To do: release to-do script

After having played around with Lifehacker’s reader-written, task-tracking shell script, I think I’m going to release to the public my tried and true homegrown script of the same function. Mine is very similar and is something I’ve been using for years. Unlike theirs though, my effort doesn’t include prioritization (I’ve never needed such a thing), but it does allow for sorting by project/type (e.g., school, website, etc.), while removing those identifiers when presenting the list back to you. Also different from theirs, I pad the task number with a zero when needed (it has to line up!) and sort by task number, not alpha.

This list is getting awfully long

While there is no shortage of task-monitoring programs out there, I’ve seen very few that actually allow you to easily delete or modify a task (I’m referring to mouse-less apps here, the only way to implement this sort of thing if you ask me). Huh? How can you have a to-do manager that makes deleting a task so much different from adding one? To wit, the majority of shell-based solutions (or, much more recently, those involving Quicksilver) simply append to a text file and then grep through it; this is all well and good, but when you want to delete/change something you have to actually open the file, find what you’re looking for, and then edit/delete it. Counter-productive? You bet.

ETA

As you guys are well aware, I’m stupid busy and surely won’t have this out for at least a couple of months. Given that I’ve been using and honing it for years, there’s not too much to change, though I do need to add quite a few comments, explain the available options, and probably throw in some error-checking for good measure (and to cut down on the amount of support e-mail I’d otherwise have to field).

Back into hell I go.

Jabra knows how to treat its customers

A couple of months ago I wrote about my Jabra JX10 Bluetooth headset, and overall, had some very nice things to say about it. However, one thing I failed to mention was the fragility of the earhook. As a whole, it didn’t feel weak or anything, but the way in which it was coupled to the headset made you wonder.

A few days ago I was removing the headset from my ear and thought that the earhook felt a bit loose. I checked, and sure enough one of the two tiny hooks that connects the earhook to the headset had snapped. Needless to say, I was a bit perturbed given the fact that this headset was $180 (ridiculous!) and knowing that I, the guy that treats his gadgets like gold, didn’t cause the problem.

Jabra made it right, and quickly

I went to Jabra’s site, found the support page, and entered my information into a form. With my allotted 500 characters I explained the problem as best I could and expressed my disappointment that such an expensive device could give way to gentle day-to-day use so easily.

Just 12 hours later I received this response from a human:

Thank you for contacting JABRA North America!

Please forward your mailing information and manufacturing code of the JX10, and we will be happy to send some complimentary replacement earhooks. The manufacturing code is 2 numbers followed by a letter, and is located on the speaker, under the ear gel.

Should you have any questions, or require additional information, please do not hesitate to contact us at Product Support.

Yah, I couldn’t believe it either. I was floored. No arguing, no sending my device in, no out-of-pocket expenses? All you want is my address?

Still in disbelief, I immediately e-mailed the information requested, and not one hour later got this in return:

Justin,

Your ear hooks are on there way by USPS. You should see the ear hooks in about 5-7 business days.

And that, readers, is how you do business. Don’t blame me. Fix the problem and make me happy. I’ll come back again and again.

Hell is bar prep

Studying for the California Bar is pretty much the worst thing I’ve ever been made to do, rivaled only by, well, nothing (the Patent Bar comes close, but that’s history :). Earlier today, midway through our lecture on Remedies, I had half a mind to take the honorable, way-of-the-samurai exit and drop my head onto my pen, aiming, of course, for an eye socket. It’s UNBEARABLE.

UPDATE: From a friend via e-mail, a quote from Winston Churchill: “When you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Everybody upgrades

Earlier today John Gruber knocked out his theory on Why Apple Won’t Open Source Its Apps. While I usually agree with most of the arguments Gruber makes,¹ though not always the way in which he makes them, I have to take issue with his position here. He posits that Apple’s upgrade-the-OS-every-year strategy is the impetus behind keeping its well-known apps closed-source:

The role these apps play isn’t just to make Mac OS X look good compared to Windows or Linux, but also to help make each new version of Mac OS X look better than the previous one; i.e. to convince Mac users that it’s worth paying for the latest upgrade.

If the source code to these apps were made available, the best features from new versions of these apps could be ported back to previous versions, lessening the incentive for users to upgrade.

I would argue that those who would consider modifying the source to these apps, or even those who would simply consider using others’ modifications, are the exact same people who are going to upgrade blindly anyway.

In other words, the hackers dissecting these programs will be the first in line to buy the new OS. I think John would be hard-pressed to find someone within his circle who doesn’t upgrade immediately (or as soon as it’s agreed that the upgrade is “safe”) each year when there’s a new point release; I know I can’t — we look foward to the release date. I don’t see how opening up the code would change that. More to the point, I think it’s safe to say that most of the people itching to upgrade each year don’t use Apple’s bundled apps anyway.

So, with John and I’s crowd out of the way, we are left only with Joe EndUser who isn’t going to use any “iSoftware” unless it comes from Apple.com or through Software Update, especially if he bought a Mac specifically for these applications. Apple is still free to market to this guy, and because he doesn’t know or care that better software options are available (and certainly hasn’t used any of these non-Apple apps in lieu of Apple’s offerings), he’ll still want to upgrade for all the same reasons he’s upgraded in the past.

John uses iChat as an example application to make his case. He points out that there’s a hack for it that will give you tabs, and argues that if the app was open-sourced, the hack wouldn’t feel so “hacky” because it would be a lot easier for the coder to get it ‘right,’ which would subsequently marginalize Apple’s ability to market the feature (i.e., it would already be out there). Point taken. However, my view is that Joe EndUser is not even going to become aware of tabs until Apple tries to sell him on them. I think my position here is driven home by the fact that it’s 2006 and we are talking about adding tabs to a chat application (i.e., they aren’t already there and Joe is none the wiser); Joe doesn’t even know he needs tabs and he’s certainly not actively seeking out an application that has them.² Moreover, were Joe to look for and find such an application, I’m far from convinced that this would deter him from upgrading, unless, of course, I’m misinformed and people do in fact pay ~$130/year for slight upgrades to these apps without taking into consideration that the OS itself has usually undergone some major changes (security, speed, etc). Granted, Joe EndUser might not care about the under-the-hood goings-on, but I have to think that they play at least some part in his decision to upgrade, if not a major part, and are perhaps a bigger draw than tabbed iChat.

Note that I’m not taking a position either way on whether Apple should open its applications up (if I were Apple, I probably wouldn’t), I’m merely pointing out that I’m not entirely sold on John’s conclusion that open-sourcing the apps would likely cause Apple’s upgrade program to suffer.

Apple, you’re killing me

I’m dying to spend money on you. Dying. But, you’re making it so incredibly difficult. Not a single day has gone by that I haven’t heard at least one new complaint about the MacBook Pro and/or MacBook, and to be perfectly frank, I think you’re in trouble and need to get your shit together before people start jumping ship. You are a hardware company, right? Start acting like it. I don’t care how fast your new machines are, if they aren’t real-world usable why would I drop 2k on one?

• I want a laptop, not a griddle.
• I want a laptop, not a HyperColor shirt (remember those?!?).
• I want a laptop, not a cow.
• I want a laptop, not a baby.
• I want a laptop, not a blow-up doll.
• I want a laptop, not a perishable food item.

All I want is a fucking laptop. If you can tell me that you’ve got a functional notebook without any of the issues mentioned above, e-mail me and I’ll buy it right now. If not, and you don’t see one on the horizon, you better start thinking very seriously about letting OS X run on non-Mac hardware because I have neither the time nor the patience to take a chance on your latest efforts and risk ending up a ‘victim’ like Daniel Jalkut.

The Penguin and I have only separated, not divorced

As much as it pains me to say it, I will go back to Linux if pushed hard enough. I’m certainly not alone in feeling this way right now and can empathize all too easily with the recent comments from Mark Pilgrim (read this and this as well), Tim Bray, and Rui Carmo. Though their complaints are centered mostly around software (making many of the same arguments and observations I’ve made in the past) and not the hardware problems I began this post with, the net result is the same, namely that some of Apple’s most influential and vocal proponents are thinking very seriously about parting ways (or, in the case of Mark, have already done so). Apple, I’d like to stay, but at some point you are going to have to get over yourself, acknowledge your mistakes, and fix them.

Reality

Let’s be honest, I’m probably not going anywhere because I need Photoshop and I’ve no desire to use Windows, so I’m kind of stuck either way. That said, were a Linux binary of Photoshop to suddenly surface tomorrow,¹ the decision would become much more difficult, especially in light of the fact that my personal e-mail and calendar are now completely web-based.

TextMate is king

About a month ago I pleaded with the developer(s) of TextMate to add FTP support to their much-lauded editor. This hasn’t yet happened, but, I did go ahead and purchase the application and have been using it exclusively for the past few weeks. Let’s see if I can sum up my TextMate experience as succinctly as possible: It’s the greatest text editor I’ve ever used on any platform.

Really, I’m not sure what else I can say. The more I use it, the more I come to realize how incredibly powerful and brilliant it is. Some might remember my proclamation that TextWrangler was the best free editor out there, and I still stand by that, but if you can fork over the money for TextMate (~$40 if you’re a student) I can almost guarantee that you’ll be swept off your feet.

I genuinely feel bad for whomever tries to move into this space because MacroMates has it on lock and might as well change the name from TextMate to CheckMate.

Your Razr sucks

I’ve been sitting on this post forever and finally just had to push it out the door before it became completely stale.

I didn’t want to be the one to have to tell you this and I’ve been putting it off for a while now, but, umm, your Motorola Razr is a piece of shit.¹ Now, I know that some of you are immediately going to accuse me of the usual “gadget elitism,” and sure, that’s probably part of this little rant, but after seeing everybody and their damn brother ² run around with this phone, I just had to set the record straight. Does it look cool? Absolutely. It’s gorgeous, and when they popped up on the rumor sites a couple of years ago I was blown away. But here’s the rub: its pros end there.

Obviously a lot of my friends have Razrs (”everybody and their brother”), including my girlfriend (and her sister and mother), but the funny thing is, if you ask them if they like it (and really push them), almost all will concede that it’s not so great (especially if they have any previous mobile phone experience). Why is this?

Well, let’s see. It’s dainty and feels like it’s going to break when open. The speakerphone sucks. The screen resolution and colors suck. It’s barely got any memory. It’s still got a freakin’ VGA camera (Motorola, 2002 called and said they wanted their technology back) equipped with perhaps the worst “viewfinder” display I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t support data transfer rates above GPRS. And to top it all off, it’s got Motorola’s notoriously nasty user interface written all over it. BUT, it looks cool and everyone has one so it must be awesome!

Now, I obviously don’t care what phone you buy or use (it’s your money and you can throw it away however you want), rather, it’s the herd mentality that really upsets me. It’s kind of like the fact that if you are a girl under 30 you’re now compelled to wear “eskimo” boots (though this fad seems to be fading). You can see it a mile away: <insert Hollywood’s current “it” girl here> wears eskimo boots one day because she “doesn’t care” what others think and a week later every teeny-bopper girl is chomping at the bit to harpoon a whale. The whole thing is ridiculous.

Again, far be it from me to tell someone what phone they should buy, but please, for the love of god, don’t run around talking about how the Razr is the end-all, be-all of mobile phones because it’s at the bottom of the barrel. I obviously don’t fault Motorola for sucking this phenomenon dry (what self-respecting company wouldn’t?), but I find it a bit disconcerting that people can be so enamored by nothing more than the look of a device (trust me, I do appreciate its design, more than most I’m sure), without even thinking about its features and the fact that there are so many better phones out there that offer a much more satisfying user experience. Then again, if your user experience is limited to making sure that everyone notices you and your super-thin Razr, you’re all set.

A brief note on the recent site changes

As some of you have already noticed (probably only those that don’t use aggregators), I took the site back to two columns a few days ago, and as ridiculous as this sounds, when the transition was complete I felt somewhat ‘liberated.’ As I mentioned before, the single-column layout was simply too restrictive and allowed for practically no expansion.

Search is back

I’ve re-added search forms to the menu (you’ll find them on the archive index and all other “archived” pages). I’d been conflicted about search here for a long time and kind of hid the option from view (well, not really, I just didn’t advertise it much). I thought about setting up some AJAXified “live searching,” but it all feels a bit too crufty to me right now and I’m not convinced that beyond the ‘neat’ factor the concept offers anything over ‘vanilla’ searching.

As it stands now, the search uses the built-in WordPress functionality, hacked up a bit to exclude the “bits.” Believe me, I’m fully aware that WP’s searching capabilities leave a lot to be desired, which is why when the results are returned (or when there are no results) I explain WP’s shortcomings and offer a Google form so that the reader can try a more complex search.

Sparklines

On the index page you’ll see a new heading in the menu titled, “My output here over the last three months.” This is basically just a Sparkline graph of my posting activity for the previous 90 days. It serves no real purpose and I’m not sure how long I’ll actually leave it up.  :P

That said, I’m still experimenting with these “micro-graphs” and have a few more ideas to flesh out, including extracting site hits from my Mint installation and pumping them through a Sparkline or two, but after having spent some time on that thought last night, I realized that it could take quite a while to implement, and, well, I’m kind of busy with that whole bar thing. If and when I get the whole thing coded up, I’ll be sure to package it as a WordPress plugin (or would it be a paneless Pepper? :).