The first day of Apple’s WWDC has been a momentous occasion for many Apple enthusiasts (read: rabid fanboi). There is a newness in the air, the night before is a mixture of anticipation and wonder, will we get any work done between 10am and noon tomorrow? Will there be a new X released? What is the limit on my credit card right now? The question is hopefully yes to all of these questions, and the man in the horn-rimmed glasses and turtle neck will make us believe that it’s going to be great! Read more…
Early yesterday, just before lunch … I had one of those technologically sad moments. My precious iPhone 3G while holding her making a call … seemed different, especially near the back. Much to my dismay, what I discovered was a crack that goes from the USB connector up through to the “Designed by Apple” text. The phone, still worked, so I called AppleCare to find out what the deal was. After several minutes on the phone, we both figured out that a trip to the Apple Store to visit the support staff was the next best option.
I went to the local store, there are 4 in a 15 mile radius of the house, flashed my Apple ProCare badge and got seen within 5 minutes by a specialist. After looking at the phone for a while, and reading his special PDF documents explaining procedure, he said it wasn’t covered under the Apple Warranty, and that it was considered “damage”. Damage? I have never dropped this phone, it has stayed in a case for most of it’s waking life, and I’m being told that the hardware warranty doesn’t cover a flimsy back on the phone?
What seems to be of interest here to me, is that the crack probably started from the USB connector and gradually got larger. I haven’t noticed it until recently, because it’s always been “in the case”. Another possible troublesome issue, is the phone wouldn’t sync a few months ago, so I took it in to Apple, and the associate took a screwdriver and cleaned out the USB portion (could that have done it?).
I do hope they release a new phone next week, because I really don’t feel like shelling out $199 unless I’m getting something “extra” for it.
Here at Mystic, we’ve been using an install of TWiki 4 for more than 18 months. We’ve also started to heavily use more of the features available in the product, and became increasingly frustrated with the apparent lack of community as of late. We get a lot of support from folks on IRC, and while some questions were answered, it was essentially a one-man show. The tubes must have been listening, because right about the time I was ready to abandon all hope, I received a twitter follow from @Foswiki.
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It would seem that Sun^HOracle is actually able to think outside the box a bit. The latest way they’re trying to get folks to learn JavaFX, is by a new online interactive game called PIE Theory. The idea is that you follow along with our two heroes, and help them unlock clues based on performing some tasks using JavaFX syntax? and generally learning more about the language. Read more…
Humans love shiny. And there’s nothing more shiny to a programmer than a brand new version of a tool used every day. Here at Mystic we use IRC as our primary mode of communication and project collaboration, and several of us have chosen Weechat. Recently we wrote about receiving irc notifications from Weechat over ssh, and the plugin written was for the current stable version of Weechat 0.2.6. The development version of Weechat is a complete rewrite, and breaks plugin compatibility. If we rewrote growl-net-notify.pl for this new version, the choice was to manage two separate source files, or find some way to make one work for both. I chose the latter method because programmers as I’ve always said, are smart lazy people, we’ll do whatever we can to automate something.
Our initial plugin for IDEA that talked to MysticPaste.com was fairly simple, offered no feedback to the user that anything happened. I spent some time trying to find out a method of achieving unobtrusive notification that the paste was successful. On initial glance at the API, nothing jumped out except for Messages, and StatusBar.
From the beginning of building out Mystic Paste, the vision was to have multiple interfaces to allow ubiquitous use of the pastebin. With the variety of plugins we’ve got out now including Eclipse, IDEA, VIM, and NetBeans, that vision is definitely here. If you reached this link looking for the plugin, look no further, the plugin page has downloads for multiple IDE platforms.
