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Mac Keyboard Shortcuts

Dan Rodney has a great list of OS-X shortcut keys, including the (to these Windows learned eyes) foreign menu symbols that can be so confusing at first glance: Mac Central.

Karl at Tuesday, June 24, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Flip Versus Canon PowerShot

For us, the Flip doesn't make sense, because we use our Canon PowerShot 870SD IS for "of the moment" videos and it has been terrific. We have over a hundred short home videos, including landmarks like Emma walking for the first time, that would have been impossible to capture with a video camera. I compose these into DVD collections that we keep in keepsake albums. If we were okay with uploading to YouTube, we'd have quite an audience. In any case, I tend to agree with Michael Arrington that the hype around the Flip is a bit extreme. Simplicity rocks - I get that, believe me. But wow there is a lot of hype.

Karl at Friday, June 6, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Aquamacs - I am home

If you like Emacs, and are looking for version that plays well in OS-X land, it looks like Aquamacs is what you want.

As an aside, following the instructions here, to download and install MIT Scheme, will get you ready to self study Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Eli Bendersky blogged his effort to read the book.

If you're concerned about learning Lisp to use Emacs, you don't have to. But if you care to dip in, defmacro's The Nature of Lisp is a good read.

If you're looking for Python support, check out this write up (M-x run-python just worked out of the box - nice Aquamacs!).

There are many versions of Emacs available for OS-X beyond Aquamacs and the one that Apple bundles. You can find them on the EmacsWiki. The CarbonEmacsPackage is a popular choice, so is Emacs App. I'll probably end up experimenting a bit with them both.

There is a great set of Emacs tutorials at IBM's developerWorks.

Emacs's Org-mode might be the answer to my note taking needs.

Karl at Friday, May 30, 2008 | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Great NYTimes article reveals a little about their Web production process

.It was both educational and fun to read the NYTimes interview with Khoi Vinh, their Design Director.

Karl at Tuesday, April 29, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Got my Mac Book Pro at work

Many of us at work are migrating to OS-X. It's logical since our deployment environment is a Unix variant, Solaris, and most of us on Windows run Cygwin to create a developer environment that resembles a Unix-like environment.

Now I'm not a stranger to OS-X. I've been convincing my family to switch for the past four years and now they mostly run iBooks and Mac Books, decreasing the time I used to spend helping fix problems. Fact of the matter is, if you are using a PC mostly to send email, surf the web, manage photos and video, it is a great all round choice.

The irony is that within minutes of getting my laptop I froze it! Turns out it isn't all that smart to run Parallels, out of the box, the way I did, and run, oh, 8 or so programs simultaneously outside of it!

Anyways, in less than an hour I had my favorite web browser, Firefox, my organizer, Wikidpad (which required me to run it from the Python source - but it worked!), my encryption software TrueCrypt, my IDE of choice Eclipse, my favorite OS-X free text editor, TextWrangler, all up and running. With Maven, SVN, Java and Python pre-installed made it easy to checkout my current work and get a build going. I won't be needing Parallels all that much since so much of the work I do can be done in OS-X, but it will be convenient to be able to test websites in different browsers, on two of the three primary desktop OSes, with little effort.

Karl at Wednesday, April 16, 2008 | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Simple Web services are so much fun

Track your Domino's pizza delivery with a python script.

Or try this nice one liner in your favorite Unix shell: curl -Is slashdot.org | egrep '^X-(F|B)' | cut -d \- -f 2 for a Futurama quote from Slashdot.

Karl at Thursday, March 27, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"crippled by their own process"

Coding Horor: "Is Eeyore Designing Your Software?":

Here's my honest question: does open source software need all that process to be successful? Isn't the radical lack of process baggage in open source software development not a weakness, but in fact an evolutionary advantage? What open source software lacks in formal process it makes up ten times over in ubiquity and community. In other words, if the Elbonians feel so strongly about localization, they can take that effort on themselves. Meanwhile, the developers have more time to implement features that delight the largest base of customers, instead of plowing through mountains of process for every miniscule five line code change.

Are large commercial software companies crippled by their own process?

I'd say that in large corporations, I've seen many internal projects beat down by the same.

The new portal architecture at CIM doesn't suffer from this, but the old one certainly did. We've come a long way.

Karl at Wednesday, March 26, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Moving to a Mac?

There's a possibility I'll be switching to a MacBook Pro as my development machine at work. A few years ago, before OS-X, a switch like this would have made me feel a little worried. I'm productive in Windows. One of the reasons why is how I arrange my Windows environment to mirror, in a sense, the Linux and Solaris machines I typically develop software for. OS-X eliminates that distinction. As for software, I use a stack of free and open source applications that have analogs on OS-X.

Eclipse (has a Mac distribution)

Sun's Java SE SDK (has a Mac distribution)

Python (has a Mac distribution)

ActivePerl (has a Mac distribution)

WinSCP and PuTTY (Fugu and Cyberduck)

Notepad++ (Textwrangler)

Emacs (has a Mac distribution)

wikidPad (runs on a Mac)

Cygwin (OS-X has Terminal :))

IfranView (iPhoto)

Inkscape (has a Mac distribution)

Subversion (has a Mac distribution)

Trac (server side, browser accessed application)

Karl at Wednesday, August 8, 2007 | Comments (3) | TrackBack

RawSugar in trouble

RawSugar, a service that has been compared as a del.icio.us competitor, but in actuality had a number of great differentiating features, is in funding trouble. My friend Bill Lazar has some to say about this, as a do a few folks like Steve Rubel.

RawSugar isn't dead, nor does it deserve to be. One feature it has - the capability to consume and coalesce your personal content streams and tag them - is one that I feel should be adopted by other social media. I was planning to figure out how to leverage it - finally - when the news broke over the holiday. Notice my experimenting with del.icio.us in my right hand menu.

RawSugar, to me, is a victim of two things: 1. A UI that hides the good stuff. It's front door is little more than a pitch/splash page when it should surface the activity taking place within. 2. A lack of attention in the online press - grassroots and otherwise. No matter what anyone says - there is only so much attention to go around and only a few people who have direct influence over it. Without their attention influence as a help - it takes a groundswell approach - vast numbers of those with lessor influence - helping spread word. It's possible. But far more difficult. Hence the demand to get noticed by blogs like Techcrunch. Being labeled too easily as a "del.icio.us" competitor - unfairly since it has a host of differentiators - didn't help either.

I hope they get some funding. In the meantime, Bill is up for some new opportunities.

Karl at Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Norgs stories: The Web Disintermediates (wait for it...)

One of the ideas that gets branded about whenever slumping circulation numbers are screamed from headlines, CD sales are found to be tanking, movie ticket sales slumping, or broadcast TV viewers disappearing, is the notion that because the Web disintermediates the middle-man between content creator and content consumer, people are going to the Web and abandoning "traditional" media.

There is some truth in that to be sure, but there is also truth in that human nature abhors a vacuum. We seek out sources of information and entertainment we decide to trust. And as such, the Web has always created a new opportunity for intermediaries, bundlers of information and entertainment, and aggregators to help manage the flow we partake in each day.

A simple out of the box example - What is a good link blogger like Eschaton, other then an aggregator of sorts?

How about YouTube? What of Google or Yahoo!?

Something to chew on as you read the following stories: