Ninjar Snow Leopard Beta

Sorry for the delay those of you waiting for the Ninjar Snow Leopard build have been experiencing. This is due to SL requiring a big re-architecture of the way .jar files are indexed by the Ninjar Spotlight importer.

Things do appear to be working and I've sent out a packaged build to the first set of beta testers this morning.

If you're interested in getting your hands on a beta build (and please bear in mind that it is just that) please drop me a line at info@wiredupandfiredup.com and I'll send you a copy out.

Hopefully, all going well, the 'real' version should hit the site in the next couple of weeks or so..

Cheers,

Richy

An Eternal Golden Braid

I've never read this book, but I just bought a copy on Amazon and am quite looking forward to it arriving. These days I do most of my reading in French, but for this one I decided to stick with the English version as it looks complicated enough without the language problems...

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Strange Safari behaviour...

For a few weeks now my Safari has hung on startup. Spinning beachballs of doom and everything. I figured it was something I'd done to it (I'm tracking the WebKit nightly releases and tend to hack around a bit with my OS) but never really had much time to figure out what exactly was going wrong.

Until now. I knew it was hanging on opening a file (I assumed the PubSub database and had tried deleting that to no avail), but this morning I decided that the PAIN of using firefox was too great to not spend half an hour fixing Safari.

After a bit of tinkering with lsof and gdb I discovered a couple of caches that I didn't know about on my machine these were..

/private/var/folders/gc/gcMtdPw4FY4KstxwBSOd7U+++TI/-Caches-/com.apple.Safari/Cache.db

and

/private/var/folders/gc/gcMtdPw4FY4KstxwBSOd7U+++TI/-Caches-/com.apple.Safari/SafeBrowsing.db

They were also huge. I've no idea what they were but I do know that when either Safari or Webkit starts up it tries to read them and on my machine this was causing it to hang (perhaps they were corrupt).

Anyway, the fix was to delete them (and the pubsub database for good measure). Steps below.

1. sudo rm -rf /private/var/folders/gc/

2. rm ~/Library/PubSub/Database/Database.sqlite3

After these two steps both Safari and WebKit work and I'm finally out of Firefox purgatory. I hope this comes in useful if anyone else has Safari hanging on startup.

Yahoo! BOSS and Java

A while ago we had to use the Yahoo! BOSS API to search and link to news stories related to various topics.

I had a quick google (no point re-inventing the wheel) but I couldn't turn up any code in Java for this, there's plenty of Javascript/Python/Ruby/etc. code. But we needed to use Java in this instance so I quickly dashed out a simple wrapper for BOSS.

A while later, it was tidied up (a bit) there's still some rough edges, but it's working perfectly well for us.

And yesterday, we decided to release it under the Apache 2.0 License so that in the future anyone Googling for Yahoo! Boss and Java should have something to help.

The buildable source is available at http://code.google.com/p/javaboss/

At the moment it has dependencies on org.json.jar and junit.jar which are included in the repo, I expect at some point we'll move those out and either use maven or ivy to resolve this sort of thing.

This keeps coming up.

Petition to stop software patents in Europe.

I don't think it'll ever go away actually, introduction of patents would probably make a few people and corporations happy and a lot of lawyers very rich.

Worth reading the studies that point to the conclusion that this is a pretty bad idea before signing :)

I wish I had a screencap of this...

I've got Bloomberg buzzing away in the corner for a bit of company (freelancing can be lonley) and they just flashed this across the screen.

Bloomberg INSIGHT : Global trade slowdown bad for growth.

Is that really so very insightful? Do traders still pay a few thousand a month for terminals to recieve helpful updates like that? Perhaps I should ditch this coding lark and consider a career in financial journalism.