Random

Quick post, since I haven’t done this in forever (really need to post on http://mini.budy.org more than here).

Google Chrome is awesome, it has it’s moments of frustration, but honestly what browser doesn’t. It’s so simple, and the Omni bar is so awesome (I often forget how awesome it is until I’m forced to use another browser), that there’s really no reason to use another browser these days.

They semi-recently (read: couple months ago) announced they’d be speeding up their release cycles to get more cool stuff in place, more often. Yah! Cool stuff at a blistering pace! (for software anyway)

I’m kind of curious about the most recent upgrade though (6). They seem to have abandoned some previous conventions without informing anyone…

I had heard they merged the two menus into one (page/tools). So that wasn’t too surprising. The feature that got me was the bookmark bar. Previously I could just press ctrl + b to have it dock to the omni bar or hide. Installed Chrome 6 and…ctrl + b…no bookmarks… I could see the bookmark bar on the new tab page (undocked) but could not for the life of me get it to show up. So I went hunting through the new tools/options stuff and all I could find was the bookmark manager. No new keyboard shortcut references or anything.

So I decided to ask the omni bar what had happened. It took a few tries, but eventually I found some posts describing bookmark bar hide/revel shortcuts for Mac and Linux. Apparently on the different platforms it’s been a different shortcut. One such shortcut was ctrl + shift + b. Hrmm.. does that work for me? Yep. So somewhere in the 6.0 dev process they changed the shortcut, but didn’t tell anyone (that I could find).

Really minor rant, but I hope they can keep these little things fairly consistent moving forward in addition to adding new awesome features. I’d definitely recommend checking it out if you haven’t. Download Google Chrome

I haven’t created a fun little project lately, but I have still been playing.

Lately I’ve been into messing around in Drupal and seeing how quickly I can bring an idea to life.

A week or two ago, I sat down for an evening and cobbled together a tool to replace a real life tool I used. To keep track of all the projects I’m working on, and who’s doing what, I found it easiest to use a white board with post-it notes. There was just something about the simplicity of it. It allowed me to have a snapshot of all the concurrent projects, without overloading my senses and causing me to feel overwhelmed.

I ran into two major issues with my real world solution. It worked great, don’t get me wrong. But it only worked for me when I was in my office. I couldn’t lug my white board around with me. And when I worked abroad for a couple weeks last year, it was painfully obvious how much I missed my board and how I couldn’t remember what was on it. The other issue is that I work with people on a regular basis, and sometimes it’s nice to allow those individuals insight into what’s going on.

Enter ‘Peej’. I have no idea why I decided to call it that. But Peej is my virtual replacement for my physical white board. It allows me to keep track of everything online, just like I did on my real white board. Only now I can see it from anywhere (I even optimized it for my iPhone). And I can share it with people.

Since it contains quasi-sensitive data, I won’t be sharing it publicly. But Here’s a screenshot from my initial design file. It looks a little different in reality, but the basic gist is there. So I’ve been fulfilling my fun/creative self-imposed quota through this project as of late. Oh, and it took me about an evening to pull it all together, theme/data/and all. Then another evening I modified styles for the iPhone. And I’ve slowly been adding to it, now that it’s extensible! :)

Was looking into this the other day with Ian, only to find that there is no native support within Flash for alternate input devices beyond the mouse and keyboard. That really is silly. At this point, with as sophisticated as Flash has become (it can use your dang GPU for hardware rendering!), it certainly seems as we should be able to accept different inputs.

Anyway, a pretty pleasant work-around for Windows users is this nifty free program called JoyToKey, which does exactly what the name implies. It converts your gamepad input signals into keyboard presses. Voila, gamepad support in your Flash games!

Btw, someone started a campaign for gamepad support within Flash late in 2008….doesn’t seem to have won Adobe over at this point, but it’s worth mentioning. And also where I found out about JoyToKey (in the comments).

Well I’m a little behind on my resolution, but not too far yet. So without further adieu, here’s my latest mini-fun Flash project:

I was browsing Gizmodo today and came across this post:

• http://gizmodo.com/5437483/wallpaper-roundup-ringing-in-the-new-year/gallery/

Which showed me this image:

Which inspired me to play around in Flash, and make this:

I hope to play around a lot more this year. I guess you could say I’m making it a “resolution”…

A nice walkthrough of how to get RoR all installed on Ubuntu:

http://www.uhleeka.com/blog/2009/02/ruby-on-rails-ubuntu-810-installing-rails/

Just sitting around tonight. Had some very long nights trying to wrap up some client work for a deadline that was today. Made it though, so all’s well. But my brain is sleepy.

I finished the external parts of the greenhouse today with Akiko. We made a door and added it to the structure. Has a little handle and lock as well (just a latch lock). Also bought some thermometers for the greenhouse. We got two, because they were both cheap. One is classic, white long thermometer with a gauge for the humidity, only 3 bucks. The other was 11 bucks, but is digital and wireless, mmm geeky. It has a base unit and remote unit, so the remote unit is out in the greenhouse and reports wirelessly to the base unit in my house. This one will tell me the time, the indoor temp, the outdoor temp, and the min/max temperatures for both locations and at what time they occurred. So more than just buying it because it was a gadget, I think it will actually be interesting to see how cool the greenhouse gets in the evenings.

I already know I need to buy some weatherstripping to seal up the door we made, if the wind blows there’s a huge draft that comes in around the door. (We used to have some weather stripping but apparently Akiko ‘donated’ it.)

So I tried to make a little time-lapse movie of the greenhouse build, but Windows Movie Maker crashed. I’ll try again tomorrow.

I also saw a nice link to Photoshop brushes on Digg today, and got inspired to at least play with one. Nothing special, but whoomp, here it is:

My blog started as a place for me to rant into the ether my gripes with a company, and it seems I have no shortage of gripes lately. I’ve always hated iTunes, I held off for quite some time in using it. I preferred Microsofts Media Player to iTunes as a lesser of two evils. I later shifted and tried out Media Monkey, which was impressive for it’s ability to help me get the meta data of my mp3 library up to date using Amazon and the like (which was how I did it manually until then). But overall I have yet to use a music player, besides Media Player, that feels like a polished piece of software that will just generally work and give me no hassle.

I was able to hold off so long because my only mobile music player was the Shuffle (the old school one that looks like a pack of bubble gum). I found a Python app that someone built that would allow me to just drag and drop music files onto my device like a USB thumb drive, then run the app and all worked as expected.

Enter the iPhone. I again held off on getting one so as to not be sucked into Apple’s shitpile that is iTunes, and also trying to avoid all the hype around the “amazing”, “game-changing”, “omg” device. But, I finally caved to my desires and was able to get one. I’m now forced to use iTunes. Things have been “usable” for quite a while, but I definitely had lots of issues with iTunes. Here are a few of them:

• slowness – why does it take so long to do anything in iTunes? opening the app, adding songs to the library, updating genius, determining gapless playback, etc.
• whack meta data – why can it only get information/album art for only like 20% of my music? the album art is 9 times out of 10 sitting in the same damn directory because media player put it there…just USE THAT!?
• podcast interface – I hardly ever use this, but when I do actually listen to one in iTunes, I’m absolutely clueless as to exit out of this ridiculous interface and usually end up closing the program to get out of it
• responsiveness – heaven forbid I attempt to do one of the things that causes iTunes to slow down, because if I do iTunes is basically unusable during the entire task, which can often be for 10, 20 minutes while it figures out what the heck it’s doing…or maybe I need to rebuild my computer: ~30 minutes to install Windows, 10+ hours to re-add my iTunes library

I have more issues with iTunes, but those are all that are coming to me at the moment. But the new reason for me to hate iTunes is because I finally installed the latest 8.2 update. They asked me to restart my computer. Ok. I restart, come back and open up iTunes to finally listen to some music and….what does iTunes greet me with? That wonderful circle/exclamation mark next to every one of my songs! Which means it, some how, no longer knows where any of my music is…all 22,000+ songs…oh gee, just what I wanted to do today. I didn’t really want to listen to my music. I just wanted to re-add all of my frickin music back into my library…because iTunes does that so quickly anyway…arghhhhh!

Damn you iTunes!

Update: Ok, so for the record I closed and re-opened iTunes and all my music was accessible again. But I still hate iTunes.

Update 2: I’ve since had to reboot my computer, and now iTunes once again doesn’t know where any of my music is…oh joy…my hatred is still well grounded and intact.

Update 3: Well I think I’ve figured out a stupid work around for when this happens, that just makes iTunes even more annoying. Just do a “Get Info” on any song, and it will actually pull up the proper location of the song, you don’t have to select the song you can just hit cancel. Then close iTunes and reopen it and voila…iTunes magically knows where all my music is again. AAAAAHHHHH….

I don’t know if I’ve ever posted on here about my laptop before, but I’m going to now. About 2 years ago or so I bought a Sony VGN-TZ170N. I was so excited to get this ultra-light laptop, that didn’t really sacrifice anything except graphics (integrated crappy Intel) in it’s small form factor. I was even ok that it had Vista on it at the time. I figured Sony wouldn’t tarnish their name by releasing a high end laptop with Vista if it couldn’t perform well with Vista on it. Little did I know, Sony doesn’t appear to care at all about their image.

This is all a bit late in the game, and so these things are no longer as surprising these days. Vista is now known to be just generally across the board, crap. Sony has long since lost their way, with different divisions unable to communicate with each other clearly and get their act together. They can still make impressive hardware, sometimes, but when they do the software seems to leave you lacking or just down right ruin the experience.

The laptop came from the factory stocked with GIGS of crapware. It was so overwhelming, that the laptop with 2 GB of RAM and a Core 2 Duo were choking under the weight of the all the crapware and Vista on top of that. So I did my best to cope, and uninstalled as much as I could…but it always feels dirty when done this way. But there was no other way, as Sony decided to not give you discs for the OS, etc. They bundled an image of the factory setup on a separate partition, from which you could create a recovery disc…aka return your laptop to the craptastic state it came from the factory.

A number of times I tried to downgrade myself to XP, but finding drivers in the beginning was quite the chore. Later the drivers became available, but I could never get the magic order to install them all correct, so I ended up missing features like Bluetooth one time, or maybe Wi-fi, or optional function keys. So I always reverted back to the craptop, it was less than optimal, but was at least fully functional, albeit crappy.

Then low and behold Sony released some XP downgrade discs. I ordered some (twice by accident), and I got them. I was so excited I could hardly contain myself, my laptop was going to finally run the way it always should have, and all that money I spent on this high-end laptop would not have been in vein. I install disc 1 of 2, going good. I install disc 2 of 2 as requested by the Sony recovery program, and it goes along for a bit then errors out. Telling me something about a Stream reading error or something, aka your laptoppy no work no more. Awesome. I try again, gets further this time, then at the end, craps out again. I try the other set of discs, same issue different time. I then in my frustration try a couple more times with different combinations of the discs and somehow it works! I now have XP on my computer and things are beautiful! It was such a wonder day.

My computer ran as I had hoped it would. I used it for roughly a year, and it was flawless. Fast-forward to last week. Windows 7 RC has been out for a while, and it’s getting pretty good reviews every where. “It’s so much faster.” “Wow, it’s a huge difference from Vista.” “This is what Vista should have been!” Etc, etc. And by this time my laptop is feeling a little sluggish from just the normal usage, registry bloat, rogue programs from a late night wandering the internet, etc. So I decide now would be a great time to try it out, it’s got to be good right? Everyone loves it!

Sorry me of a week ago. Windows 7? Meh… It’s better than Vista, but that’s not saying much. I failed to see any marked difference between Windows 7 and Vista. Sure they’ve cleaned up some areas, they don’t start as much crap when it boots up, etc. It’s got fancy wallpapers, and more pretty skinning abilities…whoo hoo. I’m all for shiny objects, but this is not the amazing revolution I thought I was hearing about with Windows 7. So I barely use it for a week, not because I have no need to use it, but because it’s still frustrating to use. Slow to boot up, slow to shut down, same for the apps I use regularly (Photoshop, Flash, etc.) And my primary workstation still has XP…and feels awesome. So the decision is made to return to XP on the lappy.

Good god…I had forgotten how horrible those damn Sony recovery discs are. I’ve tried literally more than 5 times today to install XP from those discs, with different disc combos, etc. All to no avail. Only this time, every single install attempt makes it to 99% before it craps out..which means I have to way roughly 2 hours for the damn thing to tell me it doesn’t work. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhh!!!?!?! What gives??? Why does this not just work? So now I’m trying to do a self install of a copy of XP I have and see if I can get the magic order or drivers down this time. If not, I guess I’ll give Windows 7 RC another spin…because I sure as hell am not going to subject myself to Vista again if I don’t have to.

Sigh…. if you actually read this thanks for caring about my pain, or sympathizing, or at least finding it interesting. Hope this never happens to you. You can take safe guards against this kind of story by NOT BUYING SONY CRAP. Side note, in Japan some people refer to Sony as ku-Sony, which is a play off of kuso, or shit. They also talk about how Sony products have a 1 year timer on them, and that after a year they turn to garbage. I’m finally starting to buy into this logic. I’m almost as frustrated with Microsoft, but there are still a couple straws holding them up for me right now. Mainly that XP still exists, and my lively-hood is made off of apps that work in Windows…although they do also work on a Mac…

As usual, it’s been a long time. I’ve been pretty busy, but it’s been a nice kind of busy. I started my own web development shop, Heavy Robot, at the beginning of 2009 and have been doing nicely. I’m very much enjoying running my own shop. I’ve also had a couple vacations, my sister had a baby, my parents got a house in Florida, etc. etc.

One nifty thing about not using this blog for a while is I can simply compare the version of WordPress that I’m using here to the latest versions I’m using elsewhere. Wow, I knew it had changed, but seeing the old layout again is crazy. The latest 2.7.1 WordPress is leaps and bounds above the old one as far as UI goes.

In other news Heavy Robot just released Heavy Mural (what else would we call it? ;) ). The gist behind it is it lets you upload images and it will convert them into step by step instructions to create a post-it note wall mural. People are pointing out that it can be used to create any type of pixel based art though, like paint-by-numbers style, magnetic pixels, fuse beads, etc. It was a blast to create, and has been amazing to hear peoples responses to it.

That’s the update for now!