Disqus - Latest Comments for schwa

Re: Converting OmniWeb Bookmarks to XBEL (for WebNoteHappy)

schwa — Tue, 30 May 2006 15:03:34 -0000

It is platform neutral. See http://pyxml.sourceforge.net/topics/xbel/

Re: Blog Updates

schwa — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 20:49:30 -0000

Thanks for the heads-up. I am redirecting the old-url so it should have worked. I'll keep a close watch on my error log from now on.

Re: Converting OmniWeb Bookmarks to XBEL (for WebNoteHappy)

schwa — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 20:50:22 -0000

Luis, the developer of WebnoteHappy is a friend of mine. We've discussed this before and am pretty sure it will be implemented soon.

Re: AquaticPrime Warning

schwa — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 00:07:57 -0000

Well AquaticPrime can be compiled directly into an application using the static library. So there is no framework to swap out and crackers are stuck with the methods I mention in the posting.

Also just returning YES for those two methods won't do anything if the application developer is being smart and also testing the reliability of those methods by calling them with bad licenses. Of course a cracker can get around that too.

Re: AquaticPrime Warning

schwa — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 02:02:07 -0000

Hi Lucas,

I'm a member of MacSB and have lurked during the previous discussions of AP. But thanks for your suggestion.

I don't think this is really a discussion of lost sales. A developer can put in a "I paid" checkbox into his app and then complain about lost sales all he likes but we are unlikely to have too much sympathy for him.

Crackers can and do jump through hoops to defeat software, I'm sure you've seen the tools that are used to defeat Adobe's software or the amusing Mac OS 9 cracks that involved using ResEdit to tweak some random resource in just the right way...

If a developer's application becomes popular it will become a target of cracks. And these patches will trickle down to end users who will become more and more accustomed to using them (see the Adobe cracks for example). AquaticPrime is terribly vulnerable to binary/runtime attacks, more so than any other scheme I have seen.

Re: AquaticPrime Warning

schwa — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 02:05:14 -0000

Zac: Pirates already have a Application Enhancer haxie whose sole purpose is patching copy protection systems...

Re: AquaticPrime Warning

schwa — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 11:06:44 -0000

Hi Allan,

The real problem with AquaticPrime is that one crack can crack all applications using AquaticPrime. Just like applications using the Kagi library. But unlike the Kagi library, AquaticPrime is trivial to crack with a runtime hack. And unfortunately the AquaticPrime documentation makes bold claims about "government level" security and other such nonsense. There is no small print mentioning the fact that the software is incredibly (more so than any other library) vulnerable to run-time hacks. It would be more open for the developer to make mention of runtime hacking and state AquaticPrimes vulnerabilities. While you and I can argue all day about the chances of casual pirates using Input Managers to crack apps it is really up to the developer to decide if this is a concern for his software. A naive software developer will look at AquaticPrime and think it is perfect and not be aware of all the facts.

Hopefully now that I've written this post the level of awareness across the board has been raised somewhat.

Re: AquaticPrime Aftermath

schwa — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 09:20:46 -0000

Because after pointing out a bug in an existing system it is now obviously my responsible to create a replacement for that system.

Re: Toxic Progress Indicator

schwa — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 10:21:03 -0000

Well spotted.

Re: ‘Discrete’ NSLevelIndicatorCell too slow

schwa — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 21:30:03 -0000

Thanks for the support. It shouldn't be too difficult to fix I'd imagine.

Awesome treehouse(s) by the way.

Re: ‘Discrete’ NSLevelIndicatorCell too slow

schwa — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 21:59:12 -0000

Anything I post in my public subversion repository is public domain unless stated overwise. Do with it what you will.

I should make an exception for you though Chrisâ€¦ How about commercial - $1,000,000 per seat?

Re: ‘Discrete’ NSLevelIndicatorCell too slow

schwa — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 09:43:47 -0000

Hey Ken,

I took out my code and replaced it with your simple clipping fix.

It certainly improved performance over the non-posed version but I think the caching version is still the fastest. Which is a shame, as your code is certainly cleaner and simpler.

You can compare all three versions here: http://toxic-public.googlecode.com//trunk/Misc/...

Re: Lineform 1.1

schwa — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 11:46:55 -0000

Blockquote vs quote tags fixed. I know some parts of my blog suck (along with the content).

I'll try and fix it when I can. Thanks for pointing it out though.

Re: FileVault Corruption

schwa — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 09:24:51 -0000

Well in my case the disk underlying the sparse image was corrupt. Copying the sparse image to anothe drive helped me deal with that. IIRC (this was a while ago) the sparse image could be mounted but some data was missing.

Re: Mac OS Custom Icons and subversion don’t mix

schwa — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 21:56:46 -0000

Go figure. I have them though. Maybe a previous version of did allow this files into the repository.

This probably means you wont need to add the file pattern to the -ignore configuration.

Re: Mac OS Custom Icons and subversion don’t mix

schwa — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 10:11:50 -0000

Ryan, lucky!

I didn't have that many either (about 3 files each in 2 repositories). But the dump/filter process took so long (large repositories) that I didn't want to dork about.

Your blog page is great, going into more detail about the problem. The only problem with it is that you can't always find the Icon files by doing a checkout. My icon files were in a directory that had previously been deleted - but the dump file was _still_ corrupt (I had aactually deleted them from one repository and moved them to another). You really do have to scan the dump file for the files themselves.

Re: Second Hand Smoke

schwa — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 11:38:32 -0000

Thanks Jason,

Very slick code by the way. I don't like how the code is being used within Disco (as you might have been able to tell from the tone of my post ;-) But I love the effect itself. Very cool. Very interesting looking at the cikernel code too. Very slick indeed.

Re: Second Hand Smoke

schwa — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 22:46:55 -0000

Brian: I've chatted with one of the developers of Disco, and the developer of the smoke effect actually commented on this post earlier. I'm not really worried about being contacted by anyone's laywers.

Dave: glad you enjoyed it.

Indigo: You're on your own :-)

Re: Second Hand Smoke

schwa — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 09:00:54 -0000

David Young: Yes ripping it off and redistributing it, especially if I had tried to pass it off as my own work would have been uncool. But I didn't do that.

The DiscoApp developer I smoke (Austin) even mentioned sponsoring a contest for the best smoke related hacks with free copies of Disco to the winners. Basically I think that they look at this as extra free publicity.

Re: More Automator Actions (Coming soon)

schwa — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:43:06 -0000

Go for it.

I dont actually use those automator actions (which could expain all the little gotchas you found).

Re: MacFUSE with Objective-C

schwa — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 08:15:03 -0000

Jamie,

I dont think you can mount something completely privately like that. I think you can suprress the notifications that get sent when a volume is mounted though.

But can't you do what you're trying to with normal python .zip format modules?

Re: MacFUSE with Objective-C

schwa — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 21:15:26 -0000

"handle encryption"? Not sure what you mean exactly.

There's no encryption in (Mac) FUSE or my objc wrapper.

Re: ExpressionEngine to WordPress

schwa — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 10:28:23 -0000

Hi Tamar,

You need to install the Python module 'sqlobject' first. I'd suggest using easy_install to do that (google for it).

But I'm really sorry I can't support these scripts. Good luck!

Re: FileVault Corruption

schwa — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 09:26:13 -0000

Hi Tom,

I just dont risk my data by using FileVault any more... But thanks for the link - hopefully it'll prove useful to others.

Re: CocoaJSON

schwa — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 10:37:54 -0000

Hey Mr Mojo,

It _should_ work, so you could be doing something braindead. Or it could just be buggy. I'm not doing any work on CocoaJSON right now so feel free to fix it and send me a patch :-)

Otherwise I'll add to the list of things I need to do. I really need a public facing bug tracker.

Cheers.

Jon.

Re: Software that SUCKS (but doesn’t have to)

schwa — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 11:14:31 -0000

Gustav, you answered your own question.

Not all apps that request admin privs actually need them. Not all apps that install to /Library give the option to install to ~/Library.

There is a lot of sloppy development around, and it seems that installers are very prone to sloppiness. See http://www.noodlesoft.com/blog/2007/04/15/a-mod... for a possible "silver bullet" to (some) sloppy installers.

Re: Python Metadata Importer Released for Tiger

schwa — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 16:29:29 -0000

The source is available on my subversion server:

http://toxic-public.googlecode.com//trunk/Spotl...

Re: Toxic Progress Indicator

schwa — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 16:30:22 -0000

Yeah no clue how it will work when accessed via AppleScript. Good luck and let me know what you find.

Re: Spotlight Importer Collection

schwa — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 15:35:32 -0000

Code moved to http://code.google.com/p/toxic-public/

Re: View man pages in Xcode script

schwa — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 20:24:53 -0000

I like it. Dueling man page hacks.

Re: CocoaJSON

schwa — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 11:35:52 -0000

See /subversion-moved/

Re: ExpressionEngine to WordPress

schwa — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 12:50:31 -0000

sven: sorry for taking so long to reply - all my code is now on google:

http://code.google.com/p/toxic-public/

Re: View man pages in Xcode script

schwa — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 14:44:22 -0000

Nico, if that works then very nice.

But you've just killed my blog post! ;-)

Re: The Intersection of Cool and Awesome

schwa — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 18:36:23 -0000

Hey,

Yeah, was in the process of moving around when my server had a mild meltdown. Will fix shortly

Re: The Intersection of Cool and Awesome

schwa — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 18:42:46 -0000

@amoeba, there's already a MIDI example: see

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLT0fkWna6E

Re: The Intersection of Cool and Awesome

schwa — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 08:31:44 -0000

Harvard,

Firstly, whatever floats your boat.

Secondly, it is registered, just not on the machine I was doing the screencast on.

Glad you liked it.

Re: SpaceNavigator controlled Lego Mindstorms NXT

schwa — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:03:31 -0000

Yeah I was thinking that too as I was chasing the cat around the living room. Quite an expensive RC car though ;-)

Re: Tiilt! Source Code

schwa — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:04:07 -0000

Links fixed.

Re: The Intersection of Cool and Awesome

schwa — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:17:17 -0000

@pecos bill. Doesn't need much in the way of hardware. They're just standard HID devices. I'd be really surprised if the min. specs you're quoting are accurate.

Re: R.I.P Toxic Progress Indicator

schwa — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 18:09:55 -0000

I'll be putting up information about where to send flowers to later.

Re: A Special Kind Of Idiot

schwa — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 12:16:25 -0000

Thanks Chris,

Appreciate the comment. We really don't have to suffer the nutjobs.

Re: A Special Kind Of Idiot

schwa — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 21:14:16 -0000

Hey Joe,

I've been fortunate enough to completely miss Rick up until now. The first I heard of him was on Ankur's "optimisation" blog post. Practically the next thing I know he's posting that "Johnathan Right" post.

Yeah I'm sure Rick is just thriving on this. I figured that's the way these kind of people work. He's obviously screaming for attention and just needs a big hug. Not much I can do about that.

But Rick has been ignored for a long time it seems (do not mention the spiteful vindictive batshit insane elephant in the room) and I'm not going be the victim of his abuse.

Re: A Special Kind Of Idiot

schwa — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:08:22 -0000

Jacob,

Yeah, looks like it. He's throwing any shred of credibility he had left out the window.

Re: A Special Kind Of Idiot

schwa — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 09:19:06 -0000

Kevin,

I lived in TX for 6 years. I loved it there and would move back in a heartbeat.

Re: Run Python Script

schwa — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 08:04:43 -0000

Yeah I was thinking appscript would make the perfect tool for accessing the inputs and generating outputs. I'm going to be on the road for a couple of weeks though so I probably wont be able to integrate appscript any time soon.

Re: More Automator Actions (Coming soon)

schwa — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:21:18 -0000

Yeah google links are out of date. Been meaning to fix them.

Try here: http://toxic-public.googlecode.com//trunk/Proje...

Re: Making Mercurial use the Mac OS X Keychain

schwa — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:07:06 -0000

Giorgos, yeah I would love it to be part of the distribution however:

1 It disables Mercurial's demandimport module. I couldn't get demandimport to work with my imports. And after a quick google I found it easier to disable the module than to fix things. Hopefully an hg expert can help me with this.

2 it uses a Mac OS specific compiled C module.

3 It monkey patches mercurial to override the password manager. I had to do this because I couldn't see how to access the password manager legitimately.

I don't think this extension is suitable to be included with mercurial. But I will look into the idea of creating a patch that will provide this functionality in a less hacky manner.

Re: Making Mercurial use the Mac OS X Keychain

schwa — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:44:43 -0000

@TeemuAP, yeah that might be interesting. The guys at turbogears do the same for their built-in server. I think they do it just by spawning the "dns-sd" tool. That should be relatively easy I'd imagine. Of course that would be Mac OS X only (again).

Re: AcornImage

schwa — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:24:30 -0000

Enough with the awesomeness. Gus did all the real work. I just had the idea and adapted an existing class.

You should all go to flyingmeat.com and tell Gus just how wonderful Acorn is.

Re: Run Python Script: Amazon S3 Uploader

schwa — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:59:40 -0000

Nico,

Highly likely the boto API has changed a little. I'll have a look and let you know.

Jon.

Re: AcornImage

schwa — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:38:12 -0000

ken, typically yes. but nothing prevents you from doing it like this. :-)

Re: iPhone Development

schwa — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:49:20 -0000

Well it is all NDA so we can't say much.

But I should say your experience of the SDK seems to be different to mine.

You might want to go check the SDK Documentation, which is quite explicit about this matter. Also look in
/Developer/Platforms/**/Foundation/Headers and see if you can find the required classes.

Of course everything could change before the next release. But rest assured I didn't just write the code for fun.

Re: iPhone Development

schwa — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:13:17 -0000

Don't think we can take it to cocoa-dev. The API is NDA (and Scott just clamped down on iPhone discussion on list).

Re: iPhone Development

schwa — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:47:26 -0000

@jordy/jediknil I hope you're also taking Apple to task for "Cocoa", what does "Cocoa" have to do with anything? And why we're at it, what is this "Apple" crap? Apple doesn't say "Computer manufacturer" to me.

And what would be mobile about MobileXML? There are possibilities that this code will run on linux (as part of nu) and windows (as part of Cocotron). Does that make it more or less Mobile? And wouldn't the Mobile prefix also mean it should run in say, RIM and Android too?

TouchCode is primarily an umbrella project for code that is designed to augment CocoaTouch. That's why it is called TouchCode. Take it or leave it.

Most names suck anyway, as I'm sure you're aware Jordy or should I call you "Jediknil"?

Re: A Special Kind Of Idiot

schwa — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:34:16 -0000

Hey Kent, sorry to hear that. But yeah, keeping away from. I do chortle with amusement at the guy whenever I hear another rix-story.

Re: TouchCode Usage

schwa — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:12:25 -0000

@scott

OK. So the NDA isn't lifted. This doesn't change this posting at all though as far as I'm aware.

@daniel

Good point. I need to do a doc update (ha!) for TouchCode soon. I'll change the wording.

Re: TouchCode Wins Best Open Source Project at iPhoneDevCamp

schwa — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:06:30 -0000

@manton "Mac" app? Why Mac? NSXMLDocument is your friend there…