I'll have more time next week!

Erik forwarded me a post from lifehacks.org on how we tend to overcommit.

Participants believed that both time and money would be more available in “a month” than “today,” and believed it more strongly for time than for money. A deeper investigation of a psychological phenomenon called “delay discounting,” in which people tend to lessen the importance of future rewards, showed that people also discounted future time more than both gains and losses in future money.

I can't recall how often I thought this is really a crazy week, but I'll have more time next week, or two weeks from now. Can we do something about it? This is a hard one; the authors observe:

It is difficult to learn from feedback that time will not be more abundant in the future. Specific activities vary from day to day, so [people] do not learn from feedback that, in aggregate, total demands are similar.

FeedBurner Updates their Dashboard Widget

The FeedBurner widget is one of the very few Dashboard widgets I am using, and it stopped working when upgrading to Leopard. Fortunately, FeedBurner has since then released a new Leopard compatible version of their FeedBurner widget. Sweet!

Leopard Improves Renaming

Little things can make a big difference. Now in Leopard, when you rename a file (usually I do this by pressing the enter key), Leopard selects for you the file name without the extension, while it used to select the whole file name. This makes a lot of sense since in 99% of the cases you just want to change the part of the name that is before the extension. This is the type of simple changes that enhances your productivity and that I love to see in new version of an OS.

I am curious, is Vista now doing the same? Update Nov 20, 2007: Olivier left a comment below to say that this is implemented similarly on Vista.

A2DP Bluetooth support confirmed in Leopard

A2DP is the Bluetooth profile* you need to be able to listen to stereo music over Bluetooth. It needs to be supported both by the player (computer, phone, MP3 player...) and the headset. The good news is that now A2DP is indeed supported by both Leopard and Vista. The bad news to me is that according to TUAW, A2DP uses some form of compression that doesn't make it HiFi:

Unfortunately, A2DP compresses the audio, so it's not exactly a high-fidelity solution. But if you really want to listen to your tunes from your Mac without wires, this is probably the way to go.

According to Wikipedia, A2DP can use multiple codecs but only the low complexity Sub Band Codecs (SBC) is mandatory. The TUAW post seems to imply that only SBC is supported by Leopard, which would be a shame.

* BTW, why is it called a profile, and not a feature, as in: do both your phone and headset support the A2DP feature? I guess that you are geeky enough to know about A2DP, you might as well go all the way and talk about A2DP profile.

Leopard, Solid Like a Rock... or Not

Erik warned me I had to uninstall ApplicationEnhancer.bundle, an application I didn't even knew I had, before installing Leopard. With this, the Leopard install went smoothly and after a few hours I had Leopard running on my laptop.

This was... until the next morning: Leopard had just crashed during the night. Apparently you're not supposed to use the network too much if you're on WiFi. Using BitTorrent or listening to Internet radio has been reported to cause this type of crashes. Hopefully that 10.5.1 update is on the way and fixes this issue.

Now we get a refresh in the Finder

While Bill Gates is famous for having said that 640 KB [of memory] ought to be enough for anybody, Steve Jobs must have once said that nobody needs a refresh in the Finder. But hell we do! :)

Here is a nifty little free application that comes to the rescue: Refresh Finder. And the latest version will work with Leopard too.

iMacs Crashing Too

My MacBook Pro is freezing from time to time, and others had the same experience with MacBook Pro. Now it looks like this is also a problem with the new all-alluminium iMacs.

Maybe even more frustrating, there is no sign that Apple even recognizes the problem. People are debating about whether the hardware or the software is to blame. I'll blame Apple, as they control both. Having your computer freezing should be just a memory of the Windows 3.1 and 95 days, not something you experience with the latest hardware and software. Apple creates truly wonderful hardware and software, but those crashes leave many people with a bitter taste.

Can't switch betweens files in IntelliJ with Leopard

I still haven't upgraded to Leopard. Call this prudence. So far the reports I have read have been mostly positive. Many were disappointed to see that Leopard didn't ship with Java 6, but it looks at least like Java 5 is running pretty well on Leopard.

With one exception: in some cases (all cases?), you can't switch between multiple files you have open in IntelliJ. This unfortunately is a major issue. One workaround is not to use the Mac OS X look & feel. I am not sure if this is a complete blocker for an upgrade to Leopard, but I will sure wait a little longer and see what happens with this one.

Update Nov 13, 2007: Great news: Dmitry mentioned in a comment that this issue should now be fixed in the 7.0.2 EAP build. Thank you Dmitry. For sure, those IntelliJ guys aren't sleeping!

Upgrading eXist in Orbeon Forms

Getting closer to a version 1.1.2, the eXist team has started releasing pre-release builds. Since those build are quite stable, we are looking into shipping Orbeon Forms with one of those builds. Of particular interest to us:

• When sending a query using the REST API, with a GET, passing the query with the _query parameter, the response used to have an incorrect content type. The incorrect content type meant you could sent a query with GET from XForms in Orbeon Forms. You always had to use a POST, which in many cases is inconvenient.
  
• You can now mount eXist though WebDAV on the Mac in read-write mode. (It previously used to work in read-only mode.)
• New versions of eXist feature many performance improvements, sometimes quite drastic.

A few notes about the upgrade:

• eXist now uses a number of new jar files: quartz-1.6.0.jar, jta.jar, commons-collections-3.1.jar, exist-ngram-module.jar, and stax-api-1.0.1.jar. That's quite a few jar files, and it increases the changes of incompatibilities with particular application servers.
  
• eXist also uses an XML collection class from xercesImpl-2.9.1.jar. eXist looks for this class using the explicit package org.apache.xerces. Since Orbeon Forms uses a rerooted version of Xerces, eXist can't find this class. We might need to modify the eXist code for this. This is still open.
• When starting eXist, we are getting a non-fatal exception: java.lang.IllegalStateException: error while returning XMLReader: org.exist.validation.resolver.eXistXMLCatalogResolver. This is still open.

Orbitz: Throwable Flights

I have been booking some flights recently. As usual, I did a first research on Kayak, because its cross-site searching capabilities and of its great interface (at least the best I have seen so far). The flight I selected was sold by Orbitz at a reasonable price, so I just went ahead and clicked on a link on Kayak that took me to Orbitz to complete the reservation.

This is when Orbitz served me this page (click on the image for a larger version):


First, Orbitz is telling that the flight I selected is not available. Why? Other links from Kayak to Orbitz for other flights got me the same error message. Was this a temporary glitch? An evil plan from Orbitz to avoid paying a commission to Kayak?

And have you noticed that error message? What is that java.lang.Throwable? Orbitz must be using some Java infrastructure. And I'll call those throwable flights.

Oracle: Expose your data as XML over HTTP

Once you have enabled the HTTP protocol in the Oracle listener configuration, you can access data stored in tables as XML data through HTTP.

1. Download and install SQL Developer.
2. Connect as sys to your database, under Other Users, right click on HR, choose Edit User.
   
   
   
3. Set a password for HR, uncheck Password expired and Account is Locked.

Now you can go to http://localhost:8889/oradb/HR/COUNTRIES to retrieve all the rows in countries table as an XML document. When asked for authentication, enter the HR login you set earlier.

You can select precisely the data you want using XPath. For instance, this will return the row for Argentina in the countries table: http://localhost:8889/oradb/HR/COUNTRIES/ROW[COUNTRY_ID='AR'].

The oradb part of the URL points to the DBUriServlet which serves what Oracle calls DBUris over HTTP. See the Oracle documentation for a full description the DBUris syntax.

Spam on Blogger, Damned Spam

Google is doing a great job dealing with spam on Gmail, but not so much on Blogger. I used to get spam in comments very rarely, but a few weeks ago it increased to 1 or 2 day, and for the last few days I started seeing tens of spam comments per day. Deleting each one of them requires a few clicks. This is quite a pain, so starting now, you will need to login with Blogger before you can post a comment.

Hint to the Blogger team: what about requiring those who are not logged in to enter a Captcha, like everyone else is doing out there?

Update Nov 7, 2007 - Olivier noted in a comment below that Blogger already implements a Captcha. They call this word verification, and your blog is on Blogger, you can enable it under Settings / Comments. Very nice indeed. And now anonymous comments are enabled again!

Bookmark emails with Gmail

Google started rolling out their updated user interface for Gmail a few days ago. The changes are subtle, there is no eye-candy (à la Vista or Leopard), but it's all great stuff.

Here is my favorite: when you open an email, Gmail adds a fragment identifier to the URL. Now you can bookmark this URL, or copy it somewhere and reopen it later to get exactly to that message.

You could get to the same result before by opening the email in a new window, but it was much slower and not as straightforward. I love it!

Vote for Java6 on Leopard!

As The Sun BabelFish Blog puts it:

Java developers on OSX are upset at Apple's silence as to its intentions with respect to the release of Java 6. There used to be a developer preview available, which was pulled recently with no indication as to when a replacement would be available.

They started an open petition to get Apple to realize how important the Java platform is for Mac users. So here is my vote:

13949712720901ForOSX

Now make sure to vote yourself.

Now we can have conversations on Blogger

Very nice: I noticed today that Blogger added checkbox for you to be notified of follow-up comments to a post you are commenting on.

In the past you had to use a tracking tool like coComment or co.mments to keep track of follow-up comments to posts you are commenting on. But most people aren't using any of those tools, and comments most were a fire and forget thing.

Now we'll be able to have real conversations in Blogger comments. You'll find more about this new feature, in the "official Blogger blog": Blogger Buzz.