During my recent contact with an English company, I’ve had to use the pound sign (£) a lot, which has uncovered a bug in Firefox 3 — at least I think it is… Using the danish keyboard layout the pound sign has to be made by pressing alt-4, but doing so in Firefox 3 will just result in switching to tab no. 4 if a such exists. If not, the shortcut will merely do nothing. Either way, no pound sign for me.

Effectively this means that all combinations from alt-1 – alt-9 are useless, which means that the following characters can’t be written in Firefox 3 on OS X with a danish keyboard layout: ¡, “, §, £, ∞, ™, ¶, [ and ]. I find it especially troublesome that the hard brackets doesn’t work, since they’re extensibly used in BBTags, as replacements for < and > when writing HTML examples in a place that doesn’t handle < and > well, it’s used as scope delimiter in Functional Grammar notation and in a ton of other places.

I’ve scoured the web for a solution (as well as about:config) but to no avail.

For my birthday, my dad got me a USB MIDI keyboard, which is awesome — especially if I want to use it with GarageBand, because MIDI on the Mac is soooo easy. One thing, though, is that I’d actually rather use it with LMMS and MuSe on my Ubuntu installation, but that seems to be rather difficult. It actually works fine with LMMS, but alas, LMMS does not seem to support SoundFonts and neither can I make (and play) an entire drum kit at once. I have to record each different sound individually — i.e. I have to record the tracks separatly, which is a pain, in my opinion.

So, MuSe and MIDI… It may just be me, but it seems I’ve tried every possible combination of settings and soft-synths, but still no cigar. I know that the keyboard is recognized, because — as I said — I can use it with LMMS, but MuSe just seems to make using MIDI really, really complicated, which is too bad. If anyone knows of any up-to-date documentation on the subject, please let me know, because what I’ve been digging up on google is ancient.

Anyways, I hope I don’t get too carried away with MIDI and totally lose the ability to keep it simple — don’t hesitate to let me know, if that happens. For now you’ll have to settle with my old tracks, until I’ve figured out how to work MIDI on Linux — or at least until I figure out how to make GarageBand obey my every command (hehe, yeah right… Like Apple would let me do that.) Alternatively, if Ardour make that native OS X port available soon and it has (some) MIDI editing capabilities, I might actually use that, because it absolutely rocks my boat.

Finally, if you have any tips or tricks (anything!) regarding MIDI on either Linux or OS X, please comment away (or email me). It’ll be greatly appreciated!

First of all when I boot, I get an message telling me that “No Updatable Devices Found”. I guess it happened after a system update, where the firmware for the device was to be updated, accurding to the Software Update program. I don’t use the drive that often, and I wouldn’t know if it did update it or not anyway. But this almost meaning less message annoys me, since it kind of shouts to my facethat the Playmoile OS doesn’t work as “Boom” as it says in the glitter adds.

While the first problem properly is a minor issue easy to solve, did I know how. This one is really odd. It concerns Firefox (Ff) and the OS X window manager, and is here parted in two issues. First; the Ff window reaches into top menu bar area. Either on top or underneath. In the picture it’s underneath. It was dragged into that area, but afterwards I can’t drag or click the bits of the Ff window that is in the menu bar area. Say it was on top and in a similar position as in this picture, then clicking the green radio-button to max the Ff window would instead unfold the Edit menu.

The other odd part is that Ff occupies the dashboard area. So when I enter the dashboard, it’s like Ff didn’t care and stay on top. Both of these two odd issues don’t happen all the time, I have to add, which makes it even more odd.

I was wanting to install X11 on Mac OS X, such that i could test the Synfig Studio port madsen [0] is cooking, as it depends on it. But was too slack to get out of the sofa (see pervius post; sofa’s are good for you) to go get the install dvd which holds X11, i though it would be just as easy and accurate to download the X11User.dmg from Apples site [1] which holds X11User.pkg and install X11 from there.

But no — check this picture:

The error in the picture says, that I can not install X11, since there is a newer, fresher version installed already. While that might be partly true, it’s not the complete truth. It is partly true as i have some fresh Development Tools installed that among other things hold a bunch of X11 related stuff. But not the binary it self.

Wouldn’t one expect to get X11.app installed by installing exactly that packages? - It’s what I’ve done the last time I installed X11 (to run Gimp, on a previous install of on another HD before it hard died). But now the installer can’t cope with something being too fresh. I’m happy that it don’t downgrade my (developer) sources, but why on earth doesn’t it just skip that and install the binary.

The install dvd didn’t have the same problems as this installer - thankfully.

I just saw an article on politiken.dk (a Danish newspaper) about a Valentine’s Day virus [da] apparently circulating. That, in itself, is nothing new — nor even unexpected, but along with the article they showed a picture of an old 12″ iBook. I guess the writers/editors just didn’t really think it all through, but the virus doesn’t run on OS X, but people will subconsciously make an association between a virus warning and the white Mac. And as a brand spanking new Mac-user, I’m against that.

I know it’s just a little thing and that it probably doesn’t really matter, but I do, none the less, think it’s a bit inconsiderate of Politiken.

Update (Sun, Feb. 18, 2007 15:49): As I said in the comments I actually mailed the author to mention it (not to whine or bitch about it) and today she sent me a nice and friendly reply and told me she wasn’t aware and that she’d try to keep such things in mind in the future. Apparently she’d had the same reaction from a lot of other readers. I guess the proper heading for this entry should have been Accidental FUD. Anyhow, it’s nice to know that you’re being taken seriously even though it was really just a silly little thing. :)