authenticgeek

Blogging on the Grid

2007-03-01T17:34:29Z

The only thing holding me back from upgrading to MediaTemple's grid service (from the deprecated shared-server) was that the price would have quadrupled for roughly the same hosting service. I finally emailed one of their support people who informed me that I could upgrade to a (gs) lite account, keeping my current price and still getting on to the grid service. Since you can't just buy into a (gs) lite account as a new user, it's not advertised anywhere (even to current customers) until you're in the process of upgrading.

Anyway, it seems as though everything went well although there was one mistake with some paths in Movable Type that weren't converted properly and dynamic page building was disabled for a couple hours. I get about 3 visitors a day here since I've let this blog languish so I'm really not worried.

See you in another 4 months!

For Whom The Vox Tolls

2006-10-26T19:57:16Z

The first email I have in my inbox relating to Vox (not called Vox at the time) was on July 8th, 2005. I was included on an email thread about the db schema, something I really don't know much about. Countless meetings, public and private releases later, I mark my involvement on Vox at well past a year and 3 months mark and we're finally launching publicly.

It's really difficult to work out what I think about Vox in a couple sentences. It's not as though new features have stopped being handed to me or anything really seems different on my neighborhood. All these changes that sum up to a really powerful, easy way to share things with people that care about you have been day by day for everyone on the team to the degree that maybe even we don't realize what we've created. When I hear stories about people that are self-proclaimed non-bloggers that try Vox and suddenly realize that this isn't what they thought blogging was and, hey, it's actually really useful and fun, I'm honestly a little confused. Have we really done so much to change how blogging feels to our users? I'm immensely happy that the work we've done has gone into something that changes how people enjoy and what they expect from a blogging tool. And it's no first for Six Apart as a whole or many of the people working here.

So, self-proclaimed non-bloggers, go get yourself an account on Vox and, for fuck's sake, don't add me as a friend. Find a couple people that want to hear from you more often and that you want to hear from and make them your friends. Write a post for your friends about anything that you did recently, include some photos or books or upload a video you took on your phone because you're savvy like that. Make sure they see it and show them how crazy-easy it was. Now, sit back and watch.

Rebooting Spotlight

2006-09-12T23:26:58Z

I was having an issue in Mac OS X over the past couple weeks where getting info on a file was taking forever and anything downloaded from within Safari was forcing Safari into a semi-unresponsive state where all tabs would cease to function. I intended to take it in to the Apple Store (my second visit with the MacBook) eventually but when I realized Spotlight wasn't working I started investigating myself. For some reason the Spotlight database had become corrupted and was slowing everything down so I took this quick bit of action: sudo rm /.Spotlight-V100 That'll delete your Spotlight index and Spotlight will quickly kick in to gear to replace the index fully. It seems like that's completely solved the problem for me.

Also, I was having a strange issue with vertical pastel-colored lines on boot after I installed the MacBook firmware update of about a month ago (I was forced to boot up by using command-option-p-r every time to get around it). That also seems to have corrected itself although I highly doubt that it's related.

Don't Call it a Banner

2006-07-26T19:53:10Z

Here's something that was plaguing me for months: I couldn't figure out why my header image wasn't showing up in Safari on all my macs - it looked fine in Firefox for mac or any PC browser for that matter. Even other macs seemed to deal with it fine... it was just all the macs that I owned with the problem. I figured something was messing with a user-stylesheet that was overriding id="header" so that it was display:none; but I couldn't figure out where it was. I saw it on a number of other pages that used id="header" but I quickly forgot about it since I was the only one seeing the issue and I was neglecting my blog anyways. Finally something clicked today when I was looking at the new TypePad homepage today (which looks awesome), it was id="banner", often effectively the same as id="header" on default MT/TP templates unless you're doing special things with your header content, that wasn't showing up. Long-webbed gears started turning as I realized that "banner" is a common word used to describe advertising formats. Saft, a really useful Safari plugin, has a feature called "URL Match Pattern" under the "Ad Blocker" tab which was horribly misnamed as it was also display:hidden;ing anything with the id of "banner." I'll remove the id from my template eventually but removing the "banner" rule from my personal Saft install at least fixes my problem.

we <3 vox

2006-07-06T18:37:07Z

I don't want to pretend that I've been blogging like there's no tomorrow but I've been posting to Vox much more often than I've been posting here. It's just... more fun.

Maker Faire '06

2006-04-25T21:22:33Z

The first Maker Faire was this past weekend and it was a million different ways of fun. Check out a photoset on flickr from both Saturday and Sunday. Also, makerfaire and makerfaire06 flickr tags.

Lazyweb: Sync Two iTunes Libraries

2006-04-14T21:50:08Z

Listen up lazyweb, it's dilemma time.

I maintain two seperate iTunes libraries; one at home and one at work. I find new music both at home and at work and I rate things at home and at work. I want these two libraries to sync themselves automagically over .mac, ftp, whatever. No, an iPod does not solve the problem. I want to be able to share music through iTunes in both locations. Disk space on either machine isn't an issue so tracks that exist on one machine should be copied to the other and ratings sync'd on tracks that exist in both places (most recent rating being more important). From what I've looked in to, this should be mostly doable with applescript.

Update: There's a cross-platform app called syncOtunes that seems to do some comparing and syncing (via applescript - does it only sync one way?). But no rating sharing and it doesn't seem very polished.

Error Code 704

2006-04-06T22:43:40Z

Gmail has been a really great tool up until yesterday and today. Server errors, 704 errors, emails that show up 40 minutes after they've been sent... other people using gmail don't seem to have the same issues but I have them across all my machines and browsers. Is it fixed yet?

Update: As I mentioned before, this never seems to be an issue with all users. Search queries for "error code 704" from google (irony?) spike on this page usually for less than an hour at some peak times (6AM, 10AM PST) so I suspect it's a scaling issue which google is dealing with by shedding certain groups of users. I believe the best way to deal with the issue is to blog about it considering that issues with gmail went away shortly after I did the same.

About Me

2006-04-04T23:18:45Z

My own about page has been through a number of revisions over the past couple years and it might finally be at a place where it has equal parts of keeping-itself-updated and being-hands-off. Check it out, really. It's just the shortest short blurb about me and what I do and then a series of dynamic data taken from feeds and APIs all over the web. I have my most recent flickr photos (from their very own javascript code), my wishlist items from amazon (thanks to MTAmazon) and the top couple movies from my netflix queue (courtesy a feed from netflix and little tweaking in magpie). Add that to the del.icio.us links that fill the sidebar on every page and you have a good at-a-glance picture of what I'm working on, watching and wanting on the web right now. And I don't have to touch it unless I want to add more information to it.

I was thinking about this whole I-have-profiles-in-a-million-places muck while I was playing with ExtraTasty, easily in the top ten for most innovative web apps today. Since you can friend others on ExtraTasty you need some sort of profile page. You'll get a chance to fill out the basic profile information but they'll also give you a chance to fill in your del.icio.us and flickr usernames as well as your blog feed url. Suddently your ExtraTasty profile page has all this information relevant to you and you only just signed up for ExtraTasty five minutes ago. Brilliant.

Finally, a plea; Dearest audioscrobbler, please give me some way to pick up group or album photos from data in your feeds. I want to display my top artists for the week but they're without pictures! What fun is that, really?

Wanted: Robotics Team

2006-03-13T23:50:00Z

As my craigslist advertistment says, I want to join a robotics team in the bay area. I've done the "sport" challenge robotics before with FIRST and I'd join that type of team again in a heartbeat. Combat robotics, solve-a-problem robotics or even just general robotics research would be great too. I just want to be part of a team that I can discuss and solve robotics problems with.

Barely Legal, LOL

2006-03-13T22:59:09Z

Pfft, "Under 30, on the Cutting Edge"? Where's my "Barely 21, on the Cutting Edge" article? And please try to avoid links to pr0n in the comments - that's not the kind of "barely 21" that I'm talking about :P

Eats RAM and leaves

2006-03-08T22:46:18Z

There's no shortage of better-than-average feed readers for the mac and I've been settled with NetNewsWire for more than a year, probably. I decided to give Endo a try this week because I tend to really enjoy the software Ado creates. I do enjoy the new approach to news but I can't get over the fact that Endo starts up to the tune of 170mb of real RAM (416 virtual!). NNW sits blissfully at less than 30.

Update: Endo 1.0.7 handles RAM much better, sitting at ~50/300mb after refreshing all 151 feeds. Thanks Ado!

Paper Sporio

2006-03-08T17:55:07Z

Will Wright shows off his new game, Spore. He talks about the limitless creativity you have in the game somewhere in the middle of the clip; how each player could follow a vastly different course depending on their own choices. I was thinking about the same thing (albeit backwards) about 8 hours through Paper Mario; there's probably a good chance that someone else had done the exact same thing I did in Paper Mario for hours and hours of the game and yet, it was still fun. It's this vast middleground of games that don't know how to deal with their own limitations and aren't complex enough to be creative that are boring.

TBWG 4 LIFE

2006-02-22T23:44:51Z

Byrne wants to make TrackBack a standard. I just hope no one tries to get in his way. The working group and mailing list.

President's Day Hiking

2006-02-22T02:22:42Z

Rebecca and I went hiking on Monday in the marin headlands, maybe 20 minutes north of San Francisco. I took a couple photos and figured this'd be a good time to start linking some Flickr albums here. Some favorites.