Various
Sunday, 2 May 2005
Sad enough I had to ground the longstanding mail address "tom" at this site - if a mail bounced back, use "Thomas" as account name. Sad enough, while SpamSieve worked perfectly to catch the enlargement specific mails, the rate of false positives (moved to the Junk folder) with legitimate bussines related content was to high (even one is too much, and multiple is far too much). Sorry for the inconvenience.
Software
Friday, 18 March 2005
The first release of AddressBook Exporter is available for download. It saves the contents of your whole Address Book or selected groups as CSV, XML or tab delimited text.
Current tidbits
Friday, 17 September 2004
I am not sure if this is normal. Recently it appeared more than ever to me I became an "free QA tester". I spent more time reporting bugs than accountable time on short term projects. For two simple one day projects I spent another day tracing down a handful of bugs. None of them took more than five lines of code to reproduce and each one would have been caught by the most basic unit tests available. What I considered usually a strength - the ability to switch programming environments and languages to the one that seems most appropriate - has become an extreme weakness: All environments are relatively buggy. Far more features but even much, much more bugs than "in the good old time". So I find myself more and more writing lengthy workarounds for trivial things in the other environment, and of course writing bugreports.. I guess my next series of weekend projects will focus on testing environments...
Mission possible
Phoenix to the rescue
Friday, 27 August 2004
Finally the new site design is ready. It is all XHTML and CSS, and actually the source of the pages is pretty cleaned up. Back to content creation ;-) Thanks to Eric Meyer and The Layout Reservoir for all the web design resources and inspiring material. Due to absolutely strange localizations of Adobe Golive and its incapability to synchronize files with umlauts in the name once again BBEdit and Interarchy are the tools to edit the content.
Mac programming and more
Thursday, 27 Juli 2004
In the past years I wrote multiple applications - most of them for Multimedia and Publishing - in C++, Java and RealBasic.
Besides that I implemented some Quark XPress XTensions and Adobe Photoshop Plug-Ins.
During the site reorganisation a lot of really old material from the mid-90ies was removed.
Strange how much some things evolved since then - and how much some regressed.
One of the very old, now trashed pieces of software was an file converter that started as MacEasyOpen add on
(that technology vanished pretty much in the MacOS 9 days. The remainder are the DataViz filters shipping with AppleWorks) and
evolved into an FindByContent Plug-In.
Odd enough, nearly ten years afterwards, I find myself fiddling with pretty much the same technology, now renamed for the third time.
It started as V-Twin, was renamed into "AIAT", then "FindByContent", and resurfaces now as "SearchKit".
Unfortunately, in the transition (MacOS 9 -> Mac OS X) the possibility to add custom content extractors to FindByContent was removed,
and some other holes in the APIs are open. It seems to be necessary to use some "dark old age" techniques to realize things that were already present some years ago..
