waffle

So I threw out one of my 512MB RAM sticks of my PowerBook G4 1.5GHz 15″ and put in a Kingston ValueRAM KVR333X64SC25/1G SO-DIMM 1GB DDR PC2700/333MHZ stick (that should have Googlers looking for info covered - I know I couldn’t find anything definitive when I tried - the stick mentioned does work with the PowerBook model mentioned, period).

Did it work? Yes, and oh how it worked. My Xbench benchmark more than doubled, and yes, I know that it’s been said that trusting Xbench to accurately be benchmarking is like analyzing the hiccups of a snail in order to detect tectonic movements, but I don’t care, because my PowerBook is now a whole lot faster.

Some examples:

• When I want to glance at a Dashboard widget, I do use the hold-key-and-release way, and not the press-once-to-show-press-again-to-hide, because more often than not my widgets actually reload during the transition and not 10 seconds after, and that’s unheard of for me unless you have a clean new account and no other apps running.

• Animations all over the place are way better. Frame rates have gotten way up.

• OmniWeb now only takes seventynine eighties of infinity to boot up.

• In general, apps start faster and they quit a lot faster. Without exceptions.

• However, reloading a page in Safari and then reloading the same page in XP/IE still makes baby Jesus lie down and play dead. (While it’s gotten slightly faster, it’s still not a good situation. In the immortal words of Philip J. Fry: “Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it!”)

The price for 1GB RAM sticks for laptops are henious and up there with armed robbery on the crime severity list, but once your wallet heals you won’t regret it in the least.

This one is weird.

Fan death is an urban legend that was originally primarily confined to South Korea, but has spread to other countries in the Far East. The legend states that an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can result in the death (by suffocation, poisoning, or hypothermia) of those inside. This belief also extends to air conditioners and the fans in cars. When the air conditioner or fan is on in a car, Koreans are apt to leave their car windows open a crack to avoid “fan death”.

The legend is remarkably resilient, and is accepted even by many Korean medical professionals. In summer, mainstream Korean news sources regularly report on cases of fan death, even if more likely causes (e.g. heart attack, gunshot, alcohol poisoning) are evident. [..] When informed that the phenomenon is virtually unheard of outside of their country, some Koreans have gone as far as suggesting that their unique physiology renders them susceptible to fan death.

A pirate walks into a bar with a steering wheel in his crotch and asks for a grog. The bartender notices the steering wheel and says “Hey, you know that you’ve got a steering wheel in your crotch?” The pirate answers: “Arr, it’s driving me nuts.”

This joke in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day.

“Arr, it’s driving me nuts” in honor of my Driver’s license, which I’ve just acquired.

So, my simple weekend hack Gmail+Growl is now famous. Also, I am not only a “user”, but apparently “clever”. Nice. Thanks.

This begs the story of how it all happened anyway. Here it is:

It was a dark and stormy night. Chains rattled, owls hooted. NetNewsWire downloaded the hourly news. News spread about Google’s first native Mac app, Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X. I downloaded it and it was fucking fabulous. I am not joking and I am not sucking up - it was really fucking fabulous.

After having sent myself a test mail to see what little jig it would do upon mail reception, I saw it. The sound alert I had set worked, a number was shown (unlike the Windows version, which I also rely on religiously) and, being a menu extra, I pulled down the menu and saw the extra menu for listing the mails. However, I did miss the Growl integration I enjoy with iTunes (through Synergy), Adium and other apps.

(Aside: Growl is an open framework that allows lovely notifications to appear when something happens - iTunes starts playing a new song, a mail is received, a buddy comes online on Adium, you name it. It’s quite nice. Windows users have this through some apps’ own built-in versions (MSN Messenger was first) and calls them “toasts”, from what I know, but there’s nothing like Growl.)

A minute later I found myself wanting to dissect the little bugger. This is perhaps an unusual habit but I find myself doing it from time to time.. Finder. /Applications. Gmail Notifier. Show Package Contents. Contents. Resour- hey. Is that a Headers folder? Is that a Headers folder?

And it is at this point in the story that you have to understand that when a Cocoa programmer missing functionality finds a folder commonly used to store plugin APIs, he will pounce on it. And so I did. GGPluginProtocol.h. HeaderDoc annotated! This guy really did know what he’s doing. Awesome.

The rest is a blur of trying to “weak link” - which means that you’re telling your app “okay, if this thing is here, use it, otherwise don’t” - in the Growl framework. Linking in OS X is divided up into weak and hard (traditional) linking, and likewise, the documentation about how to weak link is weak, and the actual process of weak linking is hard. (It was for me anyway.)

The actual code went from investigating the small NSDictionary objects (”hash-tables”, if you will) to find out keys, to popping up a Growl notification with all the data, to popping up a succinct name, subject, summary Growl notification adorned with the Gmail Notifier logo in less than 10 minutes. A customizable cap was added at 6 notifications to keep from flooding the display at a loaded inbox (the Gmail Notifier caps at 20, but that’s not enough for Gmail+Growl), a suspiciously composited logo was grafted on a web page with a suspiciously nice look, and I put it out on its virgin cruise.

I showed it to a few friends, I posted one email to the Growl discussion list and later on, I posted one comment on a MacSlash post about the Gmail Notifier. That’s all the promotion I’ve done. This, if anything, is absolute proof that if you build it, they will come. (In this case, probably in droves.) I was lucky and found the API (best easter egg so far this year), I built a plugin to scratch my itch and released it because I know that many others have the same itch. It’s not perfect by any means. But it works, and it fills a function.

I like it.