Tried Bespin last night, a web-based IDE that seems to be geared toward web development.

The bad news? It's a web based IDE, and that isn't going to change.

The good news? It's still faster than Komodo.

So, I installed Apple's Security Update 2009-001 yesterday, and tried to work on one of my Catalyst sites tonight. I got this fantastic error:

I head over to CPAN to update a few modules, and same error message with a stacktrace of doom. So, turns out, Apple distributed IO.bundle from way the hell back in 2005, which is what broke all of your other modules that you already updated if you use CPAN for anything at all. But hey, now CPAN is broken, so what now? You get to do a manual install, luckily, CPAN is an archive. Head over to the IO distribution over at CPAN, download the archive, and head into ye olde Terminal. Extract the archive if it hasn't already, enter the directory, and execute:

Ding, everything works again. Write an angry letter to Apple.

Edit: You may find more crap that doesn't work. For instance:

Well, just head into your now-functional CPAN and execute:

Bam, you made it spicy.

I'm starting to wonder if ActiveState benchmarks Komodo against Eclipse. I mean, if it's faster than Eclipse, it's fast enough for anyone, right?

Twenty-five years ago today, January 24th, 1984, Apple offered the first Macintosh for sale to the public. Released with a huge amount of fanfare using arguably the first high-budget "Super Bowl Ad" during Super Bowl XVIII on January 22nd, Apple aimed to change the computing marketplace forever. Contemporary personal and business computers used a command line driven interface to operate, and programs written for these platforms followed the same type of functionality. IBM's PC, Commodore's 64 and 128, even Apple's II series all followed the same idea, and few computers on the marketplace tried to change that at the time. The big contender, Apple's Lisa, was a market flop, mostly because it was sold at over $10,000, 5x the amount of the average business computer at the time. Macintosh offered a 32-bit processor (on a 16-bit bus, but let's not get caught up in the technicalities), 128k of RAM, a high resolution monochrome screen, and a mouse to control one of the friendliest user interfaces at the time. $2,499 was very steep in 1984, but it took the world by storm, and became the envy of every platform.

We got our first Macintosh in the fall of 1986, a smoke and fire damaged Macintosh 512K Enhanced, complete with an Apple HD20 (20mb hard drive!), a LaserWriter Plus printer and an Abaton Scan/300 sheet-fed scanner. My grandmother's house had burned to the ground, and her basement tenant and friend was getting into desktop publishing -- this was her machine. My dad took the machine in while she was relocating, cleaned the smoke damage out of everything, and powered it on. I remember hearing the chime the first time and watching it power up, and it was completely different than the Commodore 64 I grew up with. My dad let me play with MacPaint, and I was hooked. It wasn't until years later that I realized my dad was letting me play on a setup that was $15,000 when purchased new in 1985.

That machine lasted me until 1993 as a full time machine. I learned Pascal, HyperCard, and MacBASIC on that machine. I did the best looking school papers and projects on that machine, using the scanner to include maps and other data, and using the laser printer to provide crisp, clean printouts. I had Aldus PageMaker and Microsoft Word to create brochures, flyers, and homework. I ran a BBS off of WWIV/Mac for a couple of years. I tried to squeeze System 6 and MultiFinder in the scant, un-upgradeable 512K of RAM. I got into the first BBSs with MacTerminal, and later, ZTerm, all with my Racal Vadic 1200 baud modem, and later, my generic Hayes-compatible 2400bps modem. I really, really used that poor machine with the warped, fire damaged vents.

To this day, that machine boots, hard drive and everything. The LaserWriter Plus and Abaton scanner were sold off by the next owner long before.

The machine taught me about typography, user experience, software development, and the appreciation of a great graphical user interface. I've had many PCs and Macs since, and they are exponentially better than that poor little FatMac I used to have. Without Apple's leadership with that little machine, though, the computing world would be a far different place.

I just had to share.

Happy 25th anniversary for your crazy creation, you guys. Thank you.

I know, I know, I'm a terrible blogger. I've all but ignored this blog, and given up on LiveJournal as well. The last couple of months have been insane on top of insane, but I'm finally digging out of it. Between dealing with Christmas, dealing with minutia and fallout from moving here months ago, and a second contract that I really shouldn't have taken, I've had absolutely no free time. This means no side projects, no new shiny things, and no blogging.

That being said, it is now 2009, and I have a whole list of things I want to get accomplished right now. My wife is in Russia for two weeks, so I now have no excuse for not doing any of it. My first priorities are my abandoned Android application and whatthefuck.com.

ElJay is going to see a new release in a few days fixing a lot of the difficulties people are having. There's a 25% reduction in memory use, a huge increase in speed and responsiveness, and seems to take care of much of the network connectivity issues people have been coming up with. Once that's out, work will begin on a new application that posts not only to LiveJournal, but any LJ-based site, Movable Type, Wordpress, or Blogger site. It's the number one feature request besides specific LiveJournal stuff, so there will be some parallel development. I will likely be maintaining both applications separately, so those who only use LiveJournal don't have to learn a new tool, but both applications will benefit from the use of some shared code.

The old wtf has been running quite well lately. The number of exceptions being passed back to me have dropped considerably, and people seem to be using the site without too much difficulty. I have a huge checklist of crap I need to finish before I start mail bombing old users, but I have to say, things aren't bad right now. What's coming? Mostly style and behind the scenes changes. The code needs to be cleaned up quite a bit, as there is something like three years of start and stop development in there, and it needs to be tightened up a bit. Data management and cleanup needs to occur, as some older board posts are missing and/or corrupted, due to an old bug. The mobile site at m.whatthefuck.com is going to be filled out with some of the user options and an email notifier, and promoted to a top tier service out of wtf. Some basic blog functionality is going to be added as well, due to popular demand, and support for it is likely going to be rolled into the above "new blogging application".

From there? Who knows. I have big plans for 2009. As for the freebies? "Things I Hate About You" is going to get some social features, comments, and Facebook integration, TwitterGrowl is going to get a GUI, and is going to get a new storage engine and a new home site.

Things that aren't free? Well, you'll see. :)

This morning, I uploaded my first application to the Android Market. As a quick background, Android is Google's new mobile operating system, designed for smartphones and similar mobile internet devices, and similar in theory to the iPhone operating system. The Android Market allows third party developers to distribute their software through a centralized location for a small fee. As of right now, all software on the market is free, so you don't make any money on the process.

I decided, for some reason, that my first application was going to be a LiveJournal client, that is, an application that enables easy posting to a LiveJournal blog. I would be able to work with simple HTTP requests, design a simple but effective user interface, play with threads a little bit, and touch the Location Manager (GPS/Tracking) if I was lucky.

I was.

I'm happy with the final product, and it's modular enough that I can add to it later if I wanted to, or fork it to a generic blog posting tool if I felt crazy enough. You can log into your LJ account, select user pictures from a live gallery of all of your user icons, dynamically retrieve your location from GPS or fuzzy tracking, add moods or your current music. It's remarkably complete for a few days of work, and I think I want to add the ability to attach photos later on, as well as limit to certain friend groups or post to other communities. Trivial tasks in the long run, but I wanted to get it out there as soon as possible.

Click through if you want to see what it looks like.

Since I do a lot of sales and purchasing on Craigslist, I figured I'd start assembling a list of scammers, pranksters, and fakesters either trying to buy or trying to sell something fraudulent. It won't matter much to anyone right now, but this provides a link so Google can index it.

When I can, I will put in the names, email addresses in the to, reply to, and cc headers, and the source IP address, if available. Unfortunately, most of the source IPs are invalid.

A developer release of Catalyst::Runtime 5.8 was thrown onto CPAN tonight. It's not on all of the mirrors yet, but it will be soon. This is the result of the "Catamoose" project, or the redo of Catalyst using Moose, the modern OO framework for Perl.

I'm installing it now to see how well wtf runs. I'm very interested to see how well it works.

I'm excited. :)