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Homemade chocolate muffins

AppleScript is never easy to implement. I have been planning our AppleScript implementation for more than a year. That planning paid off and the work involved was pleasantly stress free. As ever, a few esoteric aspects of AppleScript’s requirements caused moments of wonder but nothing requiring a change of course.

The muffins were a delicious well-deserved treat.

Early morning view from Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne

Thus, I was delighted to find StartSSL‘s offerings. The prices are good and the service has been great.

I had trouble getting the sign up process working with Safari 4 on Mac OS X, and needed help to rectify the resulting problems. Within an hour or two all was put right and DssW’s Reseller site now has a new SSL certificate.

I experienced problems when setting up the site’s authentication certificate and keys. Keychain appeared to get confused at some stage and I was left locked out of my original account.

If you decide to try StartSSL from Mac OS X, I recommend using FireFox. I found Safari’s tight integration with Keychain to be counter productive. FireFox avoided Keychain’s problems and gave me control over where the keys and certificates ended up.

Ultimately, I want DssW’s keys and certificates stored in separate keychains or files, and not lumped into my personal login keychain.

Try following Glenn Fleishman’s article “How to obtain and install an SSL/TLS certificate, for free” from ars technica for the smoothest experience.

All three of DssW’s Mac energy saving products appear in Joe Hutsko’s latest book: Green Gadgets for Dummies. This is the first time I have known my work to appear on a bookshop’s shelves, and it feels good.

Green Gadgets for Dummies recommends DssW

DssW Power Manager 3 for Mac OS X

The biggest change is our dropping of Mac OS X 10.3.9 support. With the introduction of Mac OS X 10.6, the time is right. We have supported Mac OS X 10.3, aka Panther, for four years.

Panther was the first generation of Mac OS X that could support Power Manager. Earlier generations of Mac OS X did not include the underlying functionality we needed.

It feels sad to say good bye to Panther. Going forward the decision makes sense; our efforts can be better directed, and new critical path technologies are calling that Panther can not emulate.

Supporting multiple generations of Mac OS X is not always easy. Each generation of Mac OS X introduces new technologies, methodologies, and quirks that demand a deep understanding of Mac OS X’s implementation.

That effort to support multiple generations of Mac OS X with one binary often results in a much more stable product.

I was pleased to note that Snow Leopard required no specific changes to Power Manager. Instead, we used the allocated time to improve the Login Window notification mechanism and port our process management to launchd.

Reseller is written in perl using the Catalyst framework. Thankfully Reseller is not too complex, but different enough from my day-to-day UNIX development work to take me a while to orientate myself.

Catalyst has continued to improve since I last updated Reseller. In that time, Catalyst’s minor version number ticked up from 7 to 8 and with it came a handful of significant changes. Catalyst now uses Moose and has generally matured. The update meant I needed to tweak a few bits and pieces but nothing too painful.

Catalyst’s documentation continues to be outstanding; the documentation is main reason I picked the framework over Ruby-on-Rails or Java. Fad and functionality mean little without guidance. Those seeking to compete with the likes of Catalyst need to rival their clear, centralised, documentation and tutorials.

The upgraded Reseller is now live and ticking along nicely. If you notice any problems, please let support@dssw.co.uk know.