by Peter Seibel
-- A fantastic collection of interviews with 15 famous programmers. Contains some great history and insights on the field of "computer science."
-- Geeks, drugs, and deception. An entertaining look into the (fictional) lives of techno con artists, and how a recently-fired comic book artist get pulled into their inner circle.
"
-- Particularly useful reference when trying to eek out a few extra milliseconds of load times in older browsers.
-- Interesting tech, and somewhat engaging, but disappointing ending (or lack thereof.)
, by Neil Strauss
-- An engaging, first-person account on transforming from an urban writer into "Jason Bourne."
, by Cory Doctrow
-- A high school hacker fights the 'Department of Homeland Security' to reclaim American civil liberties after anti-terror tactics are taken to a new level.
-- Techniques-for, and the value-of sketching interactivity before developing products. Good ideas. OK book.
" -- About finding untapped opportunities in your market and repositioning yourself to capitalize on them. Easy to grasp; Longer then it needed to be.
" -- A thin book with some good best-practices, but a little disappointing. Perhaps it's JavaScript's fault, not the author's ;-)
" -- Good overview of usability issues in designing HTML forms, backed by examples and eye-tracking research. I bought the digital edition, which was slightly cheaper. (You can use code: WFDDE to get an extra 10% off any purchase on the publisher's site.)
" by Marshall Goldsmith
-- Discusses interpersonal skills (and how to identify and fix them) that most commonly hold executives back in their career advancement.
"
-- Lesson: Cut the corporate B.S. and stop wasting your time. Focus only on what matters most.
"
-- Lessons on handling tough conversations: firing people, relationship problems, hostage negotiations (well, maybe not that last one.) Wasn't an exciting read, but I've been paying more attention to "turning points" in conversations since reading it.
"
-- Lessons in building reusable ("pluggable") Django applications. Assumes you know the basics of Django and Python.
"
-- I really enjoyed this one. Lots of suggestions and strategies for negotiating.
The PNGs you want are in: /Applications/DEVONthink Pro.app/Contents/PlugIns/SorterPlugin.bundle/Contents/MacOS/DEVONthink Sorter.app/Contents/Resources
I found the default text distracting, so mine are now a simple gray tab.
(Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for Together.app, which only lets you edit the bounding box edges. The text appears to be drawn by the app [or, at least, doesn't seem to be a bitmap in Resources.])
There’s a lesson in there that I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.
Just the other day I had a friend mention a desire to scrape tour schedules in MySpace so that he can find out when artists he’s interested in are in town. (He eventually decided it was too much hassle and would like someone else to do it, which is why I’m able to mention it here.) It’s a cool idea, though the OnTour Dashboard Widget takes it to perhaps another level.
The Widget monitors tour information in OnTour.net and compares it to the music you have in your iTunes library. The downside being, of course, that you have to hit F12 to get a notification. But otherwise, the interaction model is perfect — meaning that you don’t need to change your behavior at all, yet you gain new value and information. Brilliant.
(Via Lifehacker)
Since no Apple product should go without an online documentary of it’s unboxing process, I present to you, <voice type=”monster truck rally”>The Amazing Unboxing of the Apple Battery Recall Replacement Battery!</voice>
Not quite as sexy as an iPod.
Admittedly, this is perhaps more of an interesting trick rather then a needed feature; However, if you’ve ever wanted to print man pages or simply read them in a nice, anti-aliased document view instead of within the Terminal, here’s a tip you might like. The following bash script (and credit goes 100% to my friend Victor, who is sans-blog) will format and open man pages in Preview:
#!/bin/bash
cmd=$1
if [ -z $cmd ]; then
me=`basename $0`;
echo "Usage: $me command_name";
exit;
fi
man $1 > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "No man page for $cmd";
exit;
fi
man -t $cmd|open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app
On my box, I called the script ‘manpreview’ and dropped it in ~/bin/ for easy access. Once you `chmod u+x` it (and have ~/bin/ in your path), you’ll be able to do fun things like `manpreview tcpdump` for some extended reading.
Earlier this week I was looking for a nice HTML editor for Eclipse to help ease life when using PyDev with a Django project. I didn’t have much luck, other then finding a few syntax coloring tools that were HTML aware. That changed today when I found Aptana: The Web IDE. It’s a free, open source IDE for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, built on Eclipse (available as a stand-alone application, or an Eclipse plugin) that offers target-browser aware code assist and syntax checking. The site includes some great screencasts to demo the product (and an interesting use of a .tv domain name.)
Though it’s officially unsupported on Eclipse 3.2 (they only support 3.1), it seems to work just fine in my environment.
(Via eHub)
[Minor update: Aptana ran fine on my OS X machine, but crashes hard on my AMD64 Ubuntu Dapper box running Eclipse 3.2.]
I was mucking around with the keymap on my Linux box last night, trying to make it feel a little more comfortable. I’m using an Apple Pro keyboard (I like them, and they’re cheap), which has the control key in the far, lower left corner. On OS X this normally isn’t an issue since the Command key is used more often; However, under X, Control is the primary modifier, and you start to notice how much of a stretch that key is for the pinky. I played around with a few settings, but I eventually I settled on swapping the control and caps lock keys, so that control is now to the left of ‘A’. I quickly realized why so many people use this setup — it really is less stressful on the hands.
It took a little brain rewiring to get used to this new setup, but I became comfortable with it rather quickly — that is, until I got to work in the morning and sat down at my OS X machine. Bouncing between machines with different keymaps is a pain, so I decided to try remapping the keys on my Mac as well. A few google searches found a number of kernel hacks for 10.1 through 10.3, but I noticed that they all seemed to be abandoned projects. After adding “10.4″ to my search query, I quickly found out why: remapping the control keys is just a System Preference. Woo hoo!
The screenshot below shows the “Modifier Key…” dialog within the “Keyboard & Mouse” System Preference panel:
I picked up my trusty Dual 450 Mhz G4 Power Mac (Gigabit Ethernet) almost six years ago. At the time, this was a beefy machine, and even today it is still quite usable (though it shows it’s age when running heavy applications like Photoshop, Firefox, and Eclipse.) To keep up with changing demands, most of the components have been swapped: An OEM Apple GeForce4 Ti video card drives the Cinema Display (the original video card couldn’t handle it, much to my disappointment when I bought the monitor); The CD drive has been replaced with a Sony dual-layer DVD burner; A newer IDE controller card was added to handle larger internal drives (the original hardware could only see up to ~120′GB’ish); M-Audio hardware is used for audio capture; And a Sonnet RAID controller card drives the hot-swappable, 1.2TB RAID array (using SATA drives.)
All together, this box serves quite well as an A/V machine, so I’m not looking to get rid of it (especially since the new X86 PowerMacs are still vaporware.) However, the RAID backplane didn’t actually fit in the Apple case (as you’ll see below), and the lone 120mm case fan was starting to ask for help. Since Apple doesn’t offer larger cases, a swap to a full size ATX case was in order.
The Gigabit Ethernet Macs pre-date the elaborate case internals and “cooling zones” that the new G5’s have. Inside, the hardware is organized just like any other PC, so while I didn’t anticipate a perfectly smooth transfer, I had no doubt that the pieces could be made to fit into a modern ATX case. To give me some extra room, I went with the rather large, ThermalTake Armor case.
The new case towers over the Apple box, but it’s extremely easy to work with, and provides plenty of options for mounting hardware and fans. The entire front is a stack of 5 1/2″ bays, which leave plenty of choices for mounting the RAID backplane, the internal drive cage, and case fans.
The stripped Armor case next to the G4. (And yes, that’s really where the RAID backplane was “mounted” — I simply ran the SATA and power cables through an empty PCI slot to the chassis up above. Don’t do this at home kids!)
The Apple case popped open. You get a better view of the SATA cables here, and the limited space for hardware expansion. (NOTE: The boot drive is actually under the DVD burner now, in the space where the ZIP drive was mounted originally. I used to have a stack of drive sitting in the bottom of the case, but with the RAID, they were no longer needed.)
Before getting too far into the swap, I pulled the Apple motherboard and video card for a test-fit (show below.) The Apple motherboard lined up with one existing mounting hole, but otherwise, clearance and fit were tolerable.
The Apple power supply was probably the only OEM part that just dropped in:
Next up was a test fit that the cables would still reach, and thankfully they did:
To mount the motherboard, I needed new holes for the board stand-offs. This was a simple chore for a Sharpie marker and a Bosch hammer-drill; However, before swiss-cheesing the case, I did have to decide how the stand-offs would actually attach to said holes. Normally the holes are threaded, and the stand-offs just screw-in; So my first inclination was to tap the holes after drilling. After considering how much time I’d waste doing this, I came up with an alternate plan. Instead of tapping the holes, I would simply make the holes just big enough for the threaded stand-offs to fit through, then attach a small nut from the other side to hold the piece in place. This saved a lot of time, and the result is just as sturdy. (Unfortunately, the macro focus mode on my N90 isn’t quite as good as I’d like, so the close-up pictures of this mount didn’t come out well enough to show.)
With the motherboard secure, the next piece of the puzzle was how to mount the processor board to motherboard. On the dual G4, the processors are actually on a small board with a ZIF-like connector on the back. With the connector snug, the processor board is then bolted to steel case-mounts that poke through the actual motherboard, and the aluminum cooling fins are hung off this little board. Without a hard mount, there would be no way to hang the cooling fins, so I needed a solution for this mount.
In the picture below, you’ll see the processor board mounts sticking up in the middle of the steel side I’m holding. This piece is attached to the plastic exterior with a series of hex bolts.
After examining the original case, I noticed that the processor mounting holes were steel bits that were pressed into the side of the case. It occurred to me that if I could pull those out, I could reuse them. The extraction was quite simple: support the steel backing with some wood, and nicely ask the mounts to come out with a 5-pound mallet. They pop right out, and I was able to reuse them in the new case.
With the motherboard and processors secure, the rest was simple wiring. I put the drive cage and boot drive behind a 120mm fan up front; The DVD burner was mounted low in the case so that my cables would reach; And the RAID backplane slide right in up top.
After double-checking every mount and connection, I brought the machine back into the office for a test run. On boot-up, I was greeted with a never-before-seen startup screen:
…the machine just hung there.
I’ve been mucking around with Apple hardware since I was about 9 years old, so seeing a new boot-up error screen is both exciting and a bit concerning. Since I had a feeling the hardware was just feeling like a lost kitten in a new home, I went with the easy potential fix and zapped the PRAM. It did the trick. (Though I still don’t know what that error means.)
The finished product not only adds a little bling to an otherwise dated machine, but also pumps a pleasantly cool breeze from the back of the case. There’s still a little finishing work left to do, but overall I’m extremely happy with the outcome — and the confusion it causes for the casual observer.
Phase I complete: The ATX case swap was a success:
The remaining empty shell:
I’ve been using TextMate to write my blog posts for quite some time now. I enjoy the convenience of MarsEdit, but TextMate lies in the center of my GTD process, and it’s such a nice text editor that I hate to leave it. Of course, actually making blog posts has required a little copy/paste action to my web CMS, but not anymore — TextMate now has a Blogging Bundle! Check out the screencast to see it in action. (And yes, this post was made directly from TextMate ;-)
Google SketchUp for OS X finally released to the public this week (as did Google Earth Beta 4 for OS X, Linux, and Windows, in case you missed it.) If you’re not familiar with SketchUp, but are at least remotely interested in 3D modeling, I suggest hoping over to the Google SketchUp Tutorials and having a peek. The first few tutorials elicit a jaw-dropping “it can’t be that easy” reaction.
On first glance, Google offering a 3D modeling program seems a bit strange. I mean, what could this possibly have to do with search, right? But the key is to look at it differently. If you’ve used Google Earth, odds are high that you’ve also tried looking a major city with the “3D Buildings” option enabled for that all too futuristic, flying-through-the-world experience. But what you notice when you do this is that there aren’t enough 3D models, and they tend to lack detail. So how do we get from flat, satellite photographs to rich 3D models of every building in the world? Well, you start by giving away a free, easy to use 3D modeling program that can import/export into Google Earth… And then you let your customers (happily) do the work for you. (Co-creation at it’s best.)
For more, see:
Below: an example SketchUp model (of the University of Texas tower) geo-positioned over a Google Earth map tile
If you’re a TextMate junkie, check out this “TextMate Tricks” post on the Macromates blog about the “Edit in TextMate” input manager for your Cocoa apps (like Mail.app and Safari.) Very, very handy!
I’ve been traveling a bit this week, which means I’ve also been accessing the net on untrusted networks. For general web surfing this doesn’t both me, but when it comes to editing my blogs or accessing any web service that doesn’t authenticate over SSL, I’d feel better if I knew my passwords weren’t floating past some coffee shop’s network admin in clear text. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution: SSH tunneling.
There’s plenty of information online that describes how SSH tunneling works and how to set it up, but not surprisingly, you have to do a bit of Googling to actually find concise, step-by-step instructions that actually work. So here we go: Erik’s Three-Step Plan for Looking Like You Know What You’re Doing SSH Tunneling. (For the record, I’m using a PowerBook running OS X, tunneling to a server running Ubuntu Linux.)
[STEP 1] On the remote server I’m running Privoxy (an HTTP proxy.) On a Debian/Ubuntu box, getting Prixovy running is as complicated as typing: sudo apt-get install privoxy
[STEP 2] Assuming you can SSH into your remote server (ie., no firewall blockage), launch Terminal.app and issue something like this: ssh -N -L 8118:127.0.0.1:8118 remoteuser@serveraddress (changing “remoteuser” and “serveraddress” appropriately.) Using the -N flag you’ll still need to authenticate with the server, but you won’t actually get a command prompt — the window will just look like nothing’s happening.
[STEP 3] Tell your browser to use a proxy for HTTP and HTTPS running at 127.0.0.1 on port 8118.
You’re done! You can now hit WhatIsMyIP to see it working.
Of course, just like other three-step programs, there’s a little fine print and few extra details that might help to know:
Happy Surfing!
I hope this isn’t a late April Fool’s joke, because it seems Apple has decided to officially support dual-boot on Apple hardware. It’s too late for them to collect the bounty, but Apple’s Boot Camp allows XP to run natively on Apple Intel hardware. The page also mentions that Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) will include this capability as a supported feature.
A friend sent me this link today: “Xcode Plugin for Symbian OS.” I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s the most promising OS X development solution for native Symbian apps that I’ve seen.
Here’s a great example of using a corporate blog to explain an unfortunate product decision to customers, “Living Photoshop: Macintosh and the Intel switch“.
The blogger, Scott Byer, is explaining why Adobe isn’t going to release a MacIntel version of CS2 — the summary being that transitioning their entire development over to XCode wasn’t feasible for CS2. It’s what Adobe’s Mac customers need to hear (that there’s a significant technical hurdle which didn’t make sense for a product currently in the market), but it’s not the kind of thing that a press release can explain. In other words, it’s important information, but without bloggers, there’s no clear channel for how to communicate this stuff.
It’s also of note that the comments list (the conversation) stretches far beyond the length of the original post. The customer feedback is mixed — ranging from “You guys suck, I spent $1000 on this software!”, to “Yeah, I understand the challenge first hand. Thanks for the explanation.”
After complaining quietly about the lack of upgrade-pricing for the new Apple iWork, I finally decided that if the new release runs faster then the current one it would be worth the upgrade. (For reference, I can type faster then Pages can display text on a 1.33 Ghz G4 PowerBook — and I’m not that fast a typist.) So I hit apple.com and placed an order.
The iWork package got here in a few days (inside a gigantic box with a bunch of that “packaged air” stuff), and I finally got around to starting the installation yesterday. I popped the CD in the PowerBook, and… the PowerBook spit it right back out. In again… ejected again. WTF? Third time’s a charm, and the CD finally mounted. I kicked off the installer… and the machine locked up. Wonderful. After ten to fifteen minutes of grinding noises from the CD drive, the OS recovered and I ejected the disk. Not one to give up easily, I rebooted the machine and make sure no apps were running before trying again. This time the CD mounted and I was able to launch the installer. However, shortly past the “100% Complete” mark, the installer popped-up an Error message and suggested I re-try. I did, with the same result.
At this point I assumed the media was bad, so over lunch I dropped by the local Apple Store. This, of course, was a mistake. Surprisingly enough, I was the only person at the Genius Bar when I was asked if I had a reservation. “No.” “Well, you can use the computers behind you to book a time-slot.” The next one free was four hours from now. “Since we’re both here, can I just ask a question?”, I ask. “Well, most questions turn out to be complicated.. but I guess. What’s the problem?” I explain the situation. “Hmm.. where did you buy this?” she asks. “Apple.com”, I say. “Oh, well we can’t help you then. We can only help if you bought the software from us. You need to call AppleCare.” I had a feeling this was going to be the answer, so I’ll just put this next line in bold for those skimming the article: You can’t get support at the Apple Store for Apple software bought from Apple.com.
Since I have a serial number and only need the installers, I did ponder just looking for a torrent, but I figured that having working media was a reasonable expectation after dropping 80 bucks for this software, so I went ahead and gave AppleCare a call. The AppleCare tech support guy was a bit more friendly, and thankfully we got it working. No need for a fancy story, but I wanted to point out the steps in case someone else needs them in the future:
/Library/Receipts/ and delete the pkg files for the app in case they’re corrupt. (In this case, the file is iWork.pkg.)/Applications/).~/Preference/./Applications/Utilities/.)When installing from the disk image, my installation completed and the apps now work. No idea what the problem was (it could have been corrupt files from the first install attempt.. it could have been a CD read error), but it’s solved now.
Last week, the boot drive on my PowerMac (an old, 450Mhz G4 DP) finally decided that it’s time was up. Not bad considering the machine is something like 5 years old; But still, losing a drive isn’t a good thing if you’re not one to make regular backups.
The first symptom I noticed was that the machine was starting to use the “spinning beach ball” much more then normal and I was seeing some unusual delays working with local files. Thankfully, SMARTReporter quickly alerted me to the problem — the drive was dying. I started running SMARTReporter on both my machines a few months back. For awhile it seemed a little silly having a menu-bar icon for something that was unlikely to be a problem for many years. Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t change my mind about the importance of such a utility. I’m also a little surprised that OS X doesn’t notify about S.M.A.R.T. warnings unless you fire up Disk Utility. It seems like an easy enough thing for the OS to monitor, but I guess it isn’t a big deal as long as there are free utilities to do it.
Of course, knowing that a drive is failing is only useful if you’re prepared to do something about it. Thankfully I had another old drive in the parts bin, which I dropped into a Firewire enclosure and mounted. Backing up the home directories was priority number one, so I used Apple’s ditto command to mirror them. (Note: ditto is a command-line tool that ships with OS X. See man ditto for more.) With the home directories safe, I put the machine to sleep to buy some time while I picked up a new drive.
With a replacement drive in-hand, I dropped it into the Firewire case, mounted it, initialized it with Disk Utility, and fired up Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC). CCC is a disk mirroring utility that can create a bootable drive. There were a few errors along the way, but CCC was able to mirror the old boot drive onto the new one. With the cloning complete, I opened the case, swapped the old drive for the new, and rebooted. Presto! A few apps (like Quicksilver) were upset with the change, but for the most part, everything works just fine on the cloned system. And to top it off, since finding 30 GB drives isn’t easy anymore, I now have *much* more space on the boot drive!
So far I’ve only read one account of this, but it seems a number of people are pointing at the news. The articles, “Sony’s DRM now for Macs too” and “Sony Music CD’s Contain Mac DRM Software Too” both point to this URL: http://www.macintouch.com/#tip.2005.11.10.sony, which has this to say:
“I was surprised to find a ‘Start.app’ Mac application in addition to the expected Windows-related files. Running this app brings up a long legal agreement, clicking Continue prompts you for your username/password (uh-oh!), and then promptly exits. Digging around a bit, I find that Start.app actually installs 2 files: PhoenixNub1.kext and PhoenixNub12.kext.”
Those kext files are Kernel Extensions… and you do not need kernel extensions to play a music CD ;-) We’ll have to wait until someone does some poking around to find out what exactly those extensions do… and if they’re exploitable rootkits like Sony is using on Windows.
Way to treat your customers Sony!
Oh, I guess I should mention this too.. If you put a music CD into your Mac and it asks for an admin password — cancel, and HIT THE EJECT BUTTON! Take the CD back where you bought it and ask for your money back.
I love this! Macromates is now offering an RSS feed for the TextMate changelog that includes a link to the latest build as an enclosure! I’ve read about this idea many times, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen it used for a piece of software I use. Thanks Macromates!
I know this made slashdot, so it isn’t new news; However, it’s significant enough to take note: Today only, Opera is giving away free license keys to it’s desktop browser!! (It’s normally ~$40.) If you’re a web developer and don’t own Opera, this is a chance to add a new tool to the toolbox. Plus, since the desktop browser includes a “small screen” mode, you can get an idea of what your web sites will look like on a mobile phone — a fantastic feature!