LYPANOV.NET

iChatTodoScheduler

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 07:32:57 +0100

There is one use case which Mail.app 3 and the various other applications I’m using to sort out my To Do lists simply does not provide for yet - recurring To Dos. For a short time I made use of Sciral Consistency unfortunately while it’s a great application, I feel quite bad for spending quite that much on something that I’ve already put a fair amount of time into in the past (see my post Planning recurring To Do's via iCal itself).

So at the weekend I decided to bring back my old AppleScript, sort out the few issues that remained, and re-release it. After around an hour of attempting to get date creation working with AppleScript (yes, really, an hour, to make a date...) I decided to give it another try in another language I enjoy using - Ruby. Two hours of using ScriptingBridge passed and I was still unable to make a To Do list item. Almost ready to give up I took a look at the new CalendarStore framework in Leopard, and figured I might as well give Objective C 2.0 and XCode 3 a shot as I’d never before tried these latest incarnations.

An hour later and the application was complete... using CalendarStore all of the manual handling of recurrence disappears and is replaced with a trivial query for todays events. Creating To Do items is well documented, so that was also trivial to get working.

The project source can be found via my github project here: http://github.com/zinf/icaltodoscheduler/tree/master.

UPDATE - I’ve uploaded a zip of the application for anyone that doesn’t have git - iCalTodoScheduler.zip. Warranty-less and free to use. You’ll need a calender “@inbox” and a calendar “Shadow”. See my earlier post for a description of creating the Shadow calendar.

Vocabulary Widget recap

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:11:13 +0100

Many months back I made some suggestive postings about my work on a Vocabulary Widget for OSX. In this last month thanks to some pushing from friends I’ve finally found the motivation to pick up development again.

It’s a shame my graphics creation skills aren’t really all that great... Pixelmator is fun though in any case! Here’s a day old screenshot to give you a glimpse of the things to come:

Firefox 3: selective anti-aliasing

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:54:18 +0100

The latest Firefox 3 builds are really impressive, much lower memory consumption, full page zoom including image resizings, tags in the bookmarks system, among many other changes that finally makes Firefox a nice alternative to Webkit/Safari. Alas... when used with my GreaseMonkey script to provide custom disable-able user stylesheets the font rendering looks just plain awful. Even 8pt fonts are rendered with anti-aliasing.

I’ve just spent a few hours figuring out a bit of the Firefox code base, digging down into the new Cairo based rendering engine, and after figuring out finally that the current system uses a bizarre mix of ATSUI for layouting, and CoreGraphics for glyph rendering I finally put together a patch which I’ve uploaded to a related Mozilla bug report.

So... people who care about having Firefox run well on the Mac. Please vote up:
Bug 389074 – Use Core Text instead of ATSUI to render text

And if you (like me) really love small fixed point fonts, my patch can be found here:
firefox3-less-aa.patch

Greasekit and user style-sheets

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:32:59 +0100

No doubt this is an extremely subjective thing... but I really much prefer having a small fixed point and set colors for text and its background when reading websites with large chunks of text.

For a long time I’ve used Safari/Webkit’s built-in custom style-sheet support, however, I frequently need to temporarily remove my custom style-sheet. For the last months I’ve searched for a solution to this issue, eventually finding various Webkit plugins which allowed for site customisation, however, I just came across the GreaseKit project and used this to quickly rewrite the functionality I needed in JavaScript.

My custom style-sheet results in pages looking something like:

And the GreaseKit/greasemonkey compatible script: custom-css.user.js

Rubydium update #1

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:44:42 +0100

This is the first in a series of postings on the latest developments and plans for Rubydium. Due to a lack of high level aims and goals I stopped development and moved away from the Ruby community for a long while many months ago.

In the meantime I’ve explored Java, in particular Hibernate, Wicket, and Seam. From there I moved on to Scala, however... after several months away from anything other than professional development, I’ve once again returned to Ruby after an interesting chat with JRuby developer Charles Nutter.

I’m soon to move from a Java J2EE development position to a Ruby development position, and as such, have decided to make public my continued work on the Rubydium project. Don’t expect too much however. In my mind the project has shifted from a major burden, something that must be perfect and ideal from time of conception until its first gasping breath, into a project which brings one word to my lips: fun.

At the moment very little has changed since the last release, but I’ll try to summarize some of the bigger changes very quickly. I’ve moved from Ruth/Ripper to RubyParser (ParseTree). I’ve worked a bit on improving the time that the tests take to run, and have fixed a few tests that have been broken for quite a while already. The strange non deterministic behaviour that I’d for a long time attributed to my own NanoVM code has now disappeared which makes working on the code base much less fatiguing.

Please don’t expect a Ruby interpreter that will ever be used for production, this is just an experiment. However, I hope all following the project will be excited by the developments I aim to make in the coming months.

For the intrigued, I’ve pushed my work to a git repository: http://repo.or.cz/w/rubydium.git