random facts girl

I’ve a great adoration for the music of Blondie, and in more than one way, I think that Debbie Harry is a great inspiration… but I often can’t handle some of those high-energy tunes on Monday morning. Personally, I’ve always thought that Call Me would be fantastic downtempo in an abandoned cathedral at 3am.

So to celebrate the release of my first iPhone app (MuniMe, in the app store now , I decided to take a little bit of my spare time away from coding and play around with music again, so I spent an afternoon a few weeks ago tinkering around with my keyboard and Garage Band, and this is the result.

The production value might not be exquisite, but since I’ve been a bit of a purist in the past, I wanted a chance to muck around with different effects and explore beat frequency by overlaying an auto-tuned track with the original (e.g., the last chorus).

And no, this song is not a secret message to anyone. There’s no subtext here. None at all. (You’ll know if this message is directed at you. Don’t call me. Really.)

What is true evil: evil for the sake of being evil, or evil for the sake of being good?

After a clean up-stall of Snow Leopard, all seems well… but I realize I neglected to create easily importable backups of my address book and calendars.

Not a problem – I had backed up my hard drive en toto, so recovering my addresses and calendars wasn’t difficult… but since a quick google search didn’t return any suggestions, I thought I’d share what I did in case you find yourself with the same need.

note:

~/ = /Users/soychicka/ = my user home directory, just like ~/ = /Users/yourHomeDir/ = your home directory.

Sadly, it appears that although they now have much nicer names, all of my screenshots in Snow Leopard are no more than black boxes of appropriate dimensions…. so that means you’ll actually have to *gasp* read directions (just for the time being).

To recover your Address Book contacts:

Open up two finder windows, one for your backup drive and one for your regular old hard drive that you’ll be using on a daily basis… and go to ~/yourHomeDir/Library, then find

~/Library/Application Support

in both windows.

You should see a folder called

AddressBook

in both windows. Drag the copy of AddressBook on the backup drive into

~/Library/Application Support.

If you dragged the folder into the right location, you’ll see a dialog that asks if you want to Keep the original, Keep Both, or Replace. Go ahead and click Keep both – it’ll keep a backup copy of the original for you in case something goes dreadfully wrong.

Then launch Address Book: you should see all of your contacts happily coexisting once again…well, at least as happily as they co-existed before, as sadly, Snow Leopard was not shipped with the power to resolve family quarrels or workplace personality conflicts.

To recover your iCal calendars:

Open up two finder windows, one for your backup drive and one for your regular old hard drive that you’ll be using on a daily basis… and go to ~/yourHomeDir/Library.

You should see a folder called

Calendars

in both windows. Drag the copy of Calendars from the backup drive into

~/Library/

on your regular hard drive.  If you dragged the folder into the right location, you’ll see a dialog that asks if you want to Keep the original, Keep Both, or Replace. Go ahead and click Keep both – it’ll keep a backup copy of the original for you in case something goes dreadfully wrong.

Then launch iCal : you should see all of your calendars happily coexisting once again…again, at least as happily as work and your personal life existed before, as Snow Leopard was not shipped with the power to add hours to the day and give you a raise.

Unless there was some new setting I forgot to enable…..

Random fact: One of Snow leopard’s new spots is pretty nice: if you are attempting to copy a file that has the same name as an existing one, instead of offering the option of replacing or canceling, it gives you the option of keeping both, and renames the original

Filename (original).
 Although it still doesn't allow you to merge the contents of two directories (hint hint), it's a step in the right direction.   Thanks, friendly apple UX team!

One of my pet peeves when it comes to web design is one that I consistently see with businesses who traditionally relied on the sunday advertisement insert is a reluctance (or perhaps overt refusal) to format their weekly ad in a manner more appropriate for the web.

I was looking for a new backup hard drive today, and after becoming frustrated with the lack of usability on the ShopLocal.com, I reverted to switching back to viewing the weekly ads of individual retailers, where I happened to stumble across this perfect example – a weekly ad from Best Buy.

We’ll leave aside the fact that this opened in a pop-up, cosmetic issues and the use of flash for the time being…. What’s key here is that the majority of advertisement content that is of interest to the consumer is below the fold, requiring that the user scrolls down the page to see the content that is of interest to them. And if you look at the next image, you’ll see why.

The layout of the ad is intended to reflects the dimensions of a page in those the traditional weekly newspaper advertisments… the ones that were so unwieldy, where you had to either clear a 3′x5′ space to read on, or make a real effort to keep the paper from flopping over on itself… the ones that have been largely replaced in print by a more manageable tabloid format.

Perhaps the old-style ad layout was selected by the designer to reinforce metaphor of a print ad by as a way to make users comfortable with the notion of viewing an ad online. Or perhaps they are simply unwilling to put their ads in a more usable format in order to force more user interaction with their content in hopes of increasing conversions.

/*headdesk*/

Do you find yourself with a migraine from the incessant *headdesk* associated with trying to figure out why your Radiant app that works so beautifully on your dev box turns into a megaFAIL after you try to deploy it on Heroku?

/*headdesk*/

Wait… are you using any radiant extensions?

Aha! Something isn’t explicitly clear in the vast majority of documentation on Radiant extensions: when you install an extension using ./script/extension install extensionName, you’re actually installing the extension as a submodule.  There are some good reasons to install an extension as a submodule: it’s super-easy, and it provides an easy way to update your extensions when the master branch has been updated.

But there is one very good reason NOT to install extensions as submodules: at this time, Heroku doesn’t support the use of submodules.  So that means even if you’ve followed the instructions and gotten it to work in your development environment, once you deploy to Heroku, the extensions disappear.  No listing in the admin panel, no files in your extension directories, everything is broke-ass, and….  /*headdesk*/

So what to do?  Most offering advice recommend that you find a way around this by installing the extension “normally”.   But what is ‘normal?’

Read more…

I’ve discovered various degrees of up-to-datedness and accuracy in some of the tutorials out there for deploying an app built on Radiant CMS to Heroku, so here’s one that is valid for the latest Radiant CMS release (0.8.1).

This tutorial assumes that you have already installed and configured the following:
- Rails (2.3.4)
-  Git (1.6.4.1)
- Heroku gem (1.3.0)

Specifically, it also assumes that you either a) have configured an ssh keys for use with git, or b) know how to deal with it if you haven’t.

If you don’t meet all of the above criteria,  get crackin’… but once you’re ready, read on.

Read more…

Have some milk that hasn’t quite turned yet?

Milk that has started to spoil may no longer be drinkable, but you can still use it up in cooking and baking without much to-do.

You might want to note, however, that milk tends to become more acidic as it ages. This normally isn’t too much of a concern to our stomachs, but if you’re using it for baking, you might want to fight off the acid using a pinch of baking soda.
Read more…

In case you need to modify your httpd.conf on your local system and restart apache, but you can’t bear the thought of 20 seconds downtime when you could be getting back to …. the important stuff.

I’ve had many discussions with others lately about websites that focus on providing user-contributed content… and in those conversations, one of the topics that invariably comes up is how to come up with the initial content required to attract users to a new web site.

While some sites continue to grow organically, attracting users by word-of-mouth and link-of-google for the limited content they already have, a new practice has been spreading like the plague for sites that seek to obtain user-contributed content (UCC): ‘data’ scraping.
Read more…

After launching Dreamweaver, does it look like it hangs at the “Initializing files” stage? If you’re linked up with a subversion repository, that might be to blame.

According to Pablo Livardo’s blog, Dreamweaver will always try connecting to the svn repository when booting up before allowing you to do anything… and it might hang for 10 minutes or so before it gives up and completes loading.

While you could try to figure out what the problem is, sometimes you just don’t care. In my case, I hadn’t made any changes to my svn repository, and I discovered my svn host was simply down.

Easy solution: disconnect from the network, then launch dreamweaver again. If, like me, you only rely on subversion for checking in major changes, you should be on the road again in a couple of minutes.