As a learning exercise I wrote my first command, status-in-gmail, which you can subscribe to on this Ubiquity Commands page. The status-in-gmail command will update your Google Talk status message in any Gmail tabs you currently have open. You can supply an arbitrary string for your status message, or have it use the selected text on the current page.

I chose this for my first command because I’d written a similar command for Quicksilver and Adium a while ago using AppleScript, and I’ve missed it since I switched to using web-based chat in Gmail. The Ubiquity side of things was really easy to implement - they’ve done a great job providing simple APIs. The only hard part was figuring out how to script Gmail to do what I wanted.

The current code is alpha, of course, and still has some limitations - you can only change your status message, not your available/busy status, and it will throw an error if you try to use it without being signed into chat. But feel free to give it a try and let me know what you think.

Now, who’s going to write the first Quicksilver-to-Ubiquity bridge? :)

Finally I came across a weblog entry that mentioned looking at the console to see the sync log. I opened /Applications/Console and saw this message:


2008-02-18 22:57:38.111 AppleMobileSync[652] CFLog (0):
CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): plist parse failed; the data is not proper UTF-8. The file name for this data could be:
/Users/abe/Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Local/clientdata/[really long numerical directory]/[really long numerical file name]


Apparently that file with the really long name was causing the problem. So I went ahead and moved it out of the way (I put it on my desktop so I could restore it if it turned out to be important). Then I tried to sync again… and it worked! I did get a couple of messages about resolving sync conflicts, but they were easily resolved and now everything appears to be working fine.

Take this for what it’s worth; I don’t know if this will work for you, or make matters worse. I have no idea what that file was supposed to do, and randomly removing application files from your computer is generally a bad idea. But if you’ve got a similar iPhone syncing problem, and nothing else works, you might want to check your Console log and see if there’s a similar file causing your problem.

I was thinking today about what to do with my remaining author’s copies of Twisted Network Programming Essensials. I’ve given most of them away, but I have a few left, and I’d like to see them get into the hands of people who will read them before they become obsolete. So I decided to try offering the following deal to anybody who’s interested:

1. Buy me something from this Amazon wishlist. To make it a good deal for you, pick something less expensive than my book.
2. Send me an email (abe at this domain) with your mailing address.
3. I’ll mail you an autographed copy of Twisted Network Programming Essentials.

Sound good? Gift away. Or email me if you have questions. I currently have 10 extra copies, first come first serve.

$ df -H -t ext3
Filesystem             Size   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1               28G   4.3G    23G  16% /
/dev/hda2              216G   142G    63G  70% /home
/dev/sda1              316G   143G   158G  48% /mnt/bigboy
/dev/hdc1              493G   115G   353G  25% /mnt/video

That’s just about a terabyte! A few years ago I would never have imagined setting up a machine for personal use with a terabyte of storage. And now I have one, almost accidentally. Amazing.

To work around this problem, I made myself a little View Source bookmarklet that works on the iPhone. Here it is:

View Source

To use, add the above bookmarklet to your Safari or IE bookmarks, and sync your iPhone. Then visit a web page on your iPhone, pull up your bookmarks and select “View Source”. A new page will open containing the source of the page you were viewing.

Unlike the traditional View Source command, this bookmarklet shows the generated source, not the original source. if the DOM has been modified by script you’ll see the modified version and not the original. Also, you’ll probably have to do lots of zooming and panning, since the lines of source code will be wide. If anybody wants to make a version that has nicer formatting, feel free to expand this code.

Here’s the original un-escaped javascript:

var sourceWindow = window.open('about:blank');
var newDoc = sourceWindow.document;
newDoc.open();
newDoc.write('<html><head>' +
    '<title>Source of ' + document.location.href + '</title>' +
    '</head><body></body></html>');
newDoc.close();
var pre = newDoc.body.appendChild(newDoc.createElement("pre"));
pre.appendChild(newDoc.createTextNode(
    document.documentElement.innerHTML));