Archive for August, 2005

I have long been a fan of newspaper style comics. In my “open the sites all at once” bucket of URLs in Safari, I have 10 daily comics.

Or had, anyway.

King Features publishes Mother Goose And Grimm and Zits. Both cartoons that I quite like. Unfortunately, I won’t be reading them on a daily basis anymore.

King Features has changed their “archive policy” such that they are now only publishing the first week of cartoons for each month. To gain receive the full cartoon, they want $15/year + a $3 “handling fee”. Why the hell they need a “handling fee” on an entirely electronic transaction is well beyond my meager intellect.
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A 10 second time lapse photo of Roger, who just turned 5, moving as slowly* as he can towards the camera.

*Roger’s version of “slowly”, anyway.

I was really happy to see a lot of honeybees buzzing around the community garden the other evening. The bees all looked quite healthy, were completely non-aggressive, and were distributing pollen quite enthusiastically.

Throughout the country, the bee population has been decimated by the combination of various fungal infections and bee mites. In the southern areas of the country, there has also been the introduction of africanized bees that are extremely aggressive and, apparently, not terribly effective at spreading pollen amongst flowers. This is quite worrying in that a healthy honeybee population is critical to food production.

Living in California is like living in a botanical garden. Everywhere you look, there are flowers, gardens, exotic trees, and odd plants. The micro climates are such that even a short hike of 3.0 miles in Castle Rock State Park will take the adventurer through several different zones of plants; dessert, damp forest, dry fields, and dry forest.

Figs, pomegranates, some citrus, and calla lillies are all among species that largely grow as weeds in the San Jose area. Pictured at left is a morning glory that my son and I planted. It has quickly shot up to 8+ feet tall and is covered with white and blue&white blossoms. On the right, is the more common purple morning glory that effectively grows as a weed everywhere. Spectacular bloom. I do believe I will never buy seeds again, preferring to simply collect seeds from the purple morning glories in the neighborhood.

Gardening in the area is extremely rewarding. The only challenge is choosing the variety of plants based upon how heavily you wish to irrigate. On the left is a single squash plant. A friend gave me a couple of seedlings that have since taken over about 1/3rd of our community garden plot. Given the intense sun, the cool and moist evenings, and a bit of water, you can easily see significant new growth on a daily basis.

When I have a moment, I’ll throw together an extended page with a tour of the flowers and plants of the neighborhood. Hopefully, at least one other person will find it interesting.

I have been spending quite a bit of time writing Twisted code. Twisted is just plain cool.

Playing a particularly cruel and twisted joke, the developers did not see fit to post a link to the current API documentation anywhere that I could find on the TwistedMatrix site. Of course, I browse said documentation on a regular basis while google-coding.

Of course, I could not find the damned link again and I had forgotten to bookmark it. LaunchBar’s voracious appetite for Safari’s history bites me again.

So that I will never lose it again: This is a link to the Current API Documentation for Twisted. That’s right. I would click the link to the current Twisted documentation if I want to know about ProcessProtocol, reactor, twistd, spawnProcess, Deferred, or the rest of the internet-y goodness of Twisted.

I’m looking for large open source projects that include an Xcode project. I have identified quite a few, but am looking for more. In particular, projects that have lots of source files and/or make heavy use of C++.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Flickr has several new features that are terribly cool. The explore page contains links into the various sections.

My favorite is Interestingness. I have no idea how it works, but the feed of photos from the last 24 hours is certainly very interesting.

There are also calendars of interesting photos.

Wow. Impressive. Boy, do I have a lot to learn.

I have long wanted to use FileMerge as the target for svn diff operations on Mac OS X. But I was just too damned lazy to bother.

Fortunately, Mike Ash was not so lazy. Unfortunately, Mike’s simple/elegant solution titles the two versions of the file “tmp” and “tmp.2″.

This works fine if you have a short term memory span of more than about 30 seconds. I do not. My short term memory is more like that of a goldfish.

Mike’s script will also fail intermittently in that svn diff deletes the temporary files as soon as the command diffing them completes. That is often before FileMerge reads the files on my system.

So, I wrote a much longer and far less elegant script that puts the name of the file and version number into the title bar while also leaving copies of the renamed files in /tmp/svndiffshm-UID forever.

You can download the script from my personal subversion repository at red-bean.

To use, you can pass the –diff-cmd command line argument to svn diff. Personally, I want FileMerge to come up all the time.

For that, edit ~/.subversion/config. Uncomment the [helpers] line and [uncomment and] set the diff-cmd line to point to the script. It has to be an absolute path (I ought to file a bug against subversion about that).

Works for me. I’m sure someone will point out a far simpler way to do this.

Update #1: Ken Anderson pointed out that the script wasn’t working when using the generic svn diff command against a file with local modifications. Yup. Sure didn’t. Now it does. The link above will always lead to the latest version.

Update #2: Mark Rowe kindly submitted a patch to enable compatibility between svndiffshim.py and SVK. Patch applied. Changes comitted. Thank you. I really need to take some time to grok SVK. It appears to solve a number of problems that I run into daily, including the need for opaque collections.