The Twitter API supports UTF-8 encoding. Please note that angle brackets (“<” and “>”) are entity-encoded to prevent Cross-Site Scripting attacks for web-embedded consumers of JSON API output. The resulting encoded entities do count towards the 140 character limit.

Does anyone notice the weirdness there? Apart from the MAGIC_QUOTES smell.

If I were feeling pathological, I could tweet a message of 140 characters all between the Unicode code-points U+010000-U+10FFFF. I think that would end up as 560 bytes. And I think that would be all fine with Twitter. Which is another way of saying that Twitter would, I assume, be happy to exceed 140 bytes for a message if it were written in, say, Japanese.

By contrast, while on my pathological holiday from good sense, I would only be able to tweet a message of 35 angle brackets – hence 140 characters, 140 bytes in UTF-8 – because the encoded angle-brackets count toward the number of characters. Seems a bit backwards doesn’t it?

Does anyone know the reasoning here? Or are the docs at fault?

Back to the angle-bracket quoting. Just as the PHP folk are finally ending their own embarrassing journey through that silliness, it looks to me like Twitter are now making a similar mistake. JSON should safely encapsulate angle-brackets, so perhaps I don’t understand the problem that they are trying to solve?

One more question: what if I tweet “&gt;”? When using the API, can that be distinguished from a “>”?

(You might have noticed that I’ve have so far been too lazy to experiment with all this stuff; I just wanted to write it down before I forgot. I’ll add a comment if I get the time to play.)

After a couple of months, I was getting frustrated. I didn’t think eMusic were following up on this, so I emailed Ihsahn’s record company, Candlelight Records, and his management/production company, Mnemosyne, to let them know. I got a couple of replies, including one from Heidi at Mnemosyne – who I’ve just realised is Ihriel, Ihsahn’s wife and fellow artist – apologising and thanking me for telling them.

And this morning I also received angL on CD, sent by post from Mnemosyne, with a hand-written postcard saying “Thanks for helping us out”, and signed “Ihsahn”.

Thanks Heidi and Ihsahn, you’ve totally made my day, and I wish you all the best.

(Side note to everyone else: angL is a bloody brilliant album, so go and get it now :)

1. iTunes keeps skipping tracks half way through. It will suddenly start playing the next track for no obvious reason. Restarting stops this for a while.
2. The keyboard focus keeps going… elsewhere – into the void – as I type in an X11 window. The one other person I’ve asked about this has the same issue.
3. Spaces is, well, just a bit crap compared to the multiple-desktop systems that you can find for X (as in X-Windows, or X11).
4. Window/application focusing and switching are sometimes just wrong. For example, Cmd-Tab switches between the most recently used applications, but Cmd-` (back-tick) cycles through the windows of the current application. Good luck to you if your application has, say, 10 windows open.
5. Terminal is broken. I gave up on it a long time ago, hence the need for X11.
6. MacPorts is great, except for port, the package manager, which is actually less useful than, say, tar. Why o why o why did they write yet another package manager? Fink at least had the good sense to use APT, but I don’t use it because I prefer the packages in MacPorts.
7. Sleep. Specifically safe-sleep. Which doesn’t work on my MacBook Pro. If I use safe-sleep (which is the default), the laptop will take several minutes to go to sleep, several minutes to wake up, and every 3 or 4 times will simply not wake up. Sometimes it will wake up but no login dialog box will appear, which means I have to put it back to sleep (and wait), then wake it up again (and wait and hope), and if the dialog box doesn’t appear, it probably means I need to hard-reboot. It would have been quicker to just pull the battery out. Actually, I disabled safe-sleep on Tiger, so maybe it works now on Leopard, but I’m not in the mood to try.
8. External monitors. I have a nice 30″ Apple Cinema Display, which is simply great. However, using it with my MBP is a PITA:
   1. For best use, start with MBP switched off (cold, not asleep).
   2. Plug in monitor.
   3. Turn on MBP, and quickly shut the lid.
   4. Don’t open the lid.
   5. Don’t open the lid.
   6. If you open the lid, Mac OS will add the laptop screen to the available display space, then rearrange your windows, backdrops, dock and menu bar. And then, if you close the lid, the MBP will go to sleep, then take 5 minutes to wake up and show the login dialog box on the 30″ display. Then all your windows will be in different places and at different sizes.
   7. Don’t plug/unplug the monitor unless the MBP is switched off. Doing so will work 2 times in 3, the other time it will leave your machine not crashed, but not working either. Hard-reboot required. If you want to take your supposedly mobile laptop computer into the other room, think again.

I am sure there are more things that irk me, but that’s all for now.

There are some things I do like:

1. Mail. It works better than any MUA I know. I just wish it wasn’t tethered to Mac OS X, highlighted URLs properly (it doesn’t understand ~ in URLs, which is, oh, only in half the URLs I get sent every day), and came with PGP/GnuPG working out of the box.
2. Time Machine. Fantastic. I love it. It makes me feel so much better. I just hope it actually works when I need it.
3. iPhone. Okay, I could use MS Windows to work with my iPhone, but… hah, I’m not that bloody stupid. Anyway, this is not really a feature of Mac OS, it’s just a requirement. Which is, actually, somewhat annoying. And the new iPhone 2.0 software is a bit shit too.

I like 2.5 things (the iPhone “feature” gets 0.5). And I’m sure there aren’t any more.

I now realise that I would rather use Linux (again; I used to use Linux all the time on the desktop). But Ubuntu (which is my distro of choice) is a PITA all of its own to install on Apple hardware, so I’m just going to persevere with Mac OS X for now.

That, and because I have an iPhone. Grr, Apple, you now make me feel locked-in to your platform, and I don’t like that.

lsof -p $(ps ux | egrep [/]opt/local | awk '{print $2}' | xargs | sed 's/ /,/g') | fgrep opt/local | awk '{print $9}' | sort -u | xargs port provides | sed 's/.*: //' | sort -u | xargs port -f upgrade


The command line rules!

It’s meant to rebuild every MacPorts package I’ve got installed that is loaded when I start XDarwin (the xfree86 port in MacPorts) in a vague attempt to fix the completely broken mouse pointer in X.

In a company far far away, I used to be a Java developer. At that time I thought that applets could be a good thing for the web. Since then, and for most of this millennium, I’ve been somewhere between indifferent and blisteringly annoyed when encountering Java applets. I silently hoped they would go away.

But they just won’t die.

Recently I joined Facebook, and they use a crappy upload applet for photos. Which reminded me of the crappy upload applet that comes with Gallery. These might be the most beautifully crafted objects, whole Versailles of Java, but during the time the ruddy thing painfully loads I can’t use the browser, and the OS even mentions that things are not responding. Okay, Versailles was not built in a day, so I’ll go and feed the donkeys or something and come back when it’s done. But, of course, it’s not beautiful as promised. It’s an eyesore, a pig to use, and breaks just after I’ve invested 20 excruciating minutes choosing photos of family barbecues.

So I’m voting with my browser preferences, and I vote for no more Java on the web. Applets were cool for a month or two, but have been a mercilessly flogged but nevertheless dead horse ever since.

Flash, on the other hand, actually has a use. Video. After over a decade of squabbling between Real, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft SomethingMediocre, it took a vector animation program to pretty much solve cross-browser video.

That’s great. But I really really do not want to watch another whizzy website Flash-splash page or another Microsoft disinfomercial next to the news. So Flash might be next to get the chop.

I’ll be using Lynx before the year’s out.

I’m writing this after reading about the Wifi Liberator on Boing Boing. It’s a simple pairing of some hardware and software that lets you freely share your paid-for Internet connection at a WiFi hotspot with everyone in the vicinity. It’s probably against the terms and conditions of those hotspots, but they’re normally so overpriced and such poor quality that my sympathy doth overfloweth not. The WiFi Liberator is a manifestation of the discontent people have with pay-for WiFi services, and the operators should take note.

My wife spent 6 days last month at the aforementioned hospital after an emergency c-section. Incidentally, the hospital was clean and modern, and the staff were friendly and professional. After the birth I took the laptop in so she could email friends about the baby, keep in touch with me, and maybe post some stories, but the high price of WiFi put us off the idea. At one point I bought a one-hour card anyway, but there was no signal.

Internet access isn’t yet a utility service like phone or water, but a data service to the home/person will become a standard fitting eventually, quite soon perhaps. For some I think it’s already more important than water, air and sex (for some the Internet is sex). In any case, if it’s advertised (and it was, in the lobbies, the lift, on leaflets…) then it should at least work, and for that price it should collect my laundry too.

You may argue that WiFi access is often expensive, and that this hospital is not unique. But that’s not a reason to roll over. I’m still dreaming about how to provide some competition to this with my limited resources, and if I don’t do it then I’m sure someone else will, because €28 a day is a rip-off.

I’ve got about 1000 tracks in Apple Lossless (.m4a) format, all ripped from my CDs. Tools like MPlayer now support it, and Amarok can play them, so why bother converting them? Well, for a long time they were not supported so I could only listen to them on my Mac. I’ve also realised, if I’m going to keep a music collection on my computer, that the format I choose better be open so I can still listen to my tunes in a decade.

You’ll need the following:

• Python 2.4 or later.
• Mutagen is a pure-Python meta-data library, and I wrote the script using version 1.8.
• MPlayer is used to convert from Apple Lossless to WAV. I was using version 1.0_rc1.
• FLAC of course, to encode the WAV. My machine has version 1.1.2-r8 installed.

So far I’ve only tested the script with one Moloko album on a Linux machine. It’ll probably work just fine on any Unix-like OS, and may just work on Windows if you peddle hard. I’m going to convert all 1000 tracks soon, but first I need to find some disk space. My advice: take backups, because there are no warranties, and, though I don’t mean to scare you, the pieces are yours to keep if things break.

Happy converting, and try the magic --help switch if you’re lost.

[Edited to fix broken link, 2009-07-06]

In other news, I want to apologise for my content-free blatherings about the Apple iPhone. I don’t think anyone reads this blog so I’m talking to myself, but I want to make my contrition public even so, for future readers :-)

Apple Mail can automatically delete old junk mail, but I also use KMail and SquirrelMail, and it’s often a long wait between the times I load up Mail, so I need something else. It requires Python 2.4 (perhaps earlier, but I’ve not tried it), and that’s it. Run it with a --help to get started.

Incidentally, the script is also in a Bazaar repository, and you can branch it if you want:

bzr branch \

http://www.premolo.net/~gavin/Scripts

Right now the script doesn’t care about SSL (I run it on the same box as my Courier IMAP server) and it uses CRAM-MD5 authentication which may not be to your taste. It’s not had a lot of testing either, so be careful, and take some backups first :-) It’s in the public domain though, so happy hacking, and I’m more than willing to merge patches.

I thought my old Nokia was pretty nifty, if a bit slow and unreliable, and my Sony Ericsson is much better. I’ve played with some Windows handsets and they’re much the same. But the iPhone is leagues, fathoms, miles, light years ahead of these. Next to the iPhone the current batch of smartphones come across as smart as a house brick talking politics at dinner.

Argh! My cell phone is corporate suited plastic lump of curdled boredom! It represents the product of a permeating lack of innovation, meddling from middle management, committee thinking, unmotivated staff, a “can’t do” culture, a, a … hang on, I lost myself thinking about the Great Seattle Graveyard of Imagination. Actually, my phone is fine and works well, but it has been utterly utterly outclassed by Apple’s iPhone.

I think Apple exceeded the hype: suddenly, every other phone on the planet looks so very old.

Update: seems like it was only at first sight. Apple might have practiced some Microsoft Innovation courtesy of LG.