Hugo’s blog

I’m very lazy, and I hate running. Yet, it’s the easiest exercise one can do, so I try to do it. But I need to motivate myself, so I keep finding reasons to go running. Usually, it’s buying some equipment. Then, I think: Oh, you’ve got to go running now that you spent money on …. And it usually works.

But now I have reached a point where I think I have everything so I really need to keep my motivation up:

• Running shoes and pants to stay warm
• Heart-rate monitor and gloves
• MP3 player and arm-band to hold it

So I ought to keep running now.

I started uploading my pictures to Flickr, and spending time writing descriptions, titles, adding tags. Other people have also contributed by adding notes, etc. So I really want to be able to get this data back, as I don’t want to solely rely on Flickr to keep my data.

I also wanted to play with the Flickr API. I looked into toolkits provided, and they are all built on the REST API. I ended up choosing Beej’s Python Flickr API. However, it uses an HTTP POST for all its calls. It’s especially weird for Offlickr which is a series of information retrieval (the permission requested is read-only). As there is some authentication information in the parameters sent, maybe it makes sense. It might have been better to use another authentication technique (digest auth?).

Anyway, I ended up with a small Python script which does the trick for now: Offlickr. I probably will improve it, but I now feel confident that I can get my data back from Flickr.

I called it Offlickr as once you have the metadata in XML form and the pictures, it should be fairly easy with some simple XSLT to have an offline copy of your Flickr space.

Ben-Q is selling a $260 8-Megapixel Camera! I don’t know about the quality of the pictures, but the specs look good. Cool!

I am giving MT-NewsWatcher a try as Gnus has been getting slower for me for some reason on my PowerBook. Also, it’s nice to have a real GUI rather than being inside Emacs.

There are a couple of things missing though: offline reading and adaptive scoring.

MT-NW supports AppleScripting and the dictionary shows plenty of things in the filter category, so it should be feasible to code adaptive scoring fairly quickly. However, I couldn’t find a lot of hacking around MT-NW on the Web.

So I am back to square one: having to learn a new language to do stuff on the Mac. I am afraid I am going to need to just get it over with, otherwise I’ll be bumping in this same AppleScript wall every couple of weeks. Sigh.

Since the beginning I started using my Treo, I noticed a Logging In message after each HotSync. I looked around on the Web but could not find anybody else with the same problem. And judging by the noise in speakers I heard a couple of times, this Logging In was indicating access via GPRS.

I finally figured the problem out. My Orange Treo came with a Talk Now application, which AFAICT is some kind of IM application, and also AFAICT, doesn’t work, as I saw a message saying that it had been deactivated or something like that.

So, removing this useless application made my message go away. I’m not sure what it was trying to do, but I’d sure be interested to know.

Regardless, I am wondering how much in GPRS charges (especially when I was in Toronto a couple of weeks ago) that will have cost. Now that’s a pretty nifty way for an operator to make a few extra bucks.

I haven’t made any progress in making it customizable, but I have made some progress to make Chheckmail look better, or at least look less weird next to other nice looking widget. Well, it could be argued that it looks more weird now:

I see an increasing number of programs claiming to be clean (no spyware, no adware, no viruses) as tested by Softpedia (see YamiPod’s report for example).

Being used to Debian, where everything is open-source and peer-reviewed, adware, spyware and viruses is a concern I never had. I guess that now that I’m using a Mac where quite a few programs are not open-source, this is something I need to watch for.

So I am wondering who Softpedia is. They have a nice and frequently updated Web site, 2.5M+ search results in Google, and a ton of programs in their repository, so they look like an entity that may be trustable. But I haven’t found a traditional “About this site” link. Wikipedia has some information about it but not that much.

It’s not clear how they test the programs either. I am no expert in malware being a Linux user and very new to the Mac (I’m not even sure about the amount of malware existing for the Mac), but it seems it me that without the source code — well, sometimes even with the source code it has to be tricky when you have a big program: I doubt that the complete source code of OpenOffice.org was reviewed but its Debian package maintainer — it is easy to figure out how clean a program is.

So I for one cannot tell how much I should really trust this certification, so I would assume that other users would have the same problem.

I think that the initiative is laudable, but they should be very explicit about exposing the factors in order for people to decide how much to trust such certification.

A while back, I expressed in my scratchpad (what I used before a blog) what I thought of Parisian drivers. My view on Parisian drivers has not changed: they are just stupid. And they proved it again today, honking because my one-way street was blocked by the firemen rescuing somebody. How dare they!

But somebody did what I often thought of doing today: throw stuff at them. Well, not chairs like I thought, but balls. This guy is my new hero. I understand that throwing objects on cars is not very clever, but you have to understand after several years of being abused by Parisian honking, it must be a real relief.

So people were honking, and he was yelling at them from his appartment, and throwing balls on their cars. I’m not sure that he only got people who were honking, but eh, there’s always collateral damage in any kind of conflict.

People were honking, he was yelling, and throwing balls, insults were flowing back and forth.

Sadly, I don’t think that any of the drivers will have gotten any lesson out of it. And I don’t think that throwing stuff at car is a way to deal with the problem, but this whole episode really made me feel like I’m not the only one who’s had enough of all this honking.

So I now use a Mac. But that doesn’t mean I’m not a Unix person anymore. Far from it. I don’t use Mail.app to read my mail for example. I still use Mutt which does exactly what I want to, and I still use OfflineIMAP for synchronizing my folders in a maildir format. And it works fine. Even better than fine.

But that led to the following problem: I couldn’t find a program to let me know if I had new mail in my maildir folders. On my Linux desktop, I use WMBiff, but I guess that there aren’t a lot of weirdos using maildir format under OSX.

So I decided to write my own, and I wanted to play around with widgets, so I wrote Chheckmail which currently only checks maildir (because that’s all I use anyway).

It’s ugly: I haven’t figured out how the geometry of a widget works, and I’m terrible at graphics.

Everything is hardcoded: I haven’t looked into how to handle preferences either, but I’m my only customer AFAIK, so editing a JavaScript file isn’t that constraining.

Depending on whether I get feedback and whether I spend more time on this, I’ll make it available publicly. It’s not that I’m ashamed of the code at this point, it’s just that it’s not userfriendly at all, nor is it documented.

Useful tip: when developing a dashboard widget, the console output shows errors. Useful to know.