I thought for a while it was some rogue application eating up CPU, and sure enough Mozilla, Chimera, and NetNewsWire all seem to waste cycles when they’re not obviously doing anything. But it happens even when I kill them. And I’ve just realized that it only seems to happen when I’m plugged in with the power adapter.

Looks like it’s related to the “processor performance” setting under Energy Saver. I wish I knew more about what the “reduced” setting means. How slow is it? Is it always reduced, or does it just pull back the throttle when the temperature is too high? That’s the setting I would like to have for use when the power is plugged in: full speed ahead unless things get hot, and then pull back to avoid having to run the fan at high speed. (For most things I do, I prefer quiet to blazing performance.)

I suppose it’s a litte ungrateful to say this two days after category support arrived in version 5 of Blosxom (or whatever it really is in Rael’s strange version numbering system). But it’s still true … you should be able to put Blosxom entries in multiple categories. Here’s a great example: this entry could reasonably fit into several other categories (Computers/Internet/Blogging because it deals with Blapp, Computers/SoftwareDevelopment/Methodologies because it deals with bazaar-style development, Computers/SoftwareDevelopment/Tools because it deals with GUI builders, Computers/SoftwareDevelopment/Interfaces because it deals with inherent problems of GUI development … you get the idea).

I understand the need to have a primary category, but secondary categories wouldn’t have to reflect the disk storage model.

Interface Builder is the first GUI builder I’ve ever used that I didn’t really hate. But it still has its drawbacks.

I have quite a few ideas for improving Blapp. I’d love to help Michael McCracken by adding some of these features myself (that seems better than becoming “that pest who asks me for three new features a day”). But that’s going to be difficult, because you can’t really send patches against the objects.nib file.

I suppose this is just a special case of the problems inherent in collaborative GUI development, but it’s still annoying.

James has a real point about Blosxom’s date management. It’s true that the date attached to a blog entry should be a “publication date” rather than the “authoring date” (O’Reilly’s weblog system gets this wrong). But once published the date shouldn’t change. I do sometimes edit entries after publication, to correct spelling or other minor mistakes. But I don’t want the publication date to change.

An additional problem is that blosxom’s permalinks are based on date. If the publication date can change, those links aren’t so perma, are they?

Linking is a pain in Blosxom, but I don’t think it’s Blosxom’s fault. I do, however, wish tools like Blapp would provide some assistance. (That’s not fair … it already does provide assistance, in the form of good drag-and-drop support. I should say I wish it would provide a particular kind of assistance.)

I’m offline a lot, so there are many times when the drag-and-drop doesn’t help much. Plus, my blog entries about particular topics tend to cluster together around particular points in time.

So I’d like Blapp to parse the HTML I write and remember a list of “recent links” that I’ve used. The first time I link to a particular page, I would have to do it manually, or drag it in. But after that, Blapp could just present me with a list of recent links and let me choose one.

There are a lot of possible refinements … perhaps restricting the list (or sorting it) to prefer links that I’ve used in the current category, or something like that.