What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I wanted to get a few things done with regards to MarsEdit, and my journal (weblog). The first was an issue I'd been having with MarsEdit and importing/including images. When I first captured the Apple logo for decorating Apple-related posts, I got it at a size that was smaller than I wanted. But it was in the beginning and I didn't really know it was a bad size until I used it a bit and created a few more. Then I made another and imported it on top of the original. This sent the image to WordPress and all appeared OK, but it wasn't. Not really.

When I went to add in yesterday's entry about the new iPods, I realized that the size tag in the inclusion was wrong. I had to hand-edit it. Same with the others in WordPress. So then I started playing with it. Turns out, it was inserting the old size with the new image. So I had a bit of a problem. I posted a message to the MarsEdit support forum and didn't directly get my answer, but got close enough.

It turns out that the image is saved into $(HOME)/Library/Application Support/MarsEdit/UpdloadedFiles/ and it's dimensions are also stored in the UploadedFiles.plist in the MarsEdit support directory. So, by placing the correct file from WordPress' uploads directory into the correct place in the /UploadedFiles/ directory, editing the plist, and restarting MarsEdit, I got it working.

Daniel (of MarsEdit) says that he's working on the library functions of MarsEdit to make this more foolproof. Now that I know what I know, I can deal with this, and I'll be much more careful about making icons in the first place, but it's nice that it's all there to be hacked upon.

The second thing I wanted to do was to see about updating WordPress on HostMonster, my hosting provider. Turns out, I was running 2.1.3, and 2.2.2 had some security fixes that it's always good to stay up on. I was very happy to see that when I went into Fantastico on HostMonster, it even pointed out that I had an older version of WordPress, and that I should update it. The update went very smoothly and in a few minutes I was running 2.2.2 and everything was fine. Excellent support from the HostMonster, and WordPress is an excellent tool.

I like to keep up to date on the software that I use on a daily basis, and with my move to HostMonster for hosting and WordPress for my journal (blog), I have been using MarsEdit a lot lately. So I was very interested in the word I'd been hearing about version 2.0. A completely redesigned interface, new features, more media choices... all made it sound like a must have update. So when I found that it was out yesterday, I had to check it out and upgrade.

What I found almost made me laugh. I had originally written my journal on static HTML pages. Then I moved to a PostgreSQL-driven database journal on my Sun box with a web-based PHP front-end. When I got my first iBook I took the time to make an XML-RPC driven interface to the Journal on the Solaris back-end and a Mac OS X client on the front-end. It allowed me to do a lot of the things that MarsEdit can now do, but it was a lot more unrefined and lacked all the polish that MarsEdit has. What was funny was that with the move to MarsEdit 2.0, the main window looks exactly like my iJournal app. I had to giggle. I may have been onto something after all.

I'm glad to have moved to WordPress, HostMonster, and MarsEdit, but it's funny to see that I wasn't all that far off on what made a good journaling (blogging) application, after all.

I'm spending a little time this morning watching the iMac, iWork, iLife Event in preparation for the announcements today regarding the new iPods. Unfortunately, there's no one covering the event today, which is a bummer, but there's no way I'm going to travel for the announcement, and I can't blame anyone else for not going either. But the rumor sites are all a buzz about the confirmed full-screen iPod - if anything can be considered to be confirmed from Apple before it's actually announced.

As for the event, I have to hand it to Steve, the guy is a Showman, no doubt about it. I have to say that it's interesting to see him play to the smaller house on the Apple campus. As I watch the presentation I'm struck by the fact that anyone in the creative arts with talent makes it look easy, and makes us all want to join in. Basketball, painting, story telling, and in this case, movie making (iMovie '08) - it doesn't really matter what it is - we see this done my a really gifted individual and they make it look so easy.

Yes, I have to give it to Steve... he makes these presentations look easy. I can't wait to see what he's got cooking for today.

UPDATE: I can't believe that the new full-screen iPods are only flash-based and only go up to 16GB. I understand that the new features are nice - WiFi, etc. and I can see that Apple wants to be able to extend the battery life to something much longer than the current 4 hours, but to limit the machine to 16GB is a big of a dumb thing to do. I'm not sure I'm even interested in this model any more. It certainly places the iPod and iPhone in much greater competition with one another. I'd have thought that a hard disk-based iPod would have cut the battery life, but boosted storage so that they were not in any real competition with one another. I guess we'll have to wait for the next update to the iPods because I can't believe I'm going to look at 16GB and think "Hey, that's half of what I have now with a 4 yr old iPod, but let's get it!"

One of the things I needed to get going today was the regular mirroring of my Chicago home directory to my new London home directory. In the past, there has been only one, but with the disaster/recovery tests requiring that we take the NFS servers offline, if I want to log into my account in London, I needed to have a local home directory there so that it didn't choke trying to get back to the Chicago file servers.

Once I got word that things were set up properly in London, I checked to make sure that I knew the destination directory - accessible from Chicago, and then I whipped up a little script that would make it very easy to keep things in sync:

#
# Specify the source and the destination
#
srcDir="/home"
target="beatyro"
destDir="/final/London/fileserver/directory/"
# make sure we have the source directory or bail
if [ ! -d "${srcDir}/${target}" ]; then
  echo "You don't have the source directry!"
  exit 0
fi
# ...make sure we have the destination too
if [ ! -d "${destDir}" ]; then
  echo "You don't have the destination!"
  exit 0
fi

# run the command to update the home directory
cd ${srcDir}
rsync -aREpogtxz --delete --exclude='.snapshot*' \
      --exclude='.nfs*' --exclude='.wastebasket' \
      --exclude='.Trash' "${target}" "${destDir}"

I've used something like this guy for a while now, mirroring my MacBook Pro's Users directory to an external drive. The idea is simple, exclude what you don't want, and everything else will automatically get mirrored. By adding in the --delete I made sure that if I removed something from Chicago, it was removed from London too. No need to have stragglers in London.

I like the fact that rsync is capable of doing a lot more than simply working between machines in a client/server mode. In several cases, there's no need to have two machines - you just want to make this directory mirrored on this base path. Simple. Clean.

Add this into a simple, nightly crontab job and every day I'll be sure to keep things in sync. Nice.