jessenoller.com

Evernote invites.

Just a quick note - I've got 10 Evernote invites - if you don't know what Evernote is, check out the Ars review here. Post in the comments if you'd like to test drive it. I'm going to need an email address.

So far, I'm loving it - but I'm also someone with about 500+ bookmarks in Safari, a ton of "to read" stuff saved on my hard drive, and over 100 RSS feeds in NetNewsWire. So something to help me archive/save/search everything is key.

Now I just want PDF indexing support.

Ok, I have 10 more left!

Per Ars: Sun is talking about porting Java to the iPhone (and an idea for python)

Ok. So Sun has come out stating they're starting work based on the SDK released by Apple for the iPhone earlier this week to port the JDK over to the iPhone.

Quoting the sun rep:

"Now, the iPhone is open" as a target platform, Klein said. The free JVM would be made available via Apple's AppStore marketplace for third-party applications.

Now, as comments there and elsewhere have pointed out - there's a clause in the Agreement that comes with the SDK forbidding applications from being placed on the AppStore that can execute/interpret "other applications" - to whit:

3.3.2) An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s).

So - unless Sun plans on making a JDK that a) doesn't run anything or b) can be compiled into an application that is to be sold on the AppStore (providing the runtime for the app, like a self-standing .jar/.war) then I can't see this happening, and option a is about as useful as a toilet bowl filled with taco meat.

On the other hand, option b: Making a runtime they release outside of the app store for application developers to use to write an application in Java and then have it compile-down to an Objective-C runtime/bytecode binary - then it could work, but those would be some *fat* binaries without a lot of magic.

Now - could the same thing be done with Python? Perhaps. Right now we have the pyObjC bridge that ships with Leopard that allows you mostly unfettered access into the Objective-C/OSX programming environment. This means you can build "native" applications in Python.

I doubt these bindings will work/exist on the iPhone, which means you want some utility to take Python code and "interpret" it down into an Objective-C binary, i.e.: an embed-able environment ala what Sun may end up having to do where you write an app in pyObjC/Python and the app+runtime is compiled down into Objective-C.

Again, without a lot of trickery, these would be fatass binaries - probably fatter than the notion of the universal binaries most people ship nowadays for OS/X.

It's a thought - now I should get back to poking at Objective-C and other pre-pycon hackery. This is something people more versed in compilers, runtimes and with more free time than me will probably explore.

For those of you looking to brush up/get into objective-c…

Because you, like me, are interested in writing some iPhone apps (and apple is only allowing objective-C stuff right now :sad:) - here is a free eBook I kept in my pocket for when I wanted to finally dive in.

It's call "BecomeAnXcoder" from CocoaLab

Brent Simmons on NetNewsWire 3.1’s Release as Freeware

NetNewWire, my favorite feed reader ever has gone totally free: Brent Simmons on NetNewsWire 3.1’s Release as Freeware. I highly recommend NetNewWire for feed management on OS/X especially for the clipping/blogging features. I've never quite been able to "get into" online readers (much like my continued need to use an offline mail clients) but NNW also syncs with NewGator's online systems - which means you can browse your feeds with their online apps as well.

The cross-synchronization and the iPhone optimized version of the online client is what keeps me hooked (also the cold fact that without it, I'd have to prune my list of 117 feeds (including 6 planets and reddit/dzone)).

Yeah, it happened a few days ago, I'm still wading through a backlog of posts.

PyObjC: Run in Python automator action.

This is an excellent post from yesterday - the author outlines how, using 10.5 PyObjC bindings and the Leopard Automator, you can add a "run python script" automator action.

I particularly like his followup post on where he outlines how to use the new 'run in python' action to ship files off to Amazon's S3 storage.

The latter of the two posts actually hooked me up with the "boto" python module - which looks like an excellent module for interacting with Amazon's web services, something I've been examining recently for a side-project.

PyObjc 2: Leopard, Python 2.5.1 and You.

So, most everyone know that Apple released OS/X Leopard a bit ago - I was on the early adopter train, and have not had any problems (except for the occasional spaces crash because I mash buttons fast).

One of the cooler things that came out with Leopard was a completely overhauled PyObjC built-in. Including Webkit bindings, and many other things (see here and here for more details), a built-in version of twisted and many other things.

However, I was a moron. I was knee-deep in debugging a problem and compulsively replaced my came-with-leopard version of Python with the python.org python 2.5.1 build. (Anyone with tips on how to undo this, please let me know).

Once I dropped in the 2.5.1 version: poof. I managed to wipe out all of the delicious stuff built into my shiny new OS, which made me a sad panda. Once the PyObjC 2.0 stuff hit the PyObjC SVN tree (here) though, I was filled with hope that I could at least restore the PyObjC stuff.

Alas! It was not to be. Come to find out, there's a hard coded string in the macpython makefile which causes the pyobjc build to use the wrong SDK and puke and die. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I gave up not realizing what the problem was. You should see a problem like this:

C compiler: gcc -arch ppc -arch i386 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -fno-strict-aliasing -Wno-long-double -no-cpp-precomp -mno-fused-madd -fno-common -dynamic -DNDEBUG -g -O3

compile options: '-I/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/include/python2.5 -c'
gcc: Modules/_Foundation_nscoder.m
Modules/_Foundation_nscoder.m: In function ‘imp_NSCoder_encodeArrayOfObjCType_count_at_’:
Modules/_Foundation_nscoder.m:220: error: ‘NSUInteger’ undeclared (first use in this function)
Modules/_Foundation_nscoder.m:220: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
Modules/_Foundation_nscoder.m:220: error: for each function it appears in.)
Modules/_Foundation_nscoder.m:220: error: syntax error before ‘count’
Modules/_Foundation_nscoder.m:228: error: syntax error before ‘i’
Modules/_Foundation_nscoder.m:249: error: ‘count’ undeclared (first use in this function)
Modules/_Foundation_nscoder.m:256: error: ‘i’ undeclared (first use in this function)


However, last night I was snowed-in at work and in between bug fixes for work, I managed to dig up a post (with fix) on the issue I was having (thanks Barry).

The short answer is sync the tree from subversion, and then edit the following file:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/config/Makefile


And remove the "-isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk" chunk of text. Drop into the sync'ed svn tree and run the 02-develop-all.sh script. Now I can happily import WebKit:

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54869, Apr 18 2007, 22:08:04)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5367)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import WebKit
>>>


Posting from iPhone send food

After much waiting my iphone is all setup and configured i am going to have to get used to typing on it though. I have fat thumbs.

And yes - it is as good as you've heard.

TextMate 1.5

TextMate 1.5 is released!

I'll tell you this much - ever since I watched this screen cast by a guy using it for Python, I've spent a lot more time working on the more interesting language features.

I've added a lot of stuff pertinent to my work in the snippets, tab triggers, etc. I really have not been this happy with an editor in some time.

Really, you should check it out.

AlmostVPN - Trac

Ran across this app via version tracker: AlmostVPN - Trac

It's interesting - it's an SSH tunneling manager that sits in the Pref. Pane in OS/X instead of being a standalone application. For those of us who have to VPN a lot, but despise things like the official Cisco VPN client (on any damned platform) this might be useful (if you have ssh access into the corporate network).

GrowlNotifier class (Python)

I use growl on my mac - but I haven't browsed the site in ages. Today, from del.icio.us I found this gem: GrowlNotifier class (Python)

I am going to use the hell out of this. Python bindings for Growl? Heck yeah!

Some notes for myself: Make sure to view the scripts and Extras folders, and also enable "remote notification" in the preference pane.

This will be incredibly useful for tracking network events - also, it'll be kind of cool. I need to make a bugzilla growl plugin to tell me when new bugs hit my queue (but that's redundant with email notifications, I know.)