If your laptop has a fan on the bottom, don’t use it when you’re naked.
Update: Stop looking at me like that. It’s never happened. Honest. 🙂
Blog
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Why Outlook Sucks: Part 1 of 900,000
Let’s find an email from Toni regarding her party next weekend. There appears to be a search box in the toolbar.
Wait.. that seems to be only for contacts. Nevermind.
There’s a find button to the left which brings up a toolbar, but it appears to search only the Inbox. Unfortunately I have a bazillion folders and rules and have no idea where the message is located, so I’ll go over to the “Options” menu (of all places) and start an “Advanced Find”.
Uh.. ok. I have no idea why I need “More Choices” or “Advanced”, and apparently I’m still searching only the Inbox. Let’s “Browse”..
Now that we’ve systematically selected every possible place the email could be–which could apparently be in my Calendar or Contacts–we can click OK and go back to the “Advanced Find†dialog and click ‘From..’
Great.. the engineers decided to reuse the same old contact finder dialog. There are a lot of people with a ‘Toni’ in their name, so we’d better embark on a separate sub-find quest to identify the correct contact record. Make sure you click ‘Find Now’ and not ‘New Search’ when you’re done.
When we come back from a coffee break, we see Outlook proudly presenting a result set, sorted by date, most recent first. That’d be great, except that if I’d received it recently, I probably wouldn’t need to use an ‘Advanced Find’ to locate it, would I? The results are also displayed within the dialog for some reason instead of the main window, so I guess I’ll have to keep this up on my second LCD, which I’ll now repurpose as the “Dedicated Advanced Search Dialog Monitor”. Whatever.
Just for shiggles, let find an email in Apple’s Mail.app.
Holy freaking crap. I typed in ‘toni party’, and it gave me emails from Toni about her party, sorted by likely relevance. It was immediately clear how to search and the results took less than a second to display, despite the fact the PC is apparently faster spec-wise and I have magnitudes more email on my MacBook Pro. Huh.Update: Part 2 of 900,000
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Conspiracy Theory: Blue Man Group Recruits Seth Godin
When I saw Blue Man Group at the Venetian I knew one of them looked familiar. It was none-other than entrepreneur Seth Godin! Ok, probably not. But there is a resemblance, no?
Seth Godin
Blue Man
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Configuring Rails To Use Gmail's SMTP Server
OpenRain.com uses Google Apps For Your Domain, and all email flows throw Google’s servers. Unfortunately, Rails 1.2.2 can’t send via smtp.google.com out of the box. As originally pointed out by Anatol Pomozov there is a solution. Here’s the simple version tested with Rails 1.2.2.
- Save this code as lib/smtp_tls.rb within your rails app.
- Add this code to config/environment.rb.
- Use ActionMailer as normal.
Updated 2008.01.04: The original link was b0rken, so I pastied the code instead.
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DSLR Camera Body vs. Lens: Where To Put Your Money
Absolutely put more of your cash into the lenses. As much as it hurts to think about, you’re probably going to trash the body long before an equally priced lens. A good lens will also hold its value relatively well, even when the lens model is updated. (Nicer used Canon EF lenses
aren’t easy to find deals on since they’re quickly bought; I’m constantly searching.)
I’m a Canon man, and I’ve tried some of the kit lens. They’re absolute crap. Images appear soft and with an annoying amount of chromatic aberration. Sigma’s lower-end equivalents such as the Sigma 18mm-50mm 3.5-5.6 DC Zoom
While admittedly blown out, there is a very distinct purple color cast in the areas directly above and to the right of the lighted area. This was shot at f/3.5, 1/80s at ISO400 at 18mm (x1.6 sub-frame conversion).
I’ve been completely satisfied with my Canon XTi
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..But *Should* You Fix That Bug?
We have a natural desire to fix things. As engineers we find satisfaction in resolving technical problems and, if you’re following test-driven practices, keeping them resolved. These thoughts flow through our minds as the primitive keyboard-wielding code monkeys we evolved from. What distinguishes us from our fecal-flinging counterparts, however, is our ability to question these instincts and wear business, user and developer hats simultaneously. Here are some additional questions we should consider before immediately reacting with technobabble.- What business value could be realized by addressing this issue? It would be ideal to resolve it, yes, but is there any ROI for the time spent?
- How risky is this? If cleaning the big red button could potentially fire the nuke, you might want to leave the booger on it.
- How critical is this issue? If sufficient workarounds exist or this does not prevent people from working, perhaps you could move it below other todo list items that are.
- How does this make users feel? Requiring the user to click OK every two minutes will create desire to stab you with a sharp object. Your death will generate bad vibes around the project.
- What is the business impact? If the tree fell, but nobody lives in the woods.. what tree?
- What are the dependencies and dependants? Superman requires his tights be dry-cleaned before saving the planet today. You might want to run to the dry-cleaners.
- When could a resolution actually be delivered? It may take 2 minutes to fix, but if users can’t get it for two months perhaps the work can be postponed.
- Who is be most appropriate person to handle it? Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s the guy who actually wrote the code.
- What actually needs to be fixed? Don’t replace the alternator if you only need a battery.
- Where does this fall in the project timeline? If the next deliverable is already late, you might need to rescope by sitting down with the business and reevaluating what is truly necessary.
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Arizona Desert: Usery Mountain Regional Park
These are a few of my favorite shots from Usery Mountain Regional Park over the last year. All were taken in color on a Canon XTi using a 28-135mm EF lens, but are presented here with no color saturation to allow for more dramatic contrast adjustments.
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The $1K Home Recording Studio Mac Add-on
Update 1: Check out “Making Friends With Some Guy Named Mike” on this band page of mine for an awesome example of this studio in action.
20 years ago digital home recording wasn’t plausible. 10 years ago we started to see its potential, but most hobbyists (read: very cash-limited people) were limited to using still-primitive versions of multi-trackers such as Cakewalk, Cool Edit Pro or Cubase with either COTS Sound Blaster PCI cards or ridiculously over-priced, high-noise, high-latency specialty cards with break-out boxes such as the Lexicon Core 2. Running on Windows 95 or 98, we regularly struggled with the stability of the platform and device drivers. Today, you can have your own personal studio capable of producing DVD-quality recordings by adding a thousand dollars of equipment to your existing computer and music rig. Here’s my living room/home theater/recording studio/Mac haven, all driven by a single Mac Mini..
Here’s are the core components..- Mac Mini (Intel).
- Big 1080p LCD television/monitor. The Mac Mini drives this beast with a DVI-to-HDMI converter cable.
- Logic Pro (Apple’s recording software). For my needs, it’s really either Logic Pro or Pro Tools. For various reasons I’ve stuck with Logic Pro run in a distributed manner with other Macs in the house using built-in Xgrid functionality over gigabit ethernet.
- Headphone amp w/studio headphones. You need at least one good headphone set to properly lay down track on top of track, but when you have people over you can usually get by with three or four. This is too much load to be powered directly by the computer, so the dedicated headphone amp is necessary. I have a Behringer HA4700. (I didn’t want to add my Event 20/20 references monitors to the already cluttered layout, so I have them in another room.)
- PreSonus FirePod. This is a truly outstanding input device for recording the entire band simultaneously. The unit is rack-mountable, connects via FireWire and optical cables, and has pristine noise-free pre-amps.
- Microphones and stands.
- Instruments. I have a full-size Yamaha keyboard (pictured), a bunch of vocal mics and guitars, and a rack of mediocre analog schwag. BYOI, whatever ‘I’ happens to be.
If you’ve already got a Mac setup and some music equipment, grabbing Logic Express, PreSonus FirePod, decent vocal mic and a bunch of cables for $1K will turn your system into an audio powerhouse which your friends will envy.
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Apple Aperture Features Explained For Non-Photographers
The RAW format pictures produced by my Canon XTi are often in excess of 10MB. Couple this with “continuous shooting” and a fast CompactFlash card, and I can easily fill a 4GB’er in a couple days. I’ve used Apple’s Aperture for about a month now through the holidays and a friends wedding, and have been very pleased with the product.
Aperture is more like ACDSee or Picasa than Photoshop. It’s about fine-tuning, managing projects, browsing, searching, sorting, packaging and publishing, and does neither layering nor psychedelic effects typically associated with digital picture manipulation. It’s iPhoto on crack. Here are a few features which I like.
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Full-screen mode. This is similar to iPhoto’s full-screen mode, but with much better tools. The “adjustments” overlay provides typical white-balance and exposure controls, as well as a slick RAW-only section and easy-to-use tools for tweaking specific color ranges. All adjustments are non-destructive, so you can freely experiment with tools without worrying about being able to revert to the original. There is literally no “Save” button. The transport at the bottom is nice, too.
- Versioning & Stacking. Rather than copy/pasting files to make small adjustments while preserving the original, the versioning mechanism provides a great way to have many different versions of the same file, such as for different cropping ratios and color/sepia prints. Stacking allows you to make good use of continuous shooting on your camera by allowing you to select the best shot from a series and hide all others in the browser. The loop tool (see image) is a pin-point zoom pointer which works in both the browsing and viewing areas.
- Management. Understanding the various types of containers admittedly took me a few days to truly “get”. Once I did, however, it’s nice how Aperture combines typical concepts such as “Folders” and “Projects” with “Albums”, “Smart Albums” (search-based albums), “Light Tables”, “Books” etc. It’s easy to keep things organized while simultaneously being able to find things.
- Meta-data. In addition to handling EXIF/IPTC information and allowing changes at import time, making changing to images en mass is easy with the “lift and stamp” tools. Adjustments such as camera settings, tagged keywords and exposure changes are easily “lifted” off a select image and “stamped” onto others. This is especially useful when working with stacks.
- Backup. Aperture vaults are basically files on backup volumes (such as removable firewire drives) which can be sync’d to when plugged in, kinda like having rsync built into the application.
- Offline. When each photo is 10MB, you can’t keep every photo with you. You can, however, store the “master” on an external volume and keep a high-resolution preview and all meta-data with you at a fraction of the data size.
If you’re using OS X and are somewhat interested in photography, I’m sorry, but you’ll probably want to bite the $279 bullet
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Full-screen mode. This is similar to iPhoto’s full-screen mode, but with much better tools. The “adjustments” overlay provides typical white-balance and exposure controls, as well as a slick RAW-only section and easy-to-use tools for tweaking specific color ranges. All adjustments are non-destructive, so you can freely experiment with tools without worrying about being able to revert to the original. There is literally no “Save” button. The transport at the bottom is nice, too.
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RAZR v3, Bluetooth, T-Mobile Internet & OS X
Here’s the lowdown on setting up your Motorola RAZR to connect to the internet wirelessly via your bluetooth enabled Mac after signing up for T-Mobile internet services. I live in Arizona and have had no issues following these steps on several Macs.
- Grab this.
- Copy the “Motorola GPRS CID1” file into /Library/Modem Scripts
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Go to System Preferences -> Bluetooth -> Devices and click “Set Up New Device…”
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After selecting the more obvious options to set up your phone, enter the connection settings as in the following screenshot. (The password is “internet”.)
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After completing the wizard, select “Connect” from the new icon visible on the menu bar at the top of the screen.
(Suggestion: manually “Disconnect” your phone when you’re done with the internet connection, as putting the computer to sleep while connected seems to cause issues when the system wakes up.)