On the CoCoaDev mailing list it was revealed that the MacBook Air’s operating system has it’s symbols stripped. That is an interesting step to take. I can only assume it is because of the small(-sh) hard drive that the machine comes with.

Like PDF on Mac OS X, if there is flash on the iPhone it’ll be Apple’s own implementation. There are just too many memories of the way Adobe treated NeXT regarding Display Postscript.

For the last half week I’ve been under the weather. So to speak. My daughter brought home a cold and I got it bad.
Just today, I am starting to feel good again. I’m sure my co-workers will appreciate that on Monday.

I had a laugh today. I took my younger daughter to the park today. They have a tire swing there. Megan really like to ride it.

When we first got there I pushed Megan a little, she likes to go fast. Then I sat down to watch people for a little bit. Frankly I was surprised by the number of fathers there with their children, way more than usual.

One father was there with his boy and girl. The boy was taking a lot of his time, so my daughter decided to ask this little girl if she wanted to tire swing with her. She looked to be about five years old, about half my daughter’s age. The girl agreed and they both got on the swing and Megan started pushing.

I was only half paying attention, and saw that Megan was spinning really fast. But it didn’t bother me much because it wasn’t as fast as I usually spin her. After a few minutes of this I see the little getting off the tire swing and walking toward her father, vomiting. Megan came over to me and I said to her she should apologize to her father. She didn’t. I ended up cleaning a little vomit off the tire swing. We left shortly after that.

The sickness didn’t seem to effect the little girls much. She was playing with other kids soon after.

SDLMESS inherited it’s keyboard handling code from mainline MESS. Mainline MESS uses the Scroll Lock key to toggle between User Interface modes. On the Mac, SDLMESS has a conditional compile to use the Insert key instead of the other key. This worked well before the new Apple keyboard.

The new Apple keyboard has removed the Insert key and replaced it with an fn key. A press on this key is never sent to the operating system. It changes a mode internal to the keyboard. This is good and bad for SDLMESS on the Macintosh.

Thankfully SDLMESS has no hardwired keys in the software. All keys can be reassigned in the tab menu. But the one catch-22 situation is the User Interface Mode toggle key. If this key is inaccessible, you are stuck with no access to the tab menu. About a year ago I saw this situation with some Macintosh laptop computers and submitted a patch to assign the keyboard mode key on the command line or inside the INI file. The switch is uimodekey. Since I have the new keyboard I changed it to ITEM_ID_DEL. This is the key directly below the fn key. This is a good way to solve the problem.

There is also a benefit to the new Apple keyboard. Apple has been assigning many different functions to the function keys (F1-F12) over the past few years and SDLMESS also assigns functions to the functions keys. Since Mac OS X would take precedence, SDLMESS would never receive the keydowns and it would look like SDLMESS was malfunctioning. If you hold the fn key and then press a function key, SDLMESS will receive the keydown and the system will ignore the key. You can even reverse this in the system preferences.

When I hold down the shift and press the eject key on my Macintosh keyboard I notice the DVD tray slides out at a tenth of the speed it usually does.

My first computer, the Color Computer, came with a variety of keyboard commonly called a chicklet keyboard. The name comes from the shape of the individual keys.

I always liked the keyboard. When I recived my CoCo 3 I shipped off my old CoCo to my uncle in Los Angeles. He used the computer for a few years finally upgrading to an Atari ST mega. When I got the computer back I found he had replaced the keyboard with an after market keyboard with more proper keys. This was a common thing to do, a lot of people didn’t like the keyboard.

Recently Apple released a new keyboard that is really nice. I asked my wife to get it for me for xmas. It uses flat, laptop style keys and is very low profile. It reminds me a lot about the original CoCo keyboard. I am really loving it. It’s was a really great present.

Sometimes people have a meta conversation about negotiating. Sometimes those same people talk about the carrot and stick method of negotiating. Those people really anger me.

Mostly because the “carrot and stick” term is a bastardization of the proper term “carrot on a stick”. Thankfully they mean completely different things.

Carrot and stick usually means you’re going to play nice until a certain point where things get nasty. This represents oppression to me.

Carrot on a stick usually means you offer niceness in front of the other party, and if they grab for it, you move a step away, hoping for the first party to make another grab. This represents cooperation to me.

I’ve noticed people using either term are not using it incorrectly. That makes me feel a little better. Nevertheless, I’ve got a lot of carrots here for the people who insist on using it.

Oh, Dan Trachtenberg (regarding Episode #37), why did you have to dislike my favorite game! TRON Deadly Disks for the Intellivision is super fun.

I really liked the arcade version of the game based off the TRON movie. The four mini games: Tank, Lightcycles, MCP cone and the spiders were all good. I was also dissapointed there was no disc game included. It would be many years before I saw Discs of TRON in an arcade.

But when TRON Deadly Disks was released for the Intellivision I was hooked. A really good single player game.

Dan did like Utopia, so at least we can agree on that.

My oldest daughter, Bethany, was very upset with us this Thanksgiving. She didn’t want to sit at the kids table. At Twelve she was the oldest child during the occasion.
As far as I know The Kids Table is an institution in this country just as large as Thanksgiving itself. Bethany had the audacity to ask me to switch places with her so she didn’t have to sit at that table. I think that really speaks towards to my lack of parenting skills for not instilling in her a proper respect for me. Only time will tell how that turns out.
On the drive home, my wife and I were talking about how mopey she was during dinner. Bethany promptly declared in her future household there will be no such thing as a kids table. The indignity of separating the children will not be tolerated.
Needless to say, my wife and I had not had a laugh that large in a long time. Jeanette, my wife, suggested I blog about this because something this good needs to be remembered for the future.