Category Archives: general

bitbucket

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I finally got around to a) updating my old WordPress-installation (after finding out spam-bots had already created custom folders on my installation) and b) uploading all my public code to bitbucket (as Mercurial repositories).
That includes my wavelet image compression library, its Mac OS X previewing GUI as well as WowPlot (including some fairly decent Objective-C WoWCombatLog.txt parsing). I converted most of those repositories from darcs (which in the case of my wavelet lib took about 3h to convert from darcs1 to darcs2 format), but on first glance they look alright.

Joe Abercrombie – Best Served Cold

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It’s as enjoyable as the “First Law” trilogy; he stills has that fascination for broken / crippled characters (but as every reviewer mentioned them it’s only natural he sticks to what’s been working) — and unsurprisingly this book is quite similar to his others.
2/3rds of the book along, there is some sort of plot twist (which is presented in a nifty fashion) but seems to have no basis in the motivation of the characters (i.e. they seem to act contrarian to their interior motivations only to serve the slight twist that has some repercussions later on).
Anyway, don’t let that stop you, it’s still a rather gory and dirty fantasy romp. The overall world / setting is one I quite enjoy, especially the background with the Valint & Balk vs the prophet and his eaters.

Solid-State Drives and You

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While solid-state drives (SSDs) seem to be all the rage in net-/laptops at the moment, most of their advantages (mostly negligible access times) also make sense for a desktop system, whereas their disadvantages (price / small size) are not as constricting as you can have multiple physical discs in a desktop system.
I’ve bought a 64GB SLC SSD drive in a 3.5″ SATA version for my Mac Pro and use it solely as an OS and applications drive, while my home-directory (where the bulk of my data obviously sits) is still on a normal, spacious hard-drive. The speed-up (in spite of Mac OS X’s already quite fast boot / application start-up times) is very noticeable.
The OS migration from the HDD to the SDD was very painless. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything but my username’s home directory, rebooted from the SSD, logged in as the user with administration privileges (which your everyday user account shouldn’t have) and changed the home-directory for my non-admin user (under System Preferences – Accounts – Right-Click on the account – Advanced Options – Home Directory).
Almost all applications (baring Xcode) cold-start approximately half-way through the first Dock-icon bounce and World of Warcraft flies with this setup. 🙂
If I didn’t need more than 64GB total space on my MacBook Pro, I’d also fit it with such an SSD drive without hesitation. But as it is, I need more space. Alas, when the next laptop is on the horizon I can definitely see myself shelling out for an SSD upgrade. Maybe mainboards should come with something like 64GB of on-board flash for use as operating system and application drive…

Apple’s MobileMe and timed-out IMAP servers

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As I was trying to clear out the folders of the mailing lists I’m subscribed to on my mail account (Apple’s MobileMe, née .Mac), I ran into a bit of a problem: I couldn’t delete any messages from some of the folders; it always failed with a timeout error from the server. These folders were usually quite populated (e.g. ~19,000 messages from cocoa-dev). After contacting support chat, and trying many things both in Mail.app as well as MobileMe’s web-app, my case got escalated.
As it turns out, nested IMAP folders are the culprit! It doesn’t matter if the folders in question are at the top-level, just having any nested folders in the account seems to trigger the “slow path” that leads to the problem.
Now my folder structure is a mess with oddly prefixed folder names, but at least it’s flat, and I can work with my emails again.

TL;DR version: Don’t nest folders on MobileMe’s IMAP servers, stick to a flat hierarchy.

Announcing WowPlot

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WowPlot is a graphical analysis tool for World of Warcraft® combat logs (compatible only with the new combat log format introduced in version 2.4). Its main focus lies in evaluating time-dependant combat performance in a very free-form fashion, which is in contrast to the mainly statistical approach of other tools.
WowPlot Example Layout
WowPlot requires Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) and is a Universal application.