Since I like dabbling with data visualization I was happy to find the following snippet:

 let _ =
   ignore( Glut.init Sys.argv );
   Glut.initDisplayMode ~double_buffer:true ();
   ignore (Glut.createWindow ~title:"OpenGL Demo");
   let angle t = 10. *. t *. t in
   let render () =
     GlClear.clear [ `color ];
     GlMat.load_identity ();
     GlMat.rotate ~angle: (angle (Sys.time ())) ~z:1. ();
     GlDraw.begins `triangles;
     List.iter GlDraw.vertex2 [-1., -1.; 0., 1.; 1., -1.];
     GlDraw.ends ();
     Glut.swapBuffers () in
   GlMat.mode `modelview;
   Glut.displayFunc ~cb:render;
   Glut.idleFunc ~cb:(Some Glut.postRedisplay);
   Glut.mainLoop ()

Simple enough, apparently draws something on an OpenGL display. According to a friend of mine I am supposed to be able to compile ocaml code to a native app. Being on Mac OS X I was sceptical. Native OS X apps usually involves drawing arrows between events and boxes in some funky XCode window.

But, lo and behold:

sudo port install ocaml
sudo port install LablGL
ocamlopt -I +lablGL lablglut.cmxa lablgl.cmxa ogldemo.ml -o ogldemo

…creates an app that opens a window with the spinning triangle on OS X. And compilation is fast! I need to learn more about ocaml…

Update: This project is now deprecated and Twitter has removed basic authentication.

Custom apps have major implications for usability so I decided to roll my own. I wanted to try out Fluid, the Prism-like app to contain web apps in their own process/window, to see if it is possible to build a complete open source ad-free twitter client in a single web page only using javascript and HTML.

So, I cuiled for a jQuery twitter plugin but had to google it to find it. Some minor modifications to the code by the fine folks at SeaOfClouds and adding a method to post new status messages gave this native-looking OS X twitter client (HUD-style to the left, default style to the right and HUD avatars style below):

Thank’s to the twitter json api it was trivial to query my own friend feed and display it in Safari. Then, I used Fluid to create a self contained OSX app that displays my static HTML page. Googling a nice application icon makes it much better-looking in the taskbar. I decided to call it “Twoot”. Twoot consumes little memory and plays nice with embedded URLs (they open in a new Firefox tab).

Unfortunately, Fluid does not allow you to distribute the created app so you will have to roll your own by:

1. Download and install Fluid.
2. Create a folder called “twoot” in your home directory.
3. Download the twoot html, js and css files from github and place in the twoot folder.
4. Edit twoot.js and set your twitter username and password. (Enter credentials in the basic auth form when launching app the first time).
5. Open Fluid and create a new app by pointing to the twoot.htm file (e.g. file:///users/you/twoot/twoot.htm) and set a nice icon.
6. Save the app as “Twoot”.
7. Your new twitter client is ready! Run it and resize as required, set the window to floating, kill tabs etc. Change the twoot.css and html file to customize it further.

Simple API:s are wonderful for usability!

history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s ",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head

I get:

108 ls
78 cd
53 sudo
29 python
13 cap
9 django-admin.py
9 ruby
8 vim
6 easy_install
3 bzr
1 ex
1 python2.5
1 ln
1 mksir
1 cat
1 cccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc

In short:

• I have trouble with my default python installation.
• I am trying Django for small project.
• I was hit by the Leopard keyboard repeat freeze bug.
• I am poor at spelling simple commands.

• IR LED in the 920 nm range (a bag of 20 cost me )
• 1.5V AA battery
• a glove
• battery holder (with optional velcro to fit it to the glove)
• some wires
• a Wiimote
• software (I tried Uwe Schmidt’s java based Mac version).

The first beta version looks like above after some soldering.

After calibration the precision is really good, even when using it in front of the small screen of my Macbook Pro. It worked very well for card sorting in the OptimalSort demo and it feels natural to pick up objects with your fingers instead of pushing a switch on a pen.

I am eager to try it with a projector but that will have to wait until tomorrow when I get back to work. It would also be nice to try the virtual scrum board that Jesper Rønn-Jensen and hos colleagues are working on. Updates will follow.

I have been running the beta version of MailPlane which provides at desktop version of Gmail (using Webkit). Apart from keeping Gmail in a separate branded window it also provides standard mac shortcut keys as well as desktop integration for screenshots and other file related things. Pretty sweet.

I was interested to see if Prism could provide a similar experience. Prism is currently an early beta at version 0.8 so it isn’t fair to expect too much of it. The feature wish list looks great.

Launching prism and creating a Gmail app worked great. However, Prism currently has some issues:

• It consumes close to 100% of a CPU core on my MacBook which makes it unusable for now.
• Font size can not be adjusted (should be a parameter?).
• There is a white space at the bottom of the app screen which reduce valuable screen estate.

I would also like to see an option to map access keys to native OS keys (e.g. Prism forwards ⌘+r as alt+r to the web app). This would allow users to work with the application in a way indistinguishable from a desktop application. also, if there was a way to interact with files (drag and drop etc) à la MailPlane I could see how Prism could be the preferred choice of many application developers in the future.

Couple it with a stand alone Ruby on Rails app (by using Joyent’s Slingshot) and you have a whole new way of developing applications that work offline, online and in a coherent way with other desktop apps. The future is bright!

So, I was looking for something to keep tiny apps up to date and found AppFresh. AppFresh will scan your programs folder when you want it to and alert you of any updates it can find. Downloading and installation is automated for most apps as well.

It will also tell you when you lasted used an application – nice if you want to clean you programs folder from unneccessary apps.

You can download AppFresh here.

“But Jesus H. Christ, it must suck giant wet donkey balls to be stuck on an archaic OS where you need to be dropping into the terminal and tweaking configuration files and compiling shit all the time. I hope the translucent menu bar is worth it. “

I agree wholeheartedly that a good package manager really makes life a lot easier. At work the other day I was about to begin installing TWiki by following the rather lengthy installation guidelines. As I was on a clean install of Ubuntu 7.10 I fired off a apt-get install twiki and lo and behold, two minutes later the whole thing was there including mysql and a large part of the CPAN library.

On OS X I have been using MacPorts from the terminal. It provides similar features to apt-get but you don’t get update notifications without diving into the terminal. And I rarely dive into the terminal to manually check for updates.

So, I googled around for a decent GUI and found Porticus. Porticus provides a nice GUI, checks for package updates and with a few clicks you can have your environment up to date. It even integrates nicely with Growl. The big difference is of course that packages aren’t pre-compiled (does that disqualify the use of “packages” to describe them?). MacPorts will download the source and build it on your machine. This is strange as Mac platforms are well known and vary little. Why not save everyone the build step and just push the universal binaries?

For some reason Apple decided to make the menu bar in Leopard transparent. With my background image this means that the menu bar will be in a shade of blue. It doesn’t look good and makes my computing environment less comfortable (I’m picky, I know…).

Someone created a software hack to remove the transparency. There is also a system setting (thank you Johan) to trick the window manager into thinking it is in older hardware. I am not sure of the side effects so I’m not that keen on installing that. Here is the pragmatic fix: take your background image and paint a white stripe, 21 pixels high, at the top. Problem solved. My menu bar is now easy to read with black text on white background (see picture above).

Before painting the white stripe you may have to resize the picture to the exact size of your desktop, otherwise the OS will resize it and it won’t fit the size of the menu bar.

Update: As Peter points out in the comments below, if you use black instead of white the menu will look similar to the default ash grey style of other Leopard apps.

This is what you need:

• A solar panel (2V to be able to connect it to the audio in port on my MacBook),
• Some cabling (a 3.5 mm standard stereo plug)
• A bowl of water
• A software synthesizer that can read input from the audio in port.

I already had access to water and a glass bowl and decided to skip the laser pointer (a round bowl will create interesting areas of focused light anyway).

Connecting the solar panel to your Mac is easy. Just connect the wires to a 3.5 mm stereo (or mono) cable and connect it to the line in audio port. Instead of using MAX/MSP I opted for the free Puredata toolkit (Pd). Pd is a real-time graphical programming environment for live interactive computer music. It is an interesting way to program a virtual synthesizer.

Fire up Pd and create a patch that looks like this:

Starting form the top left the adc (analog to digital converter) receives the signal input from the solar panel and sends it to a multiplier to increase signal strength. Two oscillators and a sawtooth phasor generator send data in various frequencies (330, 440, and 349 correspoding to C, F and A on a piano) to an amplitude modulator which is controlled by the solar panel input.

The resulting audio signal is sent to a dac (digital to analog converter) which will ouput the result to your computer speaker. If I starting Pb and create a small wave in the bowl of water in front of the solar panel the result sounds like this (heavily compressed mp3).

The options are, as usual, endless. Pd is capable of creating extremely complex patches and visualizations. You can easily use the optical interface to control aspects of midi streams.

Now that I ruined my summer project I have to think of something else. Any ideas? Maybe Smalltalk. Or an R/C steam turbine tank?

I was planning to get a small RAID solution for the home network, but they are fairly expensive, need electricity and space. So, I had a look at the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). If you haven’t heard of S3 before:

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

I was expecting S3 to be fairly expensive with the redundancy and all, but it turns out that it is cheap. Really cheap. To calculate what it would cost me to backup my iPhoto library I threw together an iPhoto backup to S3 calculator.

Turns out that starting with 2000 photos at around 2 megs each, adding 100 photos each month willcost me $10/year. Hard to beat if you are trying to build your own RAID solution.

Backup software

Here is the setup I use. I tried some of the S3 client libraries available, but the only one that was persistent enough to do the initial 2000 file sync was jets3t. It is a java library that comes with some easy to use command line synchronization scripts. After setting up jets3t with your S3 API key, all you do is tell the synchronize script to check your iPhoto folder.

Currently, I run it as a scheduled job once a month, but depending on your photography habits you may want to trigger it differently. It works like a charm and last month’s bill from Amazon was $1.23.

Try the calculator and see what your cost would be.