possible.

This is what I did in FeedSpool. This code can subscribe to feeds, poll feed data periodically, and even work out which items in a feed are new—but it punts on everything else by only caring about where a feed starts and ends, and where its individual entries start and end. The rest is left in its original XML form. So, if there was data in there for iTunes? It's still there, because FeedSpool didn't know enough to do anything to it.

This is the major difference in feed processing model. Syndication.framework loses information when it encounters things it doesn't understand. FeedSpool retains the information, because it leaves things alone when it doesn't know any better.

Now, this is not to pick on just Syndication.framework. Despite the general-sounding name, this framework is pretty much just around to power Safari RSS and not iTunes or anything else. And as I said, pretty much every other feed processing framework and tool works in this manner. Just about everybody uses a destructive process when they parse and marshal feed data into local-idiom structures.

And this destructive process is fine when all you want to do is satisfy a specific purpose—display a few headlines, for example. But if you're trying to build general-case feed plumbing, this is unacceptable and untenable. If most everything in a feed item gets lost as it goes through a pipeline, we might as well abandon feed extensions entirely in favor of microformats stuffed into the description tag—an idea to which I'm not entirely opposed.

On the other hand, consider this: This past summer, Microsoft released an architectural overview about an OS-wide RSS framework in the upcoming Vista. Unfortunately, like many RSS and Vista related things from this past summer, all links have evaporated into a redirect to a single developers portal. I can't figure out why they didn't just redirect over to here, which took me a search and a few clicks to rediscover.

At any rate, there's one sentence in this overview that gives me hope for RSS as a general service in Windows Vista:

"It is also possible to access the item XML for applications that want to perform operations on the XML instead of using the item's properties."

So, dig that. If it works the way I hope it does, RSS in Vista will take care of the subscriptions for you, poll the feed data, grab new stuff—but then it leaves the data intact for you to process whatever new and unanticipated feed payloads that may arrive.

That's how it should work.

Archived Comments

Darren Chamberlain
2005-12-13T15:03:07

If you want feed processing tools that are useful for the general case, they have to be tolerant of things not understood. Rather than intrusively breaking apart and recasting feed data into a predetermined data structure, you’ve got to remain hands-off as much as possible.

It sounds to me like you're arguing for a triplestore and SPARQL. You'd stash everything in the triple store, and then your front end app just needs to be able to construct the appropriate query and process the results. More general and extensible than creating custom classes for filtering by specific fields, and I think if you were to ever write a general filter app where users can specify filter fields and values, you'd basically be reimplementing SPARQL.
l.m.orchard
2005-12-13T15:51:47

Well, a triplestore would be great if these feeds were RDF. But alas, with the exception of RSS 1.0, they're XML. I could play with trying to make transformations from XML to RDF, but that's getting back to a dangerously unlazy level of intelligence required to map unanticipated future feed extensions to RDF equivalents.
l.m.orchard
2005-12-13T15:52:52

(Although, it'd be really cool if syndication feeds were all RDF and not just XML. Triples would be a lot nicer to sling around than SAX parsing events.)
Darren Chamberlain
2005-12-13T20:09:47

Well, a triplestore would be great if these feeds were RDF. But alas, with the exception of RSS 1.0, they’re XML. I could play with trying to make transformations from XML to RDF, but that’s getting back to a dangerously unlazy level of intelligence required to map unanticipated future feed extensions to RDF equivalents.

Isn't there already a clean mapping between Atom and RDF? There's a list of integration ideas here.

On a side note, while Googling for Atom/RDF notes, I came across blogseive, which claims to be:

...a free web-based tool that creates new feeds by filtering, merging and sorting existing feeds. The BlogSieve engine accepts virtually every (valid) feed format, processed results are then exported into any feed format you choose.

I haven't tried it, but it claims to allow filtering.
l.m.orchard
2005-12-13T21:26:27
Isn’t there already a clean mapping between Atom and RDF?

Maybe, though I don't think it's official. And even it if is, it leaves out RSS. But even if it worked for RSS too, what about all the feed extensions that might be? I think RSS 1.0 had the right idea for extension modules in the RDF universe, but the world seems to be settling for XML.

I haven’t tried [Blogsieve], but it claims to allow filtering.

It does filter, but it does so destructively. (And that's not to mention the 7-8 step form I had to go through to start filtering. Definitely not a URL-line application.) But, with respect to their filtering and conversion, check out these feeds:
- http://del.icio.us/rss/deusx
- http://feeds.blogsieve.com/192/RSS0.91
- http://feeds.blogsieve.com/192/RSS1.0
- http://feeds.blogsieve.com/192/RSS2.0
- http://feeds.blogsieve.com/192/ATOM0.3
If you compare these to each other, you'll find information loss and even just plain corruption. The dc:subject elements encoding del.icio.us tags are gone, even in the RSS-1.0-to-RSS-1.0 transformation. And somehow, in the Atom version, they managed to jumble up titles and authors. Granted, my stuff doesn't do conversion yet, but I wouldn't want to do it like this.

I haven't tried it yet, but I'd have to guess that a podcast feed with iTunes and/or Yahoo! Media elements would get mangled in a very nasty way.
Sean Conner
2005-12-13T22:34:35

Wow, is it really 1985 again? I could have sworn all this was hashed out back then (only then it was a binary format, not a text-based format).

Sigh.
l.m.orchard
2005-12-13T22:43:22

Sean: Ooh, nice link! It's been awhile since I read about IFF, and I don't think I ever quite understood the concept.

But, this part certainly caught my eye:

Our task is similarly to store high level information and preserve as much content as practical while moving it between programs. But we need to span a larger universe of data types and cannot expect to centrally define them all. Fortunately, we don't need to make programs preserve information that they don't understand.

(Also, I miss my Amiga.)
Darren Chamberlain
2005-12-15T13:14:33

Maybe, though I don’t think [a clean mapping between Atom and RDF] 's official. And even it if is, it leaves out RSS. But even if it worked for RSS too, what about all the feed extensions that might be?

You could store the fully qualified entries, with the appropriate namespaces, and then define equivalencie using owl:equivalentClass. Then (I believe) a SPARQL query that extracted the rss:entry resources would also pick up the entries from Atom and the various RSS flavours. Although at that point you'd need a OWL-capable triplestore and library.

SpotMeta fixes Spotlight for OS X Tiger

2005-11-02T00:32:48+00:00

I just realized that I've been remiss and have yet to mention Ben Summers' SpotMeta.

Remember when I was grousing about the disconnect between Spotlight and HFS Extended Attributes? SpotMeta fixes this disconnect.

SpotMeta allows you to set pretty much any arbitrary name/value pairs on any file, to be indexed and searchable by Spotlight. Furthermore, it provides GUI tools and Finder integration to make it all usable in practical day-to-day work.

I haven't had time to spend playing with it much or to figure out exactly how it works, but I think the possibilities are just beginning for this fine hack. Will it realize the promise I saw in BeFS for a filesystem/database hybrid?

Colloquy via Browser

2005-10-23T19:02:36+00:00

Am I the only one who's a little scared by the fact that Colloquy's getting ~~a built-in web server~~ web server plugin? I suppose it only completes the circle, since it uses a web browser for displaying chat messages.