Josiah’s Thoughts

Perhaps I’m just easily confused, but I found the following application behavior somewhat bewildering:

I use Growl for notifications on my MacBook and I was trying to change the appearance of the notification bubbles, so I went to the Growl preference pane and selected “Display Options”

I clicked “Smoke” in the left hand listbox, closed the preference pane and went back about my business. Up popped a notification and it had my old style still applied.

“That’s strange…” I returned to the preference pane and re-selected “Smoke.” Again, the next notification bore my old style.

Turns out I should have probably looked at the front page of the Growl preference pane more carefully before I just switched over to the “Display Options” tab. There is a “Display Style” drop down box on that page. However, I believe this whole thing is a bit inconsistent – to allow someone to select a style in a preference pane and then not have that style applied doesn’t quite make sense.

Someone correct me if I’m wrong?

Let me count the ways:
- No POP, or much less, IMAP (HA!) access
- Horrible interface, which makes the above even more insufferable
- A check for new email requires a page reload, wow.
- The obviously bored site admins who are too busy rearranging the widgets on the front page to oh, I don’t know, maintain any sort of uptime?

I literally laughed out loud when I stumbled upon the option to have CampusCruiser pull down email from another account.

“Oh, yes! Please! Take my searchable, AJAX-y, fast, always-up email and tie it down in a hard-to-get to box with no search capabilities, horrible contact management and an interface straight out of the early 90s!”

You’re probably wondering why I’m continuing to make use of this threat to my sanity. The answer is, of course, that my college uses it to host the official college email accounts. So, I’m forced to use this wretched thing until I can move on to a (hopefully) better school.

At the moment I’m waiting for some code to be emailed to me which I have to edit and turn in by a deadline, that deadline is currently less than an hour and twenty minutes away and I have yet to see said email. Good times.

Also, I’m trying to find a new theme for this site, I really like the theme applied to Pure Danger Tech, I’d like to find something very similar or even the exact same one.

Blogged with Flock

I upgraded to build 9106, which seems to have a few interesting issues of itself, but is free of the annoying mediabar-stuck-open issue!

I enjoy testing software, I promise. =)

As of 8:15PM EST the latest test builds of Flock have been significantly weird. (The photobar/mediabar at the bottom of the browser is stuck open with attempts to close it failing at all angles.)

Just gonna have to wait for another build or two I guess?

EDIT: As of build 9096 this is still an issue, I have filed it as bug #6382. /EDIT

For what it’s worth, if anyone is interested and reading this, I’m running OS X 10.4.8 Intel on a MacBook Core Duo 2.0GHZ with 2GB of RAM.

Also of note, I cleaned my desk today!

Before and after shots in this flickr set.

There’s been a “five things you probably don’t know about me” meme going around the net, and especially/specifically at blogs.msdn.com – I’m subscribed to the main feed from there (Hundreds of bloggers all pouring into a single feed generate a lot more content than I can keep up with! But I enjoy trying. ) and I have seen that post so many times.
It’s kind of interesting to be able to watch things like that develop and spread, something I’ve definitely been able to do.

Just a random observation.

Found out this evening that I have been accepted to the computer science school at NC State, not sure where I’m going to end up going yet.

Those are my gReader trends – I haven’t subscribed to any new feeds recently, notice how much of a traffic spike there has been from CES and MacWorld? And I still have a few hundred items to finish reading!

The number one thing I’m curious about at the moment is: “Will Apple update Front Row to keep the user interface consistent with the interface on the Apple TV device?”

If you looked at the pictures you will see that the interface is presented in a somewhat similar manner to what we are used to with Front Row, but with a significantly different appearance. (Darker, more blues, etc.)

Personally, I think this would be a great look for Front Row and I hope Apple updates accordingly. To me it just doesn’t make that much sense that Apple (and, more specifically, the perfectionist Steve Jobs) would ship two similar products with such varying UIs.

Just going to have to wait and see on this one, I guess!

This seems to happen to me a lot.

I was reading Stroustrup and working through some code examples last night. Aound 2AM I hit a bit of a brick wall – couldn’t figure out how to get the map<> function to work properly. After a while hitting this from all sides, looking in the index, trying random things, etc.

After awhile I decided to just go ahead and get some sleep – this is of course when I turned the page and discovered, right there in black and white, that I needed to #include <map> in order to use it. Doy.

I obviously have much to learn – but that would be why I’m taking the class.

Anyways, that discovery prompted a new drive of coding, the project moved forward, and I had it working around 3AM, when I did finally go get some rest.

Argh! I wrote a post praising Flock, then tried to edit it using the same browser, and it totally deleted the original and failed to post the edit!

Way to lose a little cred!

Also way to lose my praise, because I’m too lazy to type it all out again. (Hey, I’m a programmer, it’s in the blood.)

I’m definitely becoming addicted to Flock – feel free to go get it, it’s got a lot of great features, which I’ll let their site tell you about!

EDIT:

A few reasons WHY I’m addicted to Flock:

• Great extensions, lots of functionality I use on a daily basis built right into the browser (Blogging client, toolbars for various services, and the lovely Flickr integration, to name a few.)
• The interface -  find it simply beautiful, and very functional. There’s also something about the way Flock displays fonts that I like very much.

The only real complaint I have thus far about the browser is the boxy-looking controls on some pages, rather than the nice rounded ones you get in Safari, but there may be a fix for this?

/EDIT