I was wondering what the “Featured Images” box was when creating new posts and discovered that it’s a handy way to add images to a post. It auto resizes, crops (if you want), and can make it just “work” in your layout. The only drawback I’ve seen is I can’t use urls for the image.

Unfortunately, the Thematic theme doesn’t have out-of-the-box support for it.

Fortunately, Thematic is very customizable so this is pretty easy.

The gist of what I’m doing is turning on this feature in Wordpress, telling it the default size, and then adding the image to beginning of my post.  I added some left-right alternating alignment based on the number of the post.  Not perfect if you create lots of drafts, but better than just having the images always on the same side.

Here’s what you need to add to your Thematic child theme’s function.php:

// Add Thumbnail Support for Theme (introduced in 2.9)
if ( function_exists( 'add_theme_support' ) ) {
  add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
  set_post_thumbnail_size(250, 250);
}

// Add post thumbnail to post excerpt
function my_add_post_thumb($content) {
  if (has_post_thumbnail()) {
    global $id;
    //$id = get_post_thumbnail_id();
    $align = $id % 2 == 0 ? 'left' : 'right';
    return get_the_post_thumbnail(NULL, array(250,250), array('class' => ' wp-post-image-' . $align)) . $content;
  } else {
    return $content;
  }
}
// Add it to the excerpt on the home page.
add_filter('get_the_excerpt', 'my_add_post_thumb');
// Add it to the content for a single post.
add_filter('the_content',     'my_add_post_thumb');

And here’s the styling you need to add for the left/right images:

body .wp-post-image,
body .wp-post-image-left {
    float: left;
    margin: 5px 20px 20px 0;
}
body img.wp-post-image-right {
    float: right;
    margin: 5px 0 20px 20px;
}

Ciao!

The new 2.x series no longer requires the Dvorak hack I posted about earlier (yay!)

2.1 has a nice new mechanism for plugins, so here are instructions for making CEDET and ECB work with Aquamacs.

Note before continuing: I’m using the version numbers I got installing these packages. If there are newer ones, use them. I also am assuming you installed Aquamacs.app into /Applications/

CEDET

CEDET is a collection of emacs tools to make your life easier. I don’t fully grok all of them, but some are really nice. Semantic is in-language completion, for example.

A full install of CEDET is required for ECB and Aquamacs doesn’t come with that (yet?!) so you need to install it yourself.

1. Download the latest CEDET from sourceforge
2. Untar the file in ~/Library/Application Support/Aquamacs Emacs:

   cd ~/Library/Application Support/Aquamacs Emacs
   tar xf ~/Downloads/cedet-1.0.tar.gz
   

3. Run make:

   make EMACS=/Applications/Aquamacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Aquamacs
   

4. Create a site-start.el file. This will be loaded automagically by Aquamacs. It should look like this. You should replace YOUR USERNAME with your OS X username.

   (load-file "/Users/YOUR USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Aquamacs Emacs/cedet-1.0/common/cedet.el")
   (global-ede-mode 1)                      ; Enable the Project management system
   (semantic-load-enable-code-helpers)      ; Enable prototype help and smart completion
   (global-srecode-minor-mode 1)            ; Enable template insertion menu
   

5. Now you need to pull all the .info files into a directory called info with a dir file. Aquamacs is smart enough to figure out this is plugin specific info files, and will use it.

   mkdir info
   cd info
   find .. -type f -name '*.info' | while read i; do j="$(basename $i)"; ln -s "$i" "$j"; install-info --info-dir="$(pwd)" "$j"; done
   

6. Restart Aquamacs and you should have the full CEDET available, including docs.

ECB

ECB is the Emacs Code Browser. It basically turns Emacs into a full IDE like XCode.

1. Download the latest ECB from sourceforge
2. Untar the file in ~/Library/Application Support/Aquamacs Emacs:

   cd ~/Library/Application Support/Aquamacs Emacs
   tar xf ~/Downloads/ecb-2.40.tar.gz
   

3. Create a site-start.el file to load up ECB on startup:

   (add-to-list 'load-path
   	     "/Users/docwhat/Library/Application Support/Aquamacs Emacs/ecb-2.40")
   
   ;; Choose one of the following...
   
   ;; If you want to load the complete ECB at (X)Emacs-loadtime
   ;; (Advantage: All ECB-options available after loading
   ;; ECB. Disadvantage: Increasing loadtime2):
   
   (require 'ecb)
   
   ;; If you want to load the ECB first after starting it by ecb-activate
   ;; (Advantage: Fast loading3. Disadvantage: ECB- and semantic-options
   ;; first available after starting ECB):
   
   ;(require 'ecb-autoloads)
   

4. Symlink the info-help directory to info and create a dir file.

ln -s info-help info
cd info
install-info --info-dir="$(pwd)" ecb.info

5. Restart aquamacs and you should have ECB available, including docs.

You’re Done!

I suggest you sit down and read some of the docs for ECB and CEDET. Especially A Gentle Introduction to Cedet and reading the info docs for ECB by using M-x info or the HTML version in the ECB directory we created.

Ciao!

Image by Manfred Heyde.

Ever needed to check if a given port number is valid in bash? It’s harder than it looks because if you accept any input from the user, you can’t use declare -i since it spews errors and aborts functions if the input is malformed.

An example:

declare -i foo='10#88f'
bash: declare: 10#88f: value too great for base (error token is "10#88f")

In addition to being really annoying (you can’t use || to get around it) it is also wrong. It isn’t a matter of base but an invalid value.

#!/bin/bash

function to_int {
    local -i num="10#${1}"
    echo "${num}"
}

function port_is_ok {
    local port="$1"
    local -i port_num=$(to_int "${port}" 2>/dev/null)

    if (( $port_num < 1 || $port_num > 65535 )) ; then
        echo "*** ${port} is not a valid port" 1>&2
        return
    fi

    echo 'ok'
}

port_is_ok 1          # => ok
port_is_ok 20         # => ok
port_is_ok 70000      # => *** 70000 is not a valid port
port_is_ok tnenth2    # => *** tnenth2 is not a valid port
port_is_ok thethe     # => *** thethe is not a valid port
port_is_ok 888f88     # => *** 888f88 is not a valid port
port_is_ok 88888f     # => *** 88888f is not a valid port

# EOF

Without the to_int() function, then you’d get errors from port_is_ok and the function would abort before it gets to the check.

You have to redirect stderr to hide this bash error.

This was tested with bash 4.1.5(1)-release

Ciao!

Image by Tjeerd Wiersma

I’m always impressed at the new ways people find to use IAT.

Ciao!

It’s hard to read it in its original form, so I have re-organized it here and saved it for posterity.

Has anyone noticed this spelling error?

Anonymous:

Hi, I’ve found a surprising spelling error in IIS, in the Stop/Start/Reset dialog box.

It says “You will loose all current sessions…” rather than “lose”.

Microsoft, shame on you…

jeethu:

Hi
For enormous products range and user friendliness Microsoft provides , Lets forget this simple stuff out of hunderd thousand lines of coding.

Jeethu Joseph
IIS/Asp.Net Engineer Microsoft

Is this a real Engineer at Microsoft? I was curious, so I tracked his accounts around the internets and it seems this is his home page. His resume says he’s certified, partnered, etc. but that he never actually worked for Microsoft.

andrewh:

Is this the official response!? ^_^

I’m just a little surprised that Microsoft’s stringent QA process didn’t catch this little typo. I was even more surprised when I googled and nobody seems to have mentioned it.

Just another one to file under “MS-related strangeness…”

egbert:

OK, let’s improve the world, and forbid spell errors, and let’s also forbid, unofficial English like: “I aint’ do it” (instead of I won’t do it) and “you and me” (instead of you and I).

“I ain’t do?” I have never heard of this one. Anyone? Sounds like a job for English from Friends.

andrewh:

Sorry, but what on Earth are you talking about?

Slang has got precisely nothing to do with poor spelling, or mistakes in QA.

I’m not coming here to attack MS, but to point out what I think is an interesting anomaly.

Your reluctance to laugh about it with me could be seen to reflect a slightly precious attitude towards criticism, when in fact there is none offered.

The fact that this *isn’t* an open-source project, and people *are* paid to fix this kind of thing, is noteworthy. But hey, it’s no big deal.

Ciao.

Hey! That’s mine. You can’t use “Ciao” to end a post! Oh, wait, he didn’t use the exclamation point. That’s okay then.

pedro:

hi

Maybe I missed the point, but you are saying that it should be written “lose” instead of “loose”, right ?

If So, and just as a side note, here in Portugal, “loose” is taught as the correct english spelling.

maybe, who scanned for errors wasn’t american ?

Pedro Leite From Portugal.

The difference between loose and lose is actually pretty hard to figure out. Mainly because they sound a like and people tend to pronounce them similarly when they speak. I know I have a hard time telling which was being used if either would work in a spoken sentence.

andrewh:

> maybe, who scanned for errors wasn’t american ?

Very good point! I was not aware of that.

Have a nice day,

Andrew

gerry:

I love this opening sentence. It’s just perfect. It makes sense if said out-loud, but totally doesn’t work when written.

well , “loose” is the correct english spelling for “loose” and “lose” is the correct english spelling for “lose” but the 2 have very different meanings.

http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/lose
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/lose
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=16736&dict=S〈=E
http://www.allwords.com/query.php?SearchType=3&Keyword=lose&goquery=Find+it%21&Language=ENG&ESP=1&v=72189267

http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/loose
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/loose
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=16717&dict=S〈=E
http://www.allwords.com/query.php?SearchType=3&Keyword=loose&goquery=Find+it%21&Language=ENG&ESP=1&v=58781511

pedro:

Hi

who would know that today i would be learning english !!!

thank you for the clarification on a subtle linguistic difference.

before posting, i asked an english teacher and she ( yes, I actually talk to women in the flesh ) only mentioned the “loose” as being part of the to lose, lost, lost verb.

thanks a bunch

Best Regards

Pedro Leite from Portugal

Huh?! That comment about talking to women came out of left-field. Wow.

egbert:

ok, I understand you. I might just not have been in the mood for a laugh

Wow. That was fun, strange and surreal. I hope you enjoyed it.

Ciao!

Turn off atime

This is pretty simple. Setting noatime turns off recording of when files are accessed. I’ve never found a usage for the recording of file accesses. However, you may have a use for this behavior, so be warned.

To turn off atime then just dump this XML into /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.nullvision.noatime.plist.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
        "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>com.nullvision.noatime</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
            <string>mount</string>
            <string>-vuwo</string>
            <string>noatime</string>
            <string>/</string>
        </array>
        <key>RunAtLoad</key>
        <true />
    </dict>
</plist>

Turn off hibernate

In the article, he suggests turning off hibernate altogether. I don’t like this. The hibernate is really handy if something goes wrong and you loose all your power.

There are two ways OS-X goes to sleep: suspend and hibernate.

The first is suspend. Information on the system state is stored to ram and the cpu is stopped. This is really fast to sleep and really fast to restore. The downside is that if the system looses power, it cannot restore; the ram is wiped clean.

The second is hibernate. Information on the system state is stored to disk and the cpu is stopped. The system is powered off. On restart, the state is read from disk and the system restarts as normal. This is slow to sleep and restore, but if power is lost, the system state is still safe.

OS-X, for laptops, does both. This means it is slow to shutdown, but fast to restore.

Obviously, if you are using SSD or if you want shutdowns to be fast (like I do, since I tend to shut my lid and carry around my laptop immediately), then you really don’t want hibernation to happen unless you really need it.

So I use SmartSleep by Patrick Stein. The only time my laptop hibernates is when the power is low. The best of both worlds.

Storing /tmp/ in ram

This recipe is nearly the same as Ricardo’s suggestion. I just added the code from Patrick Gibson’s comment.

This is two part; you need to create a shell script and a plist.

The shell script goes in /var/root/ramfs.sh. You must do a chmod a+x /var/root/ramfs.sh afterwards.

#!/bin/bash

set -eu

ramfs_size_mb=256
mount_point="/private/tmp"

ramfs_size_sectors=$(( ${ramfs_size_mb} * 1024 * 1024 / 512 ))
ramdisk_dev=$(hdid -nomount ram://${ramfs_size_sectors} | cut -d ' ' -f 1)
newfs_hfs -v 'Volatile HD' "${ramdisk_dev}"
mkdir -p "${mount_point}"
mount -o noatime -t hfs "${ramdisk_dev}" "${mount_point}"

# hide the volume from the Finder
if [ -e /usr/bin/SetFile ]; then
 /usr/bin/SetFile -a V "${mount_point}"
fi

# fix permissions
chown root:wheel "${mount_point}"
chmod 1777 "${mount_point}"

# EOF

Next you need to drop a plist file in /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.nullvision.ramfs.plist.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>com.nullvision.ramfs</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
            <string>/var/root/ramfs.sh</string>
        </array>
        <key>RunAtLoad</key>
        <true />
    </dict>
</plist>

I don’t recommend moving any caches or anything, as he mentions at the end of the article. Just having /tmp/ (aka /private/tmp/) will be an advantage. Well, except the XCode thing. That’s probably useful.

Ciao!

Addendium: Reverting /tmp

I discovered that iDefrag2 needs to have /tmp be a real filesystem to do it’s “No bootable CD/DVD required!” trick. After hashing it out with a helpful developer (Thanks, Chris!) we tracked it down to putting /tmp into ram.

To undo it, run these commands as root:

rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.nullvision.ramfs.plist
rm /var/root/ramfs.sh
mkdir /private/tmp2
mv /private/tmp /private/tmp2 ; mv /private/tmp2 /private/tmp
chown root:wheel /private/tmp
chmod 1777 /private/tmp

You should reboot immediately after this change.

After reboot, verify that /tmp and /private/tmp are set up correctly:

$ ls -ald /tmp /private/tmp
drwxrwxrwt 18 root wheel 612 Jun 16 09:47 /private/tmp/
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root admin  11 Jun 16 09:23 /tmp -> private/tmp/

Important: Verify that the /tmp symlink points to private/tmp not /private/tmp!

We just got our selves a pair of ferrets. Yay! And boy are they cute and energetic.

You can identify which is which by their foreheads. One (the alpha) has a white forehead. The other has a pair of dark marks on her head.

Both are female.

They still need to settle into our household. Though the dark mark one did her happy dance this morning (its hard to describe, but great fun).

The other, the alpha, is apparently a hand biter. Since she bites when nothing is going on, I suspect she is either still stressed out or has bad associations with hands. They were cage ferrets and have never had owners, so we have a little work ahead making them comfortable with people.

Check out the photos and give us some suggestions for names!

[update 2010-04-12: They have been named! The alpha is Fang and the non-alpha is Pepper.]

Ciao!

P.S.: Man, are these things hard to photograph. They just don’t sit still for a moment. Pure energy. I’m sure as they get more used to us, we will get beter photos.

First off, install ruby-debug:

# If using ruby1.8
$ gem install ruby-debug

# If using ruby 1.9.1
$ gem install ruby-debug19

Next: Watch this video….

• Link to blog post
• Link to video: Basics of Ruby Debug

The big thing to remember is help is your friend.

Finally: A handy ~/.rdebugrc file:

# rdebugrc
set autolist   on
set autoeval   on
set autoreload on
# EOF

Ciao!

If you use emacs for editing then you probably have a customized .emacs file. Even if you don’t, your system is probably loading a boatload of features for emacs.

I certainly have a ton of elisp that I use to make development easier.

So it just occurred to me that I don’t need any of that stuff just to edit a change commit.

So I added this to my shell rc file:

export GIT_EDITOR="emacs -q"

Now emacs pops up instantly and I don’t have to wait for all the elisp to load and initialize.

This probably works with other editors too.

Ciao!

Hmm…I have apparently also posted 120 posts to my blog. Wow! I didn’t notice till I played with MacJournal. And yes, this was posted via MacJournal.

Ciao!

However, what do you do if you want monitor the output while logging at the same time? I just figured this out (probably again, since I tend to forget things… which is why I’m blogging this).

WARNING: This is bash-specific. While I prefer ZSH for my personal shell, I generally code in bash because it is everywhere.

# Logs only stdout
exec > >(tee "somefile.log")

# Logs stderr and stdout to separate files.
exec 2> >(tee "somefile.err")
exec > >(tee "somefile.log")

# Logs stderr and stdout to the same file.
exec > >(tee "somefile.log")
exec 2>&1

I got it from Naked Ape’s Shell Hacks.

This is apparently called process substitution.

Ciao!

It only works in FF3.6, but the statistics show that the users of It’s All Text! upgrade their browser almost immediately after a new version comes out, so I’m not worried.

At the time of this post, it hasn’t been approved, so you’ll need to download it manually from the versions page.

It’s approved and available via the normal spot.

I apologize for not getting this done before FF 3.6. I don’t have a real excuse except being lazy and busy with other things. But I have to say the amount of emails I got asking for a FF 3.6 version definitely got me off my butt.

Ciao!

We were watching UHF and there is a bit where a guy is trying to teach poodles to fly… by throwing them out the 3rd floor window. There was a pile poodles on the lawn of his apartment building.

She cracked up.

After she recovered and picked herself off the floor, she said that I should make a “Teach Poodles to Fly” app. I haven’t written an iPhone app yet, but you know…it almost sounds like fun.

You would use the flick motion to launch poodles out a window. If you miss, the poodle hits the wall instead of going out the window. Of course, it’s probably not a happy thing for the poodle, either way.

Ciao!

The official Apple description of the graphics in my MacBook Pro.

I’m annoyed. I’ve had my lovely late-2009 MacBook Pro with the incredible dual graphics processors for a couple months and I had the slower GPU enabled the whole time.

Apparently, you need to go into “System Preferences” -> “Energy Saver” and turn on “Graphics” -> “Higher Performance”^{apple kb}.

I am annoyed, because I thought the problems with Sims 3 was because it was having trouble, not because I was using the slow GPU.

Even more annoying, I was (apparently falsely) under the impression that this switch was either obvious, easy or happened automagically when plugging or unplugging the power.

The spec sheet for the GPU says that it is capable of switching on the fly and even using both GPUs for even more power.  I found this out via an EveryMac article.

Well, hopefully some day this will be enabled. Meanwhile, I’m going to check to see if the GCD needs enabling too.

Ciao.

I just switched from Safari to Firefox 3.5.5 and discovered I couldn’t stand the way external links open in new tabs though I wanted new-window links such as target=”_blank” to open in a new tab.

This used to work via browser.link.open_external.

But no longer. They nuked this via bug 324164. I can sort of understand it. Most people want a new tab or a new window on each new link. However, if you use spaces in OS-X or desktops in Linux, then setting this unified option to “new tab” sucks — you have to play “hunt the window” every time you click a link in a program.

Bleh.

Fortunately, someone came to our rescue with a handy addon: Tabs Open Relative (Modified) by mojo-chan.

It also has the side-effect of opening new tabs just right to the current tab, like chrome does. I’ve become used to that behavior and definitely prefer it.

Ciao!