random facts girl

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.

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…

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.

The day word went out that OS 3.0 would finally include access to the google MapKit was the tipping point that finally got me to shell out the $99 to join the iPhone developer program. Unfortunately, at the time, documentation was sparse, and although the back end was in place, I couldn’t figure out how to display my annotations.

So I put my map-based projects on hold… until yesterday, that is, when I came across this easy-to-understand 3-part tutorial with sample code that very clearly shows how all the pieces are put together. A simple “Dude, where’s my car” app shows how to gets your current location, then allows you to place a marker at your current location.

Now, the original developers intent was simply to provide an example of how to use MapKit, so I’m not chiding them for lack of foresight in any way… but in its current state, it’s a bit too simplistic to be really useful as a parking app. But it could easily be tinkered with to provide additional functionality to make it useful:

• allow you to add markers at a location you define (in case you forgot to set where you parked when you were there)
• allow you to set a timer to let you know when your meter is about to run out (or in SF, when the two-hour period of time for people without permits has expired)
• store location info when you exit the app (’cause as is, you lose it when you answer a phone call, etc.)
• etc., etc.

Regardless, for whatever app you need a map, this project is a great start for learning how to get started with MapKit.

When I’m learning how to code in a new language, I like to start off some sample code that I know works, then mutilate it until it bears no resemblance to what the original developer came up with… but making sure that it still works at each step along the way.

But my adventures with Cocoa/Obj-C present a new challenge: no stand-alone php or perl files that can easily be shuffled and renamed… when you work with a language that requires the software be compiled, there’s a much deeper structure that needs to be modified in order to assign a new identity to the project.

Sadly, Xcode doesn’t have an option that allows you to create a new project from an existing project with a new name (note to Apple: this would be a great feature to include in 3.2, *wink wink nudge nudge*).

But in the meantime, when you have some sample code you want to play around with, but still hang on to the original and not muck up your hard drive with copies of copies of duplicates of copies… try this:
Read more…

Let’s say someone invented a device that could reduce the force of gravity from Earth’s gravitational field to, lets say, the gravity felt on the moon. Presuming we had some way to make sure our atmosphere didn’t fly away, do you think we should modify Earth’s gravitational field? Why (or why not)?

I came across this gem that plays like a 1970s British mashup of Mythbusters and How Things Work when, for some reason, I was looking for info on how washing machines work today. And although it clearly explains how washing machines work, it gives you so much more.

They stage a car rollover in perhaps the clearest description of how solenoids work I’ve ever seen. In describing how the various components work they build special effects equipment, cut about 20 washing machines in half, and include various other Mythbusters-like goodies… and when the narrator gets hit in the face by water, I can’t help but imagine how hilarious it would be were there a British version of Mythbusters, with Adam’s analogue responding in that stoic British fashion…. although Jaime is stoic in his own way, it would be vastly entertaining to see a more impetuous hacker forced to deal with the outcomes of his rash actions in the stoic fashion expected in British culture.

In the historical overview of how we clean our clothes, we learn about women’s liberation – and get to see naked pirates.

The last five minutes or so address how the technology involved in producing washing machines had changed in “recent” years. They compare how And in one of the earliest discussions I’ve found surrounding gadgets/technology and sustainability, I’ve found perhaps my favorite quote thus far of the year:

“The modern engineering would probably horrify pre-war engineers who worshipped quality, not economy.”

And the reggae version of Dave Brubek’s “Take Five” at the end is a nice touch.

In all, it’s a fascinating watch – if you’re a technology geek like me who never got to take shop class or study electrical engineering but loves to figure out how things work, it’s 25 minutes well spent.

I had my first renegade baking experience was when I was 4.  My mom was outside working in the garden, and my friend and I decided that we wanted to ‘bake’ for the first time.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t reach the recipes, so we just threw everything in our reach that looked like ingredients in the bowl.  But (luckily) we couldn’t reach the stove or the oven, and when she came back inside, she found us with a big bowl full of a green mess.

About 45 minutes after enquiring as to what we had put in the bowl, our green monster cake came out of the oven.  She had magically turned it into a verdant, yet quite tasty spice cake  (a miracle, quite possibly, as the two items I recall within reaching distance from our fridge in those days were anchovy paste and Aquavit).

Why is that memorable?  It taught me creativity and ingenuity in the kitchen can sometimes lead to fantastic, although slightly bizzare results.  Thanks to that fantastic experience, to this day I’m hard pressed to follow a recipe to the letter.  I have an appreciation for all types of cuisine, and I’m open to the bizzare.

And I really like green food.

But now I have a problem. I’m addicted to books full of fantastic diy projects – various forms of knitting, electronics, sewing, glasswork, cookbooks… but I never seem to actually MAKE anything from those shelves full of books, taking up so much valuable space and collecting dust in my tiny San Francisco apartment. Read more…

Yup, there are all of the old jokes:

If Microsoft built your car, your car would crash randomly three times a day while you were driving down the road… and every time you made a left turn.
or
If Microsoft built your car, every few months you’d have to reinstall a new transmission, but you wouldn’t be able to figure out why.
or
If Microsoft built your car, all the warning lights are replaced with a single dashboard indicator which lights up to read ‘Your car has experienced an unexpected error” - but it is only after the engine is ‘unable to recover.’

Microsoft doesn’t immediately bring to mind stability, reliability, or even functionality.  If Ford’s main marketing pitch for the Focus is letting people know that they’re integrating Microsoft technology, they must really be in trouble. Read more…

Windows without walls?  You can’t have a window without a wall, let alone multiple windows without walls.  Otherwise, what would the windows be windows to?

Windows without walls are called GLASS WALLS.

Easily broken.

Ah Microsoft, you’re lucky.  So many metaphors, so little time.