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Arrrgh! Damn you Photoshop!

If you know me, you know that I am 1) a terminal user 2) a control freak 3) extremely pedantic about certain things and 4) formerly a UNIX junky. These qualities led to be excited when running OS X on a case-sensitive system was fully supported by Apple. I was excited because it would allow me to be more picky about naming my files, and use capitalization for various differentiating factors. And more importantly I could write code and be sure I had made no capitalization error that allowed the code to compile on my system but not on any other case-sensitive system (I’ve done this a number of times).

Today was the first day I needed to use Photoshop at work, and since I had a copy at work, I decided to install it. Lo and behold, the installer takes about 10 seconds to start up and then proceeds to give me the following error:

What am I supposed to do with this? I guess at some point I’ll just have to install it and copy the files over and see how that works. Time to pull out another computer I guess. In the meantime I am using Pixelmator. We’ll see how that works out. I am sad about Photoshop, since it has been my go to editor since version 2 came out back in the day.

Pythons on a Plane

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve started learning python. I’ve found a lot to like and dislike. Mostly I dislike the whitespace and how editors of choice behave with regards to it. This of course is because there is no text to signify the end of a code block.

What I have been working on is unimportant for now. What’s interesting to note is that I have re-written the project 3 times so far in the 2 short weeks I’ve been working on it. Mostly this is because as I learn more features and modules available to me, I realize that I have taken a more complicated route in order to achieve something. I hope that as I get further into this project, I’ll be able to release some modules that will be useful to other people.

So far, I’ve got a command interpreter module that knows how to dispatch commands. I will probably make it so that it will auto_detect what it can do, and dispatch commands that way, and a user will be able to register “aliases” to commands.

Darjeeling and Chili

It has been a long while since I made chili. Since going camping and eating chili nearly three months ago, I decided I wanted to make chili and it only took three months for me to get around to it. Last night, after having a nice dinner at Fuzio, and watching The Darjeeling Limited, Carmen and I went to Safeway and bought a bunch of peppers and ingredients for chili. After a few hours of work this morning, it’s reducing and boy does it smell good.

On the other hand, I would suggest The Darjeeling Limited to anyone who likes Wes Anderson movies. It had the classic Wes Anderson flair. Of course the usual actors (Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Anjelica Houston, Jason Schwartzman) show up, but some new actors have been added to the fold. Adrien Brody, and Natalie Portman join this fantastic cast of actors. I couldn’t have chosen a better movie to watch. Go watch it!

In San Diego…

My friend, Scott, and I decided to head to San Diego to see if we could see some fire and visit some friends. I met a number of Scott’s friends from San Diego, and also visited Marisa. It was good to see her (as usual), and as usual she introduced me to some good food (some awesome bagels).

What I did last weekend

This was the awesomeness. The Caterham Seven is an awesome car and it was easy to push to high speed. And despite the high speed it sticks to the ground like white on rice. If you try really hard you can get it to slip, but when you want it to stick, it just does.

Dynamic document based applications.

In Mac OS X, Launch Services tries and tracks which applications can open which type of applications.  Much of this list is based on the applications “Info.plist” file.  This is found at MyApp.app/Contents/Info.plist. But when the applications is open you can open files via the “Open…” menu. This mechanisms, by default, also end up at data available in the Info.plist.  This is all fine and dandy if you are writing a simple document based application.  But what if you are writing an application that loads plugins and those plugins allow you to open different types of documents?  How do you make sure that the open dialog allows these to be selected automatically?

NOTE:This information is pertinent to 10.4 only. 10.5 (as yet unreleased) has different characteristics. When 10.5 is released, I will post more information.

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After a long haul…

I am still alive.   Surprisingly.  I’ve been back from India for over a year, well life has moved on.  I took my sweet time getting my blog back up because while I had many interesting tidbits to post, I never had the time to post them.  I should mention that since my last post I am now working on VMware Fusion, and I like it a lot.  I still have a few of my side projects and I will post code samples from them as much as I can.