Thought Palace

After repeated prodding, I’ve finally gotten off my butt and released Murky, a GUI client app for the Mercurial version-control system. I’ve been working on it for over a year, and using it a lot myself; I had always planned to open-source it “when it’s ready”, but never actually got around to doing the necessary cleanup and uploading.

I’m happy to say that Murky is finally blinking in the light of day, with its own Mercurial [natch] repository on Bitbucket.

Setting Expectations

Murky isn’t “done”, and this isn’t a 1.0, or even a beta, release. I’m not even providing a compiled app to download, just the source repository. No one but me has ever tested it. About nine months ago Murky became “good enough” for what I usually do, and I’m a happy customer, but I’ve lost the impetus to keep adding things to it. I hope some other people will grab the baton and improve it further. Then we can throw a party for a real 1.0 release, with several names on the About box.

Obligatory Screenshot

Features

Here’s what it can do so far:

Create a new repository from an existing folder
Clone a remote (or local) repository
View the revision history (log) of a repo as [...]

Flying Meat Software has released a VoodooPad Reader app for iPhone, as a complement to their great desktop wiki. So now you can sync your VP docs to your iPhone and access them on the go, with or without a network.

What’s especially cool, to me, is that VP Reader uses my MYNetwork library and BLIP protocol for its networking. Gus calls it “an awesome network library … It made moving pages from VoodooPad to the iPhone over the network completely painless. A++ would recommend again.” Thanks, Gus! I believe this is the first appearance of BLIP in a shipping product, since my own apps remain in limbo.

The VP Reader source code is available if you want to see how it was done.

The feelings created by music are so strong, for me, but so ineffable. The problem of perception is usually described using color — how can we know if the visual sensation I call “red” is anything like the one you call “red”? — but only gets worse as you ascend to higher order perceptions, where even names become harder to apply. What do you call the feeling incited by “Guernica”, and even if you find the same words I would, is it the same feeling? And yet vision is our strongest, highest-bandwidth, most describable sense. We struggle to describe sound without using the technical terms of musicians, or vague metaphors.

It doesn’t help that so much of the music I like is so inward-focused: the guitarist gazing (not at shoes) at effect pedals, the producer sliding waveforms around a timeline, the listener bracketed in headphones like my picture above.

Everyone wants their experience of music to be shared. To play an instrument or sing for others, to blast the song from car speakers. To identify with music meant to shock, and use it to shock others. To attend a concert and know that those around you are hearing and feeling the same [...]

Brian Mastenbrook has discovered a really bad security hole in Safari RSS:

I have discovered that Apple’s Safari browser is vulnerable to an attack that allows a malicious web site to read files on a user’s hard drive without user intervention. This can be used to gain access to sensitive information stored on the user’s computer, such as emails, passwords, or cookies that could be used to gain access to the user’s accounts on some web sites. The vulnerability has been acknowledged by Apple.

All users of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard who have not who have not performed the workaround steps listed below are affected, regardless of whether they use any RSS feeds. Users of previous versions of Mac OS X are not affected.

He hasn’t released details yet, presumably to give Apple time to release a patch, so I don’t know what the bug is. But it’s my fault, since I either wrote the bad code myself, or at least didn’t notice a mistake a co-worker made. And since I’m not at Apple anymore I can’t help fix it.

Shit. I’m sorry, everyone.

FYI, I ended up taking the position at Google. I started two weeks ago, and it’s been quite exciting, despite (or because of) the “drinking from a fire-hose” aspect of learning my way around the big G.

I’m on the Google Sites team. I’ve been interested in wikis for years, and now I get to actually work on one. (Although Sites, née JotSpot, is not a typical wiki.)

I could write a lot about my experience of Google so far. It’s quite an interesting place. Merely learning about how some of their internal systems operate has been jaw-dropping. (Do you have any idea how much hard disk space Google has? Or how many CPUs? Or how many search queries they handle? Unfortunately I don’t think I’m allowed to tell…)

For now I just wanted to say that I’m not in the job market anymore. Also, that I really like all the free food :-d

I’m fooling around with Soup, a newish micro-blogging service I just discovered. I’ve never signed up for tumblr or its other clones, but I’m kind of smitten with Soup, so I set up my own:

beautiful snej soup, yum

I’ve got it aggregating stuff from my del.icio.us, flickr and last.fm accounts, as well as this blog. And I’m directly posting some things I’ve run across today, via its very nice bookmarklet.

Part of the reason I got sucked in is that Soup has the single best new-user experience I’ve ever seen on the web. You just click the “try it” button on the home page, and you get your own soup blog. No signup, no registration, just instant gratification. Then you can slide open the control panel (that slider itself is a beautiful piece of UI), import from your other social sites, and fool with the settings, all in privacy. Only after you’re hooked do you need to press the Create button and choose a username and password, whereupon your soup goes live. It’s brilliant — the web equivalent of the “untitled document” UI introduced in the ‘70s by the Xerox Star.

Anyway, please take a look and join me! (It’s not obvious [...]

I need a few brave people to test a pre-beta app for me. No, this is not Cloudy; it’s another app I’ve been working on in parallel. It’s called Your Move, and it’s the expanded version of my GeekGameBoard sample code. It lets you play board games against a human opponent; either at the same machine, over a local network, or by sending moves via email or iChat.

Obviously this would make a great iPhone app, and now that I have my iPhone developer certification I’ll start working on that. But for now it’s Mac-only.

To test Your Move you need to

Have Mac OS X 10.5.
Enjoy playing board games … in particular, Go and/or American checkers, as those are the main games it knows so far.
Have at least one friend who will play board games with you (I’ll do in a pinch, but I don’t have time to play against everyone. Plus, ironically, I suck at Go and checkers.)
Be willing to tolerate bugs, and committed to sending in bug reports, crash logs and such.

If you’re interested, please

Register an account on the Mooseyard projects website ; then
Email me at “jens” c/o this domain and tell me your username, so I can give you [...]

(This is more or less to the tune of Rock’n’Roll High School, or any other Ramones song for that matter. You have to imagine Joey Ramone singing it. Johnny, you just switch between C and F every couple of lines, got it?)

Well, back in March I got my feelins hurt
When Apple wouldn’t gimme no developer cert
The SDK they gave me had a “simulator” —
Fooled around with it, then said “see you lator!”

(iPhone, iPhone, iPhone developer)

Don’t care about iPhones on my screen
‘Cause that’s not where I wanna been
I just wanna run on the Device
I just wanna make it look nice

(I wanna be, an iPhone developer)

On Friday all the lucky devs they got paid
But my real cert came in the email today
Got my key set up, my device provisioned
Got my noob questions sent to the cocoa-dev list

(iPhone, iPhone, iPhone developer)

Now I R a l33t iPhone developx0r
Gonna sell my app at the iPhone App Store
I’m gonna price it at 99 cents
In a couple weeks, it’ll be payin’ my rent!

(L33t, l33t, l33t, l33t iPhone developx0r)

My app’s so rad, it’s got things to-do
When you go to White Castle it’ll get your tip too
Gonna raise it to a buck ninety-nine
When all of you buy it, I’ll [...]

Stickies and I hadn’t spoken in a while, but it called me this morning to announce it’s made its acting debut in a music video! That was unexpected, to say the least, but it’s an exciting career move, and I had to congratulate it; it does a great job:

Stickies makes its entrance at 0:53, if you want to skip directly to it, but really the entire video (and song) are excellent. I just wish they’d used Stickies in the opening scenes instead of Word—face it, Word is over the hill, especially that old Office 2004 version. (Did you see the bags under the Office Assistant’s eyes? Stickies told me they dragged it straight out of the Betty Ford Center to shoot those scenes, and it couldn’t remember any of its lines even though they were right up on the screen next to it in giant print. It’s sad, really. At least it hasn’t OD’d yet like that pathetic paperclip.)

This seems to be a fan-made video, by the way; but I think it’s better than the official one. Now the question is: will Apple use this in a commercial? I think they should!

[via 37signals]

Speaking of my projects, here’s a different one that’s actually finished: a new mix entitled The Fall Of The Towers.

I finished it four days ago and I’m still very pleased with it. Several of the overlays and transitions feel like they’ve become more than the sum of their parts—that’s what I aim for, but don’t always attain.