What's it all about, Alfie?

I can remember seeing Skitch for the first time - while still in beta. I think I got the link from one of the weblogs I read, but I can remember seeing it, and what it could do, and thinking This is IT!. I signed up for the beta, and when it went commercial, I bought a copy.

Two, in fact.

And then they sold out to Evernote... and redesigned the experience... and all of a sudden it wasn't the lightweight but powerful little image editor and uploader for posting to this journal, it was something that integrated with Evernote, and they took away the image hosting - except for Evernote, etc.

Basically, they sold out and destroyed what I loved about the product.

Then came Monosnap and it looked to be exactly what I needed - a Skitch 1.0 replacement. So I got it, and I have been using it for a while, but the truth of the matter is that it's buggy. Some menu items don't show up all the time... the copy and paste of an image doesn't work... it's a nice try, and it worked on some version if Mac OS X, but they haven't kept up with it, and it shows.

So now I'm looking at Glui. It's coming with some pretty good recommendations from friends that also loved Skitch, but were looking for a replacement, and it's only posting service is Dropbox, but I can live with that for now. Still... it's missing a lot of the nice features that were in Skitch - specifically, making it easy for me to get at the URL of the image in Dropbox.

Why do all these tools want to put their chrome on the image? Why not do what Skitch did, and give me a page where I can get at all the URLs, and pick what I want?

Yes... Skitch was perfect at this... and then they sold out.

It's pretty sad...

UPDATE: HA! I found that it's a preference item on Glui to copy the page link or the direct image link. That's much better. They also have the nice 'scaling' option for my Retina MacBook Pro. This might actually just be me needing to get into Glui's way of doing things. That would be very nice. 🙂

This morning I updated to the latest version of Mac OS X on my primary Retina MacBook Pro. I've done this dozens of times, so I knew the biggest issue would be getting everything back up and going after the restart. But today was different. Wow.

So I started the update and everything was fine, then it goes to the reboot phase, and it starts to come back up, and the gray screen with the white spinner shows up, and it stays there... and it stays there... and it stays there. It was there a good 15 mins, and at that point I thought it was locked up.

So I shut it down, tried again. Same thing.

Oh crud. Yes, I have a complete Time Machine backup, but this is annoying.

So I reset the NVRAM. No difference.

Then I did a safe boot and showed the console. This time, it's doing an fsck - makes sense. I said "Let it go...", and I started working. I have to admit I was really worried - after about 30 mins, but then it was up!

Sweet! It was back. I did a reboot and it was fine. So I will now let me other machine takes it's time - an hour at least, to make sure it's done. Apple makes good things - I just wish I'd had a little more faith in them this morning.

[9/21] UPDATE: the update on my work laptop went fine. Better than expected, and I have no idea why. But I'm sure glad it went smoothly.

Got a tweet today from Nathan about Storm:

Apache Storm is now a top level project! Couldn't have done it without the awesome community – congrats to all for getting it to this point

Gotta say - Storm has kept me gainfully employed for the last several months, and it's a product that's nice and complex, so as long as you have a sizable hardware budget, it's something that can work pretty well.

Don't know the real significance of this, but it's nice to see anyway.

This morning I noticed that WordPress 4.0 was out, and I was pretty surprised how quick it was to upgrade my three installs at HostMonster. I don't see the kind of changes that I saw in the move to 3.0, but watching the intro video did make it pretty clear that the composition page had a lot of work done, and the assets (images, videos) was greatly improved.

In all, it's important to update to stay ahead of the security issues, but it's nice to see the evolution already.

Sure, I'd like to learn to be a really good designer, but I know there might not be enough time in my life to get good enough at it to justify the investment. But there are also a lot of things I'd like to get up to speed on - closure's core.async, Swift, and a lot of things like that. I would love to be able to learn, and then apply these tools. It sounds like a lot of fun.

But there's a different class of still - not a skill like design, not another tool, but the understanding of the interdependent parts of a complex system. For example, I'm doing more topology tests this morning and I'm seeing behavior in the relationships between the bolts that I simply would never have guessed. It's stunning, and it makes me smile.

There's no class for this. There's no Tutorial for this. This is you, the machine, and time. This is testing how well you understand this deterministic machine you've built, and looking at the input, can you understand why the behavior is what it is?

It's almost detective work.

What a blast.

Many years ago I had a pair of chalk holders that were really amazing. They were like mechanical pencils for chalk - fantastic! But that was many years ago, and I lost track of them. Well, when I got the chalkboard for the house, I knew I wanted to get something like those again... but had a tough time finding them. I got something like it - aluminum, and it seemed to be like the ones I had, but these had a real problem - the chalk slipped in the holder - some of the time.

I lived with this for a while, but today I had had enough of that, and I wanted to try something else. So I picked up a pair of these guys, and what an improvement! These guys have a significant heft to them, and most importantly, the chalk doesn't slip - ever! What a treat.

Getting closer to where I want to be... one tiny step at a time.

This morning I saw that HipChat 3.0 for the Mac was out, and I updated. Why not? Well... the changes in this version are really worthy of the 3.0 designation. The UI is almost completely redone, and it's not a really nice facelift. Interestingly, I'm not the only one that thinks this.

The title bar is huge! What were they thinking? The whitespace around each line... and the whitespace to the left in the names column... it's just too much. In these days when people work primarily on laptops, I'm just plain shocked to see a design that so wasteful of space.

Then there's the baseline for the text.

In the larger picture, it looks like the baseline for the text of the name is lower than the baseline for the text. But when you zoom in and draw a line, it looks as though it's just an artifact of the anti-aliased text - even on a Retina display!

HipChat, as a service, is a pretty good service. It's solid, reliable, searchable, and it just works. But the designers they have had on the Mac OS X products just didn't understand that most people want to customize their experience. Why not allow CSS to stylize the display? Or at least offer a toolkit to make themes? Either of these would allow teams to personalize their view so that it'd work best for them.

Propane - the Campfire Mac OS X client - did this. I was able to completely customize the UI. Very cool. This just seems to be something trying to chase the iOS 7 style guidelines... and missing... badly. So much wasted space.

I was looking at the loading on one of my topologies today, and noticing that it wasn't catching up to a backlog from a restart as fast as I'd hoped. Since I had the capacity, it made sense to expand the topology and give it more workers, and more JSON decoder bolts, and more data filtering bolts. So I doubled the workers to 20, added many more bolts, and restarted it.

And the result was that it was slower. The capacity numbers went way up, and the backlog continued. This made no sense, but then it did. There's a balance to all things in a topology-based system like Storm. You can't increase one thing and expect it not to impact the system in other places.

So I took the changes out, and the speed returned. You can't tweak topologies without getting the performance data, and you can't measure it without upsetting the running of the topology. It's not an easy system to use, but it can be made to be quite useful. You just have to be careful.

For the last 18 months, I've done my best to keep going, but today I think I need to really put back in the writing/posting that was a significant part of each day for many years. I've tried to do this many times, and it's been largely unsuccessful, but maybe now is the time to really put more effort into it.

So I'm starting with the new month... the new season... and I'm going to try writing like I used to.

This morning, after my run, I was doing my simple weight work, and strained my back. Thankfully, it wasn't aggravating the herniated disk, but it was bad enough that I knew better than to go to work. So I'm off until I feel better.

Big Ouch.