I've written about open-source programming bounties before, and found a new one yesterday: Bounty County, which looks reasonable enough despite the name.

I didn't see any OS X projects on there yet - it's mostly Gnome stuff - but I'm sure they would list a Mac bounty if you sent it in.

Unlike some proposals I have seen for bounty sites, this doesn't appear to do anything other than list bounties - they don't hold money or evaluate completion. Maybe that's all that it takes, but I'm not sure - I think it'd be more tempting to try for bounties if there were guarantees that my time would be well-spent. Think of the difference between selling things on eBay vs. craigslist - they both work, but craigslist always seems a little sketch.

I gave my brother a Terrapass for Christmas this year, since he's kind of hard to shop for, and he owns a Jeep. The idea is that depending on what kind of car you have, and how much you drive it, you give them some amount of money that they invest in clean energy projects. The amount is supposed to be enough to reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions by the same amount that your car will contribute in a year.

It's an interesting version of carbon credits for individuals, and even more surprising is that they are trying to make a profit doing this - I'm curious to see if this kind of venture takes off.

I found the idea through worldchanging.com here, and they also point out another way to offset your carbon contribution via a non-profit, and not just tied to your car, at carbonfund.org - this is particularly interesting since as their page on your impact notes, you contribute towards CO2 emissions in more ways than just driving.

I've decided to switch over to MarsEdit, and as a result I will now most likely stop maintaining Blapp, my simple OS X blosxom weblog editor.

It's been a lot of fun through seven versions, starting with my original post about it, to Rael Dornfest (the author of blosxom) picking it up and the v2 release, when it became actually useful. I released it as open source in October of 2002, and got some great contributions from Scott Anguish, Glenn Vanderburg, and Bob Schumaker.

I'd like to extend thanks to everyone who contributed to the project and to everyone who used it - it's been fun.

There's a lot to love about Blapp, and if you use Blosxom, I'd still recommend it - but times do seem to have left Blosxom behind, and even though I really haven't been maintaining it anyway, I'm writing this to make it official that I'm done working on Blapp, and if anyone would like to take it over and keep maintaining it, they should shoot me an email or comment on this post.

There are some features in Blapp that I wish I had in MarsEdit - I liked the Links Window (although it really could have done more) and I still prefer the more flexible live preview with CSS.

I also had a convenient setup for dragging URLs into a post with some default HTML to save typing.

However, MarsEdit could get some of those features, while Blapp will probably never do all that MarsEdit already does. (Like drafts!)

I was digging around the gdb source and found that there's a plugin in there that supports macsbug style screens and commands from within gdb. If you have the XCode Tools installed, take a look at the Readme on your own (OS X) system at the file /usr/libexec/gdb/plugins/MacsBug/Readme.html

To invoke it, type this at the GDB prompt:

load-plugin /usr/libexec/gdb/plugins/MacsBug/MacsBug_plugin

then

mb

and you've got the old split screen with the register contents on the left.

I never used macsbug for anything real, but this still held some nostalgic value.

I've been behind the times on weblog technology for a while now, so when I noticed that pair had a pre-packaged WordPress install I could use on my account, I thought I'd take the opportunity to move from Blapp, which I love because it is my own code, to MarsEdit, which does more and doesn't need me to maintain it.

I've updated my Feedburner feed to the new URL: michael-mccracken.net/wp/, but the old weblog URL http://michael-mccracken.net/blog/ is still around for permanence.