Solipsism Gradient

Rainer Brockerhoff’s blog

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You may have noticed the small lock icon next to the URL on this site? Well, this means that it’s now (almost) fully buzzword-compliant, completely served over the secure https protocol via a brand-new digital certificate! TL;DR: it’s more secure for both you and me; at least, it’s much better than it was before. But nobody’s perfect.

I know; some pages (perhaps, even, this blog post you’re reading) still haven’t adapted to our new secure overlords and may not show the lock icon, or even be completely broken — I’m working on that. In a week or two all should be fine. I’m using the invaluable https://www.whynopadlock.com/ checker for this, and already managed to get an A rating from the equally invaluable https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ page. Credit to my hosting provider, DreamHost, for making this migration both possible and almost painless.

In other news, we’re just back from Yet Another Trip — this time to Patagonia and Antarctica. I’ve had plenty of time to work offline, meaning that things which are sometimes fascinating but often boring got done without excuses; I had to push off procrastination for weeks! In another week or two — or a month or two, if Zeno’s Paradox kicks in — a new RB Utility should be available. The app itself is 95% done, but as I plan to release it on both the Mac App Store and from this site, and it’s a paid app, all the tedious back-end stuff had to be learned and developed. Watch this space for news.

Update: I did some more tinkering with the security headers and I now also get a B rating from Yet Another Invaluable site: https://securityheaders.io/. (The A rating seems quite tricky, but I’m looking at the requirements.)

Update#2: more tinkering, and https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/ now says “A+”! Yay.

Updates update

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Good news: we’re back. Here’s my updated world map:
worldmap1

Bad news: my plans to work underway were largely derailed, and I had to wait an additional couple of weeks for my new iMac to arrive. Still, everything is finally installed and working now, and an update to RB App Checker Lite should be out in a day or two.

Oopsy

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The recent update to WordPress 4.0 seemed to have gone smoothly — perhaps too smoothly.

Turns out it has some fancy new redirection facilities that interfered with some of the pages outside this blog — specifically, some of the product pages, but only if the final /index.html was missing — it then would search the blog for the oldest post mentioning the product. Go figure.

Anyway, I managed to mostly fix it; the sole remaining exception seems to be the Klicko page. Please use this link to get there, in the unlikely case you’re still using that.

Another recent addition is the Crayon plugin to properly format source code on these pages. I’ve checked it out and it seems to have a bazillion options. I’ll have to play around with it and find the one that breaks the fewest older pages — this may take a week or so.

Speaking of a week or so, we’re currently on the road for yet another long trip; this time to Germany, Northern India and Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, Italy, Greece and Montenegro. I’ll probably have Internet for another 8 or 9 days, but by then whatever’s not fixed will have to wait for our return around the end of October.

Meanwhile, a small update(1.1.1) to RB App Checker Lite is waiting for review in the Mac App Store. I’ll post the direct download version ASAP; the only change is a fix for a crash that a couple of users complained about. Meanwhile, RB App Quarantine is about to be updated with helpful suggestions from users; I’ll try to do that while underway.

You should not have noticed anything, but this domain (and several domains I’m hosting for others) is now running on a new server under a new hosting plan.


I’m still with DreamHost, but now on a Virtual Private Server – and they’re certified “green”, an obscure jargon word apparently meaning “carbon-neutral”. There’s a smaller green graphic in the footer on every page now – click either there, or on the round graphic to the right to check. By clicking on that (and on other similar links throughout this site) you will see details; also, should you be wanting to host your own site with them, I will get a modest commission if you sign up through such a link.

Together with that change I’ve done some  optimizing, rechecking, and updating of the infrastructure. We now have a newer PHP, new caching software, optimized server resource allocation, and so forth. What is not new, and becoming creaky, are the Support Forums; almost all recent visitors seem to be spambots, and the underlying software is proving hard to maintain. Very few of you seem to go there; or perhaps there aren’t any bugs left in my software…? 🙂 Anyway, expect the forums to vanish sometime early next year, and they’ll probably be folded into this blog in some fashion.

Should you notice something amiss while browsing around on this site, please drop me a line!

10 years!

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Wow, today is the 10th anniversary of this blog; at least that’s the oldest post still preserved in my database. Most of the pieces were already in place in early 2002, but it took me some time to get everything running. At the time, I based the blog on phpbb, but a few years ago I migrated to WordPress; only the support forums, which get very little use these days, still use phpbb. Here’s a screenshot of the early days:

The cringe-inducing title was patterned after several similar ones I saw at the time; later on, no doubt under the influence of Iain M. Banks, I changed to the current “Solipsism Gradient”, which I still think quite descriptive. I’m still working up the nerve to ask him to use the name in an upcoming book, though… 🙂

But earlier versions were still more cringe-inducing, look at this one, from mid-2000:

At least I can safely say there’s no <blink> tag, and the animated GIF for the visitor counter was actually well-received; can’t really use it again as there are too few digits to be future-proof, but here’s what it looked like:

Well, life goes on. In a few days we’ll take a month off, flying in to Denver and driving around the parks between Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, Salt Lake City and Bryce Canyon. If all goes well, I’ll be able to work and post from underway. To coin a phrase, “we have cool things in the pipeline”… 🙂

Meanwhile…

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While I’m busy finding the very last bug in the forthcoming Quay for Lion update…

here’s a new vocabulary test. Here’s my result:

Your total vocabulary size is estimated to be:
40,700
words
 
Well, not too bad. There’s about 10 at the last screen I didn’t know, and 3 I wasn’t entirely sure about.

Re: WWDC2011

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My flight to San Francisco and WWDC 2011 leaves tomorrow night and I should arrive early in the afternoon on June 2nd.

Friday and Saturday are mostly reserved for taking care of some private business, but if anybody wishes to meet with me before WWDC, please drop me an email (rainerbrockerhoff.net), Twitter direct message (I’m @rbrockerhoff) or AIM:rainerbrockerhoffmac.com.

Early Sunday I’ll switch hotels and soon after lunch I’ll be at Moscone to get my badge. There was supposed to be a meet-up of Brazilian developers in the early afternoon, but apparently not everybody will be able to show up; at any rate, I’ll hang out at registration for a couple of hours. Later on, and all week, things will be quite hectic and I’ve no idea yet which parties I’ll be able to attend.

After the conference I’ll have a couple of days for resting and reading, and I should be back home on June 15th.

Things are looking up development-wise. I’m well along implementing my ideas of transitioning most of my products to the Mac Apple Store. While this means that all the new stuff will only run on Mac OS X 10.6.6 and up, the old versions will continue to be available, though mostly unsupported. No time to post details yet, and some of those are bound to change depending on information gathered at WWDC – but I’m optimistic that everything will work out.

More as it happens!

Lion is coming

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With the new apartment mostly ready (though the external/common areas are still unfinished), a return to blogging and coding may now be possible.

While I’ve pondered about the general direction that I wish to take my software, details are still a little unclear. Yes, the Mac App Store does figure in my plans for updating/replacing XRay, but System Preference panels are not accepted – so Quay and Klicko will continue being distributed over this website.

The developer preview release of Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” was a surprise to me. My expectation was that it would be released at (or just after) next June’s WWDC, which I hadn’t planned to attend. I’ve just installed the Lion preview and had a fast look; it’s farther along than such previews usually are, and there are sufficient new UI details and API changes that I decided to study those first, before commiting to design details on my own software.

A surprising amount of detail about Lion has already been published, NDAs notwithstanding, with only token sallies from Apple Legal. I’ve been somewhat out of touch with the developer community, so I can only speculate. Reducing the price of developer access to $99 – 20% of what it cost the last time around – may be a factor.

One aspect which will impact me immediately is that PowerPC support over Rosetta will no longer be available. There are some PowerPC apps I still use a lot: among them are Resorcerer, DMG Maker, Plain Clip, my own XRay, and – the one that’s open all the time – Eudora; as well as a bunch of utilities and games that I open very rarely. I suppose I’ll have to relegate them to my old Mac mini Core Solo, which – being a 32-bit machine – will also not be supported by Lion.

The exception is Eudora; I’ve used it since 1.0b5 or thereabouts. I suppose I’ll finally have to try out the Eudora OSE version; some fellow oldsters tell me it’s not too bad. None of the other email clients seem attractive, especially Apple’s Mail, which I actually tried out last year and didn’t like.

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