What's it all about, Alfie?

I have been wishing that GitHub for Mac would properly show my Gravatar since the first release so long ago. The problem is that on GitHub, my Gravatar shows up just fine:

but on GitHub for Mac, it's all the default I have no idea who you are… image:

The problem stems from the issue that Gravatar assumes that the email is all lower-case before it's sent to Gravatar for image lookup. This is compounded by the fact that Gravatar does not allow you to have two emails registered for the same Gravatar that only differ by the case in the email. This means that drbob@themanfromspud.com and drbob@TheManFromSPUD.com are totally different Gravatars, and the latter will never be found.

This is highlighted by the PHP code snippet that I found for successfully getting a Gravatar:

  $out = "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=".md5(strlower($email_addr));

I'm willing to bet that GitHub for Mac is not doing the lower-casing of the email address before it's taking the MD5 hash and sending that to Gravatar. To test this, I changed the user.email parameter on my MacBook Pro and did a few checkins:

The commits I did today have the lower-case version of the user.email setting in the commits, but the older ones don't. This is a clear indication that I'm right. Now it's possible, I suppose, to go back and completely update all the repos I'm using, but I think that's a bit excessive. I'd like Gravatar to allow for mixed-case, but they just take the gravatar_id, and it's already MD5 based at that point.

Nope, this is a GitHub for Mac issue, and they need to lower-case the email address before they send it to Gravatar and then all will be well. I've sent in the request to GitHub, and we'll see what they have to say. I'm hoping they fix this, I do hate to see the little grey shadow for all my checkins.

UPDATE: Great News! I heard back from the GitHub for Mac guys:

  From: Josh Abernathy (GitHub Staff) 
  Subject: GitHub for Mac - Gravatar Mixup

  Hi Bob,

  Ahh, thanks for tracking that down for me. I've created an issue for it.

  Thanks!

so it looks like it's going to get fixed in an upcoming release of GitHub for Mac. That's such wonderful news as it means that all my avatars will be me and not the gray shadow. Super nice!

OK, it's hard to imagine that just a month and a half ago, $2 billion lost due to improper hedging was thought to be a horrible thing… now it's looking like it might go as high as $9 billion. Amazing. I thought I'd heard the last of this horrible sham, but it appears not.

JP Morgan said they had $2 billion to waste, and still make a profit, now they have to pony up an additional $6 billion or more to get out of the horrible positions they got themselves into thinking they were hedging their legit positions. How much money can JP Morgan afford to loose and not be seen as the biggest pirate of the seven seas?

I've been in finance for 16 years now, and I've learned a lot, and been surprised over and over again. This is just the latest in a series of amazing things that have come up in this industry in my time. If I land a job outside this industry, I won't be sorry to leave it. I've met a lot of nice people, and yet this is an industry that's begging to be regulated even more heavily than it already is.

I have taken to using Safari for my GitHub views, and the problem there is that I'm typically looking at landscape pages in Safari, and not wide screen pages. But for GitHub, it's much nicer to look at things wide screen so that we get the entire width. What I'm left with is two different preferred sizes, and Safari will remember the last size you had, so it make sense to look into a way to make things a little easier for setting these sizes. Enter AppleScript.

It's actually pretty simple, once you know the things you can ask for, and get. The script to put the front-most Safari window into landscape mode is:

  tell application "Safari"
    activate
    set myPos to bounds of front window
    set x to item 1 of myPos
    set y to item 2 of myPos
    set bounds of front window to {x, y, x + 601, y + 629}
  end tell

placed into your ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Safari/ directory.

To set the front-most Safari window to wide screen mode, I simply used a different geometry:

  tell application "Safari"
    activate
    set myPos to bounds of front window
    set x to item 1 of myPos
    set y to item 2 of myPos
    set bounds of front window to {x, y, x + 678, y + 468}
  end tell

With these in the aforementioned directory, I can use them to resize the front Safari windows very nicely. Sweet.

I'm not sure if I'm going to be doing a lot of AppleScript, but it's nice to have when you need to throw simple things like this together.

While I like Ubuntu 12.04 a lot, the lock screen on the screen saver is a little too much authentication for me. It's a laptop, and it's on my desk, so it's not going anywhere. But I couldn't find an easy way to get rid of it. Until this morning. Yeah!

Turns out it's a simple preference command:

  $ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver lock-enabled false

And with this run once, the screen save is still active, but when I hit a key to wake it up, I don't have to type in my password to see the desktop. Nice! This is a really nice desktop linux system - in addition to being a great server platform. Very impressed.

This morning I noticed that yesterday while I was at the interviews, the Google Chrome team release 21.0.1180.11 to the dev channel. The changes are sounding pretty routine these days: new V8 javascript engine 3.11.10.12, more Retina (HiDPI) enhancements for the new MacBook Pros, and several other crash fixes. Not bad for an update. I'm pleased that they are keeping the speed up after those few sluggish releases, so we'll see what they have planned for the 22.x series.

It's been a long day, and I'm not feeling exceptionally great about the possible outcome of the day's work. It all had to be done, but I'm worried about what might, and what might not, come of all the talking and walking.

Today I had two interviews at places in Chicago, and so I got up this morning and went forth, determined to land not now, but two, offers, and be able to pick my favorite of the two. I had a more 'corporate' interview first, and I believe they are going to offer me a position, but I could be wrong. It's certainly happened before. And even if they offer me the position, I'm concerned that it'll be so low I won't be able to take it without also having to some up with some other source of income to supplement it - or move and drastically reduce our living expenses.

The second was with a start-up, and while I really liked the guys, and can see myself working with them on this venture, again, I don't see them coming up with the money I told them I'd have to have to work there. I can appreciate why they don't have the money, but then I'd really almost have wished that they hadn't have me talk to them if they knew they couldn't pay me. It just gets kinda dissappointing.

In the end, I don't know anything at this point, and I just need to sit tight, follow other leads, and see where things lead. Who knows? Maybe they will surprise me both.

That would be really nice.

This morning I was once again updating my Ubuntu 12.04 laptop and realized that were it not for a crummy hardware platform - the trackpad is horrible, and the display is very inexpensive, this would be a really nice laptop/development box. It's got all the tools I could ask for, it's got some wonderful fonts for the Terminal and such, it's got Google Chrome for all the web stuff… it's really pretty slick.

I gotta tip my hat to the Ubuntu folks. This is a much better distro than RedHat/Fedora was. I'm guessing Fedora is getting better, and it's probably as nice as you need, but the ability to do the updates easily - and have them on by default, is really nice. It's nice to have it all right there.

Certainly, I'm not giving up my MacBook Pro anytime soon, but I've looked at BestBuy, and you can get nice Wintel hardware for $700 to run this on… all of a sudden, it's something I might actually carry from time to time. Certainly nicer to work with than the crummy trackpad and display.

It's a great compliment to the MacBook Pro. Nice to have.

With the update of my web site, it seemed like a good time to look into refreshing the look of this blog as well. Specifically, look a a complementary theme - blue on white, with a "minimalist" sense, to keep the focus on the content, not the design. I was pleased to see that I'd done this search quite a while ago, and had a nice theme already picked out. Sweet!

The theme is called White as Milk, and it's a nice minimalist theme. There are a lot of little customizations that you can do, and I've had to do a few to get things looking the way I want - specifically, getting the style of a few elements looking right, and making the entire blog a fluid width page. I just got done doing that modification yo my basic web page and wanted to keep the same attribute in the blog.

This matches the look of the web site very nicely, while not trying to be a complete match to every style point. I think it's looking nice, and I'll live with it for a little bit to see how I feel about it.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 21.0.1180.0 was out with several changes for the Retina MacBook Pro as well as the latest V8 javascript engine. These are really nice updates, but what I noticed right off is the mistake in the rendering with the previous version left a slight tell-tale horizontal line in the background every "page" or so. It wasn't horrible, and wasn't even directly repeatable all the time, but it was somewhere on the page, and it was enough that it made me wonder if my machine was bad.

So it seems to be gone, and that's great news, but so are all the other fixes. These HiDPI changes are nice for a lot of people getting the new MacBook Pros, and one day I'm sure I'll have one too… but it's not where I'd hoped Chrome were adding features right now. But that's OK… it'll all work out I'm sure.

UPDATE: Spoke too soon:

Interestingly enough, these disappear if I scroll this section out of range, but will return to another location on the page if I just keep scrolling. Nasty bug, but it's in Chrome, and I'm not going to worry too much about them fixing it. They'll get to it - just like they did with the rendering of the Finance page on Zoom.

[6/22] UPDATE: this morning I see 21.0.1180.4 is out and this time, they say they fixed several "alignment issues", and I'm hoping they mean these lines. They also put in the V8 javascript engine 3.11.10.10, which is nice. I'm hoping these lines are gone.

OK, I am a big Twitter fan, and I've used several of the popular Twitter clients on my iPhone and MacBook Pro, but my latest client has been Hibari because it didn't have any of the reported problems that Twitterrific had with switching the graphics from integrated to discrete, as I've noted before.

Well… with the recent updates from Apple, I've come to realize that the display problems are now gone, and I can pick the Twitter client that suits me best. One of the things I really liked about Hibari was the fact that it showed the conversation that a particular tweet had. But this morning, I saw that Twitterrific did this as well:

Sweet! 🙂

So I'm back to Twitterrific as it's got the menu bar Ollie that lets me know when I have a new tweet, and it's visually a little easier to read the different colored tweets. I'll admit the inline pics are nice, but I almost always have to click on them to look at them anyway, and in Twitterrific I get the built-in viewer.

So for now, it's back to Twitterrific!