Blog and it shall be done! Colloquy just released an update which lists the blank chat room problem (source of amusement like “hello…?”. This makes me happy since aside from that small incapacitating bug, I’ve been extremely happy with Colloquy — it makes IRC feel like not IRC

Release Notes

Colloquy 2.1 (3720) The latest build on 9/11/2007 can be downloaded here (6.61 MB). Requires 10.3.9 or higher. Supplied as a universal binary, allowing it to run on an Intel or PowerPC Mac. Changes in this Release * Fix for the blank chat room bug. #576

Update: Hmmm… not entirely fixed — though happens much less now. Looks like /reload styles is still going to be my friend for a while. Apparently this fixes a case where with Safari 3 it happened a lot more.

I’ve been using Colloquy as an IRC client — for the most part it’s just beautiful and very Mac like. There is however one annoying recurring bug…

“Blank Chat Room Bug” [#576] Blank chat room bug Sometimes, in random intervals, some auto-joined chat rooms appear as blank / empty / not active / plain white (or whatever background color your style uses), although activity can be observed through the unread messages counter or Growl notifications. Workaround: As a workaround you can type /reload style in the affected chat rooms.

What this means is that sometimes, randomly all the text in the room disappears — this has lead to some funny “helloo…” moments on ##uportal. Hopefully posting this tip here saves someone some grief.

Got a new Macbook Pro (gotta add the pro at the end) at work, and have literally spent the whole day adding in all the stuff I “need” to make it my own development box. It’s amazing how much stuff you end up with that you quickly come to rely on. My short list seems to include:

• Quicksilver
• Macports
• NetNewsWire & Marsedit
• WeatherPop Advance
• Textmate
• Omni Group Stuff (Omnigraffle Pro & Outliner Pro)
• Micrsoft Office: Mac
• Eclipse & Webtools
• SVN (through Macports)
• … which means Apple’s developer tools, for GCC
• Maven
• Colloquy

And I’m sure a whole bunch of crap that I’m forgetting right now… It’s amazing how easy it is to justify all this upfront investment for productivity down the line