Upgrade this software (Movable Type) manually, or
One-click install (WordPress) from my web host.

Seth (and others) have said good things about WordPress, and I don't really care, so here goes.

Looks like this blog will be up at http://www.aland.us/blog/ at least until I get old posts/comments imported. New blog is http://blog.aland.us/ (once it's working).

Thank you thank you thank you thank you! I'd been looking for this for years... (not too hard, apparently)

I want to check this out at some point...

How to erase, clean, wipe a hard drive... Boot from a linux live distro and run:

shred -vfz -n 3 /dev/hda

Oh, and while I am at it, I want them to do a rapid development tool aimed at light apps. Having a rapid development tool that could be used by non-programmers would probably quench some of the desire for Flash, which is largely driven by the ability of designers to actually create functional apps without significant programming resources. While we are at it, it should run right on the iPad. In other words, I want "HyperCard Touch." And a pony.

and direct to TFA: http://blog.carbonfive.com/2010/03/testing/testing-view-controllers

This may come in handy...

I've read a few of this site's articles, and so far I've found them all interesting and informative... Saving for future reference. ;-)

I want to read this again and again (, and again...) until I have completely integrated the ideas he's put forth. Specifically, the idea of 'background app' as "run it on a web server somewhere", extended (as I assume he had in mind) to ", using Push Notification to get the user's attention when necessary"...

I wrote one of the Mac apps I wanted... Let me know if you find this useful, or if there are other apps you might want.

This is a hack; I started writing it as a proof of concept for a 'real' OSX app that I wanted, and decided that this command-line tool would be good enough for me, for now...

Share and Enjoy!

How to make a Gingerbread Dreidel, by Kriss Barnhart

So - this idea is to have an app that works roughly the way the Contacts app does, or - gasp - the way Palm's App Manager worked.

1: Present a list of "All Applications". Primarily sorted alphabetically, though could be other options. With the 0-9 A-Z scroller on the right.

2: Allow a user to create a category / folder, and import apps to that category (probably through a multi-select of some sort).

3: Provide a view of 'Categories' that drills down to select apps.

4: Probably allow an app to appear in multiple categories.

5: *Important* Have a 'New' category, for apps which have not yet been categorized.

6: Ideally (but, not initially) allow management of the categories on the desktop. ;-)

7: Place no restriction on the number of apps which can be supported/managed by this app.

* Old problem - open a new mail message, start it, decide to cancel it. hit command-w to close it. Dialog pops up, "Don't Save / Cancel / Save". There is no way to do "Don't Save" from the keyboard. 'd', command-d, or at worst tabbing to 'Don't Save' should allow me to trigger that button.

* New problem - 'walking' through messages, deleting them, goes backwards. Let's say I have 5 new messages at the bottom of my mailbox. I read the first, delete it. Read the second, third, fourth, delete them. In each case, the NEXT UNREAD message opens when I delete the old one. Now I read the fifth and delete it. Behavior in TBird 1 & 2 was that when I delete the last message in the mailbox, my 'message' window closed. Behavior in TBird 3.0 is the 'newly' last message in my mailbox opens. I'm not entirely sure why this bothers me as much as it does, but it does. :-)

* New (documented) problem - More a feature I don't like... I read some mailing lists "sorted by sender". Sometimes I want to delete a bunch of messages across lists. In TBird 2, I could delete messages from a number of groups, and only the 'visible' messages were deleted. (If I had a 'thread' collapsed, TBird would leave those messages alone.) In 3.0, it deletes the messages in collapsed threads. It DOES warn me, so I won't (probably) get screwed up by this, but it's frustrating and I haven't found an option to put this behavior back the way it had worked. At least they documented it.

* New bug, related to the above -- If I cross the 'thread' boundary, even when there ARE no collapsed threads in the selection, TBird 3.0 gives me the same alert message as above ("Will delete messages from collapsed threads"). I'll say again, there -are no- collapsed threads, all threads in the selection are expanded.

More as I find them, but those are the immediate frustrations. Not frustrating enough for me to go back to 2.x though... :-)

[eta 1]

* Great feature - not sure if it's new or if I didn't notice it before... If I'm on a message and delete it, the active selection jumps to the next message.
- A related bug / misfeature, if I'm on a message and hit 'b' or 'f' to move to the last or next message (or 'p'/'n' for last/next unread), the active selection in the message pane does NOT change.

* In 2.x, hitting 'compact folders' twice would queue the command. In 3.0, it seems to tell me "Can't do it because I'm already compacting" or something like that. Not a big deal, but in-my-face.

* BUG - in 1.x, 2.x TBird would clear the search box when I switched folders. (Sometimes I wanted that, sometimes I don't. iTunes does the same thing). In 3.0, TBird does NOT clear the text in the search box, but it also does NOT do the search on the newly selected folder.
[/eta 1]

This guy is COOL! He basically hacked together an app that figures out when you are doing a multi-touch gesture (pinch), and sends off the appropriate commands. And a nice framework, too...

Hopefully (as he says) Apple will support all the possible features in the next rev of the driver...