An Experiment in Bloggery

Flip Video importer

Kevin Ballard — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:05:11 +0000

I just picked up a new Flip Video and was dismayed to find out that it used a custom app to import its movies, and that this custom app was PPC. I was also dismayed to find out that iMovie ‘08 refuses to import AVIs even if you have the appropriate codec installed. So after some hacking, I put together an Automator workflow that will convert all your Flip videos into DV and import them into iMovie. You can download it here.

GrabUp released

Kevin Ballard — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 06:44:55 +0000

Recently I was contracted to write some software, and it’s just now been released. It’s called GrabUp. Basically, the whole purpose here is for zero-click sharing of screenshots. GrabUp is a daemon that sits in the background and waits for you to take a screenshot, then it instantly uploads it to the GrabUp servers and puts the URL on your clipboard. It has a nice status item to let you know when it’s done. If you have GrabUp running and you want to share an image, just take the screenshot and then paste the URL anywhere. So far, GrabUp has been seen in TUAW and we also got a rather nice blog post reviewing it.

SafariSource v1.7.4 compatible with Safari Tidy

Kevin Ballard — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:10:47 +0000

I’ve just pushed a new version of SafariSource out the door which is once again compatible with Safari Tidy. Please let me know if you have any problems. You can download it here.

Note that this requires version 0.2.5 of Safari Tidy, which was just released today.

Return to Dark Castle released

Kevin Ballard — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 02:54:41 +0000

Big news for Mac gaming today. Return to Dark Castle has finally been released for OS X! This game has been in development for about 7 years now, and it should be very familiar to anybody who played Mac games 15-20 years ago. Heck, I’m only 22 and I remember Beyond Dark Castle.

git-svn mirrors of MacPorts and TextMate

Kevin Ballard — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 02:09:21 +0000

For those interested, I am currently maintaining git mirrors of the MacPorts and TextMate Bundles svn repositories on GitHub. I update these periodically, but at the moment only the master branch is published.

Back from the grave

Kevin Ballard — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:14:30 +0000

Well, after about 5 hours of hacking, I got a ruby script together to migrate all my data from Typo 4.11 to WordPress, so the site is back from the dead, and now running on an engine that DreamHost is actually happy with.

Update: The conversion script is now available here or at GitHub.

Wonky memory usage

Kevin Ballard — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 12:28:19 +0000

Can anybody explain what’s going on with that memory usage? I’ve been seeing this for a few months now. These days I tend to restart a handful of apps at least once a day (sometimes more often) to combat this apparent memory problem. I’ve tried just ignoring it, but my system also tends to become less responsive over time, especially when accessing apps that I haven’t used in the last few minutes, so I can only assume that apps are getting paged out frequently. Running sysctl vm.swapusage seems to bear that out as well, at the moment I’m using 1.6GiB and when I checked 2 days ago (before a reboot) I was using close to 3GiB (quitting apps brought that down to about 2.2GiB). Unfortunately I can’t seem to get anywhere on figuring out what’s going on with all this memory. If I run vmmap on one of these processes I just see a lot of malloc blocks.

Malloc free space not reclaimed

Kevin Ballard — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 00:25:00 +0000

Lately every day when I come home from work I notice a handful of applications taking up a surprisingly high amount of Real Memory. These apps tend to be Quicksilver, Safari, iScrobbler, NetNewsWire, and GrowlHelperApp. Every day I end up quitting at least 3 apps to free up some memory and it happens all over again.

Right now Quicksilver is using roughly 235MB of Real Memory. Running vmmap on it tells me that almost all of that memory is in the malloc zone, and the vast majority of that malloced memory are freed blocks. So my question is why are my multitudes of freed MALLOC_TINY pages not being reclaimed by the system?

Coverflow in the iPhone

Kevin Ballard — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:17:00 +0000

I picked up an iPhone on friday and I’ll try and remember to write up my thoughts later, but for now I have a quick tip.

For those of you who are like me and listen to full albums and lament the lack of a Compilations preference for the iPhone, learn to love the CoverFlow view. Since this view is album-centric it handles compilations properly. The only real flaw with this view is it’s ugly if you don’t have album art.

SafariSource update

Kevin Ballard — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 16:26:00 +0000

I just released a new version of SafariSource which supports Safari 3.0 last night. This morning I received a Czech localization from Jakub Formanek, so I just released SafariSource v1.7.1. with the new localization.

So if you’re using Safari 3.0, or if you’re Czech, go ahead and download SafariSource. If you’re using Safari 2.x, please let me know it still works as I can’t test that with 3.0 installed.