Reggy Screenshots
Posted on June 8th, 2007 by Sam Souder
I just made a small upgrade on Reggy’s website for those of you who haven’t used Reggy.
Enjoy
Reggy v1.2 Is Ready for You
Posted on June 8th, 2007 by Sam Souder
Are you ready for it?
So, now we have an appcast for you to follow on the new Reggy website. Did some last minute tweaks to make me happy and now it is up on the servers, so go get it!
What changed?
- added user preferences
- matched string highlight color
- regular expression options
- regular expression syntax
- check for automatic updates
- added automatic updates using the Sparkle framework
I hope you like the update. As always, feel free to file bug reports and feature requests on the issue tracker.
I plan on posting a bit of what I see for the future of Reggy soon for those who may be interested.
Reggy’s New Website
Posted on May 21st, 2007 by Sam Souder
Reggy has a new home… reggyapp.com
I needed a site to host some things on to do Sparkle integration, so I went ahead and purchased the domain name to host with.
At some point I hope to do a real website with feeds and such, but for now it gives some information and links to places where Reggy can be seen and/or downloaded.
One of the real benefits of having this site is that hopefully you will be able to check just one place for updates to Reggy in the future.
Update on Reggy Development
Posted on May 21st, 2007 by Sam Souder
Thanks to a few noble users, Reggy’s Bug Tracker is getting use. Most of the issues are feature requests and I am slowly getting time to get to them.
I already have preferences going. Here are a few screenshots to give you an idea of where it’s going:
Hopefully that will help some people out.
I am not going to release 1.2 until I get Sparkle going for automatic application updates. It looks like that will happen hopefully within this week or next.
Joost Mini-Review
Posted on April 5th, 2007 by Sam Souder
So I was recently given a download from the Joost beta team. I was interested because I had heard some good (and some bad to be frank) things about it. I’ve heard talk about it being the “next big thing” or something. It seems that folks who are saying that have not tried it — while on 1.5Mbps cable.
I love the idea of getting TV over the internet, when you want it. We have not had a traditional TV set for over a year now I believe. Contrary to what some may think, we haven’t died missing out on American Idol or Are you as smart as a first grader? or whatever the “cool” shows are on prime-time nowadays. I am a nerd, I want to see nerdy things. I don’t want to have to watch 30 minutes of commercials just to see 30 minutes of actual programming. So we have gone without for awhile. iTunes has Stargate Atlantis (which isn’t always up to date, but whatever) and any other stuff we want to see usually shows up on Netflix.
I’ll not be long-winded for much longer, I promise. I installed Joost and went immediately to the National Geographic channel. And waited. And waited. After a bit more waiting, it skipped back to another program — the one I had selected before but decided to go past. So, it is beta, I’ll let a little slide. But the buffering is just not smart enough to use daily for me. It is constantly stuttering and the only way to stop it is to pause the program and wait (and keep waiting because there is no indicator that I can see to show you how much is buffered).
The other annoying thing is that you get seemingly random commercial breaks. I will give them points for making them small for now. But you have to wait for the commercials to load. So the process of commercials goes a little something like this:
- Watch programming (pausing every minute or so to buffer more without stuttering)
- See black screen randomly and wait 30-60 seconds (I presume this is the commercial downloading)
- Watch commercial (thankfully this isn’t too long)
- Programming seems to return almost immediately (big plus for that at least)
Also odd is the frequency of commercials. On one channel (say Off the Fence Docs) there are almost no commercials, but on another (say National Geographic) they seem to show up every 10 minutes or so. My only guess is that commercials may be up to the content owners?
So the final annoyance I found was that of the 5 or 6 different programs (on different channels as well) ALL of them, after awhile of watching, stopped suddenly and gave me a dialog saying something along the lines of “Sorry, but this program can’t be played right now. Check something else out. Error Number 121″ This is the ultimate annoyance. You are watching something and maybe 3/4 of the way in, it just says, “Oops, sorry, later punk”. I am not sure if this means that their aren’t enough peers to get the video from or what. The network seems to push uploads of around 10-25Kbps when watching programming, but the download really varies, going from nothing up to 70Kbps or so with some peaks a bit higher.
So overall, Joost seems like a neat idea. I am betting it will be a lot nicer for folks with high upload and download speeds (5Mbps/1Mbps), assuming that more people pick it up to increase the download speeds. But we’ll see how it shapes up over the next few releases. I am sure it’s not easy to get peer-to-peer TV to work well, but they are getting there hopefully. I really want Joost to succeed.
Will I use Joost regularly? Probably not. But it’s looking very promising.
Reggy v1.1 Is Out.
Posted on March 11th, 2007 by Sam Souder
I just pushed a new version of Reggy (my little open-source project for visually matching regular expressions). Version 1.1 adds much-needed AppleScript support and the ability to change the font and font size.
Enabling AppleScript support shouldn’t be as hard as it is to grasp I think. It took a few nights fiddling around before it started working all the time for me 
There is one known issue that I allowed to slip through concerning the AppleScript support: If you change the checkbox values for matching certain criteria, the UI doesn’t update the checkbox properly. The program gets the change properly and matches accordingly, but it’s as if the UI doesn’t see the change. Note that I am using bindings for the checkboxes so I figure this should be working. Anyone with expertise in AppleScript, please help!
Speaking of Hosting
Posted on January 12th, 2007 by Sam Souder
So yesterday evening/this morning when I was being frustrated by my Rails app seemingly being killed by DreamHost’s watchdog process killer, I stumbled over a company doing VPS hosting called slicehost.
Slicehost’s service is pretty neat in that you can setup a virtualized linux box in minutes. And you get full control over the entire box, they just give you a control panel to access functions like restarting and rebuilding the box. So there are ups and downs… If you don’t want to be a linux admin, they probably aren’t for you. But, if you don’t mind learning some very useful information, you can run your own box for as little as $20/month with no contract!
They add servers as they get customers to fill them, so I have to wait until next week to try it out, but I am excited to dive in and see what kind of performance it has. I am only going to test out the 256MB slice for now. I hear that 256MB is good enough for a couple hardworking Mongrel processes. Plus, I really want to make a server that can do whatever I want with (insert crazy-man laugh here).
First Post and Hosting Fun
Posted on January 12th, 2007 by Sam Souder
So here is my first post running the spectacular Typo blog Rails app. Typo seems pretty cool so far. I love the admin interface: simple, elegant, yet flexible.
So how am I running a Rails application on 1and1 hosting? I’m not. My free preview account from 1and1 (which was just fine for PHP) expires on the 31st of January, so I had to switch hosts. I also had a domain registered through them (samandjanali.com), so I had to move that as well. Who did I decide to move to?
They have some very good pricing and seemingly unending amounts of storage and bandwidth for your hosting plan (they increase every week indefinitely). They said they hosted Rails and let you install new Gems too, so I signed up.!
Yeah, not smart. I should have done more questioning and research.
They are using Apache/FastCGI, which isn’t bad really, but there is something that makes me not like DreamHost right now. They have some kind of watchdog process that seemingly randomly kills my dispatch.fcgi processes! Not to mention that their protocol for restarting a Rails app is kill -9‘ing any ruby dispatch.fcgi process
Support has been very good with DreamHost so far, so we’ll see if they have any solution for the killing my processes thing (resulting in very bad Internal Server Error 500 errors once and awhile). Hopefully they can resolve the issues and everything will be fine and dandy. I am really not in the mood to change hosting again.
