nkreeger.com - blog

MacVim FTW

2008-09-09T17:11:00.002-05:00

While I've always been a fan of Xcode... peers in the office have turned me onto an excellent port of gvim for OS X known as MacVim:

http://code.google.com/p/macvim/

While there are a million configuration options out there, here are a few I'm running with:


syntax on
set background=dark
set softtabstop=2
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=2
set expandtab
set autoindent

Basically those options enable dark background w/ syntax and 2 space softtabs. (and 4 spaces for existing tabs).


if has("gui_running")
    colorscheme koehler
    set columns=90 lines=65
    set transparency=8
endif

For running gui (i.e. macvim) use the dark color theme 'koehler' and give some initial window dimensions. Since I'm a big fan of 80 col code, and vim really doesn't have a good way of displaying that (fail) I use a 90 col window. Also the |transparency| option is a MacVim only option for that gives the window 92% opacity.


set guifont=Monaco:h10
set guioptions=egmrLt
set enc=utf-8
hi LineNr guifg=#333333

These options are enable Monaco 10pt (aliased) and the |guioptions| passes in some flags to always open a window with the toolbar collapsed. The |hi LineNr| is to override the color themes line numbers foreground. The default for koehler is a bright yellow line number foreground, and I like my line numbers to be non-distracting.


:nmap  :set invnumber

And finally, this option simply maps double typing control-n while in normal mode (i.e. not insert or visual mode) to show/hide line numbers. Very handy if you don't want to always see line numbers when the file opens.

Anyways, thought I'd pass on this good find.

Back on Correo!

2008-07-30T01:25:00.003-05:00

I've been very busy lately with pushing out the new UI stuff for Songbird, which means I haven't had much free time to work on any side projects.

During the past month or so I stopped using Correo and started to run with the Thunderbird 3 alpha, which wasn't too bad. I made the switch because a couple of the advanced features and additional polish that Correo lacked - Thunderbird had. Last week, I also tried the newer Mail.app that shipped with Leopard. After getting tired of watching Mail.app crash when trying to handle 3 IMAP accounts - I switched back to Thunderbird. Yuck! Now I remember why I started Correo in the first place. So now it's time to fire development back up.

Right now, Correo 0.3 is running off of the 1.8.x Mozilla branch - which is dated now (well, not so much for the embedding stuff). My goal for the next few weeks is to get a build setup working for the 1.9.0.x Mozilla branch (off of CVS). I still can't build mailnews under XULRunner, so that will have to wait. As I've said before, I'm probably going to stash a pre-built binary for the Mozilla dependencies. This gives me the option to patch things if I need to patch them (i.e. the build system). Once this gets done, it should make it easier for others who want to build the source themselves (i.e. no full Mozilla build before an Xcode build).

I've got the source moved over to SVN here:

http://code.google.com/p/correo/

It's currently in a half-ass state, so pulling it won't get you far. Hopefully this weekend or sometime this week I'll find some spare cycles to piece things together.

On a slightly different note, be sure to give the new Songbird "blessed build" for our next release (0.7). We've put a ton of work into it, including a complete UI redesign and super fast metadata scanning (amongst other things of course).

Thinking Chiefs

2008-05-16T12:50:00.001-05:00

NOTE: This post is 100% NFL

It's only May and I'm already pretty excited about the upcoming NFL season. The Chiefs had a terrific draft, and I think it is the initial turning of the tide for the organization. First off, Herm Edwards is committed to bringing in youth and playing them right away. His philosophy towards free agents ("helmets-for-rent") is something I think is pretty true these days. Most free agents come across from another organization and take big chunks out of a teams cap - and aren't always a lock for success.

People will quickly overlook the Chiefs this season, and maybe the next. However, think about these facts:

- They have a solid game changing receiver in Dwayne Wade
- The defensive line with the addition of Glen Dorsey should make it very difficult for teams to run.
- With the pick of Brandon Flowers, Bernard Pollard, and Jarrad Page - the secondary has youth, speed, and talent. Watch out for Flowers and Pollard because they are big time hitters.
- With a revamped offensive line and Chan Gailey the offense should have spark again. With a healthy Larry Johnson coming back, I expect the Chiefs to be much more productive on that side of the ball. Also, giving Brodie Croyle some time in the pocket will allow him to develop and the organization to actually analyze him.

Another note on Croyle - I'm a big fan of the kid. He's got a strong arm and is coming out of a big time program in the SEC (Alabama). The players (at least most of the younger ones) all seem to really like and click with him. If you remember, Chailey was the offensive coordinator of the Steelers when they had Kordel Stewart - and he made him very productive (and look at Stewart these days). I think Gailey will be able to adjust the system for Croyle. The previous coordinator (was the offensive line coach during the Vermeil era) just didn't seem to have a very good strategy and approach to running the offense. I think some of the blame for Croyle's slow start can be blamed on him. But if Croyle struggles again this year, I won't be surprised for the Chiefs to go after a big time college QB in the draft next year (Chase Daniels?).

Anyways - back to reality in May on the west coast. But it's getting much closer to giving DirectTV a call for the Sunday NFL package!

Ubuntu 8.04 Beta

2008-04-10T11:03:00.003-05:00

For writing the inotify version of my XPCOM file system observer service, my linux flavor of choice has been Ubuntu. So I had bootcamp set me up a good slice of my mac books HD and installed 7.10. It was working fairly well, especially after following this guide. However, there is an issue with the kernel version that shipped with 7.10 that makes resuming from a suspend work like 20% of the time. This hold up got pretty annoying considering I like to just put my mac book to sleep and carry it to a local cafe, so I started to look into options. It looked like my options were to downgrade the OS or the kernel, or try the new ubuntu 8.04 beta.

Well I like fancy new things, so I decided to switch and use the beta. So after some quick hiccups, the system is running fairly smooth (and suspend works). I'm really starting to like Ubuntu, and if I could fix up a few things, I'd probably use it on a day-to-day basis. For instance, the alleged new auto-screen detection thing doesn't work on my third gen macbook. I like to hook up to my big screen at home so I don't have to hunch over. If anyone has had any success with getting this feature to work, please contact me (nick at nkreeger dot com).

One thing done...

2008-04-07T02:28:00.003-05:00

Well, this weekend was pretty busy thanks to an awesome trip out to Tahoe to ride the wall at Kirkwood! The conditions were pretty sweet even for April!

However, I did manage to find a few cycles this weekend to take out the security prompts out of Correo - and start the new auto-login prompts! I'll try and put some more time in this weekend (outlook good so far) so that I can get a test-build out to the community. While I'm at it - I'm thinking of ways to bundle up a pre-build version of the 1.8 branch. I think this will help get the source in other devs hands much much easier. I need to set up some scripts to build Correo against XULRunner anways, so now is as good as a time as ever to start a custom build setup!!!

Things I want to work on

2008-04-04T13:26:00.003-05:00

I've been fairly busy at the new day job, but I've been compiling a list of things that I would love to work on. Hopefully I'll have a free weekend or some slower evenings to punch these out:

Correo:

Get rid of the annoying security prompts. These got carried over from Camino and suck now that I have to work with a mail server that uses SSL.
Automatic log-in of folders at startup. I have three accounts that I have to manually go through and "get-mail" for when I launch the app.
Mailbox searching - the only real reason I ever pop back to Thunderbird for a few minutes

Camino:

Wouldn't it be cool to have a browser sync like Google's Sync extension for Firefox? I know it would help me out since I have a bad ass Mac Pro at work that I can't take home everynight....
Pickup and finish off the embedding cleanup work that I started.

Songbird:

Prototype and attempt to build a native media-list CD-burner using the existing Cocoa framework provides ripping and burning functionality.

Mailnews:

Get the module to compile under XULRunner. This way I can move Correo to embed on XULRunner and take advantage of the great stuff that is on the 1.9 branch.

Other:

Create a server-side proxy to bluetooth robot controller for the Lego NXT kit. This would be freaking cool. We'd totally use it to drive it around the office!

My side project that I've been working on lately has been a XPCOM native file-system observer service. So far I have the Mac (kqueue) and the Linux (inotify) almost done. We shall see how windows goes.

Side Sports Notes:

It's nice to see the Royals dealing! How does that feel Detroit? If the starting pitching can stay consistent through out the year, I expect the Royals to make a run at the American Central (not joking).
I'm stoked for the final 4 this weekend, the first time ever that the number one seeds all made it. The matchup I'm looking forward to the most - Kansas vs. North Carolina!

Embedding XULRunner in Cocoa

2008-02-21T10:02:00.002-06:00

Last week I started working on prototyping a plan to pull the Camino rug out from under Correo and build a fresh framework based on XULRunner. As I mentioned before - this will make it easier for others to get the source and build it - plus may help set the path for Camino to eventually move to XULRunner in the future.

Setting up a project in Xcode took some time, but once I had all the required dependencies (you have to copy most of the dylibs into the Application.app/Contents/MacOS/ folder - or point to the /Frameworks/XULRunner.framework...) and the necessary headers added to the search path things came together pretty fast.

Download the Example Here

In this example, it's a no-thrills-barebones demo. There is no embedded view, just a class that starts up XULRunner and XPCOM and another class that demonstrates that XPCOM is running. The test class (in XRTestClass.mm) simply inherits from the nsIObserverService class and gets registered for a dummy event and is "notified" by the containing Obj-C class (XRTestClass). See the code for details.

When I get more settled in here in SF - I will probably start cutting up an embedded view and start moving the Correo code to this type of platform. However - I noticed that trying to build the mailnews component (this was probably on branch - can't remember if I tried trunk) with XULRunner didn't work because of some older auto-complete interface that isn't used by XULRunner. Anyways - that's a problem for a later time ;-)

Moving Forward...

2008-01-30T10:46:00.000-06:00

As of late last week - I am really excited to announce that I have accepted an engineering position at Songbird!

Part of the transition involves a move west to San Francisco, which has consumed much of my time over the past week or so. I'm excited to find a position that allows me to work on a great project and team, not to mention the fact that it's a Mozilla based app!

What does this mean for Correo? Nothing different, it will still be a free time project like it always has. Since Songbird is a XULRunner based app, I'm thinking that I will get some more exposure to that stand alone setup and build process so that I can attempt to clone something similar for Correo (in the future sometime of course!).

In the meantime - my IRC lurk time will be off and on and limited during the move.

Correo and the shift to XULRunner

2008-01-17T16:05:00.001-06:00

I've been thinking alot about a migration strategy for Correo to the 1.9 branch lately. Currently - the source code is only compatible to the 1.8 branch -> and for good reasons. The 1.8 branch is what the latest Thunderbird releases are cut off of, and the 1.9 mailnews component is still pretty rough (as to be expected).

However, after looking at the way Songbird does XULRunner bundling and building, I think that is the path that I will take when I start to cut Correo over to the 1.9 branch. The current Correo build system is basically a mix of the current Camino setup and my home-brew patch that adds a "macmail" build option to the Mozilla setup. Songbird stashes some of their dependencies library and components in the source tree, including XULRunner. This obviously has some disadvantages, but has some very appealing pluses. First off, the build only needs to focus on building just the Correo source code, and not the entire Mozilla tree. This will also make it much easier for other dev's to get the source and build it themselves (rather than the build-patch that is used right now). Any additional Mozilla components can be "cherry-picked" and added to the dependencies folder. Thanks to the great improvement in Apple cross-architecture build systems, I can distribute a PPC and Intel binaries in both 32 and 64 bit flavors.

Part of the Camino roadmap (as I understand it) is to eventually move to XULRunner, and I don't see why Correo can't be a good test case for the move.

As I make progress on this front - I'll keep updates posted here.

Correo 0.3 Italian Localization Now Available!!

2008-01-03T00:39:00.001-06:00

Thanks to Gualtiero Catrame, Correo now has a Italian localization distribution available!

You can download the Italian version here.

Many thanks to Gualtiero!!!

French Localization Available!

2007-12-20T09:20:00.000-06:00

With thanks to Pierre Rudloff, a French Localization of Correo is now available!

You can download the localized version of Correo 0.3 here.

Thanks again to Pierre!

Correo 0.3 Released!!!

2007-12-05T16:20:00.000-06:00

I am proud to announce that I have released the next version of Correo this afternoon. The 0.3 release contains upgrades to the IMAP and international character support as well as Leopard support!

You can download the latest release here:
http://nkreeger.com/correo/Correo_03.dmg

We are hard at work on a new site and Wiki as well as planning the next goals for the next Correo release - stay tuned!

Thanks to all those who have waited - and for your kind support!

Making a XPI on Leopard

2007-11-06T19:34:00.000-06:00

Those that are running leopard may have noticed that using the built-in archiver in the finder goes ahead and copies all the meta-data files (i.e the .DS_Store files) into the zip. Since I don't want to ship out any of these files in any extension I'm working on, I whipped up a script to copy the contents of my extension to a temporary directory, clean the meta-data files, and create a archive with the .xpi extension.

You can download that script here: (Make sure to chmod u+x makexpi before using)

The usage is simple:
./makexpi
./makexpi roaming.xpi roaming

Pretty simple - but effective! Please let me know if anyone runs into problems with this since it's pretty basic at the moment.

Really???

2007-10-29T23:14:00.001-05:00

Ok, so after watching the Packers beat the Donkeys on MNF, ESPN cuts right to the three buffoons who did the post game commentary. They started showing the Packers upcoming schedule - next week @ Kansas City.

"At Kansas City - what do you guys think?" ..
"Oh thats a win"..
"Yeah should be a W"...

Are you kidding me? Huh! These national guys are so caught up with New England that they can't get their facts straight. Kansas City is coming off a bye where they won on the road (to take first in the AFC west). Green Bay is going into the shorter week from an away game to go to another away game. Kansas City has won four of their last five and the national guys think this is a blow-off game for the Packers?

Unbelievable...

PS> Go Indy ...

Correo Update

2007-10-27T01:21:00.001-05:00

I have a new build of Correo that should be ready sometime this weekend (some issues with universal builds again... sigh). This version will fix a app-launch time bug that prevents earlier Correo builds from opening on Leopard (which rocks by-the-way).

This new version will also contain improved IMAP folder refresh and IMAP sub-folder discovery as well as some other stability fixes. The branding for this version will probably be something like .25 or .3 and it will be supported for OS X 10.3 - 10.5. It will most likely be the last 10.3 build since Panther is now the -2 OS release.

Stay tuned....

Also, kudos goes out to Pierre Rudloff for providing a French translation of Correo 0.2:
http://tael67.free.fr/divers/Correo_fr.zip

Can't Wait Til Friday!

2007-10-24T19:24:00.000-05:00

Leopard drops this Friday, and I can't wait to get my hands on a copy (yeah yeah.. I drink from the kool-aid)!

From playing around with a WWDC seed, the new dev tools rock and I can't wait to start using them for my projects!

9-in-a-row

2007-10-22T08:36:00.000-05:00

Those that know me well recognize that I'm a big Chiefs fan. Well, the Chiefs-Raiders rivalry has been going on since well before my time, but lately it's been a little rough for the battery-chuckers by the bay: 9 straight losses to KC!!!!

There's not much better than starting a week by beating the Raiders on Sunday!

(Sorry for the OT)

New Friend, New Roaming XUL Utility

2007-09-19T17:41:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately, I've been quite bogged down the past couple of weeks again, but I have managed to scrap together some time to update the roaming patch and whip up a XUL interface.

But first off, I acquired a new roomate/co-worker/friend last week ;-)

Ok, back to business... The XUL interface will help ease the setup process for testing the new roaming feature. The interface allows the user to "turn on" the service, select an account to use (for bootstrapping update messages, excuse the jargon here), and pick what data they want to sync.

Here is a teaser:

Of course, this is a rough UI whose sole purpose is to help ease the setup process for testing the roaming patch.

On a related closing note, it's nice to see MailCo getting some love!

Thunderbird Roaming Demo!

2007-08-31T01:08:00.001-05:00

I finally got around to whipping up a video demo of the roaming service that I have been working on.

The first movie gives a real quick intro about what the service is and how it works from a high-level perspective. At the end of Movie 1, you will see me create an address book change which creates an update message. That leads up to Movie 2, where I show how the update is automatically applied, and show a couple of behind the scenes things for those who are curious.

Movie 1
Movie 2

I apologize in advance for any mumbling that I do, it was kinda late when I "filmed" this. Either way, it's here for your enjoyment.

Whoop There It Is!

2007-08-17T14:39:00.000-05:00

Ok, so it has been a while since I've gotten around to typing up an entry, but I've been terribly busy with work projects and trying to finish up the SoC project.

The SoC (Roaming support for Tbird) is going nicely. I'm currently able to successfully sync my mail preferences back and forth between installations. The logic for this project has become quite challenging, but it's fun to see it work! First, I have to work out the logic for maintaining the two types of update messages, full and delta (partial). There is one full update for every n number of delta updates (n is currently hard coded, it would be a nice pref). That logic might sound easy, but then I have to take in account of those messages being posted by other machines, which can make the situation hairy. Luckily, through a lot of testing between machines, I think I have most of the major kinks worked out. The IMAP implementation for the update messages is almost complete, I just need to hide the folder from the UI. The POP3 implementation is coming along nicely as well. POP3 update messages are getting stored in the INBOX, but are hidden from the user.

I also have the address book wired up, and it listens to updates, however there are a few issues I need to iron out. We ship the entire address book file in the update file which has one draw back, loading the data. I have to shutdown the AB directory service, and restart it, not too big a deal.

I've designed the service so that it sits right in the mailnews/base directory, and can be made extensible fairly easy. There are some other things that could be done so that other data types could request roaming support, but I think this will work for now. Once I get past this upcoming SoC deadline, I'll have some time to write up a nice wiki-doc entry on the service.

On a semi-related note, I am still working on Correo. I've gotten a few emails about this and wanted to clear it up. The problem I'm having right now is time, I just don't have enough time in the day to give the app some love. I've made some changes so that it runs on the latest Leopard seed, but other than that there hasn't been much. I am going to drop 10.3 support on the next version. The application is still very young, and I don't see myself holding out support for a release-minus-two OS. Plus, there are some things that will make my life much easier on the 10.4 SDK. I'm really trying to get around to providing a suitable build system that makes pulling and compiling much much much easier for other devs. I've also registered a new domain name, www.correo-client.org, there isn't anything there yet, but I'll be hacking up something soon I'm sure. If anyone wants to volunteer any of their web skillz, please drop me an email (nick.kreeger at park.edu).

Moving to some more personal, non-tech notes:

A few weeks ago I found an old fav album from my childhood, Jock Jams Volume 1. It's so sweet, it has pretty much everything on it.

I'm totally jonesing for the start of the NFL season. The Chiefs QB battle is still dragging out, but I still think Brodie Croyle will get the job. He looked really sharp (with the exception of one pass) last night. I also won't be surprised to see Larry Johnson signed before the end of next week. For anyone who has HBO, make sure to check out Hard Knocks if you're an NFL junky. This year they've been following the Chiefs, and the shows are being produced very well. The stripper dance by Bernard Pollard was the highlight of the first episode, and watching the beloved Gunther Cunningham on the second showing was just a thing of beauty! Hearing Gun tell his players he hates Thanksgiving and Christmas because it's a distraction to the players was just so Gun.

Today it finally cooled down a bit in town. It's been well over the 100 degree mark without the heat index for about 2 weeks. Getting out to hit some golf balls with my new Callaway X-20 irons has been brutal. Hopefully things cool down here this weekend.

To close this entry out, I'll complain about the one flaw in the iPhone, the headphone jack. The only headphones that fit are the original Apple-supplied ear buds. Those work great and the mic in the set is awesome. But, if I want to listen to some music with my Bose headphones, then i have to put this stupid little adapter in that makes the iPhone look like a walky-talky. Other than that, the device has been really great!

Can It Really Be This Bad?

2007-08-08T00:04:00.000-05:00

I officially finished my CompSci degree two weeks ago! Yay!

Ah Eclipse

2007-07-26T23:52:00.000-05:00

Back during my Java days, I almost exclusively used Eclipse for whatever project I was working on. The IDE was fast and worked great on Win32 and Linux, but always dogged on Mac OS X (so goes Java on OS X). However, since cutting over and working almost exclusively in C/C++/ObjC, I have either used Xcode or TextMate for all of my text editing needs. Things have been working just fine, and I'm quite effective in that setup. However, there are things that I would love to have when hacking away in core gecko. For example, syntax completion for XPCOM, basically dereferencing a nsCOMPtr so that I don't need a hundred headers open to look up function declarations. Other features that would be nice to have is a more advanced syntax coloring system (with the exception of TextMate and Xcode 3), and a fairly easy to use make file integration.

Well, I downloaded and tried out the Eclipse CDT recently. It took a little while to get setup to work on a Mozilla tree (and index the source), but I'm quickly becoming a big fan. While it is still a bit slow (thanks JVM) the syntax editing, code completion for nsCOMPtr's, and CVS access rock. Also the integrated make system that ties into my source files (identifies the location of errors and warnings) is slick. Im still running a PPC Powerbook, and Eclipse does OK for the most part, but I'm hoping the Intel version is a bit snappier.

Needless to say, I'm going to try and do most of my Gecko work from inside Eclipse for a little while. I'll post any tips and tricks I find here if I run across any.

Made it 2 weeks...

2007-07-14T11:44:00.000-05:00

Ok, so I made it two weeks before breaking down and getting an iPhone. My contract was already up with T-Mobile, and I was shopping around for plans with another organization. Not that T-Mobile was bad or anything, but there are some areas that I travel to consistently that they don't provide me with the best coverage.

The whole process was very enjoyable. The fact that I don't have to sit at some phone kiosk and wait for someone who could care less about me activate my phone was refreshing. It took about 5 minutes to get my phone synced and activated. So far, so good, but I do have one concern... It's damn near impossible to take the phone out in public with out some bafoon asking you about it. For instance, last night I met up with my brothers for dinner and to show off my new toy. Dinner was OK, but our waiter was more concerned with asking me questions about the device than worrying about our dinner. Oh well, I did find a good rubber case that conceals it from the mass, hopefully it reduces the questions.

Random Thoughts of the Week.

2007-07-09T22:20:00.000-05:00

I've been making great strides on the Thunderbird SoC project, I'm pretty close to having the application sync address book content over two profiles. In my setup, I have two profiles on my Mac that both run the patched version of Thunderbird. I fire up an instance on one account, make a change to the AB, then flip back to my other profile and the application finds the change (during application startup, the roaming service is invoked, and detects the change) and applies the AB changes to the new profile. Other than application startup, the service will check a folder every 30 minutes (this will probably be a pref) to see if there are any new roaming updates, and apply them. I'm noticing that on one of my test IMAP accounts, the folder gets updated as soon as a message hits the folder (actually, a message header is detected in the INBOX, and is trasported to the hidden roaming folder). The project is really starting to take shape and is becoming a real blast to work on. I'll try to keep more updates posted here in the future.

Unfortunately with work, the Thunderbird project, and other events in my life, I haven't had a whole lot of time to get hacking on Correo. As soon as late August or early September rolls around, I should be back in the swing of working on the app, so please stay tuned.

While I'm thinking about Correo, I've decided that after the next release (0.25) I will probably drop 10.3 support. This is for several reasons. First off, Leopard is coming quickly. Second, there are some new API's that would make my life easier and development time faster. Third, by the time the application reaches the 1.0 timetable, 10.3 should be pretty old. And finally, I would like to get Correo on pace with trunk (Mozilla 1.9) rather soon. I know there are several issues with the trunk, but there are also alot of improvements. For example, the Thunderbird team has been spending time cleaning up mailnews, getting the source to run on frozen-linkage. Plus roaming support in mailnews is going to be trunk only, which I think wouldn't be a stretch to put on the 1.0 timetable. Enough of that thinking for now....

On a slightly-Apple related note, I'm actually feeling like I want an iPhone. I hope this isn't the hype/marketing finally catching up with me!

I just got back from a weekend run to San Francisco, was a real blast. Definitely one of the better weekends I have had in a long while. I flew in Friday night, and was supposed to fly back late Sunday night, but weather held up my flight and I got to spend another day in the Frisco, which was sooo tough ;-)

Only in the post 9-11 world....

2007-07-05T09:41:00.001-05:00

Got to love Missouri.

I mean really ;-)