People like their applications to work. Even better, they like them to work, even when things change. For the WinTel world, this isn’t a big deal (Vista aside ;), because the underlying CPU architecture hasn’t really changed, from a program’s point of view, in the past two decades. Unless you have a weird program that’s designed for AMD’s 3DNow! instruction set and you switch to an Intel CPU, or perhaps an application designed for a more esoteric old SIMD architecture, your application should run just fine (as long as your Operating System is ok with it).

Mac OS X doesn’t have the luxury of working on the same underlying CPU though, so things need to be handled a little bit differently. The solution Apple came up with was

Good morning gentle readers. I opened up my craptop this morning to witness the struggles of what seemed to be a laptop battling cancer. No, this was not another case of opteron cancer. Instead I found that Windows, unable to cope with my Cisco Aironet 350 wireless card, was creating network connections one after another in the system tray.

Updated: now with response.

I thought to myself this morning – I want an Eggo Waffle. You see, I have never had one, but have always been interested. There were some in the freezer that Robert had bought, removed from their packaging because of his space-saving ways.

Naturally I found the need to prepare an Eggo Waffle to the correct specifications as I wanted to make sure that I was having the correct Eggo experience (microwave, toast, pan fry, what?). To my surprise the feast was ruined (credit for the title), and breakfast was not magically delicious.

For years, iPhoto users have been stuck using a limited number of email clients to send their photos easily. This was mostly remedied by the iPhoto Mailer Patcher, but it left out non-applescript aware applications because, after all, iPhoto uses applescript to interface with them. One of the more notable omissions is Thunderbird.

Finally, this void has also been filled, via the iPhoto Thunderbird Bridge. It’s still quite primitive, but all the basics are there for iPhoto-Thunderbird integration.

If you’re an iPhoto/Thunderbird user, give it a whirl.

NSSpeechSynthesizer, the Cocoa class responsible for giving applications a voice under OS X, is leaky. Creating and destroying thousands of instances of this class slowly consumes all the available memory in a system, leading to degrading performance and eventual application instability.

The disappointing part is that this bug was first noticed almost two years ago.

The Kineme Quartz Composer patches now have a proper home at http://kineme.net/, including forums, bug reports, comments, and feature requests – complete with voting!

Along with the new site, a few new patches are available as well based on requests from users.

While writing the new Image Downloader (Blocking) QC patch for CoreMelt, I ran into what appears to be a bug in Mac OS X’s NSURLConnection framework – if you construct an NSURLRequest and specify a timeout of less than 30 seconds, it’s ignored when you perform a [NSURLConnection sendSynchronousRequest:returningResponse:error:]. The request takes at least 30 seconds to time out, contrary to what the documentation suggests..

Steps to Reproduce:

Faced with a need to recover images from Robert’s camera after a defective card-reader nuked the filesystem superblock, a quick utility came to mind. Nuked superblocks mean no file allocation table. It means no metadata. But it does not mean no data.

• Target medium: 1GB XD card from a digital camera.
• Data to recover: JPEGs. Lots of them.

Whipping out some jpeg-format-and-filesystem-jutsu, here’s the solution (for less than that $20 shareware recovery utility):

Making pop-up menus in custom Quartz Composer patches is actually surprisingly easy.

1. Set up a QCIndexPort input. QCIndexPorts provide values from 0 to whatever max you specify using - (void)setMaxIndexValue:(unsigned int)max;.