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A few days ago my five year old went up to my wife and gave her a great big kiss. It went kind of like this: "Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmah! There... Is that enough to make a baby?"
As always on Tuesdays, we had Siam Cafe for lunch today. Yum. And at the end of the meal, fortune cookies. You know how you add the words "in bed" to the end of your fortune? Well, my fortune read: "Behind an able man, there are always other able men."
Honest! Of course, I decided my age has I nicer ring to it if I express it using a base 16 numbering system. So what I have told you is true... from a certain point of view. Yeah I didn't buy it when Obi-Wan said it either. But if our politicians have taught me anything, it's to always present things in the best possible light and stand firm even what I am saying appears to be an outright lie.
Note: my somegeekintn.com email is hosed for the moment. I'm trying to work this out with Dreamhost (who's hosting hasn't quite lived up to the name). If you need to contact me, please try any of my gozillion other email addresses until I get this figured out.
Email update: I guess the folks at Dreamhost kicked the server (they haven't contacted me) and got my email working again. My apologies if your email bounced.
It was so nice today, which by now is actually yesterday, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to ride the "spaceship" one more time before winter decides to get serious. I needed a destination though. I'd been meaning to get out to the Green Hills Apple Store and see what that's all about, so that's the direction I pointed myself.
The Green Hills Apple Store isn't quite so nice as the San Francisco store, but hey it's a store filled with geeky Apple goodies so I was happy. So happy in fact that I accidentally bought a new computer, a Mac mini to be exact... and a KVM switch to boot.
I'd been thinking about this for quite a while actually. My PC has been making me less and less happy lately, and the Mac, besides just being a better operating system, really does a much better job with multiple users in my opinion. I have much finer grained control over just how much access my kids have to various applications and built in parental control for email, web browsing, chatting, etc., etc. Also, "my" laptop isn't technically mine and I wanted to offload some of the more personal items from my work machine to something at home. Quicken stuff comes to mind.
Installation was hampered by the fact that the mouse I was using on the PC uses a PS/2 connector and I couldn't find the USB adapter that I know is around here somewhere. So I had to buy a new mouse. I figured I'd simply leave the PC connected to the old mouse and use the new one for the Mac. Well, the PC wasn't having any of that. It no longer wants to have anything to do with my old mouse. I think it's feeling indignant about the new machine resting on top of it. Oddly enough, the old mouse communicates just fine with the mini, seeing as the new mouse is also a wireless Logitech. Windows... *sigh*.
So, the new machine is a 1.42GHz G4 Mac mini with 512MB of memory. It has been christened Number 8. Not very creative I know, but it follows a long line of computers who's names began with "Number":
Some new pictures from the last few days uploaded to flickr including this one of Aaron that I especially like :)
xbox360launch is one of the hot tags over on flickr toady. Lots of pictures of crazy people camping out to buy XBOX 360's. I don't see what all the fuss is about really.
#1: Avoid taking the advice suggested in posts such as these: via digg - The Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging.
There's really not much reason for you to create a blog unless it's something that you enjoy doing. And if that's the case, then by all means, design a site that makes you happy first and foremost. Use purple text on a florescent orange background. Have Dueling Banjos playing in the background. Sprinkle animated dancing Jesus (Jesuses? Jesii? Whatever.) all over your site, if that's what makes you happy.
It's fine to hope that you'll become the next Dooce or Instapundit. But if you believe that you can slap together a site, sprinkle in some advertising and retire to Bahamas, you're probably going to end up very disappointed.
You know when I signed up for this parenting thing, I expected usual assorted kid problems, skinned knees, spit up and later full real vomit completely with bits of partially digested... whatever, ear infections, etc., etc. We had a new one today. Alex came running upstairs, obviously distraught: "iwasplayingoutsideandiaccidentallygotarockstuckinmybellybutton"!
"You did what?", Susie and I both asked.
"I got a rock stuck in my belly button. I was holding it next to my belly button, and it accidentally fell in". (yeah accidentally)
Sure enough, my daughter had managed, somehow, to get a pebble lodged in there. My wife and I thought it was hysterical, but Alex didn't really see the humor... nor would she let me take a picture of it. Instead she simply wanted it removed.
It was wedged in there pretty good but all those years at tweezer school finally paid off with the removal of a very smelly pebble. Yeah, for some reason I was compelled to smell it. It was quite nasty.
So anyhoo, just another thing you parents and prospective parents might want to consider having to deal with as time goes by.
Well, it looks like they're going to finally turn radioSHARK v2.0 loose. I've been waiting for this for quite a while, but now that it's come to it, I'm actually pretty nervous. This was actually the first app that I wrote for Mac OS X and it has taken the longest to make it's "official" appearance.
I personally like the new version (of course I may be just a bit biased), though I can see room for improvement, but that's pretty much the case with every piece of software. Still I expect that more than one person will rip me to shreds in some review somewhere.
That has been the biggest adjustment since leaving GLW for Griffin. At GLW our users numbered in the dozens, and if they didn't like something or wanted a particular feature, they spoke directly to us. Here I have thousands of (mostly) anonymous people using my software and the relationship very impersonal. If I want to find out what people are thinking I have to visit sites like VersionTracker.
Even if the majority of people like the software, they'll always be some that, for whatever reason, hate it and will explain in great detail how bad it sucks and how the developer should be draw and quartered, his head placed on a pike in the middle of Apple's Campus as a warning to future developers. Well, okay maybe not quite that extreme, but I do have a hard time with the criticism. It's like someone telling you you're baby is ugly. You would tend to take that a little personally even though the comment may have been completely anonymous. Anyway, something I'll have to work on.
P.S. See, I've already been looking at the comments on VersionTracker. I can't help myself. slbooks_dotmac mentions skinning the app and I have some thoughts on this. I would really like to rebuild the main interface using WebKit, ie HTML, CSS, and Javascript. It would seem to me that would present the lowest barrier to entry for people wanting to tweak or completely redesign their own interfaces. The only UI element that doesn't lend itself well to this is the spectrum analyzer, but I'm sure there is a solution. Any radioSHARK users out there reading this that have an opinion on that idea?
Katherine posted an entry today on her site that reminded me of a recent email I received from Classmates. This lead to the trip to Classmates, and in turn to Wikipedia, and in turn to an evening spent jumping from link to link in my continued quest to finish the internet.
It also took me back to 1982. I was 13, growing up in New Baltimore, Michigan and beginning school at Anchor Bay High School. A time when people wore strange jackets with far too many zippers, MTV was just beginning it's quest to kill the radio star, people thought top loading VCR's were kinda neat, and my biggest concern was the frustration of having to wait another year to find out if Vader really was Luke's father.
My friends at the time were: Doug Piche and his younger brother Danny. They lived two houses down from mine and I probably spent more time over there messing with their top loading VCR than I did at my own house. Joe Barker lived 3 houses down in the opposite direction. And Mike Hartman lived another 5 or so houses past Joe. There were lots of other guys, and even a girl or two, on rare occasions, that I hung out with on Forbes, but the core was Doug, Danny, Joe, and Mike.
Typical entertainment included football, or baseball (played with a tennis ball), Smear the queer, or shooting pool in Doug & Danny's basement. Good times.
That was before high school so helpfully organized us into our proper social caste. Doug, Mike and I were all in the same grade and Joe fell in with the "freaks", Mike with the "jocks" (voted Best Smile, Prettiest Eyes, and Worst Joke Teller in our high school yearbook, the later I can vouch for). Of course I was a bit of a "geek", though not the chess playing, mathlete kind and Doug, he sort of defied categorization. Joe's group wasn't terribly discriminating. It helped that Doug and I were "quasi-freaks" ourselves. But Mike, well the "jocks" were not so forgiving about the types of people you choose to associate with and so we didn't see much of Mike anymore.
Before all that stuff, we used to sometimes go down to Mike's house to play on the Atari 2600 or later the Colecovision (256x192 resolution)! That didn't happen often, Doug's was the place where we all tended to hang out, but when it did, we'd occasionally see Mike's older brother, Butch, sitting at the dinning room table, drawing cartoons of superheroes and such. Always with the drawing. He was quite good. He'd even painted a mural outside the library at school. It was an image of books, a globe, apple, and what have you.
Butch always said he intended to get into the animation business or maybe acting. He seemed quite determined, but hey I thought Playboy photographer sounded like a good gig too, but I didn't expect to actually become one.
I knew before leaving Michigan that Butch had had some bit parts in some soap operas and had even lent a hand to the animation in American Tail but didn't think too much about it... until a few years back when my daughter started watching a new show on Nickelodeon called The Fairly OddParents. At some point I happened by the TV while this show was on and thought I saw there in great big letters "Executive Producer: Butch Hartman". I snatched the Tivo remote from Alex and rewound to make sure I saw what I thought I did. Sure enough, it was him.
Later I tried to email Butch to congratulate him on his successes and to let him know my daughter (and now my son also) was a big fan of his stuff and to wonder whether Timmy Turner was modeled in any way after his youngest brother Timmy (he probably doesn't go by Timmy anymore) Hartman. But I never heard back from him. I reckon he's a big shot Hollywood producer and all and maybe doesn't have time for "the little people" anymore. I wasn't even going to ask for money or anything... right away.
Which brings me back to my visit to Classmates the other day. My visit to Classmates led to a visit to Wikipedia to see if there was anything about the eminent Mr. Hartman. Of course there is. I briefly considered adding something to the Trivia section along the lines of "was a chronic bed-wetter" or something. Instead I followed the link to Anchor Bay High School, which I see lists all of the Notable Alumni to escape graduate from Anchor Bay. The list consists of one guy: Butch Hartman.
There's a lesson to be learned here: If your dedicated and work hard in life you can achieve anything. And if you know someone like that then you should try and become close friends so later you can be part of their entourage or at the very least maybe they'll answer a frickin' email.
Notes regarding the trivia for Butch on IMDB: It says that Butch was 1 of 8 siblings. Perhaps they had some under the cupboards that I wasn't aware of. I knew Butch, Mike, Keith and Timmy. Later they added two step brothers to the clan: Keith and Gary Tacia.
We got a new iMac in the office yesterday. You know the new ones with the built in camera and the PhotoBooth software that lets you apply interesting filters.
Of course everyone had to gather round and play with the new toy. You can see the results in J's photostream on flickr
We're not the only ones playing around with PhotoBooth.
Some time ago I was playing around with NSStatusItem and decided it might be fun to make a replacement for Apple's menu bar clock. I don't like their analog version and the digital version takes up a bit to much space. So why not replace it with something really confusing I thought.
I've had a few people ask me for it... or maybe they asked me about it, as in "what is that stupid thing?" Whatever, I'm making it available here along with the source. Enjoy.
download: BinarClock v0.1 (69k)
Hello AirClickers! Or is that AirClickUSBers? Anyway, with the new release of the AirClickUSB software come a couple of changes to the way things work.
Pretty much everything that I mentioned in the first entry about Hacking the AirClick USB still applies but there were a few changes to organization. First, all the scripts are now found in AirClick/Contents/Resources/scripts. Next, you'll notice that all of the AppleScripts end in .applescript instead of .scpt. Getting text AppleScript files to end in .scpt was tripping up a lot of folks and for the life of me I'm not sure why the .scpt extension was being used in the first place.
The other changes were additions to the functions.plist file. A function definition may include the ShowInMenu key, with a Boolean value set to Yes, to display the Name of the function in the reference submenu. Unfortunately, the AirClick software only displays the primary button used to trigger a function. There's just not a practical method to indicate things like a function that is triggered after play is held for 5 seconds with the volume up key modifier if the variable WTF is set to 3.
Finally, the AppBundle key was added at the function group level. Use this to associate a group of functions with an particular application indicated by it's bundle identifier, ex. com.apple.iTunes. Right now this is only used to find an icon to display when changing the selected app from the AirClick remote (Volume Up/Down while holding the Play button).
With the next release, we're thinking about adding a mode that tells the AirClick software to control the active application if it can, and if not then fall back to the application selected in the AirClick menu. The UTI described by the AppBundle key will used to make the determination as to whether the active application is controllable.
Back in June I was scrolling through the top 100 songs on iTunes Music Store and stumbled across a tune called Hide and Seek by someone named Imogen Heap. Never heard of her (if only I watched The O.C.)... oh but what a great voice. Awesome song. $0.99 and many listens later I was trying to find out more about Ms. Heap. What I found was that her new CD, Speak For Yourself, was going to be out "real soon now".
For a while, I regularly checked iTMS anxiously awaiting a CD full of tracks like Hide and Seek. As summer came and went I pretty much gave up on Imogen. She is after all doing this all independently (she had to mortgage her flat in London to finance everything I understand). Maybe she's having to burn CD's by hand I dunno.
This morning Hide and Seek happened to start playing in iTunes and I figured I'd see if that CD ever got released. Well, it did on Tuesday. And it was worth the wait. I'm not real good at reviewing, so just pretend I wrote this:
The U.S. debut solo album by Frou Frou vocalist Imogen Heap is a captivating record that fuses innovative electronic soundscapes with a strong female voice. If "Goodnight and Go" -- a lilting, pulsating, and hit-ready concoction -- and the alluring, synthesized pop of "Hide and Seek" are the most direct, experimental numbers like the ethereal "Have You Got It in You?" plus the rhythm-fueled "Headlock" and "Loose Ends" suggest Heap has written and produced the finest electro/alt CD of 2005. By the time the eclectic, innovative "Closing In" arrives late in the cycle of Speak for Yourself, there's little denying it.
Some time ago I installed gallery software here on SGnTN and my lovely wife was supposed to sort of take ownership of that section, organize, title, etc., etc. Well I think she got 30 or so pictures into it and lost interest (we're like peas and carrots).
So then last week I added some pictures to the gallery, took a look around and decided it was a mess and I'd organize it myself. I think I got about 30 pictures into it before I said screw it. Gallery 2 is a really nice package, but it's still pretty painful to organize ~900 pictures from scratch.
Well today I finally added some pictures to my flickr account. It it relatively painless to use so far. But then again, I think I've only uploaded a dozen or so pictures. So here's what I think I'm going to do. I'll be sharing some of my pictures on flickr and we'll try and keep those tagged and titled. Maybe the titles will even make sense. Gallery will be used as a backup for iPhoto more or less. I'll place all my pictures there in a big unorganized, title-less clump.
Flickr photos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/somegeekintn/
SGnTN gallery - http://www.somegeekintn.com/gallery/
