Rob Bevan

This installer adds ActionScript syntax colouring and a Test Movie in Flash command to the awesome TextMate editor for Mac OS X. Test Movie in Flash works with .fla files added to your project (hit Cmd-Rtn with a .fla file selected), although at the moment TextMate displays binary files as text, which for a large file can be slow. Hopefully this issue will be dealt with in the upcoming 1.0.1.

The Getting Things Done meme is not just exploding across the web: recently Victoria Moore in the Weekend Guardian refered to a liquorice tea as stuff that “somehow encourages the transparent and focused mind required to Get Things Done” (it’s the capitalisation that gives it away, surely: and clearly a reference to David Allen’s “mind like water”, a state in which you only give the attention to things that they deserve).

A guy called Jacob called at my house today. He said he’d been staying with my neighbour Roger and was on his way back to Holland after a catering trade show at RAF Benson, nearby. He didn’t want to take all his stock back on the ferry with him: were we interested in taking any of it off his hands? If we could cover his costs he’d let us have an entire case of knives and a 12-piece cookware set for roughly 10% of the retail price (1425 EURO for the pans, 795 for the knives).

I wish I’d had the benefit of this article a few months back when I was setting up my Subversion server. Although the svn documentation is excellent, it’s good to see a Mac OS X specific tutorial. Installing Subversion (plus dependencies) using DarwinPorts is really simple: just cd to your darwinports/dports/ directory and type sudo port install subversion +mod_dav_svn. Instructions on how to install DarwinPorts are here. I put together a Subversion startup item (installed into /Library/StartUpItems/), although really this is just an Apache2 startup item, but I called it Subversion since that’s all I’m using Apache2 for.

This discussion (“Sourdough puts the art of hacking back into breadmaking”) reminded me that my sourdough starter is currently in hibernation:

I’m not really a big fan of custom desktop backgrounds, generally prefering to stick with the default ‘Aqua Graphite’ image that I’m used to, but if I was, one of John Maeda’s food images would be my first choice. Perhaps this Damien Hirst’s shark-in-the-tank influenced “geometrical paradise of dried anchovies”:

John Cage’s most famous composition in MIDI, OGG, Sun .au and .wav formats!

06-18-2004 at 08:28 AM The Register is suggesting we start paying attention to the “random collections of (often highly esoteric) words” that “spam tsunamists are in the habit of finishing their missives with”, as if this constituted a form of William Burroughs-like cut-up poetry. Here’s one I got this morning from spam poet Darla ftdvmufsxkpo@thaimail.com, entitled ‘osmotic’: deerskin,was greeted with,splenetic,again he pictured,downstream,technique of your,abeyance,up and gave,biology,handbags of antelope,depletion,of the four,linotype,family starts lying,kibbutzim,<span class="hilite">all</span> the while.

Years ago, Tim and I invented a company called SHEIP, one of XPT’s clients, who were developing animal networking technology that would enable sheep, for example, each to have individual IP addresses and to be herded remotely. It’s good to see that this kind of technology really is in development, even if it’s not quite ready for prime (beef) time: “A farmer would control multiple herds from a single server at home as if they were playing a video game, said Zack Butler, of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

(New: see also ActionScript for TextMate) I had this working previously in Project Builder, but the specification files were broken in Xcode. Thanks to the C# versions I found here, I’ve been able to update these for Xcode. This installer adds two files, ActionScript.pbfilespec and ActionScript.pblangspec to /Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Specifications, adding ActionScript syntax colouring and code completion (press opt-esc) to Xcode. Update: Sam Robbins updated ActionScript.pblangspec to include component methods and properties.

Although one of the early Flex beta installers for Linux also worked on Mac OS X, this is no longer true for the 1.0 release version. However, this doesn’t mean it can’t be installed. All you need to do is extract the WAR files from the installer: unzip -d flex flex-10-lin.bin (extracting the contents of the archive to a new directory ‘flex’ in the working directory). These will be in the dist directory at flex/R_/dist.