Illusory Follies

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!

… at least in some cases.

It’s easy to store information on your cell phone by typing some text in. It’s more advanced to be able to send text messages. But what about providing a “universal” interface (meaning a web services interface) that can receive text and makes text available?

This is what Twitter does. I wasn’t very impressed when I first heard about it a while back because it seemed so… simplistic. Anyone can write a simple database with users and allow them to post text messages. But I was missing the point.

I can now use my cell phone to send a message to Twitter (there’s a program called MobileTwitter that I just downloaded and installed. This text messages pretty much instantly wings its way to the Twitter servers. From there, people can subscribe to my “stream” of messages using desktop-based clients (I use Spaz on my MacBook and my Windows PC). However, I’m not stuck using one companies application — all I need to do is poll the web service. A simple curl call will easily retrieve my latest Twitter message

curl -u andrewflanagan:mypassword http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline
/andrewflanagan.xml?count=1 -s -o /var/twitter/andrewflanagan.xml

and a few lines of PHP will make it displayable on my web page:

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement('/var/twitter/andrewflanagan.xml', 0, true);
$status = $xml->status->text;

Alternatively I could have the PHP script directly call Twitter but I ran into some problems since it takes longer to load the pages each time someone visits and Twitter unfortunately limits requests to 70/hr which results in ugliness when I get too many hits on my site. So instead I set up a cron job that runs every 5 minutes (using the curl call above) and updates the locally-stored XML file.

But anyway, the point of this is that you can easily define new interfaces for entering, receiving, and displaying text. It’s simplistic, yes. But it means that on my way back from work (in the car) I can update the front page of my blog with a message using my cellphone. I can also be pulled over by a state trooper. They have no appreciation for the depth and usefulness of this technology!

Well. I purchased an iPhone Thursday. Friday was NOT a productive day. In fact, neither was today. It’s a great little tool and it’s very handy.

One of the first things I noticed was that my voicemail messages (which get emailed to me from my VoIP provider) were NOT able to be played on the iPhone. Basically, they support WAV files but they must be in a specific format.

Solution? Well, I immediately thought that I could set up a spare email account on one of my domains and use procmail to run a conversion on the audio on my Linux box (and forward the results to my regular email account). I did a search and was pleasantly surprised to see that it had already been done (in exactly this way). However, after trying to get it working on mine I realized that it was a little messy since I was using virtual mappings (in order to store all email domains/users/aliases in a Postgresql database). Hmmm… So, I played around with maildrop (with which I was previously not at all familiar with). After much, much tweaking of permissions on folders (maildrop requires some odd and sometimes nearly conflicting permissions for things to work) I was able to get it to work as expected. I shamelessly stole the script that had already been created, emerged sox and some other utilities to support the conversion and fixed some bugs that I found along the way in my mail config (finally cleared out 250+ emails that had been queued up forever).

After all that, I still have a slight issue. A WAV file goes from being 60K to being 500K when I convert it to the “acceptable” format. Oh well. AT & T’s EDGE network isn’t the fastest for downloading 500K but I guess it’s a lot better than nothing. It sure is nice to be able to get both your Cell voicemails and your home voicemails all on the same device. The iPhone is the first (so far as I know) cell phone to offer “visual voicemail” where voicemail is essentially downloaded rather then being available over one of those irritating “press 7 to delete your message”-type interfaces.

Phew… fun stuff. I’ve decided that since I spent the time playing with maildrop I might add some fun things (like system automation via email). There are definitely a few maintenance tasks that might be nice to automated via email. At work I have a proxy and email (at least from my work email account) is one of the few things that I’m allowed to use. I guess in theory I could run a really slow, email-based terminal session (email “ls -al” and after about 30 seconds get the results emailed back). That would be kind of cool. And a terrible security hole.

Sorry I’ve been slow on updating. I need to get back into the habit. Hope all my faithful reader(s) are well!

I like the idea of widgets in OS X and the way Dashboard works. However, other than the calculator I don’t find myself using them very much. But I finally found a Dashboard widget that really is handy. It’s a tool that lets you track packages from a variety of places (Amazon, UPS, FedEx, USPS, etc.). You enter the tracking tag a nice little widget is created. It will change status and will also integrate with Growl to give you notifications (so you don’t have to always look at Dashboard to notice a change).

Here’s a screenshot.

And a link to the author’s (very nice) website. Any widgets that any of my readers use and find useful?

Bill had commented on an older post about wiring and had asked for an update. I had thought I had posted one but couldn’t find any when I just looked.

So, basically, at this point, the following is complete:

• TV is installed in the main room. Wires are cable tied to the cantilever arm and go through a nice-looking plastic grommet in the wall. My options were to buy grommets at Lowe’s (surprisingly, they were like $6 each) or simply steal some from some of our furniture (the little holes designed to have wires go into for your computer stuff). I went with the stealing.
• All speaker wiring is done. I have speakers installed everywhere except the sub-woofer (which I installed in the back center. At some point I want a sub-woofer but the high-cost and low utility (hey, the kids are napping whenever we watch anything!) has delayed my purchase.
• All wiring for Phase 1 is complete. This is a nice, official way of saying that there will be a phase 2 and we’re not there yet. However, for this first phase, we have all audio wiring (to 5.1 speakers) installed, two power outlets (4 plugs) are installed and the cable re-wired and split (in the wall). In addition, all wiring through the wall to the TV is complete. I may change what I have going through the wall to the TV at some later date, but for now, it’s everything we need.
• No more mess in the main room (just the TV on the wall, speakers on the wall, and two floor speakers). Now we have extra room and I’m considering getting a nice leather chair (in black) that matches our surprisingly well-constructed Ikea couch.

Here are the pictures:

New shelves in closet. The small top shelf is just for wiring and equipment. We’ll likely use the lower shelf for the printers. There’s another shelf below that’s outside of the shot. Notice the nice blue paint. It’s not fun painting in a closet — no room.

Here’s the rather cluttered high shelf. It’s close to the door and has all the audio/video equipment as well as the phone and two computers. The upper computer is just there temporarily. (I’m not sure exactly what to do with it — need a computer?). It does have some spare room on the shelf for remotes and DVDs and such.

Here’s a shot of the same thing without the flash. This is what it looks like when you open the door. I tied some tube lights into the power plugs on the back of the receiver so that if you’re using it, there’s a strip of light that goes around the edge of the door frame on the inside. I considered a brighter light, but you don’t need to see much and anything too bright is annoying.

Here’s a cable-filled shot of the new power outlets, the cable outlet and above (a little hard to see) the 5.1 audio outlet 5 stereo and one mono plugs (for the sub-woofer).

Here are two shots of the surround speakers. I found the mounting shelves at Lowe’s for a pretty good price Looks a lot nicer than having those horrible little plastic arms.

Here’s a shot of the front. This shows the TV mounted on the cantilever arm, the center channel (mounted a bit high but tilted appropriately) and the right front speaker (just on the floor). All the equipment is in the closet directly behind the TV. I dislike how I couldn’t mount the TV in the center (but the arm does swing over and it’s very close). The mind is a funny thing — voices (played on the center channel) do sound like they’re coming directly from the TV even though though they’re clearly not.

Here’s a shot of the binding post. Hey, it looks professional! It might look nice to use banana plugs instead of bare wire, but that’s too fancy…

Here’s the unused sub-woofer binding post behind the couch. This is an RCA-type plug so it’s a little easier to connect than the screw-on/banana plugs used for the stereo binding posts.

Here’s what behind the TV looks like. You can see the plastic grommet in the wall (which is very functional). The arm itself is attached very solidly to a stud and the cable ties may not be pretty but they’re not normally visible, so it’s no problem.

I’m considering as part of Phase 2, the following:

• CAT5, DVI and USB runs throughout the house. Realistically, probably just to the office and the “kitchen office” nook.
• An upgrade of our main room TV (the in-laws have a bigger one — it’s time to upgrade! hehe…) and moving the upstairs TV to my office (for use with the computer)
• Dispose of an old inkjet printer, move the newer inkjet to the closet, and get a laser printer also for the closet.
• I’m considering (just considering) replacing my Linux machine with a dedicated “always-on” 8-core Mac. The brand new Mac Pros are just so darn cool. I could realistically do a 3-drive, RAID 5, 1TB array with the Mac and still have room on the main drive for “non-critical” stuff. I have a 1.5TB array now on 4 drives but the extra 500MB is somewhat unnecessary for redundancy. Down the road, I could upgrade to a 2TB (3×1TB HDs) setup if I needed to expand. The new machines have max RAM capacity at 32GB — that’s simply amazing (and expensive).

Note to scoffers: This does NOT mean I would give up my Linux server — I would simply virtualize it and run it in all the spare RAM I’d have.

But except for the printers I’m not really thinking this is going to happen anytime really soon. Maybe by the end of the year. Just maybe.

I enjoy having Cygwin installed on Windows and often like to use the shell commands (grep, find, etc.). However, it’s inconvenient to spawn a new terminal window and slog through the often-complex Windows directory structure. Based off of some websites I found, I now have a way to make this work…

Create a batch script file in your Cygwin /bin folder (for me, this is C:\Cygwin\bin) with the following:

@cd /d %1
 
@bash --rcfile BASCHRC -i

Create a file called “bashcontext.reg” and save the following text into it:

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\bash]
@="Open Bash shell here"
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\bash\command]
@="C:\\Cygwin\\bin\\runBash.bat \"%1\""
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\bash]
@="Open Bash shell here"
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive\shell\bash\command]
@="C:\\Cygwin\\bin\\runBash.bat \"%1\""
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\bash]
@="Open Bash shell here"
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\bash\command]
@="C:\\Cygwin\\bin\\runBash.bat \"%1\""

You can add the registry information by double-clicking the file to run it.

Now on every directory you have a “Open Bash shell here” option that will take you there immediately. Handy!

Here’s a screenshot showing my cluttered context menu:

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing some wiring… There are multiple phases of this project.

1. Install nicer shelving in under-the-stairs closet (wood instead of that horrible white wire mesh stuff). (25% complete)
2. Get proper power/cable/network/audio wiring into the under-the-stairs closet. (75% complete — no network yet)
3. Get “media center” components out of the living room and into the under-the-stairs closet. (100% complete)
4. Wall-mount the TV and wire audio/video cabling through the wall to the closet. (100% complete)
5. Wire audio around the room for a 5.1 channel setup. (50% complete)

So far so good… the main shelf for audio/video components and computers was installed and has been painted. I’m waiting on the other shelves until after since they’re not needed for any of the other electrical components. I’m waiting on network because I honestly haven’t figured out how much of the house I really want to wire. Wireless technology has its limitations but usually it’s fine around the house. I’m thinking right now that I’ll place a patch panel into the wall with 16-32 ports and only wire a few of them initially. Maybe one or two drops for the kitchen office area (for the wife’s computer) and a few upstairs in my office (I like being able to move files onto the server quickly). The kids bedrooms simply don’t need them and I don’t really take my computer into the bedroom. Now that everything in the main room has been moved to the closet, there’s no reason to have any there. If I ever wanted to do something like host a LAN Party (I think I’m too old for that) I could just drag a switch into the main room. The media components are moved in completely (a receiver, a DVD player, a VHS player and two computers). I had an old tape deck that I gave away (never used it and now you can’t even buy cassette tapes) and an equalizer (which really wasn’t useful since I don’t care about tweaking my bass/treble anyway). The computers take up a lot of room and generate probably too much heat. I’ll probably downsize the server to a single machine that runs a little cooler and get rid of the “gaming machine” since I really don’t use it anymore. The TV is mounted using a cantilever mount.

Once I determine exactly what audio/video I’m running to it, I’ll cable-tie everything so that it folds nicely (the arm for the TV is a little like the cable-management arms in server racks so I can tie stuff to it). I’ve successfully wired the front left and right and center channels. I was originally looking at satellite speakers far up on the wall but decided to instead use floor speakers for the front and a center channel mounted high (almost near the ceiling). It’s not really an ideal setup from an audiophile perspective (the center channel should really be lower — within 2 feet of the tweeters on the floor speakers) but all it really means is that the “sweet” spot for watching movies is a smaller area on the couch instead of the whole room in front of the TV. I have holes in the wall for the surround left and right speakers (back wall rather than side walls — again not “optimal” but there was no room to mount on the sides). They are mounted at the correct height (about 64″). I’m using single-gang wall plates with gold-plated screw on connectors that can optionally use banana clips. I think it should be adequate. The sub-woofer spot has been selected but not yet cut in the wall. I’m going to place it on the rear wall facing forward from the center. I suppose it doesn’t really matter where you place the sub-woofer but this way I should be able to “feel” the bass even better since it’s almost directly below the couch. I also need speaker mounts for the surround speakers and the center channel and haven’t determined what brand/type to buy. Back in the closet, everything wires to a 5.1 binding post with the same connectors. Something like this (different brand but same look):

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.3 which supports tagging natively. There’s a new spot under the Edit window where you can enter tags. I’m lazy though so I’d like it if it could present me with a list of my tags so I could click and add them automatically… I just modified the code a little bit for one file in Wordpress and it appears to work… here’s what I did.

In the file wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php, insert the following:

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        <script type="text/javascript">
        function setTag(text)
        {
                var curvalue = document.getElementById('tags-input').value;
 
                if (curvalue == "")
                {
                        document.getElementById('tags-input').value = text;
                }
                else
                {
                        document.getElementById('tags-input').value = curvalue + ", " + text;
                }
        }
        </script>
        <?php
        $output = "<legend>";
        $tags = (array) get_terms('post_tag', $args);
        foreach ($tags as $tag)
        {
                $output .= "<a href=\"#\" onClick=\"setTag('".$tag->name."')\">".$tag->name."</a>,";
        }
        $output = substr($output, 0, strlen($output) - 1);
        $output .= "</legend>";
        echo $output;
        ?>

That’s how I feel these days. There’s always been “overhead” stuff that I have to do. You have to take showers and dress and clean up after yourself (at least somewhat). You have to spend time getting ready for work and driving to work and reading emails and just doing all the boring monotonous things that no one enjoys but are required.

Well, I’ve now hit the point where about the time I’m wrapping up all the “overhead” tasks and ready to do something useful I realize I’m out of time. More “overhead” tasks crowd in around me and it’s time to brush my teeth and get to bed early so I can wake up early and repeat.

It’s terrible.

Granted, I have time to write this blog entry. But you know what? I’ve sadly actually tried to allocate “overhead” time to write to my blog! I guess I feel as if it’s a journal in many ways and so writing in it is part of this complete healthy life.

But this makes me think: maybe it’s not that I get nothing but overhead done but rather that I’ve put far too many tasks into the “overhead” category merely because they repeat frequently. Nowadays, virtually everything I do is scheduled. I schedule my oil changes, how many times we vacuum the house, every odd job and maintenance task is updated on my calendar if I can think of it. My daily status report for work is scheduled (and I receive a horrible email warning me about it every day). If Sarah and I want to have fun, we generally schedule some event weeks in advance and I shuffle some of the chores off of that day in the calendar and reallocate them to make a little extra room.

So maybe it’s not about overhead, maybe it’s about spontaneity and the realization that precious little can be done on the spur of the moment anymore.

I hate routine. Maybe I should write a program that takes my tasks and in an intelligent way re-arranges them to surprise me without totally destroying any sense of order.

Hmm… that sounds like a program that would probably have to pass the Turing test. I think what I’ll do is make an entry in my calendar to write this program. Maybe next Tuesday. That sounds good.

I stumbled across a website that was talking about the “magical number seven, plus or minus two“. The Wikipedia article that I link to has some great stuff. It’s really quite fascinating. I myself have found that I am able to really track 8 things at a time. If I’m stressed it seems to drop to 6. I use this quite a bit for making lists. Most lists I wish to make are short (less than 7 items) but I often wish to make them when I’m without a writing device (no PDA, pen and paper, etc.). So what I do is simply think out the list and make sure I firmly remember the number of items. Then, when I need to recall the list, I quickly think of the appropriate number (which is easy to remember) and the items tend to “fall out” of my memory quite easily. I have tried to track multiple lists and can succeed in juggling a few (although it’s unnecessary since I rarely have more than one list in my mind at a time).

Sometimes I wish I was autistic (since many of autistic people seem to have this cognitive numeric limit removed). It would be fun to track lists that contained hundreds or thousands of items.

Okay, well maybe not “fun” but useful.

Or I could just get a digital voice recorder.