Rui CarmoEntirely too many surprises today, ranging from new gear to test to requests for miscellaneous help, both speckled around the usual set of somewhat Dilbertian meetings. Having slept less than my 5 hour minimum (mostly insomnia, although some of it was in front of a Mac), it was a long and definitely not fun day, even with all the new toys (as if I cared).
Back home, Mail.app 2.0 is now officially getting on my nerves. It persists on synchronizing gigabytes of mail and then complains of not being able to open mailbox so-and-so if you pull up the Activity Viewer and stop the task.
Plus it still has the same fugly toolbar as yesterday. And yeah, I know all about the toolbar hacks - believe me, the new toolbar and inconsistent metallic styling (oh Apple, what were you thinking? weren't brushed metal windows evil enough?) are nothing next to the only thing I really want: a vertical preview pane.
As soon as I backup my iMac and upgrade it to Tiger, I'm going to open Interface Builder, edit MessageViewerContents.nib (yeah, I had it figured out as the one file to tweak) and only come out when it's done.
The only things preventing me to do so are the braindead HP printer drivers that I loathe installing every time an OS upgrade breaks something, lack of time to do a proper backup and common sense, not necessarily in that order.
In the meantime, I've already discovered an apparent shortcoming in Automator: There seems to be no way to use the same file result set for two operations (i.e., pick a set of files, and use that set twice in the same workflow, or have a Y-flow instead of a I-flow).
Guess I'll have to wait for 2.0.
(I'm trying to model this in Automator, and in the meantime I've also been unable to figure out if Spotlight can deal with EXIF tags.)
In other news, I've switched from SSH Agent to SSHKeychain, which seems to work better under Tiger.
The News (or as much of it as I can grasp today):
- Tiger Server overview (via Melo).
- The Developer Overview of what's new in Tiger (I think I came across this one yesterday - or, technically, today at around 3AM...)
- The MIT Time Traveller Convention - only slightly less wacky than the PoE nuts who are ranting about PoE-powered PCs. Trust me, it's hard enough powering Wi-Fi access points - if you need to power a large office floor (upwards of 100 Ethernet jacks) you end up having a big, hot step-down transformer in every switch room.
- Courtesy of Tiger's increased disk access, Davi has put together a Perl script to make sense of his PowerBook temperature sensors. Might be fun to plot the results...
- Canvas support in Safari (via mir.aculo.us, which also led me here).
And that's about it. I'm going to leave my iBook rebuilding a bunch of Fink packages (Tiger-compatible packages of interest are still few and source-only) and try to get some rest, since I have medical exams tomorrow.
Ah, the joy of an event-filled calendar.