Today is my daughter's 14th birthday, and I do hope she has a wonderful day! I know it's a school day, so that's less than ideal in her mind, but that's the way the calendar works, and she's still in for a nice dinner (her choice), and homemade cake, and presents. Not a bad way to spend a day.
I could not be happier with the outcome of the election. I think that most Americans have no idea how lucky they are to have a guy sitting in the Oval Office that cares as much about them as Obama. Even the ones that hate him.
It's amazing.
I'm glad I saw it. I'm glad I was a part of it.
This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 24.0.1213.1 was out and the big change appears to be in the new WebKit (537.17) and a bunch of fixes related to the bookmark syncing and stability issues. I have to say that I really like the new look of the blog as it's much cleaner than the old, and it's also nice they are moving along with WebKit updates.
Good news.
This morning I'm still getting used to the OS X 10.8.2 changes - specifically, Notification Center. This is clearly a take on Growl, and as a long-time user of Growl, I know there are apps that are only recently Growl 2 compliant, so I really doubt they are wired into Notification Center. Thankfully, there's a mode in Growl to ship all notifications to Notification Center. But there's a catch…
All notifications that are redirected from Growl come into Notification Center as Growl notifications. That's no good. You loose at least half the really useful information in this. You need to be able to tell what app sent it, and then what the message is. Thankfully, someone thought of this and created Bark.
It's a Growl 2 plug-in, and it requires OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, and it redirects all Growl notifications to Notification Center - leaving the application intact. You simply download it, install it, and then set the 'Default Action' to be 'Bark', and the 'Default Style' to 'No Default Display', and you're done!
I'm hoping this is going to do what it says it does, but I haven't seen any notifications come through, but I've got my fingers crossed, and I'm hoping this works exactly as advertised.
This evening I decided to update my main laptop to OS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion because it's about time and I think they've got the vast majority of the bugs worked out, and it's ready for prime time. I'm not exactly certain how I'm going to feel about it… I've heard good things and bad, but it's where Apple is going, as with Xcode 4, and I need to just realize that it's time to get with it and make the move.
I will say that I'm a little nervous, but I'm sure it'll all work out in the end.
UPDATE: it took about 40 mins to download and another 30 mins to install, but it's working so far. Lost all app positioning and startup, but that's not totally surprising. Working well - so far.
Today I was using Skitch to add a simple screen grab to a web page that I was building, and when I tried to save it to the Skitch.com server, is told me that Skitch had transitioned to Evernote. In short - the server shutdown they had talked about was upon us.
Skitch was dead.
But I was ready. I had signed up with PinkHearted.com, and that gives me everything I need from Skitch's back-end. Even if that weren't enough, I have a CloudApp account, and can use that as well.
So Skitch is alive and well. Just not with the guys that brought it to life.
It's sad to see something like this, but the market works in sometimes sad and gloomy ways. I'm just hoping that someone picks up the mantle of the original Skitch team, and makes a worthy successor. With a reliable back-end.
This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 24.0.1305.3 was released with some really nice updates including the V8 javascript engine 3.14.5.0 and a significant update to how bookmarks are handled in the omnibus. From the comments, it's pretty clear that the omnibus is used by a lot of people for much more than a place to type a URL or a google query - which is nice, but it's certainly not behavior I'm looking for, so I never really "missed" it.
But as always, it's great to see the progress - even if it's something I don't really use.
This morning I'm having a tough day. It's not that it's really any harder than every other day - probably, it's that I'm not as able to bounce back from all the little things that are coming my way. The bus ride this morning was bad - starting with a tough exit from the train. I have about 2 mins to get from the train to the bus, and when I have several slow people in front of me on the train and platform, it makes it very hard. Couple this with a bud driver that leaves right away - and then the next bus driver is late, and it gets frustrating.
I come into work and I deal with more of this kind of silliness, and worse, and it gets kinda hard to just say "What the heck".
But I've realized they don't care. Not one bit. So if they want to write code like this - check in things that aren't working, not deploy it and mark it as deployed… Hey… who am I to argue with them?
It's not my place. Period.
So sit down, self. Have a Diet Coke, and just keep your mouth shut.
I really like Netflix and how I can run through an entire series of a TV show that I might have missed when it aired - without commercials, with pause, etc. It's really a great way to watch TV. Tonight, I finished watching Season 1 of White Collar, and I have to say it's a very nice - albeit a bit fluff, but great entertainment. It's the classic buddy story, but this one buddy straddles the line between legal and illegal. The friends are great additions to the cast, and the storied background of the thief reminds me a lot of It Takes a Thief back when I was a kid.
So good. Funny. Sharp. And doesn't take itself too seriously.
Great fun to watch.
I saw a tweet from a friend the other day:
and it got me thinking about a better back-end for Skitch 1.x. I've planned to use CloudApp and just drag things into it and get URLs, and that would work, but it's not as nice as having a great back-end that works with Skitch as it's meant to. That means being able to pull up the history, etc. It's all there. That would be nice!
PinkHearted uses Amazon's S3 datastore to save your images, so it doesn't really cost them anything to store the images - it costs me. That's nicer than CloudApp because they are going to have to mark it up to make a profit, and I can pay Amazon directly. So I decided to give it a try.
Signing up with Amazon is simple, but there's a few steps to it, so it's not as immediate as you might think. No problem, I just needed to slug through it. Then there was the issue of creating the first bucket. In short - an S3 bucket is a top-level directory in your S3 storage account. I simply used Transmit to create one, and it was very simple.
Now I had a simple bucket on S3:
At this point, I could sign up with PinkHearted and then configure my Skitch to use the WebDAV service on PinkHearted as the source. I've got it all ready to go, and if they shut down the Skitch.com service, that's where I'm going to go.
I like that it's all me now, and on S3 it's redundantly stored and should be fine.