Let's Talk About That Icon

It's pretty fucking terrible. It's so bad that I don't even care that the software runs faster than before (and it does). The improved responsiveness? 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…

This text may have been edited some, but the gist remains true.

Double word score bonus if you figure out which one is me.

"shun or wusthof"

This is a no brainer.

Don't buy either.

Wusthof is at least relatively honest about what they're selling you: a heavy, autoforged stainless steel knife from Germany. Shun is selling you an image of lightweight, folded, Japanese precision; That image just happens to be built on the back of autoforged, internationally sourced, industrial stainless steel.

Skip both, and get yourself a nice knife from Korin or The Knife Merchant instead. If you're local to the Boston metro area, just go to Stoddard's and tell them I sent you.

what is diavolo sauce used for

It's used any time you want a tomato sauce with heat. It's delicious on pizza. It's exceptional on seafood. I love it with linguine and good, fresh steamed clams. It doesn't really have a canonical use as it's predominantly an American cock-up of a more straightforward Italian tomato sauce it that doesn't detract from the unmitigated awesomeness of it.

johnny applebot

HE LOVES YOU.

(Originally in reference to the Nostalgia Sandwich.)

hosted mercurial

Mercurial is a nifty distributed version control system. It's what all the cool kids are using, unless they're using Git. If you're new to the game, check out Joel's excellent "HG Init."

This originally came in through Google in reference to my self-hosted Mercurial repos, but the post this pointed to is gone; I believe in house keeping. I'm working on a write up explaining how I'm hosting my repos but for now you should check out the semi-official list of Mercurial hosting options.

osx nntp

No explanation needed (but here is one anyway). The only halfway usable NNTP reader for OS X is Mozilla Thunderbird.

Also, thanks to Meredith Mandel for the wonderful slab typeface "Chunk(Five), Regular." If you're seeing a big blocky old-timey font for headers you can thank Meredith.

The McKern family name isn't especially prestigious, being best known (if it's known at all) as the surname of Uncle Leo (who was the best number two that number six ever confronted). But we're not concerned with Leo McKern. We're concerned with the traffic that funnels in for Ryan McKern.

The one that I'm most familiar with is the musician Ryan McKern formerly of (I believe…) Minnesota, now of Louisiana. Ryan has a multitude of musical projects going. It seems that he's in the process of moving into Facebook and abandoning the sinking ship that is MySpace; For now I'm running with the links I know work. The projects of his I've chanced over are:

• The Guilt Øf…
• Ierased
• WOLVHAMMER
• Le' goddess Rigamortis

While there may be other Ryan McKern's, I know that he's the only one who people have been searching for who have landed here. So if you're looking for the Ryan McKern who can grow a beard and who PLAYS MUSIC instead of the Ryan McKern who shaves once a week and who LISTENS TO BAD MUSIC, he's your guy.

Easily one of my favorite metal albums ever, despite its brevity. And possibly the sickest vinyl packaging imaginable.

Little known fact: I love metal. Maybe not the metal that the crazy kids in black on black attire with stringy hair listen to, but metal none the less. Which is why it behoves me to point you to Megasus.

(Picture blatantly stolen from The Providence Daily Dose. Credit where credit is due.)

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.

n. pahyl

1. a collection of objects laid on top of each other

2. What happens when something is so utterly terrible that it's heaped into a mound of failure, resembling nothing so much as a collection of animal shit, which you've probably just stepped in.

Example: The kerfuffle over this subdomain and it's associated implications for the document root that it serves has turned gone hostile. This project is officially a pile.

synonyms: heap, mound, agglomerate, cumulation, cumulus

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.

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 is a spoiler: 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. But feel free to stick around; I've got snacks!

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.

Batman is not amused at your lack of retail savvy

I don't know how horribly relevant this is or how many of you read comic books anymore (yes, they still publish them and yes, some of us still read them) but I just wanted to make good on the old adage about telling 100 people when something goes wrong as opposed to telling 10 when it goes right and let those of you who might shop there(for your children or for yourselves) that Bedrock Comics on Route 9 in Framingham, Massachusetts doesn't appreciate your business. Or rather, they didn't appreciate mine.

While I've had a multitude of small issues with them since I started shopping there on and off in the spring of 2007, the worst issues are as follows:

They've often told me they're going to order something for me, and when I ask them about it later they act as if this promise to order something is news to them. This doesn't seem like a big deal on it's face, but it's an annoying pain in the ass all the same and it's the first strike against them.

They've told me more than once that a book has sold out or didn't come in when there is a stack of them on the shelf right behind the register, and one of the two guys at the counter just forgot to shelve them… last week. Again, an annoyance. But shopping here has become the death of a thousand papercuts.

Finally, the very last time I was there I was rudely told to stop reading my books before buying them, but not until after they're already rung up my stack and I'd signed the credit card slip. I'm not mad that I was told not to read the books (… yes I am), I'm mad that I was told this after I had purchased (read: PAID FOR) a stack of books.

I understand a "don't read the books" policy, and I appreciate the basic premise. I DO! But as a consumer I also don't have the budget or the time to buy every single issue of everything with an interesting cover. A cover doesn't sell a story, and these aren't one-shot stories I'm reading, so I screen my books. Without screening, my collection would be full of 1 or 2 issues of a thousand some-odd incidental series, all too horrible to name. Yes, I admit your store would sell a lot more issues (assuming I bought everything I'm reading now), but without screening I have to stick to titles I know I want to buy or trade paperbacks that I already know I want; That means I'm not buying doodly squat anymore, unless it's got Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman's name on it.

I probably spend more on comic books and related merchandise in a year than I do lunches in the area, and I was spending a fair amount of that at Bedrock. The shop knows me by sight, and while they've always had smiling faces, they've never treated me like I was anything except an inconvenience to their ebay browsing time.

As much as I wanted to demand a $13.94 refund for my stack when this happened and make this into a scene for the benefit of the unwashed, smelly, mouth-breather who was happened to reading an X-Men comic (and therefore wouldn't appreciate irony if he witnessed it in all it's screaming glory), I'm too old for that sort of thing now. I've grown soft in my desire to see people get their comeuppance.

I'm simply going to write the owner a letter explaining everything I've just told you, and tell him that I'm done shopping there. Am I happy about driving to some place like Somerville, MA for books (Comicazi is an excellent local chain by the way, but they're an hour from my house) or giving a larger chain like Newbury Comics my money? Not really. Well… Yes, I am because Comicazi reminds me so much of EarthWorld Comics back home. But I can definitively state that I'm never going back to Bedrock Comics, and if you're passionate about this dirty, dirty hobby of ours, there probably isn't any compelling reason for you to either.