What's it all about, Alfie?

One of the reasons for wanting to get an iPod touch or even one of the newer 'classic' models is to be able to carry a few movies on the train without opening up my laptop and playing a DVD directly. I was talking to a good friend a while back and he had been using Forty-Two DVD VX to rip a few DVDs to put them on his PSP so he could travel a little nicer with his kids. He really liked the program, so when I wanted to do a little media changing on a few of my favorite movies, it seemed like a good place to start.

I have to say he was right on the money. This is exceptionally easy. You get the program, put the DVD in the drive, stop the DVD Player in OS X and then 'Open' the DVD and tell it what you want to target it for, in my case, the iPod. It knows what to do to get the best image and file size for the iPod, and then it just waits for you to tell it to 'Convert' the media. Very slick. Very nice.

Now, it'd be nice to have it rip the movie faster, but you have to accept that ripping it is a one-time cost, and just like with the CDs for my iTunes library, it's going to be an investment that will really pay off in the future. I haven't gotten a new iPod, and may not get one for a while, but I wanted to get my iTunes library loaded with my favorites before I got the iPod and had to spend hours and hours ripping movies. That would be frustrating.

UPDATE: I got the serial number after ordering it and put it in the app. Then I started loading National Treasure and was not surprised to see that it was going to take pretty close to the running time - plus a little to rip and encode the DVD. I was hoping for something a little less than "runtime plus", but I can't really blame the app, it's taking it from a very high resolution and stepping it down to H.264 for the iPod. Not trivial, and yet it's not really rocket science - just takes time.

I've been running Growl for a while now on several of my Mac laptops (PowerBooks then MacBook Pro). It's a beautiful little service that I have always thought would have great uses, but it was going to take developers to get on board with it to make use of it. There was no way to put the hooks in after the fact. Thankfully, it seems that Growl has achieved a critical mass and is looking to be a 'necessary feature' in a lot of the better Mac software these days.

About the only apps I use that don't support it are the Apple apps (Mail, Safari, Xcode) and the apps where it makes no sense to support it (Acorn, BBEdit, etc.). I'm not sure that there will ever be support for it from Apple, it seems to put a reliance - allbeit a weak one, on the Apple apps. But certainly they should consider it for Xcode and other things that could really use the notification capabilities.

Recently, the Growl developers released 1.1 and then 1.1.1 of Growl and I have been a faithful updater. I didn't get into a lot of the problems that the changes in these version addressed, but I can imagine that I might have if I were using just a few more Growl-enabled apps. Growl, like Sparkle, is one of those things that were I to make an app for Mac OS X, I'd certainly put in the support for it. There's just no reason not to - it's just too neat.

I decided today that I needed to update the technical interview questions I give to new folks wanting a job at the Shop. They are a mixture of database, Java, C, C++ questions that are really meant for the widest possible audience so it's not a big deal if each candidate doesn't know the answers to a few of the questions. C++ STL is, after all, pretty narrowly focused, but for those coming in with C++ STL experience on their resume, it's nice to have a little something to ask them.

Today's additions are primarily from Troy who I sought out for his little "gotchas" in Java as he's been working in Java for a while and I was guessing that he'd have a bunch of little 'pearls' that would make good test questions. I wasn't disappointed.

It's fun to come up with both the simple, quick questions like Why was Thread.stop() depricated? and the more complex ones like What happens in the JVM when a class is instantiated? The additions just give me more material to talk over with the candidate. I don't like to put too much weight on any one topic or language, so it's nice to have more, fun and interesting questions to ask.

Thanks goes out to Troy for his additions.

I was looking a few things up today and I could not help but hear a nearby coder getting angry at the code he was writing. Actually thinking that the code was disobeying him. I'm the first to admit that I've gotten mad while looking at code - most often at the guy who wrote the mess I was forced to fix, but to actually get mad at the code is something I find very funny.

I've always liked coding because it's about the only place in the world where what I asked for was done - without argument, exception, grief, or hassle. I mean really - people are far far more difficult to deal with than a machine. So in terms of frustration, coding is about as stress-free as things come. Oh sure, deadlines are a drag... trying to do more with less... there's a ton of ways to make any job a pain in the neck. But those are reasons to get irked regardless of the job.

It's like a carpenter getting mad at a hammer. It's a hammer - if you don't like what it's doing, hit something else. Don't get mad at the hammer. But I have worked around this particular coder for quite a while, and he's got talent, but he misses the boat when it comes to drive, commitment, and really enjoying the job.

I think he'd rather be somewhere else, but he took this job because it paid significantly better than his last job. I can't blame a guy for making a buck, but if that's the only reason you took the job, it's not going to be long before you realize you aren't really happy and you'll find another job.

Well... it's 9/11 again, and had it not been for a co-worker of mine, I'd have probably missed the significance of the date this year. Maybe not, but it was late in the morning and I hadn't noticed the date yet. And this year it got me thinking about the War on Terror. I really can't stand that phrase.

First, I think it's a bit of a stretch to use the word War in the sense of ...a sustained conflict - like the War on Drugs or the War on Terror. Really... are we fighting drugs or the drug users/makers/dealers/distributors? Are we fighting terror or a limited group of selected terrorists? Call it the War on bin Laden if that's what you want to say - but that's not what the administration wants to say. They want to have a reason for their continued existence... their continued hold on power. Make the people afraid and they'll seek refuge in the security of a man with a gun.

I'll be the first to admit that World War II required our involvement. There were very bad people doing very bad things and the only way they'd stop is by armed conflict. They struck first in Perl Harbor... their choice. But that was a country, or group of countries, and we're being asked to believe that the same is true when you're dealing with a group (no matter how large) of free citizens in multiple countries. It's as if we are to believe that a group, no matter how bad their actions, requires military action to stop what they are doing.

What would you say if the Army rolled tanks in Alabama in the 1960s to stop the Klan? Overkill? I'd agree. They did some very bad things to innocent people, but that didn't automatically trigger an armed military response. We have laws, and lawmen (police) should be (and were) put in the places of lawlessness and finally got order restored. Was it perfect? Nope. Would some have liked the military called in? No doubt.

But it wasn't, and I believe that's a good thing.

Was the military the right governmental unit to bring the people responsible for 9/11 to justice? Maybe. It's hard to say with international boundaries involved. But it's arguable that another group - say the State Department, working with other countries could have been used to bring the people involved to justice. And even if we chose to use the military to bring these people to pay for their crimes, what crimes did we commit in tracking them down?

The ends justifies the means is a very dangerous rationalization. It can get you into a lot of trouble really fast if you're not careful. Pretty soon you might find yourself on the wrong end of the justification and then you're very unhappy about the means being used against you.

And let's say the search for the 9/11 conspirators was conducted by the military. I still don't see how invading Iraq and having Suddam hung is anything more than bloodlust and retribution. If there's some solid evidence that this guy did things that would warrant us going after him, then bring them out in the open and don't call it The War on Terror - it should be a task of bringing a law-breaker to justice. But I don't think anyone involved sees it that way.

There were no weapons of mass destruction. And that was the justification used. Even if there were, Israel has them - are we going to invade them? No. They are our friends. Interestingly, so was Saddam not so long ago. Maybe Israel needs to be concerned? No, of course not. But you can't very well say an old ally becomes a horrible person and so we must invade. It shouldn't work that way. We're better than that. Isn't that what we all try to teach our kids?

If there were solid justifications for the war in Iraq, then let them be known. If it's so secret that telling would compromise national security, then maybe they should have come up with unclassified reasons - or at least unclassify enough to make the case. We require as much from our police and public defenders.

I know these views are not widely held. I'm labeled as not supporting the troops which is totally untrue. I support every single person that puts their life in danger for me and mine. Police, firefighters, the military, coast guard, etc. The question isn't support of them... it's support of what they're being asked to do by our government.

Soon enough this will all just be a historical footprint. Something we talk about like people talked about World War II. But for now, I sure do wish if we as a nation wanted to do something, we stopped using the phrase The War on Terror and started saying what it really was. Whatever that really is.

Today I had a little time to work a bit with Numbers from iWork '08. I had a spreadsheet worked up in Mesa that I wanted to convert to Numbers and see what it'd look like and how easy it would be to get it copied in and looking the way I wanted it to look. I was really pleasantly surprised that getting the graphs working was as easy as it was. I expected the data transfer to go smoothly - after all, it's just cut-'n-paste, but adding in the graphs was going to be a test as there was a lot of data there to graph and Mesa, for instance, had a harder time than I expected getting it all plotted properly.

I was a little disappointed in the fact that there weren't two-level column headers available in Numbers. I'm sure they can be created by making two rows look like headers and then have the top row of cells span multiple columns, but I'd have thought that Apple would have allowed multiple headers. Slightly disappointing, but still, not the worst thing to happen - just something to work around.

I was very pleased with the page layout and the multiple pages in a workbook. This feature has Excel and Mesa beat, hands-down. While it may be trivial to the Excel wizard, as I've seen them remove the row/column outlines and draw borders to make it look like the table (or tables) are on a blank white sheet of paper, this allows you to really do it. Also, it was a very pleasant surprise to see that dragging a table or graph from one sheet to another was possible without any change in the naming of the cells in formulas. This is something that Excel fails at, and while it's possible to get around, it's nice to be able to build up something and then drag one object off a page onto another after things are all built up.

I'd love to see tabs in the GUI tools - say, being able to drop down a tabbed interface on the page and then add tabs and drop content on them. It's a microcosm of the pages, I suppose, so it's not terribly important, but it'd be nice in the few things I was doing, but again, not a show-stopper.

After just about an hour of working with it, I'd have to say that I can't imagine that there's something I'll need it to do that I wish I had Excel for. My needs are relatively simple, and the capabilities in Numbers is really quite amazing. I'm very glad I got iWork '08.

OK, once again I am amazed by the quality of the software from the top-tier developers in the Mac Community. This morning it's the announcement of Acorn from Flying Meat. Incredible. I use Photoshop Elements for most all of my graphical work. It's nice and powerful and it does everything I need it to do - at a fraction of the cost of Photoshop. Nothing wrong with Photoshop, and if it were cheaper and lighter weight, I'd be a user. But it's neither. It's a very large app - both in cost and in machine footprint. So I was very interested in seeing what Acorn had to offer.

I use VoodooPad and FlySketch, so I wanted to like Acorn for that point of view, but I knew that I had real needs for a bit-mapped image editor that several lesser apps just didn't cut it for me. For instance, Inkscape is a nice idea, and it's free, but it's more cumbersome than I'd like. Also, the GiMP is nice, and I've used it for a very very long time on a lot of different platforms, but I've had to get a book on it to make sure I knew how to do the things I needed to do in it.

Photoshop Elements was as close to perfection as I have come, but I hated the redesign of the tool options panel and the constant menu bar under the menu bar. Not to mention that it's still a PowerPC app and is not as fast as it could be because of that. It works, and I was living with the issues, but I was a little miffed that I haven't seen an update in all these months that Photoshop CS3 has been out. I'd even considered dropping down my own money for Photoshop CS3.

But I was saved by Acorn.

As I said, I was a little worried that Acorn was going to fall short of what I needed so I downloaded it and took it for a trial spin. I was very impressed to see that it had the layers capabilities... I use that from time to time. And I played with it a bit to see how it felt to make selections, zoom in, use the tools. It all felt very natural - much more so than Photoshop Elements. When I checked the memory footprint it was 30MB as opposed to Photoshop Elements' 150+MB. Again, light on it's toes in terms of machine footprint. Nice.

So I decided to take it for a real spin and have it do the most difficult thing I've done in Photoshop Elements recently - the soft-focus/fade of an image for the weblog. It's nothing really earth-shaking, but it's the most advanced thing I've done in Photoshop, and it took a Googling to figure out how to do it in Photoshop Elements. In Acorn it was obvious. Amazing. Once I played with a few things and got a feel for where things are, I was able to knock it out in no time. Amazing. Acorn even has the most common file types I use for my work. Again, nothing earth-shaking, but just simple, clean, natural, and easy.

If you have a need for Photoshop and can't justify the cost, give Acorn a try. I was amazed.

Ever since I found Marc Liyanage's page for Mac OS X builds of PHP and PostgreSQL, I try to stay reasonably current on my laptop and my iMac back at home. I want to keep them in sync because often I'm coding up something on my laptop to test out at home, or I need to run something at home because it has continuous access to the internet while I may be moving around with my laptop.

Anyway, today I saw that he'd updated both recently, and so I decided to upgrade them both. I really love that he's gone to all the trouble to make this as painless as possible. It makes me want to start work on Xconq again - just so people can have a decent OS X Universal Build that they can run with. The problem has always been that when I asked folks about it no one knew exactly how to build it as the last Mac builder as left the scene and didn't leave build instructions. So it'd be a challenge. Still... it'd be nice to be able to give something back.

So now I'm at PHP 5.2.4 and PostgreSQL 8.2.4. All in all, a wonderful couple of upgrades.

This morning I was spending a little time trying to get a few more images uploaded to my WordPress weblog - one for Coding and another for Cube Life. I had picked out some nice images from Xcode and the web, and the Xcode one uploaded as nice as can be. But then the trouble started.

Try as I might, I could not get this one image uploaded. It was about a 50kb JPEG image and I tried it several times. No good. So I tried a little more compression to bring it down to about 25kb, and still no good. So I tried PNG - both 50kb in size and 25kb in size. No good. So I decided to look at the XML-RPC logs of MarsEdit. No help there.

Finally, I logged onto HostMonster and saw that the smaller PNG image actually got uploaded and the thumbnail image was created. Hmmm... I know that the images are also stored in a plist for MarsEdit and an image directory, but when I went to add it manually, it looked a lot more complex than a simple edit session, and I was afraid of messing things up. So I tried a few more things, and then finally emailed everything to Daniel at Red Sweater Software.

I wanted to send him the image and the RPC log from MarsEdit so that he could see what was happening. Maybe there's something happening that I didn't see, or something in the way the file is being encoded. Don't know. Interestingly, on the test case, the image made it up to WordPress, so I think I'm going to try and edit the plist to see if I can force it into the system.

UPDATE: this was an interesting puzzle to crack, and in the end I don't know that I've cracked it as much as I know what works and what doesn't. So, here's what I found out:

• Use Photoshop's Save to Web for maximum compression - this may be extremely obvious, but I tried using GraphicConverter and it wasn't a lot of help, and I tried saving it to different formats, but in the end, it was Photoshop that told me what I needed to be saving it as, and it showed me side-by-side images to allow me to choose what to do. That's the important first step: get the image size down to as small as possible.
• Somehow, get the Image to WordPress - this was interesting because in some cases, the failed upload from MarsEdit did actually get the image up to WordPress. Sometimes it didn't. I had greater success with smaller GIF files than PNG or JPEG files that were a little bigger. I'm guessing you can upload images from the WordPress Dashboard, but I haven't figured that out, and MarsEdit was good enough.
• If you have to replace an image - delete and then add - this is most easily done by deleting the images in the MarsEdit directory, and removing the entry in the plist, and then going to WordPress' Dashboard and deleting the image there. Then add it back in. This way, you get the thumbnails made by both programs.
• When adding an image to MarsEdit omit the thumbnail - MarsEdit will create the thumbnail if you just place the image in the MarsEdit directory, create a new plist entry with the right values and omit the thumbnail image and plist entry.

With these tips, I was able to remove images from both locations, replace images, and in general, get around these uploading problems that I've been having. When I was exchanging emails with Daniel on this issue he was surprised about this behavior and wanted me to send him more files that I run across that have this same problem.