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.

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!

So far I like:

• rechargeable batteries - I hate trying to find AAA’s lying around
• cradle - gives it a home so I know where to keep/find it
• easy setup via USB on Mac
• can setup favorite TV channels - I can never remember the exact channel for DSC… its in the 280’s somewhere
• all the button sets do have affordances so you can feel which set you’re rubbing
• you can import custom graphics for buttons, backgrounds, and channels - skin a remote control yeah and it supports .png!

Things I might not like:

• software to set it up requires a network connection
• device setup seems to be all GUI-driven, versus being able to write a config file
• each device gets a list of screens of options that you scroll horizontally and activate with the three buttons down each side of the small LCD
• all the buttons are kinda tiny
• the LCD font is not anti-aliased

My A/V setup is not that crazy. I have 2 DirecTV receivers, Stereo w/ 5 disc CD, DVD 5 disc, a ReplayTV, IR distribution, a 4 channel A/V distribution thing, and an XBox w/XBMC. Its more of a cabling nightmare than anything and I still need to install a small media rack in my closet.

I know I’m ready for a new remote, my existing RCA Universal Custom 8 is old and wearing out. I haven’t thought through what I am looking for in my dream remote so experimenting with the Harmony 720 should help me clarify.

I can haz ur TeeVee chanjin’ ur channelz to pr0n! Wurd.

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.

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.