This series uses example-based tutorials to explain and illustrate concepts and new lessons build upon concepts learned from previous lessons and examples. By the time you've gone through one of the books the most fundamental lessons have been iterated over numerous times (but without beating you over the head with them), and that's how these things stick. But honestly, my favorite things about these books are that they're priced to move (free & cheap, based on what format you're looking for) and that they're open-source (the source code is up on Zed's Gitorious account) but they're edited; no wild-ass Wikipedia style misinformation, just people contributing what they know where they think it'll do some good.

Long story short, it's inexpensive ($2.99 e-book, $7.99 dead tree!), well written (as well written as the beloved Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby), and fun in a nerdy sort of "taught myself calculus one summer back in high school" sort of way. Did you teach yourself calculus one summer back in high school? If you did, this book is probably beneath you. But since I spent my summers in high school at the Warped Tour, working dead-end food-service jobs, and swimming in creeks, I got a lot out of a surprisingly thin book.

If you're interested in a gentle introduction to programming, looking for a refresher on how computers do "The Maths", or just want to contribute a few dollars towards a noble cause (that is, convincing Steve to write volume 2) this is a worthwhile purchase. Double word score bonus to the fact that unless we have a massive quantum compute breakthrough within our lifetimes, the contents of this book should withstand factual atrophy astonishingly well.

The creepy mustache that is Jesse Thorn, of Put This On (the thinking man's style blog) published a bit about good headphones back on February 16th. When you think style blogging, you probably don't think about headphones (unless you buy gimmicky equipment like Beats Audio…) but he recommended the same headphones that my musician friends AND my audiophile friends had both previously recommended. After a week of hemming and hawing, I broke down and purchased an entry level pair of Grado SR60i headphones.

I had up until that point used an old pair of open-back Sennheiser HD570 cans for all of my "stuff I want to enjoy" listening; they're nothing fancy but they sound clear and they've aged well over the last, I don't know, 10 years or so that I've owned them. I don't know if that's before or after Sennheiser supposedly over-extended their brand in order to get shelf-space in big-box retailers, but I really wanted to know how these would compare. Peter, at Natural Sound of Framingham (the gentleman who sold me the Grado cans) said quite matter-of-factly, "I think you'll like these more than your Sennheisers."

After a month of near-daily usage, I will tell you flatly that Peter was right. Jesse was right. My audiophile & music nerd friends were right. They are the best headphones I've ever owned, and it was $80.00 USD well spent.

Sure, on first glance, they kind of look like the sort of knock-off junk you'd find in a swap meet in the parking lot of an Arizona hardware store. The plastic is flat and black, there's no gloss or glitz, they're sort of just hanging off these steel posts topped with a simple plastic cap, and they have a cable coming off each cup instead of routing it across the headband like everyone else does these days.

You know why they look like that? Because everything that isn't essential to making them sound good is effectively ignored: they're built for listening to, and they are wonderful. I had initially toyed with picking up the SR80i's instead, as a friend reminded me that they are supposed to be "measurably better" but I'm not really an audio nerd -- I figured, "I've got tinnitus and I can't really hear anything higher pitched than a child's voice". A month later and now I'm considering getting a second pair (maybe the SR80i's?) so I don't have to bring a pair back and forth to and from work every day.

TL;DR Anyone want a used but serviceable pair of Sennheiser HD570 cans?

**BONUS ROUND**: The Audioengine D1 USB/Optical DAC

I also picked up an Audioengine D1 USB/Optical DAC to use in lieu of the relatively noisy headphone out on my laptop. Not worth getting into since most of the technical minutia is either over my head or beneath my concern¹ but it was a solid, if unnecessary purchase.

So like I mentioned up there, I initially grabbed the book around its second or third beta release, figuring that while it was still in the process of becoming a Real Book I sometimes feel like I'm still in the process of becoming a Real Admin so, you know, what the hell, let's work through it together.

I know a number of developers who only know Ruby in the context of the Rails framework (and maybe related Rake tasks) and this book is an exceptional guide to using Ruby for more than just Rails applications. Command-line tooling has long been an area of interest for me as working in operations means often having to perform a number of repetitive tasks which lend themselves well to being scripted; good admins write good scripts.

To that end, I think there's a philosophy behind useful scripting and I think that sticking to system tools like Bash (or if you insist, standard bourne shell) whenever possible is always your safest bet. But sometimes it's just easier or smarter (and sometimes both) to use a language like Ruby or Perl for tasks like string manipulation, data aggregation and analysis, or "glue code". I think the most important thing this book does is try to instill a general philosophy of how good shell scripts and command line tools are built and maintained.

Beyond its focus on OptionParser (the standard Ruby argv parser library), Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby also gives a high level but functional overview of some of the popular options (Trollop, David's own methadone, and main) for parsing options and building help screens for your tools. For those of you who are curious, Slop is also somewhat popular but I understand that reviewing all of the options would have unnecessarily extended the length and scope of the book; you have to draw the line somewhere.

David has written a pretty useful book and I think it's a must-read for anyone who has to roll their own tools with any regularity. If you work in operations, development, or tooling you owe it to yourself to give it a read if only for the overview of what makes a successful command line tool that people appreciate using and what makes a shitty ad-hoc script with no help screen or sanity checking that your coworkers hate using but no one wants to take the time to refactor.

Let's Talk About That Icon

It's pretty damned terrible. It's so bad that I don't even care that the software runs faster than before (and it does). The improved responsiveness has taken a backseat to shame. Ping? HOST UNREACHABLE. It's an embarrassment to use or to be seen using. Here are two pieces of shitty MS clipart that my wife found in Office 2007 in less than 45 seconds:

If these two crazy kids tried to get shitty on cheap woodworking glue and Mad Dog 20/20 one weekend and "made an oopsie", you'd get something that looks a lot like that icon.

Oh, and here's a serious question: why are the window controls vertical? Chewbacca lives on Endor! It does not make sense! Stylistically and conceptually the whole thing feels clumsy and a bit like an attempt to get "in your face."

Almost every damned widget is A) yet again custom to iTunes, not the OS; B) different than it was before. They're almost all universally ugly. Things that should be buttons are just sort of decal looking sections of the screen and a lot of stuff has tremendously crappy bezels for no real reason.

Is There Anything They Did Right?

The speaker management window is a tremendous improvement?

I think I like this hybrid cover art view they're pushing for column based browsing.

You Like Third Party Library Servers?

Too bad. iTunes 10 has munged with the DAAP protocol (which, admittedly, is Apple's protocol, so it's their right) and broken 3rd party DAAP servers. So, your Drobo, your Synology DiskStation, your Netgear ReadyNAS, and those Western Digital disks that support streaming music? They're all basically going to need firmware updates when the someone figures out what to patch or change in MT-DAAP (or Firefly, if you prefer) to make it work again; you can make a pretty safe bet that Apple won't rev the protocol back to help fix this problem.

Final Thoughts

I have to believe that someone, somewhere is laboring away on music library management software that isn't encumbered by goofy widgets and ridiculous business decisions. It's probably not coming from the Linux camp (see: Rhythmbox, Banshee, Amarok, Clementine, & Guayadeque for an idea of where they're reinventing the wheel). Songbird is wrapped in XUL interface hell (never mind technical backend "iffiness"). I think iTunes has been the dominant player in this space (at least in OS X) for so long that no one even bothers trying anymore.

Sigh…

A small bit of background first: I'm using Snow Leopard and I'm unwilling to deal with the vagaries of less-than-native clients. This means that I'm not using ported Unix apps. So no Gnews, newspost, Pan, Pine, Slrn, or Tin. Those are right out.

This left me with a list cobbled together from MacUpdate:

• Unison, $24.95 from Panic
• Nemo, $14.95 from Malcom Mac
• MacSoup, $20.00 from Stefan Haller
• Pineapple News, free from Allen Brunson
• Xnntp, free from EDV Consulting
• Hogwasher, $49.00 from Asar
• OSXNews, free from Anurodh Pokharel
• MT-NewsWatcher, Donation requested, from Simon Fraser
• MaxNews, $20 from MaxProg

I had intended this to be a marginally comprehensive review of my time using these clients, but I barely got into the account setup with most of them, if I installed them at all.

Here's how it broke down…

Unison looks like crap; It hasn't been updated in since 2-26-08, and it has quirks under Leopard and Snow Leopard that I'm just not prepared to deal with. It feels dated, by which I mean it doesn't look good by modern Aqua standards; it also uses multiple windows to manage a lot of it's information. It feels like it's really based around the filesharing on Usenet, instead of being a general-purpose NNTP reader, which led me to uninstall it within five minutes. It's probably the worst looking Panic application (but one of the better looking ones in this list), which is unusual for a company who is often considered the vanguard of independent Mac development.

Nemo? So much promise. So god damned buggy. Poorly translated. Unfortunately priced given the wide-ranging nature of the bugs. These are fixable (and the price would be reasonable otherwise), but the simple fact of the matter is that this client is an example of how not to use cocoa frameworks. Didn't even make it to "use" because once it littered the root of my hard drive with empty files, I trashed it.

UPDATE

The Malcom-Mac site is down for "scheduled maintenance" and the developer of Nemo has stated his desire to squash these outstanding bugs and polish his software. I'll revisit this in a few months time.

MacSoup? No idea. It asked me to create a "settings file" to create a new database for news and mail. Obviously doesn't get what "native" client means. Looks like it's using old quickdraw calls to render the UI. Never set up accounts in it.

Pineapple News is free but the custom icons look extremely janky compared to the "standard" icons they're replacing. After setting up accounts it just hurt to use. It's visually grating on the eyes.

Xnntp has an installer. Aint no damned reason for that. It's a bloody NNTP reader. It doesn't need to create system files. OS X uses the application bundle format for a reason.

Hogwasher looks like an old Hotwire¹ client that someone stripped the filesharing out of and glued NNTP support to. It costs a lot of money (and maybe it took a lot of time to develop) but it's just god damned unusable. Trashed within minutes.

OSXnews looks awful too. Probably works better than Nemo, but has a distinct level of spit and polish missing. Never even got to setting up my newsgroup account. The author stated in July of 2007 that he was working on version 3. I wrote this in October of 2009, just to

I cannot stress how terrible the experience with MT-NewsWatcher was. It is basically an old Classic Mac application that has been updated just enough to sort-of run under OS X. It took a while to do anything, and it might be the worst looking of all of these clients. Apparently, Classic Mac OS users love it because it still looks and works like a Classic Mac application. Just so we're clear, I fucking hated the Classic Mac OS.

MaxNews was downloaded, but at this point I gave up and just installed the Thunderbird 3 beta. Is it a little overkill? Yes. Is it a little bloated? Yes. But it just works, and it works well.

So what happened? I think that a few options are plausible: these developers date to a different era, with different development mores and means. They may think that people still using NNTP don't care about their clients looking or working like complete shit, or they may think that because NNTP and Usenet as a whole date to an era where people would just roll their own GUIs or slap some shit together in curses and call it a Usenet client, they can still get away with that sort of behavior and worse still, get away with charing money for it.

So, am I being a bit of a snobby dick and trashing developers hard work?
Yes, I am.

But when the honorable mention you give to Thunderbird 3 (which is in beta right now, and more usable than anything else I listed) is the best thing you have to say about Mac OS X NNTP clients, the whole damned situation is in a sad sorry state of affairs. And if you're going to ask me to pay money for something, you'd better give me something worth paying money for. So this attempt to review these clients has ended in abortive failure, and concession to get by with the least worst option available.

1:37:20 PM Matthew Miller: Think I'm going to write an RFC with the suggestion that we extend the standard 4 option I/O error handling directives -- Abort, Retry, Fail, Ignore -- to include a fifth: Fuck_It_Dude_Lets_Go_Bowling
1:37:31 PM Ryan McKern: i'll second it if you do
1:37:45 PM Matthew Miller: excellent. let's see what the experts group thinks.

First things first, I should probably talk about TextMate. Textmate 2 feels like vaporware.

Is it? Probably not. And in the interest of full disclosure, I wrote this post in TextMate using the not-utterly-terrible Blogging bundle.

However, it's been a few years since there was anything especially novel about TextMate, and this doesn't help the fact that the editor is getting a little long in the tooth visually. This isn't really a problem, as a good editor can outlast almost anything else in the environment surrounding it. Many, many cranky people still use vi and emacs, which have both outlasted the operating systems they were built for.

I've just grown weary of having to finagle and finesse TextMate into usable shape. Admittedly, the Green Moleskin mod helps substantially (good bye project drawers!), and the use of updatable bundles has kept this editor viable in these rough and tumble times. I just can't help hating the fact that I have to keep CyberDuck open if I'm editing something remotely. Lack of SFTP/SSH support really is all I'm wistful about. Finicky bundle extensions (the Blogging bundle specifically is what I'm thinking of) are annoying but they are decidedly not deal breakers.

The Challengers

Since I am a geek, and therefore always looking for a better tool, I began testing Coda ($99) and Espresso ($79.95 or $64.95 if purchased with a CSSEdit License; It's unclear if special pricing is still available if you already own CSSEdit). Both offer a generous, fully functional, trial period. Both offer promises of kitchen-sink editing (defined as being able to handle all of my editing needs without leaving the app, including CSS editing, script editing, and remote filesystem editing over SFTP/SSH).

Panic is one of the top old-school Macintosh software companies. Their webpage is slick and their applications are polished like some sort of granite space mirror. Coda is their relatively seasoned (released in April of 2007) web development application. MacRabbit (also an extremely slick, in the lick-able sense, Macintosh software development company) then released Espresso during March of 2009 into the same kitchen-sink web development market that Coda was fighting for. If:

• you work with HTML and CSS
• you work in a language like PHP or perl
• you hate Dreamweaver

then Panic and MacRabbit want your dollars.

Espresso

Espresso, editing a ruby script

I started with Espresso, as I am a regular CSSEdit user. As mentioned earlier I have had nothing but good things to say about CSSEdit, especially since they rolled in the live preview/x-ray and local override features. Espresso is extensible through the use of small plugins called Sugars. Unfortunately, this means that as of today it also has poor language support (the Coffee House aggregator shows that Sugars are relatively immature and that there is no best-practice or general standards for them yet.). Of note is that there is no real support for Ruby yet, which is annoying as all hell since most of my back-end scripts are in Ruby. You'll see in the included screenshot that Ruby documents are just plain text documents, with no syntax highlighting. However, HTMl, PHP, and Python support and highlighting were all excellent.

Interestingly, Espresso has none of the CSSEdit guts worked into it from what I could find. It's very much a web programmers editor, not a web designer editor. While it wasn't uncomfortable to work with CSS in Espresso, I found myself switching over to CSSEdit more often than not. I imagine that in time MacRabbit will probably roll CSSEdit and Espresso into a single application. For now though, it's more context switching, with no gain in productivity to show for it.

Espresso shows promise (it is a beautifully designed application), and the concept of workspaces is novel. I appreciated the ability to work on something locally while automatically publishing it remotely, and Sugars have the potential to be as awesome as Bundles, if not more so. But much as every child has the potential to be president someday, only time will determine if Espresso's Sugars are making me coffee for $6.00 an hour in a few years.

Coda

Panic's challenger for my hard-earned editor dollars is Coda. Coda does a few interesting things, like integrating the SubEthaEdit engine for collaborative editing and incorporating the Transmit core for remote file operations. As of late it also supports plugins, though I've been unable to really find much in the way of usable plugins, since they're a relatively new feature.

The kitchen-sink approach that Panic took with Coda also extends to having a built-in terminal, which can connect to a local machine or a remote machine, for code debugging, remote operations, or whatever you'd normally keep a terminal open for while developing. Coda is a very, very complex application, and that's ultimately the problem I had with using it.

Coda's weird autocomplete suggestions

Coda wants to be everything at once, and it's very good at most things that it does. The text editor never feels like it's holding me back, but one of the big quirks I found was that the constant language-unaware auto-complete suggestions are much, much more aggravating than helpful.

I also found little utility in the included HTML reference, but that's only because I know HTML and CSS very well (not that my blog layout implies this, but I do. Honest.), and for a developer who only uses HTML to present manipulated data, I can see it being a helpful reference. Panic has recently (as of version 1.5) added the ability to point Coda towards other websites as reference guides, and that's much more useful long-term.

Conclusion

At the end of the day the only real utility Coda and Espresso offer me is remote editing. They don't support any configuration file formats and their support for anything except "web languages" (ASP, PHP, perl, Python, ActionScript, HTML, CSS and kinda-sorta Ruby) is poor at best. TextMate has bundles for Apache, nginx, and SSH, as well as general support for any of a variety of key-value pair style config files. it also supports Bash and these are ultimately the make-or-break features for me.

However, I recognize that Espresso and Coda aren't trying to be the programmers swiss army knife that applications like Vim or TextMate already are. They're editors geared towards web developers. Unfortunately, while that is a sizable 20% of my needs, the other 80% of my work is dealing with configuration files every single day I am on the clock.

For the time being, it looks like I'm sticking with TextMate.

Follow-up questions

You might ask now "Why not MacVim or BBEdit? What's wrong with TextWrangler?" Well, BBEdit is an excellent editor that just took too long to have its visual appearance overhauled. It used to look exactly like a Classic Mac OS application running inside a Cocoa OS X frame. They've just released a new version that I'm told would be worth my time to test and no longer looks like a very powerful editor hidden inside a child's toy. I may revisit it soon and see if it's shaping up into something that doesn't make me want to punch my monitor in frustration. TextWrangler feels almost like borderline abandonware at this point and it's an extremely watered down programmers editor for the languages I'm working in and for the amount of work I have to do. MacVim is an excellent port of Vim to Mac OS X, but at the end of the day it is Vim, and Vim gives you AIDS. Worse still, if you use Aquamacs then your genitals will spontaneously combust.

This was originally about automatic updates over SSH2 not working for me when I upgraded to WordPress 2.8. WordPress 2.9 is out now, and this problem turned out not to be their fault.

After filing a bug report and working through it with the WordPress team, a solution was eventually found (see the final update to this post). If you're not inclined to skip to the end then here's your TL:DR: turn off open_basedir or make the declaration less restrictive.

If you're not experiencing this problem (and Google says you're landing here if you're looking for help setting up SFTP/SSH updating for WordPress), I don't think this write-up will be of much help.

After upgrading to WordPress 2.8 I discovered that this update has broken automatic core and plugin updates for me. I use SSH2/SFTP as I don't trust, like, need, or support FTP, and the SSH log only shows that the PECL module is opening a connection and then closing it, with WordPress returning only the following to to the browser window.

> Unable to locate WordPress Content directory (wp-content).

I dug through how WordPress handles upgrades, and tracked this all down to the /wp-admin/includes/class-wp-filesystem-ssh2.php file.

UPDATE 6/13/2009 @4:40PM EST

From what I found, the rewrite of the SSH/SFTP2 update function happened because the ssh2.sftp wrapper was introduced. This replaced the older version of the function which copied contents into temp files and pushed the data around. It was a drastic speed increase, but it doesn't bloody work on my system for one reason or another.

UPDATE 6/13/2009 @7:16PM EST

I've officially cried "uncle!" and turned to the most wretched hive of scum and villainy in blogging, the WordPress forums (as well as their bug reporting and ticketing system). I also identified the patch which introduced the code which caused SSH2 support to go flying off the rails for me.

UPDATE 6/18/2009 @4:17PM EST

The WordPress team has marked this bug as belonging to milestone 2.9. There is a slim chance that maybe I'll see some relief in 2.8.1, but more than likely they're going to yet again refactor how SSH2 works for automatic upgrades. If this changes, I will update this post accordingly. For now, I believe I may have to simply let it be broken.

UPDATE 12/19/2009 @10:30PM EST

Months later, I worked out what the problem was. Ultimately a conflict caused by use of PHP's open_basedir and safe_mode kept the SSH2 module from accessing resources it needed. The way the ssh2.sftp wrapper works would bump into overly restrictive basedir declarations. If you are experiencing this problem and you check your error logs after turning them up to "debug", you'll probably find out what directory or file is causing this conflict. It's ultimately moot, since things like safe_mode are deprecated in PHP 5.3 and being outright removed in PHP 6.

Oddly enough, updating libssh2 to something more up-to-date than the outdated RPM provided by Dag for RedHat Enterprise Linux/CentOS made a HUGE speed difference. Definitely something to look into if SSH updating is slow for you.

Other than that, this round of upgrades has been mostly painless, and the hyped speed increases are not just hyperbole. WordPress 2.8 feels only slight under-baked beyond SSH2 hiccups. I confess that I haven't had a chance to play with the redesigned sidebar widget administration yet though, as I haven't even figured out how I want to implement support for sidebar widgets into this theme.

The bug that deletes some custom fields if you update posts that have them is still there. No idea how to begin tracking that one down, but I can state authoritatively that it's theme and plugin independent. Why am I linking to some dudes blog, and not the official WordPress bug tracker? because I don't even know where WordPress keeps its bug tracker.

I also had to reset WordPress Blog stats because WordPress was tracking the wrong subdomain for all of my stats. The numbers tallied up with Google Analytics and the AWFFull log grinder, but the URLs were all effed up. I fixed the problem on the WordPress.com backend, and in the process lost months of aggregated history.

The upshot to this loss is that I hope to have a new round of search hit inspired commentary ready to go in a week or two.

Through MacZot

• Audiobook Builder
  This came with some sort of bundle that I purchased, and apparently I kept no records of it. I never used it, and I don't know that I'd ever want to, but I did technically pay for it.

• Disco
  Somehow Austin motherfucking Sarner horn-swaggled me again and took $10 of my money to contribute towards his inability to get a fucking hair cut. What was I thinking? Why did I buy this when Burn does all of this shit for free using the same publicly available OS X frameworks and with none of the lame UI bullshit?

• Hawkeye, rooSwitch, KIT (now called Together)
  Hawkeye suffers from one a pretty common problem in OS X, in that it wraps open source software in a cocoa front-end and then charges you money for it. Since I don't give a fuck about DVD mastering, it was an unused license. rooSwitch swaps preferences. Neat trick, but useless for me. However, in that same bundle I got Together (then called K.I.T., or Keep It Together), which has actually been a pretty handy tool for sorting and managing the sheer volume of incidental fluff I seem to invariably accumulate.

• Data Guardian
  This seemed handy at the time, worked and looked like shit when I paid for it, and now I cannot get the insanely over-complicated license manager on the site to recognize that I ever paid for it. High regret over the money I wasted on this Epic Fail application.

• Direct Mail!
  Came in another bundle (maybe the one with Audiobook Builder?) and it's another application which does something I just don't give a fuck about.

For Work

• Mocha MacX TN5250
  Purchased in my former life as an AS400 operator, I only regret that I never got my boss to comp back the $25 that I spent on this. It made absolutely every single night where I had to dial into work while on call so much easier. I haven't needed it for almost 5 years, but I'd still use it again if I had to connect to another AS400. For Myself

• Acquisition
  God, who pays for file sharing? The developer (David Watanabe) is sort of an asshole, my license was constantly corrupted/lost/missing whenever the software was upgraded, and in retrospect, paying money to pirate shit is pretty fucking brazen. This was $25 I'd like back.

• Catalog And here we come to the first application which Austin motherfucking Sarner used to bilk me out of my cash. I had a library of about 200 burned DVDs to archive, and this app was the cheapest at the time. I paid for it, and like, 6 months later the last update was released and that was that. Buggy, featureless, slow, and unstable, this application alone is grounds for me to fight every single member of The Delicious Generation to the death.

• SKEdit
  Sean Kelly made software so usable that Apple hired him. While this has been supplanted by TextMate and CSSEdit in my work flow, I have no regrets over this. I used it often and it had the best remote site editing available at the time.

• XyleScope
  This application is awesome, but a lot of the functionality I needed has since been replicated (and extended) in the equally awesome CSSEdit, which I already had a license for. I keep it around for the occasional use when CSSEdit falls down on the job (maybe twice a year?) but overall it's just gathering the digital equivalent of dust (bitrot?).

What's the take away? I guess if you walk away from this knowing that Austin Sarner is a sack of crap, that MacZot pushes a lot of really mediocre shit with the occasional gem mixed in with the turd nuggets, and that sometimes even good software gets replaced by better software, then you got the message.

• The control panel to write human-readable, reasonable configuration files: This is where Webmin falls down on the job. The config files are valid, but god are they awful to read.

• No mention or hint of reseller anything: I just want administrative accounts running the show and hosted accounts with domains linked to them. Maybe some way for the hosted to monkey with the non-essentials of their own accounts. So on the grounds of overkill, pretty much every commercial panel fails my simple needs.

• Email support for something that's not antiquated: some panels use qmail (or some version therein, which hasn't had a proper update in years), some use sendmail (which is older than dirt and half as secure), and some use whatever the flavor of the month is (read: whatever ships on the supported OS distro). Me? I'm a postfix guy. I'm not wedded to it per se, but it's updated, feature packed, works well and its configuration is only modestly arcane (qmail, by the way, fails due to having an arcane configuration file structure that doesn't plug into antivirus or spam very easily).

  Regarding IMAP and POP support, I find that these panels often use their own "questionable" clients, or rely on courier. There isn't really anything wrong with that, I just like dovecot more (to be fair, DirectAdmin supports dovecot last I checked).

  I don't want to even get started with authorized SMTP support from these packages. God, the horror.

• No byzantine dependencies: Don't tell me that I need some god awful fossilized encryption library or ldap to make this system work.

  "Listen here, Mr. Control Panel, I don't use LDAP, and unless that is what you're using as a backing store for your hosting information, neither should you."

To that end, I've begun playing with Ruby and Thor to whip up some simple add/delete scripts (with initial success!), and the biggest stumbling block I've encountered so far is just parsing out the accounts that exist.

The Apache configuration file format is… archaic in its own right, being neither XML nor attribute: value pairs. It's readable, but there is a reason that an entire perl package (HTTPD::Config, which may or may not exist anymore) was produced just to scrape httpd.conf files.

I fear that without stepping back a little and engineering a proper solution I'm just going to wind up reimplementing what I encountered when I did overnight support for Reality Check Networks (no link provided, because, well, you know. Those dudes…).

CSSEdit has the most powerful and well thought-out interface I've ever seen for working with stylesheet properties, and its source-and-visual CSS editor is rightfully award-winning. If you've got to spend more than an hour a week in stylesheets, CSSEdit is the only reasonable tool for the job.

If you're more of a codemonkey, TextMate is the darling of both the Unix refugee camp that took shelter in OS X recently, as well as the Ruby and Rails development communities. It's sort of the best damned text-and-code editor ever produced for the MacOS, with the possible exception of the long-time heavyweight, BBEdit. The bundles are well structured, and support almost any language or variant you can think of.

If you're in the market for power editors, you could do worse than giving these two a spin. Of course, if you're the "all in one" sort, there is always Coda, by the boys at Panic. While it was slightly raw the last time I used it, if I hadn't already owned a license for TextMate and CSSEdit when it came out I'd have probably purchased it. It's improved considerably, and it is under steady development, but it is extremely web-centric (see the supported languages) and that might be a drawback for some people.