Solipsism Gradient

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.

Yes, that was a rather busy period – months without posting, and I haven’t been online much, except for checking email now and then and fighting spam (would you believe 3579 spam comments since I activated Akismet? Highly recommended).

Things have settled down a little and I now have consistent broadband again. To make a long story short, our new apartment (not the one that was new September last year!), which should have been ready Real Soon™ after our return from Texas in July, has been much delayed. The builder ran into serious snags, both technical and bureaucratic. We’ve mostly moved in, though unofficially, and all my time is being spent with unpacking, fixing stuff, installing shelves and lighting, and general setting up. All in all, we spent about 6 months in various hotels.

In about a month everything should be done, and the garage and other public parts of the building should also be ready for less adventurous tenants to move in.

In the meantime, very little has happened on the development front – I haven’t even been able to stay current with the mailing lists. If all goes well, that will change soon…

This is just to assure you, faithful reader, that I’m alive and well. (And also to make a test post, since I’m twiddling with the underlying software.)

We’re officially back in Belo Horizonte, by the way. Texas was way too hot and there was no convenient cooler place anywhere nearby, so we went back a little early. However, our new place won’t be ready for another month or so; meanwhile we’re in a hotel. Feels weird to play the tourist, but now I’ve got my iMac set up and everything ready to get back to coding.

I just found out that an errant script is messing up the automatic version checker in Quay and Klicko – a consequence of the server migration which happened several days ago. Please hold on while our trained server gnomes return from their burrows and fix it (it might be one or two more days, I’m really stretched thin here). My apologies.

Update: fixed. Again, sorry about the delay.

After checking my server logs I found several messed-up redirects. Old bookmarks and RSS feeds should all be working now…

Here’s a brief rundown on what’s new here – it’s not just the pretty colors.

First, the “dumbass folly” “noble experiment” of using phpbb forum software for my blog has been officially terminated – as you can see, I’m now running WordPress like everybody else. The upside is that now commenting is much easier, and you don’t need to register to comment.

I’ve spent some time going through all the old posts, adding tags and categories. Hopefully I’ve been able to do so somewhat consistently, to make searching easier. All my personal topics have been merged into this blog stream.

The support forums have been upgraded to phpbb version 3 (for a few days, I considered using bbpress but it wasn’t enough for my needs). There, too, users will be able to comment without registering. There’s a huge list of registered users brought over from the old forums; I’ve rejected quite a few obvious spammers, and users registered over the last 14 days may have been lost. Also, I think that some user’s passwords may not have survived the migration process. However, as I said, it’s no longer so important to be registered at all.

In exchange for allowing free posting to anonymous users, all comments and posts on both blog and forums will be held in a moderation queue; the spammers have already been at it, but “none shall pass”.

Links to older posts should be automatically forwarded to the appropriate WordPress permalink or to the new support forums, depending on the topic. The RSS feed URLs have also changed; some readers should switch you over automatically, but be sure to check.

As you may have noticed, I’ve integrated the product pages and other static material to use the blog’s theme. I haven’t quite figured out a fully theme-independent way of doing so, since I could find no theme that both supports that and looks “just so”; expect the current theme to stay in place for quite some time (maybe not 7 years like the last one, though 🙂 ).

If you see this, it means that the new site design is up.

Hope you like it; details soon. Not everything could be transferred successfully, please recheck and update any links or RSS feeds you might have pointing at old URLs.