My XBox 360 has been locking up on occasion.

And my hot water tank appears to have sprung a leak.

Bah.

Oh and complete unrelated (because I’m not using the unsupported network backup feature, not at all, whatever gave you that idea) netatalk on debian doesn’t work with Leopard, as Leopard is picky about the authentication.

I’m sitting here waiting for my preload of Half-Life Episode 2 and Portal to complete. (BTW as I’ve been a sucker and bought the Orange box, that means I’ll shortly have HL2 and HL2 Episode 1 codes to give away, so if anyone want them let me know). I’ve managed to wangle my way onto a workshop in Edinburgh in Mid November. In other sort of work stuff, my boss has said that he doesn’t mind me getting an Apple as a work laptop, which is great except what do I do with this iBook? And do I wait for Leopard?

Though I have discovered why Apple is adding widescreen displays to everything – it so that there’s enough room for all the little menu items – when Firefox is the active application there’s only room for 1 more icon and that’s only because I turned off displaying the bluetooth status.

Now one of the cool features of TextMate is that it installs an InputManager that allows you to open the text in editable text areas in other applications in TextMate for editing, however this only really work with Cocoa applications – native Mac OS X applications typically – so it works in Safari but not Firefox (Though Safari might be out of luck in the near future if the rumours turn out to be true). As I prefer Firefox to Safari, the next question to ask is there a Cocoa version of Firefox that would work? Well yes there is, 2 actually – Camino and the alpha release of Firefox 3; however neither worked properly for me.

So, thwarted in that angle of attack, the next avenue to explore is “Is it possible to simulate this behaviour in Firefox”, and indeed it is : Mozex is an addon for firefox that allows you to use external programs for various actions in Firefox – editing text areas being one, simply enter the path to the TextMate command line binary and set a key combination.

I’ve also added the GetBundle and the MediaWiki bundles to TextMate – the first to make it easier to add the second.

1. You can’t create on the fly playlists.
2. Too many things to do in sequence – connect Ipod, start IpodDisk, Start Firefly.

While googling for an answer to the first I found a partial answer to the second :

Do Something When is a bit of software that makes it easy to start applications when drives are mounted. I’ve set it up to start IpodDisk when my ipod is connected to my iBook, removing the need to go searching in my Apps folder for IpodDisk, Firefly has an icon in the status bar so is less of a hassle to start.
I’ve also set up DSW to start up SuperDuper! whenever I mount the backup directory over the network – I have occasional pangs of guilt about how infrequently I backup the laptop.

I suspect that if I poked into Automator and Applescript, these would have been fairly trivial to do myself, but DSW wraps it up in a convenient package.

I’m still looking for ways to satisfy my first gripe, all the solutions I found basically involved streaming the shared tracks onto the local disk and playing them from there. This may be the only way to do it, but it bothers me in some undefinable fashion – it just seems wrong, its entirely possible to make random interactive selections, so why isn’t it possible to queue these selections up?

I started initially looking at mt-daapd but didn’t immediately see any dmg packages for Mac OS X and I didn’t want to install Fink – the documented way to do it, so I looked around for alternatives and found Tangerine however it required Mono which caused sufficent load to make using my iBook painful.

Further googling lead to the Nighty mt-daapd build page which does have dmg packages. Installing the latest release at the time (Firefly-svn-1450) worked perfectly after I changed the path to the Artists directory of my Ipod disk. Another benefit to FireFly over Tangerine is a Status icon to turn it on and off.

As soon as you’ve understood the procedure for one upgrade a superceding upgrade will come out.

As soon as you’ve finished an extended downtime for one of your critical systems for which any downtime is frowned upon, a software update will come out for it.