Loghound.com Blog

New support systems

2010-03-05T13:40:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

A quick note that we are trying some new support systems here at loghound.com -- For as long as I've been in business I've used email as my primary support vehicle and although I think it's worked well it has two fatal flaws.

1) I tend to solve the same problem again and again. It would be nice if there was a way for people to see/search for solutions
2) It doesn't allow more than one person to help in support.

To that end I'm testing a new support system this month. The goal is to have it be a smooth transition but please be patient if there are a few bumps as we sort it all out.

-John

RapidBlog And Blogger FTP support

2010-02-02T17:20:00.000-08:00

You may have heard that blogger decided to stop ftp support going forward.

In case you are wondering this has no, zero, zilch impact on RapidBlog -- RapidBlog does not depend on this feature at all so rest assured that your blogs will continue to work just fine.

-John

Where did that space go?

2010-01-30T20:32:00.000-08:00

Making RapidWeaver plugins I often have customers report problems that I can't reproduce. A common way I deal with this is to ask them to send me their RapidWeaver project files so I can see exactly how they have it configured.

Almost every time I ask the common answer is "Ok, I'll try but it's Big!" -- recently I got the question (in an offhand way) about why it was so big so I thought I would share a little secret.

There is a pretty easy way to get a good view of where your chewing through storage in RapidWeaver.

Here is how you do it.

Make a backup of your RapidWeaver project file first… While this procedure shouldn't cause any damage it's probably safer to play with a backup.
Download GrandPerspective (Edit: See note at bottom on Disk Inventory X) -- This is a neat little app that shows you graphically disk usage.
Right click on your rapidweaver project and select 'show package contents'. You should see two folders "Pages" and "DefaultPageAttributes" - You'll need the "Pages" folder later.
Open GrandPerspective and select "Scan Folder" (file -> Scan Folder)
In the open dialog drag the "Pages" folder from your RapidWeaver bundle over to the open dialog (You have to do this because by default GrandPespective will not scan a bundle and will not let you navigate to a bundle)
Hit Scan
Up will pop a pretty picture showing you how space is allocate -- you, of course, will want to focus on the big blocks. As you select one the bottom bar will show the size as well as the 'path' of the data. For instance I have one that is called "1-Home002FPlugins/4-Lockdown/ChildPages/4-FAQ/Data.archive" -- This means it's a page under my Home Plugins/Lockdown/FAQ folder (you will have different paths but the names should give you a clue)
From here you can decide what to do -- Perhaps you need to put in smaller graphics or split the page up.

[Edit]: Biochi pointed me to Dir Inventory X. It's seens to work much better than GrandPerspective for this as you can directly select the package and it will index it (without all of the show package contents nonsense) PLUS it has the advantage of letting you navigate by folder, check it out.

Gone for a week

2010-01-22T22:31:00.000-08:00

Hi All,

I'll be out of town in Asia for the week from Jan 23 to Feb 1. It's a real whirlwind trip (Singapore, Malysia, Hong Kong and China) so support and answering emails will be very slow to non existant because:

I don't have a Mac with me.
I have no idea when I'll get internet access

I have a goal of photographing everything I eat on this trip so I'll hopefully put some pics up when I get back.

-John

Convereting old DV footage to digital

2009-12-26T17:32:00.000-08:00

I've been spending the last few days converting some of my old DV footage to digital format. I've got maybe 30 or 40 tapes and I really have no idea what is on any of them are so my hope is I can import the into a digital format and have them actually available in to enjoy and share.

One of the problems is the DV import process in iMovie brings them in as 'DV' files that are *huge* (several hundred MB easily). My 30 odd tapes will end up chewing through a unreasonable fraction of my TB hard drive so I've spent some time looking for how to compress them to more modern formats.

Initially I thought I could use an automated tool like Handbrake of VisualHub to quickly convert them but the results were less than perfect. I finally sat down and did a direct comparison. For Visual Hub and Handbrake I spent some time playing with settings trying to really optimize them, for Quicktime (using Quicktime X) there are no real settings to speak of.

The results (below) speak for themselves. Even when I upped the bit rate to Handbrake or Visual Hub I couldn't get it even close to what Quicktime can do. In terms of speed they all seemed pretty close (I didn't time them but my perception was the speeds of conversation were all about the same).

On the pictures below note especially the horizontal and vertical lines -- What you can't see from these grabs is some of odd interlace problems while watching the movie in everything but Quicktime.

Raw Footage 57Mb/s	Quicktime to H.264 2.6Mb/s
Handbrake Custom Settings H.264 2.65Mb/s	Visual Hub to H.264 3.6Mb/s

One of my initial concerns with using Quicktime was there was no Batch process. I initially loaded the movie into quicktime and used the 'Export' feature. Fortunately I came across a great solution to that: Create a service to do the conversation.

Now I can just select a bunch of movies, select services->convert to Quicktime and they show up on my Desktop, Nice!

Paperless pays off!

2009-12-23T16:41:00.000-08:00

If you have followed my blog for the past several weeks you have seen me on a bit of an organizational/paperless tear.

Today it payed off -- I had ordered a gift for someone and the first thing I did when I got the package was scan the packing information (essentially receipt) and saved it in my 'Receipts' DropBox folder.

Today I learned that the person I bought the gift for is already getting the item -- Instead of waiting until I got home, trying to find the details, and then trying to call them the next day to process the return I was able to pull up my receipt off of DropBox (I sync my Work computer to DropBox also but I could have easily grabbed it off the DropBox web interface), call up the vendor with all the details and get a return processed.

This whole process works due to a couple of thing that are available today but weren't available even a few years ago.

Painless Scanning -- My ScanSnap makes scanning completely painless. If you have never used one it's impossible to describe but scanning a document is so simple, foolproof and fast that you don't ever think 'is it worth it' -- It's actually less work to scan then to think "Where do I store this"
Files Everywhere (& backed up) with Dropbox. I have the 50GB account but I only use about 5GB so far -- This is after scanning like crazy. The fact is scanned PDF's just don't take much space and with Dropbox I can always get at my files. The nice thing about getting a paid account is that they keep backup versions (Forever?). Even if you later delete it to get more space you can go back later and retrieve it via the web interface.
Evernote. I kept track of my return number and dragged a copy of the receipt into Evernote in my 'To Do' folder. In the next few days I'll mail the item back (Scanning my proof of shipment of course), add it to the note (so it has: my original receipt, my notes talking with the CSR on return details, and proof of mailing in a single Evernote note) -- This note will drop into my 'Completed' folder once my credit card is returned.

It may sound like I'm a serious type-A which is generally not the case. I like being organized as much as the next person but generally don't spend the energy to actually do much about it. With these tools however it's really pretty painless. What makes Evernote & DropBox especially attractive is they are not tied to one computer. They are at Work, at Home and on my Phone.

Finally I want to comment on the ScanSnap. I really hesitated on buying it: $400 for a scanner? but it's one of my better purchases of 2009. It completely exceeded my expectations and I've long forgotten the money I spent on it.

-John

To Do Management with Evernote

2009-12-12T20:38:00.000-08:00

The title of this post is grand, perhaps too grand. It's really just a simple change I've made recently as part of my paperless office drive (which really should be called a simplify your life drive).

One of my torments has been todo lists. While I generally am pretty good at using them it drives me batty that I don't have a consistent way to keep track of them.

At work I've used Outlook to-do's a lot but they are generally unavailable at home. At home I've tried the built in mail to-dos as well as various services such as remember the milk and the ilk but I never found a solution that worked for me consistently everywhere.

Before I go too much further I should explain that the way I do tasks lists/todos is they tend to be associated with a bunch of other media -- For instance if I get a bill I need to call about during the week I'll scan it in (with my SnapScan of course) so I have a copy to refer to when I call. Or I might have a screenshot or just a bunch of notes.

I've settled on a solution in the last 3-4 weeks that really seems to be working for me. Evernote.

I have two notebooks, one is called 'ToDo' and one is could "Closed out ToDos" - I simply put notes in the "ToDo" list and drag them out to "Closed Out" when I'm done.

This is tremendous because notes in Evernote can contain Rich text, images, PDF's and any other sort of file so I can toss any any supporting items to my todo. As I make progress on it I can also make notes on where I am and when it's closed I can archive it for posterity sake.

Since I have Evernote everywhere (phone, work, home and web) I can always get access to work on them or close them out.

The key to this working is I have Evernote open all the time anyway so it's not a new tool I need to get into -- It's the tool I already use.

In defense of the app store process

2009-12-02T23:08:00.000-08:00

I'll admit it -- I've been (privately) pretty down on the app store process. After my first app was released (MovieFlick) I swore never again as the pain of trying to push out updates was too much.

I eventually did a second app (DreamApp). The 1.3 version has been about two months getting out and I was ready to explode today when I got what I thought was another rejection but it all worked out fine.

My first release of 1.3 had a real problem with new user accounts that I never tested and the Apple team found it so although it's frustrating to wait 3 weeks to find out they did a good job of finding a real problem.

My second submit was rejected for using 'undocumented API's' -- you may have heard that Apple has a new static analysis tool for finding usage of non supported API's and my app was caught in that. It turns out that one of the libraries I use did have calls to unsupported API's but only for testing purposes (of the framework) - I never actually used them in my code.

grumble, grumble ok submit again… Tonight I got *another* letter about unsupported API's and I was about to explode but then something odd happened…. I got an email saying 'Your app is now for sale'.

It turns out the third letter pointed out the use of a non supported api (NSHost hostWithName) but instead of rejecting it they said "We'll let it go but please fix it for the next release" -- When I first read it I hadn't noticed that fine print but true to their word it's now available.

So in this era of dog piling on top of Apple and the app store process I have to get them some credit for being pragmatic about this… They made a decision to release it but asked nicely for me to fix it next time.

Nice!

ScanSnap Safety Tips part deux

2009-11-29T17:37:00.001-08:00

A video summary of ScanSnap safety issues

Scansnap Safety Tips

2009-11-26T00:15:00.000-08:00

My ScanSnap arrived today (I'll write up about it later) but with it came a 50 page 'safety precautions' book. It struck me as odd because I couldn't imagine that scanning was a particularly dangerous activity.

Boy was I wrong. I'm really glad I decided to read the book as there are a number of really good safety tips including:

Don't use scansnap while driving a car
When handling documents be careful not to cut your fingers
When carrying the ScanSnap outside avoid rain and snow
Avoid getting a necktie caught in the scansnap

That's just a few of them -- I wish I had known how dangerous this would be before I purchased the ScanSnap

Going paperless

2009-11-23T09:53:00.000-08:00

My wife and I were cleaning our house this weekend and it struck me just how many piles of paper we had. For lots of good reasons you get paper and want to keep it (sometimes it has important info, sometimes it's a keepsake) but I was shocked by how cluttered our house was by the various bits (including copies of bills long paid, expired coupons, etc.)

Even after brutally going through and recycling there were still lots of stuff we 'had to keep'. I made a decision this weekend to see if I could transition my household to be largely paperless.

My first step started with a purchase and a change in bill paying:

My purchase was a Fujitsu SnapScan s1500m -- I've seen Fujitsu at Mac world for several years and while I've always kind of liked the idea the price (~$404 at Amazon) was always more than I wanted to pay. That changed when I spent almost an hour trying to scan in documents with my trusty HP all in one. The HP is fine for a few items but for any kind of volume it's pretty horrible -- It's slow and can't reliably feed more than a few sheets at a time.

I'm hoping the Fujitsu SnapScan fixes all of that. My plan is to shove everything I can find that I don't want deleted in there and pdf it up. For some of the docs I'll keep them in Evernote but for most of them I'll probably just store them away (maybe archive them off every year or so)

For bill pay I enabled a feature that's been on my account for a while. I switched from Quicken for the PC to doing finances online recently and as part of the switch I went to web based bill pay -- One feature of online bill pay is they can send the bill directly to your account and you can view & pay online (no more paper -- Get rid of it at the source!)

I'll report back in a few weeks on how things are going..

Even Easier Scanning into Evernote

2009-11-10T08:47:00.000-08:00

In my last post I showed a easy way to get images from Image Capture into Evernote. While that worked great it had one problem: Image Captured tends to 'forget' the selected application and you need to go find it again.

Fortunately there is an even easier way to integrate Evernote into Image Capture using Automator to create a 'real' Image Capture plugin. (and finally, I get to use Automator for something real!)

Setup is quite easy: Run Automator and select new 'Image Capture Plugin' .

Then add a single item to the flow -- Run Applescript with the following applescript.

on run {input, parameters}

tell application "Evernote"

create note from file input

end tell

return input

end run

Save it to to the default location and call it something like 'Evernote' and Voila, it shows up in Image capture as a first class citizen (and will never disappear). Note that this is for Snow Leopard (10.6) - I don't know how if or how this trick will work on earlier version of OS X.

Even Easier!

Scanning Into Evernote with Image Capture

2009-11-06T22:59:00.000-08:00

I've got a funny history with Evernote -- Around the time Microsoft came out with One Note, a small company started making something called Evernote. I actually preferred Evernote over One note but in reality I didn't use either of them much because the data was stuck on one computer.

Since then I've gone through lots of these (Yojimbo, Circus Ponies Notebook, etc.) and while I love the concept I've always given up since my life is just too dynamic.

I spend a lot of time at work on a PC, then I come home to a Mac but on the road it's all iPhone baby. With the amazingly good syncing of Evernote and the great native clients (not to mention the web) I've really started to rely on Evernote.

One thing I've started to do a lot of is scanning documents -- A typical use case is I'll be doing bills on a Sunday night and realize I need to call someone during business hours (say to get something corrected or ask a question). I've started scanning the bill into Evernote, adding a few quick comments and add it to Evernote.

The sync in Evernote works so well that I don't even think about it anymore -- I just add it and forget about it. Monday morning when I get to work the info is right there and I can make the call to fix the problem (and if it's complicated I can keep a running log of discussions in that note -- Since it includes the original bill I've got it all in one spot -- A lifesaver if you are dealing with insurance companies!)

The one thing that Didn't work as well as I would like was getting the scan into Evernote in the first place. I would:

Open Image Capture
Scan to PDF
Drag PDF to evernote
Add comments

Fortunately there is a better way (in Snow Leopard anyway) -- It's also dead-easy to set up. As a one time step step you have to select the 'scan to' drop down in image capture and navigate to the Applications directory and select Evernote. It will then show up in the drop down (like iPhoto, preview & Mail do by default) -- It becomes a first class citizen in Image capture so you can scan directly into Evernote. My work flow is now

Open Image Capture & Make sure Evernote is the selected as the Scan To Target (which it is)
Scan and add Comments

Easy!

Day with Apple Recap

2009-10-31T00:07:00.000-07:00

It was a good, but not great, day. Apple did their usual very good job of hosting. The room was comfortable, the food was good, they had nice A/V setups, I got a t-shirt and there was plenty of staff (an amazing amount -- I guess they bring in the retail store employees?)

Sadly there wasn't that much that was new to me -- They billed it as advanced but I would call in intermediate at best (however in fairness I didn't go to the open GL sessions -- I'm sure those would have knocked my socks off)

My biggest complaint? The amount of high fiving they were giving each other over how great the iPhone is. Yes, I love my phone but the fact is for the way I use it there are some very capable devices out there that are almost as good (the new 'droid on verizon looks very nice and I still am intrigued by the pre)

At the end of the day you'll still have to pry my iPhone out of my cold dead hands but I can see a day in the not so distant future where there will be lots of choices.

Finaly on the might mouse. It showed up today and I'm really impressed so far -- I hesitate to say too much until I've used it a few days but so far I'm really liking it.

Going to Apple Thursday (sort of)

2009-10-28T22:00:00.000-07:00

Well I'm off to Apple tomorrow (Technically I'm off to the San Jose Mariott). Approximately every year (usually late fall) Apple holds a series of tech talks. The last two have been about the iPhone but before that they were about Leopard (before that I'm less certain? Tiger? before my time)

The idea is that as opposed to WWDC which is held in a single location and you have to pay to go to they have a traveling roadshow for one day to hit you with information (and in very uncharacteristic Apple fashion: It's free)

I went with Isaiah last year and it was overall a pretty good session -- Not anything mind blowing but a nice day with some good information.

The format is one big classroom where they run through approximately 6-8 sessions. My guess is there will be sessions on Core animation, Open GL, Tools, Core Audio (less sure about that one), Core Data. Last year Apple bought us box lunches and we got a t-shirt (sadly the shirts were all the same size).

What really excites me is what they may announce -- Apple doesn't have that many corporate events (let's count: WWDC, Fall Music Announcement, maybe one or two other public press events) so they sometimes uses these forums to make announcements (not huge ones mind, but things relevant to developers)

Here is what I hope (pray) they announce. An overhaul of the iTunes rating system. The current one is horribly broken, as a developer it's horribly painful to see people complain of problems and have no way to get a hold of them to help fix it. I do everything I can to make my support email public but a surprising number of people will just complain in iTunes instead of trying to contact me -- Case in point: About 4 months ago Netflix had a server outage for a weekend…. It didn't effect all apps but it did effect mine so anyone using my app would find a problem. I actually worked with Netflix engineering over the weekend and by Sunday it was all back up but as you can guess I had a mass of 1 star ratings and 'this app doesn't work, wasted $1.99'. I was going crazy trying to sort out how to contact them to say "Hey, try it again, it's a server issue that now works" but it's impossible with the current system.

Here is hoping for good news tomorrow...

Two great authors

2009-10-16T23:09:00.000-07:00

If you at all enjoy the science fiction genre two authors you must read

All of their books are good but if you've never read them I'd start with "Pandoras Star" (Hamilton) and "A Deepness in the Sky" (Vinge)

Blocks Break Even point.

2009-08-29T00:32:00.001-07:00

Something a little different today -- A few experiments using Snow Leopards GCD

Perhaps someone will come along and prove my methodology wrong -- I'm just trying to get a simple 'gut' feel for how well GCD performs and what the 'break even' is

I wrote a simple cocoa app that does a trivial thing -- It starts a timer, then pushes a request to a background thread who's only job is to call the foreground thread to stop the timer. Below is the code snippit of interest.

-(BOOL) finish {

stopTime=[NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate];

NSLog(@"time was %f",stopTime-startTime);

return TRUE;

}

/********* using GCD *************/

-(IBAction) gcd:(id) sender {

startTime=[NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate];
dispatch_queue_t bgQueue = dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_DEFAULT, 0);
   dispatch_async(bgQueue , ^{
   dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
[self finish];
   });
   });

}
-(void) _bg {
[self performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(finish) withObject:nil waitUntilDone:NO];
}

/******** Using Perform Selector ***********/

-(IBAction) bg:(id) sender {

startTime=[NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate];
[self performSelectorInBackground:@selector(_bg) withObject:nil ];
}

/******** Direct Call *************/
-(IBAction) no:(id) sender {
startTime=[NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate];
[self finish];
}

/********** Using Threads ***********/
-(IBAction) _thread {
NSAutoreleasePool *pool=[NSAutoreleasePool new];;
[NSThread detachNewThreadSelector:@selector(finish) toTarget:self withObject:nil];
[pool release];

}

-(IBAction) thread:(id) sender {

startTime=[NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate];
[NSThread detachNewThreadSelector:@selector(_thread) toTarget:self withObject:nil];
}

I actually wrote this 4 ways -- One using the 'blocks' feature, one using 'performSelector', one using NSThread and one that calls 'doit' by itself. All tests were run on a 8 core Mac Pro (16 virtual cores) at 2.66GHz (this is the current as of this writing Mac Pro).

I also took three measure (the code above doesn't show all of the measurements):

The amount of time to push the work to the background and return
The amount of time to execute a trivial instruction in the background
The amount of time to push to the background and then instantly push a trivial instruction back on the main thread

The results?

	Time to push to background & return [us]	Time to execute in background [us]	Time to push to background, execute in background and push results to main thread [us]
GCD	13	20	143
performSelector	57	97	194
Threads (NSThread)	58	103	198
No threading/backgrounding	NA	NA	<1

Bottom line? GCD offers decent performance improvements over conventional approaches. But even with it's improved performance it's overhead is equal to 'hundreds' of method calls (on my test system I can call > 200 methods in 13us) so if your goal is to offload work you would need to already be facing 100us length tasks (e.g. IO, networking, long computation) before it's clearly a win -- Nothing really new here on that conclusion however as that's always been true with multiple threads

I suspect that cocoa now uses GCD under the hood for a lot of it's work so it's not suprising that the various methods all time in about the same -- I'd be curious to see this run on Leopard (but not curious enough to re-boot into leopard!)

Finally the question could be asked: How much work would it take before the work equaled the overhead of backgrounding? I wrote simple loop to just spin until the timer reached 150us

-(IBAction) loop:(id) sender {

int i;

startTime=[NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate];

while ([NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate]-startTime <150e-6) i++;

NSLog(@"number of iterations was %d",i);

}

It turns out to be about 2400 iterations for 150us.

A final note -- I'm testing the case of pushing work off on a background thread to improve the user experience -- clearly there are examples of multithreaded applications where you want to maximize processor utilization or set up a complicated processing chain that this analysis doesn't apply to.

My 'walk away' is you need to perform thousands of method calls before you reach the break even point for using any threading or background tasks.

Snow Leopard

2009-08-28T21:22:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not my favorite Snow Leopard feature is image capture.

It now recognizes my scanner (an HP PhotoSmart all-inone) and does a credible job of scanning PLUS you can now choose what to do when a given device (camera) is attached (launch iPhoto, do nothing, etc.)

What's especially nice is the network scanning feature is not natively supported (my printer is network capable and any mac on my network can now scan directly)

It's never mentioned but if you haven't check out Image Capture -- It's become a very nice utility for photos & scanning.

Snow Leopard

2009-08-24T08:44:00.000-07:00

This morning Apple announced that Snow Leopard is available this friday, the 28th. It's sort of amazing how differently Apple announces os. I mean they are announcing it's availability 5 days before they ship a brand new version of their OS.

I've been using Snow Leopard (from now on referred to as SL) for a few weeks to make sure my plugins are all working. So far it's all gone smoothly but I'll be planning some extra time this weekend to quick fix any problems discovered.

I wish I could share more about SL as I do have a few things to say but I'll honor my NDA and wait until after it ships.....

I am so Weak V3.0

2009-06-19T10:27:00.000-07:00

Just purchased my iPhone 3Gs -- For the THIRD time I swore I wasn't going to get a new phone s the changes weren't big enough (original iPhone & iPhone 3G) but once again I got distracted the shiny newness.

I hope Apple never starts making Cars........

WWDC Wrap Up

2009-06-12T16:42:00.000-07:00

It's the last day of WWDC and I just finished my last session -- I thought I would share with you, my loyal reader, a few thoughts on WWDC.

As you probably know, WWDC is Apple's "World Wide Developers Conference". It's organized around three tracks: Mac, iPhone & IT. There is usually some stuff that crosses two of the three (for instance this year a number of sessions had info relevant for both iPhone & Mac, or Mac & IT.)

The sessions are organized into 75 minute blocks, with two in the morning and three in the afternoon -- They leave a generous amount of time for lunch (but usually have guest speakers) and there are many social activities in the evening (the only apple sponsored one is the 'bash' on thursday -- the rest of organized by various parties)

This is my third year going so I've begun to see some interesting patterns. For instance there are the folks who go mostly for social reasons -- They typically miss the morning session because they were out too late -- Often skip afternoon sessions and in general can be found surrounded by a group of people chatting it up.

Then there are the IT guys -- I really feel sorry for them because there really aren't that many sessions that are just IT specific so you often find them going to technical sessions. Some of them are pretty sharp and can follow along but often times it's stuff that that they just don't use enough so it makes it hard for them to follow along.

Then there are the corporate types -- People who's company sent them. They tend to hang around other people from their team and are pretty picky about which sessions they chose (and will skip sessions if there is nothing relevant to what they do) -- You can usually spot them because they are running entourage checking email constantly.

Finally the intense 'go to every session' guys -- that's where I fall -- I tend to attend every session (even if the choices are not terribly interesting to me).

Finally there are the labs -- I've always heard that the labs area a great resource but I've never used them much. In the labs the Apple engineers around a certain technology get together at a certain time and you can bring your problems and they'll help you fix them. This year for the first time I had a problem that I didn't have a good solution for and so I went to the labs. It worked out really well as I got to speak directly to the experts who gave me some really good ideas.

I wish I could talk about what I learned this year -- there are some exciting technologies in Snow Leopard that I really think will change the kinds of apps you can easily do so I'm really looking forward to it's release.

Ciao for now..

Last Comment!

2009-06-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

No -- This is not the last post on this blog -- instead I'm referring to the fact that I got the last post on this comment thread (before they closed comments)

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/04/09/big-boy-time/

In case you haven't been following I've made a iPhone app for managnig your dreamhost account -- Initially it was spurred on by the 'crazy contest' but I actually had a lot of fun working on it (especially with a deadline -- honestly I do my best work under pressure)

My resulting app is called "DreamApp" and it's not too bad (if I do say so myself) -- Last night I debated on if I should put it on the app store or wait until after WWDC. I'll probably wait until after WWDC because I may learn some cool tricks to make it even nicer (and quite frankly releasing something before WWDC is a bad idea as your brain is generally pretty fried that week)

Speaking of which I'll be at WWDC next week -- Great Fun (most of which I can't talk about) and a nice time to meet up with some of my mac geek friends -- (in the picture from left to righ. Fraser Spiers, Me, Isaiah, some unknown tall guy -- from last years WWDC)

The holy trinity of working on more than one Computer

2009-05-14T23:33:00.001-07:00

Like perhaps many of you I live & work on multiple computers. It's almost a embarassing but I have

A Mac Pro as my main development machine (and is it ever sweet!)
A HP laptop at my 'day job' (While it certainly doesn't have the stylings of Apple it's actually quite a nice machine)
A Macbook pro for when I'm away from home
A Hackintosh MSI Wind that I use for fun

Crazy -- Four computers for one guy but there you have it. For the most part I can keep my work PC and Macs separate -- I usually don't need to share files back and forth and on the odd day i do need to share I usually end up emailing myself (or a USB thumbdrive) - A little awkward but it gets the job done.

My Macs are a different issue all together -- It's horrible to be working day in and day out on one computer (my 'pro) and then have to prepare a laptop for a long weekend away. I *always* forget to transfer something and when I'm away I'm always fretting that I am editing a old version of a file and then coming home is terrible -- I need to remember to transfer them back.

I've come across four solutions, however, that almost perfectly fix my problem and make multiple macs (or to a large extent PC's) sync up perfectly. They are DropBox, Evernote, & Mobile Me.

DropBox is the home run of this solution -- I had tried it about 6 months ago an uninstalled it as it seemed to be a resource hog (chewing up tons of CPU, bandwidth & memory). Since then the dropbox folks have done a lot (plus I've upgraded my hardware) so now it runs like buttah. You just store files in your dropbox on your PC and amazingly fast they get synced. Open up another computer and it syncs that. It even works on my work PC so I've begun to keep all my documents in my dropbox to have always access.

The other thing dropbox does is keep revisions -- If you modify or delete a file you can go online and restore it (I'm not sure how far back they keep them -- I suspect they keep them until you run up against your limit)

DropBox is free for 2GB accounts and $99/yr for 50GB accounts.

Evernote is a notes taking application -- They have a great iPhone, Mac & PC client and I use it to scribble things down. Like dropbox it works like magic and it's replaced my various folders of text documents, outlook items, etc. Evernote is free but there is a premium service for (I think) $49/yr that increases the size of notes as well as attach arbitrary files (so you can embed a PPT along with the note)

Finally mobile me. At this point I use it for calendar, address book and preferences syncing across macs and my iphone. It works pretty well for this but at you can get the address book and calendar syncing through google so the preference & keychain syncing is the only thing I use it for with multiple computers. I do occasionally use back to my mac which is nice but honestly I hope apple finds a way to make it more valuable otherwise they may not see my $99 come september.

Of the four DropBox and Evernote are my most favorite -- They work amazingly well and are free (but both offer paid upgrades with enhanced capacity & storage)

Highly recommended.

Newest Project (DreamHost customers read!)

2009-05-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

I've been playing with a new project recently -- I honestly never intended for this to turn into anything "real" but somehow it took on a life of it's own. If you use DreamHost as your web host you might be interested in looking at this -- It's a domain & list management application for dreamhost accounts (and I must say that it's turning out pretty slick) http://dreamhostapp.com If you want to help finish it via beta testing send me a note.

Drawing Mode

2009-03-25T23:55:00.000-07:00

Google just released a 'drawing mode' in google docs. While it certainly won't replace Adobe Illustrator it's still a amazing achievement for an online word processor and should be quite handy to toss up a few quick diagrams to explain a point.

Of course I've updated PlusKit to work with it -- Grab 1.58 and enjoy all of the drawing goodness.