Coals [2] Newcastle

Coda 2: Six Months Too Late

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Sat, 26 May 2012 04:12:00 +0000

Back when I decided to be a freelance web developer one of the first things I did was download Coda 1 from Panic's website. I had a mac, I'd seen how nice Coda looked on other people's machines, and it looked like it had everything I needed.

So I was excited when Coda 2 was finally announced. Panic is a good company with mad skills and design abilities a-go-go. So when it launched the other day I shelled out my money for Coda and Diet Coda so I could do all that fancy air Preview stuff and ssh into things from my iPad (I had been planning on picking up Panic's Prompt app anyway, so that wasn't a big stretch). Well, now I wish I'd saved my money, I really do.

If I had discovered Coda 2 before discovering Sublime Text 2 I would have been more impressed; Anything I can do in Coda I can do in ST2 in half the time. (I realize that I'm starting to sound like one of those vi or emacs guys. I'm sorry.)

But lets say Coda 2 dropped before I discovered ST2. Well, it'd half to be even earlier than that, because I discovered WebStorm by JetBrains and let me tell you, in every way (other than the UI) WebStorm eats Coda's lunch.

So, that's a lot of negativity with no real objectivity. What problems do I see with Coda 2 compared to the other editors? Okay, let's break out some facts.

First, extensibility. If I want a new feature in ST2 I can check Package Control. Odds are that someone has already created a package to do what I want. If not, I can easily write one myself. (Like, say, XQuery support or a flat-file personal wiki...) And by "easily" I mean just that. The API is very open, very available, and packages I write are pretty much straight Python and JSON. You just drop the files in the right folder and your new package is live. Check your plugins into Github or BitBucket and submit them to Package Control and it probably won't be too long before it's accepted and you're good to go.

Now, don't get me wrong; Coda has a plugin system too, but it's weird. You can create plugins using any interpreted language; but it really wants Cocoa programs. You have to use their builder thingy to make it into something Coda understands; and it doesn't happen all that often. I have great hopes that the new version will bring a lot of plugin developers to Coda Land, but I doubt it. For some reason, Coda2 doesn't include support for LESS, and after two days or playing around I honestly don't know how to go about building my own. after one day I had built my own less package in ST2 (which was completely pointless, because there's one included by default, but it was good practice.)

But what about WebStorm? It's clearly a niche product, even for its creators. But the nice thing is that it uses the same plugins as IntelliJ, and a lot of people use IntelliJ, so there are a lot of people writing plugins that make WebStorm do what you need it to do.

But lets talk built-in features. Coda 2 brings MySQL and Git to the table. Which is great, but, again, too little, too late. Unless your Git integration is amazing (and WebStorm's CVS systems really are amazing) most people will just use the command line or whatever they're used to. And Coda's Git integration is lackluster. You can choose which files to add or update, then either process them each individually (??) or right click (???) and tell it to commit all changes. Or you could just use the Github for OSX, which is a far superior UI for git operations. (ST2 doesn't have built-in git integration, but again, Package Control makes it feel like it does. Still, since I said built-in it'll have to sit this one out.) What's missing from Coda 2 is, well, most of the languages you'll use these days. Ruby gets some syntax highlighting love, but LESS is left out.

Quick compare: Platforms: I work on all three major platforms (Win/OSX/Linux) daily. So does ST2. So does WebStorm. Coda doesn't. Panic has always chosen to do Mac software well, and they continue the trend. here. It's a choice they made, and it's worked for them. But it makes it hard for me.

As for MySQL integration: I don't really use MySQL any more. If you do then you will like it. It's nice. Is it nicer than NaviCat or even the free MySQL workbench? That's for you to decide.

Okay, here's something that Coda does well: AirPreview. Set up Coda with Diet Coda (which is fun to do: Get them on the same network, then point your iPad at the flashy color thing until it works) and every time you save the file your iPad will show the new version. Slick, no?

Another good Coda thing: Built-in Transmit functionality. I love Transmit, so the workflow using Coda works for me. ST2 doesn't have built in FTP/SFTP/whatever, and I don't like WebStorm's FTP functionality anything like as much as Coda's. So that's a definite win for Panic.

Again, I think Coda 2 is good software, but I don't think it's aimed at me. If I were doing small site development using a traditional LAMP stack it would work well, without having to hand-edit config files like you do in ST2. WebStorm does a much better job with JavaScript, but if you're using PHP as your backend you have to pay extra for PHPStorm. Coda is certainly useful in PHP development, and if I were to choose between PHPStorm and Coda (and were working only on OSX) I would choose Coda.

In the end, I see myself using Coda 2 (if I use it at all) when I'm putting the final touches on my HTML and CSS. I'll do most of my JavaScript hacking in WebStorm, and all my backend stuff in ST2, but having a nice, well-designed and easy to use instant preview cycle for page designs will be helpful. Diet Coda will mostly be used as an SSH client, I think and for Air Preview when/if I use Coda.

Now, I could be all wrong; this is a "point-oh" release and the difference between Coda 1.0 and 1.6 was huge and significant. It's entirely possible that the same sorts of changes will be evident as Coda 2 grows up. But for now I really don't see it having a place in my day-to-day work.

The Long Road To SublimeWiki, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 23:56:00 +0000

So, because of some minor annoyances in Tomboy on OSX, I decided to do something completely other. I decided to set up a wiki system in Sublime Text 2. This had a lot of advantages. I already had my Sublime Text 2 config files synced in Dropbox, so all my settings and installed packages follow me around automatically. I could put the folder where it was storing my wiki files in Dropbox as well and that way my wiki would also follow me around without me thinking about it. This is requirement #1.

Requirement #2 is that the system I come up with makes it easy to link between documents in the wiki. Remember that this "wiki" is nothing more than a flat file system with some text documents in it, so this shouldn't be too hard.

Requirement #3 is that the wiki is moderatlely fiddle-proof. This means it shouldn't have too many features or formatting options. This is definitely a self-imposed limit, because I know that if I give myself the chance I'll fiddle with settings all day long.

So, given these terribly informal and vague requirements I went to work. Sublime Text 2 has a python API, so after going over the docs for a few dozen hours I went to work. I figured I needed three things:

A Syntax file to define the "Language" and associate the few markup categories I would allow with .sublime-wiki files. The current workflow for syntax files is to write them in JSON and then "build" them into .plist files. More on this later.
A command that I could run that allows you to press a key combo when the cursor is on a "link" and jump to the linked file. The command is the python code I mentioned.
The keyboard shortcut is a single line in a JSON file. More on this later as well.

All the formatting in one small example.

So, first things first. I created the SublimeWiki.JSON-tmLanguage file according to instructions found here. It's very, very simple. Basically it looks for anything written in UpperCamelCase and makes that into a "link". Okay, it doesn't do anything to the text at all, but it marks it in ST2's internal map of the document as "markup.underline.link.internal.SublimeWiki" and colors it based on whatever your theme's rule is for coloring that type of element. In my case it's kind of a greenish-blue.

I gave it a couple of other rules as well. It can color bold and italic passages that are delimited in Markdown style; that is *this* and _this_ are italicized, while **this** and __this__ are made bold.

And that's it for style rules. The nice thing is that once this file exists there's an entry in the syntax list fof SublimeWiki documents, and ST2 will save a new buffer with the appropriate extension by default.

so, the next step is to allow the user to link around. This is two parts: an actual _plugin_ (which is a python class that extends the `sublime_plugin` class) and the keymap that calls the plugin. Let's do the easy one first.

The keymap is a JSON file that defines a "keys" element and the command it will execute when those keys are pressed. Well, technically it's three JSON files; one each for Windows, OSX, and Linux. In this case, all three are identical:

[
{ "keys": ["ctrl+f11"], "command": "wiki_link"}
]

So, press ctrl+f11 and it will attempt to run the "wiki_link" command. Of course, if this doesn't exist then it fails hardcore. So I wrote it next.

The code is too long to paste into a blog; you can check all this out on Github (and hopefully soon in Package Management). Basically the process is this:

Find the cursor, find the word under the cursor.
If the word under the cursor is of type `markup.underline.link.internal.SublimeWiki` then continue. Otherwise tell the user (nicely) not to try to link to random words.
Check to see if there's a file in the directory with a name that matches the word under the cursor. If there is, open it in a new buffer. If not, create a new file.

That's it!

So, after some trial and error and debugging steps where I had a boatload of information being poured into ST2's console, I finally got this system working the way I like it and now I have my own little personal blog. It's not perfect; it doesn't autosave (although there is a SublimeText plugin that makes all files autosave) and it requires links to be WikiWords, instead of letting them be any text you want like Tomboy. But it works cross-platform and I'm sticking with it for now.

Anyway, I hope this has been a slightly helpful overview of how to create an extension for Sublime Text 2, and why you might want to. I have to say that I'm deeply impressed with the configrability and customizability of ST2, and the freedom it gives you to do whatever you want, however you want. I strongly recommend it, and if you feel like keeping a little personal wiki, give my plugin a shot. Pull requests are welcome, if you find a way to make it better. I'm sure there are several. Thanks for reading!

The Long Road to Sublime Wiki, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:53:00 +0000

It all started when I was reading "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" by Andy Hunt. He talks in that book about "Wiki Gardening", basically putting all of your thoughts into a wiki and linking them up. In this way you don't lose important things by not recording them. "This," I thought, "is something I need to be doing."
Enter nit-picky problem number one. I technically have my own wiki on my web server. It's...not bad. But here's the problem: To add an entry, you have to:

Open a browser and avoid all the things you normally do in a browser like check twitter, Facebook, etc. This shouldn't be hard, but I have tech ADD as bad as anybody, so it is.
Log in to the wiki
Create a new page in code mode, remember all the formatting styles and stuff
Make sure you did it right
Save the new page

Usually by the time I've done the first two steps I've lost the essence of what I wanted to capture, and even more frequently I'll stop wanting to do all this stuff because I know I'll lose 10-15 minutes on restyling the page over and over. That's just how I roll.

So I wanted a wiki system that didn't invite all this fiddling around. I wanted to be able to just type whatever I was thinking about and then go on with my day. I wanted WISIWYG editing. And I wanted whatever system I used to be synced across all my computers.

Enter Tomboy.

I'd played with Tomboy years ago when I was in my Linux phase and it was (and is) exactly what I'm looking for. It runs in the background, can sync your notes using a variety of services, lets you edit your notes like you would in a regular word processor, with lists and bold and italics and all that good stuff. Even better, it keeps track of the notes you've written and when you type the name of one of your other notes it automatically becomes a link to that note. Or you can highlight a string of text and click the "link" button and a new note is born. Tomboy is awesome. But when I played with it a long time ago it wasn't ported to Windows, and I wasn't then tech savvy enough to compile it myself. So I sighed and moved on. Today, however you can download Tomboy for Windows and it runs like a dream. Setting up synchronization via Dropbox is also easy, so I figured I was set. All I needed to do now was get it up and running on my mac, and look, they've got a version you can download for OSX! I'm home free!

Well, not quite.

Getting the mac version running was a huge challenge. The precompiled version is old. Like three whole revisions old! Unacceptable! Well, no problem, I thought. I've got the souce code and they've helpfully provided instructions on how to compile the app, so I downloaded Mono and the Tomboy source code and went to town. And it didn't work. I uninstalled everything, reinstalled, and still no luck. Looking around a few forums it looked like other people were having the same problem. So I decided to try the irc channel.

The problem was that I didn't have an installed IRC client on my mac. Looking around I found a good client, but they wanted CASH MONEY, and I didn't want to pay cash moneyfor something I planned to use for a maximum of twenty minutes. However, their product page says that they were hosted on github...and I did have a git client on my machine. Reading their readme, it says "please don't distribute binaries to all your friends" which I took as permission to create a binary for myself. So after two hours of fiddling with settings in XCode so I could make a nice, unsigned, not-safe-for-the-App-Store local copy of the app and BOOM, I had an irc client. I hit freenode, went to the tomboy channel and asked if anyone was an expert in compiling the app for OSX.

Crickets

Fifteen minutes and no response. Okay, on my own again.

Digging deeper in some forums and email threads I found that Tomboy for Mac only compiles under an older version of Mono. So I uninstalled mono, reinstalled the old version and compiled Tomboy again. SUCCESS! It runs!

Well, kind of.

It runs really slow, and sometimes takes a few minutes to register clicks. Or do anything. And sometimes it crashes for no reason. And it always crashes when you try to resize a window.

Okay, I have two roads here: I can start learning mono development so I can contribute to the project and make it awesome on the mac. Or I can teach myself Cocoa development and create a mac frontend that reads and writes in Tomboy's version of XML. Or I can take the sudden third route I just thought of and teach myself python so I can create a pseudo-wiki that runs inside Sublime Text 2.

Guess which one I chose.

More on how Sublime Text 2 came together in part two, coming soon to a blog near you.

Why I want Windows 8 to Succeed

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 05:56:00 +0000

I've made no real secret of the fact that I'm a Mac user. I'm writing this from a mac mini running OSX Lion, as a matter of fact. But lately I've been thinking of what the post-PC world is going to look like, and I'm not sure I'm pleased.

Don't get me wrong, I love the iPad and I wouldn't settle for an Android tablet if you paid me to take it. But beyond the device is the company. Apple Ascendant was and is a wonderful thing. They're making themselves indispensable and user friendly and a great platform for apps and a great way for developers to make money etc. etc. But underneath that is the sense that Apple wants to and will control their ecosystem just as tightly as they can, and when they no longer have the need to bring people into the fold that can turn quickly to a fairly dictatorial computing situation when and if they turn into Apple Triumphant.

So what they need is dogged competition. (How the mighty have fallen, Apple is the leader now everyone else is following blah blah blah whatever. I have no idea how true that actually is, but there's no denying that it feels true) The iPad is rolling over the tablet landscape with nothing but fairly lackluster competition, and Windows 8 could actually be something interesting.

Note: I didn't say "Windows 8 could be the iPad killer". This is partially because I don't think that's true and partially because I have no desire to see an "iPad killer." Until I start my own computer hardware and software company I want the competition to be as fierce and as innovative as possible, because consumers tend to be the ultimate winners in open market competitions.

So, that's it? I want Windows 8 to do well because I don't like Android? Well, I don't like Android, but that's not why I want Windows 8 to do well.

Microsoft has been moving toward customer-centricity and innovation slowly but surely these past few years, and I'd hate to see that momentum wasted. So much of what they do is actually good. Windows 7 is responsive and stable, Many of the "Live" offerings (Live Writer, Live Photo Gallery etc.) are decent pieces of software in their own rights. Office 2010 (and 2011 on OSX) is useful and intuitive. For developers, going from C# and LINQ to any other language and SQL is painful and I don't want to do it anymore. For that matter, going from Visual Studio to any other IDE is a trial of my patience as well.

Windows 8 represents the most innovative move I've seen Microsoft make in a long time of watching Microsoft, but unfortunately, they don't have the best track record with innovation, and (for the techno-supersitious) this is also an even-numbered version of Windows, and they don't have the best track record with those either. Remember that Windows ME was the perfect storm of these two factors: an attempt at innovation (in the sense of bringing the user-friendly Windows 9x line and the more technically robust NT line together), a redefined user experience, and an even-numbered version of windows.

So we'll see what happens in October when Windows 8 ships. I'm hoping for the best... because the best way to keep Apple awesome is to have awesome competition.

Creating a Syntax file for Inform7 in Sublime Text 2

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 02:29:00 +0000

I've loved Inform7 for a long time now. It's a graceful and fascinating approach and lends itself gracefully to the purpose for which it was created.

But of course I found something by which I could be annoyed, otherwise I wouldn't be me.

Three Levels of indents, after lots of irritation.

The problem is this: the built-in editor is pretty good, but there are a few things about it that drive me up the wall. Specifically the formatting on tables, which is a nightmare. Let's say you want to have a table with long entries in it. to get them to line up at all nicely means that you have to write the first line, press enter, then tab over to line it up. From there it will auto-flow, but it will be indented one more level, so you have three levels of indents for some reason, and a lot of work to get it to look like that.

Also, it's search and navigation (within the editor pane; once you've compiled your program once the Index pane makes navigation dead simple) are lacking. Since I spend an inordinate amount of time writing interactive fiction I don't want to deal with an editor that's so hampered. Also, what better way to avoid doing actual development than to put together a workflow to make that development easier?

I've recently come across two wonderful apps that I wanted to try out a bit, and this seemed like exactly the sort of trivial, pointless project that lends itself to trying out new apps, so I dove in.

The first app is Sublime Text 2, which I'm quite smitten with. Having an all-purpose, easily configurable, cross-platform text editor is a big win. (Dear vi(m) and emacs lovers: hush. We know you are the smartest and best people on earth. Please pity us mere mortals silently for now.)

Ironically, the second app I wanted to push a little bit is QuickCursor, which is very much an OSX app. But I like the idea of being able to edit files in whatever program takes my fancy. The keystrokes involved in moving text from one app to another are no less labor-intensive than just coping and pasting, but there are some nice perks that we'll cover later in this post.

So the first step was to create a grammar in Sublime Text for Inform7. Naturally, the entire point of this is to enable syntax highlighting. I decided to take some cues from the built-in Inform7 editor here and keep my syntax highlighting minimal. Section headings, strings, comments, numbers, and in-string control sections are pretty much all I called out. There are a lot of other words that have specific meanings to the language, but I wanted to keep the feel of the language, where the whole thing is just English. My other big goal was to make table editing work for me, but that's another story.

In any case, I created the syntax file following the instructions given in the excellent unofficial Sublime Text 2 Docs.

For those of you who haven't done it yet, it's awesome! (okay, it's JSON. But that's a lot like awesome.)

The main things in the syntax file are:

the name of the language (very important!)
what words mean things in that language.
what files are written in that language

I realize it sounds complex, but it's really not. The documentation above gives you the down low on this part, and my source is available on github, so you can check it out directly if you want.

It wasn't too long at all before I had my Inform files looking like this:

Ooooh, pretty!

The next thing did was set up Quick Cursor to move files over automagically. This was the easy part:

QuickCursor copies your text to a temporary file, which is then opened by the editor of your choice. This handy little interface lets you set the extension of that temp file. When Sublime Text opens a file with an i7x extension it's recognized as an Inform7 file, and you're in business.

So, before we go on, Tables look like this:

Nice and Clean!

And they look like this when you put them back in Inform:

Well, you can't have everything. But hey, we're down to TWO levels!

So I call that a win.

The last thing I needed was, of course, to make a bunch of snippets that make editing Inform7 files easier to edit. These are the things that let you type, say, "object" and have the editor suddenly give you a bunch of boilerplate text with tab stops and auto-completions and all the goods. Suddenly it's far easier to edit Inform files in Sublime Text than in Inform.

Okay, so, that's about all. Like I said earlier, the whole thing is on GitHub, and I'm open to pull requests if you want to make things better.

And don't worry, someday I'll finish that stupid text adventure I used in the screenshots as well.

Channeling Douglas Adams

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:28:00 +0000

In Last Chance To See Douglas Adams talks about writing a program that is very sexy and has pull down menus and everything, and it’s entire purpose is to figure out the volume of the nests made by a certain kind of bird. In an article called “Frank The Vandal” he writes about a desire to be able to take just the parts of programs you want and paste them into a workflow so that you can do whatever it is you want to do without using six different programs. It was in this vein that I tackled the following

Extremely Small Problem:

I do a lot of what Natalie Goldberg calls “practice writing”. which is where you just block out some time and keep writing for that entire time. This writing can be directed, or not, but the goal is to keep moving forward, to keep putting words on the page, or, in my case, into the text document. This isn’t “real” writing that you plan to put in front of other people some day, this is just exercise, to keep those writing muscles in shape.

When you exercise your muscles, you aren’t left with an artifact of your exercise. But when you do writing exercise, you have this document that you created, and have to do something with it. It’s possible that some part of it might be worth something to you in some context, so it seems wasteful to just delete it. Once again referring to Natalie Goldberg, these are like compost; they’re not really valuable by themselves, but if you keep piling them up there’s a chance that someday something good will grow out of them. Being the nerd that I am, I decided that I would keep all these useless little documents, and I would keep them all in one folder, so they would stay out the way.

So, on my home Mac I set up Hazel to just take those documents, rename them to today’s date (which gives me a good record of which days I did my writing practice and which days I didn’t) and shove them in a folder. All of this happens without me thinking about it, because Hazel is awesome. So, here comes the extremely small problem:

Sometimes I do my writing practice on my laptop, which is a PC.

Because I’m insane and picky and whatnot I use FocusWriter on the PC (it most closely matches the functionality of WriteRoom, which is what I use on my mac) and FocusWriter, by default, produces Rich Text files (rtf files). BUT I have WriteRoom set to produce plain text files (txt files). It’s possible that I could just set FocusWriter to save things as txt files by default, but that’s crazy talk. Simple solutions need not apply, thank you very much. And I still have the problem of getting my little documents (which, you’ll remember, are pretty much worthless) from my PC to my mac, and in the right folder.

Now, I grant you, I could move these files myself, but part of being who I am is having a rock-solid conviction that I shouldn’t be thinking about things if I can make a computer think about them for me. My ultimate goal is to be able to write something mindlessly and forget about it, secure in the knowledge that when I look for it (which may nor may not ever happen, but that’s beside the point) it’ll be where I expect it to be.

After a little bit of thinking and a little more tinkering, I came up with the following

Gloriously Baroque Solution:

The moving parts involved here are (in order):

Dropbox
Hazel
Automator
Word 2011 for Mac
Hazel again

Here’s how it goes:

I write my useless document, and save it to a particular folder in my Dropbox. It’s instantly beamed to all the other computers that are connected to my Dropbox account.

On my mac, Hazel is monitoring that folder, and sees a new rtf file show up. It starts a rule (Hazel’s name for a set of actions that happen when a certain condition is met) that renames the file and moves it into my “compost” folder. But the file is still an rtf instead of a txt file! Not to worry, this is where it calls Automator.

I’ve created an Automator workflow that takes the file, loads it into Word, converts it into a txt file and saves it. (and then closes Word. I don’t know why this is a separate step, but it is.) It then hands control back to Hazel. The Hazel rule completes, and colors the label of the original rtf file gray. This triggers a second Hazel rule that is watching the compost folder. This rule does one thing: if it finds an rtf file with a gray label it puts it in the trash. Since these files are only turned gray after the txt version is created I’m no longer worried about keeping the rtf file around.

This all works perfectly, much to my surprise, and (even more surprisingly) usually takes less than five seconds to run, even with all the Word opening and closing stuff. And since it’s happening while I’m not at my mac it’s effectively happening instantly.

Conclusion

Well, there isn’t one, really. All in all this took me about 20 minutes to set up, and will save me a few seconds of work a few times a week. But it’s work that I’m unlikely to do by myself, which would compromise the integrity of my compost folder. So, here’s to creative solutions to minuscule problems!

More To the World Than Computers

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:53:00 +0000

My little sister runs a fine blog about design and games and books, and she’s giving away REAL MONEY (well, gift cards) on her site. You should check it out post haste.

http://3pointperspective.blogspot.com/2011/07/mondays-day-to-giveaway.html

Have fun!

I Could Do This All Day

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:49:00 +0000

Another great anti-hacker* PSA ad:

[Bearded, ponytailed DAD enters a SON’s room. He’s holding a laptop, showing a bittorrent client window full of active seeds and downloads]

DAD: Are these your warez?

SON: No, I…

DAD: Your mother found this on your laptop.

SON: Some guys…

DAD: Some guys what? Where did you learn this stuff? ANSWER ME!

SON: FROM YOU ALRIGHT? I LEARNED IT BY WATCHING YOU!

[Dad looks slightly shamed, although it’s hard to tell through his beard]

VOICEOVER: Parents who download warez have children who download warez.

The original masterpiece.

*Yes, I am well aware of the “real” meaning of the word hacker, and often identify myself as such. (Purely White Hat, if hats are required.) But it’s such easy shorthand for “bad guy on the internet” that I couldn’t avoid it.

A Stupid Proposal

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:05:00 +0000

someone needs to start an 80's style "Just say no to 'hacktivists'" campaign, where seedy looking teens try to pressure their friends into joining stupid groups like Anonymous or LulzSec and the friends are all cool and say no and go have good lives.

I estimate that it would be at least 70% as effective as the original “Just say no to drugs” campaign, (so, not effective at all) but it would also be at least five times as hilarious. And being five times as funny as this:

Is quite a feat.

Remember, you have a right to say no to misguided online vigilantes.

I wonder how long it’ll be before this blog is hacked.

Someone Who Rocks

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 20:23:00 +0000

Every once in a while you get a peek at something awesome, and unexpected. It’s a good feeling, a shock of adrenaline and a reminder that the world isn’t as old and worn out as you thought it was.

Terraria is one of those awesome, unexpected things. It’s more than just Minecraft in 2D, like I thought it was when I first checked it out. It’s a simple, happy, complex, exciting little world all it’s own, with definite parallels in Notch’s masterpiece, but a different vibe altogether.

But I’m not here to talk about Terraria, as much as I’d like to do just that all day. One of the most delightful things about an overall delightful game is the music. There are themes for daytime outside, nighttime outside, underground, etc. etc., each one catchy and interesting (and very likely to get stuck in your head for days on end) and at the same time not overpowering, allowing you to get on with whatever you’re doing. They’re brilliant.

The makers of Terraria share splash screen space with the creator of these brilliant tracks, a company called Resonance Array. I went to check out their page, seeing what else those amazing musicians had done. And was surprised to learn that it’s exactly one amazing musician. There it all was, the pleasant little jolt, the realization that there are people who are just cool out there, doing cool things.

Check out the Resonance Array home page, it’s got a demo video for Terraria, which also gives you a good taste of the music in the game. For more fun times you can go to his “Listen and License” page and check out some tracks that you can buy for whatever project you’re working on, or just to listen to.

So, yeah. Go play Terraria, enjoy the awesome music, as well as the awesome game play. And if you’ve got an upcoming project that needs a strong audio component give Resonance Array a shot.

(Note: I’m not being paid by Re-Logic or Resonance Array for this article. I just really like what they’ve done.)

Windows Live Writer: Surprisingly Good

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 23:14:00 +0000

Every once in a while Microsoft surprises me. For the most part you just expect them to update their core lines and toss occasional jabs at Apple. And that’s fine. But once in a while something really good slips through, something that makes sense, something that works really well, and in a new way. Windows 7 is a solid, well thought out OS. OneNote is a program that delights in how well suited it is for its job. And so is Live Writer.

The first surprise is how versatile it is. So far I’ve used Live Writer to update two WordPress Blogs, this Blogger-based blog, and a homebrew blog for my employer. It manages all of them in the same interface, with the same ease and aplomb. It hardly ever mentions Windows Live at all, and doesn’t try to force you to turn all your other blog accounts into Live accounts. The setup process for all your blogs is pretty much the same: put in the public blog address, your user name and password and you’re good.

Which leads to the second surprise: it adapts to your blog’s style. When you’re editing a post you see it with the colors and fonts your currently selected blog is using. (I’m using it right now, so I’m typing white Verdana text on a gray background instead of Word’s typical black on white.)

The Preview tab shows your new post in the context of all your sidebars and other chrome. Or you can go back to the raw HTML and see exactly what the program is generating and tweak it to your heart’s content. On the whole the HTML it creates is pretty clean, unlike the nightmare that was FrontPage. It detects your blog settings like categories, tags, post dates, etc. and lets you set all those from within the app. Settings available to you are driven by the blog itself, so you don’t see anything you can’t actually do on the current blog. You can write your posts offline, store them on your local disk and upload them the next time you’re online.

Simple things are done for you as well. Copy a URL from your browser, highlight some text in Live Writer and hit the hyperlink button. your clipboard is automatically filled in the URL field in the dialog box. Is this a big deal? No. But it’s a nice touch. You can define a set of words that are always linked. For example, when I typed “Apple” up above it was instantly turned into a link. But only that first time. Again, not a big deal, but nice.

Videos are handled by uploading them to YouTube and linking instead of trying to handle your blog’s file system, but photos are seamlessly uploaded and added to the post, which makes adding images to WordPress blogs much simpler than using the native wp-admin interface.

It’s not perfect; you can’t easily pull a list of all your blog posts to update old posts, so it’s not really a management program. Some people have had problems with it’s table layout not matching what is actually uploaded to your blog. The Preview pane uses a static copy of your blog instead of a live version, so after a while you notice that in your preview your new post always appears above the post that was current when you set up that blog account (it takes one click to update the preview theme, so this is a pretty small deal.)

But here’s what it does absolutely right: it lowers the activation cost to writing blog entries. I realize that I’m exposing my own vast laziness by saying this, but here it is.

Instead of:

opening a browser
avoiding all the online distractions that come with opening a browser
getting to the blog’s edit page

which means getting to the login page
opening 1Password to get my password

start typing

I just:

start the program
start typing

But considering the price (free), the ease of use and the solid utility of the program it’s well worth a look.

Guest Post on Favorite Thing Ever

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 19:54:00 +0000

Few things are better than getting to rhapsodize about something you love on a site you admire. Favorite Thing Ever has kindly posted my guest article on Cosmic Encounter. Give it a look!

favorite thing EVER | all we do is spread the joy

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:17:00 +0000

all we do is spread the joy

via favoritethingever.com

This site rocks. There's nothing better than wandering into an entire website dedicated to liking things. Well, okay, TVTropes.org, but you know what I mean. Anyway, check out FTE. It'll make your day better. I promise

Posted via email from Nate's Random Walk

How Internet Works | Vladstudio.com - free desktop wallpapers, widescreen, dual monitors, iPhone wallpapers, iPad wallpapers, backgrounds for mobile phones, wallpaper clocks, e-cards

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 22:03:00 +0000

via vladstudio.com

An AWESOME depiction of what your browser is doing when you're sitting there looking for cat videos or snarky IT commentary.

Posted via email from Nate's Random Walk

The Person Who Really "Gets" Twitter

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:04:00 +0000

David Pogue (@Pogue) is in many ways a modern day Lewis Thomas. With a keen eye for the next big thing and an optimistic, excited attitude towards next big things, he brings things to the attention of many people who would otherwise miss out on the cool stuff going on in our world of IT and CS and other TLAs. (Note to pedants: "T" is a variable, which can be equal to "two" or "three" in this case. Now hush.)

One of the things that Mr. Pogue has done right is Twitter. With 1.3 million people "following" him, he has an amazingly broad base of knowledge, opinion, and talent at his disposal, and he makes use of it in amazing ways. Always respectful to his followers, he asks them for advice, opinions, insights, and gets richly rewarded. He's used Twitter to find people for a number of videos, to write a book, and to get instant and intelligent feedback on his blog. In all these cases he's careful to give credit where credit is due and let the world know that he's got the most awesome fan base out there. This is how social networking is done, people.

Granted, not everyone has 20+ years as the author of a famous series of books and a NYT weekly article to use as a springboard for their Twitter empire, but even of those people who are in a position to draw a large number of followers Mr. Pogue has done the best job I've ever seen of making it a good thing for everyone involved.

P.S. Those who follow me on both blogs (Hi Dad!) may remember that I poked fun at David Pogue's use of twitter on CANS some time ago.(And he gently poked back). I've never had any problem changing my tune.

Getting a new computer ready

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 06:12:00 +0000

I'll finally be getting my mac mini tomorrow, and in anticipation I've been thinking about what I need to do to get it ready to be my main workhorse computer. Which led me to think about the software on OSX and Windows that I can't live without; which led me to think about how interchangeable the two OSes really are. To start with, let's look at my list of "must install" software on OSX:

So, a lot of it is straight up web design stuff. Now, let's see which of these has a Windows equivalent:

Launchbar - Not really. Launchy does some of what Launchbar does, but not everything.
1Password - Windows version is in beta, is pretty close. Yes-ish.
Dropbox - Cross platform, so yes.
Transmit - No. There are FTP programs on Windows, but Transmit blows them all out of the water.
Scrivener - No. PageFour is doing good things, but they aren't anywhere close to Scrivener yet.
Komodo - Cross Platform. Yes
MAMP - XAMPP is as good if not better. Might be better.
Coda - No. Dreamweaver doesn't count because I hate it.
TextMate - E text editor is trying, and is close. I'll give this one a "yes"
Typinator - Breevy is a perfect, feature-for-feature replacement. Yes
CSSEdit - No. There's nothing on any OS that gets anywhere close to this beautiful little gem of a program.
XCode - Visual Studio is far better than XCode.

So, of the 12 programs I consider "must haves" on the Mac, there are six (and a half) that have Windows replacements that are as good or better than their Mac counterparts. But what about going the other way? What Windows programs do I consider "must haves", and how do the Mac equivalents measure up?

When setting up a windows box I install:

Dropbox
1Password
Komodo
Visual Studio
Microsoft Office
OneNote
Torchlight
XAMPP
TortiseSVN
Notepad++
LINQPad

So, how do the Mac equivalents stack up?

Dropbox - Cross platform
1Password - Mac Version is better
Komodo - Cross platform
Visual Studio - VS kicks XCode's behind.
Microsoft Office - I like iWork better, but Office is more full featured. Half score
OneNote - Nothing on earth is like unto OneNote. Definite no.
Torchlight - Cross platform
XAMPP - MAMP exists, but XAMPP is better. Half score.
TortiseSVN -Nothing this good works on OSX. I like Versions, but TortiseSVN is far more user-friendly.
Notepad++ - I'm counting TextMate as a Notepad++ replacement. Yes.
LINQPad - Well, not really applicable on OSX, but that wasn't the question, so no.

So, of the 11 Windows "must haves" there are 6 that have equal or better versions on OSX.

So what does this tell us? Not much. I could do a price comparison, but since Visual Studio would cost $12000 for a normal person to buy the version I get for free from school (and from work) it's just not fair or helpful.

The point is this: Each OS has things it does better, or things in which it specializes. I happen to like OSX better than Windows, but there's no denying that Win 7 is a good OS.

The deeper point is this: don't write posts like this at midnight and expect them to come to any sort of conclusion.

Thank you for your time. :)

Breevy - Short, sweet, and to the point

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:13:00 +0000

One class of programs that seems oddly abundant on the Mac is the snippet expander. TextExpander, Typinator, and others all vie for that place in the mac user's heart (and, more importantly, wallet and menu bar). During my current sojurn in PC world I haven't found one that I really like until fairly recently.

Breevy by 16 Software is exactly what I wanted. It stores your replacement strings in Dropbox, if you are so inclined, is compatible with TextExpander, and has the usual draft of replacement modes: immediate, on word-end, or only after a special key is typed (Ctrl, by default.) So I can have the string "NAte" replaced with "Nate" as soon as I stop typing, or after I type a space. But the long list of unicode characters I use to test text fields is stored as "uni1" with the requirement that you press Ctrl after typing it to fire off a full page of multi-lingual nonsense. For a more thourough review of text replacement programs in general, see David Pogue's excellent article on the subject, and a less serious version on my own Crazy Apple News Site

Breevy has the one crucial piece of UI that so many programs miss out on: it's completely invisible until you want it. Content to live in your System Tray, it monitors your typing and corrects mistakes (if you want it to.), expands your short snippets into long string, and does what it's supposed to do. Click on the icon and you can add new replacement strings or launchers. (or corrections. I just added the string "breeby" because I keep typing that instead of "Breevy".)

More complex substitutions are available as well: Multiple tab stops, control over how the replacement is capitalized (Match typed string [typing "Teh" gives you "The", while "teh" turns into "the"], case-insensitive[useful for names, so typing "bne" always turns into "Ben", no matter if you typed "bne" or "Bne" or "bNe"], or case sensitive["CR" turns into "Chromatic Room", "cr" turns into "created rhombus"] [those are really odd examples]) There are presets for inserting the current date in a multitude of formats, simulated key presses, the contents of the clipboard, and others. Finally, of course, it can place your cursor wherever you want in the replacement text when you're finished, although if you're like me you usually just want it at the end.

Breevy has one feature I haven't seen on other text replacement programs: multiple "abbreviations" for one replacement target. This is mostly useful for words you spell wrong frequently. so the replacement string "teh|hte" will replace either of the two most common mistakes people make with the actual English definitive article.

Breevy also has the another "invisible until you need it" feature: excellent support from the developer. When I updated my install from 3.03 to 3.04 suddenly my snippets and launchers all disappeared. Looking closer I discovered that Breevy itself had disappeared. I immediately emailed the developer, who responded quickly and courteously, without assuming (as it's easy to do) that I'm an idiot. We worked through a few things, and isolated the problem (My anti-virus program thinks Breevy 3.04 is a virus). He then let me know that he would work with my AV vendor to get Breevy back on the whitelist, and sent me a copy of 3.03 to get me back up and running until that happens.

I can't stress how pleased I am with this app. The development is sound and complete, the UI works exactly the way I would wish, and the developer is thoughtful, intelligent and courteous. This is a quality product.

Catalog Living

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 15:23:00 +0000

Ready for anything…

via catalogliving.tumblr.com

Leaving my basket of secondary shells under the table allows me to rotate in new shells at a moment’s notice!

There is so very, very much to love about this little site. The formula is simple: take over-decorated pictures and put awesome text beneath them. Check them out. Because you deserve it!

Posted via email from Nate's Random Walk

The "Best" Programming Language

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 12 May 2010 15:52:00 +0000

I was recently asked the following question:

" I want to start learning a computer programing language. I'm currently enrolled in an IT Degree program online and want to really focus on mastering a language (C#, perl, java, etc). What's the best one? I would like to develop office apps and possibly some iphone and android apps. "

-P. Deatherace

So, here's my best stab at an answer:

There's not a "best" language for all programming jobs any more than there's a "best" tool for a carpenter to use. At one time or another in my (relatively short) career I've used Flex/Flash, Java, C#, perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and a number of others. And this isn't uncommon. For example: if you're going to write iPhone apps you have to use Objective-C and Cocoa; if you want to write an Android app you have to use Java. C# is excellent for Windows programming, while PHP is great for web stuff. And then there's Ruby. I love Ruby for data wrangling (i.e. converting reports from one system into something another system can understand.)

So, which is the "best" language to learn? I'm sorry: there isn't one. The best THING to learn is how to think like a programmer. Andy Hunt says that we shouldn't write "in" a language, we should write "into" a language. What that means (to me) is that there are certain ways of thinking that are part of programming in general. How things are done in each language vary, but as you gain the basic skills you will be able to adapt to those differences quickly.

So, what language should you learn? If you are writing office apps C# is your best friend. Furthermore, once you get good at C# you'll be able to write useful Windows utilites quickly and easily. It won't work for Android or iPhone/iPad, but crossing over to Java/Obj-C is easier once you have your feet wet, and C# is easier to learn than the other two. If you're learning C#, get to know LinqPad. Being able to test just a couple of lines of code without writing a whole new solution or class is invaluable and will speed you up immensely.

There is no book as broad as the internet. Grow to love StackOverflow.com. You will find answers to just about any question already listed there. If it's not already there, ask the question and you'll probably have an answer within an hour. If you're using C#, get used to MSDN and get comfortable with their layout and navigation. You'll be glad you did.

Finally, the Internet is never as deep as a book. If you start to get deeply invested in a language, buy a book. O'Reilly, PragProg, Wrox, and others put out excellent books, many of which you can get at good prices used on Amazon, or get inexpensive e-book copies direct from the publishers.

Why I don't hate Roger Ebert (Even if I don't agree with him ever)

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 12 May 2010 06:09:00 +0000

My last post was irresponsible and stupid. And I got called on that and that's only right. To Mr. Ebert I can only apologize for posting thoughtless personal attacks when I should have taken the time to intelligently disagree. To everyone else I can only thank you for taking the time to either call me names or eloquently prove me wrong. Both are good.

I still don't agree with most of what Mr. Ebert writes, but that's no excuse for poor, sloppy writing. My only excuse was that I thought nobody would read my comments because nobody ever does. But even that is no excuse. Saying "I didn't think anyone was listening" doesn't justify saying ignorant things.

If anyone is still interested in this little tech blog in the future, I promise that I will spend more time and effort on the things I write. Mr. Ebert has spent a lifetime building up his credibility and a reputation, in a field I don't understand at all. My little attack on him was like an ant attacking Everest: there is no way I could harm him. But it was still very wrong and I am sorry.

While everyone is of course free to do whatever they want, I would ask that you not link to this article. This isn't a ploy to get page views; I don't want page views for movie stuff because I don't care about movies. This is just an apology, and an acknowledgement that I was wrong and foolish. Do with it what you will.

Why I Hate Roger Ebert (And You Should Too)

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:15:00 +0000

Hi there, Roger Ebert fans!

If you are here to rip me a new one, feel free (NOTE: Comments have been closed. The spammers have found this post and I'm rejecting tons of spam every hour). If you have the time, please read the comments already posted, and take a look at my ~~two~~ ~~three~~ five comments, and then you can call me whatever names you like. Because you are right; this is poorly written ad hominem attack on a well-respected and professional film critic. With whom I happen to disagree 90% of the time.
And now, Mr. Ebert's quote:

3-D is ... unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness. It limits the freedom of directors to make films as they choose. For moviegoers in the PG-13 and R ranges, it only rarely provides an experience worth paying a premium for.

(From Roger Ebert's "Why I hate 3-D (and You Should Too) )

Don't get me wrong, I have no love for 3-D. At all. I think it's painful at worst and kinda neat at best. But Roger Ebert has totally forgotten what it means to be a human being who goes to movies. He's as much a fixture in the movie industry as the popcorn machines, and has had nearly as many original thoughts as a popcorn machine. He has forgotten that film is an art form second, and "something to do when I'm kinda bored" first, foremost, and always. Basically, whenever someone starts talking about "films of any seriousness" it's time to put them out to pasture. Frank Oz (in the excellent documentary on the making of "The Dark Crystal") said (more or less, I'm paraphrasing) "We pour our hearts and souls into creating this whole new world, and for two hours, you're in it with us. Then the lights come on and you say 'well, that was fun, what's for dinner?'" That's what movies are all about.

Posted via web from Nate's Random Walk

Crazy Apple News Site Tells Gizmodo what they think about the whole iPhone thing:

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 13:59:00 +0000

Every now and again we answer really, really inFrequently Asked Questions to help those of you with no moral compasses deal with the zephyr-like and ephemeral changes in Basic Decency.

Q: So, I found this guy, and he found this thing, right? And it’s kinda not a thing that people are supposed to see yet, okay?

A: Give it back to the rightful owner.

Q: But, well, you see, I feel like I have a duty to the faceless crowds of people who visit my site on a daily basis. I mean, they deserve to know what’s coming, right?

A: Do you get paid per click?

Q: Well, kinda per pageview.

A: Give it back to the rightful owner, and give them all the money you made off of exploiting their trade secrets.

via crazyapplenews.com

Posted via web from Nate's Random Walk

Andy Ihnatko on Gizmodo's hot iPhone 4G

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:57:00 +0000

Plus, I’d be gravely concerned about how I’d come into possession of this phone. Gizmodo’s story is very, very fishy and they need to be far more open about the provenance of the device.

Right now, they’re sticking to the story that

Step One: This phone was lost in a Redwood City bar;

Step Two: (nervous cough);

Step Three: They got it last week.

via ihnatko.com

Thank you, Andy.

Posted via web from Nate's Random Walk

infographiclarge_v2.png (1983×1402)

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:50:00 +0000

via julianhansen.com

Yes yes yes yes yes yes. So much fun.

Posted via web from Nate's Random Walk

Uplink Semi Cheat

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 21:18:00 +0000

I know Uplink is an old game, but it's still awesome and you should still play it, especially if you have any interest in going into information security or software testing.Buy it on steam for just under half price, or direct from the publisher for full price.

If you do play it, the ol' "Million Credit Hack" isn't cheating, but it does kinda ruin the game. So you shouldn't do it. But if you do, you should do it right.

A lot of people will tell you how to do a million credit hack, and most of them do it wrong. At least, they do it in such a way that you are doing a lot of extra work. Here' s how I do it:

Find someone who has more than 1M credits. You will no doubt find these people as part of your regular missions. When you find this person (hereinafter "the Mark"), write down their account number and address for the Mark's bank (herinafter "TMB").
Set up an account with TMB. Write down your account number.
Make sure you have a good log deleter and a good trace monitor. Don't try this too early.
Sign into TMB as the Mark.
Transfer as many credits as you want from the Mark's bank account to your new account at TMB. Sign out.

(note: this is where most people add work for themselves. They transfer fromTMB to their default account in a different bank. This method requires you to hack two banks' logs. Why go to the bother?)

Sign back in to TMB as Admin and erase all logs of the transfer.
Sign into interNIC and erase all logs ever ever ever just to be safe.

Congratulations! You now have a shiny pile of credits! If you want, you can transfer these credits to your original bank account and that transfer is completely legal. But why? The new account is yours and you can set all your expenses to come from the new account.

Some caveats:

This will bump you up quite a way in the rankings and you'll suddenly be doing much harder missions. This means you will miss a lot of the fun missions and possibly screw the "main" storyline up as well.
No matter how much you say you won't, you will instantly buy all the best equipment possible (why else would you want all those credits?) and be pretty bored by any mission that isn't insanely difficult.
Uplink is A GAME. This isn't real life. Cracking in a game is fun (and is actually pretty good training if you ever get into QA/Testing as a career. I should know. I'm a certified tester), cracking in the real world is a crime. Check your hat regularly for signs of turning black, and avoid such a color change at all costs. It's just not worth it.