3/4/2008 - ...Well, Maybe More Like Hibernation

It's really hard to stay away. :) I've got a new blog over at http://darkwyrm-haiku.blogspot.com. I won't be updating it every two weeks like I used to for this site, but I should be updating it from time to time. Haiku and BeOS, but not just that -- other stuff, too. Who knows? I might even have something newsworthy for other sites now and then. :D

10/13/2007 - Moving Back from WordPress and Shutting Down

As always with computers, WordPress wasn't all that it was cracked up to be, so I moved back, but only for one last post. "What do you mean," you ask? I'm moving on. No more Haiku for me. Not because someone did something wrong or I'm fed up with the community or anything. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just like in my last post about my primary OS, I just can't bring myself to care enough anymore to want to do anything. Anymore it seems like I've got things in Real Life that I want to do more than build sand castles with my shovel and pail with the other boys. It's been a lot of fun and I've met many great people. You could say that I'm pulling a Rudolf Cornelissen and discovering that Real Life is more fun than many people think.

I still have quite a few loose ends to tie up that I'll be doing gradually, like the Haiku store and such, but I'll be tying them off in a proper way. When I get a chance, I'll be starting a project over at OSDrawer for Capital Be, which will be open sourced under the MIT license, and probably posting a binary on BeBits so people know what it can do. It's not feature complete and probably has some bugs, but it should work better than anything else out there right now. This site, as I've said before, isn't going anywhere, and a heartfelt thank you goes out to Claus for providing me free hosting here all these years. I'll still be checking my e-mail, but I will be unsubscribing from most of the mailing lists.

I personally can't wait to see Haiku released and use it as a user. I may even someday help do some design work for R2, but I'm making no guarantees about it. Haiku has an opportunity to succeed where every other operating system has failed. I will be lurking, but no more involved than I have to be. I wish you all good luck... it's been fun, everyone.

10/1/2007 - Between a Rock and a Hard Software Place and DRM Horrors

I’m in a no-win situation when it comes to OSes. I can’t get any real work done with Zeta / R5. Haiku is pre-alpha. Windows is, well, Windows. Linux -- even Ubuntu -- is a combination of a pain in the rear that’s good at wasting my time. After fighting with getting Samba shares for the umpteenth time, I gave Linux the official heave-ho, or at least for quite some time, anyway. XP Pro, while owned by Redmond and by association bad, ugly, and evil, has become my path of least resistance. At least I’m more than a little familiar with problems with Windows and the accompanying workarounds. I also have simple access to IE for those complete <add optional expletives> morons (like the Wal-Mart MP3 download service) who insist that you use Windows + Internet Exploiter. Can you tell I’m a more than a little salty about that particular annoyance? ;-) I feel almost like a traitor, but I’m too tired and too busy to care anymore. My motivator is broken. Meh.

In my annual reinstall of XP, I discovered yet another unpleasantry for people who are can’t stand DRM. For those of you who haven’t heard of Universal Music Groups giveaway of its music at Spiralfrog.com , they are giving people free music from major artists, like will.i.am, Sarah McLachlan, and even what seems like the entire collection of Rush. You subscribe to their service (which is free) and download away. But there’s a catch, as there always seems to be. More than one in this case. First, even with a "remember me" option checked, you still have to log in to download files any time you start a new browser session and enter in a captcha. On top of that, you have to click a button to download each and every song file. To make matters worse, encrypted WMA files (so no iPod or even Zune joy) are the file format du jour there and Windows Media Player 11 is required to play them. I can’t even use Quinntessential Player. Ick. The download manager isn’t exactly stable, either. I also discovered today that if you forget to renew your subscription each month, all of the music that you’ve downloaded is suddenly unplayable. The piece de resistance, however, is the DRM itself. WMP11 won’t let you back up your licenses, but it will let you download them as you play an encrypted song. That is, if the service will let you. Ha ha. Guess what? I tried after reinstalling Windows and SpiralFrog popped up a nice "Oops!" and said that I have no choice but to download the song again. Yep, that’s right! The almost 300 songs that I’ve downloaded to my computer (and spent hours in the process) are the digital equivalent of coasters and paper weights. Thanks, guys, but free isn’t good enough this time.

9/25/2007 - LOLCatz @ ICanHasCheezBurger Ru13z

Well, so much for 133t speak. As is my style, I’m not normally one to recommend websites from my own blog much. I figure most of us have better things to do than to hear me say how something was cool -- it cuts down on the signal-to-noise ratio that way. However, I have to mention another WordPress blog that I stumbled upon: I Can Has Cheezburger. It’s just a site where people upload goofy pictures of cats and someone puts oddball captions in them. Sounds dumb, I know, but then again, I’ve never been much of a storyteller. I looked through all of them yesterday afternoon and I laughed until I cried. That happens only very rarely, so if you’re a cat person like me (they are better, y’know), head on over there. Definitely worth at least a quick browse.

9/20/2007 - Moving to WordPress

After a long time, I've decided to move all my regular blogging to http://darkwyrm.wordpress.com. This site will still remain. Handcoding this site is just too much bother for what little time I have anymore and I want to still do it, so I've gone to more manageable means. See you there!

9/15/2007 - PR and the Joys of Being a Sysadmin

At school I'm the sysadmin for about 30 machines, including the Ubuntu server and a few Macs, and the networking setup from Hades. I just finished spending 3 months of taking about 10 of them, upgrading them to Vista, discovering that our brand new machines are slow running it and won't connect to our wireless network, downgrading them to XP, and then rolling out a new computer lab.

The network ACTUALLY WORKS RELIABLY now, too, which is saying a _lot_. My school is in a church which, because of how it was built, is well-known for draining cell phones because of all the interference and inability to get a signal. The church's wireless network covers only about half the building. Between a non-computer-type firewall between the two wings, ubiquitous fluorescent lighting, an HVAC room on the main floor, and tons of walls, it is next to impossible to have a wifi network of any kind, let alone a reliable one which spans the entire building, which was my job to set up. Every PC in the school needs to have access to a box that runs a Jabber server and Samba. Amazingly, it was harder to use a couple of Linksys WRT54GLs and wds than it was to toss a second wifi card in the server, cover each half of the building with a network, place the server where they overlap, and put the server on both. No more mysterious dropouts. I've been working on this problem for four years now. A massive sigh of relief.

Now life can get back to abnormal. Doing PR for Haiku has been pretty fun, but between keeping up with some personal problems and all this computer stuff for work, it's been hard to find time to do any of it. I've been keeping in touch with Koki, who has been quite helpful and active. Life's changing really fast right now.

9/1/2007 - School's In

That sure was fast -- the last two weeks, as usual, have been a blur. I finished downgrading all of the computers in the classrooms to XP. Finally! That's a big weight off my shoulders. Norton Ghost is invaluable -- the machine I made the snapshot took a couple of hours to put together. Creating and uploading the snapshot to a USB 2.0 hard drive took about 25 minutes, IIRC. Time to build a machine from the image? 15 minutes, including boot time. Simply amazing. There is some big Haiku news coming, but nothing I can mention yet.

8/18/2007 - Summer's End

Yep. It's that time again. The week the teachers go back to get ready for the school year starts Monday. For the first time in the years since I started learning to code for BeOS, this one is the first that I can remember NOT spending writing code. Oddly enough, I haven't really missed it. I've even changed my primary OS because of it. I'm typing this from GEdit in Ubuntu. I still keep Windows around for Quicken, Print Shop (for school), and a couple other minor apps, but I'm much more productive. I've used OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, Firefox, Inkscape, and other open source apps for practically forever, so the leap wasn't all that big. I'm even experimenting with some of the audio apps that I'll probably be using for making recordings for school. GNOME's keyboard break timer -- yes, I'm a frothing GNOME zealot, at least where Linux is concerned -- is _so_ much better than the quick-and-dirty one I wrote for my own use under BeOS. I'm also free from the increasingly frustrating, maddening, insanity-causing app-level bugs in Zeta. That in itself is a huge sigh of relief. This not to say, however, that Ubuntu is bug-free, either, but all the ones I've found are documented. I'm even experimenting with it on my laptop for school, which is saying a lot.

I haven't abandoned Haiku, however. I played with Mandriva on a spare machine for a while last week to experiment with Metisse, the (not)3D environment that inspired my 3D Desktop RFC on the Haiku site, I came to a couple of conclusions:

1. Mandriva's construction-orange desktop is really hard on the eyes
2. Metisse is by no means stable enough for day-to-day use
3. The vision I have written in my two RFCs (Tracker revisions and 3D desktop) is really the way to go

I also have an interesting bit of news for all of you, as well. I mentioned earlier this summer upgrading all of the computers at school to Vista. Thanks to Micro$oft's downgrade option, I'm now downgrading all of the new machines to XP and heaving a sigh of relief. I hate Vista. Passionately. It sucks too much for how much it costs, it's too hard to use, and it's *slow*. Even on the brand-new machines that have 2GB of RAM and an Athlon 64 3000+. My boss has even commented on that. Now all I have to do is convince her to try Linux. That'd be the day. :)

8/3/2007 - Reinventing Myself

I guess it's about time that I change my role in Haiku again. This time? Advocate. For some odd reason, code sounds more like work right now than fun. *Shrug* Not really a big deal -- it's about time that more people got involved, especially some more (active) developers. I know it's not true, but it feels like R1 is just as far away now as it was this time last year. I've already had some input with the FalterCon organizers, and I'm glad to see that something good has come of last months disaster. Korli checked in a work-in-progress driver for the Ensoniq ES1370/1371. It doesn't work very well yet, but I managed to track down some specs for him. That driver will be really handy -- sound in QEMU and VMWare, which will make for some much nicer demos. I've got some great leads for next year's WalterCon locationm, too. It's good to be actively doing something for Haiku again.

7/24/2007 - ...Or Not

Bleah. I'm still bummed about it all. No WalterCon this year, and after more than a little work on it all, too. Not that it matters -- I wouldn't have been able to go anyway because of a scheduling problem. I'm trying to not let it ruin the last bit of my vacation with my folks. Even though I'm away from my development box at home, I haven't been just twiddling my thumbs. I'm learning more about drivers, actually. It doesn't seem to be nearly as hard as I used to think it was -- it's just a different kind of programming than writing apps. It's also shown me the value of having good documentation.

I'm also brainstorming for next year's WalterCon so that the kind of goofy stuff that happened this time around won't happen again, or at least if I have anything to say about it. The session that I was going to speak on -- Haiku advocacy -- will just come out gradually, rather than all at once.

7/10/2007 - San Francisco Here I Come!

Well, WalterCon 2007 has been announced. We have a location, and everything is in full swing. Scary thing is that it's a month from Thursday. I've got the go-ahead to start registrations, but the website is not cooperating, which I am NOT happy about. I asked Koki (who did is kindly helping me on the problem and the issue will be fixed ASAP. In other news, Capital Be is making progress, little by little. The real showstopper on it has been the Budget Variance report, which has been a major pain to code. It's still not there, but, as I said before, it's making progress. With all the other stuff I have going on, I hope to have it all done by the end of summer.

6/24/2007 - Of Tweaks and Trout

It's been quiet around here the last couple of weeks, primarily because I've been working on Real Life projects which have been put off for far too long. I spent some time working on LibWalter to get it closer to a real release, but coding just hasn't been of primary importance. I desperately want to give Windows XP the boot, but because Linux's WINE doesn't run Quicken 2004 (I checked the app database), I can't... yet. Ubuntu's a great distro for power users who don't mind tweaking their system some and want to get away from Windows. I've also been asked to do a lot of the organizing for WalterCon 2007. No details until the official announcement, but it's taken quite a bit of my time the last several days.

My old optical Logitech wheel mouse wore out, too. "So what?" you ask? In getting a new one, I discovered yet _another_ Zeta bug. This new mouse is particularly twitchy using the old speed / acceleration settings I used to use. It works pretty well if I move the slider all the way to the left in Preferences, but upon reboot, it goes back to the original settings. How nice. Plonking an adapter onto it and connecting via PS/2 doesn't fix it either. When I get it resolved, I'll post the fix. I look at upgrading to Zeta like I would for upgrading to Vista -- given a choice, the previous version is better.

6/10/2007 - Recibe 1.0 Beta 1 Released!

Here is yet another item on my to-do list now checked off. Originally, this was going to be commercial software, but I just don't have the time for the requisite extras needed for such an endeavor, so this recipe manager for BeOS has been released under the MIT license, like almost all of my other projects. If you collect recipes like my wife does and have certain recipes that you use a lot but seem to lose track of, this will definitely be helpful for you. 50,000+ recipes are bundled in with it, so you are not only getting free software, but good eats, as well. Just don't come complaining to me about weight gain. :P

6/10/2007 - R2 Tracker RFC

School let out last Friday. Good thing, too. Last week was so busy I couldn't tell whether I was coming or going half the time. Now that I'm officially on summer break, I've already begun tying up loose ends and finishing projects that are still undone like I said I would at the end of May. I've got too many going on -- real life and otherwise -- so I'm finishing work I've started so that I can feel less overextended. One of those projects is an RFC for changes to Tracker for R2. Combined with the 3D Desktop RFC I did some time ago, I think that R2 could easily be better than any other desktop out there, bar none. You can go here to view it.

5/29/2007 - Burnout and Vista

Bleah. I'm fighting for motivation to do anything computer-related. That means it's time I tie up a bunch of loose end projects. This should shake itself out once school is out at the end of next week. I spent the weekend playing around with Vista Home Premium. I don't see what the big deal is -- it's pretty, but not compelling. Too many usability regressions which cancel out the improvements. I went back to XP. Wish I had some good news, but nothing special ATM. Until then, readers. :)

5/14/2007 - Misadventures in Zeta-sitting

$ rantmode on
I spent this afternoon twiddling and tweaking again, and once again I am left with a bad taste in my mouth. yT moved a commonly-used function, find_directory(), out of libbe into their own special library, libzeta. The only problem with this is that any program which uses it just fine in R5 has to have its own separate case just for Zeta. There may have been a good reason for it, but I have doubts. As of this moment, I couldn't build the Haiku tree with it, either, and I'm not exactly sure why. Too many "fluff" system tweaks and not enough substantial ones, like moving the development tools to an arbitrary place in the filesystem or changing Tracker to show /boot/beos as /boot/zeta or the silly requirement for toolbars in all Zeta apps. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the hardware support is really nice, but for a hardcore BeOS user like myself, it leaves a lot to be desired. Man, I miss Max Edition.

On the up side, I grabbed Haiku's BeMail and compiled it for Zeta and added the spam filtering capabilities. Why this was left out, I'm not sure I want to know, but I certainly did miss it. If I get a chance, I'll probably put together a SoftwareValet package so others can benefit, too.

$ exit

5/7/2007 - Zeta Tips & Tweaks, Part I: Feeling Spicy?

After being asked to share what I'm doing to tweak the system, I thought I'd start with something that is almost an extension of my own body: SpicyKeys. For those unfamiliar, SpicyKeys is a system add-on which allows you to customize keyboard shortcuts to do different things. Zeta comes with its own in the Keyboard Preferences called Shortcuts, which is more-or-less a bundled version of it. Click on the New button, hit the keyboard shortcut that you want, and then right click on the Action to choose whatever you want the shortcut to do. Alternatively, you can doubleclick on the action and type in your action directly. Why is this useful? These are some of mine. BTW, I use Ctrl + Windows + <key> because the Windows key by itself is needed on the US keymap to access special characters, such as the British pound sign and the upside-down exclamation point used in Spanish. Anyhow, here are some examples:

Shortcut	Action	Comments
Ctrl + Win + P	launch Mr. Peeps!	An address book is handy to have at a keypress :)
Ctrl + Win + H	launch BeHappy	Very nice to have while programming
Ctrl + Win + F	Firefox
Volume Up	/bin/volume increase 5	Control the software volume from the keyboard :D
Volume Down	/bin/volume decrease 5
Ctrl + Win + E	StyledEdit
Ctrl + Win + Kpd 6	*MoveMouse +20 +0	Move the cursor right 20 pixels
Ctrl + Win + Kpd 4	*MoveMouse -20 +0	Move the cursor left 20 pixels
Ctrl + Win + Kpd 8	*MoveMouse +0 -20	Move the cursor up 20 pixels
Ctrl + Win + Kpd 2	*MoveMouse +0 +20	Move the cursor down 20 pixels
Ctrl + Win + Kpd 5	*MouseButton 1	Send a left mouse click

As you can see, most of these are for launching various apps. /bin/volume is a command-line program used to change the system volume. You may also notice that I've mapped the numeric keypad buttons. If you have some kind of problem with your mouse (I've had more than a few over the years), being able to use the keypad to get around is a major help. I also have Ctrl + Win + Shift for the keypad the same way, but instead of 20, I use 3 for fine adjustments. While it does take a few minutes to set up, you will get much more back if you can launch commonly-used programs and it also helps remove much of the clutter from your desktop. You also suddenly have no need for Zeta's hackish QuickLaunch bar.

4/27/2007 - The Plunge into Zeta

I just got a brand-spanking-new AMD64 development machine. I *love* this thing. As I write this, I'm waiting on a sizable transfer from my old development box. I did plenty of hardware research, but ran into one snag: the hard drive is too big. Unfortunately, the ATA drivers under R5 apparently have some issues with not being able to do 48-bit addressing. So much for a 260GB data partition to share with Window$. :( I have a legitimate (if such can be possible, given the legal disputes) copy of Zeta, so I decided I didn't have much choice -- Window$ (*shudder*), Ubuntu (Ick.), or Zeta (*sigh*).

While I have in the past kept my thoughts about Zeta to myself, I can safely say that I have a mixed opinion. The hardware support (USB 2.0, printing, no 1GB RAM limit, etc) is *so* nice. The new apps that yT spawned (the jury's still out on MakeMe) stink. Even in 1.21, they are buggy and it's painfully obvious that the guys responsible for the interfaces on those apps (TimeZLiner, one-size-fits-all Preferences, *shudder* InfoPopper, etc.) don't have much clue about usability. BeOS is all about the experience, which definitely has its downsides in this case, but is overall positive because I simply tossed those apps out.

In order to get a reasonably nice experience similar to what I had under Max Edition 3.1, I've had to do some tweaking. Make that a _lot_ of tweaking. While I have no problem with using jam and the Terminal for Haiku development, my preferred development environment is BeIDE, even with its quirks. Despite some of the outright goofy changes, some copying and such makes BeIDE work again. Much to my displeasure, FatTracker can't be removed without breaking a lot of stuff because of the Open/Save panel. Don't get me wrong, the SVG icons are nice, but they put on a noticeable speed hit because of the extra block reads. For some bizarre reason, the stock Tracker add-on MailMarker (from the optional sources) doesn't even work when compiled. SpicyKeys crashes the input_server on shutdown. The APM driver wasn't included in with the OS for some stupid reason.

I'm going to also see if I can rip InfoPopper out. That thing is an unadulterated feature copy of some Windows manure that should never have been implemented in the first place. I still keep wondering which Window$ "feature" I hate more: the draconian licensing and business practices or the constant annoyances of the UI, from "Are you sure?" to the moronic balloon messages. YellowTab copied this and so now I am greeted by "Connecting to network" on every boot. I could not possibly care less that it's trying to connect to the network. Bug me only if something fails. Eh, I've ranted enough for now about that. I feel better now. Thanks for listening. More interesting news later. :)

4/13/2007 - Desperately Seeking USB

Pardon me, but I'm having a little trouble putting together a coherent thought ATM -- I had major dental work earlier today and the anesthetic has made me a little loopy as a nice side effect. ;-) I finally finished the draft work on my next Haiku R2 RFC which details changes for OpenTracker. Seeker development has been resumed in an effort to make sure that we all won't have to wait until R2 is released to see some of the results. The newer version works nicely (even in its development state) and is reminiscent of the column-based file browser found in NeXTStep and OS X.

I spent a fair amount of time twiddling with Haiku's USB stack yesterday and using it to replace R5's. It's not perfect, but for the first time my wife and I can use our flash drives in R5. She and I use them all the time for taking files to and from school, so this is wildly convenient. At the same time, my Olympus D-370 digital camera (mass storage driver) doesn't work right with copies or deletes, so there's definitely room for improvement.

3/31/2007 - Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut, Sometimes You Don't

More and more I'm noticing that my desire to work on something is often outvoted by my lack of time to add something else to the mix. In the last two weeks, I've managed to touch on most of my different official projects along with little experimental stuff I've toyed with sometimes in addition to the motherload of work I have in real life right now.

Scripture Guide, which has been sadly collecting dust the last year or two, got some much-needed retooling. While there is no release to speak of (and probably won't for a while), the sources in the CVS tree are much better than before and the book manager has ditched wget in favor of libcurl. The GUI for the manager looks and works much better and the upside of ditching wget as a downloader is that now there is a visible progress meter in the log window, so you can actually tell whether or not it's twiddling its thumbs waiting for Crosswire's slow ftp server. If anyone is interested in a quick build of the new sources, let me know and I'll see if I can find a moment to throw a package together of the development build.

I spent a little time hacking on Capital Be's sources in hopes that I could get the budget report code finished. Some progress, but not much. I'd say that between the formatting and the calculation code, this part of the code is the hardest in the app. It's also the showstopper holding up the release. *sigh*

In my comings and goings, I also twiddled around a tiny bit with yab, that Basic interpreter for BeOS that Zeta users are finding useful. The R5 version's pretty nice, and for someone to try to get their feet wet in programming, it's a good start. I doubt I'll use it much, but that's because everything I do has to be overengineered. ;-) If you asked me, I think it's pretty amazing that it has its own IDE which is written in the language. Apparently it's got some serious power under the hood, but the jury's still out on performance.

More and more I'm just loving database programming with the SQLite engine. I never really saw any usefulness in database programming until I had a need for it for storing transaction data for Capital Be. There are all sorts of uses for it, and I'm finding more as I go along. That's why my recipe manager (which I'm placing on the back burner for the moment) uses it for storing recipes. Incidentally, it's pretty much done, but there are *so* many recipes to go through and massage the formatting just to have enough to ship. I easily have 80,000 - 100,000 recipes total. I played around with the possibility of using a memory database for keeping track of people data for the development version of Mr. Peeps!, but storing the photo data is a pain and I don't yet know how to work with binary data (but I know it can be done) in a database yet.

I also spent about an hour or so this afternoon picking up some old experimental code with anti-spam techniques I did quite a while back which combined whitelisting and bayesian spam techniques with the fact that the current spammer tricks attach images. The thought is that you don't generally want to accept binary attachments from anyone you don't know. It works quite nicely, actually, but it would take some work to turn it all into good production code, and AGMS' spam server really ought to be retooled to use SQLite to get rid of the performance problems it has. Don't get me wrong -- he has done fabulous work in what it does, but the code is IMO ugly and it's slow because it just uses a big list for the database when a real database would be much faster. Oh well. :)

Yesterday and today I spent some hours working on a scheduling framework. Yeah, yeah, I know there are a bunch of apps out there on BeBits for scheduling and alarms, but they all suck. Badly. Almost all of them are closed source and abandonware, too. Mine, as usual, will be open source (if I ever manage to finish it) and is a framework, not a regular GUI app. The GUI comes later. So far, the main part is a watcher daemon of sorts which just waits for other apps to give it something to do. Nothing cluttering up the system tray -- something similar to a BeOS-native server which is similar to both cron and anacron without any bizarre config file editing. I just got done making most of the support code which handles the recurrence of events (a major pain) in just about any method I could think of and other stuff like sending events to the daemon. Now all that's left is to test and to implement most of the daemon's regular functionality.

I'm very thankful for OSDrawer.net, which is pretty much the SourceForge of the BeOS community. I added SimplyVorbis to it and eventually I will probably be adding Mr. Peeps! to it, too. The tree's sources have a few fixes over the last official release, but there is one bug I'm still working on nailing down before I do another release. I attempted a couple of patches, but they didn't work, so it's back to the drawing board until later.

With all this, you're probably wondering "Doesn't he ever do anything Haiku-related anymore?" and with good reason. Check the last post. :) Not long after the 3D Desktop RFC was done and posted, I started working on figuring out possibly the toughest task: how to improve our beloved file manager, Tracker. The thinking and research took just as long as constructing the mockups, unsurprisingly. I won't give away details, but it's getting close to being finished, so everyone will probably be seeing something about all this pretty soon.

After reading all this, you may be wondering if I sleep at all or if I'm going to have another run in with RSI. Don't worry -- I don't normally sit at the machine all day long and I take frequent breaks -- often to get my 17-month-old son out of something. :P Take care, everyone, until next time. :)

3/17/2007 - A Possible New Desktop for Haiku

I was hit by a whirlwind of inspiration after OSNews had a news article about a project called Metisse. I really got to thinking about Haiku R2 and what it should look like. A number of people want a 3D-accelerated desktop like Vista and OS X, but I don't want to just blindly copy the features of other OSes without having really good reasons. Playing with Metisse made me figure out what those reasons were and just how I think it ought to be done. The result is my newest usability article, titled, "Gimme [Eye] Candy: A Proposal for a 3D-Accelerated Haiku Desktop." [PDF here], guaranteed to generate some discussion and complete with mockups. I hope you enjoy. :)

3/8/2007 - Bugs, Snakes, and Recipes

It's been another time of mosting spinning my wheels, but not completely. That little side project I mentioned last post is a recipe manager which been working on a recipe manager program and while it's been done for a little while now and I'm currently doing day-to-day testing of the program, I'm still putting together the recipe database -- I'm starting with about 120,000 (that's right, a hundred and twenty thousand) recipes from the Internet, pulling out copyrighted ones, whittling down massive duplications to just a few, and generally making it a worthwhile tool. It's a lot of work, believe it or not. I'm redesigning the website I originally wrote for Capital Be, as this will also be a commercial venture. I hope it's worthwhile for someone besides me.

In other news, I'm working on learning a new computer language, Python. Michael Phipps would be proud -- each of us has poked fun at the other in a Perl vs Python thing over the years. Frankly, even though I like Perl for its power in regular expressions, it can be such a pain, too. Python is much cleaner and easier to read, so I'm giving it a shot. Speaking of Haiku, the Appearance app has finally made its way into the test images and after squishing a crashing bug, it actually runs. It's been difficult to test because Haiku doesn't run on my development machine ATM, but I'm working on getting that ironed out, after which I can get Appearance to actually do something besides look decent. ;-)

2/21/2007 - Spinnin' My Wheels

Wow, it sure seems like sometimes time goes really fast and you find that you really haven't done much to speak of. This would be one of those times. I'm working on a small side project which should be released Real Soon Now that I started in all those snow days that I had the last couple of weeks. Should be interesting to see how things pan with another niche filled. I won't say more now, so you'll just have to wait, I'm afraid. >:D

2/6/2007 - All Snowed In

Sort of, but not really. Ohio has been hit with a big cold snap that has closed all the schools today. Suddenly, I have some free time that I hadn't expected. Darn. ;-) I guess I'll have some time to code, which is a good thing. The last couple of weeks haven't been overly productive. I gave Tracker the usability once-over and cleaned up a few things -- mostly the Settings window -- and got a few ideas for R2. Waldemar and I have been working together more on usability issues lately, and it's good to have a partner in crime, so to speak. ;-) He and I are going to work on hitting the critical usability problems in R1 and killing bugs so there might be an R1 alpha this year. Lots of loose ends to tie up, too, so maybe I might be able to hit some of them soon.

1/20/2007 - I Got Your Usability Right Here!

Lately around here it's been all about Haiku. All the fortune files that I worked on for Fortuna found their way into the tree along with all the neato haiku that people wrote for startup. Back in December I wrote a new system daemon called the Services Daemon and forgot to mention it. It makes sure that Tracker, the Deskbar, and most of the servers are restarted automatically if they crash. Now it also does something similar to a BeUnited project called the restart_daemon -- programs can ask it to restart them, and it will relaunch the app after it quits. Another nice little feature that will make Haiku a better R5 than R5. :) ShowImage has also received the DW Usability Workout (now available on video and DVD :D ). It feels quite polished to me, if I do say so myself. I've also started development on a new resource editor, ResEdit. The current version in the tree shows resources, but doesn't edit them. The one on my hard drive, though, well.... you'll have to wait and see. ;-)

1/4/2007 - Holiday Haiku Hacking

I've been really motivated to get some Haiku coding done, and with Christmas vacation I was able to do some. The Mail Kit has seen some more tweaks and a few crashes fixed. I also finished making the GUI less technical. One of the really nice usability tweaks put in place is the change made to the Match Header filter. It will now search for whatever you type in and use regular expressions only if you specifically ask it to. I think this will lead to quite a lot fewer configuration headaches. The Printing Kit is now much easier to understand (less technical) and I'm currently testing it out in day-to-day situations. Considering that I've never had much luck with printing under BeOS, I'm keeping my hopes up on this one.

During Christmas vacation, I went on vacation to stay with relatives, but true to form, I couldn't get away from doing *something. In this case, I worked around not having access to a BeOS development machine and spent time working on the Haiku User's Guide -- something similar in nature to the BeOS Bible by PeachPit Press. It's going to be a fairly long document and will take a while, but hopefully it will turn out to be something that people find very useful in reading. :^)