Nat!'s Web Journal

To get something like this coded manually in OpenGL would take me at least 3 weeks, I'd estimate. With Quartz Composer it wasn't much more then a few hours. With QC you can do a whole lot of interesting things very, very quickly. Also at first the program may appear to be not much more than a demo maker, I think it can become quite a bit more over time.

Programming QC feels more like hardware design than actual programming. I think it could be a good teaching tool for programming intro courses. Forget Logo and the Turtle and give the kids some of this stuff to play around with.

I'd like to write a smooth horizontal scroller in Quartz Composer. Towards this goal, I am writing a few very simplistic text displayers. One of the most basic one, I made into a reuseable component. I stuffed it into ~/Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Quartz Composer/Clips and now I have it handy in my Clip Library. I didnt't see offhand how to set the descriptive text, that appears at the bottom of the list of clips. So I used the Property List Editor and manually entered a description. Maybe it's just me, but I couldn't get to save my composition properly, so that the "Mulle Text Provider" patch appeared immediately, when dragging out. Always some enveloping patch appeared instead, until I started a New from Template -> Quartz Composer Clip project and pasted my patches in there.

Anyway here is the patch for download: Mulle Text Provider.qtz.zip and the little demo, which was used to create the demo video.

So here it is MulleLifeFilter.qtz.zip.

oswald:/usr/bin root# df -k
Filesystem              1K-blocks     Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s3             19908432 19276288 433060    98%    /

all this adds up to approximately 12GB. So where is the rest ?

Peculiarily the Finder and du differ by 110 MB on my Library folder. Is this because the other files are owned by other users ?

It could be that after deleting a ZIP file of a mere 6 GB, using the Finder, something might have broke inside HFS+. Or maybe the log of the journalling filesystem was not properly cleaned up ?
Another possibility is, that my box has been opened up and that a root kit was installed. But when I looked at the WeaponX source code, I thought, it should be fairly easy to trick a root kit, based on that code, to reveal itself. I tried, but I didn't find anything.

Solution ? I rebooted. Mac OS X cleaned itself up, I suspect it was the log:

oswald:~ nat$ df
Filesystem              512-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s3              39816864 25264232 14154464    64%    /

Heute mal nicht in English, weil faul :P

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