Happy New Year!

Hope everyone have a happy new year!

It's been a long and tough 2008 so I'm looking forward to 2009. However, in the first few hours of the new year, I'm doing the same thing I was doing in 2008...

There's still a need for professional journalists.

I like reading, watching and listening to the news. In addition, I also like to read some people's blogs. There's been a lot of talk about how the newspaper industry is failing as readership is dropping. While this is an unfortunate reality that I hope the industry can reverse, what really annoys me is when people say how on-line blogs are replacing newspapers in providing news.

Blogs are mainly editorials and not subject to the objectivity of journalism. Even a lot of web sites are editorial forums and not news providers, but tries to project themselves as if they are. Two recent examples highlighted this for me: OSNews and Ars Technica. People might mistaken them as providers of news, but honestly they are subjective editorials on news.

OSNews pretty much had to openly admit it (or remind their readers) as such in their post which basically said that the only way they can get people to submit articles is by removing objectivity. If an actual news establishment did such a thing then it spells the end of journalism.

Ars also clearly indicated that they are mainly the provider of commentary on news in their article which so clearly shows the author's opinion in his choice of wording that I hope people realizes that we can't depend on just any person or business who can put up a site for news.

And this is just my personal opinion.

Syncing Lightning with Google Calendar

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99358#sunbird

Thunderbird Lightning 64bit

Looking in the contrib directory on mozilla will often show pre-built binaries for different OSs that isn't listed on the web site.

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/0.9/contrib/linux-x86_64/

Syncing Lightning with Yahoo calendar

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/calendar/yahoocalendar/sync/sync-05.html

OSX still less mature then BSD, Linux, Windows

There's something to be said about Windows being the most used OS on the planet even if it is not the best OS out there. While Unix and it's variants (BSD, Linux, etc.) are the most developer friendly OS, the sheer number of users for Windows mean that there are a lot of developer that write applications for it. This include programmer's editors which is a class of software that I've always been interested in.

When I started to use OSX, one of the first things I looked for is a good editor. On Windows, the sheer number of choices (and there are many good ones) can be overwhelming. The competition on the Windows world is fierce which has helped to weed out the weak. What I found on OSX was that the most mature editors were the result of Apple using the BSD kernel and thus able run Unix editors such as EMACS or VIM and when it came to advanced IDEs, they were ports from other platforms such as Eclipse.

There are some native-OSX editors such as TextMate (commercial), Smultron (open source) and BBEdit/TextWranger (commercial), but while its users tout how advance they are, they are still behind what is available to Windows programmers. Features such as pretty printing, snipplets, split-screen views of files, etc. are either non-existence or just starting to get introduced to the Mac world even though they've been there since the days of DOS. It can be argued that those feature aren't needed and I'll admit that a lot of features I only use once-in-a-while. However, the decades of work that has been put into them has allowed them to be part of editors without being intrusive and when I need them they are there.

As a Windows/DOS and Linux user, I've been spoiled by these features and it surprises me that Mac developers not only do not have these, but that they don't even know they exist.

For those interested:

DOS

#1 Brief

Windows

Editors:

#1 Visual Slickedit (commercial)
#2 UltraEdit (commercial)
Notepad++ (free -- I'd rank it #1 free editor)

IDE:

#1 Visual Slickedit (as a general purpose IDE)
#2 Microsoft Visual Studio (Linking to the free "Express" edition)
#3 Eclipse

Unix

Emacs
VIM
Eclipse (IDE)

OSX

I'm not sure yet... I'm going to give Smultron a try and I've been using TextMate on-and-off at work.

Eclipse IDE

Disable Font Smoothing in Firefox on OSX

On OSX, I disabled font-smoothing and switched to using the Tahoma font using TinkerTool because they look clearer to my eyes. In order for Firefox to follow the system setting, you have to set gfx.color_management.enabled to 'true' in about:config.

I think this setting is for Firefox's advance color management feature which means it will effect Firefox's performance a little bit when enabled.

Desktop calendars

Previously, I talked how I put a calendar on my OSX desktop using GeekTool and the standard UNIX cal program. When my wife saw it, she wanted the same thing on her WinXP desktop and since I'm now starting to use Linux as a desktop I thought I'd do the same thing for it also.

OSX:

Using, GeekTools, I simply had it make 2 shell command calls. The first one is to 'cal' which will return the current calendar month. Next, I had it call another shell command to a script I wrote that says:


#!/bin/sh

nextmonth=`date '+%m'`
year=`date '+%Y'`
nextmonth=`echo $nextmonth|sed 's/^0*//'`
if [ $nextmonth -eq 12 ]; then
nextmonth=0
year=$((year + 1))
fi
cal $((nextmonth += 1)) $year


2741

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WinXP:

To do the same thing on WinXP, you need Samurize and Cygwin. Samurize provides the ability to display output on the desktop like GeekTools and Cygwin will provide the cal program. When installing Cygwin, however, make sure to select the package linux-util because it is not installed by default.

A slight modification to the script is needed in order to run a shell script from outside of Cygwin (such as from the command prompt or "run" from the start menu):


#!/bin/sh
PATH=/cygdrive/c/cygwin/bin
nextmonth=`date '+%m'`
year=`date '+%Y'`
nextmonth=`echo $nextmonth|sed 's/^0*//'`
if [ $nextmonth -eq 12 ]; then
nextmonth=0
year=$((year + 1))
fi
cal $((nextmonth += 1)) $year


4931

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Linux:

On Linux, the program to use is Conky. Create the following .conkyrc file in your home directory:


# .conkyrc

text_buffer_size 512

update_interval 1.0

double_buffer yes
own_window yes
own_window_hints undecorated, sticky, below, skip_pager, skip_taskbar
own_window_transparent yes

use_xft yes
xftfont Bitstream Vera Sans:size=8

maximum_width 512
default_color white
alignment top_left
gap_x 10

uppercase no

TEXT
${font monospace:size=8}${execi 8600 cal}
${font monospace:size=8}${execi 8600 nextmonth.sh}


4929

update VMWare kernel modules

Reminder to myself that when installing a new kernel version to run:

sudo /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

so that the kernel modules are recompiled for the new version of the kernel.

Also noticed today that linva and 2 other repositories got merged into what is now called rpmfusion.org.

Shortcut key to lock screen on MBP/OSX

In Windows, the ctrl-alt-delete key combo will lock the screen. I was surprised that OSX didn't have any key combination to do something similar. I guess Apple expected that people will only want to use a mouse...? Anyway, I find myself wanting to be able to quickly lock my screen when I move away so this is how I did it:

Create an run-only script with the Script Editor with the following:

tell application "ScreenSaverEngine"
activate
end tell

Set an Quicksilver trigger to run this script and map the shortcut key to what you like (I used ctrl-command-delete).

If you have set the screen saver to require a password, you now have an keyboard short cut to locking your screen.