yeahrightkeller

Wilson Miner - When We Build

Sun Mar 04 00:00:00 -0800 2012

Wilson Miner - When We Build (bibliography here)

I thoroughly enjoyed this. His presentation style was captivating, and the whole thing was really well executed.

I particularly liked his point about the inherent intuitiveness of magazines (or rather, the lack thereof); an example which I had not heard before.

Also, this jumped out at me (though it may have just been the music that accented it):

The smallest changes can be transformative. But they have to be the right changes. And discovering what those are takes patience. You have to pay attention.

I’ve always wondered how you know what the right changes are. I assume he’s not saying that all it takes is a little patience and paying attention, but rather that those are merely two of the many prerequisites. Hard work is presumably required too. And time. Lots of time. In fact, my current operating assumption is that the only way to get the experience required to be able to know things like that is to have spent an inordinate amount of time learning and doing and failing (especially failing) with similar tasks in the past. Anything aside from that is just luck.

Tumblr Architecture

Tue Feb 14 00:00:00 -0800 2012

An interview with Blake Matheny on High Scalability:

Tumblr operates at surprisingly huge scales: 500 million page views a day, a peak rate of ~40k requests per second, ~3TB of new data to store a day, all running on 1000+ servers.

Pretty interesting to see their architecture, since I’ve been thinking about things like this a bit recently (though at much smaller scales). I was surprised to learn that the data set of “which posts should be on a users dashboard” (which just stores the post_ids) is 5x the size of the actual post contents. I would have believed that for something with very small post sizes (such as Twitter), but I always viewed tumblr as having longer posts. But, I suppose there are lots of post (the majority even?) that are simply a photo or a reblog of a photo with a 1 or 2 word comment….

Yosemite HD

Thu Feb 09 00:00:00 -0800 2012

Stunning colors in the sunsets, and an incredible amount of stars. I also like the accompanying photos that show the gear.

(via James Duncan Davidson)

Social Media Explained (with Donuts)

Thu Feb 09 00:00:00 -0800 2012

douglaswray:

Tumblr: Here’s a bunch of “ironic” photos of historical figures and/or celebreties with donuts.

(via Gruber)

CD Easter Eggs (remember these?)

Sun Jan 29 00:00:00 -0800 2012

As part of my continual “get stuff organized” project, I’ve been re-ripping all my CDs in a consistent format[1] and have had a few fun surprises when putting some of the older discs into my Mac.

Here is my favorite so far, from the Save Ferris - It Means Everything CD:

I can’t decide if the best part is the old familiar newspaper icon on the ReadMe, the Drag Contents to System Folder folder (with its enclosed QuickTime™ Musical Instruments extension), or the “earthlink” in saveferrisearthlink.html).

It’s interesting to notice that, unlike liner notes and big album artwork, the loss of these hidden features were not lamented in the switch to downloadable music. However, if I remember correctly, this extra content usually just consisted of some annoying low-quality videos, and uninteresting news about the band. So, in fact, this might have been the pre-cursor to Myspace pages (zing!).

I figure Apple Lossless is a pretty safe bet, especially now that it’s been open-sourced.
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Personal Podcast Generator Script

Sun Jan 22 00:00:00 -0800 2012

I've been using the heck out of Instacast recently, especially during my commute, and I've really been enjoying both the app and the great content from 5by5 and others. But, the other day, I ran across a stand-alone mp3 file that I wanted to listen to on my commute, and realized I didn't have an easy way to get it on my iPhone. Ever since switching to iOS 5 and Instacast (and with my long-time usage of Rhapsody for music), I don't have any need to regularly sync to my computer. So, the easiest thing would be if I had my own "personal podcast" feed that I could simply subscribe to in Instacast.

A little googling found a clever AppleScript to do this. However, since I'm a nerd (and not a fan of AppleScript), I naturally wanted to hack up my own Ruby script to do the same thing.

I did like the AppleScript author's idea of using Dropbox to host this. That means I can easily add to it from any of my computers.

I also like the Folder Action setup, but haven't tackled that part. I figure I can manually re-run the script for now, and if it's something I end up using often then I'll fix that deficiency.

For now, it's working great. Admittedly, it probably would have been quicker to just manually sync my iPhone for this one instance... Oh well.

Code#

Here is the ruby script I ended up with:

Where is that app?

Tue May 10 00:00:00 -0700 2011

I liked where Neven Mrgan was going with his What folder is that app in? idea. But, I thought it could be taken one step further.

Simply knowing that an app is in the "Reference" folder doesn't always pinpoint it. For example, what if you have multiple Reference folders? Or, even if you have just one, what if you have so many homescreen pages that you have no idea where that one folder is? Or, what if the app simply isn't in a folder?

So, I spent a few minutes in Acorn and mocked up this idea, where I can easily see that Paprika is located near the top-right corner of page 4:

My Jekyll Setup (i.e. Dust Settling)

Sat Feb 26 00:00:00 -0800 2011

I finally got around to finishing up switching this site from tumblr to Jekyll, and am really excited about it. It feels good to have every aspect of the site fully under my control.

Technical Details

I ended up with my own fork of Jekyll, because I wanted to write the layouts in haml (and potentially the pages and posts too), and wasn’t happy with any of the other implementations that I found out there. Though, I did cherry pick a bit from other forks, especially Henrik’s, including some features like an archive page. I also added a migrator to pull down all my posts from my old tumblr site, and added a Generator to create the tag pages.

I hacked together a simple process for publishing the site. Basically, I store everything in a git repo, edit and test it locally, but have a clone of the repo on my web server box. When I push into that clone, there is a post-receive hook that runs Jekyll to generate the site, and then copies to the proper place to be served by Apache. It’s nothing terribly fancy, but it’s been working fine so far.

I.A.N.A.W.D.

It’s probably pretty obvious that I am not a web designer, but I did my best to create something clean and simple. It’s important to me that the article pages don’t have a lot of clutter, so I stripped the typical header and sidebar cruft that most blogs have on every page, and instead just put that on the front page. Furthermore, instead of the front page being just a dump of the recent posts, I wanted it to be a nice overview of who I am and what this site is all about.

I stuck to my goal of not using any images for the basic layout/design, in order to make everything easy to tweak and/or totally change later. Except, I did add some icons (based on a nice set from Eli Burford) for the links to my activity on other sites (but, again, those only appear on the front page).

The title and headers are set in a nice-looking free font I found called Yanone Kaffeesatz, which I’m using via @font-face. I think it gives things enough style without getting too crazy. The downside is that they look pretty terrible in older browsers that don’t support @font-face, but I think I’ll just have to live with that.

Since I can re-generate things so easily, I plan to continue iterating on the design as I get bored. I also plan to take the opportunity to play around with Javascript a bit.

Going Forward

My plan is to start writing here more often. I’m hoping the challenge of it will help me practice my writing skills a little bit. It turns out that writing code all day isn’t exactly the best way to improve my prose, so this should be a good change of pace. I will still keep my tumblr site, which I renamed to quickies.yeahrightkeller.com, as a place to post quick things (and, actually, it’s turned into just an Instagram dumping-ground these days).

Side note: Having Control

I was forced to rename my tumblr site because I wanted to put up 301 redirects for my dev-related articles from log.yeahrightkeller.com to this site, so that Google updates its results to point here (surprisingly, some of those articles — especially the Xcode build tricks — get a fair amount of hits). But, I couldn’t figure out a way to put 301 redirects from a tumblr site. So, instead I switched to hosting that domain myself so that I could serve up the necessary redirects. But that meant I had to come up with another domain name for my tumblr site.

This is an example of why I’m happy to have this site back fully under my control (though, at least I was using a custom domain name with tumblr, so I could do this workaround). The control issue was a much bigger driver for me to switch away from tumblr than any of their recent uptime problems. Plus, how sweet is it that from here on out, I will have all the revisions to this site stored in a git repo, with the content written in plain text using markdown or haml?

Potentially Useful Replacement Icon

Sat Feb 19 00:00:00 -0800 2011

After seeing Jeff’s post, I was inspired to spend a few minutes in Acorn and make this. It might be useful to those of you who have two version of a certain set of development tools installed on the same machine.

And here is how it looks in use:

You should be able to just copy/paste that png into the icon-well in the Get Info window in Finder, or if you want to use the big hammer, you can download it as a .ics file and drop it in the app bundle.

Pardon the Dust

Wed Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2010

If things seem odd or messed up around here, it’s because I’m in the process of switching this site over to use Jekyll, but am not finished yet. I think I migrated most things so far. But, I’m not entirely sure the new rss (actually, atom) feed is perfect (it’s generated with a liquid template by Jekyll).

Hopefully I’ll get it all running smoothly soon.