Kevin Marsh

Jekyll

2009-02-12T00:00:00-08:00

Source Code

First up, feel free to check out the full source code that Jekyll uses to build all this html: http://github.com/willcodeforfoo/willcodeforfoo.github.com/tree/master

Importing from Mephisto

Here’s a hacky, super-simple, one-liner script that I threw together at the Mephisto Rails console:

Content.find_by_sql("SELECT id, permalink, body, published_at, title FROM contents WHERE type = 'Article' AND published_at IS NOT NULL ORDER BY published_at").each {|c| File.open("#{c.published_at.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')}-#{c.permalink}.textile", "w+"){|f| f.puts "---\nlayout: post\ntitle: #{c.title}\n---\n\n"; f.puts c.body }}

This will not work 100%, though. It doesn’t do anything fancy like output real YAML, with escaped characters. So if you have funky characters in your titles, things could blow up.

`uninitialized constant Classifier::LSI::Matrix (NameError)` when running with `--lsi` option

Applying this patch to Classifier’s lsi.rb file seemed to do the trick.

As an aside: I’m truly impressed with the Classifier gem. I’ve seen its Bayesian stuff before, but Jekyll was my first exposure to LSI.

Excerpts

Thankfully thanks to Jekyll’s slick metadata feature for posts, all I had to do was add a excerpt key to the header of a post and throw my excerpt there:

---
layout: post
title: Jekyll
excerpt: |-
  I've taken the plunge to a static-HTML blog with Jekyll. I'm impressed so far. I love having the whole she-bang in git, but then again the whole idea of a "datastore in git":/2008/04/13/git-as-a-data-store.html has fascinated me from the start.

  And pushing to GitHub pages (willcodeforfoo.github.com) just _worked_. A few minutes after pushing, I hit the URL. Half expecting an error page and half expecting just nothing I found the site. Just the way I hoped it would work.

  Big ups to "Michael Bleigh":http://mbleigh.com for making his whole blog available on "GitHub":http://github.com/mbleigh/mbleigh.github.com/tree/master. I didn't take much design-wise, but seeing how things were structured was a huge help. I did nick his Atom feed template.  
---

h3. Importing from Mephisto

Here's a hacky, super-simple, one-liner script that I threw together at the Mephisto Rails console:

The next gotcha was that I couldn’t get Jekyll to Textilize anything other than the content, and since my excerpt needed to be rendered as Textile, this was a problem.

So I submitted a patch that creates a filter called textilize that I can pass my excerpt into for formatting. Hopefully it gets applied to the master branch that GitHub Pages uses.

Inspiration

Big ups to Tom Preston-Werner for writing Jekyll and Michael Bleigh for making his whole blog’s source available on GitHub. I didn’t take much design-wise, but seeing how things were structured was a huge help. (I did nick his Atom feed template.)

Reducing the Noise

2009-02-10T00:00:00-08:00

I’m spending some time tonight to try and reduce some of the noise in my life. From a practical standpoint, this means I’m:

Unsubscribing from a few RSS feeds that I end up just reading past anyway
Deleting some iTunes tracks that I usually end skipping, both at my desk and in my car (the Skip Count in iTunes is great for this)
Unsubscribing from a few mailing lists I rarely read, are definitely not active in, and end up just Google searching when I need a topical answer
Taking steps to reduce blog spam
Creating server-side and client-side rules to move bulk e-mail from companies like Dell to their own folder or tag, and skipping the inbox altogether. Even better, unsubscribing from most of these completely.
Deleting rarely used Apps

While these minor things seem really trivial piece-by-piece, I think the sum of them cause a lot of distraction and cloud meaningful activities. As such, I plan to do this de-lousing on a periodic basis.

Your Rails Apps Changelog in git

2008-05-19T00:00:00-07:00

OK, this one is almost too hacky and simple to share, but I wanted to get it out there. Want to show your site’s users what’s changed? Just show them your git changelog:

It’s a bit dorky, and definately not as pretty as a properly parsed and formatted changelog, but for showing stakeholders what’s changed it’s been useful.

Here’s how it’s done (again, kind of a hack):

Controller

@code = `cd /var/www/vintageaerial.com/htdocs/shared/cached-copy && git-log --max-count=20 --no-merges`

View

<pre class="changelog"><%= @changes %></pre>

Stylesheet

pre.changelog { overflow: scroll; }

I definitely wouldn’t use this in high-traffic production areas without some caching. It’s also enforcing me to write better, more communicative changeset descriptions, because I know someone can read them.

rake db:production:clone

2008-04-17T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve been using this little rake ditty for awhile, to refresh my current development database with data from the production server:

namespace :db do
  namespace :production do
    desc "Recreate the local development database as a clone of the remote production database"
    task :clone do
      system %Q(ssh [db_host] "rm /tmp/out.sql.bz2; mysqldump -uroot -p [production_database_name] > /tmp/out.sql; bzip2 /tmp/out.sql")
      system %Q(scp [db_host]:/tmp/out.sql.bz2 .)
      system %Q(bzcat out.sql.bz2 | mysql -uroot -D[development_database_name])
      system %Q(rm out.sql.bz2)
    end
  end
end

Of course, you’ll have to change the bits in brackets to fit your particular situation.

Now, this obviously isn’t for everyone, but for small-to-medium sized databases it works pretty well and helps you work with real data.

Git as a Data Store

2008-04-13T00:00:00-07:00

I’m fascinated with the idea of git not just as a version control system for source code, but a redundant, version controlled filesystem for anything.

Take git-wiki for example. It uses plain text Textile/Markdown files in a git repository as its database. You get all the benefits git users have for source code, but for wiki content. I’ve written a little scenario demonstrating some of the strengths of the platform.

Just by using git, you get:

version control: with past revision rollbacks, diffs, the whole lot
redundancy: you can push up your entire wiki, with all changeset history, in seconds to multiple locations for backup
security: since each blob is referenced by a cryptographically-secure SHA1 hash, as is each commit, you can be sure your wiki hasn’t been tampered with
offline access: you can pull your entire wiki, again with all changeset history, to edit and interact with offline
branching: make radical changes without affecting the mainline

The concept seems to apply well to a wiki, but I think they’d work as well in a CMS. Imagine being able to pull down an entire site’s content, create an experimental branch of content, refine it, then push it back up to your site: all while having the freedom to go back to any point in time in seconds.

The CMS backend (if there even is one) would still allow you to make changes online, but would check them in the git repository to be tracked. Stylesheets, images, original assets, and so on could be versioned along with the text, since git is so efficient even with binary files.

sitesmetric Progress

2008-01-24T00:00:00-08:00

I’ve gotten a respectable amount of work done on sitesmetric, insofar that it actually downloads data (intelligently) and displays it (somewhere intelligently)

Sneak a peek:

Head on over to sitesmetric to signup and be notified of the beta program, opening soon!

Another Project, or, Introducing sitesmetric

2008-01-22T00:00:00-08:00

Yes, I’ve started yet another project. I’ve got tons of cycles spent on this, so I hope to be able to execute a really simple v1.0 and get it launched ASAP. The splash page is up. Go check it out in another tab… I’ll wait.

One interesting aspect of this project has been the planning. The really early conceptual stuff I did on MindMeister. What a great way to hammer out all the aspects of an idea you have kicking around your head. MindMeister allows you to be as broad (I started with a quick elevator pitch) or as deep (schema, models, controllers) as you want.

After this step, I used Fireworks CS3 to mockup some screens. Now, I thought Fireworks was just Macromedia’s wimpy Photoshop clone but since Adobe swallowed it, I think it’s trying to be a rapid prototyping tool. Which is fine by be, it worked great. I’ve never really worked with anything at this stage that let me mold pixels as easily as putty:

Without divulging too much, of course, here’s the pitch. (There are still some legal issues I’m working out with the largest search engine company.) It grew out of my frustration of trying to keep track of all the loose ends of various sites. dotfiles, lifemetric, taglol, this blog; they go on and on. All the information I needed wasn’t all together, so stuff randomly fell through the cracks and I didn’t know about some of the things I probably should have. I hope sitesmetric will fill this gap.

So imagine sitesmetric as being the one place you can go to see the latest traffic trends; mentions on sites like Digg, Slashdot, reddit, etc.; keyword positions; domain registrations; hosting details; and so on.

In the coming days I hope to share some more mock ups and comps.

Merb Asset Helpers

2008-01-15T00:00:00-08:00

Merb, like Rails 2.0, sports some very flexible asset helpers. But Merb’s asset helpers bring a whole lot more to the table in terms of flexibility, speed, and features. Kinda like Merb itself.

Take js_include_tag. Sure, you can just throw it in your application layout and include some Javascript on every page like you would with Rails. You can even “bundle” all your Javascript assets. No, not manually. Merb is smart enough to give you the flexibility of separate files in development mode, but give you the extra speed boost in production mode. This is probably old news to a lot of Rails developers that haven’t been under rocks for the past year.

But, Merb gives us even more flexibility. What if you want to minify your Javascript? Merb supports asset bundler callbacks, which let you run some code after a bundle is created:

Merb::Assets::JavascriptAssetBundler.add_callback do |filename|
  system("/usr/local/bin/yui-compress #{filename}")
end

Pretty cool huh? Now, you could come close to this in Rails with something like PackR but it gets better:

If you’re the kind of web ninja who keeps their Javascript or CSS separated, it may be kind of cumbersome to figure out which assets you should be including and when. Not with Merb. Enter include_required_js and include_required_css. Throw these two methods in your application layout and you now have the flexibility to specify what Javascript or CSS files to include for what view. In the view. Where it makes the most sense:

<!-- application.html.erb -->
<html>
  <head>
    <%= include_required_js %>
    <%= include_required_css %>
  </head>
  <body>
    <!-- SNIP! -->
  </body>
</html>

<!-- list.html.erb (or any view or partial, really) -->
<% require_js 'auto-complete' -%>

I can see this making a lot of sense for including something like Javascript auto-completion or calendar popups only on pages that actually require them. Which is a huge win for the other, say 90%, of your pages that don’t require the Javascript file to be present.

P.S. Props to the Merb team for creating clean and well-documented code that makes finding gems like this easy (and maybe even a little fun) to find.

Minor Leopard Rails Wrinkle

2007-10-30T00:00:00-07:00

If you encounter this issue booting up a Mongrel:

$ ./script/server 
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `gem_original_require': no such file to load -- builder/blankslate (LoadError)
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `require'
from /Users/kmarsh/Sites/sampleboardportal/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/basic_object.rb:3
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `gem_original_require'
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `require'
from /Users/kmarsh/Sites/sampleboardportal/vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support.rb:29
from /Users/kmarsh/Sites/sampleboardportal/vendor/rails/railties/lib/commands/server.rb:1:in `require'
from /Users/kmarsh/Sites/sampleboardportal/vendor/rails/railties/lib/commands/server.rb:1
from ./script/server:3:in `require'
from ./script/server:3

…it’s because you’re missing Builder. Try sudo gem install builder. Fixed the issue for me!

My Rails Stack Setup Notes

2007-10-02T00:00:00-07:00

It really is a no brainer to setup Linux, MySQL, Ruby, RubyGems, RMagick, Rails, etc. the 45th time you’ve done it. But it takes a bit of time to go through those 44 other times. So I decided to write down all my steps so I can consistently setup a box at will with little fuss. Take a look, it probably is very close to what you’re looking for:

Ubuntu / MySQL / Rails Stack Install Guide

The Only Way Digg Can Redeem Itself

2007-05-02T00:00:00-07:00

Kevin Rose has stated he intends to stop the censorship of the posting of the (now) infamous AACS code.

The only way Digg can redeem itself now in the minds of its followers is to be sued by the MPAA, fight it, take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, and have the DMCA deemed unconstitutional and overturned.

Coda

2007-04-24T00:00:00-07:00

So, Coda is out and it has been pretty well received. For good reason. It’s a very elegant-looking app, with nice touches all over the place. Panic really knows how to exploit the look and feel of OS X and the core technologies beneath. Put simply: it oozes Mac goodness from every corner.

I want to use it, I really do. However. I don’t need it.

You see, ever since I switched from PHP to Rails I only touch the server for little increments at a time, and no longer work directly on it (man, those were[n’t] the days!) Even when developing comps from Photoshop to XHTML/CSS, I mainly stay within my current editor and switch back and forth between Webkit.

(As an aside, I really like the bundled Panic Sans font. Appears to be some variation of Bitstream Vera Mono, possibly with the underscores tweaked.)

Rails Scalability Problems Solved

2007-04-23T00:00:00-07:00

So all this talk about Rails (not) scaling got me thinking. If the database is the next bottleneck after you’ve beefed up your pack of Mongrels, just remove it—and replace it with Twitter!

That’s right. A Twitter-based ActiveRecord store.

I expect the plugin to work something like this:

development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: sockr_development
  username: root
  password:
  host: localhost

test:
  adapter: mysql
  database: sockr_test
  username: root
  password:
  host: localhost

production:
  adapter: twitter
  username: sockr_production
  password: web2point0h

(Note here how I’m still using a traditional RDBMS for development and test environments. Kicking in Twitter here would be quite silly, as we don’t need the scalability for just our local user as we’re developing. We really need it for production!)

That’s it! The plugin would take care of marshaling your ActiveRecord objects into 140 byte chunks and sending it off to Twitter HQ for cold storage.

Keep your eyes peeled for the plugin, coming soon!

When To Say Yes to Feature Requests

2007-03-19T00:00:00-07:00

As the only web developer for a small company, I get a lot feature requests for our apps and because time is limited (for everyone) I have to prioritize these requests. My job sure would be easier if I could just say no to everyone but management probably wouldn’t have much of a use for me after awhile. So we need some rationale for turning one down and giving the other the thumbs up.

Here’s my little rule of thumb:

(time savings per day/time to implement) * number of users

or if you like terse variable names,

s/i * u

Case I: The Quick Win

Bob spends about 30 minutes a day sorting through a list of orders, paginating through and selecting ones that match a given range. He submits a request:

“Kevin, it’d be great if I could use the existing search tool to search for a range of order numbers.”

A quick estimate yields about 15 minutes for writing a few test cases, and coding up the feature. We have all the variables we need, so lets fill in our equation, sticking to hours:

(.5/0.25) * 1 = 2

Hmm, seems sort of arbitrary. We’ll leave this on the whiteboard, and tell Bob we’ll get back to him.

Case II: Productivity, Multiplied (or divided)

Just then, Sue comes in:

“Kevin, the other 4 customer service representatives and I are spending about 2 hours every day handling orders with invalid credit card numbers. Could we give our customers some more information during checkout if their card was rejected? It sure would reduce our call volume.”

Adding some more validation and error handling to the order processing steps would take a couple hours, but it looks like it would save 5 CSR’s 2 hours every day. How does this fill into our equation?

(2/2) * 5 = 5

We can see right away this looks like a huge difference, keeping in mind of course that it’s just a rule of thumb.

While it isn’t a hard and fast rule (I don’t think you could come up rules like “< x = no” and “> y = yes”) I’ve found this technique can help prioritize requests in a way that your users can appreciate. It also forces your users to think a little about how much time they really spend doing things, and how much time it takes you to do your job.

dotfiles.org Now Has Search

2007-02-06T00:00:00-08:00

I’m pleased to announce dotfiles.org now has search capabilities. This feature was born out of my desire to quickly see common features in everyone’s dotfiles, specifically shell aliases. That being said, matching lines from each dotfile will be displayed one right after the other.

Give it a try and if you haven’t yet signed up, go ahead and do so. It’s free!

reddit, digg, and Slashdot

2007-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

reddit: for computer science students
digg: for computer science drop-outs
Slashdot: for computer science graduates, circa 1980

Best of 2006 Playlist

2006-12-31T00:00:00-08:00

I had a great time listening to my favorite releases of 2006, as defined by this smart playlist:

Match [all]:
  * Year is 2006
  * My Rating is > 2

John Mayer – Stop This Train
John Mayer – The Heart Of Life
John Mayer – Vultures
John Mayer – Gravity
Teddy Geiger – Look Where We Are Now
Teddy Geiger – Thinking Underage
Daniel Powter – Bad Day
Jewel – Again And Again
Guster – Empire State
Corinne Bailey Rae – Put Your Records On
John Mayer – Waiting On The World To Change
John Mayer – In Repair
John Mayer – Slow Dancing In A Burning Room
John Mayer – Belief
John Mayer – I’m Gonna Find Another You
John Mayer – I Don’t Trust Myself (With Loving You)
Teddy Geiger – For You I Will (Confidence)
Teddy Geiger – Love Is A Marathon
Teddy Geiger – Try Too Hard
Gnarls Barkley – Crazy
Jewel – Good Day
Chris Thile – Wayside Back In Time
Daniel Powter – Song 6
Jewel – Goodbye Alice In Wonderland
Amos Lee – supply and demand
The Click Five – Just The Girl
Guster – Lightning Rod
Jewel – Stephenville, TX
Sanctus Real – Fly
Sheryl Crow – Real Gone
Train – Explanation
Chris Thile – You’re An Angel, And I’m Gonna Cry
Katharine McPhee – Somewhere Over The Rainbow
Keane – Nothing In My Way
Train – Cab
Daniel Powter – Lie To Me
Guster – Dear Valentine
Thom Yorke – The Eraser
Train – Always Remember
Ben Kweller – Thirteen
Ben Kweller – This Is War
Kate Havnevik – New Day
Train – Shelter Me
Ben Folds – Still
Hellogoodbye – Here (In Your Arms)
The Knife – Silent Shout
Ray LaMontagne – Empty
James Taylor – Jingle Bells

I think I’ll make it a New Years Eve tradition!

My Dream App

2006-12-28T00:00:00-08:00

No, not that dream app, but mine.

I’d like an app that I can use to document my computing experiences. You know, like when I’m on a Safari.

I currently do this with screenshots that automatically get uploaded to Flickr and tagged ‘screenshot’ and/or del.icio.us. However, I’d just like one button that I push, and a svelte HUD pops up, asks me for some tags and maybe a description, then pushes it up on the web somewhere. If I’m on a webpage, it’ll cache the site’s text (which I can then search), take a screenshot and then get out of the way.

Paul uses screenshots and Keynote, but that doesn’t work so well with multiple computers… and I don’t like the idea of accumulating 200 MiB files.

(Hmmm, maybe this is rediscovr?)

Update:

Junebug and Nginx

2006-11-15T00:00:00-08:00

So I came across Junebug today, which is a slick wiki engine that harnesses the power of Camping and gives you a nice-looking wiki that’s contained in one directory.

Here’s what I did to get it setup and running and proxied through nginx:

1. Install Junebug (you’ll need Ruby Gems for this to work):

$ sudo gem install junebug

2. Create the wiki:

$ junebug wiki

3. Edit the config.yml file’s url and feed parameters to the location we’ll proxy it to, say http://example.com/wiki

4. Edit your nginx.conf and add the following entries:



upstream junebug {

  server 127.0.0.1:3301;

}
location /wiki {

  proxy_pass http://mongrel-kmw/wiki;

  proxy_redirect     off;

  proxy_set_header   Host   $host;

}
location /wiki/static { 

  root /home/kmarsh;

}

5. Fire it up!: ./wiki start (this daemonizes automatically)

6. Restart nginx (send it HUP kill -HUP [nginx pid])

7. Visit your wiki at the URL you specified above, maybe http://example.com/wiki

Toward a more Republic Democracy

2006-10-25T00:00:00-07:00

The House of Representatives (and to a lesser extent, the Senate) were established out of the desire for the nation to be led by the people; realizing that not everyone could travel to the capital on a regular basis and voice their opinions.

So the founding fathers setup a republic, where citizens vote once a year for representatives that share the same ideals as them. Which is usually (poorly) determined by party affiliation.

However, how do we know that who we elect are actually voting in our favor? And, more importantly, how do our elected representatives know how their constituents would vote?

As a web developer, I am always looking for ways in which the web can be used to improve our lives. Here is one such way:

A list of upcoming issues before the House could be put on the Representative’s website;
constituents could log in and cast a vote for each issue as if they were before the House themselves;
a Representative could log in and see a tally of the votes so far for each issue. They would then take this to Congress, armed with the opinions of their constituents.

This also makes election time much easier. Rather than listening to party-incited backbiting and dirt-digging, you would know that you differ on, for example, 89% of the issues in the previous term and, in this case, it might be time to vote for a candidate whose opinions are more aligned with yours.

Because after all, shouldn’t a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” include more of the peoples’ opinions?

Dotfiles

2006-10-21T00:00:00-07:00

I’m proud to announce the grand opening of dotfiles.org!

From the site’s homepage:

dotfiles.org is a place to upload, share, and synchronize your dotfiles.

If you don’t know what a dotfile is, you probably don’t need it. And if you don’t know, learn up!

It’s my first app written in Camping, which has been a trip I’m confident to say I hope I’ll take again.

Mephisto

2006-10-16T00:00:00-07:00

It’s official, this blog is now running Mephisto!

There a few bugs and things missing, which’ll get cleaned up in due time.

Also, feeds have now been moved to FeedBurner:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/kevinmarsh

Update (or subscribe!) today!

Tab-completion for Ruby Cheat Sheets

2006-10-15T00:00:00-07:00

Add this to your .bashrc or .bash_profile file:

complete -W "$(cheat sheets | egrep '^ ' | awk {'print $1'})" cheat

Bracket accessors for your Rails models

2006-10-11T00:00:00-07:00

Here’s an interesting hack. Tag this on the end of environment.rb:

module ActiveRecord
  class Base
    def self.[](id)
      self.find(id)
    end
  end
end

Now you can do fun things like:

>> Person[1]
=> #<Person:0x23c7a00 @attributes={"name"=>"Alice", "id"=>"1"}>
>> Person[1].name
=> "Alice"

Which is equivalent to:

>> Person.find(1)
=> #<Person:0x23c7a00 @attributes={"name"=>"Alice", "id"=>"1"}>
>> Person.find(1).name
=> "Alice"

…but far cooler.

In other news, I really need to upgrade to Mephisto – just as soon as they add XML-RPC support.

iTunes Visual Refresh

2006-09-12T00:00:00-07:00

iTunes 7, released today, sports some new UI tweaks (cf. source list preview). Now, being one for consistency, I have to believe the rest of Aqua will change along with it (right? right!?), but it’s odd we didn’t see anything different in the latest Leopard preview. Although, iTunes has consistently been the earliest adopter of most UI trends.

While I haven’t seen the new UI enough yet to gauge whether or not I like it, I hope this isn’t just another “visual fork” but rather a preview of a new, consistent look for OS X.

(Oh, and I hope Apple hired or gave the author of CoverFlow some cash for integrating his app—including the name—into iTunes proper.)

Ruby Web Fetching Options Benchmarked

2006-08-19T00:00:00-07:00

My latest project requires a web crawler of sorts (technically, it just needs to grab the HTML and index it, not following any links), so fetching web pages very fast will be important. I’ve whipped up a quick script using stdlib’s Benchmark to pit several options against each other: open-uri, rio, net/http, and Zed Shaw’s RFuzz. (If I’m leaving any out, please let me know.)

The Test

Briefly, the test fetches the Google search results for testing 5 times each.

The Results

                user     system      total        real
RFuzz       0.010000   0.000000   0.010000 (  2.486962)
net/http    0.040000   0.020000   0.060000 (  2.880106)  
open-uri    0.070000   0.040000   0.110000 (  3.203510)
rio         0.140000   0.060000   0.200000 (  3.674174)

Conclusion

It appears as though RFuzz cranks through HTTP the fastest, with net/http coming in a close second. It appears as through both open-uri’s and rio’s prettiness in syntax also slows them down quite a bit earning them 3rd and 4th place, respectively.

Terra got the bat!

2006-07-31T00:00:00-07:00

(The photo not mine, but found on Flickr. It pretty much looked like that, though.)

Wireless Mighty Mouse Observations

2006-07-28T00:00:00-07:00

The UPS man just came today and delivered my new Wireless Mighty Mouse (I know, I know… it’s pricey for a mouse but I still had the $50 iPod Settlement promo code kicking around). Here are some observations:

The On-Off switch is merely a shutter to the laser, pretty clever!
Two AA batteries are included
The included software was a required install, even on Mac OS X 10.4.7
It’s quite a bit heavier than the wired Mighty Mouse, due to the batteries (duh)
You can choose to include one or two batteries at a time
There is a nice battery level gauge in the Bluetooth tab of the Keyboard and Mouse System Preferences panel
I think it samples less frequently than the wired version, as mousing seems to stutter ever-so-slightly. This has the potential to get very annoying!
The new software adds a slick Zoom feature, wherein holding a modifier key while scrolling with the ball will actually zoom the screen in. Problem is, it’s pretty disorienting and doesn’t really work all that well, but it just might take some practice.
The two side buttons are equally as annoying as the original Mighty Mouse. Their hard pressing requirement coupled with little tactile feedback render them practically unusable.
It’s nice not having to deal with the (too) short cord, especially with my MacBook
The laser will track on my glass-topped wooden desk, unlike the optical
No more LED means no more weird mouse-like projection

Dead Simple Full-text Searching with Rails

2006-07-17T00:00:00-07:00

Using MySQL’s built-in FULLTEXT searching capabilities, you can add full-text searching to your Rails app’s pretty easily. It’s not quite as sexy as acts_as_searchable but implementation is pretty trivial and no dependencies are required. One caveat: your tables need to be MyISAM.

First, make sure you add a FULLTEXT index to your MySQL table like so:

ALTER TABLE articles ADD FULLTEXT (title, content);

Then, just use ActiveRecord’s find() method, but pass in a :conditions parameter:

@articles = Article.find(:all, :conditions => ['MATCH(title, content) AGAINST (?)', params[:query]])

Clickity Clack--whine--Clickity Clack

2006-07-13T00:00:00-07:00

So I’ve just confirmed that my MacBook exudes similar whining problems as the MacBook Pro. The whine’s pitch varies with CPU usage, such as scrolling or dragging windows.

~~Solution~~ Hack: Turn off the second core using the Processor System Preference panel.

Now I just have the clickity-clack sound of my vintage Apple Extended II keyboard (oh, and only one core).

BarnRaisr and Knowledge Markets

2006-06-26T00:00:00-07:00

This idea comes from two separate events at RailsConf: a conversation and a keynote.

A conversation at RailsConf started up between a group sitting at a table, some of which turned out to be pretty knowledgeable on the subject of knowledge markets. The gentleman sitting next to me (forgive me, I didn’t catch your name!) brought up a good point about the idea of collective knowledge markets and the opportunity for people to “game the system” if there was any personal benefit involved.

Another RailsConf extraction, if you will, is BarnRaisr (which is another testament to this community: a call to action was made during Nathaniel Talbott ‘s RailsConf 2006 talk _Homesteading: A Thriver’s Guide_ and someone came up with a name and site less than a day later). The basic idea is this: present a project and have members of the community help it along by contributing testing, coding, design, and time to help this idea along.

On the ride home, these two separate ideas came together: when enough code and hours start to be volunteered on projects you suddenly have a decent indicator of the merit of a particular idea. People “game” the system by committing hours and hard work to the project, which I think anyone would agree is a pretty good thing.

RailsConf

2006-06-23T00:00:00-07:00

Live from RailsConf… no real content to offer, just bragging.

RSS Aggregation

2006-06-20T00:00:00-07:00

After years and years of manually checking each of my 75 or so favorite websites for updates I’ve decided to give an RSS aggregator a shot.

I’ve tried several in the past, namely NewsFire and NetNewsWire, but I’ve always felt like they robbed me of the ‘experience’ of visiting a website.

A lot of the sites I frequent are design related and naturally have quite exquisite designs (cf. Bartelme Design and Maniacal Rage, among others). Why would I want to forgo this pleasant viewing experience and have all the updates shown to me in a homogenized container? Mostly ’cause its easier.

I’m currently using NetNewsWire Lite to track about 100 feeds which is, so far, working well. I credit most of my pleasant experience to its NewsGator synchronization (which actually works!), which is a must-have feature for someone with a home and work Mac or desktop and portable Mac.

TextMate and WordPress

2006-06-20T00:00:00-07:00

TextMate latest new feature, the Blogging bundle, has prompted me to (finally) ditch TextPattern and switch to a blogging package with better XML-RPC support. So here we are: Kevin Marsh on WordPress!

Stuff is still a bit… broken. But on the plus side, comments now work! And we have search.

January!?

2006-05-08T00:00:00-07:00

That can’t be right…

Everything old is new again, or, Embrace and extend

2006-01-06T00:00:00-08:00

So, Microsoft has released some more details of what they have in store for Vista. Let’s do a quick rundown of the features, shall we? I think I’ve seen them somewhere before…

Let’s start off with the major features, as listed here, and work our way down (because of some lame Javascript on the page, I can’t directly link to each section.)

Virtual Folders, looks like a Smart Folder to me
Quick Search, find anything right from a unified search bar! Oh yeah… Apple did something like this in Tiger… I think it was called Spotlight. Next!
Aero, use the GPU to render fancy graphical GUI elements! Oh yeah… Apple did something like this in Tiger… pretty sure it was called Quartz (Extreme)
Live taskbar thumbnails, previews of minimized windows while hovering over their icon in the taskbar. Looks pretty similar to the Dock’s minimized windows to me, but the Dock’s are visible even if you don’t hover over them (read: more than one at a time)
Windows Flip and Windows Flip 3D… use the awesome power of Aero to show each window all at once, so you can pick from a miniaturized version rather than just an icon. Hey! I know this one. Exposé!

Let’s move on to Security, surely Microsoft has done something innovative here, I mean… Microsoft is known for great security, right? Right?

User Account Control (UAC), so basically while using a “normal” account and doing something that requires administrative privileges, a box will pop up asking for the administrator password. Uuuh, OS X has been doing this forever.
Better protection from malware, ok… so we got Automatic Updates (should be standard for any operating environment), firewall, Windows Defender and the Malicious Software Removal Tool (OK, I’ll admit… OS X does not have the Malicious Software Removal Tool. But, in its defense, it does not require it either.)

How about Internet Explorer? Surely there is some room for some innovative improvements, no? Hey, where ya going? Come back…

Tabbed browsing, just like we’ve seen in Firefox and Safari for years
Built-in RSS reader, more catching up to Firefox and Safari…
Live Preview view tab’s contents in a thumbnail preview, just like Omniweb!

At this point, it’s getting pretty ridiculous, but I trudge on…

Gadgets and Sidebar, ya know… small applications that connect to the web and a place to put said apps. Just like Widgets and Dashboard… But—the Sidebar will take up about 20% of the side of your screen! Even when you don’t want it…
Windows Calendar, ok… the thing that gets me about this one is the rounded event box. Totally screams iCal ripoff. But you can share calendars! Ya know, like iCal.
Windows Photo Gallery iPhoto.
Windows Movie Maker iMovie.

Performance is an area where I’m sure we having something of merit… Really.

Sleep Damnit. Guess not.
SuperFetch, ya know. Memory caching. Like any modern operating system has done for the past, 10 years.
External memory devices, cool! Now I can connect a USB flash drive and have it add to my system memory! Except it will be about 15% of the speed…

Windows Backup and System Restore… nothing new to see here, either.

In short, Vista is nothing but a late facsimile of Tiger. Some features are a bit more obscure, while others are glaring and its really unnerving how Microsoft can get away with it.

Embrace, yes. Extend? Not so much.

New Features Galore!

2006-01-05T00:00:00-08:00

After realizing I spend entirely too much time neglecting this site, I’ve worked a bit over the past couple days to add:

Flickr integration, in the Gallery (which prompted me to become a Flickr pro member, too)
Last 3 pictures from the Treo on the right (it’s pretty amazing that in 1 minute and 20 seconds I can snap a picture and have it show up here!)
del.icio.us integration, in the Links section
Updated résumé to reflect my new job and to sound not as needy
Updated the Portfolio
Various markup changes to make the site plumb with XHTML standards (what a shame to link to the validator and have it not even give you the green light!)
Updated the RSS feed icon to the new standard
Re-discovered love for TextPattern

Commenting Fixed

2006-01-02T00:00:00-08:00

D’oh! So that’s why I haven’t been getting many comments lately. Here I thought it was just because no one visited me…

Creating Mobile or Lite Versions of Rails Apps

2005-11-05T00:00:00-08:00

For my latest web project using Ruby on Rails, the idea of a mobile version arose.

Is it worth it? Well, how much more code would I have to write? 1,000 lines? Pages? Try 10. That’s right: 10.

Here’s the magic, first add the lines around the Mobile/lite version bit to config/routes.rb:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  # Default page is the dashboard
  map.connect '', :controller => "dashboard", :action => 'show'

  # Mobile/lite version
  map.connect ':mobile/', :controller => "dashboard", :action => 'show'
  map.connect ':mobile/:controller/:action/:id'

  # Install the default route as the lowest priority.
  map.connect ':controller/:action/:id'
end

Then edit app/controllers/application.rb:

require_dependency "login_system"

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
    include LoginSystem
      
    helper :debug
    helper :date_picker
    
    layout :determine_layout
    
    private
    
    def determine_layout
      if @params[:mobile]
        "mobile"
      else
        "application"
      end
    end
end

And finally, create app/views/layouts/mobile.rhtml

<%= yield %>

Surf on over to yourserver/yourapp/mobile/ And voila! You have a lite version of your site perfect for viewing on a smartphone or PDA. As a bonus, when you start using a mobile page, your preference will “stick” and follow you, thanks to Rail’s routing.

How to Succeed In The Web 2.0 Days

2005-08-18T00:00:00-07:00

It’s easy, really, to have a successful web app these days. Just follow these easy steps* and you too will be on your way to fame and fortune:

Think of one function that doesn’t already have a web interface. Anything. How about a web inventory of your socks?
Register a hip ccTLD from another country in combination with a subdomain. http://m.ysock.it, for instance?
Write your app using Ruby on Rails
Have a clean, efficient design, don’t forget huge text input boxes
Don’t forget Ajax! You’ll need lots of script.aculo.us effects all over. Drag and drop icons of socks to a laundry bin perhaps?
Weeks, nay, months before your app launches, offer a teaser page that allows folks to enter their e-mail address to be notified when the app launches. Don’t forget to remind them that you won’t tell their info, cause you’re a nice company ;)
Weeks before your app ships, pick a few e-mails from the list and invite them to beta test. If they provide useful feedback, give them a discount when you launch
Offer a tiered subscription model, but it is imperative that the first tier be a free trial. For free you can track 20 socks (10 pair), but pay just $4 a month and track 100 socks (50 pair), $7 a month will let you inventory 1000 socks (500 pair)… what a great value!

*Dramatization: Individual results may vary.

Ajax on the Desktop

2005-08-14T00:00:00-07:00

Ajax is making great strides in bringing desktop-like, low latency apps to the browser. What if we take it all the way and bring Ajax to the desktop? Nay, make it the desktop. The next logical step for Ajax, the Web, and computing is the so-called “Web OS.”

The Web OS would be an extremely stripped down kernel (i.e., Linux) simply running a web browser (i.e., Firefox) in full screen mode.

The traditional “start page” is becomes your desktop. The web page would be customized much like your Start or Apple menu to load pre-defined shortcuts (i.e., Webmail, or even another browser). You could even run things like word processors or spreadsheets, without the fear of being without your data when you travel.

Think about it: all of your “desktop’s” settings are stored on a central server (ahem, Google), making data accessible from anywhere. If you are using a machine without the OS, a web browser would suffice to access the same data in the same way (ala VNC.)

From a development standpoint, it gets even better. You no longer have to worry about users performing (or not performing) software updates because updates to the code are seen in real time. Versions are thrown out the window because everyone is using the latest version (no more “Have you updated to 2.0 yet?”) Simple bug fixes can be performed with no hassle in shipping another product.

So who wants to start?

10/2/2005: Update: It’s here.

Don't Compare Ruby on Rails with PHP

2005-08-03T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve made this mistake myself on many occasions but it recently dawned on me: comparing Ruby on Rails with PHP is impossible, because PHP is not an application framework but a scripting language. If you want to compare anything to PHP, compare it to Ruby.

With Rails you have Active Record, Action View and all these other cool technologies and with PHP you have mysql_connect() and echo. With PHP, you have to write code for all the heavy lifting yourself. Rails does it for you.

That was a big draw for me coming from PHP where for each app you have to write another form-verification script or try to integrate a previous one with your new app. This stuff tends to get tedius after awhile and draws you away from more important stuff like, you know, UI design, usability, thinking about your data, and actually creating the app.

On Presenting Software

2005-07-29T00:00:00-07:00

Today, I had my first ‘Steve Jobs’ moment: I presented software I wrote to an actual audience, keynote-style, complete with water bottle (but sans black turtleneck.)

It was an awesome experience and I learned a lot about presenting.

You have to take a real sense of pride in your work when you present it, but not too much so you don’t come off as being full of yourself. It also takes a lot of faith working with a live copy, hoping everything works as it should. But everything went smoothly and I think I impressed a few in the audience (one of which requested I present to a larger group soon.)

Site Fixes

2005-07-19T00:00:00-07:00

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve given this any attention. I finally fixed some nagging issues with this blog related to a Textpattern upgrade, so you can go back to viewing nothing (relatively) bug free. :x

Unix Geeks Wanted!

2005-04-20T00:00:00-07:00

I’m excited to announce I am starting a new project. It’s still in the early phases but I need your help! If you would consider yourself a “Unix-geek” (this includes Mac OS X users) and would like to help beta test, please either comment here or e-mail me. Thanks.

Tiger: April 29th

2005-04-12T00:00:00-07:00

Apple officially announced Tiger’s release date: April 29, 2005. Yay!

They’ve also updated their Mac OS X page with spiffy Tiger graphics and content.

From the new features page, things I’m most looking forward to:

Spotlight (even across network shares!, CLI tools)
Dashboard
Quartz Composer
Xcode 2
Finder Slideshow (slideshows from selected images directly within Finder)
Smart Folders, Smart Contacts, Smart Mailboxes (Smart-anything, really)
Birthday Calendar
iChat (Buddy Groups, multiple accounts)
WebDAV improvements (Kerberos-enabled)
Preview (PDF forms, slideshow)
Quicktime 7
Safari RSS (RSS reader, web-page archiving, inline PDF viewing
Safe Launch (re-launch after a crash)
Automator
RSS Visualizer Screen Saver
New default desktop (looks very similiar to Panther’s, which isn’t all bad)
Access Control Lists (ACL)
Remappable Modifier Keys (“Remap modifiers such as control and caps lock to be super elite.”)

In short, a lot.

Rails Tip: Plan your Database

2005-04-11T00:00:00-07:00

This is probably obvious to most of you, but if you’re coming from a PHP background to Rails, you probably don’t know much about database structure (or think its something you can make up on the fly).

With Rails, its extremely important to plan out your database structure before you start coding. But the good thing about Rails is its language is simple to understand. has_one, belongs_to and such.

Taking time to think about your data models will save you tons of time down the road.

RubyOnRails

2005-04-09T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve jumped on the RubyOnRails bandwagon by starting to write a simple app.

I’m just getting started, but it seems very nice thus far. It solves some of the problems (ok, not really problems… pet peeves) I have with web development using PHP.

The big one is forms. They are essential to any web app and they are such a PITA to code properly. Especially validation. The great thing about Rails is this is all done for you, so setting up a validation rule in your data model scales all the way down to form submission. Its smooth.

Updates forthcoming.

Frustration

2005-03-16T00:00:00-08:00

I don’t know how all the beer-guzzling, pot-smoking frat boys do it.

Free Cheat Sheets

2005-02-01T00:00:00-08:00

While searching for a good LaTeX cheat sheet I came across this gem made in, you guessed it, LaTeX and available in PDF format. It is 3-column, and meant to be printed double-sided.

When I needed to make cheat sheets for my Physics and Algorithms exams, I used Mr. Chang’s LaTeX sourcecode with, what I think are pretty good results.

Then I stumbled upon even more cheat sheets in a similar style, for topics varying from C to Vim and even LaTeX itself.

A great exercise in information density. I wish I had the time to do one of these for every course I take. They’re also a great alternative to the expensive sheets you can find in your college’s bookstore.

In the spirit of open source, I plan to release the source to my humble cheat sheets and see what others can do.

Update: After posting this, I discovered refcards.com and this site, two great resources for these so-called cheat sheets.

Waiting for the Bus

2005-01-24T00:00:00-08:00

At 1:30, a half-an-hour before my circuits class starts at Nitschke Hall, I head over to the Student Union bus loop to catch the Blue Loop to Engineering as I’ve done for the past two weeks now. The wait is longer than normal, but I am marginally earlier. Fifteen minutes later, no bus. The waiting area is filling up. In The Waiting Line by Zero 7 plays on the iPod, how apropos. Another 10 minutes passes.

Now 1:55, five minutes before class, the bus arrives. I venture into the blistering cold to join the ranks waiting to board the bus. I’m toward the end of the line and after a quick gauge of the line it appears as though I’ll be lucky to get a seat. The riders get off the bus and the line starts to move.

The bus quickly fills and by the time I’m on it, there are 5 or so people standing, holding onto the rails for stability. I join them and find a spot to grip the bars. The bus departs and I try hard to keep holding on and not hit anyone sitting around me. How easy the ride seems for them.

Several stops pass, the load getting smaller each time as people get off. We get to the Transportation Center and everyone except for me gets off. I take a seat.

The bus loops around the Transportation Center and instead of heading left for Nitschke, it turns right. Right back to the path we just traveled, back to the Student Union. Back to where I had been waiting to leave from. 2:05: I am late to class.

2:15, the bus finally arrives back at the Union. I get up to leave, acknowledge the odd look from the driver who is wondering why I took a joyride around campus, and get off. I forget about showing up late to class and just don’t show up at all.

Then it hits me. What if, after waiting all this time for the bus I was so sure was going where I wanted it to, doesn’t? Even worse, what if it just takes me back to where I started?

Slacking

2005-01-21T00:00:00-08:00

Another year begins, and its been almost 2 months since this has been updated. I’m such a slacker.

I guess I don’t have anything interesting to say… I don’t want to bore you with self-serving “I did this, then that, then this”-type of thing so I’ll let you take solitude in the quiet.

Vim Tips

2004-11-23T00:00:00-08:00

`CTRL` + `A`	Increment number under cursor
`CTRL` + `X`	Decrement number under cursor
`CTRL` + `Y`	Duplicate character above cursor
`CTRL` + `X` `CTRL` + `L`	Complete line
`'` `.`	Jump to last modified line
` `.`	Jump to last modified character

Speeding up Textpattern

2004-11-17T00:00:00-08:00

To speed up Textpattern’s loading of pages, edit the file

Replace:

$out['ip'] = @gethostbyaddr($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);

With:

$out['ip'] = ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);

On line 18 of textpattern/publish/log.php

Note: Log entries will only display an IP now, instead of a hostname. But if you use another package to generate statistics (i.e., Urchin on Textdrive) you can still view that information there.

(This disables a DNS lookup for every IP that hits your site. Seems to work pretty well here… pages load up much quicker, for me anyways.)

SongMeanings Improvements

2004-11-13T00:00:00-08:00

I’m not sure how active the guys are with development, but now that SongMeanings is back and (relatively) stable, I got to some solo-brainstorming about some things. Mostly ideas of features, but also some improvements and suggestions.

An open, XML-based API
Artist/lyric recommendations
Collaborative discography
Better commenting
- How useful is a page with 600 comments?
- Separate ‘meaning’-comments from ‘I like this song’-comments
More schemes
- Collaborative
Push journals more
Clean URLs
Better user ‘homepages’
- Incorporate journal
- http://www.songmeanings.net/~username could work

Ben Folds

2004-10-31T00:00:00-07:00

I’m pretty excited to be going to see Ben Folds live, in concert, next Saturday. Even though he’ll be performing at our rival’s auditorium, it still should be a pretty good show. This will only be the second concert I’ve been to, and I couldn’t think of anyone else I’d rather see.

Ben Folds is one of my favorite performers. I think his lyrics are what draws me most to his music (and incidentally, is what led me to start SongMeanings.)

Maybe after the show I can go talk to him, then mention SongMeanings. Upon immediate recognition of the name, he will proceed to tell me that he is a big fan and regale me with tales of how SongMeanings inspired his solo-music career.

OK, enough of the annoying fan-girl crap, already. ::faints::

Update: Ben hospitalized for respiratory infection. Show cancelled. Sucks.

FreeBSD r0x

2004-10-20T00:00:00-07:00

Coming from someone who runs a Debian GNU/Linux server at home: “FreeBSD r0x!”

I’m diving into the world of FreeBSD. I installed 5.2.1-RELEASE on an old Dell GX1 at work and am playing around configuring and whatnot.

The concept of ports are pretty impressive, and they seem to work well. I am continually impressed at the ease-of-use of the system as a whole.

(Going to be replacing that Debian install with a FreeBSD one soon.)

Why Less is More, and Simple is Complex (Draft)

2004-09-29T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve been doing a bit of “solo brainstorming” about my philosophy/theory of minimalist web design. It is by no means final and still has a lot of work to be done before it can be considered a final document. I just wanted to post it to see what people thought.

Why Less is More, and Simple is Complex
a web development theory

by Kevin Marsh

Abstract: Presenting content in a simple and elegant way is complex.

Main Ideas:

The term “web design” is misleading. There are really more facets to producing an effective web site.
Two elements to web “design”: content and presentation (design).
Content and presentation as two separate entities are not necessarily difficult.
The fusion of the two is more complicated than both combined.
When creating one or the other, they both must be kept in mind.
Presenting accessible (navigable) content without distraction is crucial.
Sometimes some of the most complex solutions are the easiest.
Presenting content in a simple, easy-to-understand way is complex.
A static web site presents content (content/presentation)
A dynamic web site presents content and provides interaction (content/presentation/logic)
Simple does not have to be boring.

Web Applications
Content (text/images) – database
Presentation (HTML, CSS)
Logic (PHP/Perl/ASP)

What is Distracting? (a.k.a. Worst Practices or “1999 Design”)
Large, superfluous images (i.e., animated GIFs of chrome @ signs)
Annoying tags (blink, marquee)
Too many colors
Slow-loading
Poor typography (i.e., too many different typefaces, unreadable typefaces, poor contrast)
Ungraceful degradation/browser bugs
Poor navigation
“Messy” URLs (i.e., http://www.example.com/pg.php?site=products&id=932433&=&=…)
Proprietary plugins (Flash, Java…)

What is Elegant? (a.k.a. Best Practices)
Good typography (one or two readable fonts)
A few, solid (or gradient) colors that go well together
Straight-forward navigation
Quick-loading
Few (or no) images, efficiently compressed
Clean, semantic markup
Clean URLs (i.e., http://www.example.com/products/category/item)
No proprietary plugins (i.e., no Flash or Java)
Adheres and validates to web standards (XHTML and CSS)

FavoriteSearch

2004-09-27T00:00:00-07:00

A bookmark management service (ala del.icio.us) meets a search engine (ala Google) to form—FavoriteSearch (name subject to change).

Details forthcoming. Beta testers inquire within.

Odds and Ends

2004-09-23T00:00:00-07:00

In case you’re interested, here’s what I’ve been up to for the past few weeks:

Learning Objective-C and Cocoa
Learning x86 Assembly language
Learning Ruby
Brushing up on my LaTeX skills
Doing Physics and Calculus homework
Learning more and more about Mac OS X every day
Learning about algorithms
Troubleshooting printer/Windows/user errors
Spending time with my lovely girlfriend. (I’ve realized that I probably don’t mention her much here, but I really should. She is the most important thing in my life and she rarely gets a mention beside all the geekery here.)

SongMeanings is Back!

2004-09-17T00:00:00-07:00

In case you haven’t heard (or seen), SongMeanings is back up again. Congrats to the team for getting it back up. There are thousands of people (myself included) that are extremely grateful.

Class, Gmail

2004-09-04T00:00:00-07:00

In between having Physics 5 days a week, doing Calculus homework, and fixing Macs on campus, I found 7 Gmail invitations in my Inbox.

Does anyone even want any of these anymore?

Fall Mac Imaging

2004-08-19T00:00:00-07:00

We are in the process of imaging the Macs at the University of Toledo’s two open labs, comprising a total of 30 Apple (Quicksilver) G4’s.

The absence of a sufficient network requires us to visit each machine individually and boot from a Firewire hard drive (or iPod) containing a basic install of Mac OS X, NetRestore, and our image. After the machine is imaged, NetRestore is setup to rename the machine, set the Open Firmware password, and finally reboot the machine from the freshly-imaged drive.

We then have to perform some configuration manually. The machine must be bound to the Active Directory and printers must be installed before it is ready to be used. In total, each machine takes about 6-10 minutes.

While this isn’t much of a chore for the small amount of machines the University has, it would be nice to further automate the process to make deployment even easier: my goal is to use some shell-scripts, both home-brewed and from excellent resources like macosxlabs.org.

Lack of Updates

2004-08-11T00:00:00-07:00

Wow, I haven’t been blogging very frequently. I’ve been quite busy at work and at home and really don’t have anything cool to talk about.

However, I have done a couple geeky things of note lately:

Burned a Knoppix ISO image from my Linux box directly onto my iBook G4 wirelessly (aka directly to Toast, through 802.11b, without copying the ISO to the hard drive first) after I started downloading the ISO remotely earlier in the day
Without any broadband to speak of, I connected to the Internet using my T616 phone via GPRS using Bluetooth. I then preceded to SSH into my Linux box. SSH over Bluetooth through GPRS—nuthin’ but ’net.

That’s about it. Oh, I’m learning Ruby, too.

Greatest Accomplishment?

2004-08-05T00:00:00-07:00

I feel SongMeanings has quite possibly been one of my greatest achievements technically. It was a great idea at the right time, mixed with technology and design combined with a real following: it was successful and I learned a lot from it.

But the sad thing is, in its current state I am almost ashamed of it. I feel so frustrated that I can’t tell people, “Yeah, I’m capable and can do a lot, just check out SongMeanings.net!”

Well, I suppose I could tell people that. But they will think I am only skilled at writing “We’ll-be-back-real-soon-we-promise” pages.

Knoppix STD Saves the Day!

2004-07-14T00:00:00-07:00

Our good friend, Knoppix STD proved to be a great asset to any PC-troubleshooter’s toolbox the other day.

Jenn’s aunt’s Windows XP machine wouldn’t boot to anything but a lovely BSoD with an UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error and scores of numbers strewn about the screen. I was worried a bit at first that the disk was corrupted and all the data was gone, because I had never seen this particular error before.

Armed with my trusty Knoppix STD disk, I booted into Linux and first tried mounting the problem-drive to see just how bad the problem was. It mounted, and all the files showed up with what seemed like no problem. So I got to a Fluxbox shell, fired up Firefox, and Googled the problem (hint: this means the network card was autodetected and DHCP got me on the router with nary-a-command). I got to a Microsoft page that offered a possible solution: boot from the XP disc, drop to the Recovery Console (by pressing ‘R’), run chkdsk /r, and reboot. I did so. Lo-and-behold, the glorious (blech!) Windows XP boot screen came up and the system booted normally.

OK, so maybe I owe some credit to the Windows XP disc but Knoppix certainly was useful!

Cedar Point III

2004-07-08T00:00:00-07:00

Jenn, Fred, and I went to Cedar Point today. It was fun as always… we rode:

White Water Landing
Millennium Force
Witches’ Wheel
Blue Streak
Giant Wheel
Magnum XL-200
Gemini
Raptor

We ate at Johnny Rocket’s and had sundaes before we left, Mmmm!

SongMeanings is Down

2004-07-08T00:00:00-07:00

I’m not sure why, or for how long, but SongMeanings is indeed down and has been down for several days. Apparently, a new link is being installed.

I’ll keep this updated as/if/when I hear more.

(This should provide an answer to the recent flood of traffic coming from “SongMeanings” Googlers.)

Vacation

2004-07-02T00:00:00-07:00

Today I start my vacation, until Monday, July 12! I’m not sure how much I’ll do, but time off should be good. I haven’t taken more than a few days off since I started working in August of 2002.

It’ll probably get wasted along with my Summer vacation.

Pieces

2004-06-30T00:00:00-07:00

There are tons of little things that don’t currently have implementations or don’t seem to have clean enough ones. I am toying around with solutions for:

Getting multiple POP3 accounts to aggregate to one IMAP account, with a folder for each account.
Filing/synchronizing/accessing bookmarks both remotely and on the client-side (I’m thinking of doing a linkblog-type thing on kevinmarsh.com, then creating bookmarklets to ‘bookmark’ to the remote server.)
Getting all my contacts and appointments in one place, easily accessible from anywhere, including iCal and Apple’s Address Book as well as via the web
Music. I need my music accessible from anywhere. The iPod is a good start, but I should do something like rsync my MP3s to my Linux box every night and setup some kind of streaming solution. I also need to get tunes in my car somehow…

I’ll be working on these things, maybe, and posting solutions here. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

Giving Blood

2004-06-29T00:00:00-07:00

I headed over to the Red Cross donor center this evening to give blood. I’ve never done it before, and wasn’t quite sure what to expect, other than leaving with a pint or so less of my ever-so-vital, lifegiving, red fluid.

I began by filling out a lengthly survey asking various personal questions like if I had done drugs, had sex for money, had anal sex within the last 7 years, lived in Africa, and so on. (Which of course I answered “yes” to). Then after a period of waiting, I got in the chair. As soon as I sat down, I saw Jenn next to me getting poked with the needle and quickly after, streams of blood flowing into a clear plastic package. I began to get a little nervous.

One of the biggest mistakes I made was to watch them poke the needle in, which was a bit larger than I was used to. It felt quite odd going in, but not especially painful. As the blood began to run from my body, I was feeling fine. But as more and more blood made the trip from my vains to the bag, I was feeling a bit lightheaded and warm. My hand, trying to maintain grasp on a foam ball, was starting to become numb and the rest of my arm was quickly following.

Apparently, I looked pale, because the nurse asked me if I was alright. “Do you feel like your about to pass out?” She asked. “I don’t know, I’ve never passed out before,” I replied. She took that as a yes, and after I said it I felt more and more like I might want to. She layed me down, and put two cold towels on more forehead and neck, which felt great.

Meanwhile, I was still continuing. I started seeing things a little blurry, and heard the nurses talking about how I was almost done. One of them came up and asked me if I was feeling okay, and if I wanted to switch to the other arm for the “other three vials”. My thoughts at this time were mostly “Heck no, just do it in the arm you already poked and get it over with”. So she did, and I was done.

I laid in the chair for about 30-45 minutes, then when I felt strong enough to get up, I sat up and walked over to the “canteen area” and got a piece of apple pie and 7-Up. I was beginning to feel a little more normal, and after about 10 minutes, we left.

I’m not too sure if I’d give blood again, but according to studies, every time you donate blood, you save three lives. So think of it this way, every time you don’t give blood, you kill three people. That’s a pretty strong statement. If I do decide do give again, I will definately eat something before hand to avoid my biggest mistake: not eating all day before I gave.

On the positive side (or negative—hah!), I’ll soon get to find out what my blood type is!

Mac OS X Tiger

2004-06-28T00:00:00-07:00

I love Apple as much as the next guy, but it seems to me that Apple’s latest upgrade to OS X, Tiger, isn’t filled with as much innovation as we’ve come to expect (especially since Apple was bashing Microsoft in banners posted throughout WWDC).

It’s new features basically copy some third-party utilities that have been around for awhile. Granted, the implementation might be a little cleaner, since it is built into the OS (hello bloat!), but the actual ideas have been around awhile.

Two of the greatest “features” in Tiger include:

Spotlight a.k.a. Launchbar
Dashboard a.k.a. Konfabulator (who takes a nice stab at Apple on their front page)

However, XCode 2 looks good, and the RSS reader integration in Safari also looks pretty clean.

I am also digging the refinements to the menu bar and classic ‘Pinstripe’ GUI elements (not metal). They look a bit more smooth.

The new displays look very nice, though.

Cedar Point II

2004-06-26T00:00:00-07:00

Well, Jenn and I got another trip to Cedar Point under our belt, bringing the grand total to 2 for this season.

We rode:

Gemini
Witches’ Wheel
Corkscrew
Sky Ride
Johnny Rocket’s (lunch)
CP & LE Railroad
Antique Cars
Wave Swinger
CP & LE Railroad
Iron Dragon
Wicked Twister
Chaos

(Compliments to Jenn, who did all the hard work of remembering what we rode in in what order we rode it.)

I had a blast and I’m pretty sure Jenn did too. We will be going again the week of the fourth to further maximize our Season Passes’ value. Yay!

LSG

2004-06-25T00:00:00-07:00

I just finished my first full week working at UT’s Lab Support Group. So far, its a pretty good job. The people are cool and knowledgable, and the position looks like it will be a good learning opportunity for me.

I worked on creating images for the Universities’ 40-some G4’s. It was pretty routine stuff, but in the future I will be working on some user-management and deployment shell scripts.

Next week I will work several full days, and then after my week vacation I will begin working 9-5, all week.

Oh, I get a Faculty parking pass too!

Things to Remember When Upgrading your Linux Kernel

2004-06-20T00:00:00-07:00

I tried to upgrade the Linux kernel on my desktop Linux machine the other day to 2.6.7 (the “latest-and-greatest”).

The operative word here being: tried.

I used the menuconfig utility to go through and select (what I thought were) the correct options. And compiling (make && make install) went without a hitch.

The kicker came when I tried to reboot the machine and boot into my shiny new kernel. It wouldn’t boot.

It only got so far when it comes up with the message:

UFS: Cannot open root device "303" or unknown-block(3,3)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(3,3)

Uh oh.

Apparently, the problem stems from not building ext2 support (or whatever format your root partition is in) into the kernel (as a ‘*’, not a module ‘M’). Even if you do compile ext2 support in as a module, it is never loaded because it needs the module to load it! (headache yet?)

So, I have to make a Linux boot disk and try to boot from it, access my partition, reconfigure the kernel (this time making doubly sure ext2 is selected!), recompile, and reinstall.

The Joys of Linux™

Promotions

2004-06-17T00:00:00-07:00

I was just informed by the head of the Lab Support Group at UT that I will be starting a new position on Monday! As it turns out, I will be the University’s head Mac guy 35 hours a week.

What does that mean? It means no more computer-lab-sitting and more computer-fixing! Yay!

Unfortunately, this also means I’m going to scale back my hours at Savage Consulting quite a bit. I feel bad doing so. My boss assured me that I was an integral part of the operation and I have some fairly important duties here. I have learned a lot at this job, and have been here awhile (I started at the start of my senior year of high school.) But I feel I will be an overall better fit over at UT.

I feel I’ll be able to apply some of the things I know a bit more there. They will need me to do all sorts of fun things like shell scripting and writing some AppleScript (among other things.)

Am I up to the challenge? I think so. But only time will tell. Reports from the front lines, as always, will be forthcoming.

Pretty Pictures

2004-06-17T00:00:00-07:00

Design and photography isn’t a full-time gig for me by any means, but it is a hobby that lets me creatively express myself that I do enjoy. I really wish I could do more designing and take more pictures, but the time isn’t always there.

However, I am announcing that some of the work I have done has been uploaded and is now available for your inspection. There is a lot more where that came from, it just takes awhile to prepare it for the web. The work that is here is separated into two sections: the portfolio (design) and the gallery (photography).

The design work is mostly logos and web stuff. The logos were created in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and the web stuff is all hand-rolled XHTML and CSS. (No FrontPage here!)

For the photos, I use a Sony Cybershot DSC-S30. On my wish list is a nice, prosumer digital SLR—If I could ever afford it.

I am still trying to come up with a better solution for the gallery. The current method is clunky, at best, as it doesn’t offer thumbnails. I need to whip up a nice script with ImageMagick’s convert utility to automatically generate thumbnails and lay them out on the page, along with a link to the full version (possibly in a popup window). But I wanted to get some stuff up as soon as possible.

Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy my work.

E-mail addresses

2004-06-15T00:00:00-07:00

Commonly you know someone’s name and company they work at, but don’t know their e-mail address. Sometimes if you know other e-mail addresses within the company you can decipher their particular naming scheme (i.e., firstlast@company.com, flast@company.com, etc.)

It should be possible to send an email to simply: “joe shmoe”@company.com and have the MTA automatically forward it to Joe using an internal corporate database.

Of course, spaces and quotes are not valid for e-mail addresses.

Cool Thing to Do With A Linux Box I - Text-Based Games

2004-06-14T00:00:00-07:00

To play some old-fashioned (but fun!) text-based adventure (or “interactive fiction”) games, use Frotz and grab some old data files from your favorite games. My favorite is the Zork series.

If you aren’t sure what a text-based adventure game is, or why you’d want to play one, check out the Brief Introduction to Interactive Fiction.

Installing Frotz
To install Frotz, simply download the .tar.gz file to your linux box (perhaps using wget), issue the command tar -zxvf [name of frotz].tar.gz then run make, then make install as root.

Running Frotz
To play Frotz after it has been installed, use the command frotz then the name of the image (i.e., frotz /etc/games/zork/zork1.dat)

To save the progress of your game, type save while running the game. It will ask for a filename. You can then load the save-state later by using the restore command.

Hours of console-based fun—but watch out for the grues!

Weekend

2004-06-13T00:00:00-07:00

Wow, what a busy weekend.

Jenn was dog/housesitting for her co-worker so I spent some time over there. It was nice to get away for a little while. We watched Gothika and Notting Hill which actually was pretty good.

Then on Sunday we went to church, had dinner, went to my house, and then back to church. A missionary from Kenya spoke at the morning service, and one from Mexico spoke at the evening service. It was quite interesting hearing about the adventures a missionary faces in “the field.”

After church, we went to El Camino Real. It was the first time I’d ever been there. I got the Taco Salad, and it was good, but after seeing the fajitas I wish I would’ve gotten them.

I’ll be at Scott Park from 8:30am – noon tomorrow and then at Savage Consulting until 5pm.

Who said summers are for relaxing?

Gmail Invites

2004-06-08T00:00:00-07:00

Well, well, well. It finally comes around for a begger like myself. I’ve had Gmail for about a month now and I was just notified that I have three — count ’em — three invitations to send to people! yay!

The first one went to my lovely girlfriend, Jennifer (of course), but that leaves two up for grabs.

Does anyone even want these things anymore?

Back!

2004-06-07T00:00:00-07:00

Well, after what I think should be the last period of downtime, KevinMarsh.com is up and running again. I have finally gotten most of the issues with the new TextDrive service ironed out and things appear to be running smoothly.

Thanks to Dean and Jason for providing all the VC200, me included, with such a wonderful experience (even if it did take awhile. <g>)

Cedar Point I

2004-06-05T00:00:00-07:00

Our first trip to Cedar Point for the season was today. Jenn and I rode:

Gemini
Snake River Falls
Wave Swinger
White Water Landing
Thunder Canyon
Mine Ride (which got stuck on the 2nd hill)
Iron Dragon
Disaster Transport
Space Spiral
Cedar Downs
Ocean Motion
Midway Carousel

Seeing as how we just got our season passes today as well, there will be many more trips to come!

Computer Lab Attendent Kevin

2004-05-30T00:00:00-07:00

Today was my first official day of my new job at The University of Toledo Lab Attendent for the EIT department.

I was scheduled from 3 — 5pm in Carlson Library Lab B2. Yes, 2 hours is pretty pointless and a waste of gas, but with gas as low as $1.859, why not?

Anyways, I was ready for duty, but unfortunately duty was not ready for me. I didn’t have login information for EIT’s “Headcount” system, so I wasn’t able to “clock-in” and “clock out”.

I met a fellow lab attendent, who was on duty the same time I was, and her brother. They were very nice in showing me some of the things I had to do, and some of the experiences they’ve had. It seems as though people can get pretty beligerent, like when they are asked to put away their beverages or when Word crashes and their work is lost. Something to look forward to.

I only ended up doing two major things in my 2 hour shift, which should net me around $9, after taxes:

Refilling a ream of paper in the laser printer, and
Calling “This lab closes in fifteen minutes” at 4:45pm

I never thought I’d work in a technical support position but this is really just a springboard to the Lab Support position I interviewed for earlier: they require experience on the front lines.

Preparing for Cedar Point...

2004-05-30T00:00:00-07:00

Well, the summer is here and most (Northern) Ohioian’s minds turn to thoughts of Cedar Point. I am no exception, I am really looking forward to going this year, as I wasn’t able to make it last summer.

Anticipating going at least 3 – 4 times this year, Jennifer and I splurged and bought two season passes tonight at Meijer. For $89 we get to go as many times as we want. It may sound expensive, but considering tickets are normally $40/ea. going three times pays for them easily.

I’m excited!

RIP TechTV

2004-05-28T00:00:00-07:00

Well, the final nail in TechTV’s coffin was driven in today, as TechTV and G4 offically merged to form G4techTV. My DirecTV already shows Channel 354 as “G4TV” and the TechTV website, www.techtv.com, now redirects to g4techtv.com, the new network’s “official website” (which is all G4-ish and shows no traces of the TechTV website’s look). Also, all the great content from the past years of The Screen Savers and Call For Help that lived on the web, is gone (except for in the Google cache.)

As a long time fan of shows like The Screen Savers and Call For Help, and people like Leo Laporte, this is a pretty sad day. The only remnants to survive the tragedy are The Screen Savers and while Patrick and Kevin are pretty great, they will probably not be around for much longer (they’re already been fired.)

I still remember TechTV back when it was called ZDTV and The Screen Savers were Leo Laporte and Kate Botello (I can still hear them chanting “DirectTV Channel 273!”) and there were shows like Internet Tonight and The Money Machine.

Lets have a moment of silence for the once great network. (Shuts off TV.)

Updates

2004-05-25T00:00:00-07:00

Wow, a lot has been going on in regards to this site and I’ve been so busy with them, I’ve neglected to write an actual post about them. I’m sure you’ve noticed the working links at the top and other things, keep your eyes open—there will be more to come. My head has been racing with neat things to put up here, I hope I can make it happen.

I am quite excited about this whole blog thing, which is odd because of the numerous times I’ve tried it, I never really was. I think it’s partly due to Textpattern and some extra free time I’ve been ejoying.

I’m also proud to announce that I am one of the ‘VC200’ member’s that has invested in Textpattern (a great deal consisting of what is essentially top-notch hosting for life, for $200).

So, on June 1st this site will be moving to a new space, off my Linux box and out of my attic. I’m going to miss doing it, it has been really fun keeping up the server. I am planning on still using it for some things though, just not the main kevinmarsh.com page (that sound you just heard was the sigh of relief coming from Buckeye Cablesystem’s NOC).

Imports

2004-05-24T00:00:00-07:00

Most of the old content from KevinMarsh.com has been imported into Texpattern. There are now a grand total of 23 entries here, including this one. I really need to write more (frequently).

The good thing about not updating your blog a lot is that importing is not such a chore.

I'm Back!

2004-05-24T00:00:00-07:00

After a short hiatus, KevinMarsh.com is back and better than ever! I’m now running the great TextPattern blog software.

I’m still adding some stuff and changing bits around, but I thought I’d let my 2 fans continue to read the site while I do so. :)

I’m still working on importing all my posts from my old system to the new one, so all the history may not be there (yet.)

If you see any bugs, please drop me a line and let me know. I am aware of the broken links at the top, however. Thanks.

Update: Fixed some of the glaring bugs that I haven’t been able to nail down, thanks to the base tag and more! Yay Permalinks!

Textpattern

2004-05-20T00:00:00-07:00

I’m working a little on getting TextPattern going. Yeah, I know. I was working on my own homebrewed PHP scripts but it just got so boring, cause I’ve done it all about a million times. And Dean has really done some great work here. The whole system is really great. MovableType, watch out!

I’ll keep you posted on the progress of the switch-over.

Now With RSS!

2004-05-19T00:00:00-07:00

I’m glad to announce that KevinMarsh.com now offers an RSS feed of full blog posts. The RSS feed is perfect for those users of great RSS readers.

Grades

2004-05-10T00:00:00-07:00

I think there is a problem with my Discrete Math and Linear Data Structures grade. It is way lower than I expected. I got a perfect score on 3/4 projects, did reasonably well on the tests, and thought I did a good job on the final. The professor has been quite distracted lately so I think a mistake might have been made. I emailed him but it is really making me wonder about how I approach school (that coupled with a very low grade in Calculus).

Next semester, I have to work about 5x as hard to bring my GPA up. I also have to prove to myself, I think, that when I put my mind to it I can do well. I think my biggest problem is procrastination.

While it may seem like an excuse, working while going to school is extremely hard. Too much time is demanded of the college student and working takes away valuable study time. But what else can you do about it?

Gmail!

2004-05-07T00:00:00-07:00

I am starting to think everyone in the world is not greedy and looking to make a buck—that there are actually nice people around!

Update: kevin.marsh at gmail.com

Summertime

2004-05-07T00:00:00-07:00

Well, exams are over and while I await the backlash of grades, I am thinking about what I’m going to try to do/accomplish this summer. I’ll be working, of course, but I also want to try to do some other things, including:

Spend time with my lovely girlfriend
Clean up/organize my room
Read up/practice some programming stuff
Get outside more (bikeriding)
Take lots of pictures (see above)
Get motivated for a successful Fall semester
Brush up on things I probably should’ve learned this semester
Organize the files on my computers (both laptop and Linux box)
Work on this more (add portfolio, resume, archives, searching, and some other random features)

Gmail

2004-05-05T00:00:00-07:00

I’m really trying hard to get a GMail account. I got no love from Blogger (guess I’m not “active” enough) and I tried contacting some people who were fresh out of invites.

It looks so cool and I want it so bad. :(

Dotgeek

2004-04-26T00:00:00-07:00

I signed up for an account over at Dotgeek, they have free PHP5 hosting and PostgreSQL. I’m just using it to explore some of what is to come in PHP, but SQLite caught my attention. It looks like a great addition for the small PHP site that needs some dynamic content (probably 75% of them) but doesn’t need a full-blown database like MySQL.

So check me out over at kevin.dotgeek.org.

How Does It Feel

2004-04-13T00:00:00-07:00

How does it feel to be pushed out of something you created, your vision, your “baby?” Pretty awful. But then again, when you never gave it the time it deserved who are you to complain?

Project Stamina

2004-03-30T00:00:00-08:00

Whenever I start a new project, I am incredibly motivated. I’ll get so much done in so little time. But then, after awhile, I start to get in a lull. I won’t feel like working on it at all. I’m not sure if I get bored with it so much as that I am burned out by all the work I did when I first started. I think I should probably not work so hard at the beginning, and maintain focus throughout the project instead of working all at the beginning and giving up.

C++ Perversion

2004-03-23T00:00:00-08:00

One time, in a EECS1530 lecture about classes and object-oriented programming in C++, Dr. Miller said this:

“If I call foobar on you, I can access your private members.”
-Dr. Lawrence Miller, University of Toledo

You'll Think of Me

2004-03-16T00:00:00-08:00

I think the music director at 102.9 is out to get me.

Driving home, they played the three songs that hit me most in a row and I realized something. The only thing harder than trying to drive with her in the car and holding back tears is trying to drive home with tears flooding your eyes alone.

But why would someone who was so struck—tortured even—by those three songs, play them over and over again when they finally do get home? Love.

It happens every time we’re about to break up. I’ll think how much better things will be. How much more time I’ll have to concentrate on other things like school, work, and (selfishly) myself—how much more I’ll be able to do, how much more free time I’ll have to do whatever I want, and so on. But then, it’ll hit me. I’ll lose her. And in a moment, all these concrete plans you had laid out for your free self are tossed into a mixer with those treasured memories you once shared.

The thought of breaking up doesn’t seem so bad when you’re sitting alone, or talking on the phone, or online, or even with her in an argument or a time of particular stress. It’s when you look at her, and think of the pain you’re causing her, that you crack. And something inside your throat aches… and the tears flow from your eyes. You begin to see yourself as the big jackass she’s seen you as for days.

But we don’t see eye to eye. Is it just better to cut your losses and move on, no matter how hard that will be/already is? Sometimes it seems like it can’t be, and other times it seems so easy.

(I know you’ll probably read this. And maybe a part of me wishes you did. I just needed to say this, and not directly at you.)

Frequency

2004-03-01T00:00:00-08:00

My girlfriend, Jenn, has informed me that the reason she doesn’t visit more often is because I don’t post enough.

I try to post whenever possible, and whenever I have a brilliant thought, but it seems as though I have to try to post more.

I will post at least once a day—maybe even every few hours—just for her. I can’t have her keep going to other blogs, can I?

Blog Cheating

2004-03-01T00:00:00-08:00

What does one do when their girlfriend visits some other guy’s blog more then they visit their boyfriend’s?

They probably shouldn’t link to it, for starters.

40 GB

2004-03-01T00:00:00-08:00

Yay for 40gb hard drives for $20!

Boo on old BIOS that don’t see them, freeze up when trying to detect them, and make the user think they have a dead hard drive on their hands.

Yay for BIOS flash updates!

Linux Box

2004-02-23T00:00:00-08:00

I recently got a Debian GNU/Linux box up, and connected to the Internet with my router (In fact, it’s serving this!) Anyways, when I started to put it together from some old spare parts, I was at a loss for what I’d actually do with it. I’ve had Linux boxes set up before but with no router, and therefore no Internet to them, they seemed worthless.

Well, I’ve compiled a list of things I’ve been doing with my Linux box, currently (and uncreatively) named linux.

Apache serving kevinmarsh.com (with Perl and PHP)
MySQL database server
SSHD for remote logins
MP3 Server (very limited until new hard drive is installed)
Alert Server (SMS’s cell phone occasionally)

I still have a few more ideas for what I want to do with this thing, but I’m waiting for my new hard drive to implement them.

Uptime

2004-02-18T00:00:00-08:00

To display how long your Linux box has been running, how much cpu is being used, and how many users are logged in, use the

uptime

command.

Kevin Marsh

Jekyll

Source Code

Importing from Mephisto

uninitialized constant Classifier::LSI::Matrix (NameError) when running with --lsi option

Categories

Excerpts

Inspiration

Reducing the Noise

Your Rails Apps Changelog in git

Controller

View

Stylesheet

rake db:production:clone

Git as a Data Store

sitesmetric Progress

Another Project, or, Introducing sitesmetric

Merb Asset Helpers

Minor Leopard Rails Wrinkle

My Rails Stack Setup Notes

The Only Way Digg Can Redeem Itself

Coda

Rails Scalability Problems Solved

When To Say Yes to Feature Requests

Case I: The Quick Win

Case II: Productivity, Multiplied (or divided)

dotfiles.org Now Has Search

reddit, digg, and Slashdot

Best of 2006 Playlist

My Dream App

Junebug and Nginx

Toward a more Republic Democracy

Dotfiles

Mephisto

Tab-completion for Ruby Cheat Sheets

Bracket accessors for your Rails models

iTunes Visual Refresh

Ruby Web Fetching Options Benchmarked

The Test

The Results

Conclusion

Terra got the bat!

Wireless Mighty Mouse Observations

Dead Simple Full-text Searching with Rails

Clickity Clack--whine--Clickity Clack

BarnRaisr and Knowledge Markets

RailsConf

RSS Aggregation

TextMate and WordPress

January!?

Everything old is new again, or, Embrace and extend

New Features Galore!

Commenting Fixed

Creating Mobile or Lite Versions of Rails Apps

How to Succeed In The Web 2.0 Days

Ajax on the Desktop

Don't Compare Ruby on Rails with PHP

On Presenting Software

Site Fixes

Unix Geeks Wanted!

Tiger: April 29th

Rails Tip: Plan your Database

RubyOnRails

Frustration

Free Cheat Sheets

Waiting for the Bus

Slacking

Vim Tips

Speeding up Textpattern

SongMeanings Improvements

Ben Folds

FreeBSD r0x

Why Less is More, and Simple is Complex (Draft)

FavoriteSearch

Odds and Ends

SongMeanings is Back!

Class, Gmail

Fall Mac Imaging

Lack of Updates

Greatest Accomplishment?

`uninitialized constant Classifier::LSI::Matrix (NameError)` when running with `--lsi` option