Today I can finally share some exciting news I've been keeping under wraps: I've joined Blue Flavor! In the coming days, I'll have a lot more to say about this but for now I just want to say that I'm thrilled to be a part of the team and look forward to working with this fine group of people. And what perfect timing—Blue Flavor has just launched its new site.
It was time for a change around here, design-wise. Here's the next version of Maniacal Rage—I call it Pink. Granted, it's more purple, but okay, yeah, I know.
It's very different than recent designs. It's left aligned. It uses some graphics (and a big huge background image that might load slowly for you the first time). Graphics? Wow. It's been a while.
I don't know how long it will last, but occasionally I get an itching to change everything and that happened last night around 10PM, so here we are. Have I told you how much I love SimpleLog and its easy to create themes? Well, I love them a lot.
If you're using a newsreader, you might want to hit the site to see the new design. As always, I welcome your feedback (good, bad or otherwise).
I'll be at SXSW this year. I want to meet you. If you're going and would like to meet up to say hello, please drop an email to garrett at maniacalrage dot net.
Here's a short followup to what I wrote about using iTunes over AirDisk a while back.
I've gotten a few questions about how I dealt with the second computer in the equation (i.e., Katia's machine) once I had successfully moved everything on my laptop to the AirDisk. Here's what I did:
- Opened iTunes on Katia's computer, changed the Music Location to the library on the AirDisk, quit iTunes
- Copied the ~/Music/iTunes directory from my machine to Katia's
- Opened iTunes
Now, this created an exact duplicate setup on Katia's computer that I have on mine. At least initially. Once she starts changing things, she can create her own playlists and it won't affect mine because iTunes stores this information locally. We're only sharing the actual content files on the server. But this is a good way to get both machines having the same data.
With all the talk and speculation and rumors about OS X Leopard being close to release quality, and with "spring 2007" coming closer and closer, I'm beginning to get a little worried that the new version of OS X won't have a new visual look.
Many months ago, when Jobs mentioned that there were super secret things in 10.5 that they didn't want to announce yet, I was really hoping one of them was a refined user interface. I kept holding onto that dream until some time last week when I realized that there just isn't time.
For Apple to have a new user interface they still haven't shown testers seems insane to me. It doesn't leave nearly enough lead time before release, even if "spring 2007" means June.
Obviously, I hope I'm wrong. But it's beginning to sink in that I might not be.
After a slight delay I'm pleased to announce episode 17 of the podcast is ready for consumption. Subscribe to the podcast or listen to the new episode right now using the built-in player.
In unrelated news, I had some massive dental work done this morning and my mouth still hurts, so make me feel better and tell a few friends about the podcast. Okay, that doesn't really make sense, but it's the painkillers talking, I swear.
Garrett Dimon—who has a truly excellent first name, I might add—has been helping me test SimpleLog for many months now and shortly after the release of 2.0 he switched his site over to it and wrote up a fantastic overview of the application. The attention to detail in his thorough post is awe-inspiring and it's a really great look at SimpleLog if you're interested in the application but haven't tried it yet.
Many thanks to Garrett and everyone else who has been sending positive feedback. As always, SimpleLog is an ongoing project and I'm always open to feature requests, feedback and everything else you've got on your mind. You can post your thoughts and interact with other SimpleLog users at the SimpleLog forums, or check out the wiki for more information about using/installing the app.
Today I released version 2.0.2 of SimpleLog. This version fixes a few bugs found since the release of 2.0 last week and adds one really nice feature—future posting. You can now create posts in SimpleLog with dates in the future and they won't appear on your site until the right time.
As always, upgrading is quick and painless just like installing. If you haven't given SimpleLog a shot, you should check out some screenshots of the admin interface or read the excellent review Garrett Dimon wrote about it the other day.
Unsurprisingly, using iPhoto over the network is completely useless. When you have 12,000+ photos (most of which are over 3MB in size), it's shocking that I would have even considered for a moment that I could store that data on a network and still have the same experience as using it locally. Well, experiment over, you can't.
Don't get me wrong, iPhoto still works, it just takes about 2 minutes to start up and about 4 to quit. And scrolling in the library is a constant beach ball affair.
However, the good news is that I don't really browse around in my old photos anyway after a while. I keep them because I want to have them forever, but I don't really need to look at them constantly. So, effectively, I'm using AirDisk as network storage only and I have a clean local library again.
When I start iPhoto, it uses my empty local library. If I want to browse the network photos, I hold down option when launching iPhoto and choose the network library (thanks for the tip, Shawn). When I want to import new photos, upload to Flickr, etc, I use the local library.
My only concern with this approach is what happens when I want to take photos from the local library and move them to the network library. I can't think of a good way other than copying them there and deleting them locally.
Maybe someone else has figured out a better way to do all of this. I can't be the only person who has a laptop and craploads of photos.
Due to me being sick last week and general busyness, episode 17 of the podcast is going to be a little late. Sorry for the delay, we'll have it up as soon as possible!
My new Airport Extreme Base Station arrived earlier this week and I finally got a chance to set it up last night. After some initial frustration caused by my VoIP phone router, which I eventually solved, I had the AEBS in place where a LinkSys 802.11G WiFi router used to be.
Previously, I had flashed said LinkSys router with the open-source DD-WRT firmware to add features LinkSys leaves out of its stock firmware and administration software—namely, the ability to reserve IP addresses for clients who regularly connect to the network and boost transmitter power.
Why are those two features important? The network setup in our apartment is all wireless and pretty continuous, so I'd rather every device that's normally connected always use the same IP (this makes it easier to open ports for various things like the XBOX 360). One side effect to having an all-wireless network in our apartment is the living room and office are separated by a few walls, one of which is filled with brick and plaster (an old fireplace chimney hiding behind a wall), absolutely murdering signal strength. The default LinkSys firmware's transmitter only uses 19mW (or ~13dBm) of power, which is considered very low. Using DD-WRT, you can safely up your transmission power to increase signal strength and this worked wonders in our apartment, giving the farthest item (the XBOX 360) a 75% signal instead of the 25% it had before the firmware change.
Everything worked really well—I only had to reboot the router once in over a year (compared to somewhat regular reboots with the default firmware), signal was strong, things were good. So why change to the Aiport Extreme Base Station? Two reasons: Airport Disk and wireless printer sharing.
Airport Disk could really be considered the reason I made the change, but wireless printing is great too. Before the AEBS, I had a little D-Link ethernet print server in my network, allowing me to share the USB printer with anyone on the network. This worked fine but it was an extra device, more power, more configuration to worry about. The AEBS has standard support for USB printer sharing, so I was able to get rid of this extra network device.
In fact, the great thing about the new AEBS is the ability to plug a USB hub in and connect both a printer and multiple disks, all of which work immediately. Within two seconds, I had my printer shared via Bonjour and my disks mounted over wireless on both of our computers. Airport Disk has all the functionality you would expect—it allows disks to sleep when not in use and wakes them up when you access them and it automatically mounts them when they become available on the network, if you wish. From the Airport Utility you can unmount drives from users as well.
The whole point of the Aiport Disk technology for me is simple: I want to move my music and pictures to a central network location that I can access from any computer. I want this because I want to save hard drive space on my MacBook Pro, and because I want Katia to be able to play all of our music as well (previously, she'd have to open my laptop and then browse my shared library in iTunes). Between the 40GB of photos and 20GB of music I've got, my 100GB MBP hard drive was filling up quickly. Back ups were slower. And it just didn't make sense to carry all that stuff around.
When I'm away from home, if I want to hear music I use my iPod. I don't need to carry my entire music library with me on two drives. And when I'm at home, I want to be able to hear my music no matter which computer I might be using (or over the stereo using Airport Express). Airport Disk allows you to do that.
The process for moving my music and photo libraries was a little nerve-wracking. After making a full back-up of my MBP, I copied all the media over to the external drive and hooked it up to the AEBS. To update iTunes, I did the following:
- With iTunes not open, I copied the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file to the desktop.
- Opened iTunes, changed the "iTunes Music folder location" to the network drive music folder. Quit iTunes.
- Deleted all the music from my local machine, including the iTunes folder.
- Opened the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file in TextMate and did some find/replace1 on the paths.
- Opened iTunes and ran File, Import... and chose the XML file I had just edited.
- Waited about 30 minutes while iTunes looked at every file on the network.
- Waited nearly three hours while iTunes determined gapless playback for all tracks again.
Why the gapless playback determination took so long, I don't know. In total time spent (including waiting), this was a long process, but it was worth it. Now when I open iTunes I can play all my music from my laptop without wasting space. Tonight I'm going to set up Katia the same way.
I've yet to handle the iPhoto library stuff, once I do that I'll report on how it goes.
All in all, I'm extremely pleased with the AEBS so far. Its stronger transmitter (100mW or 20dBm) is sending 98% signal to the XBOX 360, which is a near 25% improvement, even though I have it set to G/B compatible mode. It also allows for IP reservation. Granted, this is all making me yearn for an N card in my laptops, but in the mean time things are good and I've finally got hard drive space again.
- I changed
file://localhost/Users/garrett/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Music/tofile://localhost/Volumes/Media%20Book%20I/Music/↩
I've just released version 2.0.1 of SimpleLog, which should, once and for all, fix all problems with rake that were caused in yesterday's release. It was a bumpy road, but I've finally knocked out all the little issues caused by a bad frozen Rails copy and a missing dir in vendor.
I'm really sorry for the trouble. If you've downloaded version 2.0, please download this new version. You should find it trouble free, and I promise, it's really worth trying out.
Thanks to everyone who sent in initial bug reports and helped me solve the problem.
Well, that didn't go exactly as planned. After 6+ months, it's always a pain to have a major error as soon as people try to use the app, eh?
Turns out the frozen copy of Rails that I included with the initial 2.0 archive was bad and it was causing rake not to work at all. I've repackaged the archive.
If you downloaded version 2.0 and had errors, please download it again. Sorry about that!
After six and a half months, hundreds of fixes, tweaks and new features, I'm finally announcing the release of SimpleLog version 2.0.
This release is packed. A highlight of some key features/changes:
- Fully compatible with Rails 1.2.1!
- Comments with spam protection, blacklist, approval and a comments RSS feed
- New admin interface design
- "Static" pages
- Faster searching and full search results page
- Improved caching, preference loading and more for a much faster and stable application
- New default theme
- Support for Gravatars
- Subdomain and subdirectory support
- Tons of bugfixes
- Even easier to install or upgrade
I've been working on this version for a very long time now, and I'm extremely proud of the way it turned out. If you're curious, you can see the changelog to get an idea of just how much work has been done in the last few months.
In addition to the new release, I've created the SimpleLog wiki which is full of helpful information and will grow over time as I and users add more to it, as well as some simple forums for users to talk to each other and ask for help if they can't find it anywhere else.
Special thanks to Shawn Morrison, Garrett Dimon and Dan Conner who provided tremendous beta testing and general help during the long development phase, as well as the rest of my private beta testers.
You can view screenshots of the admin interface and default theme at Flickr. You can also digg this announcement.
Update: If you downloaded this version and got a rake error when trying to install, please re-download it. There was an error in the TGZ that caused rake not to work but it has been fixed.
I spent nearly the entire weekend blowing my nose and whining about my sore throat, lying on the couch watching TV and drinking juice. Being sick sucks.
I kept thinking about how much worse it would have been if I were still a smoker (a habit I quit a little over a year ago), and within two days I was feeling better. Smokers know how long being sick can last (I remember times in college when I was coughing for a full week, but that's partly my fault because I refused to quit smoking even when I was sick), and I'll tell you that it's almost worth quitting entirely for the short and less-frequent unwell episodes.
I managed to catch up on The Unit, watch a few movies and write some more SimpleLog documentation, so it wasn't a total loss.
A little birdy tells me SimpleLog 2.0 will be released Tuesday.
I'm feeling for the Flickr team right now—the recent annoucement of a manditory Yahoo! ID merge has caused panic, insanity and hatred to rain down on them in the form of a (currently) 1,800+ post forum thread. People are, quite literally, freaking the fuck out about this whole thing and it's getting a little out of hand.
Earlier today, despite Flickr's "absolutely no refunds" policy, Heather Powazek Champ announced she'd be handling prorated refunds personally, through PayPal. I know people are upset, but it has always (or at least as long as I can remember) said "payments are non-refundable" on the pro account purchase page for a reason. I don't see how a requirement to merge your Flickr login with your Yahoo! login means your payment is suddenly refundable. Nor should it.
I'm a huge fan of the idea that the "customer is always right," but then I realize that when I think that, I usually mean me: a level-headed, rational person who makes logical and well-thought-out buying decisions. I think we have (especially in the US) a very unbalanced idea of what customers deserve in the equation. The math in this case is simple: You pay Flickr a fee for a service and that fee is non-refundable, as it's stated before you make a payment. Later, you decide you don't like the decisions the company offering the service is making. You demand a refund. Well, guess what, tough guy? You don't get one.
Another side of this whole thing that I don't understand is why people are going nuts about having to deal with Yahoo!, or that Yahoo! is going to be involved in storing their photos. Wake up, people! Yahoo! has been involved for years. Just because you weren't logging in via their central ID service doesn't mean Flickr wasn't acquired by and made part of Yahoo! in the spring of 2005. That's nearly two years ago already.
On top of that, people have been saying insane things in that forum thread. Not the kind of insane that makes you think, "Oh, that's funny," but that impressive kind that makes you think, "Holy shit, get this guy to a special hospital immediately." Flickr user "otherthings" wrote:
Yahoo! cookies, required for login to Flickr, will spy on all your internet activity. #
Wow. I mean... wow. That's so completely insane, I don't even know what to say1. But Flickr's venerable Stewart Butterfield replies with a full description of how cookies work. Now, I know he's in a position in which he feels he needs to respond to people and explain what's going on, but this whole business has gotten out of hand. There's a population (which I believe is small) of Flickr users who hate Yahoo! (but apparently didn't hate them until this week) and want out—let them go.
Flickr will survive.
On a personal note, I did find having to merge annoying but that's because I'm lazy and I am set in my ways. But it only took about four minutes.
- I think my response would have been something like: If you believe that is the case, turn off your computer and throw it into the garbage. Just toss it into the garbage and go out into the living room and sit in the middle of the floor and think about your life. ↩
I was about to start enjoying a small box of Junior Mints today when I noticed the end of the box I was opening had "open other end" written on it. I pondered this for a moment.
I understand why they want me to open the other end—there's a flap and such there for easy closing—but who are they to demand that I open my boxes from a certain side? Maybe I don't want to have an easily closing box. Maybe I want to dump all the mints on the desk and eat them in one go. Maybe I think you jerks should just put a close-flap on both sides of the box.
What's next, soda makers insisting I use that stupid tab to open cans rather than punching a nail through the side?
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I like the idea that someone, somewhere is cataloguing this. Because we all see it and we want to talk about it.
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Stories written on napkins by writers from around the country. Some of these stories are really good.
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People have a lot of free time. At least they're putting it to good use!
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I love maps and I love niche sites like this. An ongoing collection of interesting/unique maps is a great idea for a site.
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Wolfgang's a great designer... this widget is really simple but it does what it says and it looks great.
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Ah, computers. They bring us joy and also hatred. Or at least, Windows computers.