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Oh! Vienna!

I finally found a mac feed reader that I actually like. It’s called Vienna. It’s open source and free too. I had been happily using Thunderbird for my feed reading, it’s quite capable in that department, but a dedicated app is always going to be a bit more slick, and Vienna is that.

The one downside was that I didn’t particularly like any of the styles available. Soon rectified though, and my shiny new ‘Perlucida’ theme is now available for download from the Vienna site.

UPDATE As of March 2006 the Perlucida style is now included as part of Vienna! So no need to download the style seperately, just grab the latest Vienna version.

Classic, Netscape 4, Photoshop 4, Livemotion 1 - so long guys.

This is something of a momentous day. I’ve finally decided that it’s time to ditch Classic Mac OS on my G4. That means goodbye to Photoshop 4, good bye to Livemotion 1.0 (which annoyingly has no options for output to other vector based formats - so I’m losing some work too) and goodbye to Netscape 4.

And whilst Mac OS 9, Photoshop and other applications have been deleted from Classic without much thought, letting go of Netscape 4 has been much more emotional. I can only think this is because Netscape was so much a part of the explosion of the web in the mid 1990’s, somehow surfing with Netscape 4 brings back memories of all that excitement.

So, bye bye Netscape 4. It was great knowing you, we spent a lot of time together, and even though we got on less well towards the end - when CSS caused so much trouble between us - I can say we’re parting on good terms. Goodbye old friend.

[Empties Trash]

A revised launchd plist for fetchmail

It turns out that my previous plist for launching fetchmail doesn’t work so well after updating to OS X 10.4.2. When there is no mail to collect fetchmail races through checking my mail accounts in less than sixty seconds, triggering a series of errors:

    launchd: nepenthes.Fetchmail: exited with exit code: 1
    launchd: nepenthes.Fetchmail: 8 more failures without living at 
    least 60 seconds will cause job removal

and so on until:

    launchd: nepenthes.Fetchmail: exited with exit code: 1
    launchd: nepenthes.Fetchmail: too many failures in succession

At which point launchd stops running fetchmail. (Fetchmail’s exit code one means “There was no mail awaiting retrieval”.)

So I returned to having launchd start fetchmail once in daemon mode, and used “set daemon” in my .fetchmailrc to specify the mail checking interval, using this plist:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" \
   "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
    <plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
      <key>GroupName</key>
      <string>wheel</string>
      <key>Label</key>
      <string>nepenthes.Fetchmail</string>
      <key>OnDemand</key>
      <false/>
      <key>Program</key>
      <string>/usr/bin/fetchmail</string>
      <key>ProgramArguments</key>
      <array>
        <string>/usr/bin/fetchmail</string>
        <string>-a</string>
        <string>-D</string>
        <string>nepenthes.dev</string>
        <string>-f</string>
        <string>/var/root/.fetchmailrc</string>
      </array>
      <key>RunAtLoad</key>
      <true/>
      <key>UserName</key>
      <string>root</string>
    </dict>
    </plist>

(File attached to this post if you’d like to download.)

There is a problem with this however - due to launchd’s asynchronous launch of processes at boot time fetchmail will often start trying to retrieve mail before postfix and thus the local smtp service is available to receive them. As long as you’re using fetchmail’s default mailbox check behavior and not the “—flush” option or its shorthand equivalent “-F”, then this will only result in an error message and the mail will be retrieved on the next check.

None the less, I’ve submitted a bug to Apple’s bug tracker as requested by the very helpful launchd creator Dave Zarzycki.

Fast User Swtiching and Colorsync Tiger Bug

Having finally upgraded from a CRT to an LCD display it seems I’ve been bitten by a bug in Tiger (OS X 10.4) where the display profile sticks on ‘Generic RGB’ after switching users with fast user switching.

The monitor ends up very washed out and so bright it hurts my eyes and it’s impossible to change the profile. The only fix is to restart the computer. It’s also no longer possible to calibrate the monitor, trying gives an error “The factory profile for the display could not be found.”.

Several people around the web report a workaround involving replacing the Generic RGB icc profile with one of your own calibrated profiles renamed as Generic RGB. Not so good with dual monitors, but it works.

I’ve found another workaround however.

Since the problem involved fast user switching I turned it off and installed Wincent Colaiuta’s WinSwitch, which provides the same functionality and a few extra features.

This seems to have the problem sorted. Seems like Apple should hire Wincent to fix that bug ;)

UPDATE: erm…so…this doesn’t entirely fix the problem…it still happens. Lets hope 10.4.2 arrives soon and fixes the problem, meanwhile I might have to consider renaming the generic profile.

UPDATE 2: So, OS X 10.4.2 arrived and this bug still isn’t fixed. Bah.

UPDATE 3: It seems the suggestion on macintouch.com by Dave Driemeyer may well sort this problem out. Basically you create another calibrated profile in expert mode and specify an option “allow other users to use this calibration”. Seems to be working so far. Go read the whole thing. Starting from where Dave’s name is mentioned.

UPDATE 4: I’ve not been bitten by this for a while, I assume update 3 (above) sorted my problems. But I just read about another fix for this, apparently you need to run DMproxy, or even add it to you startup items, it lives here: /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/DMProxy I’ve not tested this one.

A launchd plist for spamd

And one for spamd that works for me:

/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.spamassassin.spamd.plist

With content (once again remove the slash and new line in the Doctype before use):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" \
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>org.spamassassin.spamd</string>
    <key>OnDemand</key>
    <false/>
    <key>Program</key>
    <string>/usr/bin/spamd</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>-D</string>
    </array>
    <key>RunOnLoad</key>
    <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

File attached below.