Installing PIL on the Mac

Just a quick note, to remind myself mainly.

Installing the Python Image Library (PIL) on a Mac requires libjpeg if it’s going to be of any use.

So, assuming you’re using Homebrew and Pip…

$ brew install libjpeg
$ pip install PIL

Simples.

jQuery Clippings for BBEdit updated to version 1.4.3

A little ahead of the gun, I’ve updated the jQuery Clippings for BBEdit to version 1.4.3, which should be out this weekend.

These cover the full API for the latest jQuery version (1.4.3) matching all function signature variations and dollar shortcuts.

Grab them from: http://noumenal.co.uk/bbedit/jquery-clippings.

Enjoy.

Web Design in the Autumn of 2010

I’m excited about the latest crop of web browser—the diverse mobile ones in particular—and HTML5 and CSS3, and the other new techs that go with them.

I’ve been avoiding the work of a designer for a while now…

When I first discovered HTML—which must have been about 2003/2004—the standards movement was young and fresh. To give you an idea, the CSS Zen Garden was the hot pin-up of the moment. Before I heard the message I’d gone through a book on using Dreamweaver MX which was all tables and spacer-gifs. You can imagine, CSS was, for the beginner, clear and simple; both powerful and obvious. Progress was fast.

But of course, after that first flush, CSS didn’t quite live up to its promise. The path beyond those early successes soon led into a landscape of image heavy—and Flash heavy—delicate—and brittle—designs. (That was just the reality of professional web design.)

The need to engage with these techniques has always put me off. There have always been more rewarding, to my mind purer, pursuits in the realm of the developer. (This is of course a long-winded excuse for never pushing my skills here beyond the basic.) But I think this may be the case no longer.

As I see it, beyond the subjective feeling that I’ve finally got some sort of grasp on all the other stuff, the reasons for this change in circumstance are two:

1. The technology has moved on such that the (aforementioned) new bunch eliminate the need for most of the distasteful extras.

2. The rapid rise of the mobile web has (finally, thank God) made it socially acceptable to adopt—in practice—the policy of reserving nothing more for users of outdated versions of Internet Explorer than The Finger.

I’ve been far too busy for it to be true to say that, this is what I’ve been waiting for. These are interesting times indeed.

Format string is not a string literal (potentially insecure)

I love compilers.

Here I am busily working away; I throw in a cheeky NSLog() to see where I've got to:

NSLog([myObject stringRepresentation]);

Hang on! A compiler warning:

Format string is not a string literal (potentially insecure)

What's this about?

A bit of Google (via this forum post) led me to a Wikipedia article on the Format string attack. It turns out that an attacker might use printf style format specifiers to do all sorts of nasty to my heap/stack.

The correct usage is this:

NSLog(@"%@", [myObject stringRepresentation]);

No more warning. We can sleep at night.

Someone Needs to Take Econ 101

"Douglas A. McIntyre says that because iPad demand is higher than expected, Apple may have to cut prices. Uh…" (John Gruber)

(Via Daring Fireball.)

jQuery Clippings for BBEdit

On Friday I uploaded a set of jQuery Clippings for BBEdit. These cover the full API for the latest jQuery version (1.4.2) matching all function signature variations and dollar shortcuts. Grab them from: http://noumenal.co.uk/bbedit/jquery-clippings. Enjoy.

Rob Foster on the Elimination of File Systems as a User-Accessible Part

I saw this:

Rob Foster on the Elimination of File Systems as a User-Accessible Part: “

Rob Foster, observing how family and friends use their Macs:

Because they can now actually use their computers instead of simply restarting them, I’m able to better see how they use them. And the one commonality I’ve seen is that no one knows how to use the file system.

Unfortunately for the average person, the file system is so complex that everything outside of the desktop and the documents folder appears to be a vast labyrinth which most likely hides booby traps and minotaurs.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

The same experience seems to apply in ever wider circles too:

• Beyond the Desktop, there’s everything outside the Home folder.
• Beyond that there’s all the UNIXy bits that OS X nicely hides from us (dot-files, /etc, /usr, /bin etc.)
• Leaving the Mac there’s Linux’s whole /proc file system.
• And so on.

Each time there’s the same, “What’s going on here?” — which, if you are ever to get past the Desktop, is quickly followed by a deep breath and a rummage.

Of course there’s the whole Windows thing, which is a different kettle of fish but, does the ultimate answer lie in building your own Linux From Scratch, or is it “Turtles all the way down”?