Tao of Mac

Dec 11th 2004 · 2 min read

Initiated Vacation Countdown

With my vacation closing to an end, I've been trying to cram as much as possible into the little time I have:

  • Picked up my quest to render my Cobalt box useful, this time with . It looks to be feasible, easy to reproduce, and not require hard disk swaps at all. And this time, I'm going to take my time doing it, so as to try and make the procedure as useful for other people as possible.
  • Lobbied for clickable URL/URI support in , so as to make network applications truly useful for folk like myself, Melo and Nuno, who would like our boxes to talk to us and provide us with minimal interaction. The base approach would be to allow A HREF tags (and only A tags) to be sent inside notifications with application-supplied URIs. So that if , for instance, wanted to direct me to a specific channel, it would specify irc:#channel in the URI, and clicking it on would invoke via a completely standard, pre-existing API. Besides being an obvious and intuitive UI approach, it would help integrate with all sorts of non- stuff (which is my main concern at this point, and the reason I started looking at in the first place).
  • Since there doesn't seem to be much interest in that approach from the developers (casual readers will likely be wondering why, but it's hard to explain), I'm doing some Cocoa code to see if I can integrate a pre-existing URLTextView class into a notification plugin (if only for our own use). It's been ages since I spent any length of time doing Obj-C, so it's slow going - interested parties are free to drop me a line, or lobby for the concept in the forum.
  • Started coding a network server for the Gnome proof-of-concept I intend to do, but decided to hold back a little on that until I can understand what the Gnome folk are really planning to do as far as notifications are concerned - all I see are system tray bubbles from specific applications, and no drive towards a centralized notification system. I might be wrong, of course.
  • Looked at a few Rendezvous libraries and whipped up a that allows me to find machines running a specific service with the absolute minimum of hassle. I think a lot of people will find that one useful, and will host Perl and Ruby versions of it if anyone's inclined to code them.

And yet, I still manage to have significant periods of Real Life in between.

Vacations are great. I really ought to have more of them.