23 August 2007

Has anyone seen my personal life?

So I’ve “forgotten” about my site for a few weeks, my apologies to all. I have been tremendously busy at work as of late. I am currently preforming on a level of 3+, and no that’s not just my charisma there, I’m working on a couple different sides of the box lately, just trying to break out of the box concept.  Things are not all bad though, I may be getting a reward shortly of a new MacBook Pro, as I have been working at home as well as the office, and we are doing Interprise/Win2k3 server stuff my G4 here at home isn’t going to cut it, and I need the dual monitor workspace for productivity. So I will be getting a MacBook to take back and forth, that’ll be cool however it will probably end up meaning that I’m expected to do more work than I am doing currently

No biggie, we are getting caught up at work and I feel like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, kinda. At any rate, I’ll be posting up some of the exciting things I’ve been working on in the very near future (so you can stop thinking I’m more bark than bite)!

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3 August 2007

Unix 3 Certification

Apple hit UNIX 3 Certification only one of four to ever do this! Just a quick Apple is Awesome posts to piss my Windoze friends off…

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7 July 2007

Outlook on the Day’s Events

It’s late, and I’m fighting the urge to go to bed… Family Guy marathon was on the tele this evening and I got the last load of stuff from our landlords after work, today is a somewhat joyous occasion for my wife and I, we severed the ties from the negativity known as rent and are fully owners! This has been a week of hell for me at work, as well as home. WORK WOrk Work as it were, making the impossible possible at the paying gig, then moving all of our stuff after hours. My iPod almost died this week since my compy wasn’t hooked up to recharge the device, god I didn’t realize how much an asset this little thing is!

At any rate, the Meijer Potter project at work has been kicking my ass, but I think that the programmer and I have it under control finally. Both compys here and at work have been flaking on me. The intel mini has been having audio issues as well as slow reboots, here at home I can’t get the box to wake from sleep!?! I am sure I’ll figure it out but until then, it’s time for sleep myself, we have a fairly big get together going on tomorrow and I have to be sharp!

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11 June 2007

Safari Sellout?

Apple has opened up Public Beta for Safari 3 today, I am currently testing on a remote PC, that’s right folks, a remote Windows machine! While I am not a big fan, nor a fan at all of Windows I do have to work with one for development reasons from time to time. This has been mentioned from time to time, but nobody thought it would actually happen, Apple to release their famed browser for a PC, then again, they did give the Windows users iTunes, and went from PowerPC to Intel for processors… Anyway, give it a try, for Mac/Win at apple.com/safari.

I’ll post my “official” test shortly of how it works on this Windows box, as well as the Intel Mac here at work and my PowerPC at home.

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9 June 2007

Development Workflow

Computer customization can be a great thing for productivity, however it can take a turn for the worse. Case in point, today I decided to get my computer at work really ready for some hardcore GTD, but the problem with a guy like me is I never really know when to quit. I started with of course cleaning up the cluttered desktop, putting files in the works in their correct places, okay, five minutes later we’re done.

Then I started to stare at my cluttered Dock, the Apple Dock is wonderful and awful all at once. So I thought about being able to manage the order of the programs held within the Dock, would this help?

In a way it does, all of my communication apps are on the left, then come development apps, then fun, you cannot forget fun stuff or what’s the point right? I came across a few great ideas that I will share with you now.

For Dock Spacing I came across an article by Adam Betts where he made “apps” out of icons to space things, simple idea, very useful execution. Next step is image previewing, this can be daunting as I have taken over the spot of three previous artists at my job. Each doing things in their own unique way, not wrong by any means but difficult to find and edit things for the guy walking into the fray. Some files open in Photoshop, some in Fireworks, and then finally some in Preview.app, which takes less time. But while I could Control Click all files and select Preview to open this is a bit of a PITA throughout the days workflow. I came across Xee which seems to be a great replacement (will follow up with a review) for Preview, plus it has an option in it’s Prefs that allows you to auto select using it as the replacement file by file or all files supported!

Now, so far I feel like the choices I’ve made will increase my productivity and workflow, I did end up wasting about a day to figure these things out, hopefully I saved you a bit of time in this from my findings.

Happy developing my fellow monkeys! Oh, and a preview of my dock/desktop so you can see what I mean, it’s flickR (which I loath saying as much as Tivo) but I can then outline why I do what I do.

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7 June 2007

Insert witty title here!

It has been a few days since I’ve posted, I have just been busy at work. I have been soaking my brain to the max lately with thoughts of Green as well. My wife and I started recycling early this year, but it really got me to thinking about all of the other things I could be doing to reduce my carbon footprint. We are planning to give up on bags at the grocery store and I’m looking into alternative/renewable energy sources for our new home. I bought my wife an iMac, it’s an older G3 but it is helpful so she can be on whenever she wants and I can get work done whenever inspiration strikes, so yay me! We were going to go this weekend to check out a 1972 VW Fastback, however we’d have to more than likely tow it back from Springfield IL (which is a couple hour haul, and the Passat doesn’t taut a tow package). It’s for the best, I’d rather find an old Beetle to have as a project car, something fun to fix up and go cruise around in with my special gal. Oh yeah, Apple updated their Powerbooks, which if your into Apple at all you already knew by now, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, or in a coma, hey, quit reading this if your in a coma!!! More later on!

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16 May 2007

iPod Nano

Well, it’s been a couple of weeks since I left the old shuffle behind for a 4GB iPod Nano, I have to say I’m digging it so far. I never really needed a solution like this until I lost the CD player in my car, it used to be just burn a disk in the morning and go! This is a bit better solution as I can hold much more music than a traditional cd would and have a lot more choices per day. However, I now have way too much to choose from so I’ve become a driving playlist hopper

But I figure I’ll get over that.

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16 May 2007

MacFusion

Okay, so being an Apple/Linux guy this sort of thing is right up my alley. When doing development I often like others have to download via ftp, edit, upload via ftp (I sometimes bypass this with Dreamweaver). Setting up MacFusion I can mount a remote machine as a drive and edit directly as if it’s a drive on my computer, this is very handy. I am sure I’m not the first person writing of it’s goodness, but I had to give it up to the developers on this one.

Go ahead and check MacFusion out and be sure to grab MacFuse¹ from the link on that page. You will be happy you did, if productivity is an interest of yours at least.

MacFuse is the library needed for MacFusion or sshfs to run.

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14 December 2006

Firefox 3!

Okay, so it’s only in Alpha 1 but I am using it right now! Dubbed Gran Paradiso, Firefox 3 is in Alpha 1 early developer milestone. I am quite anxious about this release as it will have a major impact on how folks like myself can render websites. Cairo will be used as the default graphics library affecting how all pages and text is “painted” on the screen. It’s just too exciting I know! I wouldn’t give up my Firefox 2 until this copy is closer to Beta but it’s worth the download.

I could tell you about everything that excites me with this new build but you should head on over to Mozilla and read about it for yourself!

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6 December 2006

Superdrive Crapped Out

Well, lately I’ve been getting error messages trying to burn CD’s from iTunes and even in my Disk Utility. “Failed to calibrate the laser power level for this media.” and the like. Now I admit my Powermac isn’t a spring chicken anymore but I have certainly not abused her. So this evening I took the drive assembly out and took the superdrive apart, I mean really apart. Grabbed the 91% Alcohol solvent from a local drugstore and began hand cleaning the laser. This proved to work, sort of. I was able to burn an album in iTunes but wasn’t able to get the Ubuntu Linux dist iso to burn (for a Linux project to toss on Dexter*). I suppose I will have to try to snag another drive or resort to an external solution, I wonder how much those are going for now, it’s gotta do the DVD’s too, maybe Dual Layer is the way to go this time, Tiger supports it!

*Dexter is my Blue & White Yosemite G3

I did end up slapping in a Memorex Dual-Layer DVD-RW, this thing rocks!

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