Schinckel.net

My mobile phone died yesterday. It’s a Nokia 6610, and the day before I noticed the time was about 15 minutes slow. I reset the time, and didn’t think anything of it. If anything, I thought that maybe a rogue tower had changed the time. Then, yesterday morning, I put the radio on, like I normally do. “Bad reception” I thought. I changed the station, a couple of times, and up came the station I would originally listen to (ABC Classic FM). I looked at the phone, thinking I must have changed the station previously, but it said a different channel. “Strange”, I thought, as I passed out of my driveway and headed up the road towards the train station. “I’ll just do the old faithful, turn the phone off and then back on.” Like it’s running Windows, I guess. Hmm. Doesn’t want to turn back on. A similar sort of thing happened last October, when my phone died temporarily for about 24 hours when I was at the National Touch Championships in the Gold Coast. It came back to life, after about a day. I think the cause of this was heat, but nothing like that this time. I’ve pulled the phone to bits, I know it’s fully charged, and I cannot find out what is wrong. And I’m not about to pay $45 to some drone from Nokia who will just say it’s not fixable. So I might have to get a new phone. I’ll get one with Bluetooth, I think, and get a Bluetooth gadget for my computer, too. Still, being without a phone is a bit of a bitch.

There seems to be some sort of a layering bug with Interface Builder - I notice it sometimes in development builds of iTunesRater: As you can see, some of the widgets, sorry, views, are partially obscured. Sometimes it is worse than others, with all of the fwd/play/rev buttons covered. Sometimes it is fine. I generally have to just play around shifting different views to the front to get it all okay. Needless to say, it looks fine in Interface Builder.

Canon in D Major from the album “Adagio Karajan” by Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Wow. A month since I first posted about our new house. And the bathroom isn’t yet done. Hopefully we’ll finish the shower tonight, and then I’ll actually be able to have my morning shower tomorrow. I cannot cope without it. This weekend we’re planning to lay floorboards in the kitchen/study. At the moment it is bare joists, with dirt underneath. The boards are being delivered tomorrow morning.

iTunesRater 0.6 has been released. Saving prefs works a bit better now, but the only way to change the maxRate and minRate variables is through: defaults write iTunesRater maxRate <value>

AutoRating is working, and the program now remembers the last state for the AutoRater.

New feature is the inclusion of a preview of how the rating will look in iTunes, ie the number of stars. iTunesRater0.6.zip (Note, this URL is broken for the time being, until I get around to uploading it to a site that can handle zip files, not just 3 types of image file…)

While trying to bugfix a couple of issues in iTunesRater tonight, I found that the script stopped working altogether. I narrowed it down to a section of the code where I was asking the Finder to do something, and it was just freezing. I thought that maybe the latest security update had done something, but changing users proved that otherwise. It was something with my setup. I found it probably had to do with having a device mounted (the memory card in my Palm Zire), but having removed the device without unmounting it. The Finder had almost crashed, and wouldn’t respond to any AppleScript commands. Incidentally, I suspect that AppleScript is smart enough to not actually send any message (even an empty one) to an application when there is no command (ie, just a tell application/end tell clause with nothing between it).

I have the following code to display my most popular posts in the sidebar: {popularposts} {if $pposts != ''}   <h2>Most Popular Posts</h2>     <ul>     {foreach from=$pposts key=key item=hits}       <li><nobr><a href="{get_permalink id=$hits.postID}" title="{$hits.title}">{$hits.title|truncate:25:"..."}</a>: {$key}</nobr></li>     {/foreach}     </ul> {/if} However, it doesn’t work: the links are all to the least recent of my recent posts the last post on the page. I’ll have to fix this. (Note: a fix is in the comments).

Ray has been tiling the bathroom the last couple of days. It’s starting to look good. Here’s a before and after: I’ve spent my time sanding walls, and then re-plastering, then sanding. The areas below the front bedroom windows have been heaps of work, but they are starting to look great. And then tonight, Andy started to paint the ceilings - undercoat/primer first, of course. Since we have to move in on Wednesday, we are going to be busy painting over the next couple of days, and I have to go back to work on Monday. And I’m not sure when we’ll get around to polishing the floors.

I’m renovating my house at the moment, and I’m going to run some cable to various places. Unfortunately, I can’t do as much as possible, as the box gutter in the middle of the house precludes access to the northern roof space. Still, I will run cable to as much as possible - since I need to replace some floorboards, a fair chunk of it will be under the floor, including some floor mounted power points, cat5, and maybe some a/v cables.

One of the things Jaq liked most about our new house was this light: Unfortunately, it got broken on Friday afternoon. So, if anyone knows where we can get a replacement glass piece in Australia (prefer Adelaide), please let me know…

No time to write. Gotta sleep. Here are pics of house today.