Deflexion.com

NetNewsWire and Animated Sorting

2008-04-15T11:52:00.001+01:00

Ever since NetNewsWire became gratis on 2008-January-09, I've been using it as one of my desktop feed readers. I just noticed something very cool. First, go to the View menu, choose Sort Subscriptions By, and make sure Animate Sorting is checked. Then change your Subscriptions sort order and watch your subscribed feeds float up and over and around each other until they settle into their new position. This is so much fun that I've been clicking the Refresh All button way more than I used to!

In my preferences, I've set my feed subscriptions to refresh "Manually only." I chose "Manually only" because I only wanted to look at feeds about once a day and then do the refresh at that one time each day (different time on different days, but only once a day). A positive side effect of refreshing manually is that I get to watch the animation. A negative side effect is that I'm refreshing about ten times a day now because it's so much fun to watch the animation. So beware of a possible new addiction/time waster.

While playing around with this, I discovered the sort by Last Update option, which is now my preferred sort. I wish my email client let me sort my incoming mailboxes by Last Update. Actually, I wish that NetNewsWire were an IMAP client as well as a feed client! But for now I'm quite satisfied using it as a feed reader and as one of my web browsers. It's a pretty good web browser too.

Note: NetNewsWire 3.1.5 was released today, 2008-April-15.

Using Alpine in an X11 Terminal

2008-03-23T16:34:00.007Z

Alpine is my primary IMAP, NNTP, & ESMTP client and for years I've used it without a mouse. Using the keyboard is usually an efficient way to navigate, manage, and write messages, but sometimes I dream about being able to use a mouse. With the release of Alpine 1.10 on 2008-March-18 and my recent upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard, I decided to try using it in an X11 Terminal again. In the past I've failed to get it to work well, but today I succeeded! Here are some details about how I got it to work.

Important: These instructions worked on Leopard, but will probably not work on Tiger (or earlier) because the X11 configuration is significantly different in Leopard than in earlier versions of OS X. Details about X11 on Leopard are here and here.

Install the latest Alpine. For details, see my blog item titled Building and Installing Alpine (Apache-Licensed Pine).

In a Terminal.app window, run
```
xterm -e alpine &
```
In Alpine, go to Main > Setup > Config (MSC) and set this feature:
```
[X]  Enable Mouse in Xterm
```
Read Alpine's built-in Help about Enable Mouse in Xterm (by typing Ctrl-G or ?), but note that in Leopard you should not explicitly set the DISPLAY environment variable. Instead, it will be set automatically when xterm runs. This is one of the changes in Leopard.

Read the built-in Help about the following two features and decide if you would like to set them. Here are the settings that I use:
```
[X]  Enable Newmail in Xterm Icon
[ ]  Enable Newmail Short Text in Icon
```

In Alpine, go to Main > Setup > Kolor (MSK) and set

Color Style
  Set    Rule Values
  ---  ----------------------
  ( )  no-color
  ( )  use-termdef
  ( )  force-ansi-8color
  ( )  force-ansi-16color
  (*)  force-xterm-256color

After you set the color style, use the Space and - keys to navigate the SETUP COLOR screen and choose colors that you like.

Save your settings and quit Alpine.

Quit X11.

In a Terminal.app window, run
```
xterm -e alpine &
```
and check that the mouse and colors are working.

If you plan to run Alpine in an X11 Terminal regularly, set up an alias in your ~/.bashrc (or ~/.bash_profile) that you can use to launch xalpine with the xterm settings (fonts, geometry, etc.) that you like. For example, here is the alias that I'm currently using:
```
alias xal='xterm -fa DejaVu\ Sans\ Mono -fs 18 -geometry 116x32+0+0 -e alpine &'
```

Tip 1: The DejaVu fonts, which include the DejaVu Sans Mono font that I use in my 'xal' alias above, are libre and include many Unicode characters. To see if the DejaVu fonts are installed on your system, view this DejaVu Testing page in your web browser.

Tip 2: Cmd-double-clicking anywhere on a URL in an xterm will send it to your default web browser.

Tip 3: To select text in xalpine, you need to hold down the Shift key while using the mouse to select the text. After the text is selected, Cmd-C can be used to copy the text.

Tip 4: To paste text into xalpine, you need to first type Ctrl-\ to turn off Alpine's Xterm mouse tracking, then middle-click (Alt-click) at the location where you would like the text to be pasted. Note that in order for this to work you need to go to X11 > Preferences > Input and check 'Emulate three button mouse'.

Please post any tips, suggestions, or questions you have about using Alpine in an X11 Terminal.

Using MacVim Almost Everywhere in Mac OS X

2008-03-21T17:37:00.007Z

MacVim 7.1 snapshot 24 was released on 2008-March-14 and includes built-in [*] support for the ODB Editor Suite protocol. If you activate "External Editor" in the MacVim >Preferences > Integration panel, a menu item named "Edit in MacVim" will appear in the Edit menu of lots of Mac OS X applications, including the apps listed here. This is fantastic and has made Mac OS X much more fun for me. For example, I'm currently editing this blog item in Blogger running in Safari. If I want to mess around with the HTML of this blog item, I can do this:

Click the Blogger "Edit Html" tab.
From the Safari Edit menu, choose Edit in MacVim.
Use MacVim to edit the HTML and then use the Vim command :wq to write and quit.
The focus returns to the Blogger blog item text box, which now contains the text that MacVim wrote out.

This makes Blogger blog editing infinitely easier and possibly means that I can stop my search for another blog editing tool. And maybe I'll start blogging more!

Tip 1: To tell MacVim that you are editing an HTML file, you can either use the following command within MacVim:

:set ft=html

Or put this line in your .vimrc:

autocmd BufRead *.safari setfiletype html

This autocmd works because Safari uses the extension .safari for the name of the temporary file that is read by MacVim.

Tip 2: For more HTML+Vim tips, see the thread HTML editing and tag completion that I started in the vim_mac mailing list.

[*] In Snapshot 23 and earlier, the ODB Editor could not be activated in the Preferences panel but instead needed to be activated via a complicated sequence of commands.

Blogging with MarsEdit

2007-11-26T16:54:00.001Z

I'm still searching for a good desktop tool to manage my blogs and today I'm trying MarsEdit. I've resisted MarsEdit because it's not cross-platform (it's Mac only) and it costs $30. In a perfect world, I'd use only cross-platform FLOSS software. I want cross-platform because it makes it easier for me to switch platforms and it also makes it easier for me to support people who are not using one of the platforms I use. I want FLOSS because I think that's the way software in general is moving and I think it's more likely that a FLOSS app will be around in a few years. Also, it helps that FLOSS apps are usually gratis! But, I'm not very happy with Bleezer, which is cross-platform, or Flock, which is cross-platform and FLOSS, so I'm trying out this single-platform non-FLOSS app.

So far I like it. I especially like that:

I can make the MarsEdit post editor window font whatever size I want; this is not the case in Flock.
I can launch an alternate editor, such as vim, from the MarsEdit post editor.
Assigning labels to a post is simple -- just check them off in the Options/Categories sidebar.

1Password and Browser Independence

2007-11-12T18:26:00.001Z

I use lots of web browsers, mainly Camino, Flock, OmniWeb, & Opera right now, and I'm constantly on the look out for tools that make it easy to switch between browsers. I've known about 1Password, which used to be known as 1Passwd, for a long time, but always resisted using it because I didn't want to pay $30. Last week I finally broke down and tried it, and it has made my browsing life much much better. I was thinking that I might actually buy it after my trial ends and then today, thanks to the Opinions section on the 1Password page at IUseThis, I learned that you can get a gratis 1Password license at this 1Password+Mac Gems promotion page. I don't know how long this promotion will last so if you're interested, I recommend that you sign up right away.

As you can read about on the 1Password site and blog, 1Password has won many awards and is a nominee for one of the Macworld 2007 Readers' Choice Awards.

See Also: Dancing With the Web Browsers, where I discuss strategies I use to make it easy to switch between browsers, and IUseThis: Social Networking for Nerds, where I discuss why I use IUseThis.

IUseThis: Social Networking for Nerds

2007-11-12T16:40:00.002Z

I pay a lot of attention to software as you can tell by looking at the sidebar on the Deflexion.com home page, where I list tools and services that I use or that I'm considering using. I recently started using osx.iusethis.com to track the Mac OS X software that I use. It's an easy way to find out about updates, to learn about tips & problems from other users, and to learn about other software that I might like. Lots of people blog about the OS X software that they use and I often bookmark such posts in my del.icio.us bookmarks with the tag OSX, but it's overwhelming to go through these posts and decide what software I might actually want to try. IUseThis is a fun way to browse through software lists and quickly get a sense of what software might be useful to me. To me, IUseThis is an example of social networking for nerds. If you're a nerd like me and wondering what all the excitement about social networking is about, I recommend that you try IUseThis or some other object-centric social network service.

To learn about social networking, see:

Social network service at Wikipedia.org
Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship by danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison

To learn about the distinction between object-centric social networks and ego-centric social networks, see:

Social Network Transitions by Fred Stutzman

I'm mainly interested in using object-centric social networks, such as IUseThis and social bookmarking services, and my guess is that this is also the case for my fellow nerds.

Building and Installing Alpine (Apache-Licensed Pine)

2007-01-30T17:45:00.002Z

Alpine, the University of Washington's new Apache-Licensed Pine, has been in alpha testing since 2006 November 29 and it's now at a point where I feel comfortable recommending it to power Pine users. If you would like to participate in the alpha test, go to the Alpine Information Center and join the alpine-alpha mailing list.

Here is what I did to build and install Alpine on my Mac OS X system.

If you have not done so already, download and install the latest Xcode package from the Apple Developer Center.
Backup any Pine and Alpine files that are in /usr/local/bin. These will be replaced by Step 13 below.
Go to ftp.cac.washington.edu/alpine and get the latest alpine-x.xx.tar.bz2 (where x.xx is the version number). I prefer to get the .bz2 file because it is smaller than the .Z and .gz files.
Put this tarball in your build directory, for example in ~/Build.
Open a Terminal window.
To change to your build directory, type:
```
cd ~/Build
```

To check the MD5 checksum of the tarball, run one of the following commands:
```
/sbin/md5 /absolute/path/to/alpine-x.xx.tar.bz2
/usr/bin/openssl md5 /absolute/path/to/alpine-x.xx.tar.bz2
```
I recommend that you specify the absolute path to both the command and the tarball to ensure you are not specifying trojans. The MD5 checksum should match the MD5 checksum that is in the x.xx release announcement message.

To list the table of contents of the tarball, type:

tar jtvf alpine-x.xx.tar.bz2 | less

Note:

j = bunzip2
t = table of contents
v = verbose
f = file

To unbzip2 (bunzip2) and untar the tarball, type:

tar jxvf alpine-x.xx.tar.bz2

Note:

j = bunzip2
x = extract
v = verbose
f = file

To change to the newly created alpine-x.xx directory, type:
```
cd alpine-x.xx
```

To read the README and the configuration help, type:
```
less README
./configure --help |less
```

To build Alpine, type the following (which are discussed in the README):
```
./configure
make
```

After the build is finished, type:
```
sudo make install
```
You will be prompted for your Mac OS X password. Note that you need to be using an OS X admin account to use sudo and that this command will replace any Alpine files that are in /usr/local/bin.

To check that Alpine was built and installed correctly, type:
```
man alpine
alpine
```
Make sure that these two commands invoke the correct version (x.xx). If these commands do not work, you probably need to add /usr/local/man to your MANPATH environment variable and /usr/local/bin to your PATH environment variable. For details, see the man page for your shell (man bash, man tcsh, etc.). To determine your shell, run finger -l.

To learn more about Alpine, which is basically Pine 5.0+, see:

man alpine
alpine -h | less
Alpine Release Notes, which can be viewed either here or by typing MR (Main > RelNotes) in Alpine
Alpine's built-in context-sensitive Help, which can be viewed by typing either ^G (Get Help) or ? in Alpine
Alpine-alpha list archives
All About Pine: POP, IMAP, NNTP, & ESMPT Client for Unix, MS Windows, and Mac OS X
Power Pine: Getting the Most Out of Unix-, Mac-, and PC-Pine

Good luck with Alpine and I hope to see you in the Alpine-alpha list!

Tip 1: You should be able to use a modified version of these instructions to build Alpine on any Unix-like system. For example, I used Steps 3-12 to build Alpine on my DreamHost shared hosting account, which runs Debian Linux.

Tip 2: The Alpine FTP site includes pre-built versions of Alpine for MS Windows (PC-Alpine): alpine-x.xx-wnt.zip and setup_alpine_x.xx.exe. Details are in ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/alpine/README

See Also:

Paul Heinlein's madboa.com: Pine and Alpine on Mac OS X, which includes notes on building and running Pine or Alpine under Mac OS X.
University of Washington: Alpine Technical Notes: Building and Installation