Interface design is like your application getting a hair cut. If it is done well, no one even notices. — 3B

Good news! Checking today, Amazon now has my sinks! Placed my order for the Kohler Demilav Wading Pools in Sea Salt and some Purist Widespread Lavatory Faucets in Brushed Chrome. I also had a stack of Reward Certificates for using my Amazon credit card. No tax. No shipping. A discount. And be here next week! (In the future I’m going to enter my certificates as soon as they arrive and not let them lay around.)

Unfortunately, this rewards my tendency to wait on things…

I still enjoy the instant gratification of making a purchase on Amazon and getting the surprise when the stuff actually arrives.

Hi! How have you been?

I have been bad blogger. Some evil CSS creeped in my Wordpress posts and the Google and FireFox 3 have been warning all my friends that I am running an Attack Site. Today I looked into it. I have updated WordPress and talked to the Google. They are thinking about letting me back on the team. I’ll know later. I sure hope so and may have something to say sometime in the future.

What have I been doing? Nothing much. Did get one of the crazy powerful blenders and have been making green smoothies everyday for the last few weeks. I have been using Greenling since I am often too lazy to get to the grocery. They have lotsa stuff I didn’t know how to use, like vegetables. Now I just throw spinach, kale, chard, blue berries, bananas, apple, avacado, coconut oil, flax seed oil, spirulina, green magma, milk thistle and hazelnut milk in the blender and drink it. It gives me more energy and is at least one healthy thing I do a day.

Was also checking out Lulu. They do digital printing in small batches, like of one. I got a copy of Thought Leadership by Design and An Architecture of Resistance
to see how it works. I like the quality and am considering publishing a coffee table book on the evolution of the Flip Flop, the design critique of casual lifestyle foot wear as it cross over to the high fashion of italian leather sandals, a barefoot manifesto of sorts. Plus, I have a lot of flip flops and I think they would enjoy being in a photo shoot, make them feel pretty and important.

Electrically, I have been experiments with Insteon and have replaced most of the X10 devices in my master bedroom. They are more expensive, but they work in a network, communicate more reliably, and the best part… they ramp on and off at custom levels, so when I turn on the light it fades on and off! No more abrupt assault on my optic nerves, it lets me adjust for 0.1 seconds to 9 minutes before the light is fully on.

Good news! I almost have sinks! As much as I have enjoyed the idea of a sink and all the designing and dreaming about sinks and vanities you can imagine, it is time to pull the trigger. I have decided to go with a Kohler DemiLav Wading Pool in the new Sea Salt dimensional enamel finish. To be clear, that takes the sink and faucets out of the picture. Mounting of the sinks is still completely up for design.

K thanx bai! TTYL.
teh pR1nT5

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 Macbook 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.

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.

Crawling through the code it was clear had a very limited understanding of what the hell I was doing back then. It was still running as a CGI on Postgres in the development environment. Gee. Wonder why it was slow?

I think you’ll like this version much betteh! And still Not (always) Safe for Work.
View at your own risk.
Parental Guidance Suggested.
Dangerous Curves Ahead.
Maximum Load 3000lbs.
Do Not Use Near Open Flame.

Technically, I played with more cool stuff like RSpec, Scriptaculous effects, Haml, Sass, MySQL, more modern version of Rails (but not yet 2.0), Capistrano, ActionMailer, REST, siFR, and no more HTML tables.

1882 shirts for your viewing pleasure.

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.

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.

A Shopbot

Dirty things out of dimensional lumber and exotic hardwood!
Hot Japanese Cherry Blossom action.
Got wood?
Shiny meh-tal. Hard as steel.

Played with setting up my favorite channels and added some channel icons. This just sends the channel numbers to the screen 8-4-7 (select), kinda slowly, but I think you can adjust the delay.

Also started changing the screens for my audio receiver, which came pre-loaded with 18 screens of 6 options. On my first screen in the device, I wanted to setup the audio inputs (Replay, DVD, SAT2, iTunes). Since you control the naming, I can easily map Replay to InputDvd/Ld. With my other remote I had to know the source was #4, but there was a little TV label underneath it. iTunes is an Airport Express feed but haven’t figured out which command triggers it. The receiver thinks it should be InputTape, but the Harmony triggers the feed from my other satellite box. There are only 30+ Inputs to pick from so this could take some trial and error.

I also tweaked my Replay controls so the arrows will also trigger Replay (7 sec back) and Advance (30sec skip). Digging around I noticed that in a Device mode you can specify which buttons send which commands to any device. My other remote locked sound control to receiver, but Harmony takes it to another level.

Never thought so much about how I would like to control my TV. Plus realize now that I have something to compare, how worn out my other remote is. Note to self: Please change everything all the time to keep a fresh perspective.

Progamming a remote control that you have to reboot once you upload your changes. What do full-on non-technical people do? I wonder if anyone one has some freaky version of linux and apache running ruby-on-rails over IR on this thing yet. Harmony won’t support Bose gear since the RF is Z-Wave, but if I can convert my Bose to IR, it might.

Bomp bomp bomp bomp. I <3 techno.

About a year ago my favorite music store in SA, Hermes Music, sold out to Guitar World. Since I’ve bought a lot of light gear from them, they dropped me a post card letting me know they were having a sale. I went there looking for some XLR cables, speaker stands, and some new lights for Halloween but I ended up carrying out an M-Audio Trigger Finger(a USB midi drum pad controller) and a set of conga drums. Conga drums? Yep. DRUMS!

So I used to bedroom DJ techno/house parties in Indiana and got really into tribal house. DJing gave me a musical outlet although I can’t sing or play an instrument so I’m not sure how strong an urge it could really have be satisfying. Then there’s drums, the beat of the whole show, those low frequency grooves that grab you by the chest an pull you in. Plus, one of my favorite scientists, Richard Feynman, used to play bongos in the desert to go think about problems Considering he was playing with subjects like Quantum Electrodynamics, I imagine he became a good drummer for a physicist.

I’d also Amazon-ed some Conga books so I flipped through them to see which one made the most sense. So using Conga Drumming by Alan Dworsky, Garage Band, my Trigger finger, and my Congas, I set to learn a little drumming.

Here’s what I did.

The Conga book has a nice abstract notation to learn with which was perfect for me since I have no musical training, at all. It looks like this:

Rhythm 1-1: Calypso high drum part
| 1 | + | 2 | + | 3 | + | 4 | + |
  0   0           0   0
  R   L           R   L

This means on up-beat 1 in 4/4 time, play an open tone, with your right hand. Simple to read. Me likey. The book came with a CD where the dude plays each rhythm in the book (175 total), but they aren’t recorded so you can loop them. I have two programs that would let me make loops, Ableton Live 6 (free version with the Trigger finger) and Garage Band (free with my MacBook). Turns out to use Ableton Live, I’d need to learn a lot of stuff. Like most things Apple, when I plugged in my Trigger Finger, Garage Band just worked.

After reading a little bit of the Garage Band Help, I was able to add a new track, use the Jazz Drum Kit, and create the beat pattern for Rhythm 1-1. Then I just set the pattern to loop and drummed along with it. Kinda cool. Now I just have to practice for the next ten years.

I’m thinking about grabbing the Garage Band Jam Pack: World Music since it may have a Conga Drum Kit in it. The Jazz Kit works, but I’m faking the open tones, slaps, and bass tones by adjusting the velocities, where it might be more important to use more accurate Conga drumming sounds to learn the complex patterns later in the book.

One and Two and Three and Four and… Rock out!