words by patrick

Just a heads up: I’ve moved the blog from the old site (words.fadeover.org) to the more appropriate fadeover.org/blog. I also took this opportunity to update to the latest wordpress, as well as change the theme to something I like a little more. Eventually I want to design my own theme, something visually close to James’ excellent work seen at patrickgibsonphotography.com. This one is already kinda close, but it could be much closer.

More Adium plugin stuff soon.

Apple’s transition from the PowerPC architecture to the x86 architecture is going rather well. All their machines are now intel-based, and have been for about half a year. Lots of people have already made the switch: 3/5ths of my family, myself, my dad and now my brother, are such people. This is in line with Adium’s usage metrics, which show that a bit over half of it’s users are now running Intel machines. My brother recently decided to pack up and move to China (WTF?) and in doing so bought an Intel Mac Mini to replace his not-too-old, 1.33Ghz 12-inch iBook G4. He was nice enough to let me, um, hold on to it, while he is off in the land of the rising sun far east.

With my recent purchase of a Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro (Thanks, ADC Student Discount!), I didn’t really have a huge need for it, but being a geek I of course jumped at the chance of picking up another computer. But, what to do with it?

At first I thought I’d install FreeBSD. A lot of my friends use some linux variant, but I recently read a cool essay on FreeBSD vs. Linux and decided I wanted to try out FreeBSD. Unfortunately, driver support for Apple machines isn’t exactly stellar in FreeBSD 6.2, and is missing a few little things, like you know, keyboard, trackpad, and wireless drivers. Next Idea.

Okay, fine, I’ll install Kubuntu. I’m kinda familiar with Ubuntu, and I’ve been wanting to play with it and KDE. Driver support was much better, but Linux on Apple laptops is still pretty rough around the edges. No advanced power management (no sleep), and graphical glitches in X/KDE really turned me off. I was going to install XGL/Compiz and play around, but rather than fight with it all night I just decided to do a fresh OS X install. I still wasn’t sure what I was going to use the machine for, but running Linux was never a necessity anyways.

So with a fresh OS X install, I christened the machine Spartacus. What now? Hmmm…

I’d always wanted a MythTV box, but I don’t really watch that much television, and it’d be annoying to have to set up a cable hook-up in my room and tether it to a laptop. But then I had a sweet idea: What about that Democracy TV app?

1. Democracy

I had never noticed before, but Democracy is a sweet app. I had tried it out briefly once before, but it was too heavy on ram usage and somewhat unnecessary to be have running all the time for someone like me, who then had no interest in net TV. Now that I’ve seen that there’s some good stuff out there and I have a machine I can leave running all day downloading stuff, I can tell it is going to be getting a lot of use.

If I’m going to be watching videos I’m going to need codecs, which reminded me of something else: Perian.

2. Perian

Perian is pretty much exactly what it says it is, the swiss army knife of video codecs for the mac. I don’t need to talk a lot about this, it’s just really simple and really useful. Hooray!

But now that we are talking media apps, what else is there out there? Ah yes, what about that songbird app?

3. Songbird

When I first tried Songbird when it was announced some months ago, I was totally nonplussed. “It’s just a black iTunes”. I was wrong. I’ve been using it more now, and it’s a pretty powerful app. The ability to automagically list, download, and create a playlist for all the mp3s linked to by a particular site while browsing around is awesome. It makes reading MP3 blogs so much more enjoyable. The tight integration of other features like lyric searching, wikipedia band info, and tour info make listening to music much more of an experience than a secondary, background activity. I love it, and while there are some annoyances (no minimize on command-m?!) I can’t wait for it to go 1.0. I still keep iTunes around to stream music from my main machine, but I don’t plan on using it heavily.

Was there anything else? Ah, yes.

4. Games

Wesnoth. Quinn. X-Moto. Just a few free, light games that I love to play when killing time or just to relax a bit.

That’s essentially it so far. I’ve now got a sweet little media machine that can sit beside my bed downloading music and videos (totally legally) all day that I can peruse at my leisure. It’s got some games as well to keep me amused. It’s light, it’s fast, it’s Mac OS X, it’s great.

Thanks James.

UPDATE: This is now out of date! Get the latest version by clicking on the Adium Time Zone Plugin page in the sidebar.

Today I’m announcing the preview release of my Adium Time Zone Plug-in. This plug-in adds functionality to Adium by letting you set time zones for each individual contact. Once set, you can view the local time of the contact in their tooltip.

It looks something like this:

It’s a preview release because I’m interested in soliciting feedback as to it’s implementation before I make it totally public and tell all my friends to download it. Please try it out and let me know what you think and how it can be improved.

Note of interest:

• The city names are all taken from Apple’s NSTimeZone class. I assume I could add more, but it might be hectic/ugly to manage two separate lists; a real one and one that just maps it’s contents to the real one.
• I tried to follow the implementation of ESAuthorizationWindowController, if you were wondering why I did some of the things I did in the controller class.
• I plan on writing out a How-to on writing your own Adium plug-ins soon, so watch for that.

The plug-in can be downloaded here: Adium Time Zone Plug-in

The source (GPL Licensed) can be downloaded here: Adium Time Zone Plug-in Source

Enjoy and please let me know what you think!

I used to go by “patr1ck” on irc and other social web spheres, but now I am going by “pblair”. I made the change because I never really liked patr1ck that much anyways, and pblair is much more professional sounding and mature, and I actually like it. Blair is my middle name, so I still have a little bit of ambiguity (not anonymity) online. I had been meaning to do the change it for a long time, but kept procrastinating because I knew I would have to inform everyone, but the other day when Steve changed his I figured I might as well change mine too.

So there, you’ve been informed.

I’d like to offer a congratulatory hand to all the developers of Adium, as today they celebrate their 1.0 Release.

1.0 is a really big step. Software is constantly changing, being updated, fixed, and altered. In a world where more and more things are being released with a “beta” tag attached, it takes a lot of balls to call something 1.0. It’s saying “Okay, this is done. I feel good enough about this that I am ready to share this with everyone.” Sadly, very few software titles ever reach this stage.

I started watching the Adium project in my freshman year of college, 2003, when 0.5 had just been released. It was actually one of the first open source applications I ever used that interested me enough that I actually downloaded the source code. At that time, I wasn’t even a computer science major and I had no idea what I was looking at. Luckily, Adium had awesome support for Xtras and I was able to write a few scripts for it (ShowIP, VinDieselFacts, and ThingsThatDontExist, all defunct now) with only my meager technical know-how.

I switched majors (my entire program, actually) in second year to computer science, owing partly to Adium’s influence. I’m now in my senior year and I’m happy to say that through 3 years of learning how to program in C, Java, Prolog, Lisp, Miranda, and probably a few other languages, I’ve finally been able to contribute code to Adium. I was able to fix a small bug (#1235) that sometimes caused users to accidentally try to add a contact twice. Although it’s only a few lines of code, and I actually still need to fix some of it, it’s something. It’s a start.

It takes a lot to contribute to open source projects. You have to find time between classes, friends, jobs, the opposite sex, and other social influences to sit down and teach yourself a ton of information that nobody ever asked you to learn. And not just the source code, but sometimes entirely new languages (like Objective-C, in my case) that the source code is written in. In a period of life where all I really do is try to keep up with the things I’m suppose to be learning, that’s a hard thing to do. It’s no wonder there are so few other students that do this sort of thing. The amount of discipline, work ethic, and downright intelligence of many of the core Adium team members astounds me, but I think I’m starting to see why they do it.

It’s so freaking cool to know that some code I wrote, however minute and insignificant it my seem, will be running in hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people’s computers. To know that I had (or will have) a direct impact on that many people is really awe-inspiring. The alluring problem-solving aspects of programming still apply, but to know and feel the solutions applied to such mass audience is almost intoxicating.

I hope to fix my current patch and continue to create even more. I have ideas in the pipeline for projects of my own, and I hope that one day I can be as proud of my work as the developers of Adium are of theirs today.