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September 29, 2006
Safari RSS annoyances
Safari periodically "forgets" which RSS articles I've read. This is a shame because suddenly all the articles I haven't read get lost in a sea of articles that I really have read but which all at once have decided to...More Apple articles
Posted by wincent at 7:58 PM
Involuntary reboot log #3 and #4
Two kernel panics while trying to boot from a just-installed copy of Mac OS X. I won't bother telling you what version of the OS it was......More Involuntary Reboot Log articles
Posted by wincent at 7:17 PM
September 27, 2006
The Movable Type upgrade procedure sucks
Just upgraded to the latest version of Movable type. It's one of my least-favorite upgrade procedures. The download archive is broken. Again. The documentation on upgrading is hard to find and inadequate. The procedure effectively amounts to installing all over...More Opinion articles
Posted by wincent at 1:01 PM
September 26, 2006
Product activation improvements
I've spent the day making improvements to my product activation systems and I am fairly pleased with the results. These changes should make the product activation experience (which is already pretty good) even better for customers (when talking about copy...More Development articles
Posted by wincent at 12:24 PM
Open vs closed: secrecy, competition and business
Lately I've been thinking about a couple of binary oppositions: open source versus proprietary, and more generally, openness versus secrecy. Starting from the basic premise that if you're selling software you're doing so in the hope of making some money...More Development articles
Posted by wincent at 11:18 AM
September 24, 2006
Keeping up to date
There a number of official channels for keeping up-to-date with what's happening with Wincent products, both the public face of things (product releases and updates) and the behind-the-scenes aspects (development activity, technical articles)....More Miscellaneous articles
Posted by wincent at 5:26 PM
September 22, 2006
Lots of refactoring
Sometimes you make bad decisions that later come back to bite you. About three years ago when I started work on Synergy Advance I was still relatively new to Subversion. So, rather than creating a new repository I decided to...More Development articles
Posted by wincent at 6:00 PM
Spamhaus is good
Spamhaus is an anti-spam DNS-based blacklisting service. Some people in business advise against using such blacklists on the grounds that they could potentially block legitimate email and thus harm the business. I don't agree for three reasons: Spam is such...More Net articles
Posted by wincent at 4:54 PM
Yellow
I am spending a lot of hours staring at Xcode editor windows lately and I don't know if it's because I'm getting old, but it's getting harder and harder to look at the screen without feeling a minor sensation of...More Development articles
Posted by wincent at 4:35 PM
September 20, 2006
Don't run Mac OS X as an administrator user
In the past my advice, and that of pretty much everyone that matters, has always been "don't run Mac OS X (log in to the graphical user interface) as the root user". It's just a basic security tenet that you...More Mac OS X articles
Posted by wincent at 1:49 PM
September 19, 2006
Subversion hassles
I've just spent several hours working around a Subversion problem. I don't know whether the fault lay with the Subversion internals, is limited to the svnadmin tool's load functionality, or is really the fault of the underlying filesystem on Red...More Development articles
Posted by wincent at 8:01 PM
Leopard API changes
I'm under NDA so I can't talk about the details, but I must say that I am really excited about the new APIs (and improvements to existing APIs) that Apple will be offering to developers in Leopard. Some of the...Posted by wincent at 2:28 PM
September 14, 2006
The SCO saga
I've long been an interested observer of the SCO saga. I observed at first with indignation, but for well over a year now I've watched with the same kind of macabre fascination that a bystander finds him or herself unable...Posted by wincent at 2:20 PM
What I hate about the Mac OS X panic dialog
The wording: You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button. No admission of fatal errors, no confession of failure, no reference to "panic", "quitting", "bailing" or "giving up", no...More Apple articles
Posted by wincent at 2:53 AM
September 12, 2006
Mac OS X Internet connection sharing hacked
Don't mean to be alarmist, perhaps that title should have read, "my Mac OS X Internet connection sharing hacked". For a few minutes there I was wondering whether I'd discovered the first really nasty piece of Mac OS X spyware;...More Net articles
Posted by wincent at 2:50 PM
September 11, 2006
Code cleanup
A post by Apple's Ali Ozer to the Omni-run macosx-dev mailing list got me thinking about my current localization practices. I'm pleased to report that as a result the WOLocalizedStringsManager class is going out the window to be replaced by...More Development articles
Posted by wincent at 10:47 AM
September 7, 2006
YAHOMI
Yet Another Higher Order Messaging Implementation for Objective-C comes to light. Strong points: Very small and simple; not much code to it Better type checking (via categories) than most HOM implementations Weak points: Incomplete Doesn't seem to compile/run on Intel...More Development articles , More HOM articles
Posted by wincent at 2:18 PM
September 5, 2006
Involuntary reboot log #2
The most unpleasant kind of kernel panic: you leave the machine idle, leave the office, and come back to find the machine has panicked. Sigh. Had a bunch of unsaved work ready for tomorrow too, the kind you can't save...More Involuntary Reboot Log articles
Posted by wincent at 1:58 AM
September 3, 2006
Mailing list subscriptions
When I first got a home-based Internet connection 10 years ago Google didn't exist. Spam was an insignificant problem. I freely posted to news groups and mailing lists without fear of getting inundated with spam or forfeiting my privacy to...More Net articles
Posted by wincent at 3:13 PM
