Adam Jarret Blog

I just remembered this interesting tidbit regarding the use of the microphone on my shiny new iPhone headphones with my shiny new MacBook Pro:

Yes, it’s true—these new MacBooks work with your iPhone headphones. If you click the button on your iPhone headphones, iTunes pauses. Click again, and the music resumes. A double-click advances one track, and a triple-click moves back a track—just like on the iPhone. What’s more, the headphones’ built-in microphone appears as the input device “Microphone port” in the Sound preference pane.

At the time this was published, I didn’t have an iPhone or a compatible Intel Mac so I didn’t pay much attention. Now that I do, this is pretty nifty.

I knew there was a reason that I identify so much with JoCo’s tunes:

Over the years I’ve sort of set up this system where other people can talk to a machine, and that machine will make sure that I hear about it. (laughs) That’s the only way it works for me, because if I’m responsible for remembering something, it will be forgotten.

I love the Terminal. LOVE it.

However, as a programmer who has grown up in the world of GUIs, I can have a hard time visualizing things when only using the command line. For this reason I love when scripts bridge the gap between the world of Aqua and the dark underpinnings of Unix.

Man, work has been crazy lately.

Sadly, there’s been no time for GTweet-ing, but hopefully I can implement some planned features when my day job calms down a bit.

In the mean time I wanted to post a quick note about a fix for a problem that has been dogging my Mac: namely, that it doesn’t like to remember passwords anymore.

So I decided to install Windows 7 RC. Loyal readers of the blog know that I am a devout Mac enthusiast (some might argue “fanboy”), but I keep a PC around for, you know, PC stuff.

They’ve been talking about the Windows 7 beta on Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott for a while now, but I didn’t really see the need to install the pre-release code.

As a rule, I don’t like to keep anything on the desktop. This is especially true for the Windows XP machine that I keep around to play a few games, and test web sites in IE.

Today, after over 7 years of running XP, I was presented with a “There are unused icons on your desktop” notification in the taskbar.

GTweet came back to life yesterday as “Beta 2” after being ported to Python and moving to the Google App Engine.

I was very excited to get the new version out the door, but the accomplishment was tainted by slower-than-I’d-like response times when viewing the feed in Google Reader. The development environment that I use for testing new versions of GTweet uses compiled C binaries to speed up the PyCrypto library but the live environment of Google App Engine does not.

I’m thrilled to announce that GTweet Beta 2 (now with 100% more Python) went live this morning.

For those just joining us, I came back from vacation last week to find the PHP version of GTweet in shambles after my (shared) server collapsed under the pressure, so I decided to port it to Python and move it to Google App Engine.

After a wonderful and relaxing trip to Greece, I returned to a flurry of e-mails warning me that GTweet is down.

Frustrating though it may be, I have the bittersweet problem of having grown too big for my hardware.

As this is currently a hobby project, I don’t have the resources to beef up the GTweet infrastructure (read: I’m broke) so I’m thinking about porting the whole thing to Python and running it on the Google App Engine.

I just discovered how to change a default Firefox setting that has been bothering me for ages.

The Problem

In Safari (the browser I use most often) single-clicking on the location bar does what most text input fields do: it places the cursor at the location in the text over which you positioned the mouse.

In Firefox, single-clicking the location bar highlights the URL. Without fail, I start typing an addition to the the existing URL only to find that I have erased the text I was hoping to start with.