Sam Souder

A quick video showing some of the honey harvesting process from...

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:12:00 -0500

A quick video showing some of the honey harvesting process from Wendall’s Fall crop.

Pencil Tip Micro Sculptures By Dalton Ghetti

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:18:42 -0500

Pencil Tip Micro Sculptures By Dalton Ghetti:

Simply amazing. Taking months to complete a tiny sculpture like this surely makes you appreciate both the craft and the result.

Yes, Adobe Illustrator, because 4GB of RAM is not nearly enough...

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:53:00 -0500

Yes, Adobe Illustrator, because 4GB of RAM is not nearly enough to export a PNG slice 600px X 600px.

Silly GlimmerBlocker

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:02:00 -0600

Why does GlimmerBlocker’s Sparkle-based updater have a fake Apple menu?

Bluetooth Proximity Detection

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:01:36 -0600

Today Ben asked me to help him get Bluetooth proximity detection scripts working for him so his MacBook would activate the Screen Saver (and require a password to get back in) when he left his desk and to deactivate the Screen Saver upon his return (without having to manually enter his password).

He found a nice blog entry describing how to get it set up, so I made up a git repository with the scripts and the needed C program to notify the loginwindow process that you changed a user preference for the Screen Saver.

So, how do you work this thing!?

You will need the Proximity application and to download the repo from github. Then just follow the README file and point Proximity to the scripts you downloaded.

Enjoy, thanks a lot to Jesse Hollington for figuring this stuff out!

BitLeap Acquired

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:01:34 -0600

So, things are staying busy as usual. The boys are doing well and getting big! Work has been a bit hectic as we were acquired by Barracuda Networks. It’s been exciting but fast. It is definitely good news for the customers as we will have more resources to both do fixes and push new features.

So we will see how things go and if they calm down soon :)

Office Hostages

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:01:30 -0600

We had some fun last week while the bosses were out of the office for a few days.

Let’s just say that we have lots of old backup tapes, a chair, a willing office-mate, a camera, a flash (with grid), and too much time on a Friday afternoon.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget the duct tape. Never forget the duct tape!

Go see the aftermath on Flickr.

Craigslist Crazy

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:01:27 -0600

I am selling a ton of infrequently used things on Craigslist to finance my new camera purchase. There is a lot of good stuff, especially for musicians, photogs and geeks.

Go ahead, make me an offer, punk.

UPDATE: My new camera has arrived, so I have put my Nikon D50 Outfit up for sale too. Also, I forgot I had a set of triggers for flashes that I don’t require anymore.

For Geeks

iGo Juice70 Computer Power Adapter Set with Travel Bag 780310892
Hynix 1GB DDR2 PC2-5300 Notebook SO-DIMM RAM (2 x 512MB) 780309879

For Paintball Nerds

~~Kingman Spyder TL-R Paintball Marker with 2 CO2 Tanks, Java Mask, Case 780308929~~

For Photogs

~~Hähnel HN-D50 Battery Grip for Nikon D50 with Battery 780306382~~
~~Nikon D50 DSLR Outfit with Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S DX ED Zoom Lens 789569510~~
~~4-Channel Wireless Radio Trigger Transmitter/Receiver Set 789581412~~
~~Tamrac 5510 Explorer 10 Digital SLR Camera Bag 780303348~~
~~Lowepro Lens Case 2 (Black) 780301935~~

For Musicians

Midiman/M-Audio Oxygen8 Midi Keyboard and Controller 780299625
Line 6 POD 2.0 Guitar Effects Processor/Amp Simulator 780298420
Ibanez GAX70 Transparent Red Electric Guitar 780017164

Daring Fireball's TitleCase Ruby Conversion

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:01:24 -0600

Update: Welcome fellow Daring Fireball readers. If you wish to get right to the actual code, feel free to skip to it.

I recently took up the challenge from John Gruber and Dan Benjamin to port John’s TitleCase.pl Perl script to an equivalent Ruby version. It seemed to me that converting someone’s script to another language would be a fun experiment to help learn any language. I was right.

I set up a git repository at GitHub.

I decided to write an extension to the String class in Ruby, as that would allow you to use this String#titlecase method anywhere and you could therefore write a standard input processing script trivially with this library included via a gem. Writing the extension also gave me a great excuse to learn more about RSpec, a nice Ruby testing library. I wrote the tests in RSpec, but I admit my tests were a quick hack to get them working at 3 in the morning, not good spec tests. Maybe someday I will convert them into real sentences of intent, as they should be. Either way, it was fun to try out Test Driven Development, and using the autotest function of the ZenTest gem to watch the tests start to pass as the script came along.

So after a few hours of learning about RSpec, ZenTest, all the tests from Gruber pass, even the one he lists as not working with his script. I took a different approach in how to process the titles, so there are not as many gotchas to fix up after processing either.

If you find it useful, let me know. And of course, fork the repo and send back some more test examples and any bugs you find.

P.S. Daniel also converted my Ruby version to PHP. We are going to use it at BitLeap for various things. He had also said about seeing about making a WordPress plugin out of it. So, I will prod Daniel to see if he will setup a public repository for it.

BitLeap Cap Tower Destruction

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:01:20 -0600

We destroyed the cap tower in our old office at work. It was great, Andy gave it a good swat with a wiffle ball bat. I put together a video so you can see it in slow-motion too. Check out the video on the BitLeap Blog.

Update: And BitLeap has decided to do a free contest: Whoever comes closest to guessing the number of caps that make up the tower by February 1st, gets a $50 gift card to either Amazon, Starbucks, Apple or Barnes

Coloring in Reggy

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:01:17 -0600

So, I have already seen a few people not entirely happy with the way I implementing coloring of groups in the newest Reggy release. I figured I would just give my view of what I did and why.

My goal with Reggy from the beginning was to be simple and not look like junk. There are many other regular expression testers out there. If you like them, use them. I happen to think many of them look like dirt. Reggy may not be gorgeous, but it’s certainly not dirt either.

The first implementation of coloring was actually by a volunteer (Justin Bakse) who was nice enough to pass the code back to me to look over. It was a good start for sure. But it used an implementation that I just don’t want —- for simplicity’s sake: you pick X amount of colors, then for each match the code picks one of the colors, then the next and so on, repeating. This is visually distinctive if you pick a bunch of crazy colors, but I am still thinking that picking 10 colors in the preferences is not the Mac experience I want to provide for people.

My implementation looks like this:

// Add new color to matched ranges
bool countUp = YES;
float r,g,b,a;
[[NSUnarchiver unarchiveObjectWithData:[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] objectForKey:@"match_color"]] getRed:&r green:&g blue:&b alpha:&a];
for ( unsigned int i = 0; i < [matchedRanges count]; i++ )
{
    NSRange thisRange = NSRangeFromString([matchedRanges objectAtIndex:i]);

    // Generate new color from base color
    if ( i > 0 && [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] boolForKey:@"color_submatches"] )
    {
        if ( r > 0.8 || g > 0.8 || b > 0.8 ) countUp = NO;
        if ( r < 0.0 || g < 0.0 || b < 0.0 ) countUp = YES;

        if ( countUp ) { r += 0.2; g += 0.2; b += 0.2; } else { r -= 0.2; g -= 0.2; b -= 0.2; }
    }

    [[testingStringField textStorage] addAttribute:NSForegroundColorAttributeName value:[NSColor colorWithCalibratedRed:r green:g blue:b alpha:a] range:thisRange];
}

Pretty simple I think. Get the color components of the match string color preference (r, g, b, a). Then for every match other than the first match, increment each RGB component by 20% (this is a 0 to 1 scale) or decrement depending on the component values. I came out with 0.8 as a maximum value by just testing a bunch of different match colors and found 0.8 to be around the acceptable range of readability against a white background for most colors. The increment or decrement step value of 0.2 was another value I just played around with until there was a good balance between having each color step look different, yet still provide a small enough value so as to allow as many steps as possible between 0 and 1.

If anyone has a more elegant solution, please propose it. I am not a genius, I just know what I like. And I don’t like having to pick a bunch of colors. I like the simplicity of using one color with differing brightness as it still seems that the user has control over the coloring, but maybe I could go for a color generation scheme that is based on color theories like complements or triads. Or maybe I am the only one that is this picky?

Reggy 1.3 Is Out, Get It!

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:01:12 -0600

I pushed out a new version of Reggy this morning.

Release Notes:

added preference to apply sub-match/capture group coloring: each match or capture group gets a slightly different shade of color —- especially nice for nesting matches
added preference to automatically use the clipboard contents on startup for the regular expression and/or the testing string
added menu items to paste the clipboard directly into either the regular expression (Command Shift V) or the testing string (Command Option V)
added a new and improved Reggy icon (Leopard Compatible/Resolution Independent)
added help link for regular expression syntax preference (goes to wikipedia)
updated regular expression engine
simplified preferences window

Thanks should go to Steve Huff at the Harvard-MIT Data Center for requesting the startup clipboard preferences. It was a great idea that, along with the menu items to quickly paste into the fields, many people will be happy to see.

So anyways, Leopard’s icon size is big, and I mean big:

I had to redraw the icon this morning because the clipping icon I was using was swiped from Tiger. I figured it would probably be proper of me to not steal the clipping icon.

I am really excited to get onto developing a Leopard-only 2.0 version. I am starting to read through the new documentation now. Let me just say thank you to Apple for making developing stuff like Reggy fun and easy.

The Adobe Updater Is My New Favorite App...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:01:09 -0600

TO HATE.

Those who use the newest of Adobe’s Creative Suites on old hardware (a 1Ghz PowerBook G4 for me) can sympathize I am sure.

My laptop is getting old, yes I know. But Adobe, your updater application slows my computer down more than Photoshop and Illustrator do! Now, I am kind of used to slow these days, so I normally wouldn’t complain too much if it weren’t for the craziness I witnessed this afternoon after rebooting from the latest system updates from Apple.

I was never happy with Adobe Updater, so I normally tell it to go away when it does come up. Given that, I had an update to install — Acrobat 8.1 Update. Fine, I just restarted, so I’ll let it go through before I start back on my work.

Maybe not a good idea.

Steps to update Acrobat 8 Professional

Hit update on the Adobe Updater. (My CPU and HD will now be pegged for the install, Okay I am used to that.)
Waiting about 10-15 minutes…
The install is seemingly 90% completed or so. Now a dialog comes up that says some items need “repaired”. Items like the Safari PDF Plugin, eww, no thanks — too slow. So I uncheck that and let it go to town “repairing the PDF Printer”.
Woops, I see a dialog that says “Wait For App Shutdown Title” — “Please click OK when other apps have stopped” with both Cancel and OK buttons. What? Wait a moment, wait for what app to stop? The updater? Because that’s the only app really running in the Dock. Confused, I click OK.

It returns. I click OK, again… I see a pattern emerging here.

After a few bouts of click madness just for fun, I click Cancel. I have no idea what that means. The dialog doesn’t read well obviously. Cancel could mean destroy the computer immediately for all I know.

But then it works. Five minutes later, I am greeted with this screen:
Looking at Acrobat’s information in Finder it is indeed updated to 8.1.0.

Utterly slow, confusing and just plain bad Adobe, for-shame.

UPDATE: Looks like Gus Mueller loves the updater too. Thanks for the links Daniel.

Reggy Screenshots

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:01:02 -0600

I just made a small upgrade on Reggy’s website for those of you who haven’t used Reggy.

Screenshots

Enjoy

Reggy v1.2 Is Ready for You

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:00:57 -0600

Are you ready for it?

So, now we have an appcast for you to follow on the new Reggy website. Did some last minute tweaks to make me happy and now it is up on the servers, so go get it!

What changed?

added user preferences
- matched string highlight color
- regular expression options
- regular expression syntax
- check for automatic updates
added automatic updates using the Sparkle framework

I hope you like the update. As always, feel free to file bug reports and feature requests on the issue tracker.

I plan on posting a bit of what I see for the future of Reggy soon for those who may be interested.

Reggy's New Website

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:00:30 -0600

Reggy has a new home… reggyapp.com

I needed a site to host some things on to do Sparkle integration, so I went ahead and purchased the domain name to host with.

At some point I hope to do a real website with feeds and such, but for now it gives some information and links to places where Reggy can be seen and/or downloaded.

One of the real benefits of having this site is that hopefully you will be able to check just one place for updates to Reggy in the future.

Update on Reggy Development

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:00:25 -0600

Thanks to a few noble users, Reggy’s Bug Tracker is getting use. Most of the issues are feature requests and I am slowly getting time to get to them.

I already have preferences going. Here are a few screenshots to give you an idea of where it’s going:

Hopefully that will help some people out.

I am not going to release 1.2 until I get Sparkle going for automatic application updates. It looks like that will happen hopefully within this week or next.

Reggy v1.1 Is Out.

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:00:21 -0600

I just pushed a new version of Reggy (my little open-source project for visually matching regular expressions). Version 1.1 adds much-needed AppleScript support and the ability to change the font and font size.

Enabling AppleScript support shouldn’t be as hard as it is to grasp I think. It took a few nights fiddling around before it started working all the time for me :)

There is one known issue that I allowed to slip through concerning the AppleScript support: If you change the checkbox values for matching certain criteria, the UI doesn’t update the checkbox properly. The program gets the change properly and matches accordingly, but it’s as if the UI doesn’t see the change. Note that I am using bindings for the checkboxes so I figure this should be working. Anyone with expertise in AppleScript, please help!

Speaking of Hosting

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:00:16 -0600

So yesterday evening/this morning when I was being frustrated by my Rails app seemingly being killed by DreamHost’s watchdog process killer, I stumbled over a company doing VPS hosting called slicehost.

Slicehost’s service is pretty neat in that you can setup a virtualized linux box in minutes. And you get full control over the entire box, they just give you a control panel to access functions like restarting and rebuilding the box. So there are ups and downs… If you don’t want to be a linux admin, they probably aren’t for you. But, if you don’t mind learning some very useful information, you can run your own box for as little as $20/month with no contract!

They add servers as they get customers to fill them, so I have to wait until next week to try it out, but I am excited to dive in and see what kind of performance it has. I am only going to test out the 256MB slice for now. I hear that 256MB is good enough for a couple hardworking Mongrel processes. Plus, I really want to make a server that can do whatever I want with (insert crazy-man laugh here).

First Post and Hosting Fun

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:00:11 -0600

So here is my first post running the spectacular Typo blog Rails app. Typo seems pretty cool so far. I love the admin interface: simple, elegant, yet flexible.

So how am I running a Rails application on 1and1 hosting? I’m not. My free preview account from 1and1 (which was just fine for PHP) expires on the 31st of January, so I had to switch hosts. I also had a domain registered through them (samandjanali.com), so I had to move that as well. Who did I decide to move to?

DreamHost.

They have some very good pricing and seemingly unending amounts of storage and bandwidth for your hosting plan (they increase every week indefinitely). They said they hosted Rails and let you install new Gems too, so I signed up.!

Yeah, not smart. I should have done more questioning and research.

They are using Apache/FastCGI, which isn’t bad really, but there is something that makes me not like DreamHost right now. They have some kind of watchdog process that seemingly randomly kills my dispatch.fcgi processes! Not to mention that their protocol for restarting a Rails app is kill -9‘ing any ruby dispatch.fcgi process :)

Support has been very good with DreamHost so far, so we’ll see if they have any solution for the killing my processes thing (resulting in very bad Internal Server Error 500 errors once and awhile). Hopefully they can resolve the issues and everything will be fine and dandy. I am really not in the mood to change hosting again.