Google Talk

Just for yuks, I downloaded Google Talk today. I’ve never been much into IM, but since this is from Google, maybe I’ll be able to do something interesting with it at some point. I’ve been kind of curious for a while about the possibility of using IM for various system notifications and stuff like that. Other IM clients I’ve played with haven’t had useful command-line versions (or APIs) that could be called from a script. I’m kind of curious to see what’ll happen with this one.

Text Editors

I spent some time looking at text editors tonight. I’m currently using an old version of Multi-Edit for most of the work that isn’t done directly in Visual Studio, PowerBuilder, or dbArtisan. (Which isn’t much really, but it’s still enough to worry about.) My only real beef with Multi-Edit is that it doesn’t have Unicode support. I was hoping that the newest version (9.10) of Multi-Edit would support Unicode, but it looks like that’s not going to happen until version 10.

Crimson Editor has Unicode support, and also supports a lot of languages (for syntax highlighting). It also has support for macros and column-mode editing, which are both essential.

UltraEdit looks interesting too. It’s got Unicode support, syntax highlighting, column mode, and macros. It doesn’t appear to support as many different languages as Crimson, though.

And of course, there’s always emacs. I’ve always wanted to learn emacs. Right now, I just know enough to get in, do some fundamental editing, and get out. A deep understanding of emacs is something I could actually put on my resume.

podcasting stuff

I’ve been listening to a number of podcasts lately on a fairly regular basis, and I decided to take the next step today, and actually start listening to them on my iPod. I’d been simply pressing them to audio CDs and listening to them in my car via the CD changer. This works fine, but I usually don’t want to listen to a given podcast more than once or twice, so it’s kind of a waste of a CD.

I decided to use my old first-gen 5GB iPod for this, rather than clutter up my newer iPod with podcasts. Getting this set up turned out to be quite a production. The old iPod was Mac-formatted, so, at first, I set it up to sync with my “received podcasts” directory via XPlay. That worked OK, but I thought I could do better by switching to iTunes. So I reformatted the iPod and set it up to sync with iTunes. I didn’t get very far. I started getting disk errors, so I reformatted again and set everything up again. I did a little better this time. I got one disk error at one point, but it’s been good since. I’ve been playing around a bit, trying to stress it and see if it’s going to keep working or not. So far, so good.

I also decided to upgrade to iTunes 4.8, just for yuks. That worked fine, except that it broke iPodder. I upgraded to iPodder 2.0.3, and everything seems fine now.

So, after all that work, I now have an iPod full of podcasts that I can plug into my car stereo via an old casette adapter. It sounds OK, but not great. I also ordered a car charger from XtremeMac, so I can keep the thing going, since the battery life ain’t what it used to be.