I don’t want to go into rant-mode (again) and start elaborating on why Adobe has made such a fool of themselves with their handling on the November-of-2011-layoffs-and-technology-decisions, you’re free to form your own opinions – there are lots of pieces on Flash Mobile, Flex, layoffs and various communication disasters around there.

But those (and some other events I really don’t want to talk about at this time and place) sent a clear message: Further diversification is needed, even if Apache Flex turns out to be the most successful thing in the world and there would be further demand for it and even if I was to become the most awesome JS coder ever and even if Adobe ColdFusion was a viable product for the rest of all times.

Back from uni and various toying-around with Haskell and Erlang I had an existing interest in Clojure. The other day I had an email conversation with my friend Sean Corfield about something CFML-related when we got into talking about Clojure. I had noticed before that Sean was doing more and more with Clojure and was quite active on Twitter when it came to this topic. Anyway –  I decided to have a look into Clojure and I really like it so far. It’s basically a Lisp-dialect for the JVM (with ports to target MSFT’s CLR and Javascript).

As Sean had shared a few interesting links and books to get started with me, I thought I’ll pass the info on and make it available for others who’d be interested in getting into Clojure.

Sites:

Home of Clojure: Clojure.org
In-Browser tutorial: http://tryclj.com
Puzzles to explore the tricks and trades of the language: http://4clojure.com

Books:

Clojure Programming (O’Reilly Rough Cuts)
The Joy Of Clojure (Manning)
Clojure in Action (Manning)

The author of the latter, Amit Rathore, is also running an online course “Introduction to Clojure” starting on January 30th via codelesson.com. I have signed up for it because it looks really, really interesting and a good way to get up to speed even faster than by playing around as I do now. Finally – there’s Clojure/West in March in San Jose. If everything goes according to my plan, I’ll be there!

That’s not all though, I do realise that Clojure is at this stage just another niche technology. There’ll be more news, updates and further plans coming in this blog as soon as I find the time to write about them.

Getting into Clojure (and other stuff) is a post from: Blog in Black

Read that as: Mac OS X 10.7 won’t have Java (by Apple), maybe we’re lucky and get the 10.6 update 3 thrown into OS X 10.7, but maybe not. To be fair – Apple was never a big and fast supporter of Java on OS X, for them to release Java 6 and 64-bit versions of the runtime was apparently a major drama so that a bunch of Java developers on the Mac at some point in time just switched to SoyLatte, a FreeBSD port of Java 6. That worked and still works fine for a lot of server applications such as Tomcat.

This solution has an issue though when it comes to desktop applications as those would quite often require Java APIs such as Sound/AWT/Swing etc. Through SoyLatte one’d have to use X11 and not the native Mac UI because the problem is that those APIs tie into the underlying operating system APIs and if Apple is not keen/interested in actively supporting a tie of Java into those for OS X, who is?

A lot of chat, gossiping and commenting went on in the java/mac/webdev communities during the last few days and I have to say I’m not thrilled about Apple going down that way. For me it’s another step towards the “there is just solely our way”-attitude that they put to show when it came to Flash on the iPhone, allowing non-Objective C-apps to the app store and on other occasions such as not installing Flash Player with OS X 10.6 on the new MacBook AIR laptops/netbooks (silly game, Apple). A lot of people were recently saying that “Adobe was the new Microsoft”. Well, I might be able to see where some of those people come from, but if that was the case then Apple would be the new Microsoft to at least the same extent – if not worse

But that’s not the point I wanted to make anyway. I had a look at which Java desktop apps I’m actually running on my Mac(s). The most important one is Eclipse in a variety of flavours: Eclipse, ColdFusion Builder, Flash Builder, FDT and some others. If I couldn’t easily run Eclipse in the future that’d be a major issue. Then: IntelliJ IDEA, Aqua Data Studio and a whole bunch of little Java apps for JVM and GC monitoring or tools of a similar category.

This afternoon I got into a Twitter discussion with @BruceHoult about the whole topic. “Unfortunately” he made a point when he said: “their stance that you can install whatever you like but they’re not going to maintain them for you, you mean?”. Yes, why should Apple maintain and support Oracle’s platform? Is Microsoft maintaining the JDK/JRE for Oracle? Probably not (but I don’t know). Side note: This example doesn’t hold for the Flash/iphone situation though as I really can’t install what I want on the iPhone/iPad because Apple would not allow a Flash Player into the app store.

Where does that leave us (or rather me)? Basically I need and want Eclipse to run on future versions of Mac OS X, otherwise the Mac platform would be as dead as it could be for me as a development platform. Luckily, that’s doable with SoyLatte and OpenJDK today as shown here: http://njbartlett.name/2010/10/24/eclipse-soylatte-no-x11.html. This solution might not yet offer the best and greatest performance ever yet, but I’m sure that people will put effort into OpenJDK for OS X re performance and additional functionality. Don’t underestimate the financial & time investments software vendors like Adobe have made into the Eclipse platform. Just alone Flash Builder, ColdFusion Builder and Flash Catalyst are built on top of Eclipse and the amount of Adobe-related development happening on OS X is still very high, even though SJ and Apple have pissed off the Adobe community to a certain extent.

Another very interesting piece to read is shoes[1].drop(); – basically saying, stop whining, the Java-on-desktop API model was flawed anyway and it’s up to Oracle to come up with a proper strategy for Java 7 and 8. This post does have a lot of merit, I still don’t see Java on the desktop on OS X being dead (yet).

Some thoughts on Java, OS X, Eclipse and others is a post from: Blog in Black

Even though I’m a convinced OS X / Mac user when it comes to my development machines, sometimes I unfortunately have to connect to resp. mount Windows shares via Samba. That could be a remote Windows server at the client’s end I’m connecting to via VPN or just a share in a virtual machine in VMWare Fusion on my Mac.

Sometimes though unmounting the share/drive in Finder leads to a weird scenario that it unmounts fine but when I try again to mount the same or a different drive via Samba, I get a totally arbitrary error message saying nothing but “please check the IP address, bla bla bla”. Obviously the IP address is fine, rebooting the VM doesn’t help either.

The log files show something like:

<timestamp> /System/Library/CoreServices/NetAuthAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/NetAuthAgent[54255] Enumerate shares failed!: syserr = Operation timed out

You’ve got two options here – reboot your Mac (annoying) or enter the world of Terminal.app and run either:

killall NetAuthAgent

or

kill -9 <processID>

(you might need to do this as a super user depending on your setup)

After that – you’ll be able to hook up to Samba shares again just fine.

How to fix arbitrary error when mounting Windows drives via Samba in OSX is a post from: Blog in Black

Qlcolorcode already has built-in support for Action Script (although it’s not complete and really 100% correct for AS3 as it appears to me), but it’s supposed to do the trick. I ran into the issue that it unfortunately didn’t work for me. A bit time spent looking around and playing with the default application to open .as files on my Mac brought up the following blog post. Of particular interest are the comments:

http://www.n8gray.org/blog/2008/01/07/qlcolorcode-041/

I can just speak for Snow Leopard and in that case you’d want to look into comments 8, 12 and 18. Basically after this step the relevant section in my Info.plist in the Qlcolourcode plugin package looks as below and syntax highlighting for Action Script works (sort of):

<key>CFBundleDocumentTypes</key>
<array>
	<dict>
		<key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
		<string>QLGenerator</string>
		<key>LSItemContentTypes</key>
		<array>
			<string>public.source-code</string>
			<string>public.xml</string>
			<string>com.apple.property-list</string>
			<string>org.tug.tex</string>
			<string>public.plain-text</string>
			<string>com.apple.applesingle-archive</string>
		</array>
	</dict>
</array>

The next step was to get MXML working. That’s a bit trickier because it’s not yet built-in into the plugin. Luckily Qlcolorcode supports XML and as MXML is  a proper, fully XML-compliant language it can’t be too hard to enable it for MXML. The good thing is – someone has done it before:

http://playground.deju.nu/2008/10/os-x-quick-look-for-mxml-files/

The bad thing – this is for OS X 10.5 and it didn’t work out of the box for me. In general I’d recommend to follow the descriptions in there. The command to run in step 5 on OS X 10.6 would be different though:

qlmanage -d3 -p yourmxmlfile.mxml 2>&1 | grep 'Generator used'

Also the path used in step 8 had to be different for me. Instead of Resources/highlight/etc/highlight/ the filetypes.conf would have to be looked for in Resources/etc/highlight/. Also in my version of the file the file type definitions for xml and html did look differently:

$ext(html)=htm xhtml
$ext(xml)=sgm sgml nrm ent hdr hub dtd wml vxml wml tld svg xsl ecf jnlp mxml

As you can see, I added the mxml file suffix to where it made much more sense imho. From here on just follow the instructions and you should be good to go.

This should provide a working solution – not necessarily a perfect one as the highlighting for AS 3 is not quite right and it would be nice to tweak the syntax highlighting for MXML and CF; some new CF tags are not properly picked up etc. I might have a look into that – it’s not too hard actually because qlcolorcode uses highlight internally. Will keep you posted

OS X quick look for Flex is a post from: Blog in Black

OS X quick view for CFM and CFC

The other day then I found a quick look plugin named qlcolorcode that in fact does support CF. The installation is dead easy: you drop the QLColorCode.qlgenerator file in /Library/QuickLook (I wanted to make sure all my user accounts on my machine have access to it, in general it’s supposed to work as well by dropping it into ~/Library/QuickLook).

The only potentially tricky issue could occur if you have XCode installed on your Mac. XCode comes with a quick look plugin for source code preview that might get triggered ahead of qlcolorcode. To disable the XCode plugin you can run the following code in Terminal:

f=/Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/SourceCode.qlgenerator
sudo mv $f $f.disabled

If everything worked fine you should se a similar output as shown in the image.

The plugin actually seems to be quite flexible re other languages – more info is available in the FAQ. Actionscript and MXML come to mind …

OS X quick look for ColdFusion is a post from: Blog in Black

The technical reason is basically that Fusion is checking for the existence of a file /System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist on the installation media. That particular file just exists on the installation DVD for the Server version of OS X. Apparently a bunch of people have tried to create patched ISOs of the OS X installation disc, as far as I understand most of those come with various disadvantages, such as struggling to load the corrent system updates later on etc.

Another approach is to patch VMWare Fusion and just tell Fusion not to check for that file. That basically means modifying the Darwin bootloader which is located in /Library/Application Support/VMWareFusion/isoimages (darwin.iso). This file is digitally signed therefore you can’t just change or swap it. Luckily though, the certificate comes with VMWare Fusion, so that it’s possible to modify darwin.iso, sign the file and everything would be good.

A few sites have sample shell scripts for that, if you want to go the easy way – download MultiMac Helper, written by some of the technical editors of Germany’s well-know computer magazine c’t. It works really well – just run the tool once and it will patch Fusion, run it again and it will rock-back the patch. I’ve tried it – everything still works fine (for example my existing Windows VMs in Fusion). OS X 10.5 installed nicely – make sure you switch off sound and all energy saving options in your guest OS X (some people have reported issues with that).

Oh, the obvious legal disclaimer: I do not recommend that you try that at all, in particular not on any machine you have somewhat important data on. You’re on your own, don’t blame me for anything or any issue you run into and you’ve been warned. Most probably you’re even breaking some license agreements depending on the country you’re residing in. Again – you’ve been warned, don’t blame me.

Virtualizing OS X 10.5 Client on OS X 10.5 is a post from: Blog in Black

Leopard and the broken FileReference in Flash Player is a post from: Blog in Black

Luckily, after doing a bit of research, I found Triaxis Ltd., a company focussing on selling Apple products for reasonable prices and with an awesome and very personal service. They trade as macdirectseller.co.nz. Basically the business model is to buy their stock from US wholesellers and pass on the much better US pricing (which is also slightly based on the favorable exchange rate) to customers here. The good thing (from a business point of view) is also that the Macs are legally imported, taxes are paid and you get a proper GST invoice. I mean, it’s also easy to buy a Mac in the US myself but then you’d have to “import” it properly, pay duties, GST on import etc. blabla…

But anyway, the point is that I want to express my total satisfaction with Triaxis’ services. We’ve ordered two Mac notebooks on different occasions, everything from payment to delivery via courier (personal and signature req) went fine and we were even kept in the loop with delivery status (my MBP order was a bit delayed due to Apple stock issues in the US) and courier tracking numbers. Very well done, I would always again use their service and order Mac stuff from them!

Want to buy a Mac in New Zealand? is a post from: Blog in Black

After working with Powermail, I’m pretty happy now. The software is great, works very well for me and I can really recommend it. Apparently a few people who work with particular IMAP server setup have major issues, but that didn’t concern me as I just want it to be my POP3 client anyway – so all good from that end.

The downside though is that I’m particular unhappy and disappointed about their ordering process and the resulting customer experience on my end. I’ve ordered online, provided my CC details and first thing I got is that they don’t process the transactions automatically but that a human had to look at them.

Fair enough, but slightly annoying if the trial limitation even within the first 30 days is to have a maximum number of 200 mails in your email client or you’d be unable to send/receive at all.

So I sent them an email explaining my situation and asked how long the processing would take. They came back to me a day later saying they’d process it asap. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. Nothing happened. In the meantime (3 days) I’ve sent another email explaining my situation again. No response. Finally I was totally fed up, sent them an email saying something along the lines, “Hey guys, can’t be THAT hard to process a CC and generate a license key. Please let me know if you’re able to do that by close of business today, in case that’s not going to work out, please cancel my order.” I got my license key later that day, along with an email stating reasons such as “We had two orders from NZ and one CC processing failed and thought it was you, but we mixed up the two customers blabla”.

Hmm, what do we learn from that? Things can go wrong and process could be delayed. But if a customer who’s willing to give you money feels not valued and not listened to, he will finally be ready to walk away. Same with the failed CC processing – how about letting your customer know? Even if they thought my CC payment had failed – why haven’t they let me know? I mean, they’re not a corporate but apparently not a one man show – in this type of company setting, I’d expect a bit more personal contact/attachment to your customer.

Oh, another piece of information – from the next release on, the Powermail trial will be extended from 200 mails to the incredible number of 1000 mails. Great…:) I hope that someone from Powermail will read this – if yes, let me please ask you in which world are you living in?

What they should do is as easy as it could be: Provide a 30 day trial with FULL functionalities, let people import 27 million emails if they want to, let them play with it, figure out if the software works for them or not – but after 30 days, lock the software totally until they’ve provided a registration key.

Anyway – the software itself is great for what I need it to provide, but their service/trial license/communication/order handling could be improved.

Powermail – the end of the story is a post from: Blog in Black

I’ve decided to give Mail.app another try, but I was heavily disappointed. Although the client is nice it just didn’t work properly to import my huge mailbox files and it took literally minutes to render particular folder (a few thousand emails in one folder seems to be the maximum it could cope with). CPU load went through the roof and I had to restart it every few hours. Very bad experience for me…

So, research went on and I finally found PowerMail which seems to be it in terms of my needs and also in terms of dealing with huge amounts of emails. The import of my 200something mbox files went flawlessly and in a very reasonable amount of time, handling and speed are fine and the filtering mechanism suits me well.

The drawback (for some people) might be that it comes with a price tag of 49 Euros. Given that I’ve always paid for my email clients during the last 5-6 years (TheBat! is not free either), that’s not an issue for me, I’m very happy to pay for good software that actually does what I need

I’m a bit disappointed about their trial handling though. The 30 day trial is limited to 200 emails in your database. If you have more, the trial doesn’t allow you to receive and send emails. That particularly defeats the purpose of a trial in my case as I need to test it with huge amounts of email, which was a bit of an annoyance. Anyway – it works fine for me and I’ve ordered it online. Sadly their process takes a human to look into it which means a further delay. I suppose they’re based somewhere in Europe, so I expect to hear back from them later tonight!

Solved: good email client for OS X – PowerMail is a post from: Blog in Black

I bought a pretty cheap printer (HP LJ 1020, one of those “Windows only” printers) and it worked alright with my PC, hey – one can’t complain for NZ$ 149 at that time Now with the Mac, it didn’t work – not too much of a surprise.

I’ve googled a bit and found a lengthy thread on macoshints.com about this issue. The outcome is – it’s not officially supported, the pre April 2006 version of the HP LJ 1022 version of the printer supports the 1020 as well. After that date (apparently because some people told HP that their driver worked well with the 1020), HP removed the inofficial support for the 1020.

It’s a bit tricky to get the correct drivers and to get them setup so that it works. A good way is to go to that thread mentioned above and grab the driver file which is linked to in post no. 154. Install it (resp. do all the removal stuff before if you have tried different versions of the driver), reboot, plug in your printer and you _should_ be able to add it to Mac OS X.

HP Laserjet 1020 on OS X is a post from: Blog in Black

Anyway – I’m pretty much done with moving all my data to the new machine, setting up software etc. All good. But there is one issue with OS X that really puzzles me: email clients.

Before you start throwing stuff at me – I’m using pretty much the most perfect email client I can think of on Windows: TheBat! It does actually everything I need it to, I never lost any email by corrupted files, it easily copes with the amount of emails I’m currently storing in 7 or 8 accounts (300.000 and growing) and it is configurable down to an absolutely stunning Macro language if necessary.

The downside of it – its storage format and also the available export formats are limited, i.e. I can export to mbox per folder or single messages to .eml oder .msg files.

On the Mac side of things, I’ve been looking into various options:

1. Thunderbird – seems to be nice, but I’m struggling importing my mailbase – and just with having a folder with a few 1000 emails made it behave pretty sluggish.

2. Apple Mail – seems to be better than Thunderbird, but I’ve been reading a few very negative posts in forums and blogs about it’s capabilities when it comes to huge amounts of email. Also – similar issues with importing from TheBat (just folder by folder… args)

3. Mulberry – That one seems to be made for me. It’s complex, offers a lot of possibilities to setup, configure and finetune but I can’t find a way of importing my emails? Is there a way at all to get data INTO Mulberry?

4. Eudora – had a brief look into it, but I was a bit turned off by the fact that it’s not supported anymore. But maybe it’s still an option.

5. Microsoft Office for Mac email (whatever the name is – Oh well… nah, not an option currently. Maybe after they’ve released the new office later this year…

Hey OS X users out there – any option I’ve missed so far? Any recommendations?

In the meantime I continue running TheBat in my Parallels installation in Coherence – at least that works fine and is not too bad. But I’d really like to change this rather sooner than later and end up with a native OS X email solution that I can live with… Help!!!

Finally – a very nice and true quote about TheBat!

—
The Bat reminds me a lot of Unix. People say that Unix is hard to use. The same charge has been leveled against The Bat. I’m not sure that’s the case, though. I think it’s more of a “user friendly” system than most people realize. A co-worker once told me that Unix is a friendly operating system. “It just chooses its friends carefully,” she said.
—

(source: http://www.610tech.net/20030907.shtml)

Wanted: A good email client for OS X is a post from: Blog in Black