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	<title>Tom Gidden &#187; OS-X</title>
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	<link>http://gidden.net/tom</link>
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		<title>Space Honker v.0.1 for Mac</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2011/01/17/space-honker/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2011/01/17/space-honker/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Jan 2011 21:46:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Programming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cocoa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[honk]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mac]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[osx]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[punctuation]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/?p=157</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[On Thursday, Farhad Manjoo of Slate vented his spleen about those of us who use two spaces after their full stops, a.k.a. "periods". This seems to have triggered a minor kerfuffle, though not for the first time. While I disagree with a few of his points, the premise is sound. Unfortunately I, like many others, have double-spacing ingrained.  This app might help.

Manjoo's argument seems to ramble a bit. It's allegedly a holdover from monospaced typewriters, but the width of two spaces in a monospaced font is much more significant than under in a proportionally-spaced font.  Eh?
He also claims that "Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s" and "we've all switched to modern fonts" [my emphasis]. Well, sorry, but we haven't all switched to modern fonts, as I think many programmers, screenplay writers and lawyers will attest. I use monospaced fonts every day, and I read and write all email in the wonderful Monaco typeface that comes with every single Mac.
His argument has been picked up by others, both pro- and con-. I will let them argue it.
Enough of a rant from me, though. As I said, I do agree with the overall premise, but how to switch? Habits are hard to break. Rigging up some sort of taser seems excessive, but an obnoxious noise should do the trick.
The result is Space Honker, version 0.1 (build 0002). This is a small app for Mac OS X which sits in your menu bar and watches what you type. As soon as you type a dot (or an exclamation mark, or a question mark, or a colon, or a semicolon, or a comma) followed by two spaces, it should make an irritating noise. Just to rub it in a bit more, it'll update a counter to tell you how many grievous sins against typography you've made.
It will only trigger if you hit the keys in order, so if you type the full stop and then mess about somewhere else in the sentence and then return and type the spaces, it will not trigger.
It's the product of about two hours' work, so by no means the best piece of code I've ever written (to the point that I'm not releasing the source publicly for fear of embarrassment) but it might work.
Feel free to download it and try it, but at your own risk: I haven't put anything that I know to be nasty or malicious in it, but you never know. Oh, and if it fails to pick up a sentence and you get marked down for bad punctuation, that's also Not My Problem.
Please let me know how you get on with it. Next up: something to cure me of my unhealthy dependence on the ellipsis…
The Methodology
If you're a programmer, you might want to check the method I'm using:  it uses NSEvent's addGlobalMonitorForEventsMatchingMask:handler: to listen to all keyDown events in the system. On keyDown, it checks to see if it has a known unichar for the incoming keyCode, stored in two unichar[65536] arrays: one for shifted, one for unshifted. If not, it uses [event characters] to get the unichar for the key, and if it's reasonable, it'll store the result. Otherwise, it'll mark that array entry as -1, ie. no match. By caching values, it reduces the amount of NSString lookups that would otherwise occur on every single keypress.
If it finds a chain of one of the specific punctuation marks, followed by two spaces, it'll honk.
Anyway, if you're a competent Cocoa programmer and you want to take the code off my hands and clear it up, buzz me. Otherwise, best of luck.
The sound effect is by Stickinthemud, and came via Freesound, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License. Thanks!
Incidentally, Space Honker triggered 16 times in the process of writing this post. Heh.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>MySQL and PDO on OS X Leopard, Intel</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2008/06/30/mysql-and-pdo-on-os-x-leopard-intel/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2008/06/30/mysql-and-pdo-on-os-x-leopard-intel/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:35:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apache]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dbd::mysql]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dbi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[leopard]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mac-OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pdo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pdo_mysql]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[perl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[php]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[universal]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/?p=53</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[(NOTE: Make sure you read the comments for this post, as there's a better way to get around the 64-bit/32-bit problem without having to compile things. --Tom)

I don't know if I'm missing something big, but getting Perl, Apache, PHP, PDO and MySQL to play nice on my Mac OS X 10.5 install on my Intel Core 2 Duo (Penryn) MacBook Pro hasn't been easy.  This is partly thanks to Apache being compiled with x86_64 support, and Perl with i386 only.
Anyway, Googling about, I notice that others have tried this arrangement with varying degrees of success.  The easy answer is to install something like MAMP or replace the Apache and PHP installation with a custom build.
However, I prefer to keep my installation as stock as possible, and I'm not a huge fan of proprietary packaging systems like MacPorts and Fink.  Don't get me wrong: those systems do what they're meant to do, and as a long-time FreeBSD user, I appreciate the approach.  However, they don't fit into the Mac mindset too well, plus I'm too lazy to keep them up-to-date.
In other words, I want Apple to do it all for me, via Software Update where possible.  The aim is to keep the stock Apache, PHP and Perl in place, and just add stuff.
The 10.5.3 Apache install does include PDO, but it's fairly crippled: the only drivers are the SQLite ones, even though standard "mysql" support is included.  So, "pdo_mysql" will need to be installed... no problem: just install it as a module.  But which architecture?
Since 10.5.3 Apache is compiled for i386 and x86_64, it'll run by default as 64-bit, requiring the 64-bit MySQL client libraries.
However, the included 10.5.3 Perl build is compiled only for i386, so if you want to build DBD::mysql for Perl as well, you'll need 32-bit MySQL client libraries.
The MySQL 5.1 official Leopard binary isn't currently a universal build, so right now if you download a binary distribution, you have to pick either 32-bit i386, or 64-bit x86_64.  This will knacker either PHP/PDO (64-bit) or Perl/DBI (32-bit)  So, assuming we don't want to replace -- or otherwise mess with -- the stock Apache, Perl and PHP, recompiling MySQL seems the way to go: we need to build a fat MySQL with both architectures.
To do this, download the MySQL source (I'm using 5.1.25), unzip and compile with something like:

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5 \
CFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc7400 -arch ppc64' \
LDFLAGS='-O3 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc7400 -arch ppc64' \
CXXFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc7400 -arch ppc64' \
./configure \
'--disable-dependency-tracking' \
'--prefix=/usr/local/mysql' \
'--localstatedir=/usr/local/mysql/data' \
'--libexecdir=/usr/local/mysql/bin' \
'--with-comment=MySQL Community Server (GPL)' \
'--enable-thread-safe-client' \
'--enable-local-infile' \
'--with-big-tables'

make

sudo make install

You'll then probably want to do something like:

sudo -s

cd /usr/local

export MYSQL_VERSION=mysql-`mysql/bin/mysql_config --version`-osx10.5-universal

mv mysql $MYSQL_VERSION

ln -s $MYSQL_VERSION mysql

chown -R _mysql:staff $MYSQL_VERSION

cd mysql

ln -s share/mysql support-files

ln -s var data

bin/mysql_install_db --user=_mysql

I'm not sure whether this is the right procedure, but it works for me.  A lot of this will change depending on your requirements and circumstances, so don't blame me if it kills your pets.
Next up is to install the PDO_mysql module.  This is easy. Firstly, download the PHP source.  As of Mac OS X 10.5.3, the current PHP is 5.2.5, but I downloaded 5.2.6 and it seemed fine.  Unzip it, and go into the distribution directory (ie. php-5.2.6)
Then:

cd ext/pdo_mysql

phpize

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5 \
CFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc7400 -arch ppc64' \
LDFLAGS='-O3 -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc7400 -arch ppc64' \
CXXFLAGS='-O3 -fno-common -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -arch ppc7400 -arch ppc64' \
./configure --prefix=/usr --with-pdo-mysql=/usr/local/mysql

make

sudo make install

You might need to add the following line to /etc/php.ini (creating that file, if necessary):

extension=pdo_mysql.so

Then, restart Apache and you should have a working PDO_mysql driver.
Installing DBD::mysql for the stock Perl is a different matter.  If you just do a CPAN install, then the multiple -arch tags that the mysql_config from your new Universal build of MySQL will return are going to foul it up.  So instead, you can just build DBD::mysql for i386, as Perl is going to be running in 32-bit mode anyway.
There are probably better, easier ways of doing this, but I resorted to just doing a manual DBD::mysql build, stating the flags by hand:

perl Makefile.PL \
 --cflags="-I/usr/local/mysql/include/mysql -Os -arch i386 -fno-common" \
 --libs="-L/usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql -lmysqlclient -lz -lm"

make

sudo make install
]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>32</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>EyeTV 3</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2008/01/16/eyetv-3/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2008/01/16/eyetv-3/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:51:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Reviews]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apple]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elgato]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elgato-EyeTV]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[EyeTV]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[EyeTV-3]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mac]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OS-X]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2008/01/16/eyetv-3/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I've been a dedicated user of EyeTV for almost two years, to the point that I no longer watch TV on the big screen in the living room.  Instead, I watch almost exclusively on my iBook.  Back in May 2006, I wrote a post about EyeTV 2.2 and its shortcomings.  Today, Elgato have released EyeTV 3.

I haven't posted on my blog for a few months now, as my spare time has been tied up on a super-secret project involving Flash (well, Flex), Papervision3D, Box2D and what for me is some really heavy duty math.  However, after what I found to be a particularly disappointing MWSF 2008 keynote, I noticed EyeTV 3 appear, and I must say, it's worth a mention.  Slamming down &#163;30 was a no-brainer... far more palatable than the &#163;60 they charged for the EyeTV 1 to 2 upgrade.
I also noticed while writing this review that Elgato's 404 page gives out a 10% discount code... Nifty.  Only wish I'd found it a couple of hours ago.
In short, there are things I still don't like about EyeTV, and things I haven't really tried yet.  On the other hand, there are a few features in V.3 that make up for all of that.  In fact, a good chunk of the wishlist in my previous post is now done:

"Smart Playlists" and "Smart Recording Schedules".  I can now set up automated record lists based on complex criteria.
A smarter search engine.  Done.  They've got a full set of criteria there, with an all/any system.
Tuner and recording sharing over Bonjour.  Shared Libraries appear on the sidebar, and the system seems to work well.  I can easily watch recordings on my Mac Mini from my Laptop with little or no delay.  It even works when EyeTV.app isn't running on the serving machine, thanks to a background daemon.  Of course, it'd be far nicer if both machines' tuners could be fully and automatically scheduled and controlled from a single interface, but hey, you can't have everything.

While they've given EyeTV a patchy makeover and added some other minor features, these three alone justify the upgrade for me.
Unfortunately, the other features on my wishlist don't seem to be there yet.  PDC, in particular, would be nice.  Apparently, the Freeview Playback standard supports something similar to PDC, but I see no evidence of it in EyeTV.  This really would have come in handy a couple of days ago, as the popular and eagerly-awaited new Louis Theroux documentary started 15 minutes late thanks to a bunch of fat "sportsmen" throwing darts about.
The other one I'd still really like is a "close" button on the pop-up controller.  It's still far too enthusiastic, popping up at the slightest provocation, and assuming any accidental keypress is a request to change channel randomly.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
	
		<series:name><![CDATA[Elgato EyeTV reviews]]></series:name>
	</item>
		<item>
		<title>iPhoto, Flickr and EXIF munging using Perl</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/12/27/iphoto-flickr-exif-munging/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/12/27/iphoto-flickr-exif-munging/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Dec 2006 18:21:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[albumdata.xml]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apple]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cocoa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[exif]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flickr]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flickr::api]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[geocoding]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[geotag]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[geotagging]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[iphoto]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[iptc]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mac]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mac::iphoto]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[metadata]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[perl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PerlObjCBridge]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[picasa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[scripting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[xmp]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2006/12/27/iphoto-flickr-exif-munging/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[EXIF/IPTC/XMP tagging of GPS coordinates, folksonomy tags, and other goodness is a nice idea, but unfortunately, iPhoto and Flickr don't play too well together.  Couple this with the fact that any decent support those products now have is not included for photos already imported into them.  So, here are some notes resulting from some experimentation, along with the Perl code I wrote along the way.

(Note: for the rest of this post, I'll refer to all metadata stored in the image file itself such as EXIF, IPTC, XMP, etc. as "EXIF" data.  This isn't strictly correct.  However, using the term "metadata" could be confused with such data held in other files, such as iPhoto's own database.)
For Christmas, my dad bought my mum a decent photo printer: the Canon PIXMA iP5200R.  Very nice piece of kit, with good printouts, and most importantly, easy setup, with no CUPS and Windows -v- Mac issues.  Anyway, as an upshot of this, my dad wants some of my photos for building a Picasa library for her to print stuff from.  Specifically, the photos from the Caribbean holiday we had earlier in the year.
I've been playing with Picasa a bit, and I must say I love it.  It's what iPhoto should be.  It's a good deal faster for a start.  That's comparing my iBook G4 1GHz against my mum's Compaq Deskpro Pentium III 733MHz, which is a few years older.  Secondly, it doesn't use a horrible non-scalable monolithic database like iPhoto does.  Thirdly, it seems to deal with metadata a bit more sensibly.
On the downside, neither iPhoto or Picasa handle collaboration functions very well.  Both have publishing functions, and iPhoto has a read-only "sharing" function, but I mean the true sharing of photo libraries.  My mum and dad have separate computers, but they share a camera, so it would be incredibly useful to have a shared photo library which either could use.  On this count, Picasa wins slightly, because although it has no true sharing ability, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with two copies of Picasa working on the same directory on a shared drive.  I'm not sure how it would handle conflicts though, due to the lack of locking.  For now, I'll advise my parents not to run it at the same time.
I usually manage all of my photos in iPhoto.  However, due to the lack of decent keywording and other metadata in iPhoto, I ended up adding a lot of metadata in Flickr instead.  As a result, my iPhoto library is woefully out-of-date with my Flickr library, even though it's far more complete as I only upload a subset of my photos to Flickr.  I specifically want to extract Flickr tags back into the files themselves, and ideally rip the Geotagging information I added within Flickr.
While iPhoto is drastically improved by Keyword Assistant, it doesn't store the keywords (read: tags) in EXIF form, but in its own database.  During this investigation I discovered that iPhoto does import keywords from EXIF, and also Geotagging info.  The fact that it doesn't manage EXIF is a fairly annoying flaw, and one that I hope they'll be fixing.  I've heard that Microsoft Vista now does sensible things with EXIF.  iPhoto is, quite frankly, falling far behind other solutions at this point, and I hope next month will bring a new iLife with an improved iPhoto.
So, I had a good look around the 'net for some utilities to try to clear up this mess.  I've had a play with things like Cal Henderson's Flickr::API and Dmytro Kovalov's Mac::iPhoto before, and they're not particularly mature.  Incidentally, Mac::iPhoto also seems currently broken.
Others have attempted using Applescripts.  The ones I found around the 'net are far too slow to cope with the ~8000 photo collection I have.  This is probably due to the sucky design and/or implementation of Apple Events in MacOS.
Instead, I've had a play with PerlObjCBridge, or whatever Apple's calling it.  In Perl, it's "use Foundation;".  This gives access to the Cocoa API within OS X, which I figure is probably the fastest way to manipulate Property Lists.  Since iPhoto stores at least a backup of the database in XML form (specifically Property List form) as "AlbumData.xml", we can use this to cross-reference the data.
The most critical link between my Flickr and iPhoto collection is missing.  This would be a link between each individual photo and its alter ego in the two different collections.  Since filenames aren't necessarily complete or preserved by either iPhoto or Flickr, this is relatively difficult to establish.
I've found that a reasonably good connection is between image creation time/dates.  By matching the EXIF timestamp data within the file stored by iPhoto with the EXIF data extracted from Flickr, you can get a reasonably good correlation.  At this point, it would be a nice idea to shove the Flickr URL for the image into the local EXIF data and get iPhoto to read it.  From then on, there would be an established link.
Well, I got about as far as adding the URL, tags and geocoding to the image, but I gave up when it came to getting iPhoto to read it.  There is a relatively obscure "rebuild" function in iPhoto, triggered by holding down Cmd and Opt while starting iPhoto.  This allows rebuilding of thumbnails and the binary databases (presumably) from the XML.  Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to reread the images for new metadata.  I think this would require actual modification of the AlbumData.xml file to work, which sounds like a far bigger job.
In the meantime, this proves that such a script is feasible, albeit painful.  At the moment, this is a run-once script, so it's not much use for regular usage.
SOURCE CODE:  I am supplying this code freely with the understanding that there is no warranty or guarantee.  Also, I'll go as far as to say that incorrect usage could quite easily delete your photos, destroy your Flickr account, upset Flickr, and kill your pets.  DO NOT USE THIS CODE UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND IT COMPLETELY AND ARE WILLING TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANYTHING GOING WRONG.  For more details, read the README file.
The most recent version can be obtained from my Subversion repository: iphoto_flickr_exif_munge/.
I also apologise for the quality of some of the code.  It's far more experimental than I'd usually want to release, but I think it might be of use to someone like me in a similar situation.  Rather than just throwing it into the depths of my hard drive and forgetting it, I figure it's probably worth blogging.
My conclusion to all of this is that I really need to get my iBook replaced with something good enough to run Aperture or Lightroom, and then reimport the whole bloody lot.  Painful, to say the least.  I'm also hoping that Google get around to writing Picasa for the Mac.  I think I'd prefer it in the long term.]]></description>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Mac Flight Tracker widget timezone bug</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/10/mac-flight-tracker-timezones/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/10/mac-flight-tracker-timezones/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Aug 2006 20:54:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apple]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bdt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bst]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bug]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dashboard]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flight-tracker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[flighttracker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[javascript]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mac]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mac-OS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mac-OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MacOS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[nsdate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[osx]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[os_x]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tiger]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[timezone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[widget]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/10/mac-flight-tracker-timezones/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Flight Tracker dashboard widget that comes with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) seems to have a fairly major bug.  However, this bug seems to be the result of something quite obscure to do with timezones, and it only seems to manifest itself in the UK during the summer.

I've noticed this problem a few times:  specifically whenever any one of my close friends or family members flies anywhere.  This time, my mother is on her way back from San Diego to Bristol via Newark.  Thanks to the incredibly annoying terrorist attack attempt today, my dad and I were understandably concerned about flight delays, so I pulled up the Flight Tracker.  Unfortunately, the information seems completely wrong.
Turns out, the minutes are right but the hours don't relate to any of the relevant timezones.
Anyway, a little background.  Here in the UK, we have two main time scenarios:  firstly GMT, which is for all intents and purposes, UTC.  We also use BST:  "British Summer Time" which is UTC+1h, and kicks in for archaic agrarian reasons and the "Think of the children!" brigade who are convinced it'll stop traffic accidents.
While the rest of OS X seems okay and correctly uses BST, Apple's Mail.app has always strangely listed incoming mail as being sent relative to "BDT", which comes out as "British Daylight Time", which is fairly meaningless as there's no such thing.  The times are correct, but they just have the wrong abbreviation afterwards.  On researching it, this seems to be the result of bad data from the Unicode people which might have made its way into NSDate.  Anyway, it's usually just a cosmetic thing, and of little or no consequence.
I believe, however, that it's the cause of the Flight Tracker widget's problems.  To test this, I altered the widget to display the timezone, by replacing the bit in FlightTracker.js, in function formatDateForDisplay() that says
var timeStr = date.toLocaleTimeString("short");
with
var timeStr = date.toLocaleTimeString("long");
This reveals that the times are supposedly in "BDT".  I believe this might be the problem.  I think something is reinterpreting this as "Brazilian Daylight Time", which would explain the weird offsets.  I think JavascriptCore or something is referring to the same bad data as Mail.app, probably via NSDate.  I'm not a Safari hacker, and I haven't really investigated that far, so I'm not sure where the problem is.
Looking a bit deeper into FlightTracker.js, I'm not really surprised there's a problem.  The timezone calculation code is fairly messy, with comments such as:
// We're going to be stupid and hard coded about parsing the server provided date strings for now
// ??? for some reason parseInt returns 0 on this but parsefloat works ???
and
// here we do proper handling of the timezone offsets.
// We enter everything in pretending it's UTC time
// and then we convert it to miliseconds since 1970,
// add the timezone offset in miliseconds to it
// and then set this as the new UTC time
There seems to be some string hacking going on at several places to decode the data sent from FlyteComm.  The original data is reasonably well structured, with the timezone offsets being given correctly as -0700 and +0100, which presumably indicate that the times are given as local times of the departure/arrival locations, as per normal for the airline industry.
I'm not completely sure what's going on, as I'm not really set up to debug someone else's widget, especially one with weird custom controls, and barely any code comments.  It's obvious to me that the widget isn't particularly well written, and is one of those things that "just works".  It was probably hacked up for fun by a Dashboard developer, and then fasttracked to the nearest Steve Jobs keynote rehearsal.  As Steve Jobs's Dashboard demos tend to be done at MWSF and WWDC, I doubt this problem has ever really been seen at Apple.  I bet if it was a problem with Pacific Daylight Time being misinterpreted, it'd be fixed immediately!  I've done a little bit of googling, and it looks like the BDT bug has already been submitted to Apple (several times), and it's still there.
When I get a chance, I may try to debug this one further, and perhaps rewrite FlightTracker's timezone code properly using the correct offsets rather than performing nasty magic using getLocaleTimeString().
What I would prefer is that the timezone of each time is given next to the time.  Ideally, they should toggle-on-click or slowly fade between local times (to the flight) and local times to the machine, and possibly relative times ("1 hour ago", "in 53 minutes", etc.)  That would make the tool a lot more intuitive anyway.  I'd rather not reinvent the whole widget, as in all other ways, the widget's really not too bad.]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/10/mac-flight-tracker-timezones/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>18</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>X11 Colors list for Mac OS X</title>
		<link>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/04/x11-color-list-for-macosx/</link>
		<comments>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/04/x11-color-list-for-macosx/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Aug 2006 21:29:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Tom Gidden</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Techie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[clr]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[colors]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[colours]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mac]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mac-OS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mac-OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MacOS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[NSColorList]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[OS-X]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[osx]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palette]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PerlObjCBridge]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rgb]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[x11]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[x11-colors]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[x11-colours]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/04/x11-color-list-for-macosx/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A friend of mine is a recent newbie Mac user, after finally succumbing to the shiny white lure of the MacBook.  As an expert Unix user, he was missing the old X11 colours list, because he can't have his terminal set up with a horrible shade of puce without having to work out the RGB values for it.

Christopher Holland has already created an OS X color list for the Resene color list which is allegedly used on many X11 windowing systems, but to be honest, I haven't encountered it before.  I last used an SGI in about 1997, and I must confess I never looked at the color selector.  It also didn't seem to include the specific wretched tincture my friend wanted.
So, rather than taking the easy route and just picking the closest match from the Apple crayons, we had to grep /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb.txt instead.
To eliminate the possibility of this nightmare operation having to be done again when he finally comes to his senses and picks a normal color, I hacked together a quick bit of code to create a .clr file.
Just use the "Open..." doodah in any colour selector in Mac OS X.  It should automatically copy the file into your user's Library/Colors.]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://gidden.net/tom/2006/08/04/x11-color-list-for-macosx/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

