The Blog That Goes Ping

Jack OS X - a Jack implementation for Mac OS X: — just updated to work with Leopard. Or rather, the updates which make it work with Leopard are just now out of beta and on the front page. I took it for a spin this morning and routed a streaming story from NPR’s Flash player into Audacity, so I could make an MP3 of it. Spiffo! You gotta read the documentation though, it’s not super intuitive.
Jack is awesome. Jack is Free Software, originally developed for Linux. Yet when I actually use Linux, I never even try to use Jack, because Linux sound is so fragile in the first place that adding another possible point of failure to the mix seems downright foolhardy.

I gave the Firefox 3.0 beta a try, and it was really nice — very fast, smooth, responsive. I need my extensions though, so until extension writers start upgrading I’m on Firefox 2.0.whatever. In the meantime here’s a way to make it pretty on Leopard.

Despite Leopard being new and shiny and wonderful, I’m terribly discontent with it. The biggest reason seems to be the huge amount of Macports breakage. I can’t build Haskell to play with it, but that’s fairly trivial. It’s not like that’s anything but an intellectual curiosity thing. But I also can’t build the GIMP, which is actually something I use with some frequency. It’s because MacPorts had finally, during the extra year and a half that the delayed release of Leopard had given them, gotten everything just singing together. Everything built right and correctly and worked together.

Then Leopard arrives and the breakage begins.

It’s like there’s this wave of “works-right-ness” that ebbs and flows. When a new version of OS X comes out, then much of the cool open source software I love gets broken on it, hopelessly, certainly beyond my ability to fix. At this point, (Ubuntu) Linux looks better because a ton of things work there that don’t on OS X. As time goes on, things get fixed and fixed and fixed on OS X until it’s on an equal footing with regards to open source stuff building correctly, and at this point OS X looks better than Linux because of its general professionalism and ease of use and smoothness.

There’s a second wave in there related to Ubuntu releases but because they happen every 6 months instead of every one to two-and-a-half years, it’s a smaller, less disruptive wave.

UPDATE: They fixed Gimp. (Well, they fixed glib2, which was the source of the problems.) Good-o. :)

Tesseract Software:
Flash Video Downloader is an application which allows you to easily batch download and save streaming flash videos from most streaming video sites (e.g. youtube, google video, dailymotion, etc)

That’s one less firefox extension I need now! (Though to be honest DownloadHelper does a lot more than snag flv’s offa youtube… but that’s what I use it for mostly.)

ironcoder » Child’s Play Day:

Child’s Play is a Seattle-based charity started in 2003 by the guys at Penny Arcade that helps make the holidays a little nicer for sick kids staying in children’s hospitals by providing toys and games for them to enjoy. Since its inception over a million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash have been collected.

This year a group of independent Mac Developers are teaming up and donating all of the proceeds from sales of their various software titles on Thursday, December 7th to the Child’s Play charity. To participate simply purchase the products as you normally would through the various online stores. Your money will be collected and sent to the charity and you’ll get some great Mac software to enjoy.

Includes some of mph’s favorite software, WebNoteHappy and VoodooPad. (I own the latter and while I don’t do much with it these days it is good software from a great developer.) (Oh, funny — they’ve got the app mph blogged cryptically about just today…)

Looks like a lot of neat stuff. (Guitar Shed especially, not that I’m a guitarist… Oh, and I could pay for Billable if it helped me get around to actually invoicing somebody that I keep forgetting to…)