So I caught about half of the first debate tonight. I find debates to be a great way to get it straight from the candidates rather than the usual media-spun version. (the first thing I do after a debate is turn the TV off - why do I care what the media has to say about the "strong points" and "weaknesses" each candidate had??)
Here's the gist of it for those that missed it:
Senator K: Yes, I'll tell you exactly what I'll do. But first, the President didn't
That about sums it up for The Senator. Seemed to be a whole lot of lovely sounding generalities, but not a whole lot of detail.
President B: (in reply to any question) You can't send missed mexages, err, mixed messages to our troops or the world, that's not the way the Commander n' Chief leads this great nation. My opponent didn't mislead when he voted to authorize the use of force.
The President tended to gravitate toward excessive repetition he is sometimes overly fond of - not eloquent at all, but quite passionate.
Anyhow, it's fascinating to see the stark difference between the two men. The fine folks at JibJab illustrate it quite well.
I look forward to the debate next week also. Nothing like a healthy dose of politics and issues to refresh our love of democracy!
I need corrupted fonts. Badly. I need the help of the netizens of the interweb to get these corrupted fonts. Please email any corrupted fonts the MenuViews tool below finds to my name at this company dot com. Please compress them as some fonts will be destroyed by the internet.
Download MenuViews.
To use:
Download it. Unzip it. Run it. Click on "TestFontMenu". Wait a while. If it doesn't appear, click it a second time. It should crash. Open the Console (/Application/Utilities/Console) check the console.log. It'll list a bunch of fonts and their paths. The last one listed should be the one that caused the crash. Remove it and run MenuViews again and see if it crashes. If it does not, the removed font is corrupted. Please email this to me along with the crash log and the console log.
So, its been 10 days today since I installed MT-Blacklist 2.01b onto the MT 3 installation.
Some statistics to prove how useful the tool is:
- Comment spams blocked: 102
- Comment spams moderated: 19
- Duplicates blocked: 0
- Blacklist - Strings: 2996
- Blacklist - URLPatterns: 33
- Blacklist - Regexes: 31
- Blacklist - FlexProtect: 0
Jay and the gang, if you're around at MacWorld SF '05, I owe you something nice (if I get a visa =).
As you can clearly tell from the title, FontCard 1.1 is "out" (That's a download link, that it is). Biggest news to this release is it is about 5 to 30 times faster than the first FontCard 1.0.3 released back early this year. Uh, did I just say first? Wonder what I mean by that... According to various tests I've done. If you want to turn on logging for FC, you can see the times yourself. Second biggest news, it now works with Cocoa applications. And it takes about 400 milliseconds to set up too (which is deferred), so that was really fast. Sadly, there is no Cocoa support for Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar Version 10.2.8 or earlier because it lacks support for the new menu manipulation methods and Cocoa really hates it when you select a menu item that doesn't exist. Exceptions out the wazoo. Sorry people that use said version of the Mac OS.
The entire backend was rewritten to be all sexy like. So now if an application has multiple font menus, it will use the same one for them all. This means it is faster and it also means that there is no longer a delay every time you open the font menu in InDesign even thought it is evil and destroys the font menu every time it is closed.
Carbon "Show Fonts" support has also been added. This is primarily for BBEdit 8.0 and Tex-Edit Plus. FontCard will look for this menu item and spawn a new submenu off it that shows the font menu. Doesn't matter where it is, FontCard will find it. In Cocoa, FC makes a new item below the Show Fonts command. The difference is due to the fact that Carbon menus are usually index based so adding an item to a menu could cause the program to internally choose the wrong item. Cocoa, however is not index based. However, because Cocoa menus sit on top of Carbon, it has a separate dictionary-like representation of all the menu items. Adding a submenu to the main item would cause it to be lost when the items are resynced (which could be at any time) or it could make the parent menu item stop functioning completely. That'd be bad. This all means that unlike FontSight not only does FC work with all native applications, it is also cheaper. And unlike You Control: Fonts there isn't a list of pre-approved Applications that you can work with. FC should work with all native menus (the font "menus" in Office in the Palettes are not real. If FC doesn't work with an application, then that is a bug and should be reported.
Speaking of Office... There is a fun bug in Word 2004 that completely prevents the font menu from working if WYSIWYG menus is turned off. Doesn't matter if FC is installed or not, it just won't work. Since FC requires WYSIWYG menus to be off in the host application, that made it impossible to use it in Word 2004. No More! FC now sends an AppleEvent to Word, from Word. Sadly, this means the first time you do it, there will be a slight delay as components and things are loaded into Word. Assuming Microsoft fixes the bug in the next update to Word, FC will know what to do.
What else....? Oh, if you don't use your fonts for a while, OS X will empty its cache of them so the next opening of the menu might be a little slow. This isn't due to FontCard, it just appears to be a memory optimization that OS X makes. And you might notice the installer for FC installs an item called com.apple.Recents.collection on some computers. This is because, due to an entirely broken Font Collection API, there is no way to recreate this collection if the user has deleted it or never had it in the first place. I didn't even notice this until some users started asking for a feature I added more than 6 months ago. I kept saying I added it, and they kept saying "No, you didn't. Now shut up and add it." One really nice and patient user was willing to work with me and help me confirm that it really was a bug in OS X. I've filed a bug against almost every function in FontPanel.h. Sigh.
And finally, this new FC uses a new registration scheme. It is painless, free, and secure (SSL Powered!) to update it. Just install FC, the preference pane will open, URU will launch, and you will be asked if you want to update (for those paranoid users out there, automatic updating is not enforced). And we do not capture the MAC address, unlike some other pronoun-named software companies. I'll let Slava or Brian explain why this Serial Number change was necessary.
I've been mentioning the icon updates the talented artist Max Rudberg has been creating for us.
He's slowly redoing our icons, one at a time, paying extreme attention to detail, and we quite like the end result. We're proud to present to you the two new icons for the upcoming updates we're going to have out soon (both are in beta testing):
Additionally, you can see the new Installer icon for WindowShade X. Both products are getting a facelift, and the new icons are essential for the new look.
I am pretty sure you'll like the updates, too. =)
After a short time away from Movable Type and a somewhat less that satisfactory run with WordPress we are now paying customers of Six Apart and running on MT 3.11.
Please be patient for a day or so while we re-import the comments from recent entries. Thanks!!
Many of us, including me, are the software developers. Many call ourselves 'indieware' developers. We develop software, formerly known as 'shareware', that allows people to download it, try it for some period of time (or with some features disabled), and, if the software looks and feels good, purchase it. After you purchase it, user usually enters a serial number that turns the 'demo' version of the software into the 'full' version.
On the other hand, if user doesn't like the software, he/she is free to trash it and not use it again. No obligations to the author - don't like it, don't use it.
Then, sometimes, one of these serials gets pirated. By pirating I mean that some legitimate user who has bought the software releases his serial number on some of the 'hacker' communities, so other people can use the software for free. I am not talking about sharing a serial with a friend, we all know it happens, while we don't endorse it, it's really not the problem. If the program is so good you wanted to share with a friend, it's okay. Maybe the friend will tell another friend about it or will buy it in the future because he likes the product. But in this case, I mean the serial is 'leaked' to a semi-big group of people who are not affiliated with the poster in any way, other than that they all are pirates (sometimes serial numbers get generated, which means the hacker reverse engineers the software serial number algorythm and generates a serial that is perfectly valid from the program point of view - but either way, this is still a 'pirated' serial).
Developers deal with the pirated serial numbers differently:
- Some don't care at all;
- Some disable the pirated serial numbers in the next version of the software;
- Some accept the serial but display a message designed to guilt-trip the person;
- Some employ some Internet checks to mark and nail down the pirated serials while the application runs;
- Some make a new serial number scheme to mark the serials invalid.
As you can see, the deal is to make sure the pirated serial numbers don't work, either immediately or in the future versions of the product. It is our right as a developer to do so, and it is usually written in the license agreement to the software.
However, it has come to my attention that some developer I will not name here has moved further on the road of fighting the piracy. Here's what the software they make does:
If a pirated serial number is entered, the software erases the user's Home directory. Yes, you heard it right - the software completely erases it, beyond repair. This means all of the user's documents, settings, music, movies and whatnot are suddenly gone.
I don't know what to think of this. While I understand the developer's frustration regarding pirates, in my opinion, it is totally unacceptable to erase anything on a user's hard drive, even if he is a pirate. Dear developer, you do not have the right to touch a user's data. You have the right to fight the piracy in your own product. But you cannot touch any other sensitive data. It's not yours.
For this reason, for example, our installers don't delete anything on the hard drive during the uninstall process. They move the uninstalled files to the Trash, letting the user delete them when he or she wants. And no, I am not trying to say the developer should've moved the Home directory to the Trash. I am trying to say that erasing anything is bad.
I hate to see a situation like this in the Mac community. Of course, the only people directly affected by this so-called "anti-pirate protection" are pirates, yet it still indirectly creates a bad image for the rest of us indieware developers.
What do you think?
Update: As it appears from one of the comments (from WiseWeasel), the developer did removed the file deleting code pretty quickly. Therefore, my apologies to the developer for possibly some unneeded flak towards him. However, the point still stands, and I think it should be a good learning example for all of us. Thanks for your feedback!
Update 2: I kindly ask to not post the name of the application here. As mentioned before, the author fixed this mistake quickly; for this and other reasons the product name was left out intentionally. If you feel the need to discuss that product specifically, please do so elsewhere. I am leaving this post open as a general discussion on this matter, as I know for sure this is not the first time such 'anti-pirate' protection tactics have been used. Thank you.
Update 3: Comments are no longer accepted. Thank you for the participation. I beleive the discussion is no longer constructive or objective. I am pretty sure the original developer is punished enough as is, and I am also sure that the rest for us it is a good lesson. Apologies if I hurt anybody's feelings, but such kind of issues should be worked out publically, in my opinion.
...while working on the WSX update, added the following to the code:
else if (...)
{
// [application name removed] engineers deserve a 3 liter (that is about 101 fl. oz. for you Americans)
// enema filled with stainless needles and glycerin for their programming and error validation techniques.
Oh, the joy of being a programmer. I am pretty sure someone has the same to say about my programming and error validation techniques...
Update: Thanks to Steve, replaced the mistyped glicerine with glycerin. After some thought, I decided that it really should be turpentine, as glycerin is too smooth. :)