Global Reset

Always one to chase after the shiny new technology, I’ve moved my blog over to Typo from Wordpress. Typo is a recent blogging engine developed using the latest buzzworthy web framework Ruby on Rails. I’ve been meaning to experiment with Ruby on Rails for a while now, and I guess Typo is a good start. One of the first differences you’ll notice is that Typo is AJAX-ified with a handy “Live Search” dialog over there on the right-hand side. This provides a pretty nifty instant search interface, with a transparent round-trip to the server. So you get something that looks somewhat like a local application, much like most of GMail’s functionality. Getting Typo running on Dreamhost wasn’t nearly as straightforward as Wordpress. Here’s the steps I followed:

1. Used Subversion to do a checkout on my local Mac of the latest Typo source (svn co svn://leetsoft.com/typo/trunk trunk).
2. Used the Dreamhost Web Panel to add the IP address of my local Mac to the allowed IP addresses that can access my mysql database.
3. Used CocoaMySQL to make a dump of my existing database (in case I screwed anything up) using the Export->”CocoaMySQL Dump” menu option.
4. Used CocoaMySQL to import the schema required for Typo (I imported it into the same database as my Wordpress install) using the Import->”CocoaMySQL Dump” menu option and selecting the db/schemas.mysql.sql file.
5. I used Cyberduck to ftp the Typo files into mywebsite/typo folder.
6. Made some necessary files executable (chmod +x script/ public/).
7. Browsed to http://mywebsite/typo/public to configure the installation.
8. Ran db/converters/wordpress.rb to import my Wordpress database into Typo.
9. Made a backup of the Wordress blog php files (moved /blog to /blog2).
10. Used the Dreamhost Web Panel to make a new subdomain (blog.globalreset.org).
11. Moved the Typo installation into the subfolder for blog.globalreset.org.
12. Remapped the domain to point to blog.globalreset.org/typo/public as the root folder for the website.

I fought for a while with getting Typo to work under my /blog subfolder of my domain, but it didn’t like it. I followed on the directions on the Rails wiki and in the Dreamhost forum, but couldn’t get it to grok the urls. I gave up and just went with a new subdomain, which Rails apps seem to like.

Also, I couldn’t find any themes I liked for Typo yet, so I started mucking with the default one. I’m not terribly happy with what I’ve ended up with here, but it’ll do for now.

Technorati Tags: RubyOnRails, Typo

I put up a handy start page for my Sidekick and PSP web browsing.

http://globalreset.org/mobile/

It has links to a few mobile sites, as well as quick search boxes for Google search, M-W dictionay, Yahoo! Finance’s stock quotes, and Google Local. I started off by copying Erik’s version, and adding a few items I thought were necessary but he overlooked..

My new home for my blog, globalreset.org, is being hosted by Dreamhost.com. I was referred to them by a friend of mine, and I’m glad I chose them. It’s pretty reasonably priced, at $7.95/month, and has a pretty powerful web-based management system. The reason I chose them, over similarly priced competitors, was that they offered shell access and webdav support. Also, the Pragmatic Programmers are pretty excited about this Ruby on Rails thing, and Dreamhost supports that as well (and you won’t find a similarly-priced competitor with that offering). As soon as I get that infinite free time thingy, I’m going to investigate this Rails framework.

In any case, if you want to try Dreamhost, I have a promo code that you can use: GR1337Promo. It’ll take $50 off your order. So, if you order just a month-to-month plan, it’ll basically waive your setup fee. If you pre-pay for one year (there is no setup fee in this case), it’s about half off the cost of your first year. Feel free to re-distribute this promo code. Full Disclosure: I get a referral fee of $47 each time one of you save $50.

I booted up my Windows XP machine to try out FlyakiteOSX. It’s a suite of tools to help skin your XP desktop to look a lot like OSX. If nothing else, you should check out the website. It’s a very slick Javascript implementation of an OSX desktop. It’s kind of a painful way to navigate a website, but it’s really amazing how well it’s put together. I hope the idea does not catch on though… I think one or two desktops is enough. I don’t need another one in my web browser.

In any case, the FlyakiteOSX suite works remarkably well. It doesn’t change many of the tiny user interface issues that I was hoping for (i.e. double-click on title bar still maximizes, unlike OSX which minimizes.) But it does add transparency to pop-up menus and a pretty drop shadow to every window. I have a reasonably speedy AMD box, so I didn’t notice if this was a severe drain on resources. It might stay on my home machine (which rarely gets any power-on time since I got the Mac Mini), but I probably won’t propagate it to my work PC.

Experimenting with that got me curious about getting widgets on my Windows XP machine, so I also tried out Konfabulator. This is actually a bit different from the Dashboard included with OSX Tiger. It allows widgets to run floating on your desktop, above your normal apps… Versus Dashboard which only runs on an invisible layer which must be summoned to the foreground. Konfabulator does have a layer which isolates just the widgets, so it ends up looking a lot like Dashboard. I haven’t experimented with many widgets, but the default ones are useful enough to convince me I’ll like it. This will be propagated to all of my machines. I may even use the OSX version of Konfabulator instead of Dashboard, just so I can be assured that any widget I grow to love will work everywhere I go.

Technorati Tags: Apple, MacOSX

So, a few days ago I complained about sites who hosted RSS feeds without the full content in the RSS feed. Apparently, even sites which post only text can exceed their allotment of bandwidth. This is news to me… But I suppose I underestimated either the size of the readership or the common courtesy of the readers. Of course, by that I mean that you would be doing your favorite blogs a nice favor if you could avoid fetching their RSS feed once per minute… Especially blogs which are only updated once or twice daily.

I use BlogLines for all of my news reading, which seems to be on an update schedule somewhere between 20 minutes and an hour. The good thing about BlogLines though is that it fetches your feed only once for all the users of BlogLines who read your feed.

I’d like to make a suggestion though for site owners whose RSS feed does consume a lot of their bandwidth… Host your feed with FeedBurner. They provide a pretty good set of “circulation” statistics, to help you track the size of your readership. But, perhaps most useful of all, they actually cache your feed and serve it up for you. They refresh their cached version once every 30 minutes. And it’s free. They have a “pro” version which offers more statistics and other advertising-related features, but the basic statistics and feed hosting is a free service. If you’d like to try it, but also be able to switch back transparent to your readership, they have a good suggestion on how to do that in one of their FAQs.

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with FeedBurner, nor do I receive any sort of referral bonus if you try their service. I’m just a happy user.

On principle, I have to start being more strict about unsubscribing from feeds with a truncated RSS feed. The whole point of this syndication stuff, is that I gather all of my news into a centralized location and I format it how I want it formatted. When certain bloggers only offer a truncated feed, I have to exit my feed depot to visit their website. In certain cases, I assume the site is trying to conserve bandwidth. That must be the case for sites like Cox and Forkum. I guess the bandwidth adds up quickly when the content you are distributing is primarily a large image, rather than text.

But what excuse does Diana Mertz Hsieh and Patrick Oscar Boykin have for their truncated feeds? Most of their posts are relatively short… They aren’t making advertising money off the site… It’s possible they don’t realize that a truncated RSS feed annoys some of us. I have no estimate of the size of their readership, so I guess it’s also possible that I’m the only one. Diana is an interesting character in Objectivism in that she originally sided with David Kelly (in the infamous split with ARI and Peikoff), but after serious reflection has reconsidered her position and has written a lot of good articles about what’s wrong with The Objectivist Center (in practice and in principal). I believe that her well-written articles do net her a large audience. Patrick is a friend from Georgia Tech. We were meant to be roommates, but he kicked me out of my own dorm room to squeeze a friend of his in. Consequently, we became very good friends. A couple of his publications on social networks have been recently slashdot‘ed, so it stands to reason that his audience has to be more than a handful of readers.

I wonder if there is a service out there that parses popular blog layouts (wordpress, blogger, etc) and ”screen-scrapes” the full blog post into a full RSS feed? Do truncated RSS feeds bother you also? If you aren’t using RSS yet, check out BlogLines for a good example of “RSS made easy.” You can start with my blogroll as a quick intro.

Update: No thanks to my petty complaints, Diana’s RSS feed is no longer truncated. I no longer find her blog, in any way, inadequate. :) Though I did learn that bandwidth is a concern. Those of you using an RSS client would probably be doing all of your favorite blogs a solid if you toned down the polling rate. A couple of times a day should be more than adequate for anything but a “breaking news” blog.

To all who are subscribed to the rss feed of my blog, please re-subscribe. I started routing the feed through FeedBurner.com. One of the new features of the feed is that it will auto-splice in a daily summary of my del.icio.us bookmarks. Here’s the new feed url:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/GlobalReset

If you don’t know what I’m talking about and what it means to subscribe to a feed, I suggest you check out BlogLines (my favorite online news aggregator). Just click the ”sub bloglines” button at the top of the sidebar there.

Erik pines for a second monitor at work… Well, gaze upon this with envy! Notice the specification document on the right side and the memory map of one of our devices taped to the left side! And that’s UltraEdit for my code and Cygwin for my compile in the middle! Would the addition of a second monitor give you the kind of resolution I have on my device spec?!

Click on that picture to get a technical breakdown of all the components of the modular multi-head display unit.

First thought: I need some more memory in this damn thing! If you are thinking of getting a Mac Mini, don’t accept the minimum 256mb. My 1gb stick is sitting on my table now, waiting for me to build up the courage to crack this thing open. Believe you me, it’s a very daunting task. Just listen to the snaps and pops in this guy’s video of the ordeal.

I’m still not sure if I’m going to splurge on a MiniMate. Once I get the extra memory installed and I software overclock the ATI card, I’ll judge whether or not “disc seek times” are really bothering me. Now, would someone kindly explain to me why in the hell Mac users still think it’s a good idea for every application to share that same space across the top of the screen for every application’s menu bar? And why in the hell doesn’t it close the application when I close the last open window of that application? Does anyone have a utility that changes that behavior to work more like Windows (or every other GUI ever). I guess I’ll get used to it eventually. Just like I’m trying to get used to using “cmd” (or the Windows key on my MS keyboard) for all my favorite keyboard short cuts… i.e. it’s “cmd-c, cmd-v” to copy and paste, not “ctrl-c, ctrl-v”. Same for using the arrow keys to highlight words… Windows: shift-ctrl-arrow, Mac: cmd-shift-arrow. I challenge you to do that while keeping the unused fingers on your left hand close to the home row keys. It ain’t easy…

On a happier note, I’m loving the idea of these application “packages.” In fact, they are such an obvious Good Idea(tm) that I am now pissed off that this is the first I’ve seen of them. So, rather than creating these giant folders in your “Program Files” folder, with subfolders for all of the various pieces of your application, your entire app is bundled into a single file. It’s like a living tar file. So, as you download plugins or what not, they are added to the appropriate folder inside your app bundle. Want to install the app? Download the bundle and drop it into your Applications folder (or anywhere you like really). Want to uninstall the app? Delete the bundle. To me, this is bad ass! Now, if you’re already a Mac user, that’s old hat and I probably sound pretty juvenile bringing it up. If you’re a Windows user, doesn’t that piss you off that this is the first we’ve heard of it!?!?

And, hot damn, Dashboard. Where have you been all my computing life? You make everything so easy. Every piece of data I regularly need to reference is available at the flick of a mouse.. And it’s all thanks to your beautiful widgets.

Spotlight hasn’t really wowed me yet. The saved search folders are cool. I’ve been using the saved search folders to organize my email in Outlook for years. It will be nice to have the same concept applied to the file system, and not just my email. Other than the saved search folders, it’s very similar to Microsoft’s offering (now out of beta). I think I still prefer Copernic to both of those solutions, though it has been crashing on me a lot lately.

More to come, as I actually move some of my files over too it (docs, photos, movies).. That’s when the really fun stuff starts!

I’ve been a Firefox convert since the 1.0 release and I’ve slowly been converting my officemates ever since. I tried Firefox/Mozilla a few times before, but was never impressed. Sure, tabbed browsing was fun, but I didn’t really need it. About the only time I use it now is when I select “Bookmarks->Distractions->Comics->[Open in tabs]”.

The thing that’s sold me, and kept me using Firefox religiously since the heavily publicized 1.0 release, is the wide availabity of extensions. Here’s a list of some that once I tried them, I couldn’t live without them.

• Gcache - I actually signed up for a Google developer ID just so I could start working on a Google “cache browser”. I was annoyed that when I viewed a page in the cache, each link on the page wasn’t modified to link to the cache version of that page. Turns out, thanks to this Firefox extension, I finally have my cache browser… wipes tears
• All-in-One Gestures - This extension wraps a bunch of extensions into one: mouse gestures, rocker navigation, scroll wheel navigation. My favorite mouse gesture is the image zoom. Hold a mouse right-click on any image in a web page, spin the mouse in a full circle, and release… And the image is now doubled in size, right in place, shifting the text of the web page over as if the designer had actually intended the image to be double it’s size.
• ScrapBook - This extension is what’s helping me build up a sort of library of helpful web pages. Allows you to save a copy of a web page, or just a selection, into a local collection. If the page disappears, you still have your copy. It also allows a full text search of your collection and you can organize everything into folders. I’d like to be able to synchronize this between home and work… Maybe the next release will help me out with that.
• Password Composer - This one is still on my “tentative” list. I love the idea… But it isn’t terribly practical. The concept is that you use a portable, easy-to-remember master password and combine that with information about a particular site to produce a unique password for the site. This means that if the site admin is bad or if the site is hacked, your easy-to-remember (and re-use) password has only been compromised on one web site and they can’t use that to access your information on any other website. Where it fails the “practicality test” is when I sit down at your computer and you don’t have it installed. Actually, there may be a web interface that takes “master password” and “site url” to give me the unique password so that I can still use it anywhere, so I should research that before I pass judgment.
• AutoCopy - Know how Trillian auto-copies any text you select into your clipboard? Yeah, this extension makes Firefox do that.
• del.icio.us - This is really the only way I’ll post links to my delicious page anymore. You get a pop-up window that shows you a list of your tags and a list of popular tags. There is a “recommend” box which contains the intersection of those two groups. So now I just click the tags out of the recommended box and hit “post”… So much easier than visiting delicious each time so that I can remind myself if I was using “.NET” or “DotNET”.
• SmoothWheel - Gives web pages a much smoother looking scroll, with options for accellerated scrolling if you hold an option key.
• BugMeNot - After you install this extension, you’ll never have to register to read an article at a web site (that you likely don’t want to get spam from) again. Whenever the site prompts you for a username/password to continue, right-click and select BugMeNot. The extension searches the BugMeNot database for a user/pass combo and fills it in for you automatically
• greasemonkey - In short, greasmonkey is an extension which allows you to associate “user scripts” with a given web page. With “user scripts”, you could make sure that all URLs displayed on any page are clickable links, improve the usability of a site you frequent, or route around common and annoying website bugs. They have a huge repository of scripts available if you don’t want to write your own. One of my favorites is the Google Smart-Delete Button (why won’t Google add this??). Actually, all of the Google user scripts should make you want to install this extension.
• ForecastFox - Adds a nice weather display to the status bar. Okay, I could probably live without this one, but that’s why it’s at the end of the list.
• TabMix - added 6/7/05 - Updates the tabs UI with lots of options. I enabled the “X” to close on each tab and the “Duplicate Tab” context menu option. I find myself using both of these features a lot. Duplicating a tab seems like a no-brainer to me, especially since the “Open this page in new tab/window” menu option was blatantly missing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work in Mac OSX Firefox, for which I ended up going with 2 other extensions to solve the same problems: TabX and Duplicate Tab

I may update this post from time to time if I discover any new ones. Please post a comment to let me know if you think there are any really good ones that I missed.

Technorati Tags: Firefox