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User Name grikdog
Member Since 2003-07-19
Total number of Feedback Posts: 217
Total number of comments: 43
Last 10 Feedback Posts by grikdog [ Search for All ]
LittleSecrets 1.7 (Mac OS X)
Mixes Japanese and English text transparently (Just Like A Mac) 
Nice. Parts of this are implemented very well indeed, and I don't know enough to comment on the rest. I understand why it does, but I wish it wouldn't, use backup files. Also, I'm not really that fond of blowfish, but it's ok, I guess. Could there be an option to use AES (or Brian Gladman's 256-bit Rijndael code for us purists)? [alert admin]
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Wednesday, May 24 2006 @ 03:35 PM PDT
AquaLess 1.5 (Mac OS X)
AquaLess used the be only GUI manpage reader that would actually work on Mac OS X, due to a long-standing bug in groff rendering that was not fixed under X11.app until 10.3.3 (or that's when I noticed the fix was in, anyway.) Doing a <code>man unixutility | aqualess</code> in Terminal is so automatic I don't think about it -- prestidigitation handles that automatically. I'm not really sure what the comment here about not formatting refers to; I have never seen a case where there's a significant deviation from the text produced directly in the Terminal window. AquaLess is a workhorse here. I use it on every foray into the old command line interface. [alert admin]
Sunday, February 12 2006 @ 03:04 PM PST
Return of Snow 2001.12.8 (Mac OS X)
Like it says, white snowflakes tumblin' on a black screen. This is one of the classics, ported to Mac OS X. I like the varying wind and drift effects. And there are only two "imagineered" snowflakes with octal symmetry - the majority are hexagonal. There's a desktop variation - just a moment, I'll see what it does. Ok, same thing, except transparent background shows your desktop with white snowflakes. The one missing feature of the original - snow doesn't pile up at the bottom of the screen, or on the top edges of windows. It just falls through. Nice and old school, though. [alert admin]
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Sunday, January 22 2006 @ 07:43 AM PST
SleepWatcher 2.0.3 (Mac OS X)
What a great idea! As for how to use it... Install the SleepWatcher.pkg, then install the SleepWatcher StartupItem.pkg. Launch TextEdit. Enter these lines:
#!/bin/sh
osascript -l AppleScript -e 'tell Application "Finder" to say "Just going to sleep now, ok?"'
(Don't enter these lines ;-)
Save the file as ~/.sleep and wait about 5 minutes for your screensaver to launch. Listen.
That's it. The rest is only limited by imagination. For starters, study the man page: man sleepwatcher Then open /Library/StartupItems/SleepWatcher/SleepWatcher in TextEdit and find the line that starts SleepWatcher. The man page suggests that you can do A LOT MORE than minimum, but the default configuration is powerful.
In my own .sleep file I launch a script to fire off the PostgreSQL dumpall command, if it hasn't run yet. Screensaver time is the perfect time to make a database backup, at least for small personal databases.
[alert admin]
Wednesday, January 11 2006 @ 10:56 PM PST
Maui Wowee 1.0 (Mac OS X)
35 years ago, Maui Waui would have been featured in a Cheech and Chong smoker. This dog downloads from a whizbang site that launches ads in your face (http://www.macgamestore.com/detail.php?ProductID=428), costs $20 (less a penny), occupies 12.1 Mb unzipped, comes as a DEMO not true shareware and gives you 60 minutes of demonstration play, most of which is occupied by screens that say "Loading" or "Help" or "Levels", puts "MauiWowee.app" on your menubar, grabs your screen and changes resolutions for you, and asks for your name. I entered "Stupid" because I downloaded and launched this pup without knowing its antecedents. The program dutifully displayed "Aloha and Welcome, Stupid" at the bottom of the screen. It comes with bouncy, cheerful music that is well, bouncy. And cheerful. And you can turn it off, although that will eat into your 55 minutes of remaining game play (by now) as you figure out how to do that chore. The actual "game" is a bit counterintuitive, despite the instructions. While you can click and drag a square to another location, the program then launches a complicated redraw that bears no resemblance to what you expected to happen and may fire off three or four "matches". Oh, yes, forgot to mention: Besides being un-Mac-like, with no nods whatever to HIG, the program is sloooooow. Enjoy. The game itelf looks interesting, but considering the quality of other similar kids' games that can be delivered at glowing speed and raging Technicolor on Mac OS X Panther, this one has some serious growing up to do. Tikis, yeah, it's got tikis. And tedium. [alert admin]
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Saturday, January 07 2006 @ 01:15 PM PST
Ultralingua Dictionary 5.14 (Mac OS X)
At least for Spanish translation, the "dictionary" is only semi-useful. The advantage is that you can ADD your own entries, as you discover their meanings (perhaps by looking up regionalisms, colloquialisms, slang and idioms at the Royal Academy's online dictionary at http://buscon.rae.es/diccionario/drae.htm ) With the exception of the Oxford Spanish Desk Dictionary (2nd Rev. Ed.), most of what passes for Spanish glossary in print hasn't been dusted off since the Fifties. Ultralingua is a tool I can't do without, but I won't update it until its word list improves dramatically. [alert admin]
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Wednesday, December 28 2005 @ 11:37 AM PST
Firefox 1.5rc1 (Mac OS X)
Quits like a champ under 10.3.9
Firefox 1.5rc1 will not launch for me, but simply quits without notice after posting its icon to dock(s). Pity too, because recent Camino nightlies are so stodgy (and leaky?) they're almost unusable. [alert admin]
Wednesday, November 02 2005 @ 06:57 AM PST
Vienna 2.0.0.2012 (Mac OS X)
2.0.0.2012 has two Help menus on the menubar, right next to each other. Scripts menu is missing. Themes don't install correctly or installed themes become "corrupted" with this version. I have to take a bye on this one. [alert admin]
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Sunday, October 30 2005 @ 09:54 AM PST
AmphetaDesk 0.93.1 (Mac OS X)
My experience with Amphetadesk is two-fold: The first time I tried to install it, it wanted to download a truckload of perl modules from CPAN and I killed the install. Who has time for "some assembly required" installation, especially on a Mac? The second time I tried, I'd spent most of a morning (weeks later) trying to install a Perl script to convert an rss feed into html -- an effort which eventually failed for much the same reason as effort 1, above. Within moments after giving up yet in in disgust, I found a no-nonsense script called rubric at RubyForge that meets my rss2html needs exactly. But as a side effect of all this foofarah, I discovered I'd installed sufficient Perl modules to run Amphetadesk. Which is interesting. Yes, it works. No, it doesn't display enough of the content actually available in standard RSS 2.0 (not counting Userland extensions) newsfeeds. And it's not that configurable. And it exposes an advanced user settings interface for you to dork around with proxy settings and other geeks-only stuff. But it does make a limited, rather nice display of a valid RSS in your web browser. That's kind of cool, especially for a pre version 1.0 app. So, bottom line -- damnation with faint praise. Most people will be better off with NetNewsWire Lite, also free, but this has a few geek-level uses and some ways to get even more interesting as the future unfolds. [alert admin]
Thursday, October 13 2005 @ 12:09 PM PDT
Golly 0.91 (Mac OS X)
Cool retro version of John Conway's Game of Life
Everyone's seen Life, except for the new kids who haven't, of course. What very few now alive have seen is the original, hand doodled version on graph paper! Which makes sense, of course, because Life is both addicting and maddening to generate by hand, which made it one of the very first pencil-and-graph-paper games to be computerized. Life is well-named, since the doodles in motion uncannily resemble the odd two-dimensional creatures of Flatland. What Golly brings to the table, besides the cool retro feel, is a collection of some of the largest and hardest to set up of this whimsical beasties ... including some of the very counterintuitive guns, puffers and breeders.
I give this high marks as a sterling museum piece, a kind of diorama on the inner worlds of the first computer programmers of the 20th century. [alert admin]
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Monday, October 10 2005 @ 09:55 PM PDT
Last 10 Comments by grikdog [ Search for All ]
Actually, they only sort of work in 10.3.9 -- if your hard disk spins down, going back to the nonpareil window will freeze your cursor, screen, etc.
Original feedback item : Read More
Friday, December 30 2005 @ 02:33 PM PST
...85, according to Jud.
Original feedback item : Read More
Tuesday, August 09 2005 @ 08:46 AM PDT
I spoke too soon. "Fixes" depend on available memory, apparently -- at any rate they execute rather slowly, and animations may still anomalies. Also Stock Ticker no longer displays my list, nor will it allow me to re-enter my list.
Original feedback item : Read More
Friday, August 05 2005 @ 07:53 AM PDT
command line interface to a command line interface
If your copy of Tiger is NOT properly configured...
Q: How many members of the U.S.S. Enterprise does it take to change a
light bulb?
A: Seven. Scotty has to report to Captain Kirk that the light bulb in
the Engineering Section is getting dim, at which point Kirk will send
…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Thursday, July 21 2005 @ 02:49 PM PDT
apostrophes, please
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Friday, July 15 2005 @ 07:46 AM PDT
It can't be too difficult to render correctly. MS Internet Explorer 5.2.3 hasn't been updated for years, doesn't complain about picky standards, and renders the page absolutely spot on. So, interestingly enough, does Camino.
Original feedback item : Read More
Thursday, July 14 2005 @ 01:49 PM PDT
Actually, I do enjoy watching Nutcracker on Christmas Eve, especially with a toddy and a leather-bound edition of Freud's dream interpretation. So cute. So dangerous.
Original feedback item : Read More
Saturday, July 09 2005 @ 06:50 AM PDT
Aside from identifying fragments....
Basically, one surefire way to defrag any hard disk is to clone it onto a Firewire hard drive, boot to some other volume, format your fragged drive, and re-clone it right back. At least, I haven't seen a defrag utility capable of running to completion on any of my Macs for years. Such a beast may exist, but I stopped looking for it, frankly. Also, IIRC Apple's HFS+ file management is supposed…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Friday, July 08 2005 @ 09:15 PM PDT
Needs a StartupItem, though. Here's step one... <pre> #!/bin/sh . /etc/rc.common ## # Start up the Tomcat server on Mac OS X # # StartService () { ConsoleMessage "Starting Tomcat server..." /Library/Scripts/Tomcat/start_tomcat 2>&1 >/dev/null } StopService() { ConsoleMessage "Stopping Tomcat server..." /Library/Scripts/Tomcat/stop_tomcat 2>&1 >/dev/null } RestartService () { StopService StartService } RunService "$1" </pre>
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Monday, July 04 2005 @ 01:22 PM PDT
Dictionary attack: Every word in the English language is in the OED. YOUR task, if you choose to accept it, is to arrange them meaningfully. You can even use the same word more than once ("ROM"), or never ("illegal" or "copyrighted"). As for being "too dumb" to figure out how to find illegal, copyrighted ROMs and run them on MacMAME, there's something to be said for piddling yellow tracks in the…
Original feedback item : Read More(1 words)
Wednesday, June 15 2005 @ 07:56 AM PDT
