NSLog();

MIT has invented wireless electricity. Long-time readers of the blog (both of us) will remember my To Do List. I'm not keen with items being taken away from me. The item reads: Invent wireless electricity (I'm still waiting on Rob to finish his portable cold fusion device).

What's unusual is that the "Rob" noted in the above is Rob Clark, currently studying at MIT. Hmmm… What's troubling is this: The List is meant to show progress. Do I remove items once they become impossible to achieve? The List should not be about disappointment or despair, but hope and triumph.

I've pre-ordered my component cables online, thanks to Cabel. You can do so too by clicking here. If you order the fastest shipping ($13), you'll have your cables by Friday or Monday.

It sure beats calling in (800-255-3700) and being rejected several times by a "lines too busy" message.

Retailers may or may not have component cables around launch time. Many won't see them until December. So, if you're looking to play your games in 480p, grab the cables now, folks. Perhaps they'll take some of the sting out of your Wii's lameass stereo audio output. 😛

P.S. Not only is the audio output stereo only, but the red/white audio is so closely bound to the damn video plugs (see this image) that there's no way in heck I can plug the component video into my TV and the audio into my receiver. I'll have to get a patch cable. WTF Nintendo?

Carey and I went to a local exercise store today to look at an elliptical machine for (ugh) the living room. Our $68/month membership to the Pennbriar (a local athletic club) expires soon and we don't use it nearly often enough to justify the cost.

We both liked the Octane Q37e (which has a wireless heart monitor that straps around your chest), and it runs $2399 ($2500 after taxes) ((That's 37 months at Pennbriar.)). It has a rather natural step motion, the pedals are 1.8" apart, and the stride length is a moderate 20". It felt comfortable, but we only used it for 30 seconds apiece.

Has anyone bought an elliptical? What advice or opinions do you have?

A day after complaining about the way WordPress handles "read more" links, I've cobbled together a plugin I've named "BetterWPReadMore." It's available from a modified "Plugins" tab at the top of every page.

Also, BetterWPMail was bumped to version 0.11. Realistically, it should be at least version 0.2, but whatever.

WordPress uses a template tag function called the_content() ((Line 54 of /wp-includes/template-functions-post.php in version 2.0.5.)) to publish content. This function does little more than call another function, get_the_content() ((Eight lines down in the same file.)).

The get_the_content() function is responsible for, among other things, splitting up WordPress posts at the <!--more--> delimiter. It creates HTML that looks like this:

<p>Last paragraph of main entry<br /><a href="http://permalink">ReadMoreText</a></p>

The optional parameters (there are three, but only two work in WP 2.0) allow you to change the "ReadMoreText" in the example output above. The problem? Not only is the link missing a title, but the text is all you can control.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 1260); »

I'm posting this at the request of a friend.

At the MacWorld Expo in January, Garmin announced they would be working on officially supporting Mac OS X 10.4 by the end of 2006. Eleven months later and Garmin has made no further comments regarding support for the Mac. Earlier this year, Garmin listed software engineer positions requiring Cocoa experience. Those listings are there (presumably they've been filled), so hopefully progress is being made.

Give us a sign Garmin! A lot of GPS geek Mac users are eagerly awaiting official Mac support!

AppleJack is now available for Intel Macs. I've never installed AppleJack on my own machines, and it came out shortly after I stopped working as a Mac Genius, so I never tested it there.

I'm a little leery to install such a low-level tool, but it's been around for quite some ((Though, since this is the first Intel release, I may still wait a version or two.)) time and I've not heard many bad things about it. Do you use AppleJack? How has your experience been?

I opened Keychain Access a few days ago and was surprised that I had "875 items." Really? 875 items? Can't I get rid of some of these?

So I sorted by "Date Modified" and deleted a few keychain items I hadn't used in years. I noticed, though, that these "old" items were interspersed with keychain items that were old but in daily use. They simply hadn't been modified in years. Given this, I couldn't safely select everything from 2003 and delete them - I'd have to pick my way through a good portion of my 875 items to weed out the items I truly no longer use. Search can help (as it did for "freshsquee"), but only if you know what you're looking for. In the case of old keychain items, you've usually forgotten that they exist to begin with.

Keychain Access would be much more useful if it stored a "Last Accessed" date. I could sort by this date, see which keychain items I'd truly not used since 2003, and delete them en masse. I might even confidently delete items from 2004 and 2005!

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 377); »

The Steelers have played solid football three times this year. Is it any wonder they've won those three games? They've dominated nearly every game they've lost as well, but when you're -11 in the turnover differential, it often doesn't matter how good your team is. With a -11 differential, you can be a top-10 team in defense and offense and still be 2-6.

Now they're 3-6 and, with one more loss, are out of the playoffs. If any team in the NFL is capable of running the table, it's the Steelers. But running the table is not an easy thing to do by any stretch, and with a coach with one eye on his retirement to North Carolina and his other eye on his Super Bowl ring, I don't know that the motivation or preparedness is going to be there to do it.

I updated the DNS records for nslog.com over eight days ago. Everyone quickly came to the new IP address. Everyone except OpenDNS customers, that is. OpenDNS has not yet updated. I didn't notice until I got a few emails from people asking why NSLog(); was 404ing on them.

I logged in to the old server to put up a page telling folks that OpenDNS may be slow. If you want to temporarily change your DNS servers (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220), you can see the message.

I didn't think anyone actually used OpenDNS, but at least a few of my readers apparently do.

I'm trying the Democracy WordPress polling plugin and this is the first poll I've created:

{democracy:1}

Feel free to elaborate in the comments.

Occasionally, I'll download several movies from one location. I did so recently in grabbing a bunch of TextMate screencasts and a bunch of Wii videos from IGN's Wii site. Sometimes I'll keep a video, sometimes I'll throw it away when I'm done watching it.

This process would be rather simple if the proxy icon in QuickTime Player (QTP) actually worked. Instead, I watch a movie, drag its proxy icon to the trash, watch the trash highlight ((Actually it darkens, but you know what I mean - it "selects" or "activates.")), I drop, and… nothing happens. The movie should be placed into the trash. I could do trash the movies I didn't want to keep and close the windows of the ones I did (or move them out of my downloads folder), I could easily load the trash up with movies I wanted to delete and close the windows to movies I wanted to keep.

Do QTP (v7.1.3) proxy icons work for anyone else? BBEdit allowed me to put files in the trash via this method. TextMate, TextEdit, CSSEdit, and a few other Cocoa ((This distinction may be the dividing line, as QuickTime Player now links against Cocoa and behaves like a Cocoa app, including the use of aliases in drop locations via proxy icons, just like TextEdit.)) applications did not. Perhaps this is the expected behavior for?

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 751); »

Brad and I are looking for an icon developer who isn't busy to do some icons for "Iris," an application I've mentioned a few times here. Adam Betts is busy (though I've sent another plea to him). Eugen Buzuk is busy. My personal favorite, Julia Nikolaeva, is also busy.

More below…

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 305); »

I'm attempting to help a friend with an Apache/PHP issue. In her shared server's local account, she has the PECL HTTP "http.so" shared library. She'd like to load the module for use in a PHP page or two. She has no access to httpd.conf or other configuration files and the .so is located at an odd path, say, /usr/home/friend/pecl_http-1.3.3/modules/http.so.

Does this need to be loaded - and can it be - via .htaccess directives? Or is this not an Apache issue at all, but a PHP issue?

If anyone can provide some help, that would be great. Some quick Google searches turned up nothing this morning, and now I have a few hours of work on another project, so I won't get back to this until this evening. Perhaps someone will answer by then.

Every so often, I read yet another comment on yet another blog about how TextMate is so great. So I download it again and launch it again. I configure some of the settings (hey, it has Preferences now!). I've done this a few times now (and a search for "TextMate" on this site will confirm this).

Recently I conducted another of these experiments. I got so far as trying to modify one of the files in the theme I use on this site. I typed a line or two, uploaded the changes, and realized I'd edited the wrong file. I hit cmd-Z to undo and… yeah. TextMate users know what I found. Undo only "undoes" one character at a time.

Into the trash TextMate went again.

For those TextMate users in the audience, why do you use TextMate? For those BBEdit users, why have you stuck with BBEdit?