saturn return to sender

Tip for anyone hooking up new Comcast broadband on a Mac: you’re going to have to call customer service. Save yourself a frustrating hour of attempting to avoid that fate, and just call.

Even if you get a dhcp-assigned address, Comcast won’t let you through until they “turn it on” on their end. Their default welcome page says you must first have an account and an email address. Sigh. It gives you a link to download some installation software, but the link does not work. You still have that install CD that came with the package. You figured you wouldn’t need it and you are correct, but you try it anyway.

The software install process, which is presumably designed for grandma, and would presumably allow you to set up your account, is useless. First, it “requires” Internet Explorer 5.2 and won’t run unless you let it install it. Soon after you grudgingly allow it to defile your machine, it will ask you for an administrator password to do god-knows what, and then not accept it. The guy who installed the cable said before he left that on Macs, the password it wants “is not what most people think,” and that I’d probably have to call tech support. I bemusedly said, “I think I can figure it out.” Okay. So I even—while sneering with great distaste—enabled the root account to see if they, stupidly, coded their crap to require the root account instead of an administrator account. It still didn’t accept it.

So. I called. The girl was nice, knew what things like DHCP and IP address meant, and flipped the switch for me. Hooking to the wireless router required me to reboot it and the modem, but it all works now. Do yourself a favor and just call.

I use TextMate. I often want a quick way to get files (and folders! yay TextMate!) into TextMate without moving my hands from the keyboard. If I’m on the command line, I have an alias (for bash):

alias edit_in_textmate="open -a TextMate"

With tab-completion, opening a file or folder is usually just a few keystrokes away. In other contexts—mostly Finder—I’ve been using Quicksilver’s Open With… trigger to send the current selection to TextMate. That requires a keystroke for the trigger (I have “Command Window with Current Selection” mapped to ctrl-option-space), then a few strokes for “Open With …”, then a few keystrokes for “TextMate,” though QS usually figures out what I want right away.

That’s too much work. I just spent 20 mintues trying to figure out how to make a single-key trigger that will send the current selection to TextMate. It wasn’t obvious how to do this, which seemed odd. QS is otherwise spectacularly robust and well-designed. I hunted on the QS fora a bit, but this post by Dan Dickinson held the secret: it turns out that the ability to make a custom trigger that pulls the current selection requires you to enable QS “advanced features.” Your catalog will then contain an extra item called “Proxy Objects.”

Once you enable Proxy Objects, “Current Selection” can be keyed into the object pane of the trigger creation dialog. I assigned ctrl-option-T to the trigger to send the current selection to TextMate. Works like a charm! Yay!

If you happen to be, as I was yesterday, googling for the answer to the question, “If I’m using OpenLaszlo or standalone Flash to make a slideshow-like presentation and I want to use a USB wireless slide advance thingy, what keypress do I look for in my onkeydown handler?”

The answer is page down (34) to advance the slide and page up (33) to, um, retreat (? devance? there’s no single word for this!) the slide. (Also, left arrow: 37. Right arrow: 39. But the one I was using mapped to pageup/down.)

I’ve been extremely geeky lately and I apologize for that. I was reading through some old circa 2004 posts the other day and I was a much more interesting blogger back then.

BUT. Right now svn has me very worried. I added a directory to my local working copy, checked in, but one of my other working copies (namely, the one that’s the actual, live web site) refuses to notice the presence of the new directory. An update on our testing server correctly pulls the new directory, so it’s definitely in the repository, but all working copies report they’re at the same version, yet one of them doesn’t have the new directory. Erm.

[ update: next day, the working copy reported the directory in question was missing ("!") instead of reporting nothing wrong whatsoever. fiddling a little (revert, update, etc) got it to finally pull the directory. so .... i dunno. i guess subversion needs a good night's sleep sometimes? ]