Thomas Legg's Geek Blog

So I'm not a heavy-duty tweeter. But I do have a twitter account, so every once in a while I'll look at the twitter software for the Mac.

My main app for the moment is TwitterPod. It's a program from Japan that supports Sparkle and Growl and spell check and provides a search function for all of those tweets. It provides for templated tweets, such as waking up and eating dinner and all of the routine matters that are tweeted. It also provides some integration with the web browsers, such as opening the URL from a tweet in a new browser tab/window. Unfortunately it only provides for grabbing a URL from Safari and none of the other browsers, like Firefox or Camino.

I noticed that MiniTwit updated to 2.0 recently, so I decided to take it for a test drive. First, I don't like the lack of preferences. Not one bit. Secondly, I don't like the blocky user interface for viewing tweets. I much prefer the list view from TwitterPod. Thirdly, MiniTwit doesn't respect the global preference for preferred browser. So if you open your followers page from MiniTwit, it will open it in Safari, even if your preferred browser is Firefox or Camino. The extras integration from MiniTwit is nice that it allows tweeting not only Safari's URL, but ITunes' current song, and current message being read in Vienna or NetNewsWire. Since I do most of my news reading via Vienna, this is the saving grace for an app I'd throw to the trash otherwise.

Just saw this up on HK Headline news. 富士康搬廠減成本 Foxconn is looking to move their factory out of Shenzhen. The immediate thought is Hebei and Shanxi provinces as the provincial salaries there are 60% of Shenzhen's. Also note this:

亦會在匈牙利及印度等低成本市場開設新廠房

Foxconn is also looking at other low-cost markets, specifically naming India and Hungary, for possible sites to open new factories to reduce the price pressures found in Shenzhen and China.

So I've been busy with other computer related jobs, so I haven't been able to follow the online world as much as I would like. But in the meantime I did get around to modifying the new template to work around a few layout issues. The new work seems to work on IE6 and IE7 and Firefox 3 for Windows and Firefox 3 and Safari 3.1.1 for the Mac. There are some open issues with the comments windows, but I'm getting to that.

So I performed the upgrade from Postgresql 8.2.* to 8.3.* this morning. There were a few burps.

First, an upgrade across the minor number requires a dump and restore of all databases, so I had to take the database server offline for a bit during the upgrade and perform the restore.

Second, the 8.3 series has a major switch in the way it handles typecasts. This meant that certain code in Serendipity was unhappy. This post at Postgresql Online about Serendipity discusses some of the issues with 8.3 and Serendipity. This thread at the Serendipity forums provides the answer to getting your individual entries back online.

So the latest beta of Adium X came out to much fanfare because of the addition of Facebook chat. Personally the integration with the Address Book was the most noticeable item for me, but the Facebook chat showed promise. I did succeed to log in to my account and note which Producer friend might not have been as productive as they could have been.

But checking it right now, the log in procedure seems to produce a big nada. I haven't pulled up a packet sniffer to see what's really going on, but something tells me that Facebook didn't appreciate an app that boosted Facebook chat rates without boosting Facebook's ad rates.

UPDATE 8:30pm HKT
Looks like it's back. But I'll keep testing to see whether this was just a momentary burp or not.

UPDATE Fri 8:00am HKT
Back off. And I've successfully logged in to Facebook via the web, so it's not a problem with a sock in the tubes.

UPDATE Fri 9:00am HKT
Very peculiar. Facebook chat is not responding with a status and Adium X provides the option to connect to Facebook chat, but it looks like it is connected? Sounds like a few bugs still in the API connection between Facebook chat and the Adium X interface.