Computers: January 2006 Archives

I am no NBA fan. No Kobe fan, either. But 81 points in one game is impressive.

Vince Carter didn't think so. The man who admitted to intentionally playing bad to get out of Toronto said that it shows Kobe is not a good team player.

I was at Game 4 of the 1987 Western Conference Semifinals between the Warriors and Lakers (yes, I went to a basektball game on Mother's Day, but no worries, mom went with us). Golden State won the game 129-121, on the back of 51 points by Sleepy Floyd. He scored an NBA record 39 in the second half and 29 in the fourth quarter (playoff records that still stand, I think).

During that fourth quarter, Floyd's teammates got the ball to him every chance they got. If Floyd passed the ball -- one in particular was a two-on-one breakaway -- the hometown fans booed, because it was unconscionable that a player so on fire should be so unselfish. Everyone -- except the Lakers and their fans, and maybe Floyd himself -- wanted Floyd to take every shot.

It was an amazing performance, and after experiencing it firsthand almost 20 years ago (dang!), I find it hard to accept that Kobe was doing anything wrong by taking all those shots. Especially when coming from Carter.

Awhile back I added a SOAP interface for Slash journals. It lets you post journal entries, modify existing entries, delete entries, get entries for a specific user, and get individual entries.

I also implemented a perl distribution called Slash-Client to make it nice and easy to use. The base class, Slash::Client, defines the methods for the SOAP calls, including authentication. Slash::Client::Journal implements the specific journal methods.

There's two basic ways to authenticate, using a UID and password, or a logtoken (which can optionally be read straight from your browser's cookie file). So, as a quick example:

use Slash::Client::Journal;
# cookie file found automatically for Firefox on Mac OS X,
# so auth done automatically (patches welcome for others)
my $journal = Slash::Client::Journal->new({
    host        => 'slashdot.org',
    ssl        => 1,
});
 
my $id = $journal->add_entry({
    subject => 'w00t',
    body    => 'this is the coolest thing EVAR'
});
 
my $get = $journal->get_entry($id);

Reskeys (those things that are replacing formkeys, that don't let you abuse our resources) apply, so you can't just spam us with a bunch of journal entries and so on with SOAP any more than you could with the web interface.

I've been using Slash-Client to post pretty much all my own journal entries (including this one) for months now: I just type into BBEdit, the first line is the subject, the rest is the body, and I Select All and hit a key combo to run the script to send it. It's worked well for me. I wrote a small Pudge::Journal class which calls Pudge::NowPlaying to put the fancy Now Playing link at the bottom, and off it goes.

Let me know if you have any questions.

I have VNC/ssh access to an Intel Mac. Thanks for all the help from everyone.

I'm busy the next few weeks, but hope to get into fixing more of this soon. There's a bunch of problems to solve, but nothing too difficult, I think.

It looks like the problem with Mac::Carbon on Intel Macs is that we are passing a string (for example, 'MACS', the four-char code for the Finder) and then converting it into an integer, which on Intel, gets the endianness wrong.

Matt Sachs helped me with some iChat-based debugging, and Matthias Neeracher gave me a fix, which is in the process of being tested and stuff.

It looks like Intel Macs do not properly send Apple events using the included Mac::Carbon library (which I maintain). This, from the command line, should bring the Finder to the front:

perl -MMac::AppleEvents::Simple -e 'do_event(qw/misc actv/, { bund => q[com.apple.Finder] })'

It's equivalent to this AppleScript:

tell application "Finder" to activate

Much of Mac::Carbon does work fine, but ... this doesn't work at all. I don't know if it is due to a bug in the Intel Macs, or a changed behavior, or a bug in my code (most likely in AESend(), in AppleEvents.xs).

That also means Mac::Glue doesn't work.

I don't have real access to an Intel Mac, so I have no hope of fixing it anytime soon.

I have no idea if my Mac modules work on the new Intel Macs.

If you have trouble with them and want my help, be prepared to do a lot of work with me to test things out.

My father-in-law might be getting one; if he does, I can use that one. If not, I won't have one to work with, and can't do any real support of them, without help from someone else.

Most of these modules are included with Mac OS X, but when I did have a short chance to play, the Apple events stuff didn't work at all, so no Mac::Glue. Maybe they've fixed it, though.

The aforementioned Chuck Connors, star of the silver screen, played a season each for the Boston Celtics and the Chicago Cubs. He played one game for the Brooklyn Dodgers, too. (Incidentally, I first learned this at the NBA Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA, where they had a picture of him and a blurb about his pro sports career.)

Josh McAdams interviewed me for Perlcast. Josh does a really nice job with these interviews, I've enjoyed listening to them all. We did it using Skype, which I'd never used before. Not sure exactly how he recorded it, I forgot to ask (if it were me, I'd probably have used Soundflower). I supplied the bumper music with one of my amazing smash hits, You're Clueless.