Finally got around to upgrading WordPress and low and behold, my bizzare xml-rpc problems are now gone. Guess I trampled something when I was removing all those spam comments.

This means I might actually post more often, now that MarsEdit can talk to WordPress again.

This also means I’ll probably be sending Daniel Jalkut some more coin on the latest version of MarsEdit. Supporting your favorite indie software developers is a good thing!

Dear Apple, or more specifically, the Safari developers at Apple,

I would really, really, really love for one feature to be added to Safari. Just one more feature, and I think I’ll be in web browser nirvana. Seriously.

I want Safari, just like FireFox, to be able to save my session and offer to restore it the next time Safari starts up. Now, not just a “save session at quit” kind of thing, either, because that doesn’t help when Safari crashes. I mean a “save as you go” kind of thing, like Saft adds to Safari, and like Firefox has, so that if Safari does crash, I get that wonderful little “Would you like to restore your previous session?” dialog.

Now, Firefox’s dialog is a little sparse, but effective. It lets you restore your previous session, or start a new one. Starting a new session presumably blows out whatever might have been saved, which is fine. If one of the pages in your previous session caused the browser to quit, though, simply restoring that session whole-hog might not be a good idea.

Saft, I think, takes the other extreme, and allows you to pick every single URL (from all the tabs and windows) to choose whether they are part of the restored session or not.

So, here’s my idea. Save the session as you go. When you quit cleanly, log that in the session save data. When you start up, if there’s a saved session present, pop up the “start a new session or restore your previous session” dialog. If the user chooses to restore, check to see if the session exited cleanly, or crashed last time. If it crashed, pop up a new dialog, saying that it crashed last time, and one or more of the pages from the session should be disabled. Then let me select what gets restored and what doesn’t.

Of course, make the whole session saving feature optional, by putting a single checkbox on the Advanced panel of Safari’s Preferences.

I’m sure there’s a cleaner way to design the session restore choices (one dialog instead of two, with some intelligent hiding based on what the user clicks on?) I’m not a UI designer, so someone else will have to work that magic.

In summary, Safari developers, I want to have session saving and restoration built into Safari with the same fit and finish that the rest of the browser has, and that includes restoring sessions after Safari crashes and providing the ability to pick and choose what gets restored.

Thank you,

Gregory

P.S.: Yes, I could just use Saft, which I’ve paid for and used for a couple years now. However, with Safari updates becoming more common, I’m getting tired of waiting for two weeks for Saft to catch up. Besides that, I’m becoming more and more uncomfortable with the idea of any InputManager hacks running on my system at all.

Anyone know what causes every single script in wordpress to spit out errors like this:

PHP Notice:  Undefined index:  399768cac5c44d61 in /.../wp-admin/admin.php on line 1, referer: http://method.unnerving.org/wp-admin/post-new.php

Every single error message has the same hex number.

The database looks okay, but I did have to delete a number of comments from the wp_comments table by hand… Could that have screwed it up?

Dear LazyWeb,

What would be a good “getting started programming Mac OS X” book for a 15-year sysadmin proficient in perl and formal CS schooling?

I have itches I need to scratch.

Just a quick update while I work out what I really care to do in terms of a web presence.

Google was kind enough to alert me to the fact that this site had fallen victim to comment spam. I’ve cleaned all these comments out of the system, and updated the entire site to ensure that comments could no longer be left on any post.

So, that means no more comments, people. The, like, three of you who commented so far.

Sun has apparently purchased MySQL.

Does anyone know what Sun is doing? Does Sun know what Sun is doing?

Sun is now a Microsoft Windows OEM?

• See the Microsoft press release.
• See the Sun press release.

Is Sun even relevant anymore?

A couple people pointed to Joel Spolsky’s thoughts on having comments enabled on a blog. And he’s right.

I’ve been thinking about just what it is I want to do, and I’m thinking that Method isn’t really working. Well, that, and I never actually write anything for it. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to be doing, but expect a new domain name in the next couple of months, along with possibly a more focussed effort towards actually keeping this blog updates a little more frequently.

No promises, though.

I’ve fixed the comments. Basically, it worked out to me not having completely moved enough bits into place for the new theme, so when things were missing, they’d default back to the most basic thing. The most basic thing, unfortunately, was a simple index page that didn’t include anything about comments.

Coda, from Panic, has really been a godsend in terms of allowing me to very easily put this theme together and hack on it. I’ve been especially thankful for the ability, as of 1.0.1, to use a local HTTP server for previewing, as that’s helped with some of the PHP issues. For something as complex as WordPress, though, I find that it’s just better to keep a separate Safari window around, as the preview for individual PHP files that make up the parts of WordPress don’t really lend themselves to being called directly via a URL.

Amusingly, Coda’s ability to use a local HTTP server is what prompted me to get the Apache Web Server included in Mac OS X running, and get it playing with PHP, and install MySQL “Community Server”, and get all those bits playing together. I figured, if I’m going to hack on the face of my blog, I might as well do it offline so that it actually works before I push it online. The result is that I have a fully-functional copy of Method running on my PowerBook which I can hack on to my heart’s content, safe from prying eyes for debugging and testing.

I think that’s pretty cool.

I think in a week or so I’ll put together a nice review of Coda based on what I’ve been able to do with it so far, just to wrap up my experiences and impressions with it. I’m very happy.

Coda 1.0.1 is available.

I’m looking forward to trying out the enhancements.

Also, Cabel from Panic got back to me on my expired demo problem, even though I wasn’t expecting a response. Color me impressed. (What color is "impressed", anyway?)