Finally got around to installing the 2.11 update released in December. The coolest new addition is the instant messaging application which allows you to connect to Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft IM networks.

I haven’t played with it enough to come to any conclusion on whether stability is any better (my phone often reboots when I answer it!) or if the Web browser is any smarter (it doesn’t seem to be very good about using its cache).

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Lately, Quicksilver has been quietly dying very often and I’m constantly restarting it. I suppose I should try reinstalling and/or deleting my preferences, but before I do that, I was wondering if anyone else was seeing this.

Interestingly, I’ve also noticed that the “check for updates” functionality always fails to connect to the server. I’ve wondered if this and the crash are related (e.g.: Quicksilver dying when it attempts to do an automatic check), but that’s just pure speculation.

Here’s a snippet from the last crash log that got dumpd in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter

Process:         Quicksilver [1566]
Path:            /Applications/Quicksilver.app/Contents/MacOS/Quicksilver
Identifier:      com.blacktree.Quicksilver
Version:         β53 (3814)
Code Type:       X86 (Native)
Parent Process:  launchd [87]

Date/Time:       2008-04-01 11:27:29.302 -0700
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.5.2 (9C7010)
Report Version:  6

Exception Type:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)
Exception Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE at 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread:  4

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While following the exercise “Creating Blue Apple Loops” on page 262 of “Logic Pro 8 and Logic Express 8″ by David Nahmani, I was running into some trouble.

1. Open Logic project file: “07 New Day”.
2. Drag the Marquee tool (Command-click tool) over the High Arpeggio region from bar 5 to bar 7. Verify that before releasing the mouse button, the help tag reads “5 1 1 1 7 1 1 1″, indicating that Marquee selection goes from bar 5 to bar 7 and is thus 2 bars in length.
3. Click the Marquee selection with the Pointer tool to create a new region that should be exactly 2 bars in length.
4. In the Arrange area’s local menu bar, choose Region > Add to Apple Loops Library.

Expected Results:
The dialog should offer the choice of “Loop” or “One-shot”.

Actual Results:
The choice of “Loop” or “One-shot” is grayed out.

According to the book and http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301036, this graying out is a symptom of having a region that is not a whole number of bars in length, but this region seems to be exactly 2 bars in length as far as I can tell.

I posted about this on the Logic Pro Help forums (run by Mr. Nahmani; not Apple) and Mr. Nahmani kindly pointed me to an earlier thread that explains the problem and how to work around it. Basically, the bug is that the help tag is indicating that the region is 2 bars in length, when in fact, it’s actually a bit shorter. The remedy is to tweak the region a bit to make it shorter and then to make it exactly 2 bars in length.

I hope this helps other folks who run into this problem. And I hope Apple fixes this bug.

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I had been working through the exercises in “Logic Pro 8 and Logic Express 8″ by David Nahmani lately, mostly while on the shuttle bus to and from work (and yesterday on the VTA light rail on the way to SD West). I completed the last lesson last night, which involved adding music and sound effects to a video.

The book is excellent and I learned a lot about using Logic from it. Now that I’m done with this book, I’m going to buy “Logic Pro 8: Beyond the Basics” by David Dvorin and work through that.

While on the topic of Logic, I should mention that the author of the book, David Nahmani, has some nice Logic forums at http://www.logicprohelp.com/

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WordPress 2.3.3 has been released.

$ svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.3
U    wp-includes/gettext.php
U    wp-includes/version.php
U    wp-includes/pluggable.php
C    xmlrpc.php
U    wp-admin/install-helper.php
Updated to revision 6736.

This release has security fixes so I suggest you do the same ASAP if you’re a WordPress user.

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Interesting that the Unix calls for setting user ids of processes are so varied and so complex, that they warranted an entire paper. I only skimmed, but I did get a pretty good description of the “saved uid” parameter of the setresuid call.

Setuid demystified (PDF)

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Just stumbled up on this (via TiVoBlog who in turn found it via TiVo Lovers) and will have to give it a try sometime:

From TiVo HME SDK for Python:

An implementation of TiVo’s HME (Home Media Extensions) protocol for Python, as a module (hme.py), a simple server (hmeserver.py), and examples (mostly ported from TiVo’s Java HME SDK). Everything is released under the LGPL 2.1+, except where noted. (Most of the examples are Common Public License.)

I developed this in Python 2.5.1, and haven’t tested it with other versions, but it does nothing exotic. (hme.py depends only on the struct module. hmeserver.py is a bit more demanding.) But I have tested it in Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows XP.

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