Illusory Follies

Well I finally got sick of my small MacBook screen (useful while traveling but no fun at home when you have a lot of windows open). The new monitor is a 26″ Westinghouse LCD with a max resolution of 1920×1080. The color and brightness are outstanding and a hunt for dead pixels turned up none.

With the new screen I can more realistically deal with multiple large windows than before with my small laptop screen. I’m considering also getting a DVI-enabled KVM to allow my work laptop to easily be plugged in.

With the new monitor in place I feel like I’ve breathed some new life into my MacBook — it’s still plenty fast enough for most of what I do (the exception is running a Windows XP virtual session at a realistic speed). The big memory hog on this machine is still Microsoft Office (no surprise) which I only really use because it’s the only way to check my work email on this machine (using Entourage).

Overall, I’m quite pleased. Our main TV is a Westinghouse and despite it’s “off-name” brand for TVs and sneering remarks from the “big name” brand owners, I’ve been quite impressed with them.

Well, I don’t normally function as an advertising agency, but I thought I’d mention to anyone using OS X that there’s a splendid new application out by Lighthead Software. It’s call Papaya and it’s purpose in life is to make sharing files easy and effortless.

Sharing can be such a pain because of problems between Windows and Mac or even just silly things like firewall rules, security, etc. It would be nice if there was a reasonable way to share files that was:

1. Straightforward — don’t make me click around a lot
2. Easy to share — let me IM or email something that people can easily reference in order to access the shared material
3. Used standards that work regardless of your friend’s operating system

Papaya seems to be the answer.

Sharing files locally is automatic. Depending on your router/firewall, sharing files on the Internet may be just a tiny bit complicated but you only have to configure it once. For my own needs, this is beautiful. I can drag and drop files into Papaya, instantly get a link to share with friends and be on my way. No need to email large files, worry about acceptable formats or whatever else.

Papaya is priced at €20( $31 USD as of 5.26.08). If you have a Mac and need to share files, I definitely recommend this.

Also, Lighthead Software also makes the extremely handy Caffeine application that will keep your laptop from sleeping, having the screen dim, etc. It’s a free program and it’s operated with just one click on turn on, one to turn off. I use it often.

To Lighthead Software, thanks for some excellent programs!

I normally do not participate in this sort of thing. But this one is a little bit more interesting and I have precious little information about myself on this blog. So when my lil’ sister Alison “tagged” me to write up 7 random things about me, I’ve decided I’ll actually do it. I’ve made it slightly more interesting (scary?) by making them things that I’d not terribly proud of about myself.

7 Random Things About Me That I Don’t Normally Admit

1. I’m red/green colorblind. My wife (and my oldest kid) are incredibly color oriented. I’ve wondered many times if my wife has tetrachromacy. This random fact is one that is used to the infinite amusement of family and friends as in “Hey, what color does the carpet look like? What about the blinds? Wow! That’s weird!”. Please stop — thank you.

2. I’m a terrible cook. This has not stopped me from trying. I’d like to take this time to apologize to my family especially and the close friends that I have caused to suffer. I assure you, my intent is delicious food.

3. I have a dream… that one day I will be an author. I don’t feel particularly gifted nor do I have anything particular interesting to share with the world but I think that it would be fun to work from home all the time, wake up late, and write off trips to exotic places as business expenses. I’ve also considered writing technical books like those in the O’Reilly series. Most of the authors write terrible drivel so my title would fit nicely. (By the way, I like O’Reilly better than any other tech-book publisher — I just think most of the authors are better coders than writers).

4. I like ABBA (the dance/pop group). I’m sorry Sarah.

5. On a related note, I have taught my oldest son to dance. I’m sorry Patrick. Very sorry.

6. I think that binary is really cool. I fantasize that I have an audience who cares about me explaining it to them. In fact, I regularly “test the waters” by attempting to explain base n number systems to those around me. This explains why I rarely get party invitations.

7. Speaking of numbers, I like them a lot and try to memorize them. I still know one of my good friend’s Social Security Numbers (Sam, you should have NEVER let me get near your wallet) and I can assure you that the largest size of a signed, 32-bit integer is 2,147,483,647. They’re fun. I’m worse with numbers and letters together (as in license plates) but I’m trying to hone my skills (my brother said he knew/heard of someone who could keep a queue of 7 or so in his head while driving — I’m not there yet, but I practice regularly.)

Supposedly I should “tag” others but I don’t like the idea — people shouldn’t be forced to share. If you’re in some way influenced to share about yourself by reading this post, just let me know and I’ll link to it. There — that’s nicer.

…Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the children of one’s youth.
Blessed is the man
who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

I find little time these days and I noticed with some annoyance that I was behind with my Wordpress updates. I run a number of sites (13 Wordpress sites alone) and updating from 2.5 -> 2.5.1 is sort of painful and tedious.

So I made a script (most of the domain names are removed but you could add to the list):

sites=(illusoryfollies.com
       flanaganclan.com
       sarahflanagan.com)
 
base_path="/var/www/vhosts"
wordpress_download_url="http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz"
wordpress_download_file="latest.tar.gz"
wordpress_download_directory="wordpress"
wordpress_database_update_url="wp-admin/upgrade.php?step=1&backto=%2Fwp-admin%2F"
jailed_directory="httpdocs"
temp_directory="wp-temp"
 
number_of_sites=${#sites[@]}
 
 
echo "Updating $number_of_sites websites with the latest version of Wordpress."
 
for current_site in ${sites[@]}
do
  echo "Now processing $current_site..."
  echo "  Setting up directories..."
  if [ -e $base_path/$current_site/$jailed_directory ]
  then
    echo "  !!Detected a jail'ed website..."
    mkdir -p $base_path/$current_site/$jailed_directory/$temp_directory
    cd $base_path/$current_site/$jailed_directory/$temp_directory
  else
    mkdir -p $base_path/$current_site/$temp_directory
    cd $base_path/$current_site/$temp_directory
  fi
 
  echo "  Downloading latest version of Wordpress..."
  wget -q $wordpress_download_url
  echo "  Uncompressing..."
  tar zxfv $wordpress_download_file > /dev/null
  cd $wordpress_download_directory
  echo "  Copying into existing directory..."
  cp -r * ../..
  cd ../..
  echo "  Updating database..."
  wget -q "http://$current_site/$wordpress_database_update_url" -O /dev/null
  echo "  Cleaning up..."
  rm -rf $temp_directory
  echo "Done processing $current_site."
  echo ""
 
done

Now it takes about 15 seconds to update everyone’s site and it even performs the “Database Upgrade” step (at least for now).

Automation is a good thing. Speaking of which, I’m interested in Capistrano but I still haven’t really done anything with it. It looks like fun… I’ll have to add a post if I have any luck experimenting with it.