Recently we had an interesting opportunity to deploy 7 identical customized machines for one of Kosada’s consulting clients. We’ve been working on disk images to make this quick and painless, and have more or less succeeded. However, getting an archived image onto the machines has a few different methods, depending on circumstance. We also get to pay a penalty every time the underlying hardware changes, since the image bundles in specific drivers. Usually we’re able to work around this with minimal pain.

Excitingly, these new machines broke the mold (they’re slightly older, considerably cheaper machines), so we had to tweak the image a bit. [more...]

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a P5 Glove listed on eBay for $20. It arrived a couple of days later, and I started playing with libp5glove by Jason McMullan, Tim Kreger, and Ross Bencina. I built a very simple Quartz Composer patch around it.

 
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I made a pair of patches to allow Quartz Composer to directly interact with the Phidget InterfaceKit 0/0/4 (relay outputs) and 8/8/8 (digital inputs + analog inputs + digital outputs).

 
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I took Martin Kahr’s Apple Remote Controller Wrapper Class and built a Quartz Composer patch around it.

This release is only compatible with Tiger (10.4).
Leopard (10.5) includes a built-in Apple Remote patch.
Please see also kineme.net for Leopard-compatible patches.

Get version 0.1 here.

Some notes:

• The events received from the Apple Remote are fairly strange to begin with.. You don’t simply get “key down” / “key up” events as I would have assumed, but instead get cooked events — for many of the buttons, holding the button down generates a different event than tapping it.
• My patch queues events, to ensure that each keypress is visible for at least one frame.

Steve Mokris is a developer at Kosada, Inc.

The Bower VL46TC Titanium Super Wide-Angle “Fisheye” lens with “macro” claims to be:

• “Titanium” (I think it’s actually aluminum)
• “High Resolution” (It’s a glorified magnifying glass, so it unavoidably blurs around the edges.)
• “Digital” (This one baffles me. It contains no electronic parts whatsoever.)
• “AF” (AutoFocus. Again, contains no electronics, or even moving parts. My lens’s autofocus still works when this is attached, for the most part. However, under some circumstances, the attachments confuse the camera and necessitate manual focus.)
• “To fit : […] ALL FINE SLR CAMERAS.”

OK, now the fun stuff: pictures! [more...]

Mozilla is an open source project that produces some widely used software. Their most noteworthy product to date is Firefox, a standards-compliant web browser.

Being open source, their projects and products are often enhanced by the contributions of others. These contributions often come in the form of a “patch” — a file that tells the computer what to change in the source code to add the contribution. [more...]

In addition to writing the inspector panels for custom Quartz Composer patches tutorial, I spent this weekend writing up some advanced custom-patch-development documentation and posted it on QC Wiki:

• QCPatch Configuration
• QCPatch Events
• QCPatch Methods

Steve Mokris is a developer at Kosada, Inc.

…in thirteen easy steps or your money back.

This release is only compatible with Tiger (10.4).
Please see kineme.net for Leopard-specific informations.

 
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Author’s Note: Forgive this preamble I promise that they’ll be juicy links and google page rank increases in Part 2.

After my October escapade in Boston — with a brief layover at Yon Reptile Campaign — Lifeâ„¢ decided to shine a ray of hope in my general direction, after Thanksgiving. However, quick to grant me access to enough income to pay rent, Lifeâ„¢ viciously raped my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, and I was unable to use MPlayer to play movies, use GL to play games, or whatever else we non-Apple people do with our video cards. [more...]

I use PINE as my email client.

“Why are you living in the late 1970s?” you ask.

But I’ll refrain from answering that question for now. And I’ll even refrain from correcting you in that PINE wasn’t available until 1989.

And, so, in fighting the ongoing war against email, I tend to spend a lot of my day interacting with Mac OS X’s Terminal.app. I SSH into one of our Fedora Core Linux servers and run PINE there.

The default keybindings used by Terminal.app leave a bit to be desired, however [more...]