The Prince Of Swords

This weekend I planned to migrate my Macbook to Leopard. I started Friday evening…and I’m already done. It was a really good experience and pretty much guarantees that I am never going back to Windoze, not that I’d even considered it in the last year and a half.

Since I have been running out of disk space, my upgrade was twice as sweet. On the recommendation from my local mac-users list, I picked up a Seagate Momentus 200G G-Shock drive (ST9200420ASG) to replace the 80G I was running on. Then I added a Macally BS250U external drive enclosure. Plus, a week ago I had just gotten a Western Digital 320G Passport which I’ll probably use for Time Machine. Armed with a copy of Leopard, I was ready to go.

Step 1: Backup MacbookPara hacer apuestas en ruleta, el jugador de poker en linea debe elegir el número de fichas que quiere de un grupo utilizando el ratón, debe llevarlo donde quiere y soltar el botón del ratón para colocar las fichas. to WD Passport via SuperDuper for safety.

Took forever (6hrs), but worth it.

Step 2: Load a clean copy of Leopard on the new Seagate drive via USB.

Had to do this twice for some unknown failure. The first time it didn’t want to recognize the external drive and then never completed.

Step 3: Boot the Macbook from the attached Seagate Drive.

A firewire drive enclosure would have been faster but USB is more ubiquitous.

Step 4: Use the Migration Assistant to load the user account data, including Apps, from Macbook. компютри втора употреба

You probably want to use using a temporary account on the Leopard install since it won’t let you easily overwrite an existing account name. This took about three hours but I didn’t have to do anything so I let it run while I slept.

Step 5: Run the apps and see what’s broken.

All things considered, most of my stuff worked. Mail, network settings, passwords, and documents were all there. I had to install XCode, MacPorts, MySQL and re-install Growl, Inkscape, and X11. I’m sure my LDAP server is busted but I never knew how that was setup anyway so I’ll get somebody else to help sort that out. I thought I’d have to do more to get all my rails apps running, but installing a database was all it took.

I removed Desktop Manager, thank you for the good years of service, but Spaces seems to be the way kids do it now. MailBadger is busted, but it is the effort of one person, so if it gets updated for Leopard, cool. Shapeshifter is also a no show, which being the superficial punkass I am will be annoying. I like pretty things.

Step 6: Shut everything down. Remove the Macbook 80G and replace it with the Seagate.

This too was crazy easy. Pop out the battery. Loosen three screws in the RAM rail. Unroll the hard drive tab and pull out the drive. Remove the shield and place in on the new drive. Do the previous three steps in reverse. I was barely nervous firing up the laptop once assembled.

First impressions are good. I am not such an Apple fanboy that I follow every article on the interWebs detailing every internals tweak they’ve done to Leopard. But, even running the OS over USB 2.0, my system was faster. 7200rpm drive vs Mac OS 10.5? I don’t know which is actually responsible for the boost and I don’t care. Its faster.

Leopard! MEEE-OOOWW!!!

Now I need to try to do some work and see if I missed anything.

So back when you used Win98 to develop webs apps in PHP, there was that cool plugin for SVN that integrated with Windows Explorer. You could see the status of a file because its icon would change colors if you modified it. You could right-click and do most of the SVN actions.

I’ve been wanting that for the Finder in Mac OS X ever since I switched in 2006.

At the end of December, besides the year crashing to an end, a tool I’d written off for dead, was updated!

SCPlugin is like Tortoise for Mac! I’ve installed it and will let you know how it goes.

I’ve been using svnX. It’s ok for general work but doesn’t let you easily check out a previous previous version of a file or handle svn properties.

So a few months ago I was trying to move some color palettes between Inkscape and Color Schemer Studio Pro, both of which I still use. Recently our company colors shifted an RGB value from 204 to 196, which to most may not be noticeable. But, since I created a color space for all our webs apps based on that value, I can’t NOT touch up all my colors.

While playing with colors again, I found a simple solution to sync palettes across all my Mac apps. Turns out the Mac Color Picker likes to use “.clr” files that I still have not figured out how to generate.

But, I never looked very closely at all the tabs in the color picker - Color Wheel - Color Sliders - Color Palettes - Image Palettes - Crayons… did you miss it?

Image Palettes! Yep, create an image of swatches in your palette and the Color Picker will let you use it. Using Color Schemer Studio, you can easily export your palette as a .gif.

A copy of the image you use will be stored in ~/Library/Colors/.

I include a palette in all our web projects just in case a developer ever wants to know what our colors are.

Purple is a color.
Violet is a spectrum of light.

So I’ve been back on some web interface design stretches lately. Working alot with SVGs in Inkspace and I’ve totally found my medium of choice. I got hooked on raster graphics playing with Photoshop more than ten years ago. It was so expensive I never ventured into Illustrator but have been wishing I would have lately. Vectors seem to fit my brain better even though I’m not super mathy.

To get my rounded-cornered Web 2.0 AJAX soaked interfaces on point I’ve been creating buttons, icons, and layouts in Inkscape, an open source Scalable Vector Graphic editor. I’ve gotten the hang of it and now that Firefox and other browsers are providing native SVG support, I look forward to doing some cool stuff with it. One idea I’d like to chase down eventually is defining the relationships between the colors in a web skin, as opposed to the actual colors. Then we could provide a user preference screen to adjust some sliders so they can set the base color, hue, saturation, etc and the rest of the interface would dynamically re-render all the graphics elements. I think we’d swamp a browser trying to update every graphic SVG element on-the-fly, but some server-side love could handle the job.

Anyways the thing I was playing with tonight was simply importing and exporting colors to get them where I need them. I’m using Color Schemer Pro to work with colors. It makes mixing, matching, and saving colors in multiple formats simplio. When creating skins, I often embed a .gif of the colors so you can grab them via Colorzilla, since most people don’t like to memorize the hex codes. (I’ve really been into #5D07B0 lately, but #6700B8 is nice too.)
I’d like to take a color scheme and turn it into a palette I can use directly in Inkscape. Color Schemer Pro (CSP) can export as .gif, .html, .aco, ai, .txt, …, .act, and .xml. Very cool except Inkscape doesn’t read any of these. So….the solution from tonight is to:

1. Export from CSP as a .act file
2. Import as new swatch in GIMP
3. Look in your ~/.gimp-X.X/palettes where GIMP will have converted and saved a .gpl file
4. Copy the .gpl file into Inkscape into the /Contents/Resources/palettes
5. Open Inkscape. Ta-da! Your palette is there!

The imported palette is missing the caption for each color so it is blank if you mouseOver it, but you can edit the .gpl file if you really want to. It’s really just a text file with some RGB color codes in it.

May all your pixels come true.

Over the weekend I spent some time trying organize all the stuff I have going on….again. My hipster has never left me but since I’m on a number of projects, my ToDo lists have gotten a little crazy. Luckily we’re using Basecamp for most of them so I can feel a solution coming.

Through the MacHeist thing a few months ago I upgraded to DevonThink Pro. It rocks but takes a little time to get used to. I’m using it as my supplemental brain. First, I “indexed” some of the key folders on my MacBook, like my Sites folder which houses all the source code and design documents for all the apps we’re writing. I also imported all my bookmarks and all the emails I’ve sent. I imported all the ebooks I have, although Devon couldn’t read my DRM’d copies of the ITIL books I’ve got. As I visit sites, I end up “capturing” a lot of interesting things. I imported an entire portal I setup years ago to put all my ideas, meeting notes, etc.
Overall this gives me a good start to my personal knowledge base. When I search for “Riva”, Devon gives me all the connected items I have, links to sites, diagrams I’ve done, papers I wrote, documents I’ve downloaded. It rocks! Here’s some stats:

• 10,724 Groups
• 18,974 HTML files
• 35,758 Text Files
• 10, 352 Images
• 12,352 Links
• 380 QuickTime movies
• 106, 257 Total records
• 39,930,853 Words (309,992 unique words)

The fact that I know that is kinda cool. The idea that out of 39M words, only 300K are unique, points out how much repetition there is in our language. Somebody should look into that.
This weekend I experimented with using DevonThink as my new GTD tool of record. To GTD, I started with a simple directory structure for In Box, Projects, @Home, and @MacBook. @ just means it is a context. In the Project group, I have all the projects I know of each in their own group. Within each group I then add an “outline” for each task. An outline is a snippet of text with a checkbox. Any record can be “labeled” which just turns them one of seven colors. I used orange to indicate “Waiting For” (which now that I write this gives me a better idea!).

So here’s the problem. I have 306 groups in “Projects”, meaning some projects have multiple sub-folders. Tasks for each project get buried in a hierarchy. As I add “tasks” to each related group, I don’t want to have to open up all these groups to see my tasks. The first step was classifying tasks. I just add “(N)” to a task to mean Next. So a task for a Project looks like “(N) Paper prototype dashboard”. If I’m waiting for something I use (W). Looking through some Applescripts that shipped with Devon, I was able to tweak them to suit my needs. I now have an Applescript that grabs all the items I marked with (N) and replicates them to a group named “(N)ext”. I attached the script to that group so every time I click it, it re-runs the search and re-populates the folder with my Next items. The feature that makes this possible in Devon is its ability to replicate an item, which is effectively a linked copy so any changes to a replicant flows back to the source and all other replicants. I then repeated the process for a “(W)aiting for” and “(S)omeday/Maybe” groups. I also created a script to rename an itemand append a (N), (S), or (W) to it. Ta-da! Problem almost solved.

Things to look into:

• Remember how I am adding (N), (W), etc to each task and then collecting those items into special “smart” groups? Now that I’m thinking about it, I can trigger the task based on their label which is easier to change than having to rename them manually or run the script for it.
• Basecamp has an API in Ruby. DevonThink Pro supports Applescript. There is a library ‘rb-appscript’ that lets you write Applescript in Ruby. Seems to me I should be able to use the Basecamp API to pull all the ToDo items from all my projects on Basecamp and import them directly into DevonThink.

Lots to do to get things done.

As a new Mac user I was compelled to do the MacHeist thing. Very cool. I’ve been demoing DevonThink Pro for a while so getting the Personal version instantly made this worth it. I already owned a TextMate license (and have been reading the PragProg PDF on it).

The vendors have been delivering my licenses over the last few days so I’ve been playing with a new package each night. I’ll try to write up some summaries.

I recently trashed my MacBook by probably installing some random badness (like trying to recompile SCPlugin for MacTel use) so I decided to wipe and re-install which turned out to be a very quick and easy process (minus the transfer time for my music collection).

Now that I’m back up, I’ve been continuing my Mac metamorphosis. The only legacy app from Windows I hadn’t replaced yet was Visio, which I’ve never really liked but due to some process engineering work I’ve been doing lately, has been making it appearance on my desktop regularly. There are a couple of solutions like running Parallels or even maybe VMWare, but I’ve decided that it is time to move on and not put any Microsoft apps of the past on my shiny new Little BlacBook.

For graphing in Mac, OmniGraffle is your answer. I downloaded the trial and jumped right in. The main goal was to recreate the Riva Visio Stencils. Riva is a process diagramming method that focuses on Roles, Activities, and interactions. It comes from the book “Business Process Management: A rigorous approach” by Martin Ould. It was brought to my attention by Neil Benson at Increase Consulting in the UK. I use it to map what people do and how they could interact with a software system.

Business Process Management: A Rigorous Approach (Paperback)
by Martyn A. Ould
@Amazon

Here is Martyn Ould’s site. There are Visio stencils you can download.
http ://www.the-old-school.demon.co.uk/vc/riva.htm

Things I like about Riva:
- focused on roles and their interactions (via explicit state changes)
- compact diagrams vs boxes and diamonds
- it is easier for me to follow these diagrams than swimlanes since your focus bounces all over the lanes where Riva has a clear flow
- case refinement is easier to extend (decisions or cases) than with typical diamonds for decisions since cases are represented in a linear path that can be added to, where adding more diamonds alters the diagram much more

After I maxed out the 20 object limit in the OmniGraffle trial, I bought a Pro license and got down to polishing a first draft of my Riva Stencils. My bet was that by building a set of stencils I’d learn OmniGraffle faster since I had a clear goal in mind plus I’ll be doing some modeling this week and put the stencils to real use.

After about 10 hours of dinking with it, my first draft is complete with Web 2.0 rounded corners! The main lesson I’ve learned is that Mac is Beautiful and works. As crazy as it sounds to non-Mac peoples, the quality and style of my Mac
seriously does make me happier to work with it which again confirms the “Broken Windows” theory from the famous psychology experiments.

If these work well this week, I may release them to Graffletopia.com and share the love.

My Very Firstest OmniGraffle Stencils

It’s like Linux, only beautiful. Jobs was dead on, it makes me wanna lick it!

This weekend I started setting up my Rails environment. The first step was getting Subversion working. Setting up the client was simple then I played with svnX and pulled some of my code down. Coming from the Windows world I’d forgotten how addicted to Tortoise I was and went in search for the Mac twin. SCPlugin looked promising but even after installing XCode Tools to compile it from source, and trying a new version of mach_override for MacTel use, I failed. Not a big disappointment, I haven’t tried to compile anything in about 7 years so it was kinda fun to go back a Linux shell and dink around.

I also played with Locomotive for Rails which looks nice, but I’m going to install Rails the long way just to go through it. I’m using the tutorial on hivelogic.com.

So far I am in the full pursuit of happiness. Thanks MacBook!