Safari/Windows

There's been a lot of noise online about Safari 3.1 installing itself on Windows for people with iTunes. I actually had to try in order to get it to install on mine. But, I have to say, it totally sucks. I think I tried Safari 2 on Windows a while ago, and thought it was ok, but Firefox was better. Now they've gone way overboard trying to OS X-ify it in the way it looks. Try it out and see what I mean. They pretty much threw away all of the built-in Windows controls and rewrote them to match OS X.

This is particularly interesting because I've been running into a lot of Apple fanboys on forums talking about Java on the iPhone and saying how the Java look and feel will destroy the iPhone. I don't think any of these people have tried Java since 1996 or so, much less on a cell phone where the J2ME controls usually match up with the native UI of the phone.

FYI: Bank of America and the Post Office, you both suck!

Let me tell you a story while I wallow in my own self pity. I'm sure you all know that most major banks and the US post office are customer service disasters, so this probably won't phase you.

About a year ago, I moved into a new condo. I called up many awful customer service hotlines to update all my addresses. I got lots of junk mail. So much junk mail the post office decided my mailbox was too small for it. They decided to put a hold on my mail and start returning it to senders without asking me.

Luckily, Bank of America apparently has several customer-friendly (note sarcasm) procedures to deal with such mishaps. First of all, they of course stop delivering new statements to the address in question. Second, they also stop posting them in your online account. Third, they make no attempt to notify you of such events. Finally, to add a nice twist of WTF to it, they display an error when you try to view statements.

So, now here it is, March 11th, corporate taxes are due in less than a week, and I have no bank statements from 2007, and will not have any for "7-10 business days". I am 95% to blame for this situation, but I still hate corporate America for its assistance in this matter.

Sakai and the App Builder plugin

So, I am trying to jump into Sakai development by writing a tool that can keep a log of email conversations between instructors and students. Since I'm new to Sakai, I will probably end up starting over a few times before I figure out the best way to develop. I decided, at the advice of a coworker to start using RSF and the App Builder plugin. So far, it's pretty intimidating. I started by doing a full CRUD framework, since that is one of the options for the plugin. I think digesting RSF and the way they set up their Hibernate stuff at the same time is a bit much, so I've gone backwards to starting with their hello world app, which I'm going to try to convert into a number guessing game to give me a handle on session management, RSF, etc. It seems like there is a pretty serious lack of any tutorials that go beyond modifying the hello world to say something different. The whole video tutorial thing is pretty cool, so maybe I'll make one if I get far enough along. But for now, I can recommend starting with hello world if you don't know RSF already. I can also say that RSF looks pretty nice so far. Much simpler than JSF but some of the same good ideas.

Web 2.0 idea

Ok, so I think I just came up with a great web 2.0 idea. It would be kind of like delicious on crack. The idea is that you take a snippet of a web page, like a quote, and you "bookmark" it, then you can annotate it with comments. Like, for example, when you are reading some documentation about some computer programming nonsense and the guy that wrote it says something really nerdy, you can bookmark it along with your commentary ("NERDS!") and this picture of Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds. Then a person can see the snippet and your commentary, and clicking on it brings them to the web page which you found it on.

Leopard terminal color rotate

I used to use this trick to rotate colors between terminal windows. When I upgraded to Leopard, the windows stopped being transparent, which sucked. I have finally come up with a solution that uses a different technique. You will need to create several terminal profiles for different color schemes. The cool thing about this way of doing it is that you can use different transparency settings for different colors. You should call the new profiles "rotate X" where X is a number. Then you install this script as /Users/alwold/setcolor.sh or some such thing:

#!/bin/sh
if [ -e ~/.lastterm ]; then
LAST_PROFILE=`cat ~/.lastterm`
fi
if [ "$LAST_PROFILE" == "" ]; then
LAST_PROFILE=1
else
LAST_PROFILE=$(($LAST_PROFILE+1))
fi
if [ "$LAST_PROFILE" == "6" ]; then
LAST_PROFILE=1
fi
echo tell application \"Terminal\" to set current settings of first window to settings set \"rotate $LAST_PROFILE\" |osascript
echo $LAST_PROFILE > ~/.lastterm

Finally, you need to call that script from your .profile (or you can just put the whole script in your .profile). Also, the script assumes you have rotate 1 - rotate 5. If your number of profiles is different, change the 6 accordingly.

Obligatory iPhone post

Today, Apple announced the iPhone SDK, including an actual download.  This was sort of unexpected, since the rumors indicated it would be something unpolished.  This is cool.  But, what is perhaps even more cool is their distribution model.  They do have things on "lockdown", but the barriers to entry are lower than any other carrier model I've ever seen.  Developing with the SDK is free, registration in the program is $99, which seems to be the only cost to publish your app.  Revenue share is 70%, which is much higher than typical carriers.  Free apps are allowed, which is not available on any other carrier that I'm aware of.  This is almost enough to make it viable to use a non-hacked phone.

Now, I just need to free up some hard drive space so I can actually install the giant 4 gig SDK!