48-Hour Days

Today was the first day of VBS for Timmy. He was pretty excited to go, although he didn’t really understand what it was going to be. He excitedly put on his special t-shirt (a yellow one he picked out with an iron-on we got at registration) and dutifully carried a pack of Oreos out to the car (part of our donation to the cause). He started to take off down the driveway, but I was scared he’d drop the cookies and bust them all into little pieces, so reluctantly he walked. He was really, really careful with those Oreos!

When we got to church it was a madhouse. There were two registration tables set up in a narrow hallway and all the kids, parents, and siblings were being funneled through them. The two elderly ladies handling sign-ins could barely hear me when I shouted his name! There were kids crying everywhere, with Moms telling them how much fun they’d have and just to give it a chance and they’ll make all kinds of new friends. I started to worry that my little man would want to go home, too. But he didn’t seem to notice them. He was anxious to get to school.

We walked back to the preschool classroom where the three-year-olds and four-year-olds were and got his name tag. As soon as he saw all the familiar toys, the play dough, and the other kids he took off. I had to call him back for a kiss! Not to worry, my little man would love school.

When Kellie and I picked him up, the first thing he said was, “Mommy, I was getting so angry.”

Puzzled, I asked, “Did you get angry at one of the kids?”

“No.”

“Were you angry with your teachers?”

“No.”

“Why were you so angry?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t want to talk about it.”

We met Daddy for lunch at Bob Evans because he happened to be working very close by. At lunch he told Daddy the same thing. Daddy asked the same questions I did and got the same responses. Then a lightbulb went on.

“Buddy, were you angry because school was taking so long?”

“Yeah. I was angry because it was a long time and you weren’t picking me up, but then you picked me up and I said, ‘I was getting so angry.’ But I was not angry anymore.”

Uh, oh.

Since this conversation we’ve asked him several times if he still wants to go and the answer is always an emphatic “Yes,” which is a good thing. I just hope the answer doesn’t change in the morning.

I’ve been learning Ruby and Rails the past week or so and I really do love it. However, I have lots of terminal tabs open and this was getting quite annoying. One for MySQL, one for the server, one for the Rails console, etc. Then today I ran across a post in the TextMate mailing list from someone with the exact same complaint. The suggestion? The under-used and oft-forgotten screen command. Ah, ha!

I’m a bit familiar with screen, having used it in the pre-tab Terminal days. Ah, the Good Ol’ Days when I had one window for emacs (before TextMate, obviously), one for this server, one for that process, and a utility shell. I never got too crazy with it, but I was able to use it. I knew its capabilities, I just didn’t need anything fancy.

Today I got fancy.

What I really wanted was a screen configuration file for my project. I figure if I can separate the configuration out that way, then I can have different screen sessions running for different Ruby apps. This might come in handy in other places, too, like when I’m compiling on a remote server. It took a while to get just the right config file. Here it is:

escape "^Ff"

hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= kG}[ %{G}%H %{g}][%= %{=kw}%?%-Lw%?%{r}(%{W}%n*%f%t%?(%u)%?%{r})%{w}%?%+Lw%?%?%= %{g}][%{B}%Y-%m-%d %{W}%c %{g}]‘

screen -t ruby  1 tcsh -c ‘cd /Users/dmkash/Develop/Ruby/project; /usr/bin/ruby script/server’
screen -t rails 2 tcsh -c ‘/usr/bin/ruby /Users/dmkash/Develop/Ruby/project/script/console’
screen -t shell 3

I’ve redefined the prefix character sequence from C-a to C-f because I still use emacs quite a little bit. C-a in emacs moves you to the beginning of a line.

Next, I did some fancy stuff with the status line at the bottom of the screen. I cannot take credit for it. I found it here. It is quite nice.

The next three lines open up three windows. The first starts the Ruby server for the project, the second gives me a Rails console for the project and the third is a utility shell. Sweet, huh?

Now, to launch a screen session for my project, I just type screen -c ~/Develop/Ruby/project/.screenrc. To make it even quicker, I added an alias with the project name to my .cshrc file. I gave the session a name using the -S project argument and told screen to reattach to the running session if possible using -D -R. My entire alias line looks like this:

alias project    'screen -S project -D -R -c ~/Develop/Ruby/project/.screenrc'

I’ve wanted to do one of these posts ever since I saw Brendan’s a few months ago. I just haven’t had the time until now. Anyway, here goes:

EagleFiler

I can’t say enough good things about EagleFiler. This is my brain. I dump anything into it that I want to be able to find later, which with my pack-rat nature is just about everything. I’m still trying to find my optimal system of tagging and filing, but with such fabulous search capability, I still find everything. I even use it for my movie catalog and recipes.

Growl

If you are a Mac user and you don’t have Growl then you probably live in a cave somewhere. Growl provides a common notification system for Mac apps. There are tons of applications that have Growl support and there are several different styles. The command-line growlnotify plus cron is the perfect combination for reminders.

Mail.app

This is my mail client of choice. For a long time I was faithful to Thunderbird, but I finally needed to use an e-mail client that was integrated with everything else I was using. Thunderbird is a great client, but its cross-platform nature means that it just doesn’t work seamlessly with just about anything. With a few tweaks, Mail.app has turned out to be quite nice.

SpamSieve

Mail.app has some decent junk mail filters built in, but they weren’t quite up to snuff. SpamSieve adds Bayesian filtering to just about any Mac e-mail client. It also scores e-mail rather than just declaring it Spam or Not Spam. This allows you to set up rules to deal with the almost certain spam messages and manually review the others.

Firefox, Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar

Being a web developer, I can’t live without my Firefox. Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar are also indispensable. I have tried other browsers, but I keep coming back to Firefox. I’ve been using the version 3 betas and, except for beta 5, they’ve been pretty stable and show big improvements. Beta 5 seems to crash if I look at it funny.

Adium

It seems that every person I know is on a different IM network. Adium neatly ties them all together into one UI for me. I seldom even think about who is on which network.

Fluid

I use a lot of web applications and I used to have about 20 tabs open in Firefox. Fluid provides site-specific browsers for all of them. I don’t know that there is an actual productivity boost, but it feels good to have these sites separated out.

1Password

This is one that I really didn’t think I’d use. It was part of the MacHeist bundle that I bought and I thought, “What the hell?” I love it. 1Password uses the Keychain to save login information for web sites I visit. It is supported in just about every browser (except Opera), and even in Fluid! I get the feeling I’m only scratching the surface of its features, so I’ll have to play with it more.

Quicksilver

This is just automatic for me now and if I sit down at a Mac without Quicksilver, I find it incredibly frustrating to use. This is a swiss-army-knife application and can do just about anything you want it to.

MacJournal

This one I just bought and already I am really glad I did. With two small children, there are hundreds of cute little stories, funny things they did or said, milestones, etc. and I want to capture them all. MacJournal lets me quickly jot down a little snippet of my life. It date and timestamps it so I know exactly when it happened. I can also add photos or sound/video recordings to an entry. Fabulous! It is becoming a digital scrapbook for me.

TextMate

Ahhhhh, my IDE/text editor/blogging tool of choice. TextMate rocks. I use it for all development: Objective-C, Javascript, XHTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, shell script. Also for editing text configuration files (especially Apache) and I’m writing this blog post in it. The keyboard shortcuts, like those of emacs, are now engrained in my fingers.

GeekTool

I forget that this is even running, but GeekTool keeps my external IP address, remote client status, and a few choice logs available on my desktop.

MagiCal

MagiCal is a great little application that puts a small, unobtrusive icon in my menu bar with the date. It is much more flexible than the built-in date/time options.

Curio

I use Curio for brainstorming and organizing my thoughts. I also use it for flowcharting, although it really isn’t built for it. It really helps me when I’m planning out the steps in a particular process.

Chicken of the VNC

Chicken of the VNC is how I access computers in the office to provide tech support or run our custom database applications. It is a great VNC viewer app.

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire has a lot of features I like: hiding read items, smart categories, Growl notifications. The thing I like the most is the internal browser. I used to have all kinds of tabs in Firefox that were blog items I wanted to read. No more. I keep them open in NetNewsWire and they stay in a sidebar right in front of me, so I don’t forget about them.

Whew!

Well, I was going to include the online applications that I use, but I think this has gone on long enough. I hope maybe I’ve pointed you in the direction of an app that is new to you, but that you’ll come to love as I do. I love trying out new apps, so please post your favorites!

Wow. Life has been really pretty hectic lately. I’ve hardly had time to breathe. I miss my friends from CWSA, whom I haven’t even IMed with in what seems like ages. How are you Bridget? Still out there? Brad? Brad? Brendan? Eric? Joe? Everyone else?

So, what’s kept me so busy? Well, potty training for one. I thought my son would never be potty trained. No amount of coaxing, bribing, or threatening would get Timmy to go in the big potty. Then, finally, miraculously (as it seemed anyway) he one day announced, “Mommy, I have to go potty.” and he got up from his puzzle and did it. He kept it up for two days and I was starting to think this was it. But, no. He went back to his old ways for another week. When he again decided to use the big potty, I didn’t get my hopes up. However, I knew he was done with diapers when his teacher told me he had gone potty at school for the first time. I knew instantly that he was serious. He hasn’t needed a diaper since. One down, one to go.

Most of my time over the past few weeks has been spent on the section of my company’s web site devoted to our annual conference, Riemer Week. With a little help, I was able to create a design that won the approval of my superiors. Since then life has been a never-ending string of updates, changes, corrections, and additions. The program was being reworked and fine-tuned up to the last minute. Content trickled in and then hit like a tsunami. Just as things seemed settled, one of our speakers (and a good friend of many) passed away. I only got to meet him at one Riemer Week, but he was such a warm, friendly, fun-loving person, I instantly felt like I’d known him longer. I was looking forward to seeing him again, showing him pictures of the kids, and hanging out with him.

I’m both looking forward to and dreading Riemer Week. It is in May in Monterey, California and I’ll be there this year. I’m looking forward to going someplace new, staying in a nice hotel, eating good food, and hanging out with Anna and Tom (who I miss a lot working from home). I’m dreading spending a week away from my kids. I wonder how they will deal with it? Probably better than me. I’m feeling a bit teary just at the thought. Oh, how will my babies survive without me???

Ahem. Okay, I’m better now.

Riemer Week has meant weeks of work and I actually racked up some over time. Unfortunately, the extra hours I put into work meant that something else had to suffer. That something else was the housework. So, now I’m desperately trying to catch up. It is all the more urgent, as we are putting our house up for sale.

This is something that makes me really nervous, cautiously excited, and a little sad. I love my house. I’ve loved it from day one. It has been a place of solace in sad times, and of celebration in happy times. I lost a marriage and a baby here. I discovered my independence here. I was blessed with a happy marriage and two beautiful children here. This is the only home I’ve been able to call truly mine, the only home Ray and I have called ours, and the only home my kids have ever known. There is a big part of me that will be sad to leave.

But, we’ve long since outgrown it. Cozy and sweet as it is, it is bursting at the seams. Since my children insist on getting bigger, the situation is only getting worse. We are finally making the move, literally. I hope, anyway. As everyone knows, this is a horrible market if you are trying to sell. Even worse if your house happens to be in the city of Cleveland proper. Luckily, we are in a great neighborhood and you couldn’t ask for nicer neighbors. How do you advertise that?

We’re not fooling around and we’ve priced the house to sell. A photographer is coming in about two weeks and once the pictures are ready, the house will officially be on the market. That gives me a few weeks to de-clutter, thank heavens. There is just so much stuff! Then there are the Spring Cleaning chores that will need to be completed a bit early. I usually wait for warm weather so I can open the windows, but I don’t have that luxury this time around. The next two weeks are going to be filled with packing, shuttling things to my inlaws’ house (they’ve graciously agreed to let us store our extra stuff there), and scrubbing everything in sight until it all shines.

I’m nervous as hell about selling our house and I absolutely refuse to look at any other houses until we have a firm offer on the table, at least. Ray is optimistic and thinks it will sell quickly. It is a perfect starter home, in great condition, clean, move-in ready, and priced low. We’ve made tons of improvements, but in this market, that may not matter at all. What we need is a couple who has been looking in our price range for a bit, but not liking anything they see. Until they see our house and just fall in love with it. Then they will buy it just as we find the perfect house for us. Everything is timed just right and we trade keys before the mercury even hits 80.

Hey, it can happen.

My setup at home is rather unorthodox. We have a really small house. Really small. As a consequence, I don’t have an office. I don’t even have a desk at which to work. I use my laptop as an actual lap-top and work in the recliner or on the couch in our living room, where we truly live. When not in use, the MacBook Pro lives on the coffee table and, as you can imagine, it gets moved around quite a bit. All of my other equipment (DSL modem, router, web server, etc.) is located in our upstairs bedroom.

Among the various components located above me is an HP OfficeJet 5610 and a 500GB SimpleTech SimpleShare. Separately, I’ve been very happy with the performance of both devices. But, until now I had never tried to connect them.

I purchased the SimpleShare because I needed more disk space for my iTunes and iPhotos libraries, as well as somewhere to put backups. I didn’t relish the thought of dragging an external drive around the house with me and I wanted something that would be available from any computer on my network. A network-attached drive fit the bill rather nicely.

Getting the OfficeJet to play nice with the SimpleShare’s built-in print server was not the most straightforward process. HP does provide driver software for Mac OS X, so I’ve had no problem printing when the printer was directly connected to the MBP. I figured the drivers had to be on my computer somewhere, right?

I connected the OfficeJet to one of the USB ports on the SimpleShare, then used the web interface to enable the print server. The SimpleShare had no problem seeing the OfficeJet. So far, so good.

I then used the Print & Fax preference pane (I’m running Leopard) to attempt to add the shared printer. I could log into the SimpleShare and see the printer, but when I had to choose the driver, I was stuck. The driver for the OfficeJet wasn’t there. There were other OfficeJet drivers and I tried a few of them, but they didn’t work. The SimpleShare accepted the job, but nothing printed.

So, what was I using to print when connected directly? Apparently, some application that served as a proxy of some sort. There wasn’t a PPD somewhere that I could select. Damn.

Some Googling around led to others with the same problem, but no one finding a solution. So, I tried the Apple forums. BINGO!

Here’s the solution in a nutshell (all of these files are available from The Linux Foundation):

1. Download and install Ghostscript
2. Download and install Foomatic-RIP
3. Download and install HPIJS for Mac OS X

Once these were installed, it was a simple task to add the printer in:

1. Launch System Preferences and choose Print & Fax
2. Under the Printers list, click the + button; this will open a printer browser window
3. On the toolbar, click Windows
4. Click on the name of your SimpleShare workgroup, then host; you’ll be asked to log in
5. Once logged in, you’ll see the printer attached to the SimpleShare; select it
6. From the Print Using drop-down, choose “Select a driver to use…”
7. There isn’t a 5610-specific driver, but there is a driver for the 5600 series, and that is the one that works for me

Incidentally, the printer browser is a rather strange and buggy beast, with an unfinished feel. It doesn’t seem to be attached to any application: you can’t hide it, it doesn’t have a menu of its own, and it doesn’t go away when you quit System Preferences. When you are presented with a login panel, you have the option of saving the information in the Keychain. Although it appears to have been saved in my Keychain, it wasn’t using it because I had to enter my password every time. I also noticed that I was only able to see the printer once, then I had to reboot to see it again. I’m not sure if this is a bug in the printer browser or with the SimpleShare. I tend to think it is with the printer browser, though. These are annoying quirks and hopefully will be fixed in future updates. I’ll have to file a few bug reports.

Anyway, I’m happy with the outcome. I have more printer drivers than the law allows, but I can print from anywhere in my house. Now, if I can only find some software that will bring the printed pages downstairs for me…

If you haven’t just crawled out from under a rock, you know about Microsoft’s version-targeting proposal for IE 8. If you have just crawled out from under a rock, welcome back, and go read:

• Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8
• From Switches to Targets: A Standardista’s Journey
• Compatibility and IE8
• The Bruhaha of the Meta Declaration
• Standards mode is the new quirks mode
• Version targeting in IE 8, and an alternative path for Microsoft

I am not going to express my opinion on the topic just yet. I have some ideas, but I want to think them through and put together a considered opinion. However, I did have something that I just had to get out.

I think Microsoft really deserves a pat on the back for allowing this to be an open process. It is wonderful that all of this discussion and debate is taking place now, before even a beta of Internet Explorer 8 is available. That gives the web development community an opportunity to influence how it is implemented and, perhaps, even if it is implemented. It gives other browser-makers a chance to implement the same functionality in their browsers, if they choose. It shows us that they are listening and they really are trying. Think what you will about the way they are trying to do it, but it seems to me they are trying to do what is best for developers and users alike.

So, kudos to you, Microsoft. Here’s hoping you are truly listening.

I’m a die-hard Thunderbird fan. I have been since something like version 0.5. I love the way it threads messages. It very gracefully handles multiple accounts and subscriptions to mailboxes. It has some pretty flexible configuration options, including the ability to save all sent messages in my Inbox. This means that my e-mail messages are threaded right along with the messages I receive. Total time-saver for me, as I like to archive my responses to important e-mails.

Thunderbird does have its downsides, though. Tagging is an incomplete feature at best. Searching is slow and buggy. Mailboxes sometimes show messages that I have already deleted. And, a big one that has bothered me since the beginning: I can’t use Apple’s Address Book. I miss out on a lot of things because of that. Another biggie: no direct capture to EagleFiler. I have to save the messages and then let EagleFiler import them.

I’ve tried a lot of clients over the years: Mulberry, GyazMail, Entourage, GNUMail.app. They all missed something vital to my workflow and/or were incomplete.

I’ve tried Mail.app many times in the past and the latest version actually seemed like something I could switch to, except for one important thing: I can’t configure it to put my sent mail into my Inbox. Sure, I could bcc myself on everything and then clean out my Sent folder, but that is too much work when I can configure Thunderbird to do what I want. This is a deal-killer for me. I’m so used to Thunderbird it is going to take a lot to make me change.

So, I was pretty psyched when I stumbled across Correo. This is a fledgeling project, but seems to be headed towards exactly what I’ve been looking for: Thunderbird with Address Book support. Awesome! I tried out the latest build (0.3) and it just isn’t usable yet. I can’t find any way to contact the dev, Nick Kreeger, and I’m wondering if AppleScript support will be something else he plans. If so, than this is the holy grail of e-mail clients, for me at least. Go Nick!

Last night’s meeting was another huge success. Brad Colbow took us back to the basics of HTML and CSS with a great presentation. He used a design that he’d been working on with the client’s permission to demonstrate how he broke up and styled the pieces of the page. When he showed the design, my jaw dropped. Now there is talent. I was also keenly interested in how he broke up the page, which sections were which. It was enlightening for all, I think.

Following the presentation I got to talk with some of the other members, which is always fun. I am learning that I know more than I thought. When I initially joined the group, I was really unsure of my techniques and I really wanted to find out what best practices the pros used. I’ve found that a lot of what I am doing is The Right Way, which is really an ego boost. I’m also learning about how others solve the same problems I’ve run into, or at least that I’m not an idiot because someone else actually did have the same issue.

Chris Hattery and Bridget Stewart talked abut their experience with Dreamweaver, which is something I’ve heard of, but never used. Sounds like it has a lot of the features I love from TextMate. I had thought that Dreamweaver was strictly WYSIWTF, but apparently it is a really good IDE for XHTML and CSS. Who knew?

Next month promises to be another fabulous meeting. Joseph announced that we’d be doing a CSS tips ’n tricks session, with anyone who wants to presenting on a technique they’ve used. I can’t wait!!

It is a lovely, breezy, cloudy, slightly chilly fall day. I adore these days. I’ve just opened up all the windows and doors. Doesn’t seem like we’ll get many of these, since it is getting late in the year and I know the snow is going to be upon us soon.

I just today read a blog post about the release of gcalcli. This is so awesome! I’ve paired it up with GeekTool and now I have today’s events right on my desktop. Sweet!!!