Bear Den Designs

Rick Wright 1943-2008

I was actually listening to David Gilmour’s first solo record when i read that yesterday Richard Wright died. I’m sad to hear it. He was working on a new album, so I would guess he didn’t want to go yet. I’ve been a Pink Floyd fan since i was young and it’s unfortunate to lose another one of them.

los tomates han regresado( plus ff3 throwdown )

Although there were not any reports of salmonella glazed tomatoes in Florida, I was unable to get any on a sandwich the last few days. Today they have returned and have thus helped me order an exponentially tastier sandwich. I would like to personally thank whoever it was that decided to wash their hands after rolling in pig excrement and raw chickens and before touching these particular tomatoes. Sadly, I may never get the chance…

I looked through the mozilla site and there are no Firefox 3 release parties listed in the entire state of Florida. Disappointing. Admittedly, it’s only disappointing because i want to go to a FF3 party and pretend it’s a Final Fantasy 3 party. I’ll come in costume, Materia in hand. Yes I’m talking about the american version(FFVI, technically).

Trying things

I gave Sinatra a go this week. I first tried it out while breaking off part of a rails app that wanted to go off on it’s own. Sinatra wasn’t the right thing for that. Not into rewriting controllers and views for this.

I’ve nearly decided to use it to redo one of my sites, however, so we will see. The other possibility i am considering is using Ramaze. I think it might be that Ramaze looks like it has better documentation and seems to have a decent size community. It also might be because i like saying, “RA-MA-ZE!!!” Not quite sure yet. I’ll post my recount of the processes and a description of the aftermath here.

I’ve also been toying around with Textmate. Im not quite sure if it is exactly what I’m looking for. I know. I’m developing on a mac and NOT USING TEXTMATE?? How can this be?? I guess I’ve just never minded that the free IDEs I use are, well, free. Using Netbeans has been mostly painless (6.1- not so sure yet) and i like practicing my vi when it’s not so painless.

So… found a situation where I am not crazy about using Netbeans and vi would take me longer than a gui to do what is needed. I’m going to give TM the trial month and see if it is really worth the $80. Yes I know there are half off coupons floating around most of the time.

Also, I won a Macbook Air at Railsconf. Anyone want to buy it?

Macbook Air 1.8Gb Intel Core 2 Duo, 2Gb RAM, 64GB Solid State Drive

This thing retails $3098.00+tax. Ill sell this one Sealed in box for 3000. Saves you about 315 dollars.

Email me if interested.

Back

I am back from New York, settled in, and back to work. I had lots of fun in and out of the city.

some highlights:

eating and drinking at Gabrielle’s in rockville center
karaoke at J.Paul’s in oceanside
awesome falafel and kebabs at Pete’s Pitaria in Island Park
knishwich and belhaven at last chance cheese in hunter
saw snow for the first time


Snowboarding Windham mountain
exhibits @ New York Historical Society, nyc
ridiculously overpriced sandwiches at Katz’s deli

Genghis Tron @ the knitting factory, nyc

Exhibits @ MONH, nyc
Irish bar hopping in manhattan

That was fun; now back to survey creation.

Get Spaces and Netbeans working together

So Netbeans released 6.0.1 and Apple released Leopard 10.5.2 update yesterday. Good news yes? Unfortunately Apple’s Spaces still is not going to recognize Netbeans or apparently a number of Java5 apps.

After a bit of googling, it seems the fix is involved with a missing key in Netbeans’ Info.plist file that Spaces looks for in order to identify available applications. Time to change it.

First thing is getting permissions changed so you can edit.

Now vim (or whatever editor-name-as-action-verb you want to use) Info.plist and add these lines.

  
<key>CFBundleIdentifier</key>
<string>org.netbeans</string>

Mac also has a Property List Editor that handles tags for you. Show package contents from the Netbeans icon and open Contents > Info.plist, select Root and click “add child.” Once you have done that, just type in the key and string in the fields provided.

Alright, now you can go to spaces and add Netbeans. Instead of the Netbeans icon you will see “Unknown Application” in the Spaces window. Fun. You can Check Info.plist again if you want; the CFBundleIconFile key is there and calling netbeans.icns for you. even better, Netbeans still only works properly part of the time. wtfdwts?

I noticed when i ran the Leopard 10.5.2 update and before i installed Netbeans 6.0.1, I saw the Netbeans icon in Spaces and things worked properly. 6.0.1 got installed… broken again. so I did the Info.plist fix again and we’re back to the “Unknown application.” I moved the whole netbeans folder out of applications and deleted its association in Spaces, then moved it back and it all worked.

Too much buck for too little bang? Maybe. For me, it was enough of an annoyance to fix. Oh and if you want to be able to reliably ⌘-tab to a java app that is in another space, it can be done as well. Open up a second window in the app and it will work for some reason that I don’t claim to understand.

My ⌘-tab solution in Netbeans is to keep the find/replace dialoog box open. Because i have that up most of the time anyway and it counts as a second window, it is a fix( read: hack ) I can live with.

Ok well hopefully Apple can get this thing solved by the time I need to upgrade my Macbook Pro to Leopard. I suppose that could be a little while since I cant upgrade that one to Leopard until ProTools LE can run on it. The HD version only supports 10.5.1 and that was just announced yesterday. This begs the question – Why am I running Digidesign products on a Mac anyway? Time to get Logic Studio I think.

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