Due to an internship in Canada, I might not post on this blog as often as I liked. I already let it without any posts while we were fully in the exams period, but I’ll try to resume a normal activity as soon as I come back.
Update: as I’m probably going to learn and work on Ruby on Rails, I might blog about it. We’ll see!
As a school project, we recently finished Photocard, a Java application for Linux that allows you to design postcards (‘we’ as in a couple of other students & me).
Basically, Photocard listens to /media/ for an USB key, lets you chose a blueprint for your card (that might contain text and pictures), then drag and drop pictures into that blueprint, retouch them, and print your card (actually save it to /tmp/).
This is not a commercial-grade product, of course, and there are a lot of details I would have changed and improved, given some more time. For example, rotating pictures is choppy, luminosity and contrast aren’t well defined, the notification system is botched, the XML parser seems way too complicated for what it does, the user interface could be improved… And we used the MVC pattern as good as we can, but I don’t think we respect it fully.
However, it works! I’m pretty proud we managed to get it done on time. And some bits of it are really cool and pushed me to think about OO concepts in depth (anonymous classes & reflection in particular).
The project itself might be useful to someone out there, so we released it on Sourceforge under the GPL. All the comments (and the application itself) are in French, though.
Have fun!
My usual habit (some would call it an intermittent OCD, but meh) of sorting and organizing files and folders to a great extend and my almost as severe relentless longing for optimisation recently met in an existential question: is it possible to colour files in the Finder through a keyboard shortcut?
OS X lets you add colours -or “labels”– to a file by right-click or in the Finder’s File menu. GUI are cool, but get in the way of efficiency once you know your keyboard inside and out.
Well, after some research, it seems that such a shortcut does not exist. You can’t even create a shortcut the usual way, as the “Label” menu point stands for all labels. (I’ll eventually describe the usual method in this blog!)
The simplest way to implement such a feature was to create a set of AppleScripts that colour files that are currently selected, and launch them via the most amazing QuickSilver. Or Alfred. Or even Spotlight.
The AppleScripts look like that:
property file_color : 5 -- replace '5' above with the number for the color you'd like to use: -- 0=none, 1=orange, 2=red, 3=yellow, 4=blue, 5=purple, 6=green, 7=grey tell application "Finder" activate set items_ to selection repeat with item_ in items_ try set label index of item_ to file_color on error e display dialog e end try end repeat end tell
This is the purple one. Therefore, I called it scp_SetColourPurple.scpt and dropped it off somewhere QuickSilver indexes – proceed this way for each colour you want to add.
All it takes now to colour a set of files is to select them in the Finder, type in Ctrl+Space (to summon QuickSilver) and the three letters to your colour of choice – scp to set the coulour to purple, scr to set colour to red, scy to set colour to yellow…
(Full disclosure: the above code was originally found somewhere on the internet, I can’t find where right now. If I find the link again, or if someone can point it to me, I’ll give props to the original author.)
Seitunes v1 is here! I think everything I need it to do is in here. I’m not planning on adding new features in the near future – if anything, I’ll concentrate on optimizing performance.
Seitunes is a command-line interface for iTunes.
It allows you to see what’s playing in iTunes and control it (play, pause, set volume, toggle shuffle, select a playlist, set song rating) from your terminal.
I finally decided to split the program in two separate parts.
libseitunes.(c|h) is a C API to access iTunes through Applescript calls. It is also under GPL.
Seitunes.(c|h) is the higher-level part of the application, which is now completely Applescript-free.
Support for rating (display and modification).
Playlists: Seitunes now displays the playlist currently playing. You can also see all available playlists, and select the one you want to play (with ‘/’).
A bug caused Seitunes to think iTunes was completely stopped (hence not displaying data about artist and song) if you went to next track whilst playback was paused. iTunes actually reports such a condition as “stopped”, so I added some code to handle this case (it basically checks if there is a “current track”, and if so, displays the data).
Seitunes is now on GitHub!
I’ve stumbled upon this very interesting blog post by Eric Sink, classifying software into three big categories: ThemWare (someone writes software, only other people use it), MeWare (someone write software, only he uses it) and UsWare (someone writes software, he uses it and other people do so).
I have currently no idea if anyone else uses Seitunes, or even downloaded it once to see. If you do use it, I’d be delighted to hear from you!
In response to my blog post about the issue affecting arrows under OS X 10.6.3, Jonathan Groll pointed out that copying the ncurses libraries from an old 10.6.2 install would fix the problems. It works, but manipulating libraries in that way still feels a bit wrong to me.
And that’s without even mentioning the security implications of getting these libraries from “somewhere on the internet” if you don’t have them laying around anymore.
Instead, let’s fix an Open Source system in the way Open Source is supposed to work: grab the sources and recompile!
Apple provides the sources for the insides of OS X on opensource.apple.com. Considering ncurses-31 (the 10.6.3 version) is buggy, we’ll download a tarball of ncurses-27 (the 10.6.2 version) from Apple right there: ncurses-27.tar.gz.
Step 1: compile.
mbp:ncurses-27 florent$ make
Step 2: install.
mbp:ncurses-27 florent$ sudo make install Password: TargetConfig: MacOSX cd /tmp/ncurses/Build && CFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc -g -Os -pipe -isysroot /" CCFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc -g -Os -pipe " CXXFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc -g -Os -pipe " LDFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -arch ppc " /tmp/ncurses/Sources/ncurses/configure \ --prefix=/usr --disable-dependency-tracking --disable-mixed-case \ --with-shared --without-normal --without-debug --enable-termcap --enable-widec --with-abi-version=5.4 --without-cxx-binding --without-cxx --mandir=/usr/share/man /bin/sh: line 0: cd: /tmp/ncurses/Build: No such file or directory make: *** [install] Error 1
Oookay, by default this Makefile tries to install ncurses into /tmp/ncurses and complains because the directory doesn’t exist. Why not. There has to be an option to change that when calling make, but I went for the fastest choice:
mbp:ncurses-27 florent$ mkdir /tmp/ncurses/Build mbp:ncurses-27 florent$ sudo make install
And wait for the magic to happen. It’s quite long (and verbose) actually, don’t worry if it takes a few minutes.
Once this was finished, I launched sudo update_dyld_shared_cache and ran some tests: no luck, ncurses still behaved badly.
Then I noticed the “make install” output seemed to show ncurses-27 was actually installed (great!)… In /tmp/ncurses (not so great).
I don’t fully understand how OS X deals with these source tarballs. However, I noticed that /tmp/ncurses/Build contains a Makefile. It looks like what’s installed in /tmp/ncurses is merely an intermediary build that you can then install:
mbp:ncurses-27 florent$ cd /tmp/ncurses/Build/ mbp:Build florent$ make mbp:Build florent$ sudo make install
I then ran sudo update_dyld_shared_cache again. This time, it prompted:
update_dyld_shared_cache[62767] current i386 cache file invalid because /usr/lib/libncurses.5.4.dylib has changed update_dyld_shared_cache[62767] current x86_64 cache file invalid because /usr/lib/libncurses.5.4.dylib has changed
Which is good, because it shows we actually changed the compiled version of ncurses (libncurses.5.4)
I finally ran the tests again: ncurses now works like a charm!