ORA blog: Avoiding CMS Data Lock-in, on how I decided to use Smarty Templates rather than a full content management system for the coming J-School site rebuild.
Music: 13th Floor Elevators :: Reverberation
Racked Up
How hard can it be to slide a few servers into a cabinet? Took pretty much the entire day to rack up a UPS, X-Raid, and three X-Serves into an XRackPro2. From top to bottom, the J-School’s existing web server, fairly new streaming media server, brand new directory server/RAID controller, and 1.4 TB RAID-4 student/faculty storage system. Haven’t yet configured the RAID or directory server — will be working on that in the coming weeks. Huge leap forward – this half-height cabinet replaces a wall full of mostly x86/Windows servers.
Music: Brian Wilson :: Vega-Tables
Nowhere Images, Automator
Added 50 new “Images from Nowhere” (right column, rotated hourly). Had been saving them up for months to try out Automator, but the only Photoshop resize action I found turned out to be commercial rather than free, and the PS batch action I already had set up does a fine job anyway.
Did have good results using Automator to add hint tracks to a bunch of webcasts earlier this month. But even then, the shell script I had already created to automate the same task was faster and simpler to launch. Automator seems like a wonderful idea, but I’m having trouble coming up with real-world jobs for it… I think the big break will come when I need to process the same set of files in multiple applications. For example, a code cleanup I’m currently involved in could benefit by being able to pass the same set of files through both BBEdit and Dreamweaver. But Automator depends on having access to applications with the right hooks built in, and it may take a while for those to appear (BBEdit is ready, Dreamweaver is not).
Music: Severed Heads :: Goodbye Tonsils
Clean Sync
As if Apple had read my mind (or read this post), iTunes 4.9 and the accompanying iPod updater released today addresses every single one of my sync frustrations. No more using an external RSS aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, transmit them into iTunes, and then into the iPod. No more manually removing casts I’ve already heard*. Suddenly it’s all tightly integrated, totally elegant, just works. How Apple of them. The new podcast directory built into the iTunes Music Store is pretty cool too, but has some growing to do.
* Actually this remains to be tested – there’s a preference that lets you tell iTunes to keep copies of all casts you haven’t yet heard. How “haven’t yet heard” is defined remains to be seen. I’m assuming that the 29MB iPod updater I just installed includes a mechanism for determining whether I’ve listened to a cast all the way through; on the next sync it should remove that cast from my hard disk as well.
Music: Sheldon Allman :: Space Opera
GIF Pronunciation Page
Finally, archaeological evidence for the correct pronunciation of the acronym “GIF.” Not sure about the claim that Mac users tend to say GIF and Windows users JIF — never noticed a correlation there, but it does lead to a great user comment on the site:
First of all let me say that Mac zealots should be rounded up into cattle cars, gassed to death and incinerated to make certain there is no remaining genetic material that might infect the rest of the gene pool. I group Mac-heads with NAMBLA, the flat earth society and regional militia. I say this merely to point out that how violently I would oppose aligning myself with this much confused group. However, there can be only one correct pronunciation of the acronym GIF. And that pronunciation begins with a hard G as you would find in the word “graphic”. Still have trouble forming the correct sound? Try this. Begin to say GIF as if you were saying the word “graphic”, abandon the final six letters as you slip into the acronym. GIF, there you’ve said it correctly.
I agree with this guy (about the pronunciation part), but will defer to the authors of the format and return to using “JIF” in pronunciation. Even if it’s wrong. Dammit.
Thanks baald
Music: Twink :: Cloud Watcher
Flipping Through Covers
Playing around with the new iTunes Artwork screensaver in Tiger — generates an array of all albums in your collection for which you have cover art, randomizes, throws them up in a grid, flips/replaces covers at random. Sounds a bit silly, but in reality feels like a sort of reclamation — the vanishing romance of thumbing through piles of LPs, cover art scattered over the rug. Feels good.
Of course you quickly realize how little of your MP3 collection even has cover art. Clutter solves that, but grows your database by about 1MB per album (art is added to metadata of each track) and it would take weeks to add cover art to an entire collection.
You need to use the CLI screencapture utility in OS X to shoot screensavers. Be sure to silence it with the -x flag — without that it hoarks forth an ungodly loud noise when it snaps.
sleep 25; screencapture -x cap6.png
Interesting that Apple has switched from PDF to PNG as the screen capture file format with Tiger. Would be nice if they offered a preference for that.
Music: Tim Buckley :: Gypsy Woman
New J-School RSS Feeds
Built RSS feed generators for the J-School’s student and faculty stories databases today. Nice to be able to test RSS feeds directly in Safari. These will probably be lightly updated now that we’re into summer. Now that these exist, I’d like to build a custom Dashboard Widget for J-School RSS feeds in time for next semester, and load it onto all of the new incoming Macs.
Finally got approval and backing to undertake a massive re-creation of the J-School web site this summer, glory be. We’ll be hiring a designer; the hard work is going to be cleaning up and prepping 1500 pages of static content, taking it out of 1997 mode. Design tables, font tags, non-existent standardization on how pages are constructed. By the time I’m done, every page should be XHTML compliant, lightweight, and with total separation of design and content. We’ve got a heck of a lot of custom PHP/MySQL stuff interleaved, which could make choosing and integrating a CMS tricky.
Now that back-to-back conferences and jury duty are over, nose to the grindstone.
Music: Magazine :: shot by both sides
Skookum Tools: WordPress, VideoCue, Dashboard
As WordPress has evolved and grown itself a larger, more supportive community and a larger body of plugins, I’ve become increasingly enamored of it, using it for more side projects. I also love that my hosting customers can install a WordPress blog with literally three clicks from their cPanel interfaces. On Monday I hooked up with Matt Mullenweg (co-creator of WordPress) for lunch, who got me totally juiced up about the advanced capabilities of WP. The biggest thing that’s held me back from a full-scale migration from MovableType is the fact that WP still doesn’t have multi-blog capabilities built in from the ground-up. At the J-School I have about 300 users scattered across 20+ blogs, all with varying levels of permission. WP has nothing like this… or so I thought. Turns out there’s an alpha version of a multi-user WordPress out there. Apparently, WordPress-mu is pretty much production quality despite being listed as alpha. Need to check that out.
Mullenweg, FWIW, is one of the sweetest, most charming guys you could hope to meet. Was very interested to learn that c|net uses WP (with a simple caching plugin) for a huge number of public publishing projects. Last I heard was that c|net had basically invented the massive Vignette CMS. Very interesting to learn they’ve basically abandoned their own baby in favor of simple, lightweight, open source tools.
Yesterday hooked up with Simon Clarke of Vara Software — I know Simon from the Adamation days (can’t believe there’s still a web site there), where he and another engineer were responsible for personalStudio (BeOS video editing application, later released for Windows). Vara is doing some really cool stuff, and I’ve decided to stop using Channel Storm’s LiveChannel for J-School webcasting and switch to Vara’s WireCast. It’s that cool, and won’t result in any loss of functionality. Also got a personal demo of Vara’s VideoCue — teleprompter software that also takes camera input, lets you mix in images and titles, output to QuickTime, and optionally post results directly to a blog. Skookum stuff.
Just emerged from a couple of sessions on building Dashboard Widgets and am totally fired up. Just need to clear a few days (yeah, right) and go for it.
WWDC 2005 Keynote Notes
Show notes: Steve Jobs’ introduction of OS X on Intel processors, Mac growth, etc. Took forever to get a WiFi connection. 3800 attendees, 3700 of whom have PowerBooks, so not much bandwidth to go around. This will be old news by the time this goes up, but FWIW…
Continue reading “WWDC 2005 Keynote Notes”
The Smell of Burning Resin
That thin blue line running vertically down the left side of my iMac screen mentioned a few weeks ago? It went away on its own. I don’t like symptoms that appear and disappear without reason or cause. Few things more mystifying than intermittent computer problems. Things should either work or not.
Two days ago I walked into the office to have nostrils greeted by a truly acrid chemical smell emanating from the top vents. The kind of smell that you just know causes cancer without even having to look it up. Shut it down, opened it up, everything looked absolutely hunky. Must be pooting forth from somewhere hidden — inside the power supply or something. Fortunately, the Apple Genius was able to duplicate the smell immediately (“I love the smell of burning resin in the morning,” he said, quoting Duvall). A capacitor frying, probably. Or something worse. Maybe I’ll get a new motherboard out of the deal. [Update: Yep, an industry-wide problem with bad caps.]
So now I’m working on a borrowed PowerBook — divorced from all my data — for the next two weeks. Which actually coincides nicely with WWDC, and is giving me a chance to check out the new Mail.app in Tiger, which has come a long way, baby. Loving it. The fact that it integrates with Spotlight while Entourage doesn’t is giving me one more reason to consider moving on from Entourage (even though I do think it’s one of the cleanest apps MS has ever produced, it’s got an IMAP bug that drives me crazy, so I’ve been using Thunderbird for IMAP for the past few weeks).
Also having a great time playing with Dashboard Widgets, and will learn how to create them myself next week. Friend Guy D2 created a Widget port of Brian Eno’s classic Oblique Strategies. My strategy for today:
Make what’s perfect more human.
Will strive to do that. Got a favorite Widget? Let me know.